The Accursed

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Upton was particularly hurt by encountering, in the press that very morning, President Roosevelt’s denunciation in a speech of certain “yellow journalists” and “muckrakers” bent on “stirring up discord in America.”

  So, Upton crosses out his inspired title. But can’t think of a substitute.

  Hearing UPTON SINCLAIR! amid the ceaseless murmur and clatter of the train station, yet steeling himself to resist; for he knows it is a phantom calling to him, and mocking him; a simulacrum of his own, future self in some unfathomable time. He dares not look up; he must keep his glance down, on the sheet of foolscap; he must concentrate, to save his life; falling to the task of covering one long sheet of foolscap in his small hand, and then reversing it, so that every inch of space will be utilized, and nothing wasted; and then a fresh sheet is produced out of the valise, and another. So immersed in his work is Upton Sinclair, the hands of the great clock in the center of the terminal now read 2:48 p.m. which means that the young author has missed his train to Englewood, and will not discover the fact for several minutes.

  Yet there is no reason for immediate alarm, for another train to New Jersey will come along in an hour or two; and Upton Sinclair will see to it that he does not miss that one.

  THE CROSSWICKS MIRACLE

  So the Curse seemed at last to have lifted, and the three Slade grandchildren entombed in the family mausoleum, Annabel, Oriana, and Todd, were roused from their stony trance, sometime in the early afternoon of June 4; and, at the antipodes of the Earth, in the Southern Ocean, in the hold of the pitching and tossing Balmoral, Josiah was restored to life, to the amazement of Captain Oates and his crew, who would swear that, frozen in the ocean, he must certainly have died.

  A miracle, it would be said—or indeed, miracles. And directly related to Todd Slade’s adventure in the Bog Kingdom, and his grandfather’s death in Princeton. Yet historians have tried to explain these unique events as “natural”—the original origins of death having been mistaken. For the young persons entombed in the Slade mausoleum might have suffered a rare category of catalepsy, or a relatively benign strain of the Laotian sleeping sickness; or, it may have been, an hypothesis suggested in the anonymously penned The Vampire Murders of Old Princeton, an insidious form of mesmerism.

  “For the very fact that the young people now live necessitates the fact that they never died”—this was the verdict of Dr. Hiram Hastings of the Harvard Medical School, summoned to Princeton to give an expert diagnosis of the bizarre development of three individuals, of the same family, “coming to life” at the same time, in their family tomb. (It was Todd who shouted loudest, attracting the attention of the terrified groundskeeper of the Princeton Cemetery, who could not believe his ears, and then could not believe his eyes; and would never wholly recover from his shock.)

  Dr. Hastings’s much-deliberated conclusion was that the young Slades had lapsed into comatose conditions in which breathing, heartbeat, and other vital signs were suppressed; but responsible physicians and medical workers should have detected life in their bodies and brain activity of a kind, by shining a beam of light into the individual’s eye, in which an involuntary reflex of the pupil would signal life. Told that reputable physicians in Princeton, notably Dr. Boudinot, Sr., and Dr. Boudinot, Jr., had “thoroughly examined” their patients before declaring them dead, and signing death certificates, the Harvard doctor said, with a bemused smile, “Yes. But this is Princeton, you see. This is not Boston, Massachusetts, where our medical standards are higher.”

  It seems that Josiah Slade was not in fact “frozen” in the waters of the Southern Ocean but had been subjected so quickly to so low a temperature, his body had reacted by reverting to a state virtually prenatal, or mimicking hibernation; in Josiah too, breathing, heartbeat, and vital signs were gravely suppressed, and only a cursory examination of his “frozen” body was made by Captain Oates and his appalled physician (in fact, a dropout of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and not a licensed M.D.) before he was declared dead, his body wrapped in canvas and placed in the hold, to be interred when the Balmoral returned to New York Harbor at the end of the summer.

  (Though awakened at the time of the others, Josiah did not return to Princeton until late August, for the Balmoral continued on its expeditionary journey into the south polar region, as planned.)

  Josiah, too, had quite terrorized his shipboard companions by pounding on a door to the hold, and shouting loudly. Since none of the crew would open the door to him, Captain Oates had had to be summoned; and he, like the Princeton cemetery groundskeeper, would never wholly recover from his shock. Captain Oates seems soon then to have retired from sea-going, to vanish into the mountainous regions of upstate New York and the anonymity of a landlocked life.

