The Accursed

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Josiah thought, with a sick thrill of elation—Have I killed again? Struck another demon to the floor, and murdered him?

  Amid this scene of general chaos Miss Charmian threw her squat little body at Josiah Slade, clawing at his exposed skin with red-painted talon-nails. “Beast! What have you done! Look like an angel-boy and reveal your true colors—devil! Call the police! He has murdered my darling Jack! Oh—the blood! My darling Jack is bleeding from his scalp! This is outright murder! The great Jack London—oh help!”

  Josiah tried to push the frenzied little woman away—how like a wild cat she was, hot-eyed, hot-skinned, baring sharp little teeth, and raking her claws against him however she could; valiantly he was trying to help London to his feet, but the stunned man had little strength in his legs; Miss Charmian continued to scream and to claw at him as Josiah turned to her, to try to placate her; for she was nearing a state of hysterics, hyperventilating; her small pug-face glowered with an unnatural heat. It was so, Jack London had been injured in the fall; he was bleeding freely from a scalp wound, streams of blood running down his fleshy face that was now drained of color, deathly-pale; his lips had gone loose and were pale also, wet with saliva like froth. To the staring throng Josiah stammered: “It wasn’t my fault—he attacked me—I was only defending myself—I didn’t mean—you must have seen, I didn’t mean to—harm him . . .”

  Miss Charmian screamed: “Oh—stop him! Murderer! He has killed our prince! The greatest literary genius of our time!”

  “But—you are all witnesses . . .”

  Josiah looked about for Upton Sinclair, but his friend was sitting on the floor where he’d fallen, very white-faced, tremulous; a froth of vomit shone at his mouth, and his shirtfront was stained. No help there! Josiah fumbled to wrap a napkin around London’s head to stanch the bleeding, but his hands shook badly, and the wounded man continued to flail feebly at him, and curse him; Josiah let the blood-soaked napkin fall to the floor and backed away from the table, desperate now to escape. As if seeing something terrible in his face, unknown to Josiah Slade, the others shrank from him; a path opened for him amid the crowded restaurant; he found himself staggering out onto Forty-second Street where the night air was startlingly fresh. In Josiah’s wake were cries Stop him! Call police! Murderer!—dimly heard, as in a fading dream.

  Quickly Josiah ducked into an alley beside MacDougal’s. From the alley, though he had never been in this terrible place before, and had only the vaguest sense of what he was doing, deftly he made his way to another alley, and so to Forty-first Street, and then Broadway, near-deserted at this time of night, where he found himself half-running, north, in the direction—he believed it was the direction—of his apartment building on Eleventh Avenue and Thirty-sixth.

  The clothes he’d chosen for the evening’s rally which he’d hoped to attend—beige flannel trousers, a dark-brown coat, white cotton shirt—were torn, and smelled shamefully of alcohol; his fair, fawn-colored hair was disheveled, his cheeks were lacerated and bleeding as if clawed by a cat; both his ears smarted and stung and on the following morning, in the stark clear light reflected from the Hudson River a short distance away, he would discover that part of his left earlobe had been torn or bitten off, the tiny wound encrusted with a black, brackish little blood-button.

  “Demons! I have entered a region of demons, and narrowly escaped with my life.”

  TERRA INCOGNITA I

  Lenora.”

  Low and level and calm-seeming, the pronouncement of the faithless wife’s name.

  Incriminating letters—was the proper term billets-doux?—clutched in his hand.

  As Copplestone made his grunting way up the staircase, and along the second-floor corridor at Wheatsheaf, in the direction of Lenora’s morning-room, where she had sequestered herself in the pretense of writing urgent letters on behalf of the New Jersey Society of the Colonial Dames of America, seeking funds for a restoration of “historical landmarks” in the state.

  “Len-ora.”

  Her maternal carelessness had cost Copplestone his sole male heir as well as his beautiful little daughter. Even if he could find it in his heart to forgive his wife’s adultery—(and Copplestone’s heart was of the size of a walnut, and maggoty)—he could never forgive her for that.

  And in her morning-room, with lattice-windows overlooking the spring profusion of the garden two floors below, and a stand of tall elms and oaks some distance away, Lenora sat very still at her writing table, a fountain pen in her trembling hand; she was swathed in black, as a widow; though not a widow but the bereft mother of two beloved children, who had departed this earth prematurely, and terribly. After a servant had brought her breakfast on a tray—(mostly untouched, for Lenora no longer had any appetite for food)—she had dared to lock the door against her husband, and could only hope that he would not discover it, and fly into a rage.

  Touching the tip of the fountain pen to a sheet of stiff stationery embossed with a gilt rendering of Wheatsheaf, in its original, Colonial-era state, Lenora wrote, as if her life depended upon it: It has lately come to our attention that the “Dolly Lambert” house at Washington’s Crossing is in dire need of repair . . . We are hoping that you will aid us in the restoration of this crucial . . .

