The Accursed

by Joyce Carol Oates

  And Josiah Slade makes the impulsive decision to join several friends bear hunting in the Poconos, though it is but a few days before his sister’s wedding, in which he is to play a prominent role. “But what if—something happens to you?” Annabel asks, pleading; and Josiah says laughingly, “Nothing will happen to me, I promise,” and Annabel says, “You will return, won’t you? The night before? No later? Josiah? ”—almost begging her brother, You will return, you won’t leave me alone to this—will you?

  And handsome Lieutenant Dabney Bayard, being fitted in an Egyptian cotton shirt, and slim-tapered trousers, chances to note, out of boredom, a small black insect on the neck of the Italian tailor kneeling before him; idly he reaches down to pinch the thing in his fingers, and give it a sharp dig with his nails, with the result that the tailor screams in surprise and pain, and lurches away from Dabney—for the black speck isn’t an insect but a mole or tiny wart, deeply rooted in the man’s flesh.

  THE SPECTRAL WIFE

  On the humid morning of June 4, 1905, which was the very morning of the Slade-Bayard nuptials, young Upton Sinclair, who lived with his wife and infant son in a ramshackle farmhouse on the Rosedale Road not so very far from the old Craven estate, had walked several miles into town, badly needing to stretch his legs after a long stint of writing; and, knowing nothing of the wedding, and nothing of the principals except, dimly, the name Slade, with which the young Socialist naturally associated the extremities of capitalist exploitation of the masses, he chanced to see, on Nassau Street, a stream of stately motor vehicles and horse-drawn carriages, as in some sort of royal procession—“Not a funeral, for there seems to be no hearse. A wedding?”

  For some minutes, Upton Sinclair stood on the sidewalk gazing at the conspicuous opulence on display: for the motor vehicles arriving at the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton were exclusively luxury touring cars, of such manufacturers as Pierce-Arrow, Lambert, Halladay, Buick, Cadillac, and Oldsmobile; the fittings were all of brass, very smartly gleaming, as the windshields were of gleaming glass. And the horse-drawn carriages, which were fewer each year, being inexorably displaced by motorcars, here exuded an air of the timeless and romantic, very smart too. Upton, who owned neither a motorcar nor a horse, looked on with an abashed smile, for in his subdued state of mind the young Socialist wasn’t roused to indignation, but rather to a kind of envy—not of the opulence, but of the evidence here of families, and couples. Here was the ruling class of the province, Upton supposed; yet, when you considered them, they were a tribe comprised essentially of families; and at the heart of each, a couple.

  It was a bourgeois social institution: the family, and at its heart the couple. Yet, Upton considered it with much wistfulness.

  His own marriage, his own dear wife Meta—ah! how troubled, and how precarious, lately; Upton had walked into town, rather than borrow a horse and buggy from his neighboring landlord-farmer, to escape the confines of his writing-cabin and the confines of his brain, lately obsessed with his marital dilemma to the detriment of his creative energies.

  For Upton dearly loved his wife: yet, he knew that such love is hobbling, and enervating; and not worthy of the Socialist ideal. And he knew that such love can be precarious, based upon a bedrock of sheer emotion, and not the intellectual rigor of Marx, Engels, and other Revolutionary thinkers.

  In the open air, that was just slightly over-warm, and distinctly humid, Upton brooded upon his wife: her unhappiness, her desperation, her mysterious change of personality, in the past several weeks. How was he, in his mid-twenties, untutored in the skills of marriage and parenthood, to contend with such an alteration? Just the previous night after a botched dinner she had prepared in the ill-equipped farmhouse kitchen Meta had been weeping angrily, and then weeping hopelessly; declaring that she “could not go on, but prayed for the strength to be delivered from her misery”; to the horror of her husband, Meta had dared to press the barrel of a revolver against her forehead, and could not be persuaded to surrender the weapon to Upton for at least ten agonized minutes.

  At this time, their infant son was sleeping in his cradle in the next room.

