The Accursed (24 page)
Josiah, who had disdained bicker at Princeton, as one of the more sought-after freshmen in his class, had received a bid from the exclusive eating club Ivy nonetheless, unofficially and indirectly—which he’d ignored, in his Slade arrogance. And so on campus during his undergraduate years he’d been the envy and the awe of all, even certain of his professors. To have ignored Ivy! He had made his friends elsewhere, a few. But friendship and popularity had not seemed to him the point of college, then or now.
Now the expression in Wilson’s long-jawed face, of an old humility but partly mollified by the hope of vindication, made Josiah feel that, for a moment, he’d been cast back to his adolescent self on this very campus: essentially, a claustrophobic little world of privilege and anxiety in which one was made to
care too much
about too little.
“I’m sorry to hear that, sir. The eating clubs can be tyrannical, if they are not checked.”
“
They will be checked
. I will fight the entrenched alumni and the G—damn’d board of trustees and accursed Dean West who supports them,
till the death
.”
Woodrow Wilson was trembling now, through his long lean body.
It was very extreme of the ministerial Wilson to have said
G—damn’d
.
Josiah felt an impulse to comfort the older man, even to wipe at his damp mouth with a handkerchief. Yet he would never touch Woodrow Wilson—of course! He was remembering, in a European lecture in McCosh, years ago, one of his professors declaring that while madness in individuals is relatively rare, it is virtually a prerequisite for a certain sort of political leader: “He is not functionally mad, but mad in his intellect. He will know by instinct how to rally others to his madness, in the pretense that he is in their service and their lives depend upon him—Napoleon, for example.”
Josiah thought
At least here in the U.S., in our democracy that can’t happen
.
It was said about town that Woodrow Wilson had had “political ambitions” since boyhood. In a ribald moment Frances Cleveland had remarked at a dinner party that the “most potent male organ” in all of Princeton was the mouth of Woodrow Wilson.
Josiah smiled at the thought. But ceased smiling at once, as Woodrow Wilson was glaring at him.
“You are amused, I see!
You,
as I recall, were a member of Ivy.”
“No. I was not.”
“I had heard, you were. Or, you’d declined their bid.”
“It was all long ago, Dr. Wilson. It’s best to believe that the eating clubs will ‘wither away’ with the rise of democracy on campus—as the Socialists and Marxists predict, the state will ‘wither away.’ ”
“No way of life so entrenched will ever ‘wither away’—it must be helped, with dynamite, if need be. As well expect that Nigras and—and women—will be admitted to Princeton University, one day, as to fantasize the ‘withering-away’ of the eating clubs.” Wilson laughed, at such a ridiculous notion.
“And does Dean West oppose you on that issue, too?”
Wilson saw no undue familiarity on Josiah’s part, in asking this question; but rather responded with heat, as if Josiah were a confidant.
“Yes. Of course. West opposes me
on every possible issue,
as it is my soul he wants, in a nutshell, he has said.”
“ ‘In a nutshell’—really?”
“He has said. It has been reported to me.”
Now in a state of quivering nerves, Wilson lurched to his feet. Josiah took advantage of the moment and quickly stood as well, with the excuse that he had to leave, for he was expected at dinner at Wheatsheaf that evening. With a curious smile of elation, Wilson laid his arm on Josiah’s shoulder, and escorted him down the narrow stairs to the first floor, and to the foyer. (Josiah wondered where in the house Mrs. Wilson and the daughters were. The “tower” was just enough detached from the main part of the household, so that Woodrow Wilson could slip up there, and even have visitors, without being detected.) Just as Josiah was about to leave, eager to step outside into the fresh air, Wilson said, bringing his mouth close to Josiah’s ear, “You will wonder why I invited you? It is very hard to say this, Josiah, but—my dear daughter Jessie has been unwell, you know—after the—that terrible day—to which she’d so long looked forward, as a bridesmaid. Dr. Hatch has been administering to her, with some success. But I must tell you—Jessie is tormented by terrible dreams. The sleep-medicine Dr. Hatch prescribes seems almost to exacerbate them. Nights in succession she has dreamt of poor Ruth Cleveland—and the murdered Spags girl, whom none of us knew of course—these wraiths tease and torment her, scratching at her window and begging to be allowed inside; lately, the two have been joined by a third girl, a blond girl, which seems to Jessie to be your sister Annabel, as she was some years ago—young, innocent, terrified, begging to be let inside Jessie’s room; but Jessie reports that she is too transfixed by horror, to move from her bed. Jessie says—
What if they are vampires?
