The Accursed

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Mrs. FitzRandolph, you don’t mean that,” the frightened girl said, “you can’t mean to harm Baby. Please, mistress—”

  “Oh! Listen to him scream! I can’t bear it.”

  Mandy pressed her fingers into her ears, in dismay. The entire front of her dress and apron were wet from the bathwater; her hair, that had not yet been fashioned into its Gibson Girl style atop her head, was hanging in her face, wetted and limp. “Brigit, Terence is spoiled. He is selfish. He cares for none of us really, not his mother, and not you. We have all been derelict in spoiling him, and now—it’s almost too late.”

  Brigit tried to lift the squirming baby out of the bath as Mandy tried to push him down, crying that he was bad, bad—“possessed by a demon!”

  But Brigit managed to wrest Terence from her, as Mandy wept and pummeled at her with her fists; the one, Brigit, a sturdy wide-hipped girl of nineteen, the other, Amanda FitzRandolph, a more delicately boned woman with fevered eyes, locked together in an astonishing struggle, that none of the FitzRandolphs’ friends and neighbors would have believed. And here was the baby’s ceramic tub overturned, water everywhere, Mandy’s clothing soaked, and hair in unsightly strands.

  “Amanda—forbear.”

  Count English von Gneist stood in the nursery doorway, with a look of consternation. How out of place the gentleman was, in this part of the house; and how formally he was dressed, as if for travel, in a cloak of lightweight black wool lined with pale silk, and a black silken top hat; and carrying an ebony-knobbed walking stick beneath his arm. Though the handsome gentleman was frowning, his manner was that of an irate but affectionate elder, a “friend of the family” who has taken upon himself the duty to chastise.

  “Such things are beneath your dignity, my queen,” the Count said to Mandy, extending his arm, “—so, let the infant be: and come to me at once. For it is time.”

  So it was, Amanda FitzRandolph ran sobbing to her lover, without a moment’s hesitation; and he opened his arms wide that he might enfold her protectively in the cloak. In full view of the staring Brigit, who held Terence close against her breasts, the Count chastely kissed Amanda’s brow, and lifted her in his arms as if she were his bride; turned on his heel, and bore her in triumph from the room.

  “Mistress! Oh—mistress!” the tremulous Brigit called after her. “You cannot mean it!—you cannot wish it!”

  But no one attended to the Irish girl’s words. Little Terence continued his heartrending cries, kicking and flailing his arms as the Irish nanny held him fast, and Mrs. FitzRandolph had, in an instant, vanished from view in the arms of the Count.

  Neither was ever seen again in Princeton.

  THE TEMPTATION OF WOODROW WILSON

  On the morning of May 30 the shocking news spread through Princeton, and made its way in swirls and ripples and eddies across the university campus: the president of the university, the much-revered Woodrow Wilson, had suffered a severe stroke, and had been hospitalized; and was not expected to survive.

  At once the murmur arose on all sides, even from Dr. Wilson’s detractors, that such a terrible thing could not be!—for Woodrow Wilson was so clearly singled out for greatness; here was one who had seemed, from his adolescent years, destined for a special fate.

  And with news of Dr. Wilson’s stroke there came news of its probable cause: just when it had seemed that the university president was to emerge victorious from his long struggle with Dean Andrew West, Fate cruelly reversed itself and Dean West triumphed instead.

  (How had the canny dean of the graduate school brought off this coup?—with what ingenuity, bred of low cunning and craftiness? By arranging that elderly Isaac Wyman agree not only to leave the university a fortune of two million, five hundred thousand dollars, but to specify in his will that this money must be administered by no one except Dean Andrew West.)

  Hearing this crushing news, first brought to him in a handwritten missive from the dean of the faculty, and delivered by Matilde—(ashy-faced with knowing the content of the missive and what it would mean to her beloved Dr. Wilson)—Woodrow Wilson knew, on the afternoon of May 28, 1906, that all was lost; wanly sat at his desk, beneath the frowning portrait of Reverend Aaron Burr, Sr., stunned, open-mouthed; then, with but a murmur to Matilde, taking his leave of his office, and of Nassau Hall; staggering across campus oblivious of his surroundings, and to Prospect; there to seek commiseration from his astonished wife, and even for a brief spell to weep in her arms. “My enemy has triumphed at last,” he said as Ellen tried to comfort him, “and if I know the man, he will eat my heart. My tenure at Princeton is over. I must resign. God only knows what awaits, if all the world learns of my defeat here! I can’t appeal to the trustees to reject this request, as they’d done with the other—this is two million, five hundred thousand dollars. And it is destined for my enemy. How did it happen! How did the wretch bring it off? I had thought—oh, Ellen!—in my vanity I had truly thought—God favors me, He will see me through this struggle. God is on my side.”

