The Accursed

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “But the double-dealer won’t leave Princeton, I know. There is some devilish business about this ‘Institute of Technology’—the Harvard president Mr. Eliot is seeking to annex it to Harvard, as a ‘science department.’ How, then, is Dean West to be president? It’s all very complicated—diabolical. Yet the trustees will believe him, especially Grover Cleveland who is the man’s crony.”

  As Wilson ranted, and rambled, in a “stoic” voice, Josiah glanced about the room, which was both Spartan and cluttered; only just a desk, a table, and chairs, but the windowsills, as well as the table, were stacked with papers and documents; on a low sideboard close to the desk were a startling number of medications and syrups; Josiah noticed even a package of wide white gauze bandages, and a tin bottle with the Gothic legend Hebes Liniment on its side. Stained spoons, soiled handkerchiefs and tissues—from these, a stale, dimly cloacal odor emanated.

  “Might I open a window? It’s a little close in here . . .”

  But no, Woodrow Wilson frowned at the suggestion: for he was fighting bronchitis, and could not risk further infecting his lungs.

  Following his complaints of Dean West, Wilson complained of the difficulty he was having clearing away “dead wood” from the university, which he had inherited from the genial, ineffective president Francis Patton; yet more difficulty, in his campaign to abolish the eating clubs, that held a “veritable chokehold” on university undergraduate life, and had the power to intimidate the faculty and administration as well. And sports—“The sports teams dominate, crudely; and their coaches and trainers imagine themselves as deserving of their salaries as our faculty.”

  Josiah recalled how Annabel had often defended Woodrow Wilson, when others were criticizing the man as “cold”—“coldly ambitious”—a “self-righteous prig”—a “Byzantine logothete”; Annabel had protested, saying that her friend Jessie’s father, as she knew him, loved to talk with children, and to amuse them with his comical dialect stories in a “darky” drawl. Particularly little girls, Annabel said, in recollection of several occasions in Jessie’s company, when Mr. Wilson lowered himself into a squatting position, to speak more comfortably with them, and to make them laugh harder.

  Several times Josiah tried to interrupt Wilson’s monologue, which persisted in a dogged, quiet way, like a slow movement of molasses; he was eager to ask about Axson Mayte, but Wilson deflected him by suggesting to Josiah that he pursue a career in law, as he had, initially; for he’d intended to go into politics, with a law degree, and not to practice law. He then lectured his visitor on the fact that their Calvinist faith did not countenance withdrawal from the world for the world was, as the Bible makes clear, a battleground between the forces of Good and the forces of Evil—“The Devil likes nothing better than for the best of us to retire to private life, and let the world go hang!”

  “The ‘best of us’—but, sir, how are we to know?”

  “How are we to know? Why—God allows us to know. There can be no mystery here.”

  Irritation flared in Wilson, as if a match were being struck. The grainy-lidded eyes grew sharper in contention, and the languid posture immediately straightened. Yet Josiah said, not quite insolently, but in the manner in which he might have tried to refute any of his older Slade relatives, “So far as I’ve learned from my studies, here at Princeton and after, all nations, tribes, clans, and sometimes even individuals, believe themselves to be ‘God’s chosen people’ and their enemies the Devil’s. In which case, Dr. Wilson, it requires quite an act of faith to imagine that God is exclusively on our side, and has only our interests in mind, when there are so very many others—millions.”

  Wilson blinked slowly at Josiah through his bright-polished eyeglasses as if he’d never heard anything so extraordinary, and so disturbing, in his life. “Josiah, I wonder if I’ve heard you correctly? Such ‘free-thinking’—‘anarchic’—notions have no place at Princeton, and can’t be blamed on your course of study, I’m sure. At the seminary, Reverend Shackleton has gone on record stating that ‘no new ideas’ of any sort will be entertained there, unlike that bastion of ‘free thinkers’ Union Theological Seminary; and my commitment to Princeton is, as I have said, ‘reform’ in the service of tradition. Ideas like yours make for lively debating subjects but, in actual life, are unacceptable, relativistic nonsense.”

