The Lost Prince (40 page)

The girls came bursting into the room and sat beside their mother with expectant looks. “Is this dreadfully important,” Susan said, “or just something minor?” Her older daughter’s directness always made her mother smile.

“It is just that I have something of substance to tell you,” Eleanor began. “I will be going to Europe, and I shall be gone for a considerable amount of time.”

“But there is war in Europe, Mother,” Susan said.

“Are you going to be a spy?” Jane said, bursting forward.

“No, I fear it is nothing so romantic as that. I just need to go see an old friend who has suffered in the war. Now there will be an armistice, and I can travel where one could not before.”

“But who, Mother?” Susan asked.

“Yes, who?” Jane joined in.

“Our friend Dr. Jung, in Switzerland. The armistice will allow it, and make it safe.”

“An armistice is a peace, isn’t it? I learned that in vocabulary,” Jane said.

“Yes, it is a peace, and the war will be over. I will be gone for a while, and I am taking Standish with me.”

“But he is so little,” Susan said.

“He is very brave though,” Jane said.

“He will do just fine,” their mother assured them. “And your father will be in charge here, and Mrs. Spurgeon will run things.” It always gave Eleanor great comfort knowing the degree to which Frank trusted the extraordinary competence of their housekeeper.

“That will be good for Father. He says Mrs. Spurgeon is good at running an organized household, but not as good as you.” In this, she sounded like her father.

“I shall miss you both terribly,” Eleanor said. “But I know you will mind Rose and do well in my absence.”

“You won’t need to worry,” Susan said.

“We will
cope,
” Jane said. “That means ‘to make do.’”

Eleanor had always tried to give her daughters all the love and support they needed but at the same time encourage independence. As each of them arrived at age eight, her age when her own mother had died and when her life changed dramatically with the entrance of her severe aunt
Prudence, Eleanor could not help thinking what a tragedy it would be at that crucial moment to lose one’s mother. She had marveled at how Susan first and then Jane a year and a half later had each developed her own voice and her unique way of looking at the world. Susan was so much like her father, she thought, and Jane, with her spontaneity and freshness, was so unlike the pair of them. Eleanor loved seeing her two daughters together and found herself constantly amused. And then there was the entrance of young Standish.

A few years previous, when her son was around two years old, she had begun to notice how his sensibilities were shaped daily by his two older sisters. Because of her fateful foreknowledge, she knew from the start that Standish’s life was destined to be different, that he was to be set apart from others, but she didn’t see how. For a young man, being raised in the presence of strong sisters would have a poignant effect for the better, she concluded.

Some years before, when the world was reading about the extraordinary exploits of polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, it occurred to her that his remarkable leadership abilities were tempered by a kind of connectedness not usually associated with strong men. The reason, she surmised, was the fact that Shackleton had grown up with sisters. Her husband, Frank, on the other hand, who often displayed a stiffness and distance and had become famous in adulthood for his rugged and sometimes quite stubborn opinions, did not have sisters. It delighted her to see the care and attention Susan and Jane gave their now four-year-old brother.

“We shall miss you,” Susan repeated when the fact that young Standish would be accompanying her mother on the trip finally sank in. “And we shall miss our brother.”

“Yes,” said Jane, “he will be all grown up when you return.”

Eleanor laughed. “We will not be gone
that
long. And he will miss you. You girls are very good to him.”

Eleanor paused and looked at her girls. The visitation of influenza was not far removed, and she could easily fall back into the desperate feeling of loss that it had brought with it. Her eyes began to well up. “I am so sorry that I will be leaving you.”

“It’s all right, Mum,” Susan said bravely, seeing her mother’s concern. “You have to go.”

“Yes,” Jane burst out, “Mrs. Spurgeon won’t make us practice our music
lessons every day,” which brought a laugh from her older sister and her mother.

Serious Frank’s contributions to the situation were not insignificant, and typically pragmatic. On the delicate matter of travel into war-torn Europe, he said, “We can book you passage through the bank of London, and enter through Marseilles.”

It was, of course and as always, wise and timely advice.

AN IMAGE OF PEACE

T
ravel through Marseilles meant avoiding the war-clogged northern ports, and passing through southern France up to Geneva avoided the southern war zones. The train trip to Zurich would be her first test, a journey “not without its challenges,” Frank had said, “but manageable. Passage directly east to the Italian border, of course, would be more direct geographically,” he said, reporting his findings from banking colleagues who kept track of international finance, “but traveling up over the Alps to neutral Switzerland is far safer and, of course, easier to arrange politically.”

Frank was right. Once safely across the Swiss border and in the protective care of her friend Carl Jung, she and her son could rest a few days, then enter the real test: travel through war-impoverished Austria and Italy.

Eleanor and young Standish traveled easily together, as she had anticipated. In the long hours on shipboard during the crossing, and now on the train, she found him a remarkably calm and self-possessed traveler. And she especially loved having the long hours of reading to him. She had brought with her a number of his favorite books, including Robert Louis Stevenson’s
A Child’s Garden of Verses,
a child’s atlas of the world, and a book of illustrated Bible stories that all three of her children knew by heart and never tired of hearing over and over again. In moments between stories, she would open the child’s atlas and point out where they were now and where they were going.