  So distraught was Ellen West, so utterly caught up in her husband’s suffering, the whispered words escaped her lips: “Oh, dear husband—they have murdered you.”

  EARLY THE NEXT morning Mrs. Wilson discovered her husband, following a sleepless night, collapsed on the floor of his tower study, or hideaway, where, it would be reported, the disappointed man had gone to write his letter of resignation to the board of trustees; senseless, unmoving, rigid as death, his widened left eye covered in blood and his face ossified in a grimace of rage.

  IT IS CERTAINLY true, as all historians concur, that the precipitating cause of Woodrow Wilson’s stroke of May 30, 1906, was the triumph of his nemesis West; yet, the cause of West’s triumph has never been fully elucidated; nor is it the case that the dean himself knew how, unwitting, he had performed as a mere pawn in the general incursion of the Curse into the Princeton community. Which is to say, West’s triumph was but the triumph of the Curse in mortal guise.

  (I am not one of those who believe that Andrew West “dabbled” in the occult. I have never come across any convincing evidence supporting this rumor, that had been promulgated, as we have seen, in part by Dr. Wilson himself.)

  As five of the controversial “Mrs. Peck” letters are extant, and determined by reputable Wilson scholars to be in his hand, the passion of Woodrow Wilson for this mysterious woman is no longer any secret; while in ’06 it was known only to the principals and one other person—the Wilsons’ youngest daughter Eleanor, or “Nellie.” (It seems that Nellie chanced upon crumpled drafts of the incriminating letters among her father’s papers in the tower; saw their nature, and destroyed them immediately, to prevent Mrs. Wilson discovering the affair. Shaken to the depths of her soul by this betrayal of her revered father, Nellie never said a word to anyone.) Yet, the damage had been done; the letters mailed; and the adventuress “Mrs. Cybella Peck” so indifferent to their worth, and their effect upon Woodrow Wilson’s reputation, that she left them behind in her room in the Peacock Inn, where they were discovered by the canny innkeeper, and hidden away. These invaluable documents are not only items of great rarity, in that they throw a revealing—some might say exposing—light upon the man who was to become the twenty-eighth President of the United States; as they contain passages of a salacious nature, they are kept under lock and key in the Woodrow Wilson Special Collection and are forbidden to any but the most highly qualified scholars.

  So it seems, mercifully, Mrs. Wilson was spared all knowledge of her husband’s infatuation for another woman; and there is evidence to believe that Dr. Wilson, recovering from his stroke, remembered “Mrs. Cybella Peck” but vaguely, as one remembers, in fragments and elliptical images, the seductive hallucinations of a fever dream . . . appealing, and seductive still, but forever out of reach.

  NEW HISTORICAL EVIDENCE suggests that it was Samuel Clemens who brought together the “Presbyterian priest” Wilson and the beautiful Mrs. Peck in Bermuda, on a whim: for the much-acclaimed American m
an of letters was known for the eccentricities of his humor, and often behaved wantonly, and cruelly, in his attempt to escape what he called the Bog Kingdom of Boredom.

  So it was, Mr. Clemens thought it an entertaining prospect, and something of a scientific experiment, to suggest that the puritanical university president be invited to Sans Souci, and to see if Wilson would succumb to Mrs. Peck’s wiles, as many another man before him, married or not. “It’s no more malicious, and surely no more unnatural,” Mr. Clemens murmured to himself, smoking his smelly Havana cigar, “than the act of introducing the male black widow spider to the female of the species. For, what is one doing but hastening the procedure of Nature, and thereby abridging the narrative?”