  Josiah had all he could do to keep from rolling his eyes; or, in the undergraduate way of muted derision, shuffling his feet against the bare hardwood floor. Instead he said, with an air of placating an excited elder. “Well. I know enough, sir, to know that I’m very ignorant.”

  He didn’t like the tremulous way in which Wilson was staring at him, or the twitching motions of Wilson’s lips, that appeared caked at the corners with a powdery white substance.

  He wondered why Wilson had invited him to visit. It could not have been to recite his usual grievances, surely?

  He ventured to say: “Now, sir, on this matter of a former associate or acquaintance of yours, Axson Mayte—”

  “No, no! That accursed individual is no ‘associate’ or ‘acquaintance’ of mine, I assure you!”

  To this, Josiah could think of no reply. For certainly Woodrow Wilson had been seen in the company of Mayte frequently, for a fixed period of time; Josiah himself had seen them together.

  “He was coarse and barbaric and no gentleman, like Jack London”—Wilson spoke now as if inspired, by an association of ideas—“who, the other day, dared to state in public that he would not deny that Socialism is a menace! ‘Its purpose is to wipe out, root and branch, all capitalistic institutions of our present-day society’—so the ruffian boasts. The Revolution, as they call it, will have taken place by 1910. And what of the influx of multitudes of immigrants of the lowest classes from southern and eastern Europe?—for the sturdier stocks of the northern Europeans, the British and the Scots-Irish, are increasingly threatened; as, it is said, bad money drives out good.”

  Josiah sighed, and made no reply. In the near distance Old North was tolling the welcome hour of 6 p.m.

  “When I was an undergraduate at Princeton, and something of a ‘poler,’ I was blackballed by Ivy,” Wilson said, with an ironic twist of his lips; as if nothing could be more incredible, than this revelation. “I vowed then, to take my revenge where I could, and when. I have waited twenty years. The Campbells of Argyll know patience.”

  An objective observer could not have drawn any connection between this impulsive utterance of Wilson’s and Wilson’s repugnance for “anarchy”—but Josiah understood.

  Josiah, who had disdained bicker at Princeton, as one of the more sought-after freshmen in his class, had received a bid from the exclusive eating club Ivy nonetheless, unofficially and indirectly—which he’d ignored, in his Slade arrogance. And so on campus during his undergraduate years he’d been the envy and the awe of all, even certain of his professors. To have ignored Ivy! He had made his friends elsewhere, a few. But friendship and popularity had not seemed to him the point of college, then or now.

  Now the expression in Wilson’s long-jawed face, of an old humility but partly mollified by the hope of vindication, made Josiah feel that, for a moment, he’d been cast back to his adolescent self on this very campus: essentially, a claustrophobic little world of privilege and anxiety in which one was made to care too much about too little.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, sir. The eating clubs can be tyrannical, if they are not checked.”

  “They will be checked. I will fight the entrenched alumni and the G—damn’d board of trustees and accursed Dean West who supports them, till the death.”

  Woodrow Wilson was trembling now, through his long lean body.

  It was very extreme of the ministerial Wilson to have said G—damn’d.

  Josiah felt an impulse to comfort the older man, even to wipe at his damp mouth with a handkerchief. Yet he would never touch Woodrow Wilson—of course! He was remembering, in a European lecture in McCosh, years ago, one of his professors
declaring that while madness in individuals is relatively rare, it is virtually a prerequisite for a certain sort of political leader: “He is not functionally mad, but mad in his intellect. He will know by instinct how to rally others to his madness, in the pretense that he is in their service and their lives depend upon him—Napoleon, for example.”

  Josiah thought At least here in the U.S., in our democracy that can’t happen.

  It was said about town that Woodrow Wilson had had “political ambitions” since boyhood. In a ribald moment Frances Cleveland had remarked at a dinner party that the “most potent male organ” in all of Princeton was the mouth of Woodrow Wilson.

  Josiah smiled at the thought. But ceased smiling at once, as Woodrow Wilson was glaring at him.

  “You are amused, I see! You, as I recall, were a member of Ivy.”

  “No. I was not.”

