The Accursed

by Joyce Carol Oates

  More seriously, Dr. Wilson explained that he was, in truth, not opposed to female suffrage per se, but he feared it would have the pernicious effect of “doubling the vote” in most households and in this way bringing about “the useless enlargement of an already over-large and ill-educated electorate.” As to the feminists’ argument that, since the freeing of the slaves, Negro males were allowed the vote (at least theoretically, in certain regions of the country), it should then follow that women be given the vote, Dr. Wilson’s rejoinder was a witty: “Two wrongs, ladies, cannot make a right.”

  The suffragette movement filled Woodrow Wilson, as it filled many men of his time, with both loathing and trepidation, for it seemed to him “abnormal” for women to behave in an “unwomanly” fashion; which could not fail to lead to promiscuity among the sexes and a general collapse of morals. For wasn’t it the case that women like his very own dear wife Ellen were provided by God with a quality of sympathy and support that, in turn, provided men with the necessary strength to combat evil? And what if this strength were undermined, or sabotaged? “All the sex will give over to crude Amazonian postures,” Dr. Wilson prophesied, “and we men shall be so intimidated, the species might end within a generation.”

  Yet more repulsive was the thought, if women were allowed the vote, might it then follow that women would run for political office? The very thought was outrageous!

  “Imagine, a female senator! A female President! The United States would be the laughingstock of the world.”

  Along lighter lines, Woodrow Wilson could not resist a jest or two at the expense of the crusading suffragettes. He thought both Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were “noisome harridans, whose bile was the consequence of their ugly faces.” He thought the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 was the “root of all present evil—the original witches’ brew.” Only Mrs. Julia Ward Howe escaped his censure, striking the eye as an agreeable and motherly old lady whose wild notions could not possibly offend anyone.

  So far as Dr. Wilson’s own womenfolk were concerned, Ellen Wilson and their three daughters assured Woodrow that they did not wish to vote, fully trusting to men in such matters.

  The tale was many times reiterated through generations of Princeton students, of President Wilson’s refusal to be swayed to any violation of his academic and moral principles, by womanly ploys. For instance, in the spring of 1904 a well-born widow from Washington, D.C., made an appointment to speak to him, to appeal to him to reinstate her son, who had been expelled from the university in his senior year for the crime of keeping a mistress—(indeed, just across from Old Nassau, in an apartment above the Bank of Princeton). Dressed in mourning, for the distraught woman had lost her husband only months before, she made her case to Dr. Wilson along personal lines: stating that her son had already suffered “deep mortification” and that his entire family shared in his shame; and that she herself was soon to undergo surgery for the removal of a tumor, and believed that her chances for survival were threatened if this ignoble disgrace was allowed to stand.

  Though Woodrow Wilson listened politely and sympathetically to the petition, he was resolved not to weaken, for it was a principle of his that he never changed his mind “once he turned the key.” To the tearful widow he said, with regret: “Among undergraduates at Princeton, Madame, the only offense of greater moral turpitude than drunkenness is impurity. It’s an unfortunate development that your health has been endangered by your son’s disgraceful behavior, but this is not the fault of the university, Madame, nor is it mine. If I am forced to choose between equal justice in our university, and your life, Madame, I am forced, I fear, to choose the former.”

  THE DAY PRECEDING Woodrow Wilson’s stroke, which was the very afternoon of his final assignation with the female known as “Cybella Peck,” Dr. Wilson spent much time in agitated brooding; and whether at last he might summon forth the strength to speak his heart to his beloved Cybella as he’d managed to speak his heart in his letters to her; whether he might seize her hand in his and press his lips passionately against it. In Bermuda, in the haze of late-hour soirees at Sans Souci, there had been fleeting and ambiguous intimacies . . . but these seemed to fade, like dreams in daylight.

  “Madness to be in love, like a schoolboy! And at such a precarious time in my life.” In a misery of bliss, Dr. Wilson regarded himself in a mirror: the long, lean, lantern-jaw and glass-glittering eyes. He was thrilled to imagine what Andrew West would think, if West saw Cybella Peck and Woodrow Wilson together!

  Since the wooded acres beyond Battle Road were not often frequented by Princetonians at this time, being adjacent to the famed Battle Field at the edge of the village, Woodrow Wilson arranged for Mrs. Peck, who had traveled to Princeton expressly to see him, to meet him there, shortly past four o’clock; making his excuse in Nassau Hall that he had an urgent medical appointment.