  It was a very good thing that none of the young people could remember the circumstances of their “dying,” or lying in state, or being entombed. All had the confused belief that they had slumbered deeply, and would not have wished to be awakened. For was not their sleep, as Macbeth had spoken yearningly of sleep, a “raveling up of the sleeve of care”; had they not slipped from a place of grief, and, in waking, found themselves restored to a semblance of their old happiness?

  Annabel was never to remember having “given birth”—though in her dreams she would perceive the image of a floating “ghost baby” with features too indistinct to be seen; and of an identity totally unknown to her.

  The youngest, Oriana, was yet more soft-spoken and reticent than she’d been in her previous life, except at odd, mercurial moments when she burst into nervous laughter, or tears; she remembered nothing of her fall from a high roof of Wheatsheaf, but spoke wonderingly of her flight into Heaven, the movement of her “white-feathered wings”—the joy of being borne aloft in the air as if bodiless. Her companion was a hawk, she said, of noble proportions; a female hawk, she seemed to know, with “golden” eyes—“How I wished I could fly with her forever! But my wings were not strong enough, and she flew on without me; and I had to come back, to my home.”

  Todd recovered slowly from his ordeal, having lost a good deal of weight since his “death”; he then confounded all the family with his memento of the Bog Kingdom, as he called it—a single black checker, of carved wood; a very old piece it seemed, which was found clutched in his fingers when he awakened in the dark of the tomb.

  By degrees, over a period of weeks, Todd regained some of his memory, and was encouraged by Annabel to dictate his story to her, that all of the world might know of his experiences; which account has been included here in its entirety, in the chapter titled “A Game of Draughts.” Todd rejected the notion, as an insult, that he had simply “frozen” to a comatose state in the cemetery, while visiting his cousin’s and his sister’s tomb; it was Todd’s insistence that he hadn’t been in the cemetery at all at that time, but in his grandfather Winslow Slade’s library where he dimly recalled the fireplace with the secret passageway beyond, and how he had made his way through. (Yet, when Todd and Annabel examined the fireplace in their grandfather’s library, all the bricks were in place, and none were loose, or could have loosened. “It is a perfect brick wall,” Annabel observed, “through which no one, not even a wily snake, could crawl.”)

  Following the trauma of her “death” Annabel Slade recovered by slow degrees to a semblance of her former self; she would not regain her youthful beauty, which may have been fragile and fleeting as the roses in her mother’s garden, but acquired a more thoughtful, if slightly ironic look of female sensitivity; her forehead was just perceptibly lined, with worry-frowns etched permanently in her skin; her smile was not so spontaneous as it had been, but rather hesitant, and guarded. Annabel had become one who distrusts happiness—until it has been proven to her that the happiness is genuine. Of the four grandchildren, Annabel was the most afflicted by amnesia; she would recall virtually nothing of the long episode she had told her family, which was recorded by Josiah in the invaluable Turquoise-Marbled Book; fort
unately for her, she recalled nothing of her grotesque pregnancy, and its aftermath. So confused was the young woman, when first she’d wakened, and was removed to Crosswicks, to familiar quarters, she persisted in claiming that she “knew she must not marry Dabney Bayard but must break the engagement at once”—as if the year were still 1905, and the date sometime before June 4. She told her parents: “Dabney does not love me, I know. He loves my ‘Slade’ name—he loves this estate. He may not like women at all—at least, he does not like me. And I don’t love him—I don’t feel for him any portion of what I feel for you, or Josiah. And though it may disappoint and anger you, dear parents, I don’t think I want to marry anyone at all.”

  Henrietta and Augustus must have exulted, that their (naively optimistic) prayers had been answered: their beloved daughter restored to them as she had been; that is, innocent, and in a sense a virgin; for, her experience being guiltless as it seems to have been, Annabel could no more be counted as the illicit bride of Axson Mayte than she had been the bride of Lieutenant Bayard. (Their marriage had been annulled, and so was stricken from any and all church records.)

  “I will never leave you again, dear parents,” Annabel said gaily, “—at least, I will never leave Princeton or—at least, I will never leave New Jersey. That is my promise.”

  Of the four morbidly afflicted grandchildren, Josiah was the most clinically curious regarding his experience in that “other” world. He was certain that he’d been conscious all the while he’d been in the hold of the ship; mistaken as dead, he’d certainly been plunged into a deep sleep, with imperceptible vital signs. The barking of dogs close by his head, the whinnying of horses, the howling of winds, the creaking of the ship—these were phantasms in his dreams, yet very real. Vividly he remembered his sister in distress, on an ice floe in the Southern Ocean; he remembered her calling to him; and he remembered hurrying to her rescue—but beyond that, he remembered nothing. Except for growing gaunt from lack of food, Josiah had been refreshed from his sleep; and in this sleep, his evil “voices” vanished. Having wakened from his enchantment Josiah believed that he was fully himself again, as he had not been for a year or more; and never again suffered the incursion of alien thoughts, that had so made his life a torment.

