The Accursed

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Your loving husband,

  Woodrow

  ADMIRALTY INN

  26 APRIL 1906

  My precious darling,

  Thank you for your sweet, sweet letter, & thank the girls for me, for their most welcome little notes—you cannot know how moved I was, after my turbulent night; how I have carried my dear family close against my heart through this long & unsettling day. I am sorry to hear your “troubling” news from Maidstone & as you have chosen to supply no details, I am led to worry that the long-invalided Adelaide Burr has taken a turn for the worse. Here, though I try to avoid contact with Princeton faces, as much as courtesy allows, I find that yet again I have accepted an invitation to dinner, this time from the FitzRandolphs who are hosting a dinner at Sans Souci; & my punishment will be the donning of my frock coat & gray striped trousers & the most starched collar in my possession, this very evening. Kindly Mrs. FitzRandolph has arranged for their driver to pick me up in Mrs. Peck’s Silver Cloud Pierce-Arrow yet another time. (Though I do not like it greatly, how our Princeton friends & neighbors assume that I have no way to transport myself; as the board of trustees sets my salary so modestly, I cannot afford a motorcar, let alone a driver to drive the motorcar, back home.) & though she is kindly, Mrs. FitzRandolph is somewhat coercive, a character flaw often found in females of wealth & social station; her clothes far too “stylish” for my taste—nearly as calculated to capture the eye as Mrs. Peck’s that are allegedly sewn for her by a Parisian designer of great renown, a man it is said, who fashions clothing for the First Lady of France. Both Mrs. FitzRandolph & Mrs. Peck are women who favor the most delicate “pastel” colors; the skirts of their dresses are very full, & the shoulder line of their clothing strangely low, in what is said to be the Japanese style—(for Mrs. Peck saw me staring, & laughingly explained). The women’s hats here are enormous—nothing like my dear wife’s modest-trimmed little hats—& lavishly trimmed with very pretty though fluttery ostrich feathers. Mr. Clemens quips How many ostriches must be sacrificed, that our ladies’ vanity shines forth—to which I inwardly murmured AMEN!

  I had meant to tell you, dear Ellen, that I’d caught a glimpse the other day of the FitzRandolph baby, which few persons in Princeton have seen—its name is Terence—much swaddled in infant’s clothing & in a buggy covered in veils, to protect the child from the sun’s strong rays; as well, as Amanda FitzRandolph says, most curiously, from any “singular influence” the child might receive, from an adult stooping to peer into his tiny face!

  At last—I have prepared the final drafts of the letters for the trustees et al.—& will toil through the day tomorrow, like a Trojan, to mail them; in the hope that the recipients will have absorbed the import of these letters, in the days before I return to Princeton.

  Do not worry about me, dear Ellen—I am quite all right. (I have not needed to use the pump more than a single time!) Though running very low on Oil of Castor, which I hope I can purchase here on the island for I shall be desperate, I’m afraid, without!

  My dearest wife, I must close now, as time has passed so rapidly & Mrs. Peck’s vehicle will soon come for me, like a chariot out of the sky. I am missing my dearest little Ellen so very much, no words can say.

  Your loving husband,

  Woodrow

  ADMIRALTY INN

  26 APRIL 1906

  11 A.M.

  My precious darling,

  Confound it, I have only now made myself comfortable at this little table above the beach, & there is some sort of ungodly commotion close by; shrill calls & shouts as of unruly children. Most distracting, when I am polishing & perfecting my letters; & now my head throbs, & my hand begins to shake.

  It seems the mystery on the beach is solved: one of those loathsome jellyfish had evidently stung a wading child, whose nanny had been negligent. A boy of ten was stung yesterday, too. Very foolish of the children to play hereabouts & of their parents to allow it. (When I made some remark to this effect, to a very well-mannered & light-skinned little Negro who was settling my table-legs into the sand, a smile from him, & a roll of his eyes, sent me the clear signal that the Negroes of this island paradise think it exceedingly foolish for tourists & visitors to wade in the ocean; but would never dream of expressing this opinion, of course. I think it is my Southern roots that binds me to the Negro race, our sense of rapport in the midst of foolish Northerners!)