”
Wilson’s voice quavered. Josiah stepped away, as if he’d been stabbed to the heart.
Wanting to protest
My sister is not dead. My sister is not a vampire!
Instead, Josiah could only thank Wilson, and hurriedly depart.
The bell of Old North was tolling an unknown hour.
V
ampire!
Josiah is incensed. He has never heard anything so ridiculous in his life.
For Josiah is purely a rationalist. Josiah’s heroes are Aristotle, David Hume, John Stuart Mill. He is not widely read in philosophy and logic but feels a repugnance for all that is
murky, mystical.
Yes, to a degree: Josiah is a Protestant Christian. But Josiah does not subject his faith to reason; his faith is bound up with family loyalty, which is not to be questioned.
“There is no ‘supernatural’ world—only just this, the ‘natural’ world. All the rest is nonsense.”
“NONSENSE.”
In her opulently furnished boudoir-library at Westland, Mrs. Grover Cleveland has distracted herself from her marital worries by typing, on her new frontstroke, Underwood typewriter, the concluding pages of an article on female suffrage that had been begun by her ailing husband at the invitation of
The Ladies’ Home Journal;
but Frances Cleveland has revised the article in her own far more conversational voice so that it is a chatty effusion, and not a dreary sermon. Frances smiles to think it will make a considerable “splash” when it is published: “ ‘Sensible and responsible women
do not want to vote.
The relative positions to be assumed by Man and Woman, in the working-out of civilization, were assigned long ago—by a far higher intelligence than ours.” Frances pauses before typing, with fierce strokes of the machine, the final riposte: “Female suffrage is, in a word,
nonsense
.”
From an adjoining room, poor Grover is calling to her. Frances has the excuse that the typewriter-mechanism is very noisy, and she can’t hear; in any case, a servant will come running, soon.
“It is what we pay them for, after all.”
ITEM
. COUNT ENGLISH
von Gneist, of late the most sought-after dinner guest in Princeton, in a dark-hued evening suit with a ruffled white shirt and silver-embroidered vest, has escorted Mrs. Amanda FitzRandolph and her great-aunt Thomasina Bayberry to a lavish dinner at Drumthwacket—for Edgerstoune is away in San Francisco, on business. It is at this dinner that von Gneist exchanges significant glances with another guest, Miss Wilhelmina Burr, who feels a sensation of cold come over her even as, with girlish laughter, she responds to the remark of a dinner-table companion to her right.
Such a powerful personality!—and so handsome, though his cheeks are creased with melancholy. But what interest would the Count have in
me!
Since Annabel’s departure, and Josiah’s continued indifference to her, Wilhelmina has vowed not to withdraw from the world in heartbreak, or in invalidism; often she is seen in hiking shoes and tweeds striding along a bank of the Delaware-Raritan Canal, as it runs parallel to Lake Carnegie; often, she is seen striding along Nassau Street, in the direction of the public library; at least once a week, in the early morning, she is seen on the train platform at Princeton Junction gripping an artist’s portfolio, on her way into the city and the New York School of Art where she receives instruction from the renowned Robert Henri himself—though forbidden by her anxious parents to
stay the night
in New York City, even at a relative’s home.
Item.
It is at Wheatsheaf, the home of his uncle Copplestone Slade and his aunt Lenora, that Josiah hears news to tear at his heart: that, according to his uncle, Annabel and “that man, Mayte” have been sighted at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City and yet again at a private dinner party at the Frick mansion on upper Fifth Avenue. With a snort of disgust Copplestone hands Josiah a newspaper clipping from the
New York Herald,
a photograph of a couple in a smart Paige motorcar, the young blond woman wearing a veil about her head and shoulders and the gentleman in linen duster, dust-hood, and goggles; the caption beneath reading simply
The fashionable set tours abroad
.
This photograph, Copplestone said, was fresh evidence of the “infamy” their family would never outlive.
“But is this Annabel? The man is certainly not Mayte.”
Josiah examined the photograph closely. Possibly, the young woman might have been his sister, or her twin; but the gentleman was certainly not Axson Mayte, for he was slender and darkly handsome, and Mayte was squat and ugly as a troll.
Copplestone raged: “And to think that I played cards with that scoundrel, in fact, lost money at cards to that scoundrel, at Andrew West’s! And more than once.”
