The Accursed

by Joyce Carol Oates

  As the naïve young woman had but a vague notion of what it might mean to exchange such glances, and be the recipient of such smiles, with a man she had not glimpsed before this hour.

  In addition, Annabel was devoutly religious. She could not have clearly stated what set her Presbyterian faith apart from other Protestant faiths, or, except in the most obvious terms, how it was to be distinguished from Roman Catholicism, an old and much-feared enemy; though she had long outgrown the childish notion that Winslow Slade was God, she cherished in her heart the fervent belief that her grandfather was one of the chosen few in his generation; certainly, Grandfather had been the instrument by which countless individuals, many of them grave sinners, had been brought to Jesus Christ and to salvation. Unlike the more strident “outspoken” female—including Annabel’s friend Wilhelmina Burr—Annabel would never have wished to discuss with the “free thinkers” among her Princeton circle such fashionable issues as whether the Bible is literally, or figuratively, true; or whether it is revelation, or history. Those yet more disturbing new theories springing from Darwinists, Marxists, Bolsheviks, Anarchists, and other atheist-ideologies, were utterly perplexing to Annabel, who could not imagine why anyone wished to argue for such beliefs, that so lacked kindness and comfort. In her family it was considered unseemly for women to concern themselves with such matters—a very harsh judgment: “unladylike.” In the words of the poet—

  Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever!

  —embroidered on one of Annabel’s hand-stitched pillows; a sentiment that has not lessened, in my opinion, with the passage of years.

  Annabel had been an excellent scholar at the Princeton Academy for Girls, as at the two-year collegiate Kingston Academy for Women, in nearby Kingston, New Jersey; her strongest subjects were poetry, art, and calligraphy; in her fantasies of an independent career, she had liked to imagine herself as an artiste of some sort, designing children’s book covers for instance, or creating original art for children; or, more ambitiously, illustrating her own verse in small, exquisitely designed books like those by Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Mary Anne Sadlier, and the wonderfully mysterious and cryptic Emily Dickinson, who had died in 1886, the year of Annabel’s birth—(Annabel’s favorite of these poets, though she understood that Dickinson’s verse was considered “rough” and lacking “feminine sentiment” by the literary establishment). She had not liked math, science, history—“So hobbled by facts! And facts are the least revealing, of any aspect of our lives.”

  Yet, Annabel had received reasonably high grades in these disliked subjects, for, lacking in aptitude as she was, she was yet more capable than the majority of her girl-classmates.

  On this weekday morning in April, Annabel was not showily dressed; though she wore beneath her clothes, on her already slender body, a straight-front corset tightened to make her small waist appear smaller still, so that she could scarcely breathe; this cruel restraining undergarment being mandated for her, since the age of fourteen when it was perceived by her uneasy elders that she was becoming womanly in the bosom and hips.

  Though it was not a rainy day, Annabel was wearing a “habit-back,” or “rainy-day” skirt of pale blue flannel-and-cotton; a skirt fashionable at the time, that dropped to shoe-top length, ideal for rainy days but proper enough for casual wear at home. Her silken white blouse sported stylish puff sleeves, with tight cuffs, and as many as twenty-five mother-of-pearl buttons at the front; her little bolero jacket was pale yellow quilted cotton; her straw hat, prudently worn in the sun, was trimmed with a green satin ribbon tied beneath the chin. Since Annabel would be seeing her fiancé Dabney Bayard later in the day, with the assistance of one of the younger Negro maids she had fashioned her silken hair into a sleek pompadour and numerous small curls. Annabel’s hair was a fair brown, that might appear blond, or even silvery, in certain lights; it was held in place by ornamental amber combs that had once belonged to her grandmother Oriana, a woman departed this life long before Annabel had been born.

  As her fair complexion was too delicate to brave even the rays of an April sun, Annabel kept the rim of her straw hat strategically lowered over her eyes; yet it must be presumed that Axson Mayte, staring so frankly at her, as at an exotic animal-specimen on display, could see how arrestingly pretty she was, and how fragile, like the very narcissi she held in her hands.

  Suddenly there issued out of the wind-rippled flowers at Annabel’s feet a faint hissing whisper—Annabel, Annabel! In her confusion, Annabel thought It is Grandmother Oriana. She is worried about her amber combs, she regrets leaving them for me.

  (This was a curious thought, since Annabel had not known her grandmother, who’d died many years before her birth; nor had she known her grandfather’s second wife, Tabitha.)

