The Accursed

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Mrs. Peck paused, allowing Woodrow to absorb this yet more staggering news. Dazedly he asked if it could be true—“Wyman is about to capitulate to West, and destroy me utterly?” Seeing how shaken Woodrow was, and how damp his pallid forehead, Mrs. Peck removed a lace handkerchief from a pocket, and dabbed at his heated skin.

  “ ‘A course of action that will change all’—how?”

  “As I am ordained by a Higher Power, Tommy, transcending merely human notions of justice, morality, ‘right or wrong,’ so I am ordained also to thwart the dean’s plan; even, if necessary, rid the world of his evil influence. That is—if you should wish it.”

  Quietly Cybella Peck spoke. But Woodrow Wilson heard clearly.

  “ ‘Rid the world of his evil influence’—? If I should wish it?”

  “The Almighty is concerned that His plan for you may be sabotaged, before it has quite evolved. The Almighty has reason to know that the dean may leap into the Devil’s camp—and bring more disaster upon this troubled community.” Now Cybella spoke matter-of-factly, looking frankly into Woodrow Wilson’s astonished eyes. “The unrest here of late, and through the country generally, follows from the failure of strong leadership to assert itself, whether from the governing bodies, the pulpit, or the university; this must be known to you. The ‘bestial’ killings in Princeton . . . the ‘tragic deaths’ . . . If Andrew West’s coup is allowed to take place, the man will never rest until he has shamed you out of office and crowned himself president of the university. (Grover Cleveland has said that he doesn’t plan to die until he sees his friend inaugurated!) All this goes strongly against the plan of the Almighty that Woodrow Wilson is to triumph at Princeton, and enjoy a long reign, like certain of your distinguished predecessors, prior to continuing with a public career in government, and ending as a statesman . . . So, this obstacle must be dealt with immediately.”

  “—statesman? When my stock is so low here at Princeton . . .”

  “Tommy, a brilliant career lies before you, if you do not weaken. Princeton now—Trenton tomorrow—Washington, D.C., thereafter; from there, the world itself one day, united as a sort of ‘league’ or ‘club’ with the American President at the head . . . Dear friend, your eyes are glassy, and your manner stricken; where is the razor-sharp look of old, which so many have feared?”

  Woodrow apologized for his slowness to respond, and his failure to quite comprehend all that was being explained to him. He hoped he would be forgiven, but he felt “very queer”; as if a “great pressure” were building inside his head; and he could not catch his breath, in this humid spring air.

  “Tommy, sit down! Here in the grass. We will sit together, as the Almighty looks over us.”

  In the tall, unmowed grass at the edge of the Battle Field woods, the couple sat, somewhat awkwardly; for Woodrow Wilson was wholly unaccustomed to such a behavior, and had probably not sat on the ground since he’d been a boy. Very close by, Mrs. Peck gathered her strawberry-tinted skirts becomingly around her, and sank down into the grass, and took up her parasol again to shade her flawless complexion, as she spoke, quietly, yet urgently, to her shaken lover: “You have only to indicate to me, dear Tommy, by a squeeze of your hand, if you want your devi to fulfill your wish—if it is indeed your wish that the evil represented by Andrew West be eradicated, at once. Before you, then, will lie a triumphant reign here at Princeton, including the banning of the eating clubs, at last; you will be favorably compared to your predecessors Winslow Slade and James McCosh. Even greater honors will follow, in my Master’s scheme for you, leading to such heights, your old enemies will have to crane their necks to gape up at you. A time of terrible devastation lies ahead for Europe; a time of sacrifice, for young American soldiers, who will be sent to ‘make the world safe for democracy’; yet you will triumph, and one day you will hear orisons of worship through war-torn Europe, in Italy in particular—seas of adoring Italians chanting your name in the squares of Rome—Viva Voovro Veelson! Viva Voovro Veelson!”

  Woodrow shook his head as if to wake from a dream, and in a faint voice queried: “ ‘Voovro Veelson’—why cannot my name be pronounced properly? Is it in mockery? In jest? I don’t like to travel far from home, Cybella; my nerves, and my stomach, can’t tolerate it . . . My dear Cybella, you are frightening me—I feel very queer indeed.”