  “I had heard, you were. Or, you’d declined their bid.”

  “It was all long ago, Dr. Wilson. It’s best to believe that the eating clubs will ‘wither away’ with the rise of democracy on campus—as the Socialists and Marxists predict, the state will ‘wither away.’ ”

  “No way of life so entrenched will ever ‘wither away’—it must be helped, with dynamite, if need be. As well expect that Nigras and—and women—will be admitted to Princeton University, one day, as to fantasize the ‘withering-away’ of the eating clubs.” Wilson laughed, at such a ridiculous notion.

  “And does Dean West oppose you on that issue, too?”

  Wilson saw no undue familiarity on Josiah’s part, in asking this question; but rather responded with heat, as if Josiah were a confidant.

  “Yes. Of course. West opposes me on every possible issue, as it is my soul he wants, in a nutshell, he has said.”

  “ ‘In a nutshell’—really?”

  “He has said. It has been reported to me.”

  Now in a state of quivering nerves, Wilson lurched to his feet. Josiah took advantage of the moment and quickly stood as well, with the excuse that he had to leave, for he was expected at dinner at Wheatsheaf that evening. With a curious smile of elation, Wilson laid his arm on Josiah’s shoulder, and escorted him down the narrow stairs to the first floor, and to the foyer. (Josiah wondered where in the house Mrs. Wilson and the daughters were. The “tower” was just enough detached from the main part of the household, so that Woodrow Wilson could slip up there, and even have visitors, without being detected.) Just as Josiah was about to leave, eager to step outside into the fresh air, Wilson said, bringing his mouth close to Josiah’s ear, “You will wonder why I invited you? It is very hard to say this, Josiah, but—my dear daughter Jessie has been unwell, you know—after the—that terrible day—to which she’d so long looked forward, as a bridesmaid. Dr. Hatch has been administering to her, with some success. But I must tell you—Jessie is tormented by terrible dreams. The sleep-medicine Dr. Hatch prescribes seems almost to exacerbate them. Nights in succession she has dreamt of poor Ruth Cleveland—and the murdered Spags girl, whom none of us knew of course—these wraiths tease and torment her, scratching at her window and begging to be allowed inside; lately, the two have been joined by a third girl, a blond girl, which seems to Jessie to be your sister Annabel, as she was some years ago—young, innocent, terrified, begging to be let inside Jessie’s room; but Jessie reports that she is too transfixed by horror, to move from her bed. Jessie says—What if they are vampires?”

  Wilson’s voice quavered. Josiah stepped away, as if he’d been stabbed to the heart.

  Wanting to protest My sister is not dead. My sister is not a vampire!

  Instead, Josiah could only thank Wilson, and hurriedly depart.

  The bell of Old North was tolling an unknown hour.

  OCTOBER 1905

  Vampire! Josiah is incensed. He has never heard anything so ridiculous in his life.

  For Josiah is purely a rationalist. Josiah’s heroes are Aristotle, David Hume, John Stuart Mill. He is not widely read in philosophy and logic but feels a repugnance for all that is murky, mystical.

  Yes, to a degree: Josiah is a Protestant Christian. But Josiah does not subject his faith to reason; his faith is bound up with family loyalty, which is not to be questioned.

  “There is no ‘supernatural’ world—only just this, the ‘natural’ world. All the rest is nonsense.”

  “NONSENSE.”

  In her opulently furnished boudoir-library at Westland, Mrs. Grover Cleveland has distracted herself from her marital worries by typing, on her new frontstroke, Underwood typewriter, the concluding pages of an article on female suffrage that had been begun by her ailing husband at the invitation of The Ladies’ Home Journal; but Frances Cleveland has revised the article in her own far more conversational voice so that it is a chatty effusion, and not a dreary sermon. Frances smiles to think it will make a considerable “splash” when it is published: “ ‘Sensible and responsible women do not want to vote. The relative positions to be assumed by Man and Woman, in the working-out of civilization, were assigned long ago—by a far higher intelligence than ours.” Frances pauses before typing, with fierce strokes of the machine, the final riposte: “Female suffrage is, in a word, nonsense.”

