The Accursed

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Annabel: come with me.

  Now the bride found it impossible to maintain her composure but with each hissed ejaculation of her name glanced over her shoulder—now to the right, now to the left—her skin ashen, and her lips visibly trembling.

  So much has been written on the subject, and so high did local feeling run for decades following, the historian must proceed cautiously in presenting an “objective” picture of the scene. For, in what appears to have been a denial of their senses, a majority of the spectators—(those who might describe themselves as close friends of the Slade family, for instance)—would afterward insist that the young Annabel had been “abducted” from the altar, in the very wake of her marriage to Lieutenant Bayard; for no one could have believed that the bride would have been capable of an action so mad, and so criminal, as walking away of her own volition.

  The reader must imagine for himself the interior of the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton on that Saturday morning in early June 1905. A church interior of white, bedecked with sumptuous white flowers—lilies, roses, carnations; the walls otherwise unadorned, with a beautiful Protestant simplicity; narrow windows in stone walls, whose wavy glass emits a wavy sort of sunshine. Presiding at the altar is Reverend Nathaniel FitzRandolph, Winslow Slade’s able successor; middle-aged, gentlemanly, with an earnest bald head and a frowning sort of smile, conscious of the solemnity of the occasion; above, at the rear of the church, rich resonant organ-notes intoning Bach. The bride in dazzling white has been delivered to the altar, and to the bridegroom, by her beaming father, Augustus Slade, seated now in the front pew of the crowded church; Lieutenant Bayard has come to stand, and then to kneel, beside his bride, in his U.S. Army dress uniform; women’s eyes are fixed upon the bride, and her bridal gown of creamy-white satin, with its stylish “monobosom,” high collar, yoke of ribbon inserts, feather stitching, and nine-inch-deep waist shirrings; the long skirt deceptively plain, with but a few horizontal tucks ending in a lacy train; the sleeves double-puffed at the upper arm, then slim to the wrist, in ribbon and feather stitching about which Mrs. Grover Cleveland would lament in her diary she could not ever again wear so slim a fashion.

  To the surprise of all who knew her, Mrs. Horace Burr, that is, Adelaide Burr, has risen from her invalid’s bed to attend the ceremony, supported on one side by her devoted husband Horace and on the other by an older McLean brother; Adelaide who began to weep even as Annabel was led up the aisle by Augustus Slade, and all the more as Annabel and Lieutenant Bayard knelt at the altar, heads bowed, like beautiful children to be disciplined, and Reverend FitzRandolph began the solemn intonations of the Presbyterian wedding ritual. That evening, Adelaide would record in her journal, in a cascade of hieroglyphics, that the mere trim of satin lilies-of-the-valley on the bride’s gown so moved her, she yearned to be a girl again, a silly little unsuspecting goose, another time joined in holy matrimony with dear Horace, if she could be outfitted thus! Adelaide, as well as other female observers, take particular note of the bride’s floating veil which had been handed down through the Slade family, dating back to England in the late 1600s, before the early, adventurous crossings to the New World.

  The reader should probably know, however, that the fashionable “narrow silhouette” of the bride, which renders the young woman’s waist exquisitely small at about eighteen inches, is the result of artful corseting; the monobosom of 1905 is cleverly built up so that, of necessity, and to continue the harmonious line, the entire body of the female is forward-tilting. Like the waist, the hips are remarkably slim—a controversial innovation, as fuller hips in the female are preferred by the more conservative of fashion-makers, as by, in general, the male sex.

  The reader should imagine the Slade family in the front pews of the church—the dignified old gentleman Winslow— his sons Augustus and Copplestone and their wives; Annabel’s brother Josiah, prominent among the groom’s party, not fashionably but handsomely dressed for the occasion in a dark suit, with a dark necktie; for, fortunately, Josiah had returned from hunting in the Poconos with his friends, just the previous night. And there is Annabel’s cousin Todd forced to wear a “little gentleman’s suit”—(chocolate-brown linen, hand-stitched white satin vest, white gloves, gleaming black patent-leather shoes)—seated beside Josiah, itchy and restless and with a threat of his eyes rolling back in his head like those of a captive wild pony.