  “Tommy, you surprise me. That Woodrow Wilson should stare at me in such a craven way, and show so little enthusiasm for my Master’s plan. In an instant you could rid yourself of Andrew West—my Master has the power to strike him down as one crushes a fat beetle beneath his foot; and by this you triumph here at home, and can lord it over that gang of palsied old fools, the ‘board of trustees,’ whose boots you are very tired of licking, you know; and you will drive that tub-of-guts Cleveland into an early grave—if not quite early enough. Your dear wife Ellen, suspecting nothing, will be delighted for you; your daughters will adore you yet more, and suitable husbands may emerge for them, who are now holding back, to see how your shaky career proceeds. As for the faculty here—once you’ve set your foot on their necks they are yours forever, for they are of a cowardly disposition, and will not make any trouble if you pay them reasonably, and invite them to Prospect House from time to time. Once done, as I’ve said, ’tis done forever; and all will lie before you, Dr. Wilson—all of the world.”

  In a vague hopeful voice Woodrow said, as much to himself as to Mrs. Peck, “ . . . Father did seem to foresee. His hand upon my shoulder, his voice ringing . . . my son will be a great man. Yet, Cybella, it’s very strange: I don’t actually seem to feel any ‘ambition’—beyond Princeton. It is really all that I require. I have never liked Europe—only England and Scotland. My nerves are irritated by ‘foreign accents’—the mangling of English. I have no use for the so-called cultures of France, Spain, Italy, Greece, even Germany; the Catholic countries are contemptible, under the directive of the pope. I do not know and can’t greatly care if the Alps are in Italy, or in Switzerland, or Belgium; if Baghdad be in Persia, or Constantinople, or Mexico. All may be heaped on the banks of the Zuider Zee, so far as I am concerned.” Feebly he laughed, having meant these latter remarks as a joke.

  “Tommy! This is not like you. Remember your father’s hope for you, and your own secret desires. From boyhood you’ve sought your destiny—if but indirectly. And now I, as a devi, the first of my kind to visit Princeton, and perhaps the last, have been designed by the Almighty to act in your behalf—with no consequences for you except good.”

  “ ‘No consequences’—? No one would know?”

  “Of course, no one would know. Andrew West would vanish—‘of natural causes.’ ”

  “ ‘Natural causes’ . . .”

  “Dear Tommy, you sound like a parrot! But a timid sort of parrot, not at all the bold, visionary statesman that is the essential Woodrow Wilson.”

  In the distance, Old North was tolling the hour of five: so swiftly, an hour had passed! It was Woodrow’s custom to dine promptly at six o’clock, at Prospect, if there were no guests. Fumbling at his collar, which had grown terribly tight, Woodrow wondered aloud what he must do . . .

  “Do?”—Cybella Peck’s voice had grown perceptibly sharper, and was tinged now with sarcasm. “Why, you have to do nothing. What have you ever actually done, my friend? You are a talker, a commander . . . you tell others what to do. You need but give me your consent, a mere squeeze of your hand on mine, and the vainglorious West will topple dead in the midst of his enormous breakfast tomorrow at Merwick—an instantaneous stroke, that will give him no pain.”

  By degrees, Cybella Peck’s voice was growing vehement, impatient; she was turning her parasol restlessly on her shoulder; gazing with a disbelieving contempt at her companion, who seemed scarcely aware of her any longer as a female presence of exquisite beauty. His lips moved numbly: “ ‘No pain’. . . . that is a mercy. Andrew will overeat—overindulge . . . His blood pressure, it’s said, is dangerously high. Yet, what an appetite! It is a pity .
. . yet he is of the Devil’s party, that’s clear . . . well, I will miss him. . . . Countess, I feel so very queer, I hope you will forgive me.”

  “Your consent, sir,” Cybella Peck said, with a forced smile, “and your forgiveness afterward. If you’d rather not express your secret wish aloud you might just nod your head or . . .”