  Yet, a moment later Annabel had forgotten the whisper. So distracted was she by the stranger in her grandfather’s garden, she couldn’t seem to concentrate. That she had not turned away from the man with the hand-sickle, and walked quickly up to the house, as she had every opportunity to do, seemed to encourage him for, smiling still, the tip of his pink tongue darting at his lips, he stepped forward again in a single gliding stride, now less than five feet from her.

  Now, surely, he would speak to her?—but he did not.

  Annabel lifted her bouquet of flowers and in a kind of child-miming gesture indicated that the visitor should note her task, and its urgency, and not detain her any longer; aloud she murmured, for the visitor to hear, or not—“I have tarried too long, already.” For overhead the sunny sky was becoming riddled with rain clouds; a giant thumb and finger pinched shut the sun. Yet for some reason, as if she were paralyzed, Annabel didn’t turn away; and again the hissing Annabel, Annabel! seemed to rise from the wind-buffeted petals of the flowers at her feet.

  Then—in the literal blink of an eye!—there stood the gentleman before her, now just twelve inches from her; for now he did seem like one of Winslow Slade’s emissary-gentlemen, on a churchly mission that would be kept secret from the rest of the family, who were but lay-Presbyterians in the faith. Out of giddy nervousness Annabel may have murmured “H-Hello” or “G-Good morning”—which had the immediate effect of unlocking the gentleman’s silence at last. For now he bowed a second time, with an eager sort of stiffness, and announced that his name was “Axson Mayte, of Charleston, South Carolina”—“an associate of Winslow Slade’s”—“overcome with rapture, chère mademoiselle, at the prospect of making your acquaintance.”

  At this, Annabel stammered her name, for she could not think of a polite way of avoiding it: “I am—Dr. Slade’s granddaughter—Annabel Slade . . .”

  The visitor seized Annabel’s small hand, and bent as if to bestow a kiss upon it, in the German manner—hardly more than a sociable gesture, with no actual touching of the lips to the back of the hand, yet Annabel felt the imprint of a considerable, impassioned kiss; she was certain, she’d felt the imprint of the snaggle-tooth incisor against her sensitive skin. And she’d smelled the stranger’s breath—harsh and dry as ashes.

  In that instant, the very marrow of her bones seemed to shiver, and the satin tie beneath her chin felt dangerously tight, like the long straight-front corset, too tightly laced that morning by Harriet, the frowning Negro girl who seemed both fond of her young white-skinned charge, and resentful of her. Half-fainting Annabel yet clearly thought—Must I pay now for my vanity! O God have mercy.

  If Axson Mayte of Charleston, South Carolina, had taken note of Annabel’s shudder of distress, he gave no sign; for he was a smooth-mannered gentleman, with his sharp deep-set eyes and sidelong glances, that might have been as ironic as they were yearning. He proceeded to cut for Annabel, with his borrowed hand-sickle—(the blade of which was wickedly sharp, Annabel saw with a shiver)—a dozen or more fresh flowers: daffodils, miniature iris, star-of-Bethlehems, narcissi—which he then made a gallant ceremony of presenting to her, with another grave bow.

  “Oh! Thank you, sir.”

  Anna
bel felt that she had no choice but to accept these flowers, though juices from their cut stems dripped, and darkened her rainy-day skirt in tiny splotches; she had no choice but to thank Mr. Mayte, for he was very kind; and as gallant, she was sure, as any Princeton gentleman.

  More gallant than her fiancé, certainly! For Dabney could be curt and ill-tempered, when he and Annabel were alone, with no elders to observe him; Dabney could confound Annabel with paradoxes she wasn’t sure were serious, or mocking: “Do you think? Your face is so like a doll’s—a painted ceramic doll.”

  Annabel saw with relief that Axson Mayte had set aside the wickedly sharp hand-sickle, letting it fall carelessly on the path.

  The gardener would discover it there, or—possibly—Annabel’s mother, Henrietta, who “gardened” in pleasant weather, in beds kept weeded and lushly fertilized by the grounds staff.

  In a confused sort of happiness Annabel was smiling. Or—perhaps it was sheer nerves, unease. So many spring flowers, some were falling from her hands. Impulsively she selected a long-stemmed narcissus to offer Axson Mayte, for his buttonhole.

  “Compliments of Crosswicks Manse!”

