The Accursed

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Willy said, not quite meeting Josiah’s eye, “I think that’s why I asked you to drop by, Josiah. I may have made a terrible mistake . . .”

  “What sort of mistake?”

  “Of the man himself, whose name I can’t bring myself to say, Annabel never spoke, to me. Though I’d been hearing news of him, as a new presence in town, befriended by many of our friends and neighbors, and Dr. Wilson; and my mother had got it into her head, he and I must meet.”

  “Yes. I’d heard that.”

  “But Annabel wasn’t present, at that awkward meeting—a dinner party here, and only ten at the table. In actual words, Annabel said very little about the great change that was coming into her life; but in actions, gestures, and sighs, and sudden outbursts of nervous laughter, she said a great deal. For it was evident to me, on several of our walks, and quiet times together, that Annabel was, if not unhappy, then clearly not happy, as she should have been. I’d thought she was feeling some anxiety about marriage to Dabney, whom she really didn’t know very well, or maybe about marriage itself—Annabel was so very sheltered, as you must know. It’s a curious thing, a man who marries must pretend that he has no ‘experience’—a woman who marries in fact has no ‘experience’—in our class, at least. And nothing must be uttered aloud.”

  Josiah said, slowly, “Annabel was sometimes too happy—at her engagement party, for instance. She seemed to have fallen in love with Dabney’s uniform, or some idea of him, rather than him. Or maybe she’d fallen in love with our fantasy of what Annabel Slade should be, the most beautiful bride, the most obedient daughter.”

  Carefully Willy stubbed out her cigarette, which she’d scarcely smoked, into a little silver bowl.

  “Josiah, I think that I let Annabel down. She seemed to want to talk about something, one day when we were walking in Crosswicks Forest, but I—I felt shy about pursuing it, or just too ignorant. Since then, I blame myself every hour.”

  Josiah waited, as Willy went on: “She hinted to me that she’d ‘fallen in love and was damn’d’—‘I belong now to another, in body as well as spirit, and no one can save me’—I tried to see how this was in reference to Dabney Bayard, even when I knew it could not be. It was very strange, Dabney seemed to have nothing to do with Annabel’s agitation.”

  “And—what? You chose not to hear?”

  “I chose not to understand.”

  “What exactly did Annabel say, can you remember?”

  “She was speaking emotionally—not very coherently. She said ‘neither Josiah, nor the dashing Lieutenant, can save me’—something like that. So I knew, I should have known, that Dabney wasn’t the object of her concern.”

  “Poor Lieutenant Bayard! I could feel more sympathy for the man, if he hadn’t made himself an enemy of the Slades.” Josiah was on his feet, agitated. He’d set his cup of Ceylon tea down in haste. “If I could lay my hands on this ‘Mayte,’ I could revenge both Dabney and me. But—where have they fled!”

  Hesitantly Willy said, “It might be that Annabel did fear Dabney—she feared you all. She didn’t want to disappoint her family, or his family. She might have behaved out of desperation, simply to escape.”

  “ ‘Escape’—where?”

  “She might not have known what would happen. If she became at all ‘involved’ with this man, in secrecy.”

  “And you never saw them together, or heard her speak of him?”

  “I’ve told so many people, Josiah—no, and no! Of course not.”

  “Annabel was by nature a very shy girl. She knew nothing—I’m sure—of ‘marital relations’—and I’m sure that my mother did not disabuse her ignorance.”

  Willy, staring into her teacup, could not reply. Josiah saw her face color with warmth. He said:

  “There should be a kind of ‘free love’—as the revolutionaries say—for those who are fearful of marriage. Or better yet, a way for a woman to live her life without either—‘free love’ or ‘marriage’—but just as an individual, as a man might live, undefined by the opposite sex.”

  “Yes. That is so.” Willy paused thoughtfully, biting her lower lip. “But Annabel was not ready for such a life, no more than I am, really. Though I’m closer to it than Annabel could have been. To live freely, as the suffragettes argue, a woman must be self-sufficient, financially. She must have decent work, and a decent income. Neither Annabel nor I have this—yet.”