  So, the immediate crisis had passed. But Upton was left stunned, demoralized and confused; as dazed as if he’d been struck a blow to the head with that very revolver, that his wife had brought with her when they’d married. (That is, Meta had brought the weapon with her in secret, that had belonged to her father, an ex–army officer whom Upton had not yet met.)

  Yet, Upton was resolved to go about his domestic duties, and fulfill his Saturday’s shopping and errands in town, as if nothing were wrong; for his wife’s moods were so mercurial, it might well be that, when he spoke with her again, later that day, nothing really was wrong, and Meta would have forgotten her distress of the previous night.

  Still, she had come to dislike the “idyllic surroundings” in which the young couple was living, in the countryside near Princeton; and each meal prepared in the bleak kitchen with its wood-burning stove and hand-pump sink, was a plunge into the unknown, as each effort of nursing a colicky baby was fraught with the possibility of disaster.

  “I think that I am not a good mother,” Meta had begun to lament, “as I am not a good revolutionary. If this were the French Revolution, I should be guillotined.” Her humor was senseless, to Upton. Her laughter was harsh, and upsetting—not the sweet throaty laughter of the young woman with whom Upton Sinclair had fallen in love, only two years before.

  The future, which had seemed so promising to Upton, was now uncertain; like the progress of Socialism in the capitalist societies of Europe and America, precarious and somewhat haphazard, unpredictable as a vast game of chance. It was evident that reform was needed on every side, from the shame of child-labor in factories throughout the entire country, to the debased and dehumanizing conditions of the Southern Negroes, whose lives were hardly improved from the slavery of their grandparents. Yet, how should he and his fellow Socialists confront such a massive entity? Had he the requisite courage?

  Brooding upon these matters, Upton lost track of time; it was like him, to lapse into a sort of waking fugue, from which the baby’s crying or his wife’s sharp voice would wake him, scarcely knowing where he was. On the Nassau sidewalk, he was being jostled by pedestrians, who stood about gazing and gaping at the now shut front doors of the First Presbyterian Church across the street, where the private wedding ceremony must have been in progress. The stately procession of motor vehicles and carriages had ended; the select wedding party was all inside the church, it seemed.

  “I hope they will be happier than Meta and I have been. I hope it isn’t the institution of marriage that is the dilemma, but only just our passing—transient—moods . . .”

  There was a murmur in the crowd, as, across the street, the wide white doors of the church were flung open; and a young woman in a wedding gown and a man in formal attire quickly descended the stone steps—could this be the bride and groom, so soon? The young woman wore a wedding gown of dazzling silken-white beauty, with a long train that trailed against the grimy pavement; the gentleman, a formal coat and tails, and white gloves, and a high top hat that gave him a grotesque sort of height, like one on stilts. Despite the elegance of their clothing, this newlywed couple moved with an air of clumsy haste, even of urgency, as if in flight; climbing into a brougham that awaited them at the curb, a carriage of another era, drawn by four horses—four! (And each of these horses a splendid specimen, Upton saw—purely black, with high heads, braided manes and tails, and not the smallest patch of white at their forelegs or ankles to distract the admiring eye.) Such was the young Socialist’s somber mood, he failed to respond in his customary way to this display of capitalist greed, but sadly wondered how so lovely a young woman, probably not twenty years old, should have been aligned with a gentleman so singularly repulsive!—the bridegroom being at least three times her age, squat-bodied, flaccid-faced, with a face like a toad’s.

  Upton, who kept a journal hidden away
beneath the floorboards of his writing-cabin, rehearsed what he would write there, when he returned home; for very few minutes of the young writer’s life were “lost”—that is, would fail to be converted into useful prose, for future reference, if not for publication.

  Revolutionary theory isn’t required to reason that such a marriage is a forced one. The bride has been SOLD—like chattel. Shame to her family, and to all her tribe! For all her youth and angelic beauty, she shall soon regret her life.