  Here too is Miss Wilhelmina Burr in the front pew, the much-envied maid of honor; clearly nervous in her snug-fitting flounced pink gown, and not smiling calmly as she would wish; and the six beautiful bridesmaids in their matching dresses, like upright breathing pink-satin flowers; there is little Oriana, Todd’s sister, the flower girl—an angelic little blond child with very bright eyes and a shy smile. Of the groom’s men only Josiah Slade figures in this narrative, so I think I will not elaborate upon these others—handsome young men, friends and comrades of Lieutenant Bayard, whose names are lost to posterity even as they find themselves eyewitnesses at close range of the extraordinary events of that day, when the Curse first manifests itself to the public in the most dramatic of ways.

  Annabel: now.

  According to Adelaide Burr, seated in the second row, directly behind the Slades, it was Todd Slade who first exhibited an awareness of the low hissing sound in the church, judging from the boy’s restlessness, and agitation; another was Woodrow Wilson, possibly, with his acute hearing and the extreme sensitivity of all his senses, who glanced about frowning, and squinting; then, with disapproval. One by one, numerous persons heard the hissing, or imagined that they heard; though what it was they were “hearing,” no one could have said; nor could they have sworn that the sound was audible, and not rather an uncanny vibration of the air, as if a high-pitched whistle were being blown, undetectable to the human ear.

  Yet Dabney Bayard, kneeling at the altar, seemed to hear nothing, and to be aware of nothing except the minister’s gravely intoning voice—Dabney Bayard do you take Annabel to be your lawful wedded wife—and his own solemn reply I do. The muscles of Lieutenant Bayard’s jaws clenched as if in a sudden spasm of nerves and he turned to his beautiful bride only to see, with some shock, that the demure Annabel was scarcely aware of him, or of Reverend FitzRandolph; her blue-violet widened eyes sought someone or something in the church, not visible, though perhaps at the very rear of the austere old Colonial building.

  Annabel: come.

  Yet, the ritual proceeded: Reverend FitzRandolph made his final pronouncement, in the name of the Lord: I now pronounce you man and wife. And yet, even now, when the bride and groom should be embracing, and kissing, the low hissing grew louder, like rising waves, and Annabel shuddered, and drew away from Lieutenant Bayard in a fainting gesture, as if she failed to recognize him.

  By this time the whispering had increased in volume. Each individual who heard it was perplexed, and some frightened; stricken with a numb sort of panic; not knowing if he or she heard truly, or had lapsed into a temporary sort of faintness, or madness, in this humid public place that had seemed now to have turned hostile.

  For such is the Devil’s power to tease us, and terrify us, as to whether we are in his spell, or merely caught up in childish fantasies.

  AS THIS INFAMOUS EPISODE in Princeton history moves to its inevitable conclusion, I will acknowledge that I am relying almost exclusively upon my predecessor Q. T. Hollinger, as well as a miscellany of letters, journals, and diaries written by local observers. For otherwise, the episode is totally beyond my comprehension. Yet it is clear that the bold summons—Annabel! Come to me—is from Annabel’s seducer Axson Mayte, who stands at the rear of the church, in the opened doorway, not taking a step inside.

  Not daring to take a step inside, commentators will note. For the sanctified church is a holy place, into which the Devil, or any of his demons, cannot enter.

  Yet, though Axson Mayte cannot enter the church, he has the power to draw Annabel Slade, now Mrs. Annabel Bayard, from her husband’s side, as
forcibly as if he has stridden into the church and along the crimson carpet to seize the trembling young woman by the nape of her neck, and lead her away with him.

  Annabel: it is time. You will come with me at once.

  And so, the bride turns from her bridegroom, blindly; drops her floral bouquet onto the carpet; glancing to neither side, but with her gaze fixed to the commanding figure in the doorway, hurries up the aisle, with the wounded grace of an injured bird, her lips parted in breathless subjection, and in the most subtle, and most sensual, of female smiles.

  “Annabel, my love! Have you been not naughty?”—so Axson Mayte declares in a low, mocking voice; and, while the wedding guests turn to stare in gawking horror, the toad-like creature grips the bride roughly in his arms and presses upon her lips a kiss of the most carnal heat, and manly authority.

  PART II

  The Curse Incarnate

  FOR HYSTERICAL MAIDENS

  I WOULD PRESCRIBE MARRIAGE,

  FOR THEY ARE CURED BY PREGNANCY.