  According to Count von Gneist, who, it seems, is something of a naturalist, & has even traveled to the desolate Galápagos Islands, of Darwinian notoriety, certain of the swarm of jellyfish washed upon the beaches of Bermuda are of a species larger than the usual, with jelly sacs and tentacles of near-preternatural size; and their toxin is quite potent. Ugly red welts were raised on the boy’s legs yesterday & he wept most fearfully . . . I would weep too, if I’d blundered into one of those shimmering protoplasmic brutes, that appear, from a distance, like mere sea-debris, or seaweed!

  Mrs. Peck has invited me to stay for the remainder of my Bermuda vacation at Sans Souci—it is very kind of her, for the Admiralty Inn with its elderly British guests begins to weary me; & there is the attraction, both Count von Gneist & Sam Clemens are houseguests there, & marvel at the beauty & hospitality of the villa, on the southernmost peninsula of the island & surrounded by tall swaying court palms & gorgeous bougainvillea to a height of twenty feet. Servants at Sans Souci, it is reported, are not common West Indian Negroes but are descended from the original “indentured servants”—(of whom some were told, when they arrived at the island, that the term of their indenture had been raised from seven years to ninety-nine—if they were black)—thus of a higher quality generally, & remarkably intelligent.

  How I wish you were at my side, dear Ellen—I am so dependent upon my dear wife, to “dress” me; & am quite at the mercy of the ladies who make merry over me, as the puritan-browed Princeton minister, feeling obliged to adjust my necktie, or a collar or cuff, that somehow betrays a bachelor’s toilet.

  In a droll aside Mr. Clemens observed, last night, in my ear, as one of the servants came around with tiny cups of very black “Haitian” coffee—“Ah, luxury! Comfort! Ease! Wealth! Rich food & drink & the folk who come with it! It is all very stupefying & dull, is it not, Mr. Wilson?”—& when I raised my eyebrows at such a comment, with Cybella Peck but a few feet away, Mr. Clemens quickly amended, “Yet it is preferable to the rest of life, of course. One must consider that.”

  (Mr. Clemens is looking a great deal aged, from when I’d last seen him, which is strange. He plays billiards, he says, as he smokes his cigars—“Like a fiend out of Hell.” Yet his hair is no less whiter & bushy & his moustache no less cavalier. His cigar emitted so potent a stench, I feared I might have to hurry from the room to be violently ill; but I knew my departure would arouse merriment in the other guests, & I could not risk this. Imagine my astonishment when Mrs. Peck “lit up” a cigar—I believe it is called a cigarillo—of her own, & puffed away at it laughing with the men, fortunately in the open air.)

  Except for a skirmish in the early hours of the morning with Mrs. FitzRandolph’s bouillabaisse I have been digesting my food fairly well, which is a good prognosis for my return to Princeton, I think! Yet more significantly, I have had a number of excellent conversations with persons of unusual common sense about the future of America & its “unique” politics—the propensity of the masses not to vote invariably in their own self-interest, or indeed, to vote at all, which allows for the skilled politician to manipulate to his advantage. Especially, I have valued my conversations with Count von Gneist whose intelligence & wit compete with Mr. Clemens’s, except he is not so corrosive. As I have noted to you, the Count speaks English with a marked accent; at times, his speech is so fluid, it resembles music. Here is a gentleman who is also a man, in the way that our blowhard president “TR” is not. At all times he displays an inborn sort of gallantry, and an easy deference to authority; recognizing me, as he has said, as one of the American aristocracy, born to rule—
a type, the Count says, immediately recognizable to Europeans. His eyes are a curious sort of lemon-tawny hue, like a certain sort of leather when it has been well polished. His hair is leonine, with graying locks. I confess that I am somewhat taken with him—& wonder if he might be prevailed upon to lecture at the university, on any subject of his choice—history, politics, the Galápagos Islands! When first we’d met this gentleman exclaimed: “Ah, the famous Dr. Wilson!—who has, it seems, made so many craven enemies in Princeton, one senses he is destined for greatness”—& another time, on another subject, the Count murmured to me in an aside, almost in apology: “No man is a prophet in his own provincial community, Mr. Wilson. You must take solace in that.”

  It is so rare, dearest Ellen, that a man finds such a companion in another man, & a stranger at that!

  3:10 p.m.

