The Rescuer

by Joyce Carol Oates

At the time of our present narrative in March 1905, when Woodrow Wilson sought him out surreptitiously, Winslow Slade retained much of his commanding presence—that blend of authority, manly dignity, compassion, and Christian forbearance noted by his many admirers. No doubt these qualities were inherited with his blood: for Winslow’s ancestry may be traced on his father’s side to those religiously persecuted and religiously driven Puritans who sought freedom from the tyranny of the Church of England in the late 1600s; and on his mother’s side, to Scots-English immigrants in the early 1700s to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who soon acquired a measure of affluence through trade with England. Within two generations, a number of Slades had migrated from New England to the Philadelphia / Trenton area, as, in religious terms, they had migrated from the rigidity of belief of old-style Puritanism to the somewhat more liberal Presbyterianism of the day, tinged with Calvinist determinism as it was; these were compassionate Christians who sided with those who opposed the execution of Quakers as heretics, a Puritan obsession. Sometime later, in the Battle of Princeton of 1777, General Elias Slade famously distinguished himself, alongside his compatriot Lieutenant Colonel Aaron Burr, Jr. (Elias Slade, only thirty-two at the time of his death, had boldly surrendered his powerful positions in both the Royal Governor’s Council and the Supreme Court of the Crown Colony in order to support George Washington in the revolutionary movement—a rebellion by no means so clear-cut in the 1770s nor so seemingly inevitable as it appears to us today in our history textbooks. And what an irony it is that Aaron Burr, Jr., a hero in some quarters in his own time, has been relegated to a disreputable position scarcely more elevated than that of his former compatriot Benedict Arnold!)

  It was a general characteristic of the Philadelphia / Trenton branch of the Slade family, judging by their portraits, that the men possessed unusually intense eyes, though deep-set in their sculpted-looking faces; the Slade nose tended to be long, narrow, Roman and somewhat pinched at the tip. In his youth and well into old age, Winslow Slade was considered a handsome man: above average in height, with a head of prematurely silver hair, and straight dark brows, and a studied and somber manner enlivened by a ready and sympathetic smile—in the eyes of some detractors, a too-ready and too-sympathetic smile.

  For it was Winslow Slade’s eccentric notion, he would try to embody Christian behavior in his daily—hourly!—life. In this, he often tried the patience of those close to him, still more, those who were associated with him professionally.

  “It’s my considered belief that the present age will compose, through Winslow Slade, its spiritual autobiography”—so the famed Reverend Henry Ward Beecher declared on the occasion of Winslow Slade’s inauguration as president of Princeton University in 1877.

  As a popular Presbyterian minister, who had studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, Winslow Slade had long perfected the art of pleasing—indeed, mesmerizing large audiences.

  Though, in contrast to such preachers as Reverend Beecher, Winslow Slade never stooped to rhetorical tricks or empty oratorical flourishes. His Biblical texts were usually familiar ones, though not simple; he chose not to astonish, or perplex, or amuse, or, like some men of the cloth, including his formidable relative Jonathan Edwards, to terrify his congregation. His quiet message of the uniqueness of the Christian faith—as it is a “necessary outgrowth and advancement of the Jewish faith”—is that the Christian must think of himself as choosing Jesus Christ over Satan at every moment; an inheritance from his Puritan ancestors, but rendered in such a way as not to alarm or affright his sensitive followers.

  It is no surprise that Reverend Slade’s grandchildren, when very young, imagined that he was God Himself—delivering his sermons in the chaste white interior of the First Presbyterian Church on Nassau Street. These were Josiah, Annabel, and Todd; and, in time, little Oriana; when these children shut their eyes in prayer, it was Grandfather Winslow’s face they saw, and Grandfather Slade to whom they appealed.

