The Accursed

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Where rarely Josiah smiled in Princeton, frequently he found himself smiling in Manhattan, bemused by such impersonal activity, and such a spirit of brashness.

  How vast the world was, and how mysterious! How small, how provincial, how dreamlike was Princeton, New Jersey; how sheltered from the rough vitality, vulgarity, and foreignness was the university, that seemed to float, like an enchanted island, somewhere just a little above the Earth. Especially, the bookstores of Manhattan were very different from Micawber Book Store, with its fastidiously shelved books and high-quality journals and magazines and, in special glass cases at the rear, first-edition and antiquarian books, that sold at high prices. In a large, bustling store on upper Broadway, that more resembled a small warehouse than a bookstore, Josiah acquired Lincoln Steffens’s controversial The Shame of the Cities, which was not sold at Micawber, as well as several issues of a crudely printed Socialist magazine called Appeal to Reason, which he’d never before seen, whose title attracted him. “For that is our only hope—an ‘appeal to reason.’ ” And afterward, sitting in Union Square, oblivious to the hubbub on all sides, Josiah began reading an excerpt of The Jungle, that dealt with the squalid conditions of the Chicago slaughterhouses and meat-packers, in a most personal, even intimate way, that quite captivated Josiah, even as it sickened him.

  Indignantly he wondered—could such revelations be true? The wealthy and unscrupulous Chicago meat-packer “Durham” of the novel appeared to be a thinly disguised J. Ogden Armour.

  Thinking, “But the Armours are our friends. They are my grandparents’ and my parents’ friends. Are the Armours themselves aware of this?”

  Josiah could not believe that the well-bred Princeton family, whose sons he’d known at the Academy, had anything directly to do with the Chicago branch of the family, of which J. Ogden Armour was the head; though surely, they owned stock in the thriving company, as perhaps the Slades did as well . . . At the time of a massive strike in Chicago two years before, which had involved the hiring of thousands of Negro strike-breakers, to replace the striking union workers, Josiah had been traveling in the West and had rarely seen a newspaper, or cared about “news.” Now, reading of these incidents in Appeal to Reason, he was ashamed of himself for being so ill-informed.

  The Princeton Slades and the Princeton Armours were distinguished families of the West End, thus allies and friends by tradition. Annabel had been a classmate and friend of Eloise Armour, in a little circle that had included Wilhelmina Burr. And one of the Armour sons, Timothy, an upperclassman at Princeton University when Josiah had been a freshman, had been instrumental in acquiring for Josiah, who’d scorned it, the precious invitation to join Ivy. Josiah wanted to think that the Armours’ reaction to The Jungle would be similar to his own.

  Yet, reading further, in other issues of the Socialist magazine, Josiah was increasingly appalled, and sickened. That workers labored in such conditions, not unlike his dear sister Annabel’s experience in the cellar of the Bog Palace, was outrageous; so poor, so trapped in the economic vise, even sickly men, and injured men, had no choice but to return to the conditions that were killing them: tuberculosis, rheumatism, “brown lung” and blood poisoning, and every kind of physical injury from accidents on the killing-floors that were slick with blood and offal. Most hideous were the fertilizer rooms and the “steamy tank” rooms where, Josiah read, workers sometimes slipped into vats of boiling water and were dissolved within seconds, to be sent out into the world as “Durham’s Pure Leaf Lard”! (After reading the notorious chapter nine of Upton Sinclair’s exposé, Josiah had had to close the magazine to recover.)

  “Can it be, I’ve unwittingly eaten some part of a fellow human being? At Crosswicks, at our dining room table, my family and I have been cannibals?” The thought was so awful, Josiah could not bring himself to eat anything, even bread and cheese, for the remainder of that day.

  VOICES! LIKE HOUNDS of hell, in hot pursuit.

  Infrequently Josiah attended church services now. And, when he did, he resisted sitting in the Slades’ pew at the front of the church, for he felt a revulsion for his Slade-self, seeing this individual through the eyes of others, as one of privilege and shame in about equal measure. And so, Josiah slunk into the First Presbyterian Church hoping to be undetected, by even his own family; he slipped into a pew at the rear of the church, and hid his face, in a paroxysm of remorse.