  “Annabel was brought up to be wed. You, I think, are different—you are almost of a newer generation.”

  “How I wish that that were true! But I will try.”

  “People say you want to live in New York. You should, somehow. Princeton is not the place for you, right now.”

  “It is churchly humbug here, isn’t it? And such good, kindly, Christian people, whom we love, and whom it would hurt to leave.”

  “Well, Annabel has left. By this time, I should think that she might have returned if she’d wanted to.”

  Willy said, in a lowered voice, “If Annabel has cast her life here aside, even if she has made a mistake, shouldn’t she be allowed her freedom? Her freedom even to be made miserable?”

  “I would kill the son of a bitch, if he made Annabel miserable. If I could find him, and get hold of him.”

  A roaring in Josiah’s ears, and a hot flush in his face. It was made very obvious to him, he and Wilhelmina Slade were alone together, in this room; had they not the freedom to do what they wished, even to be made miserable? And what delight, in such freedom.

  “I suppose we’re all selfish, as I know I am, Josiah. I want Annabel back with us, where we know she’s safe.”

  “How could we ever believe that, again—‘safe’!”

  “Or maybe the truth is, Annabel didn’t ‘choose’—she was the victim of a sort of spell, like hypnosis or mesmerism. That is what most people think, and what I would prefer to think.”

  “It’s what I think—what I prefer to think. And if I can find the man, I will make him pay. For my sister’s situation calls for rescue, and for revenge, even if she herself does not.”

  In such emotion, as if he had no idea what he did, Josiah seized Willy by the elbow, and lifted her to him and kissed her mouth, wetly. Then stepped back from her, the heartbeat in his chest so wild, he felt that he might faint; only fresh air could help.

  Kissed by Josiah Slade, even in so distracted a way, Willy could not seem to respond; then, as Josiah left the room, she followed after him, daring to pluck at his arm. “Josiah!—my friend. Will I see you again?”

  “Yes. Yes of course. You will see me again—many times. Good-bye!”

  Josiah stammered, eager to escape. A few minutes later, striding along Campbelton Road in the direction of Elm Road, he could recall of the heated emotional exchange only the admonition Shouldn’t she be allowed her freedom? Her freedom even to be made miserable?

  “GOD’S CREATION AS VIEWED FROM THE EVOLUTIONARY HYPOTHESIS”

  This is the intriguing title of Winslow Slade’s sermon, delivered at the Germantown Unitarian Church just outside Philadelphia, on October 19, 1905; the last such public appearance the renowned former minister was to make in his lifetime.

  Through the lengthy, humid summer, Winslow Slade had virtually hidden away in his library at Crosswicks, in a paralysis of grief and (it may have been) shame, following the loss, as he called it, of his beloved Annabel. Unlike Josiah, and most of the Slades, Winslow shrank from speaking of the situation; he showed so little animation at the prospect of locating Annabel, bringing her back, “revenging” her honor, you would almost think that he’d given her up—the “loss” was irrevocable, and out of human hands.

  When his daughter-in-law Henrietta burst into tears in his presence, as several times the poor bereft mother did, Winslow allowed others to comfort her, and quietly excused himself, and left the room to return to the sanctuary of his library.

  In the autumn, Winslow roused himself, to a degree, to accept an invitation from Colonel Harvey to write an essay for H
arper’s on the delicate subject of the “popular preaching” of the day, and its danger to the stability of a more mature faith; he accepted invitations to give guest sermons here and there in Jersey, and, most successfully, at the Germantown Unitarian Church in an affluent Philadelphia suburb, on “God’s Creation as Viewed from the Evolutionary Hypothesis.” So many admiring faces, so many heartfelt handshakes!—reminiscences of Dr. Slade’s many years as a Presbyterian minister, and president of Princeton University, and governor of New Jersey—and much else, that Winslow Slade had nearly forgotten, as if it had been the effort of another man, a stranger to him. If there were murmurs behind his back of the terrible scandal in his family, these were tactfully hidden from him, and may have provoked a greater sympathy for him among his hosts. What a good, saintly man! And what a cross to bear, in his twilight years.