  Of course, it is no secret that Sam Clemens was deeply in love with Cybella Peck himself. He had fallen under the woman’s spell several years before while vacationing in Bermuda for reasons of health; and was fond of referring to himself as a “genial husk of a creature, demanding very little of the world and receiving always a dollop too much.” His own infatuation with Mrs. Peck persevered, like a chronic illness, yet he believed that he enjoyed an enviable sort of invulnerability—“also known as impotence”—so far as the female sex was concerned. In Clemens’s own droll phraseology, it seems that his passion for Havana cigars and Old Gran-Dad whiskey, employed at the start to nullify the tumult of his heart, soon took precedence over the tumult; and became more the objects of his desire than any flickerings of Romance had ever. Mr. Clemens proclaimed himself “dehorned by age” yet retaining the novelist-voyeur’s playful interest in the vagaries of “other fools’ sentimental attachments.”

  This historian regrets to report that, in his letters to his wife sent from Bermuda, Woodrow Wilson considerably misrepresented his relations with Cybella Peck! In, for instance, his letter of April 19, Dr. Wilson barely mentions her at all, except as the hostess of a luncheon at Sans Souci; it isn’t altogether clear how, or why, Woodrow Wilson was invited to the luncheon. In a subsequent letter, Dr. Wilson disdainfully speaks of Mrs. Peck’s Botticelli beauty—which he can’t see; never does he indicate how enraptured he was with her, and how distracted from the work he’d brought with him to Bermuda. In fact, upon being ushered into the young woman’s presence by a native butler clad in white, Dr. Wilson stared in boyish awe at his hostess, who was certainly the most beautiful woman he had ever seen at close range.

  His immediate thought was a husbandly sort of embarrassment, or shame for his dear little wife, so much less attractive than the glorious Cybella—Poor Ellen! A mercy she is not here.

  As the mistress of Sans Souci was known to be married to a very wealthy man, or was perhaps the heiress of a very wealthy family, so the mistress of Sans Souci was known to be of an “indefinable” age—clearly, she was not young; yet, her face had the mask-like beauty of a Greek statue, flawless and aloof. Her eyes were a curious golden-brown hue, and thick-lashed; her complexion pale as cream. Her smile, which was both demure and sensuous, revealed flawless white teeth—which feature made Dr. Wilson feel self-conscious, for his own teeth had become alarmingly decayed and mottled of late, and he feared extensive “gum-work” so much, he had avoided his Princeton dentist for months, canceling appointments Mrs. Wilson had made for him. Cybella Peck’s hair was an uncommon silver-blond, giving to her features a lunar, and not an earthy, quality; it had been elaborately fashioned in a heavy braided coronet, and braided loops, entwined with camellias, suggestive of an early and more romantic era. She was wearing a Worth gown of burnished gold silk trimmed in ivory silk and styled with a Greek simplicity that belied its elegance and cost; and again Dr. Wilson felt a stab of embarrassment, for his poor dear Ellen whose pudgy figure rendered even attractive clothing dowdy.

  When they were introduced by Mr. Clemens, Mrs. Peck smiled her dazzling smile and, extending her hand to be kissed, softly exclaimed: “Woodrow Wilson, is it! I have long hoped to make the acquaintance of the celebrated author of Congressional Government, and feel myself quite honored.”

  This was extraordinary. Woodrow Wilson could not believe his ears. It was not uncommon for people to claim an admiration for Dr. Wilson’s A History of the American People, or George Washington; but to have read, and admired, the far more demanding Congressional Government was remarkable indeed. Confused and blushing like any schoolboy, and certainly not able to kiss the woman’s proffered hand, Dr. Wilson made a stammered reply; blushed deeply; and was very grateful for Sam Clemens’s presence. What a kindly man Clemens was, and how sympathetic with Woodrow Wilson, seeing the flash of panic in his eyes, as in one sinking beneath the surface of a treacherous sea.

  Woodrow Wilson had long “mastered”—(or so he believed)—the full bag of tricks of platform speaking, which requires a receptive, uncritical audience, but as he knew, the art of sophisticated social conversation was quite beyond him; though Mrs. Peck seemed most impressed with all that he had to say, and plied him with intelligent questions of Princeton, and of the United States, and of the “future of the world” in the twentieth century, that he might speak with his customary fluency.

  In this way, the first visit was a considerable success; and as he was preparing to take his leave, Mrs. Peck drew him aside to say that she hoped they would meet soon again, for it had been a very long time since she had encountered a gentleman of quite Dr. Wilson’s mettle—“for vigor of intellect coupled with manliness of form.”