  “The first act of my newly regained sanity,” Josiah said, “was to disengage myself from the folly of the South Polar expedition, which was poorly funded and poorly staffed; when the men set forth on land, led by Oates, I remained safely on the Balmoral with a few other men, to write in my journal and compose my thoughts. Men were lost in the polar region—all of the ponies were lost, and half the dogs—God only knows what the survivors had to do, to survive those grim months. But they did return. And so we all returned to civilization, just a little later than scheduled.”

  To his family, and to Annabel in particular, Josiah vowed that he would never again set sail for terra incognita—“There is the unknown world within, that quite suffices.”

  THOUGH The Accursed is a chronicle of events primarily limited to 1905 to 1906, I think it is necessary to suggest an immediate future beyond the buoyant summer of 1906 when all of the Slades were reunited, except for the unhappy Copplestone. Within the year, through a set of serendipitous circumstances, Josiah and Annabel joined the Helicon Home Colony in the countryside near Englewood, New Jersey; for Josiah had another time sought out Upton Sinclair, at an Intercollegiate Socialist rally in New York, and established a connection with the young organizer, whom he introduced to Annabel, and eventually to Wilhelmina Burr, who joined the Colony at a slightly later date. (When Annabel and Wilhelmina at last embraced, having not seen each other since the morning of Annabel’s wedding, Wilhelmina burst into tears declaring that she had never in her heart believed that her dear friend had died; somehow, she had known that Annabel was still living, in some way unfathomable to the world. “And now, I hope never to let you out of my sight again,” Wilhelmina vowed, “or, at least, out of the range of my love.”) And there came to live in the Colony the former seminarian and now avid Socialist Yaeger Ruggles, who became a close friend and comrade to all, as one with particularly “radical and revolutionary” ideas ranging from union organizing to farming, worker-owned factories to “race-free” education and housing; ideas, unfortunately, far ahead of their time.

  The Helicon Home Colony was comprised of several stucco-and-wood-frame buildings including a residence that had been a boys’ dormitory, that had had to be renovated, for use of the commune; the property included some two hundred acres of fertile land, both cultivated and wooded, stretching from the Old Jericho Road north and eastward past Lockwood Gorge. The Colony was to prove, at the first, at least, a happy retreat for the idealistic young people who had had quite enough, as they phrased it, of proper bourgeois society; and wished to apply their energies to such disciplines as agronomics, organic agriculture, animal husbandry, and greenhouse-horticulture. When not involved in Socialist activities in New York City, Josiah was much absorbed in the breeding and training of Peruvian horses, whose beauty and grace quite bewitched him. Wilhelmina persevered in her art, hoping to cultivate a “women’s Socialist aesthetic”; Annabel concentrated upon writing, and the upkeep of the Colony to which, like Josiah, she contributed virtually all of her trust-fund money.

  Though the young “farmers” were novices at the time they began their venture, Upton Sinclair had been canny enough to invite more experienced individuals to join the commune, to help with the outdoors; it was his dream that one day soon, in another year or two, the Helicon Home Colony might expand to include fifty members, a hundred members, two hundred—“Eventually, we might revolutionize the world!” Upton had charted a five-year plan by which the Colony would soon become self-sustaining, and even profitable; in the meantime, they would supplement their income with private earnings, like those from his book royalties, and they would grow as much of their own food as they could, and sell what they could—“People in the area will know, they can trust us.”

  In the early winter of ’06, that they might quell some of the slanderous and threatening things said of them by residents of Englewood and environs, there was a double wedding on the premises, presided over by an ordained (female) minister of the Brooklyn Unitarian Church, at which these couples were joined in matrimony: Josiah Slade and Wilhelmina Burr, and Annabel Slade and Yaeger Ruggles.*

  Of what lies ahead for idealistic young people in March 1907, this historian will not speak except to say that all survived the arson-set fire; for my chronicle has ended, and “ordinary life” must resume. My final scene is the double wedding ceremony at the Helicon Home Colony in a flower-garlanded setting, with Upton Sinclair boyishly smiling, shaking hands with the bridal couples and the guests, tears shining in his eyes: “Comrades! It is the dawn of a new day! Revolution now!”

  Epilogue

  THE COVENANT

  (Winslow Slade)

  O DEARLY BELOVED IN CHRIST—HEAR ME AND HAVE MERCY.