  —Hippocrates

  THE DUEL

  I pray for you, Josiah, as I have prayed for your sister—that you will not succumb to barbarism.”

  In a voice scarcely raised above a whisper Winslow Slade spoke to his distraught grandson in the hours following the hideous public shame of the “abduction” from the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton, in full view of more than two hundred invited guests.

  As if, and not for the first time, the distinguished older man seemed to have the power to read another’s mind.

  “If our enemies be evil, beware that they draw us into evil with them.”

  So saying, Winslow Slade reached for his grandson’s hand; but Josiah was no boy, and his hands not a boy’s hands, to be placated in this wise Christian way, even by a beloved grandfather.

  HE WOULD DO IT, he vowed.

  For hadn’t he the example of his (male) ancestors?—some of them very young men indeed, younger than he, who had been willing to surrender their lives in battle; others, their manhood challenged by an adversary’s careless insult, immediately responding with the challenge of a duel. There was thirty-two-year-old General Elias Slade who had signed the Declaration of Independence, and who had fought bravely during the Battle of Princeton, said to have been bayoneted seven times, by a cowardly cadre of British soldiers, and brought to die at the old Clark farm on the Princeton–New York Pike. There was Major Vreeland Slade, another of Washington’s aides, who had distinguished himself at the first Battle of Springfield; and Colonel Henry Lewis Slade, who had defied the demagogue Andrew Jackson; and Bingham Slade, who had died in a duel fought with a law school classmate at the University of Virginia as a consequence of their disagreement over a popular Democratic scheme of the 1850s, to annex Cuba and Central America for slavery! (For such were the dreams of our American democracy, in the middle years of the nineteenth century.) And there was Abraham Lewis Slade who had fought a duel, at the age of sixty-seven, to repair the honor of his very young third wife—an incident celebrated in the gutter press that had occurred in 1889 in Manhattan’s Central Park and was, as Josiah had gathered since boyhood, a source of both family embarrassment and family pride.

  For Abraham Lewis Slade had, according to legend, calmly returned his adversary’s (missed) shot with a perfectly aimed shot of his own—that had penetrated the other’s forehead in a “ghastly, gaping” hole between the man’s astonished eyes.

  Arrested by police officers on the spot, with a charge of murder, Abraham Lewis Slade did not spend more than an hour in police custody, being at once freed, and all charges against him dropped, by an act of the New York mayor, a political friend and confidant of certain wealthy friends of Abraham Slade, all members of the prestigious Century Club.

  So far as Josiah’s Strachan relatives were concerned—(Josiah’s mother was a descendant of the Strachan family, originally of Bride’s Head, Rhode Island)—Josiah knew of fewer heroes, and fewer heroic deaths; yet from earliest boyhood he’d been intrigued by tales of Walton Strachan, from whom his mother was directly descended, who had at the age of eleven proved himself so capable a spy for General Edward Braddock, in western Pennsylvania, in a campaign against the French, that he was decorated by the general himself, in full view of hundreds of assembled troops. Only a few years later, Walton had distinguished himself as an officer in the Colonial army, in the Battle of the Monongahela River, in 1755; two decades later, Walton Strachan had died in a duel in Philadelphia, over a freed slave woman who had seemingly come under Strachan’s protection.

  “Am I so courageous? Even with Mayte mocking me at every turn?”

  By which Josiah meant, the memory of Axson Mayte taking hold of his sister Annabel in the doorway of the church, in full view of the assembled guests; the hellish image of Axson Mayte multiplied in Josiah’s imagination like a mirror-image multiplied to infinity.

  Like any young man bent upon an honor revenge, Josiah feared that another man would exact justice before he could; in this case, Lieutenant Dabney Bayard, who had gone into hiding, it was said, soon after the incident in the church, when his newly wed bride had been stolen from him and cast him into the intolerable role of cuckold. For it might be presumed that the wrath of a betrayed husband and lover was more potent than the wrath of a brother.

  (According to Bayard relatives, it was believed that the betrayed husband was on the track of Annabel and her “abductor”; now that a week had passed, and now twelve days, it became known to the Bayards that their disgraced Dabney had been involved in “drunken altercations” in public houses in Trenton, Washington Crossing, and New Hope, across the state border in Pennsylvania; that it was being whispered, in West End Princeton circles, that Lieutenant Bayard was “going to the dogs” and that, in a fit of temper, fueled by shame, the distraught young man had “severed all communications” with the Slade family, who should have been his allies.)