  For weeks Winslow had worked on “God’s Creation”—he’d never been a minister who avoided intellectual issues, or who glossed over scientific challenges to faith; for weeks, he’d consulted books and journals from his library, and newer material, from Chancellor Green Library, which he’d quite enjoyed visiting, in a pretense of being a young, curious scholar once again. He’d discussed his talk with his grandson Josiah who seemed to be, among Winslow’s relatives, the only one familiar with what Christian theologians called the “evolutionary hypothesis,” but their discussions proved contentious, and upsetting: Josiah claimed that the view of Darwin’s theories which Winslow was presenting was “so simplistic as to be erroneous,” and that Winslow’s willingness even to consider the theory, advanced by numerous theologians, that the Devil had scattered false fossils to undermine faith in the Biblical creation, was “absurd.” Most upsetting, Josiah suggested that his grandfather really didn’t understand Darwin’s basic concepts of survival of the fittest and survival by natural selection—“It is all random, Grandfather: there is no ‘creation’ at all.”

  “Josiah, of course there is a ‘creation’! Look at the world—the world is there.”

  “But the world, all worlds, are ‘accidents.’ I think that is what Darwin meant.”

  “Darwin could not possibly mean that there is no design. Without design, there would be chaos.”

  “Well, I think the theory is: out of ‘chaos’ arises something that resembles ‘design.’ But it’s all random.”

  Winslow, usually soft-spoken and courteous, even with very stupid people, was beginning to lose patience now with his arrogant grandson: “But Josiah, how is that possible?”

  “Grandfather, how do I know? I’m not a biologist, a geologist, or a geneticist! I’m trying to be a rational person, amid a most irrational world.”

  “It is not ‘rational’ to think that our world, humanity itself, might have evolved out of—nothingness. It is only rational to conclude that if there is a creation, there is a Creator. If you discovered a complex Swiss watch cast away on a beach—”

  Josiah interrupted: “But there is no ‘creation,’ Grandfather. You are trapped in your theistic vocabulary.”

  Now angrily, Winslow persisted: “—a Swiss watch cast away on a beach, and you would conclude that the watch ‘evolved’ by itself? That there was no watch-maker, and no creation?”

  “It isn’t the same thing, Grandfather. One is a biological phenomenon, and the other is an ‘invention.’ It’s a foolish argument. Of course, there is an inventor, and there is a manufacturer, of a watch! A watch does not reproduce itself.”

  But Winslow seemed not to understand, doggedly returning to the thesis of his sermon: “The existence of so complex a mechanism proves a ‘Creator’—so too, our complex species, and the vast world . . .”

  “Grandfather, no: given the astonishing variety and processes of the world, and so much that goes horrifically wrong in the world, it is more rational to assume that there is no ‘Creator’—it is all an accident, and we must try to understand it.”

  “Never! I can never believe that the world is an ‘accident’ and not a ‘creation.’ And the people to whom I will be speaking, who have faith in our teachings, will never believe, either.”

  Winslow spoke hotly, furiously. His usually affable eyes shone with rage. Josiah had never seen his grandfather in such a state and felt immediate regret, for what was the practical purpose of such a discussion? The older generation must believe what it must believe, Josiah thought. Younger generations will supplant their elders, and feel pity for their ignorance which they were proud to call “faith.”*

  With a mumbled apology Josiah excused himself, and slipped out of his grandfather’s study.

  They were never to discuss the subject again.

  He is trapped, like a butterfly in a jar. So long as the oxygen remains in the jar, he can survive. But no longer.

  AS IF TO REFUTE Josiah, and what Winslow Slade called, in his sermon, the younger generation of quasi-rationalists, the Germantown congregation was very receptive to his ideas, and to their expression in a form in which the youngest listener, as well as the least educated, might understand; the essence of the sermon was that “faith” and “science” inhabit totally different spheres, and do not overlap, even to share the same vocabulary. There was no applause in the beautiful old church, as there would have been in a lecture hall, but the Unitarian minister and his company were enormously pleased with the sermon; and numberless people came up to Winslow Slade afterward to shake his hand, with the praise that he had explained their own beliefs to them, in a way they could not themselves.

