The Accursed

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The elder Mrs. Prudence Burr had come to help Johanna pack, to return to Princeton; like others, she was astonished and dismayed by the “unfathomable clutter” in the professor’s study, which was not characteristic, all agreed, of the generally neat Pearce van Dyck, whose bookshelves in both his university office and in his Hodge Road residence were assiduously alphabetized, and who rarely left a book on a table, unshelved. But here, at Quatre Face, as if it were mute evidence of the man’s madness, were large unwieldy charts or graphs—“Scheme of Clues” (?)—and numerous notebooks and loose sheets of paper, many lying underfoot. Mrs. Burr and her colored-girl helper discovered a dozen pages of diagrams analyzing the tales of A. Conan Doyle, in the professor’s urgent, crabbed hand.

  But the most telling discovery was an innocent-seeming bookmark of pressed flowers, in a copy of Spinoza’s Ethics, that was lying on the professor’s desk, beneath the Scheme of Clues; Mrs. Burr opened the book, saw the bookmark, leaned to smell the “pressed flowers,” and quickly cast the book from her, as if it were a poisonous insect.

  “What a tragedy! Pearce must have thought this was a ‘flower’—dried lilies perhaps. In fact, the rank-smelling thing is dried ‘Angel Trumpet’—a toxic cousin of the jimsonweed and one of the most lethal of ‘wild-flowers.’ ”

  So toxic was Angel Trumpet even in its desiccated state, its fruits and seeds, if eaten, would produce in human beings such symptoms as fever, dilated pupils, confusion, delirium, convulsions, and sometimes death. If Professor van Dyck had been breathing the faint but prevailing odor of his “bookmark” each day for hours, for months, it was plausible that his brain had suffered a gradual deterioration, resulting in paranoid suspicions and rage.

  Canny Mrs. Burr, of an age somewhere beyond seventy-eight, had the practical sense to have her helper “wrap, carefully,” in several layers of newspaper, the toxic bookmark, to bring back to Princeton with her, to turn over to police investigators.

  When Josiah heard this news, he was stricken with guilt anew.

  A poisonous weed! And not a calla lily, found broken and bruised on the ground at the old Craven house!

  And shall you not confess a voice taunted him, hollow and nasal like that of Axson Mayte himself. Shall you not acknowledge the source of the Angel Trumpet in the professor’s office?

  “ARMAGEDDON”

  Can it be? So soon?”

  Hearing of such disturbing matters—(the outbreak of “horrific” and “inexplicable” incidents among a number of prominent Princeton families)—Upton Sinclair came to wonder if Armageddon might be closer at hand than the Socialist prophets believed. And he speculated whether he and his wife and son might be in danger, dwelling so close to the evident center of the Curse.

  “Who would have imagined, the tranquil oasis of Princeton, New Jersey—a spawning-ground of the Jersey Devil!”

  Upton spoke lightly, yet half-seriously. He could not but think that the travails of the very rich were deserved, and justified, from the historic perspective; yet he very much doubted that these travails had fallen upon them from a supernatural source.

  Yet, it did seem to him, a cataclysmic change of some sort was in the very air, even in rural New Jersey.

  “For, only consider, Meta,” Upton said excitedly, one evening as his wife busied herself with kitchen chores, and tended to little David in his high chair, “there were fifty-thousand Socialist votes in Chicago’s last election; twelve thousand orders received within a single day when The Jungle was published as a book; in Princeton, of all places, there is a commemorative stone honoring ‘Mother Jones’ and the child mill-workers; and it’s clear that my lead piece on ‘The Children’s Crusade’ is responsible for the entire May issue of The Nation selling out on newsstands!*

  “Coupled with the ‘tragedies’ of the old Princeton families—Slades, van Dycks, Burrs—and there may be others—it isn’t unreasonable to suspect something more than mere coincidence, do you agree? Kropotkin has said, nothing in history is ‘happenstance.’ ”

  Suffused with a sudden elation, Upton gripped his startled wife by both her upper arms, and diverted her from spooning mashed turnip to little David. In an excited voice he proclaimed: “It seems clear—we’re living in the ‘Last Days of Capitalism’—as the soul of oppressed man breaks its chains to rise against the ‘Juggernaut of Greed’—and to take revenge where it will. And it is happening years before we had prophesied, and just a few miles from the little log cabin in which ‘Upton Sinclair’ wrote The Jungle. Could anything be more astonishing, and more of a miracle?”