  (It should be noted that from that day forward, until the morning of his nearly fatal stroke, Woodrow Wilson carried in his breast pocket, in strictest secrecy, a single camellia petal that had fallen from Mrs. Peck’s hair.)

  THE SUBJECT OF Woodrow Wilson’s relations with women is so complex, ambiguous, and frankly “controversial,” this historian is reluctant to introduce it here; yet, I believe it should be recorded, for matters of historical accuracy, that no other gentleman in this entire chronicle except perhaps the raving lunatic Horace Burr was capable of such deliriums of passion as Thomas Woodrow Wilson—the very individual known to the world, as to history, as stiff, unbending, puritanical, and “priestly”!

  For it seems to have happened that Woodrow Wilson fell in love with Cybella Peck at that first meet—at the proverbial “first sight.” Even as he would write to his devoted wife letters invariably beginning “My precious darling . . .” virtually every day he was in Bermuda, yet his heart was taken captive by the mistress of Sans Souci, and he could think of little else, despite the protestations of the letters. In fact, so overcome with feeling was Dr. Wilson, he stayed up later on the first night to write the first of his numerous letters to My precious Cybella, though it is believed that he never mailed this letter to her.

  Of the extant letters it is the second that ranges furthest afield, whether boastfully or naively: for the besotted Woodrow tells the object of his passion that “deep perturbations are natural to me, deep disturbances of the spirit”; he tells of a conversion experience he’d had at the age of sixteen—which the “miraculous” meeting with Cybella Peck had evoked. “This profound upheaval of my soul was stirred by the example of a pious and comely youth named Francis Brooke, a student at the Theological Seminary in Columbus, South Carolina, where my father taught. Ah, his radiant powers of persuasion! I knew at once, Cybella, that a work of true grace had begun in my heart . . . The immediate consequence of the conversion was, of course, that I was admitted to adult membership in the church; the larger consequence, that I now comprehended the nature of Jesus Christ’s love for mankind; and beyond this, the special hope that God had for me, that I, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, was chosen for a singular task; that I must never yield to my enemies; and that God would preserve me until my task on earth was completed.”

  For several pages Woodrow Wilson continues, the subject being his “rapture” at having met Cybella Peck, and his “deep and abiding gratitude” for his friendship with young Brooke, the “magnetic Christian” who had changed his life; then, realizing that he must bring his outpouring to
an end, he speaks again of his great pleasure at making Mrs. Peck’s acquaintance, and concludes with the hope that they will meet again very soon.

  MUCH CRITICISM HAS been leveled against Woodrow Wilson for his sentiments regarding women, particularly since the turbulent years of the 1970s when the issue of “women’s rights” was first raised, in a somewhat militant and hostile manner, not advantageous to one of Dr. Wilson’s generation and background. (See Hellings, Skirmish, Kozdoi, and O’Stryker for the most extreme of radical feminist thinking on this subject.) Certainly, Dr. Wilson’s general attitude toward women could not be deduced from the worshipful air of the “Cybella Peck” letters. It seems to have been Dr. Wilson’s belief, widely shared by men of his era, that the “sacred role” of Woman was to inspire Man, as the “sacred role” of Man was to serve the state “devotedly, religiously, and loyally.” In these beliefs, which Woodrow Wilson often uttered, he was confident he did not speak solely of and for himself but of and for America; and indeed, he did not doubt that America spoke through Woodrow Wilson, in a voice approximating that of the Almighty.

  At the same time, Dr. Wilson was scarcely willing to play the fool in endorsing mere women as equal, let alone superior, to men. Indeed, he did not think they could be taken quite seriously as “citizens of the Republic.”

  He had once spoken sharply to Miss Wilhelmina Burr who’d been arguing in favor of women’s suffrage, quite delighting his audience (including women), and inspiring general mirth through the room, by stating that, while he was adamantly opposed to handing over the vote to women, he was as adamantly opposed to arguing against it—“For the reason that there are no logical arguments against it.”

  “But why, then, Dr. Wilson, do you oppose voting rights for women?” Wilhelmina had asked, a flush rising into her handsome face; and Woodrow Wilson amused the room by saying, “I have told you, Miss Burr. I am ‘adamantly opposed’—for no logical reason except I am adamantly opposed.”