  As much remorse for his having failed to murder Axson Mayte, as for his failure to have detected his sister’s unhappiness as the fiancée of Lieutenant Bayard.

  He had not ever been one to pray openly, in a church setting; nor had private prayer meant much to him, who could not perceive how, considering the millions of inhabitants of the world, the Creator could be aware of any of them, as individuals; still less could he understand why. He’d long abandoned the hope of acquiring his grandfather Winslow’s combining of faith and intelligence, that had made Winslow Slade so revered a figure—among those of his kind.

  Scarcely listening to Winslow’s successor Reverend FitzRandolph, who derived the most familiar and the most trite conclusions from Holy Scripture, and addressed the congregation as if they were indeed sheep, Josiah lapsed into an open-eyed reverie; and became vulnerable to the flood of voices that rushed at him in the high-pitched mocking voices of cherubs to blend with his own prayer-voice: Our Hellish Father who art in Hell damn’d be Thy name damn’d Thy Kingdom forever & ever AMEN.

  BLUESTOCKING TEMPTRESS

  Josiah! I am your friend, please come to me when you can. Or when you wish. Please!”—so Wilhelmina murmurs to herself, testing the thrilling, unspeakable words while adjusting her new “slouch” hat in a mirror, or struggling to button the tight cuffs of her crisp white cotton middy-blouse, or preparing her cumbersome art-portfolio, to carry into the city for her lessons with Robert Henri.

  Yearning, yet headstrong Miss Wilhelmina Burr!

  In the spring of 1906 Wilhelmina has begun teaching as a part-time instructress in Art, Elocution, and Eurythmics at the Rocky Hill Seminary for Girls just outside Princeton, on the old King’s Road to New Brunswick, to the distress of her family; for the Burrs think it déclassé, indeed embarrassing, that their debutante daughter should wish to “work” at all, let alone side by side with (spinster) females of middle-class families, and worse.

  Yet more alarming to the Burrs, those alternative days when Wilhelmina takes the early train into the city, to indulge in her “fevered, if undirected” interest in art.

  For Wilhelmina exults in her very stubbornness, that she might be self-supporting if necessary, and independent of all the Burrs.

  “Otherwise, I shall have to marry. If I can’t marry for love, I shall have to marry for money. I will not.”

  In this way Willy believes herself content. Or believes she should be content. For in this new phase of her life it has happened that men have begun to take “interest” in her, as they had not earlier; except, none of these men are quite ideal. And none of them of course is Josiah Slade.

  Indeed, the attention of these men has come to be worrisome to Wilhelmina, and not so pleasurable as one might expect.

  Her encounter with Count English von Gneist, for instance—of which, resolutely, Wilhelmina does not wish to think.

  “A misunderstanding. A misfortune. Never again!”

  On her left wrist the incensed young woman carries still the mark of the Count’s strong fingers—like an iron vise, they had seemed. And she carries still the memory of the man’s broad grinning teeth. And the glowering topaz eyes. Never again!

  Yet, as a sympathetic biographer, shall I suggest, this outspoken young woman is not so innocent as she imagines herself?

  For it seems, a sly sort of female-demon peeps out through Willy’s serious brown eyes, and distorts her smile with its own; a becoming blush comes into her cheeks, unbidden, in masculine company; even as she shrinks from the most innocent sort of coquetry, for fear of being misunderstood. Though Willy has brushed her
springy hair back from her face and fashioned it into a schoolmarm’s chignon, and Willy has scrubbed her face until it shines like soapstone, defiant in its plainness, yet, she has become a figure to “turn heads.”