“But—is this ‘Mayte’? He doesn’t resemble ‘Mayte’ at all.”
“Though, Josiah, bear in mind—I didn’t trust him from the first. His manners were those of a Rooshian Bolshevik, and his ‘luck’ with cards too good. He stank, too, of ambergris—like a silly female.”
Stung by this remark, perhaps, though ordinarily Lenora remained silent when her husband gave himself up to one of his rants, Josiah’s aunt said quietly: “Why, Copplestone, I remember you saying of Axson Mayte that he was a most lively fellow, ‘a man among men,’ and very clever in his mimicry of both Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt.”
Copplestone grunted, in a kind of grudging assent. “Indeed yes, he was cruelly funny. But I did not laugh.”
Lenora said, bent over her embroidery as if it, and not the conversation, drew her deepest concentration: “Why yes, Copplestone, I believe you did laugh—quite cruelly, I thought at the time. For Woodrow Wilson would believe himself a friend of yours, as he is a friend of your father’s.”
“He
is not
a friend of my father’s. He is a hanger-on, who wants my father’s support—the support of all of the Slades.”
Josiah sensed that there was tension in the air of the drawing room, between his uncle and his aunt; badly he wanted to question Copplestone about Axson Mayte, but this did not seem like an opportune time.
And how dank and chill Wheatsheaf felt that evening, like a mausoleum.
Wheatsheaf, inhabited now by strangers, is one of the oldest and most regal houses on Bayard Lane, having been originally built in 1769, with numerous additions to follow over the decades. It is in a palatial Georgian style with a “soft” redbrick facade, high roofs, a prominent portico, and narrow shutters framing its many windows, at the corner of Bayard and the road now known as Cleveland Lane. Through Josiah’s childhood his uncle’s house, a quarter mile from Crosswicks, had always seemed a more relaxed house than his own, or, at least, the household was given an air of gruff levity by Copplestone, who had no wish to compete with his older brother Augustus as a “serious” son of Winslow Slade. (Josiah’s family had always lived with the elder Slades, as Crosswicks was an enormous house, and might easily have benefited another family.) Like his friend Andrew Fleming West, Copplestone was admired through the West End for his generosity, hospitality, and “masculine” sense of humor; though social acquaintances knew little of the strain of his relationship with his son, Todd, a subject which Copplestone was not likely to discuss with them, or indeed with anyone.
As he’d approached the house Josiah had heard a shout from a second-floor window and, glancing up, had seen his cousin Todd gesturing to him; during his conversation with Copplestone and Lenora, Josiah had heard similar outcries from the top of the staircase, but knew that, if he sought out his young cousin, Todd would hide from him—that was the boy’s sort of humor, for which, at this time, Josiah hadn’t much patience.
At this time Copplestone was forty-seven years old, having been born in 1858; yet, as the man was bald, and favored muttonchop whiskers, and was rotund as Dean West, he looked a decade older. Copplestone had always had an easy and relaxed attitude toward life, as an heir of the Slade fortune: why others taxed their brains with riddles about the nature of God, and the divinity of Christ, and whether God be
in
or
above
nature; why did the innocent suffer, and the evil reap harvest—Copplestone could not guess. “The distinction between ‘eternity’ and a tankard of ale is a simple one: I can close my fingers around the tankard, and drink, while with ‘eternity’—I’d wait a very long time before my thirst was quenched, if I looked to sustenance from that.”
Since Copplestone’s income was assured, he’d frequently indulged himself in speculations of a reckless sort: several years ago, he’d gone in with Trillingham Bayard in backing a private militia, to be hired by companies who needed protection against picketing strikers and the like, as with the United Mine Workers of recent notoriety, and the much-publicized strife in the “Silk City,” Paterson; he’d lost as much as $200,000 in backing Thomas Edison’s revolutionary scheme of cement furniture which had, as Copplestone affably said, “sunk without a trace.”
Copplestone had also invested in the Cape May–Atlantic City resort area and he was involved in the Cape May Challenge Cup Race, betting lavishly, but not always wisely. It was a measure of Copplestone’s habit of favoring the underdog in such competitions, he’d financed a motorcar from the experimental workshop of Henry Ford, of Greenfield, Michigan, in a race on the Cape May sands, with the result that the Ford motorcar lost badly and the young inventor was so penniless he had to sell his racer in Cape May City, to a rival, in order to buy a railroad ticket back to Michigan! For Copplestone, in a swift change of mood, was so disgusted with the car’s performance he refused to finance the inventor’s return home. He’d had enough of “homegrown American” products—“Next time I’ll back the Ace Frenchman,
Chevrolet
.”