  In all, Mrs. Peck and Woodrow Wilson met in secret only a very few times, I think; some historians argue that they didn’t meet in any “intimate” setting at all; yet it seems likely that this rendezvous, in this idyllic place, occurred but once.

  In Princeton, to which she claimed she was drawn “by the power of your pen, dear Woodrow,” Cybella Peck took a suite of rooms at the Peacock Inn on Bayard Lane; but of course her lover could not meet her anywhere in the vicinity of the Inn. Woodrow felt the strain of their love more obviously than did Mrs. Peck; he suffered the pangs of guilt that married men commonly feel in such circumstances, yet, like these married men, he did not wish to alter his situation in the slightest, for nothing gave him more exhilaration, more joy, more hope. Yet, as the affair was (seemingly) unconsummated, and indeed very far from being consummated, Woodrow rarely felt any compensatory sense of triumph, elation, or mere animal gratification.

  (Poor Ellen Wilson! Like many wives of unfaithful spouses, she felt quite clearly the agitation in her husband’s soul; yet, in her naiveté, Ellen Wilson attributed Woodrow’s condition to his ongoing battles with the dean of the Graduate College and the eating clubs on Prospect, that showed no signs of being resolved. It was the more frightening for Ellen that she had had firsthand experience with madness as a young girl, when her minister-father succumbed to acute psychotic rages in middle age, alternating with melancholia; and had died by his own hand, most shamefully, on May 30, 1884—by a cruel irony of fate, twenty-two years to the day before her husband’s stroke.)

  On the humid spring afternoon of May 29, as the hour of four o’clock drew nearer, Woodrow Wilson taxed himself with worry that Cybella Peck would not appear at the edge of Battle Park; then, he taxed himself with worry that she would appear, and he would be “undone, utterly.”

  Capable of baring his heart in prose, in letters, Woodrow greatly feared losing “self-control” in the presence of another person. For no one, not even Ellen, had any sense of the “perturbations” locked within his breast.

  Yet there was no need for worry, for there was Cybella Peck at the edge of the woods, awaiting him like a figure in a pre-Raphaelite painting: in a flounced muslin dress of an older style, consisting of numerous frothy layers of strawberry-tinted material, and trimmed with ribbon of a subtly darker hue, ingeniously woven into the stitching. Mrs. Peck was slowly turning a white parasol over her shoulder; on her head was a broad-rimmed straw hat with a satin band that matched her dress, and on her fingers white lace gloves. A very fine veil obscured the luster of her eyes. The impression produced upon Woodrow Wilson’s overwrought nerves was that of a precious orchid transposed by magic to a northern woods, so it was little wonder that, even as he hurried to greet her, his courage drained from him, to a degree. “Ah, dear Cybella! You have come . . .”

  Having picked in stealth a little bouquet of sweet alyssum and miniature iris from his wife’s garden behind Prospect, Woodrow presented this to Cybella, who accepted it with a happy smile, and affixed it to the belted waist of her dress.

  Politely then, Mrs. Peck inquired after Dr. Wilson’s health and well-
being: “For you look, dear Tommy, as if you have lost your ‘golden’ Bermuda tan altogether, in just a few weeks!” Dr. Wilson felt obliged to reply in some detail of his usual crises of digestion, nerves, vision, spinal column “irregularities,” and “aching gums,” as Mrs. Peck listened with as much attentiveness as Ellen Wilson would have done.

  “We will find a way to ‘transcend’ such crises, dear Tommy. You must have faith in me.”

  The lovers walked in Battle Field, along a faintly trodden path of sunshine and shade; Mrs. Peck’s arm slipped through Woodrow’s, and exerted a delightful pressure upon it.

  Mrs. Peck complained, in the way of one who means to entertain, and not to aggrieve, of the “unwanted attentions” of an “importunate suitor” who had recently “re-inserted himself” in her life: one of the most renowned of American writers, praised as being to America what Shakespeare was to England. It was partly this problem, as Mrs. Peck explained, that had brought her to Princeton to meet with Woodrow, that is “Tommy”—for she wanted advice from a gentleman of Dr. Wilson’s intelligence and sensitivity. What was she to do?—which way to turn? For the undesired suitor was a widower, and very lonely; he had loved her some years ago, futilely, and she had thought that the fever had passed; yet now again he was plaguing her with declarations of love, unwanted letters, and ill-written verse—“For he has no talent for poetry, Tommy, as you do. He is all crude, crushing prose.”