  With particular care for her Kingston days as instructress at the girls’ school, Willy dresses in white cotton blouses with high starched collars, tight sleeves, and full, rather than “hobbled,” skirts; though she hates the sensation of being suffocated, Willy binds herself up each morning in a straight-front corset with long hips, to make of her soft, resilient flesh a kind of armor. (Inadvertently, Willy’s tight-corseted figure attracts admiring glances, for she is made to appear, beneath even her fullest skirts, distinctly shapely.) Willy scorns excessive hairstyles, and wide-brimmed befeathered hats; wears no jewelry except for her pin-on watch and a miniature ivory brooch in the shape of a swan, a family heirloom recently given to her by her aunt Adelaide. (Though brought to her at Pembroke by her uncle Horace Burr.) And her stockings are thin black wool or cotton, and her day shoes of black leather with prim black buttons. Yet, still, there is something covert and lascivious in her step, in the inclination of her head, and most of all in the veiled sweep of her gaze. For why else do Princeton men, some of them proverbially happily married men, gaze at her as they do?

  “It must be my fault. It is something new, but—what?”

  Of a single week, from the stout, middle-aged Copplestone Slade, from taciturn Hamilton Hodge, from ministerial Dr. Woodrow Wilson of the university and Reverend Thaddeus Shackleton of the seminary, even from the gout-stricken Grover Cleveland, Willy receives unsolicited, unwelcome, and disagreeable attentions. Drivers have brought to her house sealed love-letters for her, and several prettily wrapped packages from the prestigious Hamilton Jeweler; so many packages from Edmund Sweet’s—chocolates, bonbons, Black Forest tortes, even jelly beans. (Jelly beans! Willy is baffled, for who would eat such juvenile candies, that had not the slightest appeal to her since she’d turned sixteen.) Flowers are of course the most favored gift: these have included dozens of long-stemmed roses from the Bank Street florist, plus gardenias, lilies, daisies and lilacs, potted orchids. Even at the seminary where Wilhelmina is Miss Burr, with a reputation for making her girl-students work, and with no patience for girlish silliness, she is the recipient of illicit letters pressed into her hands by these very girls, which is embarrassing to her; she is stern about declining gifts, even those from a girl’s grateful parents, given for “disinterested” reasons.

  With a reluctant hand Willy opens one of the unsought billets-doux from a gentleman, sighing at the clichéd salutation—My dear adored Miss Burr, Dear Beauteous Miss Burr; impatiently she skims the protestation of love, couched in the language of subtle male reproach, and notes the signature, or, as often happens, the absence of a signature.

  “It is a kind of sickness, a plague. But who is to blame?”

  When these unwanted attentions first began, sometime in the early spring of 1906, as the scandal and tragedy of Annabel Slade began to wane, and sightings of Annabel’s “bestial child” had all but ceased, Willy did feel, to her shame, a kind of girlish pleasure. These were not the sorts of attentions her mother had hoped for her, following her expensive coming-out in Manhattan, but they were authentic-seeming, and passionate. It is not surprising, nor should we judge Wilhelmina Burr harshly, that the young woman, only just twenty-one, would be flattered by such masculine interest; she may have interpreted the attentions from married men as but playful, and not serious. Perhaps such attentions are common in Princeton, and she has not known?

  Regarding herself in the mirror, with an air of critical yet hopeful inquiry: “Can it be, ‘Willy’ is beautiful after all? And will he take notice—finally?”

  For all such masculine interest is to Wilhelmina but a prelude to the interest of Josiah Slade, of whom she continues to think obsessively.

  In her sweetest dreams, she feels Josiah’s lips—warm, assertive, yet tender—pressing against her mouth; for the impulsive kiss in the garden room, now months ago, is as vivid to her as if it had happened just the previous day. Wakened from this sweet sleep, she could weep aloud—whether for joy, or sorrow, she cannot know.

  For Willy has learned, from numerous sources, that Josiah is in retreat from life, since Annabel’s death. Like a monk he seems to her, a penitent, and wholly admirable. She would never judge Josiah Slade harshly, as one who’d trifled with her feelings, as she would never have judged Annabel, her dearest friend.

  Though Wilhelmina may have been flattered to receive cards and gifts, she knew that she must ignore the cards, and return the gifts when possible. (How is one to return flowers, though? Willy kept these, filling the garden room with such beauty and fragrances, visitors laughingly commented that one could fall into a trance in such surroundings.) It was also not possible to return gifts that were anonymously sent to her; or to reject the exquisite heirloom brooch that her aunt Adelaide had allegedly given her, by way of her uncle Horace.