  As The Accursed is a chronicle of, mostly, the Slade grandchildren, it seems fitting for the historian to note that Winslow Slade loved these children fiercely, rather more, it seems, than he had loved his own children, who had been born when Winslow was deeply engaged in his career, and not so deeply engaged with family life, like many another successful public man. While recovering from a bout of influenza in his early sixties, watching Josiah and Annabel frolic together for hours in the garden at Crosswicks Manse, he had declared to his doctor that it was these children, and no other remedy, that had brought him back to health.

  “The innocence of such children doesn’t answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret of family life.”

  “And how is your daughter Jessie?”

  “Jessie? Why—Jessie is well, I think.”

  Woodrow’s eighteen-year-old daughter, the prettiest of the Wilson daughters, was to be a bridesmaid in the wedding of Winslow Slade’s granddaughter Annabel and a young U.S. Army lieutenant named Dabney Bayard, of the Hodge Road Bayards.

  Winslow had thought to divert his young friend from the thoughts that so agitated him, that seemed, to Winslow, but trivial and transient; but this new subject, unexpectedly, caused Woodrow to fret and frown; and to say, in a very careful voice, “It is always a—a surprise—to me—that my girls are growing into—women. For it seems only yesterday, they were the most delightful little girls.”

  Woodrow spoke gravely, with a just perceptible frisson of dread.

  For the intimate lives of females was a painful subject for a man of his sensitivity to consider, even at a little distance.

  Winslow smiled, however, with grandfatherly affection. For it was the more remarkable to him, his “fairy child” Annabel was now nineteen years old, and about to take her place in society as Mrs. Dabney Bayard.

  “Ah, Lieutenant Bayard!—I think I’ve glimpsed the young man once or twice,” Woodrow said, without the slightest edge of reproach in that, perhaps, his wife and he had been excluded from recent social occasions at Crosswicks Manse, “and he seems to me an upstanding Christian youth, and a patriot as well: the grandson, isn’t he, of John Wilmington Bayard?—hearty Presbyterian stock, and most reliable.”

  “We shall see. I mean—yes of course. You are quite right.”

  More than once, Winslow Slade had caught an unwanted glimpse of his dear granddaughter walking in the garden behind the Manse, with Lieutenant Bayard; a handsome boy, but impetuous, whose hands too frequently made their way onto Annabel’s petite body, at her waist, or lower, at her slender hips . . . It was not a vision the seventy-four-year-old wished to summon, at this awkward time.

  Woodrow said, yet still gravely, “Our Margaret, you know, was born in Georgia—not in the North. My dear Ellen took it into her head, near the very end of her pregnancy, that she could not bear for our firstborn to be delivered north of the Mason-Dixon line, and so I—I humored her of course . . . And I think that, in a way, it has made a difference—Margaret is our most gracious daughter, not nearly so—emphatic—headstrong—as the younger girls, born here in the North.”

  Winslow Slade, whose ancestors did not hail from the American South, but rather from the Puritan north of New England, tactfully made no reply to this peculiar remark, in its way both apologetic and boastful.

  “Would you like a cigar, Tommy? I know that you don’t ‘smoke’—at home, certainly. But I have here some very fine Cuban cigars
, given to me by a friend.”

  “Thank you, Winslow—but no! I think that I have told you, how my dear mother cured me forever of a wish to smoke?”

  Winslow Slade inclined his head politely, that Woodrow might again tell this favorite story. For Woodrow was quite practiced at the recitation of certain family tales, as if they were old tales of Aesop.

  “I was seven years old when Mother called me, to enlist her in killing the aphids on her roses. It might have been that I had been watching my father and other male relatives smoking cigars, and may have appeared admiring; Mother was quick to take note of such details, and I have inherited her skill. ‘Tommy, come here: I will light one of Father’s cigars, and you will blow smoke on the nasty aphids.’ And so—that is exactly what I did, or tried to do.” Woodrow was laughing, a wheezing sort of laugh, without evident mirth; tears shone in his eyes, of a frantic merriment. “Ah, I was so ill! Violently ill to my stomach, not only repelled by the horrific tobacco smoke, but vomiting for much of a day. And yet, Mother’s wisdom was such: I have never smoked since, nor have I had the slightest inclination. Observing the trustees lighting up their ill-smelling cigars, when we are meant to have a serious meeting, leaves me quite disgusted, though I would never betray my feelings of course.”