  How very good it felt, or should have felt, to bask once again in such public adulation! And in the cause of defending the Christian faith, against atheism. But Winslow was feeling tired, and mildly anxious, as the elderly are likely to feel, when some distance from home; and so he excused himself before the elegant luncheon at a church member’s house had ended, saying that he had to make a 2 p.m. train.

  On the return to Princeton, Winslow could not keep his eyes from drooping; he could not concentrate on the book he’d hoped to read, the newly published The Life of Reason by George Santayana, of the Philosophy Department at Harvard. In a light doze in his private compartment on the train Winslow woke abruptly to stare out the window at a creature of some sort—a horse? a deer?—running and stumbling alongside the speeding vehicle—seeing then to his astonishment that the figure was human, and wraith-like. Why, it was Annabel!—his beloved granddaughter Annabel!—running barefoot in the rough terrain, thin bare arms pitifully extended to him; her long tresses blown wild, and her fair, childlike face wildly contorted. Grandfather! Help me! Don’t abandon me! Intercede with your God for me!—even as the train seemed to be gathering speed, and pulling away; and Annabel was left behind, staggering desperately through the sere and tangled grasses beyond the railroad bed.

  So noisy was the train’s clattering, no one heard the elderly man’s cries of horror, and for help. No one was to discover him collapsed on the floor of his compartment, half his face contorted in a look of terror, and his eyes rolled back inside his head, until a conductor slid open the door, at Princeton Junction.

  THE PHANTOM LOVERS

  Man’s belly is the reason why man does not easily take himself for a god.

  This curt aphorism of Nietzsche had a special meaning for Upton Sinclair this autumn: not because, like billions of impoverished beings throughout the world, he suffered from daily hunger; nor, certainly, because he over-indulged in rich foods. Upton’s peculiar condition was a lack of appetite, or, even, at times, a revulsion for food; he was rarely “hungry” in the usual sense of the word and, after forcing himself to eat a meal, often writhed in silent agony as if the acids of his digestive system were in turmoil.

  How mysterious his predicament was, and how unjust, that he of all persons should be so afflicted!—when he religiously adhered to the tenets of vegetarianism, avoiding not only meat and poultry but fish; and kept to a rigorous asceticism, working for as long as fifteen hours a day at his desk, and denying himself all but heated skim m
ilk when he felt light-headed. It was Upton’s theory that fasting would stimulate him to sustained feats of prose, as he believed it had others; hadn’t Balzac labored at his desk for as long as thirty hours at a stretch?—and Upton Sinclair believed himself to be cleaner, healthier, and more ascetic in his habits than Balzac, and more selflessly dedicated to his ideal.

  Meta worried that Upton was making himself “anemic”—and generally ill—but the young author replied that children as young as six toiled all night before burning furnaces in the Allegheny steel country; and his work, set beside theirs, was light indeed. “I don’t want to spoil myself, and grow lazy,” Upton said, “when the Revolution will need all the strength we can provide it.”

  “But you aren’t ‘lazy,’ Upton—of course you are not. And you don’t eat much, as it is, and are very thin.”

  “Not so thin as others are!” Upton retorted. (Though secretly he felt a little distress, that he could not seem to gain weight, but only to lose it; that, after eating the most mild of foods, like unsalted and unsweetened porridge, a single boiled egg, a bowl of warm milk in which bread had been soaked, he experienced a stoic and silent sort of pain in his stomach. And he felt most grievously sorry, that, as a consequence of the asceticism he imposed upon his little family, his son David had developed rickets, according to the diagnosis of a stern-faced Princeton doctor.)

  Meta would never forgive him for that, he feared—the puny bone-development of little David.

  Yet it was difficult for her to argue with Upton, who retreated as always to his Socialist beliefs. He was convinced that the ulcerous condition of his stomach and the over-sensitivity of his nerves were mere symptoms, the cause of which was finance capitalism: the “mighty fortress of Greed” which he and his Socialist comrades detected on all sides in the United States of the early 1900s.

  “In so sick a society,” Upton said to Meta, “how is it possible that anyone is healthy, at all?”