  Woodrow Wilson felt a stab of jealousy, and rage: for he knew that this unwanted suitor had to be Sam Clemens, his rival. Excitedly he said, “If you have asked him to desist, he is not a gentleman to persevere. You must reject him absolutely. I think—I believe—he is not a moral man: he is a cynic, and an atheist, and a drunkard.”

  “Indeed! I think you are right, Tommy. Yes . . .”

  “You might consider moving to Princeton, taking lodgings here—to avoid him . . . I could help you, of course—if but indirectly . . .”

  Noting how agitated her companion had become, Mrs. Peck changed the subject, now asking Dr. Wilson how his administrative work was progressing; and whether his “difficulties” were close to being resolved. This prompted a lengthy monologue ranging from any contempt for his “backbiting” enemies, to subdued pride in the rumor that certain New Jersey Democratic “kingmakers” were speculating about Woodrow Wilson’s qualifications for governor of the state.

  “Governor of the state! This is wonderful news,” Cybella Peck said, “of which I’ve heard, I should tell you, just a little. And will your enemies be crushed, if this comes about?”

  “If I were to be elected governor, yes—they would be crushed. That is, if they don’t crush me beforehand.”

  “Why, what do you mean?”

  “As president of the university. Here, I am frantically vulnerable.”

  So the couple walked at the edge of the Battle Field, slowly, in deep and earnest conversation; an observer would note the awkward height of the gentleman, and the graceful strawberry-tinted figure of the lady. At times, the lady inclined her head toward the gentleman’s shoulder, as if unconsciously.

  Then, Cybella Peck paused; and raised her veil from her eyes, to look at Woodrow Wilson frankly, and to receive his full admiring gaze; and told him, in a childlike voice, that she had deceived him, in a way, by not fully identifying herself; that she was not what she seemed.

  “ ‘Cybella Peck,’ yes—to a degree. But in fact, to speak truthfully, I am Countess Cybella de Barhegen, and I am not an American-born citizen but a ‘naturalized’ citizen, since the age of twenty.”

  “ ‘Countess!’ ”—Woodrow Wilson blinked and gaped in awe.

  “I have not wanted to confess to my American friends, unlike my dear comrade English von Gneist, who never hesitates to spread out his pedigree on the ground, to be walked-upon by anyone who wishes, that I am a so-called full-blooded European aristocrat of the ancient house of Barhegen, in northern Germany. I am a ‘countess’ not only by birth but through marriage; and that a most ironic and bitter bond, indeed.” In a lowered voice Cybella said, “A countess doubly, dear Tommy; that is my fate. A married woman, not entirely by volition. And now I have fled the Old World, and want nothing more than to establish a new life here . . . You are looking curious, I think? You are wondering about my husband? The shame of it is, my family married me off to the Count Hugo de Barhegen, a widower of some sixty years of age . . . and the father of children older than I, for I was only eighteen at the time. In short, dear Tommy, it eventually came to this: I found myself so unhappy in my ‘blessed’ marital state, as a consequence of certain conjugal customs said to be commonplace in central Europe, that I began to plot my escape. I was without friends, and my family would have disowned me; my step-children were brutes, wanting only to use me; at the nadir of my misery late one night, hidden away from my husband in a remote wing of the Castle Barhegen, I fell upon my knees and petitioned God for mercy—so very violently, and with such passion, a burst of light ensued in the room and a presence materialized which I took at first to be a form of God Himself, but which was in fact an archangel—(have you ever seen one, dear Tommy? No?)—suffused in nearly blinding radiance, both splendid and terrifying, as you can imagine.”

  Woodrow Wilson gazed in awe at the beautiful Cybella—Countess Cybella! In his life as an intensely devout Christian, a Presbyterian for whom the religious life was of paramount significance, he had not ever seen, still less been visited by, an archangel.