  “A most thoughtful mother!” Winslow returned the cigars to their brass humidor.

  In a corner of Dr. Slade’s library an eighteenth-century German grandfather’s clock chimed a quiet but unmistakable quarter-hour: Winslow Slade was hoping that his young friend would depart soon, for Woodrow was clearly in one of his “nerve” states, and the effect upon Winslow himself was beginning to be felt; of all psychic conditions, anxiety verging upon paranoia/hysteria is perhaps the most contagious, even among men. Yet, Woodrow could not resist reverting to his subject, in an indirect way, to lament that the United States was burdened with “an insufferable buffoon” in the White House: “A self-appointed bully who fancies himself a savior, mucking about now shockingly in Panama, and swaying the jingoists to his side. The presidency of the United States is not an office to be besmirched but to be elevated—it is a sacred trust, for our nation is exceptional in the history of the world. And I, here at home, in ‘idyllic’ Princeton, must contend with Teddy Roosevelt’s twin, as it were—who pretends only to have the interest of the university at heart, while wresting my power from me.”

  Winslow sighed, and could not think how to reply. He seemed to know beforehand what his young friend had come to ask of him; and did not want to encourage him; yet, inevitably, Woodrow made his plea, with the blinking simplicity of a small child, his moist eyes gleaming behind his polished eyeglasses: “Dr. Slade, if you might indicate your support of me, or rather, your preference: Woodrow Wilson or Andrew West . . . It would be such a relief to me, as to my family.”

  Pained, Winslow explained that he thought it a wiser course, for one like himself in retirement from all politics, to remain neutral.

  “I am sure that, in the end, wise heads and wisdom will prevail. You will have a vote of the trustees, and that will decide it—soon, I would think?”

  “Winslow, that is—that is not—this is not quite the answer I had hoped for, in coming here . . .”

  Winslow persisted: “I prescribe for you, my dear friend, the simplest and most fundamental of all Christian remedies—prayer. By which I mean, Woodrow, a deep examination of your soul, your motives, and your ideals. Prayer.”

  The younger man blinked at Winslow, as a tic in his left cheek seemed to mock his enfeebled smile. “Yes, you are right—of course. You are invariably right, Dr. Slade. But, I’m afraid, you are uninformed—for I have already spent countless hours on my knees, in prayer, since this hellish situation first manifested itself, months ago. Of course, it has been a gathering storm. I have enlisted prayer from the start, yet the results have been disappointing: for West continues his sorties against me, even laughing behind my back, and God has not seen fit to intervene.”

  So astounded was Winslow Slade by these words, he could think of no adequate reply; and silence uneasily fell between them, as smoldering logs in the fireplace shifted, and darkened; and Woodrow reached out, in a nervous sort of curiosity, to take up a small jade snuffbox on a table, to examine closely. It was an engaging object, though hardly beautiful, covered in a patina of decades, its lid engraved with a miniature yet meticulously wrought serpent that, coiled, looked as if it were about to leap out at the observer. Strikingly, the cobra’s eyes were two inset rubies of the size of pumpkin seeds.

  Fascinating to Woodrow, in his somewhat dazed state, how these rubies glittered, with the fantastical potency of an actual serpent’s eyes . . .

  Now daringly Woodrow said, as he had been preparing to say, perhaps, this past half hour: “He seeks power in a very different way, you know.”

  “He?”

  “West.”

  “Ah yes—West is still our subject?”

  “It is not mere rumor, Dr. Slade, it has been whispered everywhere in town, and Ellen was reluctant to upset me by repeating it—but Andrew West has consorted with clairvoyants and mesmerists; in a pretense of ‘scientific inquiry,’ like his Harvard psychologist-friend William James, he has delved into what we must call occult practices—that fly in the face of Christian teaching.”