  ONCE IN MOTION, afoot, Upton soon lost himself in the very mundane nature of his errands, making his way along crowded Nassau Street, along Chambers, and Bank, and Witherspoon; frequently consulting his notes for the morning: flour, sugar, cornmeal, eggs, soap, bread, tea, barbershop, library—this last underscored several times, for Upton was immersed in a Civil War novel of “Socialist ideology,” and had come to reside near Princeton University primarily to use the university’s special historical archives. (Does it strike the reader as ironic, that Upton Sinclair of all persons should wish to peruse the library holdings of Princeton University, while inwardly denouncing the institution as a bastion of Caucasian privilege; still more, that such covert behavior contradicted the secret principle of Socialism: NO COMPROMISE WITH THE ENEMY.)

  How Upton Sinclair, author of the youthfully ambitious King Midas and the misguided creator of the hoax-experiment The Journal of Arthur Stirling, came to live near Princeton, New Jersey, is a complex tale on the surface; yet, beneath, fairly simple—being penniless, after the failure of his first two books, he had entered into a financial arrangement with the wealthy Socialist George D. Herron, in which he and his family would be supported at thirty dollars a month, in surroundings very different from their pestilent garret room in New York City, while Upton labored at a Civil War trilogy destined to convert the masses to Socialism. The first novel, Manassas, was completed; the second, Gettysburg , was well under way; with Appomattox yet to come: the very pinnacle, Upton believed, of Socialist vision. Neither Upton Sinclair nor his sponsor Mr. Herron could doubt that the trilogy would have a vast popular appeal, if the masses were made aware of it, and urged to read it; for had not Jack London a remarkable success, with similar “popular”—“adventure”—materials. Though there was always frustration in trying to convert the downtrodden, who clutched to their hearts the delusions of the ruling class as if such delusions could be their own.

  The dilemma is, in the United States, each penniless citizen believes that, with luck, he might become a millionaire; and so doesn’t want to put restraints on “robber barons”—he might become one, one day!—so Upton mused, and would inscribe in his journal that night.

  On such matters Upton had often lectured Meta, in the early months of their marriage. Particularly, Upton was given to quoting Nietzsche’s Zarathustra—Only where the State ends, there begins the human being who is not superfluous.

  Though Upton knew himself ideologically estranged from Princeton, indeed an enemy alien in its midst, nonetheless he and Meta had several times strolled, on twilit evenings, along leafy Prospect Street, in order to overhear undergraduates singing in their palatial eating clubs—“Why, the boys sound like angels! How is it possible?” Meta exclaimed; or in the yet more sumptuous West End of the village, where great old houses from Revolutionary times were to be seen: Maidstone, Mora, Pembroke, Arnheim, Wheatsheaf, Westland (said to be the home of ex-President Grover Cleveland, on Hodge Road) and, not least Crosswicks Manse, dimly visible from Elm Road. Taking care not to be swayed by the architecture of these grand houses, or the society to which it belonged; for all wealth sprang from the labor of others, wage-slaves to the machine. This would come about, Upton said, when the “historic phase of classes” had completed itself. So, while Meta listened, Upton lectured her on the threefold dialectic of Marx and Engels, the St. Simonean concept of class struggle, and the Smith-Ricardo labor theory of value; and those eminent predecessors frequently cited by Marx and Engels: Fourier, Owen, Feuerbach, Hegel. It couldn’t have been an accident, Upton said excitedly, that both Marx and Darwin published revolutionary books in the single year 1859; nor an accident in his own life, during a period of despondency when he was working his way through the City College of New York, a copy of Nietzsche’s visionary Thus Spake Zarathustra fell by chance into his hands—“In an hour, my life was changed.” For it seemed clear to him, as to an increasing number of contemporaries, that the future would see Zarathustra as the true savior of mankind—“The Jesus Christ of bourgeois Christianity being discredited.”

  Closing his eyes, so moved, Upton recited for Meta several exhilarating passages of Zarathustra, that couldn’t fail to sway anyone of sensibility; ending with the thrilling words—“ ‘A free life is still free for great souls. Verily, whoever possesses little is possessed that much less: praised by a little poverty!’ ”

  To which Meta said, “Then we are much praised, I guess! For we are more than a little poor.”