  Gently Meta detached herself from her husband’s grip, and, turning back to her motherly task of feeding little David, murmured only: “Yes. A miracle.”

  PART IV

  The Curse Exorcised

  COLD SPRING

  Sweet, blameless child! She is an angel now.”

  In Princeton Cemetery, on an unseasonably chill morning in mid-May, another time the grieving Slade family gathered to bury one of their own: in a mother-of-pearl casket measuring no more than four feet in length, heartrending in its very smallness.

  “She is with angels now.”

  “She is with her beloved cousin now . . .”

  It was the death of nine-year-old Oriana Slade whom the Slades and numerous others were mourning. A most shocking and unexpected death—seemingly, an accident.

  Oriana’s small body, weighing scarcely sixty pounds, had been discovered not in her little bed in the nursery at Wheatsheaf where she’d been tucked in by her mother Lenora as usual, but, in a soiled and torn cotton nightgown, outside the house, beneath a flowering if somewhat ravaged tulip tree beyond the northeastern wall of the property.

  The child’s body was bruised and broken as if it had fallen, or had been flung, from a considerable height, more than merely the six-foot height of the fieldstone wall.

  The highest peak of the Wheatsheaf roof ? Was this possible?

  Yet, as all who saw her testified, the little girl did not look as if she had suffered, at the time of death. Her eyes were partly open, and her mouth; her expression was more of startled surprise, even serenity, than of fear or distress.

  No one could explain how Oriana, who had never been known to disobey her parents or her nanny, had managed to slip out of the nursery in the night; how she had climbed to a considerable height, her tiny feet bare, and her small body clad only in a cotton nightgown; how, indeed, and why?

  Todd, stunned by his sister’s death, which did not seem yet altogether real to him, said that Oriana had several times told him about her “Annabel-dreams”; and of “the privilege of the sky”—(an oddity of expression from a nine-year-old which I would doubt, except it is quoted more than once in investigative reports); and someday “flying” by herself to the “icy land in the North” where Annabel now dwelled. The skill of flying was being taught to her, Oriana had told Todd, when no adult could overhear, by a very pretty silver-haired lady with “sharp eyes.” Todd had laughed at such nonsense, for he could not take his little sister seriously; his own nonsense was effort enough for him to take seriously, as he cheerily said.

  (For Todd was inappropriately cheerful, even giddy, at times, in the days following his sister’s death. Yet, at other times, he was cast in a stony silence, tearless, and mute.)

  Once, he claimed, he’d tried to tell their mother about Oriana’s “flying” dreams, but his mother had been distracted, and hadn’t seemed to hear.

  Another time he’d tried to tell his mother but his mother had said, frowning, that he and his sister should not always be “telling tales” about each other.

  At the gravesite, which was the Slade family mausoleum, hewed of granite and limestone, with a portico of Italian marble, the mourners gathered close together in a sudden light, chill rain; exchanging the comforting bromides of commiseration and condolence, as best they could; though, for some, for whom the death of the child Oriana carried with it a measure of something like terror as well as grief, there
was very little to say. Surely it was no exaggeration, all that Pearce van Dyck had claimed: there was a Curse on the community, and not even the most innocent of individuals, a nine-year-old child, might be spared.

  Reverend Nathaniel FitzRandolph, who had aged over the winter, led the familiar Christian prayers, adding, in a voice of forced optimism, that if dear little Oriana had indeed imagined she could fly, it must have been to Heaven she’d flown.

  Close by, Todd Slade pressed his knuckles against his mouth, to subvert an attack of laughter.

  His parents were staring at the small gleaming white coffin as if here finally was a riddle they could not solve. Copplestone’s face, the face of an aging sensualist, was flaccid and puffy; broken capillaries in his wide nose gave it a red-tinged cast; his small greenish-gray eyes seemed to exude an air of petulant irritation, directed primarily at his wife: for it was being said that Copplestone blamed Lenora for their daughter’s death, and would never forgive her. Always the woman was “gadding about town” in their new Pierce-Arrow, manned by an “impudent Nigra” in a “monkey-suit uniform” Lenora had had custom-made for him; always she was “meddling” with invalids and charity cases and ladies’ committees bent upon restoring old ruins, or sending “needless and unwanted” secondhand clothes to some “godforsaken place” like Ethiopia.