  Josiah, who had not been a friend of Dabney Bayard, and would not have wished to be an ally, except under duress, was relieved by this; for he intended to find his sister by himself, and to exact a just sort of revenge upon Axson Mayte, no matter the consequences to himself. He had read, as a student at the Princeton Academy for Boys, translations of both Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey; he had read those romantic-action novels listed previously in this chronicle, in which the exploits of courageous men and boys were honored, by Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Jack London, Owen Wister; stubbornly he had wished to interpret, in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, those passages in which the Hatfields and the McCoys make war upon one another, and barbarously kill one another, as exalted by Twain, and not instead deplored. As Josiah traveled from one Jersey town to another, in pursuit of the missing couple, he found himself in the wake of the enraged husband Dabney Bayard, who preceded him, at times, by merely hours; and wondered that, if Dabney were in one of his drunken tempers, and spoiling for revenge, declaring his intentions to any and all who would listen in public houses, Dabney might be reported as saying things insulting to Josiah’s sister’s honor, necessitating that Josiah must fight him. To Winslow Slade he felt obliged to speak in this way, as he could not have spoken to his own parents: “If the ‘wronged husband’ insults the ‘unfaithful wife,’ if he so much as hints at his displeasure with Annabel, you know, Grandfather, what I must do. I will have no choice.”

  And Winslow Slade said quietly: “No, Josiah. You will have a choice, as we all do. Even as she did—our lost Annabel.”

  IT SOON BECAME EVIDENT to Josiah, with the intolerable passage of days, and finally weeks, that there were unique problems involving the search for Annabel and the demonic Axson Mayte: for not only had the illicit couple disappeared from the church on Nassau Street, in a dignified old brougham pulled by four matched horses, “as if into thin air along the Old King’s Highway” (now Route 27), but, in the aftermath of the scandal, very few persons could account for Axson Mayte during the weeks of his residence in Princeton.

  It wa
s true, Mayte had been entertained at several of the most distinguished old Princeton houses, and had been a visitor at Crosswicks Manse; he had been a guest for several days at Prospect, the president’s house at Princeton University; everyone in the West End seemed to have met him, and to have shaken his hand which was recalled by some as “strong, vigorous, hot” and others as “limp, chill as a dead fish, boneless.” Yet, Josiah had great difficulty piecing together information about the man. His grandfather Winslow had not been very helpful, saying only that Axson Mayte, a Virginian associated with the Presbyterian Church, had virtually invited himself, to speak with Winslow in his library—“On a theological matter, of no interest to the lay person”; the meeting had been brief, not two hours; but Axson Mayte had not left town, turning up elsewhere, at others’ homes, and at Prospect, to shake the hand of Woodrow Wilson. Why had he come to Princeton in the first place; where, indeed, had he come from—(by this time the Presbyterian-Virginia background had been proven false); was he a man of the law, as Woodrow Wilson believed, an “ethicist” and an “educator”; was he a wealthy man, as others believed, or was he a gambler and card shark, as others claimed; how had he become associated with Winslow Slade’s sheltered granddaughter Annabel; and, most mysteriously, what precisely did Axson Mayte look like?

  No two persons seemed to agree. Josiah himself remembered with a vivid sort of revulsion—the squat man’s toad-features, and ditch-water eyes; a sly, sensual, insinuating smile, of wormy lips. Yet others whose opinion Josiah valued, like Horace Burr, insisted that Axson Mayte looked “altogether ordinary: neither tall nor short, thin or stout, attractive or ugly”; several of the women, including Johanna van Dyck and Florence Chambers, claimed to have found Mayte “handsome, in an arrogant-Southerner way” but “soft-spoken, courteous.” No one could agree: did Mayte have “coarse, dark hair”—or “fair, thinning hair”; or was he in fact bald? Professor Pearce van Dyck, still ailing with a mysterious infection of the lungs, could speak in only a hoarse voice, insisting that Axson Mayte was “a kind of golem”—(a golem being a creature out of Hebrew tradition, a humanoid creature fashioned of clay and lacking a soul). Of West End Princeton residents not one would confess to having brought together Axson Mayte and Annabel Slade: indeed, no one could recall having glimpsed the two together at the same gathering, beneath the same roof.