  Yet Woodrow Wilson continued to brood, while his vague fingers groped at his jaw; and Cybella Peck was growing increasingly impatient. “The world is all before me, as Father predicted . . . if Andrew but topples over dead. So simply! He would not feel a thing . . . He and I are of an age when such things can happen . . . indeed, I suffered a ‘minor’ stroke at the young age of thirty-nine . . . from which I did recover. . . while Andrew, you say, will not recover?” As Cybella drew out her fan, and again snapped it open, and began to fan herself vigorously, Woodrow continued, musing: “I think that I could indeed affect the course of history—the destiny of nations—God’s will translated into politics. The tariff has long been an abomination to me, as to all Democrats; I think that I could easily ‘go Teddy one better’ and put strength into the anti-trust laws; and give federal assistance more liberally, to undercut the power of the labor unions. Yet I wonder, Countess, if there hasn’t been some misunderstanding—you have mistaken me for someone else . . .”

  Mrs. Peck said at once that that was unlikely. Her tone was now transparently ironic. “There is only one ‘Thomas Woodrow Wilson,’ I think. Are you saying that you reject us? The plan of the Almighty, to be enacted through you?”

  Tugging at his high starched collar Woodrow Wilson said, more forcibly, as if he had been gathering strength, sitting so awkwardly on the ground with no instinctive sense of how, or where, to place his long, lanky legs, “Even if I wished this advancement, Countess, I could not accept it at the cost of another’s life—not even at the cost of another’s suffering . . . No, I can’t wish Andrew West dead under any circumstances.”

  “And do you think West would be so magnanimous toward you?”

  “I—I—I can’t think—that he would be less magnanimous . . . For there is Jesus’s admonition that we must love our enemies, and do unto others as we would they did unto us.” Woodrow spoke slowly, with the air of one picking his way through a difficult passage. “But the primary reason I must reject your offer, Mrs. Peck, is simply that I do not want to injure my enemy for any reward whatsoever, still less for revenge.”

  Now Mrs. Peck responded with scarcely concealed rage: “Suppose it is the case, Dr. Wilson, that the dean’s fate will fall upon you tomorrow morning, as his substitute? That my Master, impatient with your feuding, and with your mutual appeals to the Higher Powers for aid, has decreed that one of you must be struck down? Might you be prepared then to change your mind?”

  The troubled Dr. Wilson had been fumbling with his pince-nez, to fix them more securely on his perspiring face; and now made an effort to stare at the woman with some trace of his old “power”—unfortunately, almost entirely drained from his watering eyes. But in a voice that quavered with certainty, he said: “If you knew me, Countess, you would know that I never change my mind once I have made a decision. The key is turned in the lock, and thrown away.”

  The strain of this lengthy conversation was such that Woodrow Wilson was exhausted, and came close to losing consciousness; indeed, he may have lost consciousness for a fleet moment. Lying on the grass in his ministerial suit, white shirt and necktie, he opened his eyes to see the sky lurching above him, like an abyss into which he was in danger of falling; and there was the sun, in the western sky, swollen, throbbing against his very brow. Though he’d tugged his collar open he could not, it seemed, breathe.

  “Countess? Where . . .”

  When the spell passed, Woodrow sat up, disoriented. He was alone: his companion had vanished, without a word of farewell; and had left carelessly behind, on the grass beside him, unless she’d flung it down in disgust, the little bouquet of alyssum and iris he’d given her from his wife’s garden—the delicate flowers now yellowed and withered and the leaves so dry, they crumbled to dust when he touched them.

  POSTSCRIPT: “THE SECOND BATTLE OF PRINCETON”

  The rest is history.

  For of course it happened as the “Countess de Barhegen” prophesied: Isaac Chauncy Wyman did indeed pledge a gift of two million, five hundred thousand dollars to Princeton University, stipulating that the dean of the Graduate School, Andrew West, must oversee the money in the construction of a graduate school of his design.

  When notified of the bequest, the elated West traveled at once to Boston by train, to thank Mr. Wyman in person—(as, some eighteen months later, the dean would travel to Boston to attend Mr. Wyman’s funeral, and to lay a sprig of ivy on Wyman’s casket, taken from the outer wall of Nassau Hall). From Boston, West would wire triumphant cables to several of the university trustees, who had been his staunch supporters through the years of the Wilson/West struggle—

  TE DEUM LAUDAMUS. NON NOBIS, DOMINE.