  (Lenora, stricken with grief, said nothing; she would not defend herself, at least at this time; though confiding in her sister-in-law Henrietta that she often despaired of the future—of how it might one day “end” between her and Copplestone. “He is nothing like his father Winslow. He is nothing like most of the Slades—that is, a good person.

  “God forgive me, I wonder if it wasn’t to escape her tyrannical father that our poor daughter sought ‘flight.’ ”)

  The stricken parents stood a little apart from the majority of the mourners, directly in front of Reverend FitzRandolph. It would be perceived by some that they were not touching, nor did they look at each other through the gravesite ceremony.

  It would be perceived generally that all of the West End of Princeton was present: those who had not been invited to Annabel Slade’s funeral several months before.

  (That is: Burrs, Sparhawks, Pynes, Armours, Strachans, FitzRandolphs, van Dycks, Biddles, Bayards, Washburns—to name just a few of the more prominent families.)

  (Of course, there were conspicuous absences here. Horace Burr, and Pearce van Dyck, to name two; and Wilhelmina Burr had stayed away, for a private reason.)

  Since Josiah’s involvement in the death of his former professor Pearce van Dyck, and since many tales of this incident had been told in Princeton and environs, Josiah Slade was conscious of all of Princeton observing him, and passing judgment. It had been ruled that he was “blameless”—legally. And Johanna van Dyck—(at the funeral this morning clad in draperies of black linen and on her head a wide-rimmed black-veiled hat, with her grim-faced Strachan relatives)—never ceased to proclaim to the world how heroically Josiah had “saved the lives” of her baby and herself. Yet, even in New York City, to which his restless spirits took him, he sometimes imagined strangers watching him. And where can you run, and where can you hide? Bearing the mark of Cain on your forehead, the murderer of one who trusted you.

  It was an unexpected development, after months of behaving in a subdued and melancholy way, Josiah was beginning to be irritable, and irascible; most of all, the young man was prone to quarreling with his father, Augustus, as he had rarely done previously. Fresh from reading all that he lay hands on of the writings of Upton Sinclair—(known to be a resident of the Princeton area, whom Josiah was eager to meet)—as well as Lincoln Steffens’s The Shame of the Cities and novels by Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, Josiah had surprised his parent by disagreeing with his father over the veracity of J. Ogden Armour’s reply to The Jungle, which was published in the Saturday Evening Post; and of the good faith of the majority of businessmen who were angrily refuting the charges of “muckrakers” in the press.

  Augustus responded with dignity, initially; when his son pressed the issue, daring to bring to the dinner table, to read aloud, the most repulsive passages from The Jungle and from Norris’s novels, Augustus reacted as if he had been personally challenged: “Josiah, enough. Those are Socialists and Anarchists—they are not to be trusted! Free Thinkers, Suffragettes, Atheists—those who would overturn our civilization, and set it to the torch. You will not upset your mother and your grandfather and me, at such a time in our lives.”

  “What better time, Father? If the world is in upheaval, what are we to do but heave ourselves up, with it?”

  “If you knew what you were saying, Josiah, you would not speak in such a reckless way.”

  “If you knew what you were saying, Father, you would not speak in so complacent a way.”

  Now agitated, a flush coming into his face, Augustus said, with uncharacteristic anger: “I can scarcely believe this is you, a son of mine, and a grandson of Winslow Slade, who says such things—and not an evil spirit that has wormed its way into your heart.”

  Evil spirit! This unjust remark had the effect of silencing Josiah and sending him from the table with a muttered apology. At his place at the dining room table was a plate of roast beef from Mr. Armour’s Chicago stockyard, untouched.

  Now at the Slade family mausoleum, at Oriana’s gravesite, Josiah stood stiffly tall. He had managed to avoid his parents, and was standing between his weeping aunt Lenora and his grandfather Winslow, who was leaning on Josiah’s arm; lightly at first, and then with increasing heaviness. A pious drone of Christian prayers numbed his brain. Josiah wanted to bestir the mourners by demanding who among them believed, for a particle of a moment, that his little cousin Oriana was an “angel” in Heaven; who did not believe that the family Curse had claimed her, as it would claim them all, in time.