  KNOW THAT MY SIN HAS BEEN THE MORE COMPOUNDED IN THAT I HAVE WORN THROUGH MY LIFE THE FACE OF VIRTUE.

  KNOW THAT MY EVIL HAS BEEN THE MORE COMPOUNDED IN THAT I HAVE SPOKEN THROUGH MY LIFE IN THE VOICE OF RIGHTEOUSNESS.

  O FRIENDS AND NEIGHBORS AND FELLOW CHRISTIANS, O BELOVED KIN TO ME, YET THE MORE ABUSED BY ME, WHO HAS DWELT AMONG YOU IN HYPOCRITE GOODNESS THESE FIVE DECADES AND MORE.

  KNOW THAT MY BLAME FOR THE CURSE PERPETRATED UPON YOU IS THE MORE COMPOUNDED IN THAT I HAVE MADE THE FEEBLE AND HYPOCRITICAL PRETENSE OF AN EARLIER CONFESSION: A FALSE CONFESSION FROM THE FIRST SYLLABLE.

  KNOW THAT THE CURSE UNLEASHED UPON YOU AS A CONSEQUENCE OF WINSLOW SLADE’S SIN, AND THAT ALONE; AND THAT IT WAS NOT A PACT WITH THE DEVIL BUT A PACT WITH ALMIGHTY GOD WHOSE WRATHFUL HAND CANNOT BE STAYED BY THE EXERCISE OF PRAYER, GOODNESS, OR SACRIFICE OR ANY HUMAN PETITION AT ALL.

  KNOW THAT I STAND AT LAST UNMASKED AND STRIPPED BEFORE YOU, AS MURDERER, PERJURER, AND HYPOCRITE BETRAYER OF ALL THAT YOU HOLD DEAR; AND THAT ON THIS SABBATH MORNING IN MY SEVE
NTY-SIXTH YEAR, FOLLOWING THE RAMPAGING HORROR FOR WHICH I ALONE AM TO BLAME, I DO HEREBY CONFESS MY SIN, MY CRIME, AND MY BETRAYAL OF OUR COMMONWEAL, AND ABSOLVE YOU OF THE BITTER DEED OF CHASTISING ME, BY CONSENTING TO MY OWN DEATH AS QUICKLY AS THE LORD GOD WILL SEND IT: THAT I MAY BE PLUNGED INTO THE FARTHEST DEPTHS OF HELL, TO SUFFER THERE FOREVERMORE, AS MY PITEOUS VICTIM HAD PRAYED IN HER TERROR OF ME.

  “YET YE SHALL BE BROUGHT DOWN TO HELL.”

  IT WAS NOT THE FRENCHMAN SELINCOURT WHO STRANGLED THE YOUNG WOMAN NAMED PEARL BUT I, WINSLOW SLADE: I WHO STAND BEFORE YOU DECADES AFTER THAT FOUL DEED UNMASKED AND STRIPPED AND PROCLAIMED THROUGH ALL THE WORLD AS MURDERER, PERJURER, AND HYPOCRITE BETRAYER: I, AND I ALONE WHO MEANT TO SILENCE THE POOR MILL-GIRL WITH THE MANGLED HAND AND THE SKIN LIKE SOMETHING SINGED AND EYES TREMULOUS WITH KNOWLEDGE OF HER DOOM AT THE HANDS OF THE FRANTIC YOUNG (WHITE) MAN TIGHTENING HIS HANDS ABOUT HER NECK AND SQUEEZING, AND SQUEEZING, IN THE DESPERATION OF COWARDICE AND SHAME; UNTIL NO LIFE REMAINED IN HER FRANTIC BODY, AND NO TEASING FIRE BLAZED OUT FROM HER DULLED EYES. UNTIL THE GIRL LAY LIFELESS AND BROKEN ON THE CHILL GROUND BEFORE ME: AND WINSLOW SLADE WAS INDEED DAMNED FOR ALL ETERNITY.

  I WANTED ONLY TO SILENCE HER SCREAMS AND ACCUSATIONS WHICH I DID—O LORD!

  I WANTED ONLY TO EXERT MY POWER OVER HER TO INTIMIDATE HER AND ABASH HER WHICH I DID—O LORD, THOU KNOWEST HOW!

  I WANTED ONLY TO INFLICT SOME SMALL WARNING INJURY UPON HER HEATED AND WRITHING FEMALE FORM IN THE RANK INDECENCY OF HER SEX WHICH I DID—O MERCILESS LORD, AS THOU WELL KNOWEST.