  Wandering about Sans Souci—how very different from the confines of Prospect! There, I am never made to feel quite at home, for the university is the land-owner; & the undergraduates feel it is their right to gape & gawk through the fence, at all hours of the night. But here—all is open to light & the sea; for no one would dare trespass on this private land, so fortified against outsiders, & so capably staffed by the Sans Souci servants, who are very loyal to their masters. I wish that my dear little wife could walk with me, to observe this palatial villa of smooth white stucco & red shutters; so quaintly, Mrs. Peck refers to it as a “cottage,” that consists of two large wings, and some fourteen bedrooms, as grand as the New Jersey governor’s summer home at Sea Girt, or as anything at Cape May, for that matter.

  How the snobbish West End of Princeton—(not excluding our shameless epicurean ex-President)—would gape & gawk, to see me treated here so very graciously! Their much-maligned & taken-for-granted Woodrow Wilson here treated like royalty! To see how the Cybella Peck fusses over me, that my suite is ideal, & every service of Sans Souci at my disposal.

  There is, or was, but a single jarring note—just this morning—as I lingered on my balcony gazing toward the ocean, a movement caught my eye on the beach—one of the villa’s servants, though very light-skinned; yet the young man seemed to me unnervingly like the Ruggles boy, of whom I’d spoken to you—who had fraudulently claimed to be a kinsman of mine, you might recall—a preceptor at the university & a seminarian—who had had to be dismissed from both—for reasons too disturbing to speak of . . . Yet later, it seemed to me that I saw this very servant in conversation with Count von Gneist, at the edge of a broad flagstone terrace; something crimson had fallen to the ground, & the servant quickly bent to pick it up, as if to prevent the Count from doing so; this, a sprig of gorgeous bougainvillea, the impudent young man inserted into the Count’s lapel, as the Count laughed . . . Imagine my alarm when the two glanced in my direction, yet fortunately did not see me, crouched very still behind a screen.

  I am sure that the Sans Souci servant is not Yaeger Ruggles. It was but an optical illusion of some kind, that afflicts me after over-stimulation, & a poor night of sleep.

  Another child has been stung by a jellyfish, it seems. They say that the poor little girl was rendered unconscious for some minutes, & has now been carried away to be hospitalized. What a pity!—only eight or ten years old. One would think that the nursemaid, or the mother, would keep closer watch . . . I am so relieved that you, dear Ellen, are spared the sight of these singularly ugly freaks of nature, born without skeletons, soft-shimmering, yet deadly. This day, Mr. Clemens made a ribald joke that offended me, to a degree, on the subject of the “lion’s mane” with its myriad tendrils and stinging toxins. (Quite wonderfully, Count von Gneist recalled that Arthur Conan Doyle, the British mystery writer, has written something called “The Adventures of the Lion’s Mane,” of which Mr. Clemens had not heard for, as he said negligently, he did not waste his time reading mere fantasies, when the actual world of pain & suffering stared him in the face.)

  Champagne, & white wine, & after-dinner cordials—to which I declined with thanks, it scarcely needs be said; as I could not hope to sleep a wink, so great would be the rebellion in the “equatorial regions” . . .

  Midnight

  Ah, how I miss my darling spouse! Though this bedchamber at Sans Souci is splendidly furnished, & far too large for a single lonely bachelor; & the sound of the night-time surf very comforting, like the palm of a giant hand that caresses, and consoles. My neck, stiff from craning much of the evening, to hear the wit so fiercely batted about, like badminton birdies, is badly wanting my dear Ellen’s soothing fingers, that banish aches & pains & nettlesome foolish worries lodging in the over-heated grooves of my brain . . .

  Waking in the night to a horrific vision, or it may have been something glimpsed earlier, yet not registered in my distracted brain at the time; yet now seeing, with an unnerving vividness, our friend & neighbor Amanda FitzRandolph acquiescing to an offer made by the Count of a pinch of snuff from a tiny ivory snuffbox! Of all Princeton ladies, there was Mrs. FitzRandolph, a new mother, allowing the Count to insert the snuff in one of her nostrils, that she might draw breath, and sneeze—a quicksilver rippling over her face, and tears starting into her eyes.

  This, & the incident on the terrace with the young Negro servant, has caused me to slightly reconsider my new friend Count English von Gneist; though a man among men, & surely a gentleman, I am not certain that his manners are for Prospect—for Dr. Wilson’s “petticoat haven”!