  One of his voices slyly queried If Annabel has died, why not Oriana? A balance is restored beneath Crosswicks and Wheatsheaf and now just Josiah and Todd remain.

  Though he knew better, as a rationalist, and one for whom “history” is a matter of scientific investigation, yet it did seem to Josiah that Professor van Dyck was very convincing, in arguing for the Curse; if less convincing in its particulars. Josiah could not conceive that an actual demon had entered into Pearce’s soul but it did seem plausible that the philosophy professor had been poisoned by the noxious Angel Trumpet carelessly pressed into a book; he had not confessed to anyone that he had himself given the toxic plant to his friend, under the mistaken impression that it was a calla lily—that’s to say, a ghostly calla lily.

  The Mercer County coroner had discovered that, indeed, a region of the cerebral cortex of Pearce van Dyck’s brain had visibly deteriorated, by what cause the coroner could not say. He did not rule for the Angel Trumpet, but he did not rule against it, either.

  It was similarly implausible to think that a “demon” had entered into the deranged Horace Burr, now committed to the Otterholme Hospital for the Criminally Insane, in Summit, New Jersey, where the controversial Thornhurst water cure for homicidal lunatics had been prescribed for him.* Horace Burr was said to be scarcely recognizable. (It was a measure of Horace Burr’s madness that, soon after his arrest, confession, and commitment to Otterholme, the deluded man began to alter his story: though he had certainly murdered Adelaide to “put her out of her misery,” it had been through the urgings of Miss Wilhelmina Burr, a young relative of his, that he had done so. In this fantastical story, Horace Burr spoke of the bluestocking temptress as the true cause of the murder, for she had “given me some hope, that we might one day marry—if I were free.” What was more alarming, and to Josiah disgusting, many in Princeton were coming around to believe the madman’s slander; and Wilhelmina Burr had even been questioned by Princeton police, to her great shame.)

  At the edge of the gathering of West End mourners was a curious couple—heavyset Grover Cleveland with slouching shoulders, and a bowed head, so obese that his neck spilled over
his collar; and Frances Cleveland heavily made-up with “kohl” eyes and a shiny mouth, and very fashionably dressed for so somber an occasion. It had been rumored that, of late, Mr. Cleveland continued to be “poorly”; though he ate as usual his enormous morning meal, and a yet more enormous evening meal, he was reportedly “of little appetite” for his luncheon meal, and often fell asleep in the company of others, at times even when he was himself talking. In the sudden death of Oriana Slade, Mr. Cleveland was surely reliving the death of his beloved Ruth; when visiting Wheatsheaf, Mr. Cleveland had always made it a point to talk to the pretty little blond girl, and to dandle her on his fatty knee; laughingly he told his hosts that he would “very happily” spend the entire evening in the nursery, with their beautiful little daughter, than at the dinner table where he was expected to “wax eloquent.” (In truth, no one expected Grover Cleveland to “wax eloquent” at any West End dinner table.) Even now, as the heartbreakingly small mother-of-pearl coffin was being placed in the tomb by pallbearers, Mr. Cleveland sucked in his breath, and swallowed; he had all he could do, to keep from fainting; for he saw the little blond child and his own dear Ruth playing amid the weatherworn gravestones—dancing in their white garments, their hair loosed and curly, and their dainty feet bare. As he stared, smiling, the girls hid behind a marble angel about fifteen feet away, and peeped out at him, one darling head on either side and forefingers to their pretty pursed lips. Daddy come play with us! Play with us now! Tell no one but come play with us now!

  (“Grover, you must not make such sounds,” Frances whispered in her husband’s ear, irritably, “—that sound not like sobs but like grunts. Please just stop, I am so mortified.”)

  Also at the edge of the gathering of mourners, as if uncertain of their social standing among the West End company, stood Woodrow Wilson and his wife Ellen; the one tall, puritanical and stiff-backed, and the other short, somewhat dowdily dressed, with a small black veiled hat that looked, to the West End ladies’ eyes, like something that had been pushed to the back of a closet years ago, and had lately been dusted off and revived. And Mrs. Wilson’s black cloth coat, with shiny black buttons, looked suspiciously similar to a cast-off black cloth coat that had belonged to Frances Cleveland, and had been recently donated by her to the Princeton Women’s Relief Fund, for indigent females in Mercer County.