  NOT FAR AWAY, at Mora House, Amanda FitzRandolph was softly singing a lullaby to little Terence in his crib. The infant had wakened, as he usually did, at about 4:30 a.m., and had not left off crying, whimpering, thrashing, and kicking until after 9 a.m.; the nanny was diligent, and uncomplaining, but clearly exhausted; and so Amanda had intervened, soon after breakfast, in her muslin “at-home” gown and a beribboned housecap. In this phase of her life Amanda FitzRandolph was determined to be a very good mother; she was determined to abjure forever the temptations of the secular and sensual world, that is the madding crowd; despite the attractions of that world, and the figure of the Count, she would plunge ever more deeply into motherhood, even widowhood . . . Softly singing, to the small figure in the crib, that was beginning by degrees to cease fretting: “Little Baby Bunting, Father’s gone a-hunting . . . Gone to get a new fur skin, to wrap the Baby Bunting in . . .”

  (Yet it was startling to Amanda, as to members of her family, that she seemed at times to have “forgotten” her husband of many years, Edgerstoune FitzRandolph; or rather to remember the man as but one of her numerous Princeton acquaintances, including those relatives for whom she felt dutiful but dull affection. Edgerstoune had died of an accidental poisoning—(by jellyfish)—in Bermuda, scarcely a month before; the accident had happened on the beach, and out of Amanda’s sight; only the Count had been a witness, and without him, Amanda did not think she could have survived; certainly, she could not have arranged to send the poor man’s body home for burial, as the Count so efficiently did. Yet, though Edgerstoune’s remains were buried in Princeton Cemetery, Amanda retained the notion that Edgerstoune was still in Bermuda, dozing, in sunshine, a copy of the Wall Street Journal on his lap, on the flagstone terrace at Sans Souci.)

  As the baby drifted into sleep, Amanda studied again his strangely dark-hued, ineffably “Indian”—(“Asian”?)—skin and features; the Count had counseled her, not to dwell over-much on such superficial qualities, for it was the soul of the child that mattered. “As it is your soul, dear Mandy, and not your physical beauty, that so mesmerizes me.”

  Amanda laughed, hearing the Count’s whispered words. The blushing widow/mother glanced about the nursery, to make sure that she was alone; and not observed by any of the servants as she continued to sing her tuneless song, the words of which she was obliged to repeat as she could remember but a single stanza:

  “Little Baby Bunting . . .”

  CLOSE BY, in Westland, the pale yellow Colonial set so far back from Hodge Road it could scarcely be seen through a scrim of trees, Mrs. Grover Cleveland was similarly attired in an “at-home” gown (by Worth), standing lost in thought: staring with eyes of dull rage into her invalid-husband’s bedroom where, propped up
against pillows, the aged, obese man panted, and wheezed, and grunted, and muttered to himself, while scribbling notes to be transcribed by a stenographer; for it was Grover’s latest delusion that he was involved in “business as usual”: writing out commandments to his fellow trustees at the university pertaining to an action certain of the trustees wish to undertake, to force Woodrow Wilson’s resignation; preparing memos to underlings at the Equitable Life Assurance Society, which Mr. Cleveland was flattered into “chairing” in the twilight years of his life.

  Watching him, the former Frances Folsom brooded over not the loss of her daughter in Buzzards Bay, not the loss of her father so many years ago (which ill luck propelled the teenaged girl into the arms of her father’s old political crony-friend Cleveland, in the desperation of her loss), but over the convention that, as she is not yet a widow, she cannot keep company with any man beside her husband, or risk the cruelest censure; and she does not wish to keep company with him.

  It grieved the handsome dark-haired woman too, that her aged husband did everything so slowly.

  “It will take him forever to die! He is so absent-minded.”

  The Count has come several times to call. The Count is a friend of Grover Cleveland’s, it is known; or rather, it is said; for Mrs. Cleveland knows that she must not allow any of her Princeton friends to guess that it is she, and not the ex-President, who has drawn the Count to Westland.

  Yet the Count has only just shaken Frances’s hand; he has stroked the fingers tenderly, and fixed her with a “piercing” gaze, and—murmured not a word.

  IN THE HEART of the green-leafed university campus, in his attic bower at Prospect, Thomas Woodrow Wilson (as he lately thinks of himself) is toiling over a much-revised poem, that had originated in a sonnet addressed to the young woman who had rejected his first proposal for marriage years ago; recast then as a sonnet addressed to Ellen (who had been deeply moved by it); now, recast in a more daringly modern, “thrusting” mode of poetry addressed to his dear friend Mrs. Peck. Downstairs Dr. Wilson’s adoring women-folk, including now a spinster sister-in-law, tiptoe about to spare him any distraction, with not the slightest suspicion that the middle-aged swain is not toiling over his commencement speech (“The Role of the Christian Gentleman in the Nation’s Service”); that his pulses beat erratically, and he is cruelly taxing his already strained nerves in the invention of such bold verse—

  You are the song I have waited for—

  I find in you the vision sweet—

  The grace, the strain of noble sounds,

  The form, the mien, the mind, the heart,

  That I have lacked and thought to find

  Within some spring within my mind,

  Dearest Cybella!