  From an adjoining room, poor Grover is calling to her. Frances has the excuse that the typewriter-mechanism is very noisy, and she can’t hear; in any case, a servant will come running, soon.

  “It is what we pay them for, after all.”

  ITEM. COUNT ENGLISH von Gneist, of late the most sought-after dinner guest in Princeton, in a dark-hued evening suit with a ruffled white shirt and silver-embroidered vest, has escorted Mrs. Amanda FitzRandolph and her great-aunt Thomasina Bayberry to a lavish dinner at Drumthwacket—for Edgerstoune is away in San Francisco, on business. It is at this dinner that von Gneist exchanges significant glances with another guest, Miss Wilhelmina Burr, who feels a sensation of cold come over her even as, with girlish laughter, she responds to the remark of a dinner-table companion to her right. Such a powerful personality!—and so handsome, though his cheeks are creased with melancholy. But what interest would the Count have in me!

  Since Annabel’s departure, and Josiah’s continued indifference to her, Wilhelmina has vowed not to withdraw from the world in heartbreak, or in invalidism; often she is seen in hiking shoes and tweeds striding along a bank of the Delaware-Raritan Canal, as it runs parallel to Lake Carnegie; often, she is seen striding along Nassau Street, in the direction of the public library; at least once a week, in the early morning, she is seen on the train platform at Princeton Junction gripping an artist’s portfolio, on her way into the city and the New York School of Art where she receives instruction from the renowned Robert Henri himself—though forbidden by her anxious parents to stay the night in New York City, even at a relative’s home.

  Item. It is at Wheatsheaf, the home of his uncle Copplestone Slade and his aunt Lenora, that Josiah hears news to tear at his heart: that, according to his uncle, Annabel and “that man, Mayte” have been sighted at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City and yet again at a private dinner party at the Frick mansion on upper Fifth Avenue. With a snort of disgust Copplestone hands Josiah a newspaper clipping from the New York Herald, a photograph of a couple in a smart Paige motorcar, the young blond woman wearing a veil about her head and shoulders and the gentleman in linen duster, dust-hood, and goggles; the caption beneath reading simply The fashionable set tours abroad.

  This photograph, Copplestone said, was fresh evidence of the “infamy” their family would never outlive.

  “But is this Annabel? The man is certainly not Mayte.”

  Josiah examined the photograph closely. Possibly, the young woman might have been his sister, or her twin; but the gentleman was certainly not Axson Mayte, for he was slender and darkly handsome, and Mayte was squat and ugly as a troll.

  Copplestone raged: “And to think that I played cards with that scoundrel, in fact, lost money at cards to that scoundrel, at Andrew West’s! And more than once.”


  “But—is this ‘Mayte’? He doesn’t resemble ‘Mayte’ at all.”

  “Though, Josiah, bear in mind—I didn’t trust him from the first. His manners were those of a Rooshian Bolshevik, and his ‘luck’ with cards too good. He stank, too, of ambergris—like a silly female.”

  Stung by this remark, perhaps, though ordinarily Lenora remained silent when her husband gave himself up to one of his rants, Josiah’s aunt said quietly: “Why, Copplestone, I remember you saying of Axson Mayte that he was a most lively fellow, ‘a man among men,’ and very clever in his mimicry of both Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt.”

  Copplestone grunted, in a kind of grudging assent. “Indeed yes, he was cruelly funny. But I did not laugh.”

  Lenora said, bent over her embroidery as if it, and not the conversation, drew her deepest concentration: “Why yes, Copplestone, I believe you did laugh—quite cruelly, I thought at the time. For Woodrow Wilson would believe himself a friend of yours, as he is a friend of your father’s.”

  “He is not a friend of my father’s. He is a hanger-on, who wants my father’s support—the support of all of the Slades.”

  Josiah sensed that there was tension in the air of the drawing room, between his uncle and his aunt; badly he wanted to question Copplestone about Axson Mayte, but this did not seem like an opportune time.

  And how dank and chill Wheatsheaf felt that evening, like a mausoleum.