  (Willy thought it strange that there was no note from Adelaide accompanying the brooch. And that Horace thought it necessary to bring the brooch to her, in person, on a Sunday afternoon when no one else in the family was home, with the explanation that the antique brooch was too precious to trust to a delivery boy.) “But—how is Aunt Adelaide? Is she well, or—not so well?” Willy asked her stout mustached uncle, who told her, with a sorrowful smile, “Not so well, Willy, I’m afraid. Some days it seems almost poor Puss can’t fully wake herself up.”)

  With the passing of weeks, however, Willy has begun to be vexed by such “attentions”—the more so, the majority of men who pursue her are older, and married, and in some inevitable way undesirable.

  As disturbing as the men’s behavior, the behavior of the women is yet more disturbing.

  For instance, encountering the three Wilson daughters in Edmund Sweet’s, Willy smiles her friendliest smile and invites the young women to sit at her table with her, and have some tea and cakes; but the eldest, Margaret, sharply shakes her head no, and Jessie and Eleanor nervously decline; for it seems, their father awaits their return from an errand at the pharmacy, and they have come only to purchase a few little cakes, to eat on their walk. Not long after this, Mrs. Johanna van Dyck, who has always been so sensible and friendly, turns away with a frown when she and Willy chance to meet at Micawber; and Mrs. Cleveland, buxom and glamorous in sable coat, hat, and muff, and high-buttoned kidskin boots, so cruelly “cuts” the smiling young Wilhelmina in Palmer Square, poor Willy feels faint with shock.

  And, in days and weeks following, Willy is also snubbed by Mrs. Sparhawk, Mrs. Morgan, Mrs. Pyne, Mrs. Armour and her daughter Eloise; even Mandy FitzRandolph (about whom ominous whisperings have begun to accrue), who had always been her friend. Thinking Oh Annabel, if you could help me! What have I done, what can I do to make amends?

  Most upsetting to Willy is the fact that Josiah Slade has not dropped by to see her, nor even contacted her, since the day of that sudden kiss. Several times she has imagined she’d seen him, in Princeton, but at a distance; she had not wanted to pursue him, so unmistakably, and risk another snub. And once, to her astonishment, she was sure she’d seen Josiah making his way along a crowded sidewalk at Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue, in the vicinity of the New York School of Art, which was her destination; again, Willy suppressed the impulse to run after Josiah, and to call to him—“For in Manhattan, perhaps Josiah doesn’t want to be confused with Josiah Slade of Princeton.”

  “YES! THIS BEGINS to be vexing.”

  With a sigh Willy unwraps a little present from LaVake Custom-Made Gifts, and stares inside the box at what appears to be a gold collar-necklace adorned at its center with a square-cut diamond. The unsigned card reads, bizarrely—

  To the Cruel & Beauteous Bluestocking Temptress

  From One Who Harbors no Ebullition Against Her

  For All She has Prick’d Him in Torment of Love.

  Your Faithfull Suitor
r />   How beautiful, the gold necklace; yet how frightening, its resemblance to a dog collar.

  And the hand? Though far looser and scrawling than normal, with a clumsy attempt at disguise, Willy is sure she recognizes it, with a sharp intake of breath, as that of her uncle Horace Burr, her father’s younger brother, and husband of poor Puss.

  THE GLASS OWL

  Through Princeton it began to be remarked upon how, in a time of general sorrow and strife in the Slade households, the boy Todd, Copplestone and Lenora’s “idiot” son, was undergoing an unexpected change; less in his appearance, for Todd was yet very young for his age, with a spindly nervous frame and darting eyes, than in his behavior.

  So strangely, Todd seemed to have taught himself the rudiments of reading and writing, which tutors and governesses had despaired of teaching him for years.

  Since his beloved cousin Annabel’s death, Todd was less conspicuously vexing than he’d been to his family; he did not incur Copplestone’s wrath quite so often, or provoke his mother to tears. Where previously the very sight of a book might throw him into a fit, unless it was a children’s picture-book, now Todd was spending hours in the library at Wheatsheaf, which was not a room much frequented by either of his parents.