  “Yes, dear Tommy—you are right to look at me with such sensitivity—compassion, yet a kind of pity—for it was not an ‘easy’ experience for me, at my young age, and in my desperate circumstances; as all mystics have recorded, an experience of the ‘visionary’ sears the soul; you cannot truly know if you live, or have died. Or if you are in the presence of the godly, or the demonic. So confused and frightened was I at the time, I didn’t fully comprehend the archangel’s message; but the substance seemed to be that I had wished in my heart for death and had thereby committed in my heart the sin of suicide; and so, if I wished, my accursed mortality might be absolved by God, and my spiritual being devoted for all time to God’s employ. Which is to say, my dear friend, that I was in a position to escape both my bestial husband and the natural consequences of my own sin, if I consented to taking my place amid the community of spirits whose function, in God’s great scheme, is to perform as a devi—an angelic messenger.”

  Cybella Peck paused, that Woodrow Wilson might absorb her remarkable words. There was a look of strain in her face, very different from the woman’s usual bright social manner; her pressure on Woodrow’s arm increased, as if she required his strength to support her.

  “A—devi? ‘Angelic messenger’? Can it be—?”

  “Tommy, yes. You alone know my secret. Sam Clemens has teased and tormented me, calling me an ‘angel’—‘his guardian angel’—but the man has no awareness of what he is saying; for he does not believe, and I’m afraid his tortured soul will be tortured forever—in Hell. You, dear Tommy, are totally different: you can be entrusted with my secret. If I’d seemed to you, in Bermuda, a sophisticate of international society; if I seem to you now a descendant of an ancient race, with pretensions to nobility; if, indeed, I sometimes struck you as ‘chill’ and ‘artificial’—why then, my dear friend, I must confide in you, and you alone, that I am an agent of the Higher Power, and not a mortal woman at all.”

  With this revelation Mrs. Peck leaned against Woodrow Wilson’s arm; she placed a gloved hand on his wrist, as if to calm his pounding heart; for it was clear that Dr. Wilson was shaken by this revelation, and did not know what to think.

  In a quiet voice Cybella Peck reiterated some of what she had said, that might have bypassed the distracted man; and went on to explain further her life subsequent to the angelic visitation, which had been years ago in fact, long before her “new, virgin” life in the United States.

  “I think it must be your modesty, Tommy, that draws me to you. And your modesty that
prevents you from quite comprehending why a devi might be employed to communicate with you intimately. But, you see—angels will appear to men who deserve and require them at crucial times in their lives, when God has need to make His intentions clearly known.”

  In such a way the seductive Mrs. Peck enumerated past histories of angelic visitations to men of significance, whose histories Woodrow knew well—Gladstone, Napoleon, Alexander the Great, General George Washington on the eve of his brilliant attack of 26 December 1776 on the unsuspecting Hessians at Trenton. All these accounts, Woodrow listened to with grave intensity. At last saying, with an involuntary smile of his pale lips, “It is true, it is true—as Father promised.”

  “ ‘Father’—?”

  “My father. When I was a boy. ‘Angelic messengers’—‘a special destiny’—he seemed to know. Yes,” Woodrow said, wiping at his eyes, “he knew.”

  “And is your dear father still living, Tommy?”

  “No! He is not.”

  “Yet, from Heaven he can observe you—your career. You can be sure of this.”

  “I—I sometimes hope . . .”

  “Except, dear Tommy, there is a particular reason that I am here today, as you must know. For a devi, nothing is accidental; all is part of the great scheme. You are not aware of the danger you are in—at this very moment, in Boston, your unscrupulous rival at the university has all but convinced an elderly alumnus to leave a large sum of money to Princeton, with the restriction that he be named executor—more than two million dollars, to be specific. Consider the insult to the university itself, that an outsider, even a very wealthy alumnus, should presume to dictate university policy! Soon it will follow that ‘robber barons’—like the notorious Andrew Carnegie—will seize control of the highest educational institutions, by dangling gifts of large sums of money before administrators, and by outright bribes to them. Corrupt politicians, outright criminals: will they not want to erect monuments to themselves, and endanger the idealism and innocence of youth? And all this follows from Andrew West’s manipulation of an impressionable old man in Boston, who is easily flattered as the descendant of a Revolutionary War hero; who cannot tell a flatterer from—a gentleman-administrator like you. (For I think you visited Mr. Wyman last year? With no satisfactory result?) It’s a pity, and a tragedy; yet all is not lost, for the purpose of my visit is not only to alert you to the imminent disaster, but to suggest to you a course of action that will change all.”