Josiah’s ruddy-faced uncle was a very social person, unlike his older brother and his father Winslow; his presence at West End dinner tables assured a certain intensity of
bonhomie
. His skill at dialect stories was far in advance of Woodrow Wilson’s, though the men both favored “darky” accents; Copplestone had cultivated, too, a set of jokes featuring “Rooshian Jews” and “immigrant Poles.” Copplestone was a popular club-member in Manhattan, as well, though the effort of taking the train, or being driven by motorcar such a distance, was not appealing. In more than twenty years of marriage Copplestone had never been less than absolutely faithful to his wife, so far as anyone in Princeton knew.
Copplestone felt obliged to punish his rowdy son Todd from time to time, but he doted upon little Oriana, who was clearly his favorite. He’d always expressed a great affection for his niece Annabel, and he was fond of Josiah who, as he complained, ought to have been his son and not his nephew; for they would have gotten along well, and he should have minded it less, that Todd was an idiot.
(
Idiot?
Did Copplestone carelessly speak of his only son in this way? I’m afraid that, yes he did. And not always when Todd was safely out of earshot.)
Josiah’s aunt Lenora, née Biddle, was Copplestone’s age; not a beauty but a “handsome” woman, if somewhat fleshy; though small-proportioned when seated beside her portly husband. Her hair was of no memorable style and in any case usually covered by a morning-cap, or afternoon-cap, or bonnet, or hat; she rose early each morning, and always bathed twice—the first immersion was for soaping and washing; the second, for rinsing. She attended church services nearly as often as church services were available, and always read her Bible before bedtime; it did not greatly matter to Lenora which book of the Bible she read, only that she read a few pages, as intently of Hosea, or Nehemiah, or Zephaniah as of the Gospels or Genesis, for she would not remember what she’d read only a few minutes later, only that her mood was calmed, and prepared for bed. Each day also Lenora prayed that Todd would revert himself to normal boyish ways as, she seemed to recall, he’d behaved when he was younger; for, like her husband, Lenora found it difficult to believe that their son wasn’t choosing to behave badly, and might have learned to read and write if he’d tried harder; but Lenora never scolded Todd, and was brought to tears when Copplestone decided it was “time for a whipping.”
Of her many activities, Lenora was most proud of her prominent position in the New Jersey Society of the Colonial Dames of America, and her role in the Ladies’ Altar Society of the First Presbyterian Church. But Lenora was most famous in the community for her excellent way with foods, particularly pastries: her specialties were cream-and-custard cakes and tarts of all varieties from quince to boysenberry. It was declared that a West End lady could scarcely sink into her sickbed before Lenora arrived with a prettily trimmed basket of dainties from her kitchen; she was most solicitous of the chronic invalids in town, visiting them weekly. “Ah, it is Lenora Slade again,” Adelaide Burr would say with a little scream of a laugh, “so I know I am
sick;
and have little hope of recovery.”
Yet there was in Lenora an inclination to be severely critical of behavior that deviated from her own, and, with her nephew Josiah present, Lenora couldn’t resist bringing up the subject of Wilhelmina Burr whom, she said, she had never entirely trusted, for her “wanton” influence on Annabel, since the girls were classmates in elementary school. Wilhelmina was “outspoken”—“capricious”—“disrespectful of her elders”; she dressed scandalously, in “Turkish trousers” and “unskirted bloomers.” Most alarming, Wilhelmina had quarreled with her parents about living in Manhattan, and she was attending art classes in which, it was said, nude persons
of both sexes
were known to pose; Lenora had heard too, from the Stocktons, that Wilhelmina now smoked cigarettes occasionally. It was common knowledge in Princeton, Lenora said primly, that this aggressive young lady had “set her cap” for a certain young man whose name she would not mention.
“Aunt Lenora, you’re right—you should not mention it.” Josiah was both bemused, and irritated; he felt a pang of guilt, for Wilhelmina whom he meant to contact, but seemed never to have time, or the opportunity.
“Well. Others do, you know. Quite frequently.”
“I’m sure all that you’ve heard is just the usual gossip, invented to injure feelings rather than illuminate truth.”