  Mayte seemed genuinely surprised by this gesture; warmly and effusively he thanked her. “From the depths of my soul, chère mademoiselle, I thank you—you are too kind—you cannot know, in fact, how kind you are—a rare quality in ‘ladies’ of your station, in my experience.”

  Though Mayte’s words were flattering, or were meant to be, the man next behaved in an odd, crude manner: he shortened the narcissus stem by clamping his strong teeth upon it near the flower and biting down hard, that it might fit with ease in his buttonhole—where in fact it looked very striking.

  “Will you, mademoiselle—?”

  Looming over Annabel, from his height of at least six feet, Axson Mayte extended his arm for Annabel to take, hesitantly, that he might escort her back up to the Manse where now, on the rear terrace, Winslow Slade himself was waving and calling urgently to them.

  THE SPECTRAL DAUGHTER

  Now, we arrive at the first public manifestation of the Curse, on Sunday morning 20 April 1905—except that no previous history credits this episode, nor did any of the principals know, or could have guessed, what the vision of the Spectral Daughter portended.

  That is, what the vision portended for those like the Slades, and Lieutenant Dabney Bayard, who might have supposed themselves mere bystanders, astonished and pitying witnesses to a mental collapse of ex-President Grover Cleveland.

  This chapter, intended to be brief, is pivotal in my chronicle, and difficult to execute, I think—for, prior to this, my dramatized scenes were between but two persons; now, I am attempting a larger dramatis personae, and must try to hint to the reader, without being over-explicit, some of the subtleties of emotion that existed among the young people Josiah, Annabel, and Annabel’s fiancé, Dabney Bayard.

  (Yet, some readers will complain: the chronicle is too subtle. Even as others will complain, it is not subtle enough.)

  ON THIS MORNING, following Sunday church services in Princeton, a party of approximately two dozen persons traveled to the “old Craven estate” on Rosedale Road, which had recently been purchased by the Slades, as its grounds of several acres abutted the three-hundred-acre property of Crosswicks Manse, that stretched back from Elm Road; the revelation being, that the elder Slades were making the Craven estate a wedding gift to the young couple, for them to take occupancy there following their honeymoon in Italy.

  Of course, I have seen photographs of the “old Craven estate” which was razed years later, to make way for a larger and grander country estate at the height of the economic boom of the 1920s; at this time, among the Slades and their party, the house was considered a “honeymoon cottage” though it contained as many as twenty rooms, with twelve high, narrow front windows bracketed by black shutters; its steep roof was made of gleaming Holland tile. So large a house, with an impressive exterior of Boonton limestone—(incidentally, from the Slades’ quarry at Boonton)—would not seem, to most readers, unfamiliar with the vagaries of the rich, appropriately designated a cottage.

  Later, the house was to acquire an ironic, or perhaps a purely ignorant misnomer—“the old Bayard estate”—though neither Lieutenant Bayard nor his bride Annabel was ever to live in it, nor even spend a single night beneath its roof; at the time of this narrative, in 1905, the house was still named for its original owner, the Revolutionary hero Major Dunglass Craven, who, as George Washington’s most intimate aide, uncovered the scheme of the spy André, and brought about his execution.

  It was a gay and splendidly dressed party, driving out in several surreys trimmed in pink dogwood from Princeton for brunch at the house, which was to be presented by Crosswicks kitchen staff on-site, as china, cutlery, tables and chairs and linens, and a vast quantity of food and drink, had to be brought from Crosswicks, to the (vacated) house. So far as I have been able to determine, from various diaries and letters, the party consisted of Grover and Frances Cleveland, Pearce and Johanna van Dyck, Edgerstoune and Amanda FitzRandolph, Ezra and Cecelia Bayard (Dabney’s uncle and aunt), Dr. Aaron Burr III and his wife Jennifer, and her daughter Wilhelmina (who was to be Annabel’s maid of honor at the wedding), the Reverend Nathaniel FitzRandolph (since Winslow Slade’s retirement, the full-time pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton) and Mrs. FitzRandolph and the Reverend Thaddeus Shackleton, head of the Princeton Theological Seminary, as well as a number of the Slades—Winslow and his son and daughter-in-law Augustus and Henrietta, and Copplestone and Lenora Slade, Annabel’s uncle and aunt, and their young son Todd, as well as Annabel and Dabney, and Annabel’s brother Josiah.