  WHY HIS YOUNG WIFE wept so much, and allowed herself to sink into sickly depressive states, Upton didn’t know, for his temperament was entirely different: he liked to think of himself as a go-getter. So he felt constrained to lightly chide her, for her immersion in the self-serving throes of private life while the Revolution was in the making, and needed all their energies. Wasn’t there the prospect of the Good Time Coming, when the working class would go to the voting polls, and overthrow the existing bourgeois government, and seize the means of production, and precipitate the classless and stateless society which Marx had predicted? “No matter how poor we are, or how much we are made to suffer, so long as we know the future, Meta, that is enough.”

  “But we don’t ‘suffer’ nearly as much as most people,” Meta said, hesitantly, “like Negroes, and the poorest immigrants. And we can read—there is always the prospect of escape, through books.”

  “Books are not a means of ‘escape,’ Meta! Books are a means of knowledge, and of learning how to cope with the future.”

  Upton had spoken curtly, for, though he often lectured Meta on the particular injustices endured by Negroes and by poor immigrants, he did not like her to seem to contradict him when he was in his idealist mood.

  He’d been surprised and gratified—very surprised, and very gratified—by the unexpected response his novelistic exposé of the Chicago stockyards, The Jungle, was receiving in its serialized form in the Socialist publication Appeal to Reason; the editor himself had expressed amazement at the newspaper’s mounting sales, and predicted more remarkable things for the future. (Upton hadn’t wanted to over-excite Meta and raise false hopes, but several New York publishers, including the capitalist bastions Macmillan and Doubleday, had expressed interest in publishing the novel in book form; and it had begun to seem not merely a fantasy, that Upton might soon have the means to pursue cherished goals: producing a play, founding a magazine, organizing a Socialist society in Brooklyn.)

  It was true that the “idyllic romance” of the New Jersey countryside had turned somewhat sour, for life in the ramshackle old farmhouse was arduous, though conditions had been much worse when the young couple and newborn son had to spend their first Princeton winter in a tar-paper-insulated cabin heated by a single wood-burning stove and all were freezing, and sickly much of the time. (If it had not been for the charity of the landlord-farmer and his wife, little David might have died of the croup; but on the coldest, most bitter nights, the young Sinclair family was invited to sleep in the farmer’s house, where it was reasonably heated, if not precisely “warm.”) Now, though they were living in a farmhouse of their own, it was a very primitive dwelling, with a roof that leaked, and rotted floorboards, and mice that scrambled about inside the walls; and it was so, Upton’s nerves were unusually sensitive to the baby’s near-ceaseless whimpering and crying, that distracted him from his concentration. And so, in warmer weather, Upton returned to the tar paper cabin, to work in solitude, on the ambitious Gettysburg. (So devoted was Upton Sinclair to his work, he’d resolved ne
ver to spend less than twelve hours a day at his desk, with the unfortunate but necessary consequence that Meta was obliged to milk the cow, that had come with the farmhouse; and deal with a flock of mangy chickens, that yielded very few eggs; and attempt to protect the meager fruits of a small orchard and garden from armies of worms, insects, and slugs that infested them in overlapping shifts. Upton sympathized with Meta’s frustration, as with her exhaustion; but he did not condone her frequently voiced despair—if they were to one day help found a Socialist colony it would be in a rural environment, and so the present farm work was excellent training.

  Upton was made to feel guilty, thus to feel resentful, when Meta complained of being “lonely”—and “bored”; for hadn’t she Upton, and little David, and the farmer’s wife to speak with; and any number of Socialist comrades with whom she might correspond, as Upton did, daily. But, Meta pleaded, she yearned for a change of scene, even for the small novelty of riding in the “moth-ridden” surrey into town; yet strangely, Meta often became over-excited when dressing “for town,” as Upton was clumsily hitching up the mare, and declared that she couldn’t come with him after all—her breath was too short, or her heart racing, or a “trouble in her womb” had flared up. (At this time, Meta suffered from a malady of the female reproductive organs, a result of the fourteen-hour labor she had endured in the poorly staffed maternity ward at Bellevue, for which she’d been advised, by a Socialist comrade-doctor, to take Lydia Pinkham’s Compound, and avoid red meats. And not to become pregnant again until she was in stronger health.)