  “ ‘Occult practices’—? Andrew West?”

  Winslow Slade laughed, for Andrew West had the solid, burly build of a wrestler; certainly an intelligent man, with degrees from Cambridge (England) as well as Harvard, yet not in any way a sensitive or inwardly-brooding person, of the kind who might take the occult seriously.

  “Yes, Dr. Slade, though you may smile at the prospect—‘occult practices.’ By which he hopes to influence ‘powers’—thereby, to influence the more impressionable minds in our community, and among the trustees. I told you, it is a battle—in an undeclared war.”

  “You are saying that our colleague and neighbor Andrew West, dean of the graduate school, is an—occultist?”

  “Well, I am saying that it is said—it is said by many—that West dabbles in the occult, in a pretense of scientific inquiry; one of his allies is Abraham Sparhawk, in philosophy; but a newfangled sort of philosophy in which up is proved to be down, and time and history not fixed points as we know them to be, but something called—I think the term is—‘relative.’ What they are cooking up together, to defeat me, I have no way of knowing in any detail.” Woodrow continued to examine the little jade snuffbox, as if the cobra’s glittering eyes had transfixed him. “And d’you know, as a result of his campaigning, Mr. Cleveland scarcely returns my greeting at the Nassau Club—he has become a favored crony of West’s, this past winter.”*

  Winslow said, a little sharply, “It must be the lateness of the hour, Tommy—you are saying things that will have to be consciously ‘forgotten’ by us both, in the light of day. Frankly, I don’t believe for an instant that Andrew West, or anyone else at the university, is ‘delving’ into occult practices; and I ask you to reconsider what you have said.”

  So speaking, Winslow lay his hands upon the younger man’s hands, that were visibly trembling; meaning to extract from his fingers, before he dropped it, or crumbled it, the little jade snuffbox, which Woodrow continued half-consciously to grip.

  Yet, Woodrow would not surrender his position: for, despite his appearance of neurasthenic intensity, and the watery weakness of his blinking eyes, the man was yet endowed with a most powerful, indeed
near-unshakable will. Vehemently he said, “Dr. Slade, you of all people should know that some loosening of the tongue is prudent, when Evil appears in our midst. I am not saying—I am not accusing—West of summoning the Devil, but of consorting with those who might, or do. Just last night, in my library, Professor Pearce van Dyck spoke at length with me, defining the principles of ‘mesmerism’ and ‘animal magnetism’ as best he could; for Pearce is, as you know, as much of a rationalist as any Christian might be, and professes an abhorrence of ‘occult practices’ as much as I—including even Spiritualism, which the ladies so extol. According to Pearce, those European scientists and physicians who have advanced such bizarre notions, like Mesmer and Charcot, that make a mockery of Christian free will, are best ranked with alchemists, sorcerers, and witches; and are held in very low esteem by true men of science. Yet, the theory that a ‘magnetic fluid’ might pervade the Universe, including the human body, and that this fluid might somehow be controlled, if one only knew how—this theory is not without plausibility, I think. It is like holding the key to certain chemical processes—like knowing the recipe for gunpowder! And while the ostensible aim of mesmerism is the improvement of mental health, any fool can see that the reverse can be true as well: there being a diabolical side to man, more prevalent, in some quarters, than the angelic.”

  This outburst of speech left Woodrow breathless. His stiff-laundered white cotton collar, that had been spotless that morning when he had arrived in his office in Nassau Hall, was visibly wilted; a faint glisten of perspiration shone on his furrowed brow.

  Winslow said, in an even voice, like one who feigns a tactful kind of deafness, “Well! Let me pour you some brandy, Woodrow, to soothe your nerves, and then I will ask Henry to drive you home. I think you’re not quite yourself—and Ellen must be awaiting you.”