  To this, he signs Your Thomas—as “Woodrow” now seems to him stiff, pompous, and pretentious.

  TERRA INCOGNITA II

  If you wish not to burn in Hell with your fellow Slades why then set out for the Polar region, and save your devil’s hide!

  So persistent was this voice in the days following Josiah Slade’s disillusionment with Jack London, he succumbed at last; and cast his lot with an expedition set to leave within a week for the South Pole, under the auspices of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in cooperation with a private American financier named Winthrop Moody, a relative of Josiah’s through his mother’s family.

  From boyhood Josiah had read avidly of the great expeditions to the Polar regions, dating from antiquarian histories of Viking explorations in the North to latter-day records of voyages by Ross, Parry, Nordenskiöld, and Nansen. It seemed that just the other day the world had thrilled to the triumphant sea-journey of Amundsen’s Gjoa, which crossed the great “Dome of America” from east to west for the first, and perhaps the only, time in history; in the autumn of 1905, Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s The Voyage of the “Discovery” had been published in two volumes, illustrated by drawings and photographs that had entranced Josiah Slade, as they had entranced Adelaide Burr. Immense icy bergs, fields of snow that blinded the eye, and those mountains of the South Pole “rearing their lofty heads” as Scott described, “in desolate grandeur.” These were astonishing sights, indeed—as lethal as they were spectacular in the chill of minus-fifty-degrees Centigrade, and the purity of their brief sunshine; mesmerizing in isolation, mystery, and the powerful attraction of terra incognita to the civilized man. In the words of the great Shackleton: “You can’t comprehend the yearning, the heroic compulsion, to eradicate all that is terra incognita; and to set your foot on places of this Earth where man has never trod.”

  Reading such words, Josiah felt inspired, and filled with yearning. For he was one of those who did comprehend.

  Wanting to write to Upton Sinclair, whom he took for a sort of soul mate, though the young Socialist was lamentably thin, and ashy-skinned; rather anemic Josiah thought him, and disappointing in the brawl of the other night, when Josiah had needed a comrade. Yet, he would have liked to write to Upton Sinclair these words which he could record only in his morocco-leather-bound notebook:

  It seems to me that this world is sullied almost beyond redemption in hypocrisy, lies, and outright evil. Even Socialism, I fear, is tainted—a demon lies within the very best intentions. And so whether to save my hide or not, I had better flee terra cognita.

  JOSIAH’S MOTHER’S THIRD cousin Esdra Moody had put Josiah in contact with Winthrop Moody, who’d put Josiah in contact with Captain Eric Campbell Oates, the younger brother of the famed “Soldier” Captain Lawrence E. G. Oates,* who was at this time seeking funds for a spring expedition to the South Pole, and signing up recruits in New York City. (Such linkages sound more complicated than they are, for very little occurs in this world, in polar expeditions as in politics, without such connections among relatives, friends, acquaintances, and club members!) So certain was Josiah that an expedition to the South Pole would save his life, if not his soul, he went to Captain Oates in the man’s lavish suite at the Waldorf and nearly begged to be taken on though he couldn’t claim any experience as a sailor or as an explorer, apart from hiking in the Rocky Mountains and in Yosemite. He offered only a “strong back,” as he said, and an “indomitable will”; and a passionate desire, which all but glared out of his eyes, to escape the temperate zone, and to make his way into terra incognita.

  Eric Campbell Oates regarded his handsome and very fit-looking petitioner with a kindly, if dubious eye. He knew, from his friend Winthrop Moody, a little of the dolorous events of Princeton, New Jersey, over the last year, and more; but he’d ceased listening when the man had begun to prattle about a “curse”—he, Captain Oates, knew enough of curses, and could not imagine that anything truly wicked could emerge in the lily-white enclave of Princeton, New Jersey, set beside the places Captain Oates had seen in his travels, not excluding the so-called Belgian Congo. He told Josiah that terra incognita is more than a mere expression of romantic yearning, it is also a place—“And a very dangerous place, for one who has never left the temperate zone.”

  “Please give me a chance, Captain Oates! I will do anything you ask—any task, however menial. And I can contribute something to the expedition, as Winthrop Moody has probably told you—not very much, but virtually all of my savings.”

  Which persuaded Captain Oates of his seriousness and worth.

  SO IT HAPPENED with dizzying rapidity, at the end of May 1906, as the first-year anniversary of his sister’s abduction and public shame approached, Josiah Slade left his home, and took lodgings in New York City; joined the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, and came close to murdering his hero Jack London; and signed up with Captain Eric Campbell Oates for the Balmoral expedition to the South Pole, and set sail the following week, leaving behind a most peculiar farewell note to his stricken parents:

  Dearest Mother, & dearest Father—

  I shall depart terra cognita for 18 months, they promise, at the

  very least; & if I & terra cognita are fortunate, for longer than

 
; that. Do not expend your parental love on me as I have been

  unworthy of it; do not pray for me, who will sail beyond the

  range of earthly prayer.

  The Southern sky has no history, it is promised, & no