  By this time Woodrow Wilson had been struck down in his tower at Prospect, felled by a “massive” stroke.

  So ended, sadly for Dr. Wilson, the “Second Battle of Princeton.”

  DR. DE SWEINITZ’S PRESCRIPTION

  After Woodrow Wilson’s stroke of May 30, 1906, the distinguished Philadelphia physician Wilhelm de Sweinitz was summoned to Princeton by the trustees of the university, that an expert verdict might be offered on the subject of Dr. Wilson’s future health.

  In the interim, Dr. Wilson’s longtime physician Dr. Hatch, in collaboration with Dr. Boudinot, seemed to have antagonized the Wilson family by suggesting that Dr. Wilson appoint an acting president of the university; and seriously consider resigning his office, to return to a less demanding professorial schedule. After twelve days of severe disability, Dr. Wilson began to “rally” despite the fact that the vision in his left eye had all but vanished, seemingly forever; his ability to flex the fingers of his right hand seemed permanently impaired; and neuritis of the left shoulder and leg had lately grown so painful, paralysis might be imminent. Most worrisome to the physicians were the convalescent’s mercurial swings of mood: from despair, to euphoria; from extreme caution, to certitude on all matters; to bouts of sardonic laughter, and bouts of despairing tears. Yet, the invalid was soon “up and walking”—with a cane; and his speech, though hesitant and slurred, gradually strengthened, like an atrophied muscle returned to use.

  Woodrow Wilson would not hear of appointing an “acting president”—not while he was alive!

  As befitting a specialist of high repute, Dr. de Sweinitz examined his patient with painstaking thoroughness and assembled a medical history by closely querying Dr. Wilson’s Princeton physicians, and not only Dr. Wilson and his wife and daughters, and certain of his associates, but even the household staff at Prospect, as to the man’s habitual behavior. Dr. de Sweinitz estimated that Woodrow Wilson had suffered, prior to 1906, at least fourteen breakdowns in mental and physical health; mincing no words, he diagnosed arterio-sclerosis as a consequence of prolonged high pressure on brain and nerves.

  Mrs. Wilson pleaded with the Philadelphia physician, not to make such a diagnosis public. “A dying by inches, is it not? What then of Woodrow’s career?”

  Nonetheless, Dr. de Sweinitz insisted upon his conclusion, and suggested an uncompromising prescription.

  “The patient’s medical history is such, I must advise him not only to retire from his presidency here, but to retire from the academic world altogether. He must ‘close up shop’ at once. In addition, he must give up all pretensions of a public life; most of all, his habit of speechifying, which is a kind of insidious myth-building: erecting mere opinions and fancies into pontifical orations, much repeated and calcified, declaimed on public platforms before an audience. Also, Mrs. Wilson,” Dr. de Sweinitz said, more severely, “he must give up his habit of reading books: for a man of Dr. Wilson’s temperament can’t read another man’s line without wishing to
combat it, which inevitably leads to ‘vocalizing’ his thoughts, and thereby to speechifying. He is plagued by ceaseless thinking, like wheels churning in mud. This has caused his high blood pressure, and a strain to all the nerves and vital organs.” At this the distinguished physician paused, for he himself had worked up a nervous intensity, signaled by a quavering of his voice. “I must therefore advise that your husband retire from thinking as well, for he cannot think without wanting to write and speechify—a pathological circle from which we must save him, else he is prematurely doomed.”

  As Ellen West wiped tears from her eyes, Dr. de Sweinitz took pity on her yet further, saying that if Dr. Wilson followed his advice, and took all the medications prescribed him, she and her daughters could expect to have him with them for some years more—“No less than five, I would estimate, Mrs. Wilson, and perhaps as many as seven. But he must never yield to thinking in the old way again.”

  THE CURSE EXORCISED

  Historians are in general agreement that June 4, 1906, marks the date of the “exorcism” of the Curse on the Princeton community, being coincidentally the date of the death of Winslow Slade; but none has yet attempted to link the events in any convincing manner. Hollinger’s feeble thesis—that the “energies of Evil” had simply run their course, and that the “dead” grandchildren of Winslow Slade had never really died—has been the most commonly accepted.