  “Grandfather! You are so kind! You make us happy as children—we scarcely know what to say . . .”

  So Annabel exclaimed, seeing the house with its somewhat austere and even forbidding limestone exterior, and the great weight of the Holland tiles, that looked like an avalanche about to flow; yet the greening grasses and overarching elms and oaks, just beginning to come into leaf, gave the scene a picturesque air, like a fairy-tale dwelling; Lieutenant Bayard stammered his gratitude as well, having lost some of his usual composure at the sight of the property, soon to be deeded to him.

  It would be disclosed afterward that negotiations to acquire the house had been discussed with Dabney’s father and his uncle and aunt, before the Slades had moved forward with the purchase. But Dabney himself had not guessed—the plot was kept secret from him, as from Annabel.

  (Though very likely, as a shrewd young military officer who had graduated with honors in his class at West Point, Dabney had surmised that the wealthy Slades would give their dear Annabel and her bridegroom a gift commensurate with their love, and their wealth.)

  Still, confronted with the “Craven estate” on this sun-lit morning in April, in the midst of a gathering of jovial well-wishers, Dabney seemed quite surprised, and somewhat tongue-tied. A fierce blush rose into his face and in his eyes too sprang some sort of moisture which surreptitiously he brushed away with his fingertips.

  The atmosphere of this outing was light, admiring, and festive, for the spring day was perfection, and the stone house with its handblown leaded-glass windows, and its Tiffany-stained glass framing the front door, struck all as ideal for the “honeymoon couple.” Hearing the words honeymoon couple caused Annabel to blush, and Dabney to smile awkwardly; though Annabel couldn’t fail to have noticed a certain reserve in her brother Josiah, and a matching discomfort in Dabney when, a few minutes later, by chance the three young people found themselves together in a downstairs room, while the rest of the party ascended to the second floor, to admire the several bedrooms and the splendid vistas framed by each window. (Most of the rooms were empty of course, but Annabel’s mother, Henrietta, had been out to the house numerous times with a retinue of servants on a confidential errand of “decorating” the house in a temporary sort of way. The real effort of decorating, and of furnishing, would fall to
the young married couple.)

  “How exquisite!—how very lovely! I quite envy the young couple”—Mrs. Cleveland’s forceful soprano voice carried down the staircase—“the house is a tablet rosea—they will make of it their own. Unlike the house I stepped into, as a young bride . . .”

  (Mrs. Cleveland was coyly referring, as often she did, to the White House: she had married the much older President Cleveland in the East Wing of that house, as a girl scarcely out of school.)

  And there came Grover Cleveland’s booming voice, in a playful sort of rejoinder—“Dear Frances! You have overcome your initial disadvantage, that is certain. Many times!”

  Out of a stubborn sort of diffidence, perhaps, the three young people had stayed behind. Dabney Bayard, erect and handsome in his dress uniform, made a game effort to engage Josiah Slade in a quasi-masculine conversation on one or another topic: the fortunes of the New York Highlanders against their rivals the Cincinnati Reds, and the caliber of both teams set beside the Boston Americans; horses, most hopefully—for Dabney was something of a horseman; and the latest antics of the President—Teddy Roosevelt proudly photographed with a spread of animal-corpses at his feet—wild sheep, bison, deer and pumas on a lavish hunting expedition in the West; Teddy threatening to intervene in Venezuela, that was defaulting on its debts (“It will show the Dagos that they will have to behave decently”*); Teddy in virtually every edition of every daily newspaper, grinning out and eyeglasses winking as he trumpeted the virtues of the imperialist Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.

  Lieutenant Bayard was particularly interested in discussing the “outlaw mining strikes” in eastern Pennsylvania, lately the focus of much newspaper coverage. How “itching” Dabney was, to be involved in some sort of U.S. Army intervention! (That morning, Reverend FitzRandolph at the pulpit had alluded to the “anarchist and atheistical outrages” perpetrated by the United Mine Workers of America against the mine owners and, by extension, against the “law-abiding citizenry” of the American people as a whole.) Yet, though the Slades of Crosswicks had investments in the Pennsylvania mines, as in New Jersey and Pennsylvania textile mills, and Josiah might be expected to concur with Dabney’s sentiments, Josiah only shrugged indifferently, and held himself aloof; and Annabel stood blushing at her fiancé’s side, not knowing whether to be distressed by her brother’s rudeness, or vexed.