Hotly Woodrow said: “Thank you, Dr. Slade, but I do not drink brandy—as you must know. And I am not in any womanish state of ‘nerves.’ My dear wife has not the slightest idea where I am—she has retired to bed by ten p.m. and would assume that I am working in my study as usual. I find it upsetting—and baffling—that you, Winslow Slade, with your thorough grounding in Calvinist theology, and the practical experience of being a Presbyterian minister, should take so lightly the possibility of ‘diabolism’ in our midst . . . I wonder whether West himself hasn’t sought you out, in this very room, to poison you against me, who has long been your devoted friend—and to influence your thoughts!”
Woodrow spoke with such adolescent sarcasm, his friend was taken aback.
It was then, the little accident occurred.
Though the men certainly could not have been described as struggling together, in any sense of the phrase, it somehow happened that, as Winslow Slade sought to take hold of Woodrow Wilson’s (flailing) arm, to calm him, the younger man shrank from him as if in fright; causing the jade snuffbox to slip from his fingers onto a tabletop, and a cloud of aged snuff was released, of such surprising potency both men began to sneeze; very much as if a malevolent spirit had escaped from the little box.
Unexpectedly then, both Woodrow Wilson and Winslow Slade suffered fits of helpless sneezing, until they could scarcely breathe, and their eyes brimmed with tears, and their hearts pounded with a lurid beat as if eager to burst.
And the austere old grandfather clock against a farther wall softly chimed the surprising hour of one—unheard.
Footnotes
[*] Which diary, included in the Firestone Library Special Collections, was provided for my perusal by the kindly curator who had no idea, for how could he have known?—that I alone, of the numerous researchers who have contemplated five tons of Wilsonia, managed to crack the ingenious code.
[*] In order to give shape to my massive chronicle, that has been assembled from countless sources, I intend to “leap ahead” in time whenever it seems helpful. Also, I should note here that Thomas Woodrow Wilson, born 1856, soon saw the advantage, as an ambitious young man, of a more distinctive-sounding name: Woodrow Wilson. It was a proud if somewhat fantastical claim of Woodrow’s that his lineage extended back to one “Patrik Wodro” who had crossed the English Channel with William the Conqueror; and that no one of significance had yet asserted himself in American politics who was not of Scots-English origin—a somewhat contradictory claim, it would seem.
[*] Grover Cleveland, twenty-second President of the United States, had retired to Westland Mansion in Princeton after leaving office in 1897; a considerable presence in Princeton, both by repuation and by girth, Cleveland lived scarcely a half-block from Crosswicks Manse, on Hodge Road; he too was a trustee of the university and, as Woodrow Wilson feared, a supporter rather of Dean West than of Woodrow Wilson. It was invariably a social coup to include Grover and Frances Cleveland in any gathering, despite Grover’s uncouth manners and buffoonish laughter, and the disappointment of his second term in office; worse yet, as many knew, Grover Cleveland had, as sheriff of Erie County in upstate New York in his early career in politics, personally executed, by hanging, at least two condemned men, rather than pay a hangman ten dollars.
About the Author
JOYCE CAROL OATES is a recipient of the National Medal of Humanities, the National Book Critics Circle Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction, and has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys, Blonde, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the New York Times bestseller The Falls, which won the 2005 Prix Femina. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978. In 2003 she received the Common Wealth Award for Distinguished Service in Literature, and in 2006 she received the Chicago Tribune Lifetime Achievement Award.
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Novels by Joyce Carol Oates
With Shuddering Fall (1964)
A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967)
Expensive People (1968)
them (1969)
Wonderland (1971)
Do With Me What You Will (1973)
The Assassins (1975)
Childwold (1976)
Son of the Morning (1978)
Unholy Loves (1979)
Bellefleur (1980)
Angel of Light (1981)
A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982)
Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984)
Solstice (1985)
Marya: A Life (1986)
You Must Remember This (1987)
American Appetites (1989)
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990)
Black Water (1992)
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993)
What I Lived For (1994)
Zombie (1995)
We Were the Mulvaneys (1996)
Man Crazy (1997)
My Heart Laid Bare (1998)
Broke Heart Blues (1999)
Blonde (2000)
Middle Age: A Romance (2001)
I’ll Take You There (2002)
The Tattooed Girl (2003)
The Falls (2004)
Missing Mom (2005)
Black Girl/White Girl (2006)
The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007)
My Sister, My Love (2008)
Little Bird of Heaven (2009)
Mudwoman (2012)
Credits
Cover design by Allison Salzman
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
THE RESCUER. Copyright © 2013 by The Ontario Review, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Epub Edition JANUARY 2012 ISBN: 9780062268709
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