The one book that young Standish wished to hear from over and over, however, was a grandly illustrated children’s version of the
Odyssey
. “Read it again,” he would say when she finished the last chapter, and at each adventurous moment, such as the encounter with the Cyclops or the drowning of Odysseus’s men in the whirlpool, he would stop her reading and ask every manner of question.

She was often amazed by his observations about the stories. During one reading, he stopped her when she got to Odysseus’s return to Ithaca. “The people are mad at him, aren’t they?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, they are mad because he did not bring their sons back from the war. They blame him.”

“Yes,” Eleanor said, “they do not realize what Odysseus did for them, how hard he tried.”

“It’s not his fault,” the young boy said suddenly. “His men didn’t obey. They killed the cattle of the sun, and they opened the bag of winds.” One of Standish’s favorite parts of the story was when the gods captured all the winds so Odysseus’s crew could sail home quickly and safely, but when the ships were just in sight of Ithaca, they disobeyed and opened the bags, sending the ship back to sea for ten more years. “It was his men,” Standish said. “It was not Odysseus’s fault.”

There was something about the purity of that observation that touched Eleanor deeply, and it was a detail we know she shared in a letter to Will Honeycutt back in Boston.

On shipboard, young Standish entertained himself for hours each day by drawing with crayons in the notebook his mother had brought for the crossing.

“This is Poseidon,” he would say, and point to a mass of color he had just scribbled onto the page. “And this,” he would add with a flourish, turning the page, “this is Circe, the good witch.” Eleanor found she was endlessly amused when in the presence of the vivid imagination in all three of her children.

“Wherever do they get those images?” she asked her very practical husband one evening.

“They make them up,” he answered with his banker’s precision.

Upon arrival in Marseilles, they went by cab from the docks to the train station. While waiting for the train they befriended a young French
photographer, who said he was also on his way to the war zone. “You have chosen well to go through Zurich,” he said. “It is by far the safest way to make a hazardous journey.”

Once in their compartment, when mother and son both tired of reading, Standish would watch the peaceful French countryside out the window, unaware at his young age of the irony, considering the bleak devastation not so many hundred kilometers to the north and east. He would watch the passing farmlands and comment on the various animals he recognized, or fall asleep against her shoulder. Fellow passengers in their compartment on the French train, or earlier on the ship, would smile benevolently at the two of them, the image of serenity and peacefulness, suggesting nothing of what lay ahead for them.

As they approached the Alps, the French photographer found their compartment. “I was hoping for an image of peace, Europe being so consumed by war, and now the aftermath,” he said, and in the subdued light from the train window he took a photograph of Standish asleep in his mother’s arms, as she read her Henry James novel. “
La Madonna et l’enfant,
” he said in a whisper, as he was framing the shot, “
très sympathique, madame, très sympathique.
”

Some years later, a package arrived at Acorn Street from Paris, a book of photographic images of newly peaceful Europe, and one of the full-page photographs in black-and-white was mother and son by a train window.

Seeing the French Alps rising off in the distance with their dramatic snowy caps, Eleanor pointed and exclaimed, “Look, Standish. Those are the Alps. Aren’t they majestic?”

And her young son looked to where she was pointing, then joined in: “I see them, Mummy, they are indeed majestic,” he exclaimed.

As the train approached their destination in the heart of Switzerland, Eleanor admitted to a disappointment that the tranquility of travel was over. The arrival at their destination had brought with it the worry of uncertainty spared them on their long train ride.

Carl Jung met them at the train station in Zurich and took them directly home. He seemed so exceptionally clear-eyed, at the peak of health and fitness, that Eleanor remarked later that both she and Standish seemed to grow in enthusiasm just being in his presence. “I am so glad you are both here,” he said with a flourish, and he wrapped Eleanor in an exuberant
embrace and then took young Standish’s hand as if meeting an important gentleman. “I am pleased to meet you after all this time,” he said.

“I am pleased to meet you, sir,” Standish replied.

When they had settled into the backseat of the chauffeured auto car on the way to Küsnacht on the lake of Zurich, he said, “We have much to talk about, and the children will enjoy having Standish with us.”

“Much has changed in our lives,” Eleanor said.

“Yes,” Jung said with a smile. “And with change comes growth. Much growth.”

She had visited Zurich once before, in the spring of 1913, at a time when she was worried about her friend. Back then she had made plans with Frank for a European trip with the family at summer’s end. He would spend time in Berlin on banking business, and she and the girls would stay with the Jungs in Küsnacht. Carl Jung was undergoing a kind of crisis, she knew from the content of the letters. His troubles with Freud and their inevitable separation had brought about an instability not unlike that of the schizophrenics he had spent so much time listening to and studying.

He would spend hours by himself, conversing with the voices in his head, building childlike wooden structures down by the Zürichsee, and writing for hours in his study. He had had commissioned a large red-leather-bound book of blank pages, and he began to fill it with illuminated Teutonic calligraphy and paintings, the result—disturbing, some said—of his conversations with his own unconscious. “Dr. Jung is in the throes of a psychosis,” one doctor warned.

“My family worries about me,” he admitted to Eleanor in a letter, “but they ought not to. What arises from my unconscious and seems so disturbing is merely healthy exploration of what must be explored.”