  As for Edgerstoune’s absence, there came Mr. Clemens unsteady on his feet & an unlit cigar in his stubby fingers, observing to all who would hear: “A man may accommodate himself to a disagreeable situation in a few months. The intolerable may take a little longer.”

  Your loving husband,

  Woodrow

  SANS SOUCI

  APRIL 27, 1906

  12 NOON

  My precious darling,

  Again, thank you so much for your dear little letter, bearing such sweet tidings of household news, which had been brought to me from the Admiralty Inn yesterday; but had been unaccountably misplaced in my bedchamber, & only just discovered by the sharp eye of my devoted boy Isaiah.

  D—n! While I have been scribbling away here, some of my papers—drafts of precious letters to Cuyler, Hibben, Slade, Pyne, et al.—have been blown from the balcony, & onto the beach; & so exasperated am I, my darling, I am tempted to allow them to blow out to sea . . . except for the exertions of dear Isaiah, who would “do” for me, as he has several times said, “to the very ends of the earth.”

  (News has come to Sans Souci of a most tragic event, though not a surprising one: a child was at last so badly stung by the lion’s mane jellyfish, he suffered a paralysis of the heart muscles & has died. How hideous an ending, for some family, to a Bermuda idyll! & how grateful I am, my sweet love, that you & our dear girls are NOT HERE.)

  Forgive me, I beg, for my belatedness in replying to your last letter—or letters—for as you must know I am very busy with my work, including the piece for the Atlantic as well as the sermon for the Philadelphia Society; &, more recently, a speech for the Mayflower Society. None of these is completed—but all are reasonably in medias res. & my damnable neuritis has been giving me such pain, through the night; & so much seems often to be happening here, whether impromptu motorcar expeditions about the island, & luncheons on a bluff above the beach; & charades (at which the stiff-jointed Princeton president is surprisingly agile, to the ladies’ delight); & a vertiginous trip on a yacht, circling the island, with a sighting of sharks; & numerous teas & dinners. I attend very little, of course—yet, it is as Mrs. Peck has said, “The university president is the very best advertisement for the university & must not hide his light under a basket.” & to quote inimitable Sam Clemens—“This place is rife with millionaires as a casu marzu cheese is rife with maggots.”

  (Dear Ellen, forgive me! If my speech is becoming coarse it is not my wish nor my fault exactly, but the influence of such outspoken persons as Mr. Clemens; such drunken influence I will shortly t
hrow off entirely, when I return to our cozy nest at Prospect.)

  Yet, a word more of Sam Clemens: “Mark Twain”—“St. Mark” as he sometimes calls himself. Here is a being both devilish & yet angelic. His exterior look of age is matched by an interior erosion of the spirit, for a daughter’s recent death (to which the poor man alludes obliquely, yet often) seems to have shriveled his heart. He speaks most obsessively—to some, tediously—of lynching in the United States—& how the Congress & the Chief Executive & the Supreme Court remain indifferent. He is writing, he says, a “blasting” essay for Harper’s—“The United States of Lyncherdom”—which he has asked me to read, & I am hesitant to say yes, for the subject is offensive to me; also, I am most pressed for time. Mr. Clemens’s most conspicuous vice, he has said, he would like to share with me, of all people—his smoking of “the most exquisite lung-corroding Havana cigars”—of which he smokes rarely less than forty daily. (How is this possible?) When a British lady guest at Mrs. Peck’s affected surprise & dismay at this startling statistic, warning “Mark Twain” that he was digging a premature grave for himself, the dapper white-haired gentleman affected an apologetic expression & informed her that he could not possibly smoke more than forty cigars a day, though he had tried. The man’s consumption of Old Gran-Dad whiskey is likewise impressive, or dismaying; yet this is the only means, he confided in me, by which he might hope to “sink into a restful blank Oblivion, for three or four blessed hours each night.” Unhappy man! I tried to speak with him on the soothing powers of prayer, but he puffed on his foul cigar & coughed & chuckled saying he hadn’t yet sampled that brand, & wondered how it might compare to Our Gran-Dad. All this, my dear little wife, I should refrain from telling you, as it is of course rather vulgar, & upsetting; the more so, that the humorist is so amusing in his replies, one cannot help laughing.