The Accursed (32 page)
Scarcely listening to Winslow’s successor Reverend FitzRandolph, who derived the most familiar and the most trite conclusions from Holy Scripture, and addressed the congregation as if they were indeed
sheep,
Josiah lapsed into an open-eyed reverie; and became vulnerable to the flood of voices that rushed at him in the high-pitched mocking voices of cherubs to blend with his own prayer-voice:
Our Hellish Father who art in Hell damn’d be Thy name damn’d Thy
Kingdom
forever & ever AMEN.
J
osiah! I am your friend, please come to me when you can. Or when you wish. Please!”—so Wilhelmina murmurs to herself, testing the thrilling, unspeakable words while adjusting her new “slouch” hat in a mirror, or struggling to button the tight cuffs of her crisp white cotton middy-blouse, or preparing her cumbersome art-portfolio, to carry into the city for her lessons with Robert Henri.
Yearning, yet headstrong Miss Wilhelmina Burr!
In the spring of 1906 Wilhelmina has begun teaching as a part-time instructress in Art, Elocution, and Eurythmics at the Rocky Hill Seminary for Girls just outside Princeton, on the old King’s Road to New Brunswick, to the distress of her family; for the Burrs think it déclassé, indeed embarrassing, that their debutante daughter should wish to “work” at all, let alone side by side with (spinster) females of middle-class families, and worse.
Yet more alarming to the Burrs, those alternative days when Wilhelmina takes the early train into the city, to indulge in her “fevered, if undirected” interest in art.
For Wilhelmina exults in her very stubbornness, that she might be self-supporting if necessary, and independent of all the Burrs.
“Otherwise, I shall have to marry. If I can’t marry for love, I shall have to marry for money.
I will not
.”
In this way Willy believes herself content. Or believes she should be content. For in this new phase of her life it has happened that men have begun to take “interest” in her, as they had not earlier; except, none of these men are quite ideal. And none of them of course is Josiah Slade.
Indeed, the attention of these men has come to be worrisome to Wilhelmina, and not so pleasurable as one might expect.
Her encounter with Count English von Gneist, for instance—of which, resolutely, Wilhelmina does not wish to think.
“A misunderstanding. A misfortune. Never again!”
On her left wrist the incensed young woman carries still the mark of the Count’s strong fingers—like an iron vise, they had seemed. And she carries still the memory of the man’s broad grinning teeth. And the glowering topaz eyes. Never again!
Yet, as a sympathetic biographer, shall I suggest, this outspoken young woman is not so innocent as she imagines herself?
For it seems, a sly sort of female-demon peeps out through Willy’s serious brown eyes, and distorts her smile with its own; a becoming blush comes into her cheeks, unbidden, in masculine company; even as she shrinks from the most innocent sort of coquetry, for fear of being misunderstood. Though Willy has brushed her springy hair back from her face and fashioned it into a schoolmarm’s chignon, and Willy has scrubbed her face until it shines like soapstone, defiant in its plainness, yet, she has become a figure to “turn heads.”
With particular care for her Kingston days as instructress at the girls’ school, Willy dresses in white cotton blouses with high starched collars, tight sleeves, and full, rather than “hobbled,” skirts; though she hates the sensation of being suffocated, Willy binds herself up each morning in a straight-front corset with long hips, to make of her soft, resilient flesh a kind of armor. (Inadvertently, Willy’s tight-corseted figure attracts admiring glances, for she is made to appear, beneath even her fullest skirts, distinctly shapely.) Willy scorns excessive hairstyles, and wide-brimmed befeathered hats; wears no jewelry except for her pin-on watch and a miniature ivory brooch in the shape of a swan, a family heirloom recently given to her by her aunt Adelaide. (Though brought to her at Pembroke by her uncle Horace Burr.) And her stockings are thin black wool or cotton, and her day shoes of black leather with prim black buttons. Yet, still, there is something
covert
and
lascivious
in her step, in the inclination of her head, and most of all in the veiled sweep of her gaze. For why else do Princeton men, some of them proverbially
happily married men,
gaze at her as they do?
“It must be my fault. It is something new, but—what?”
Of a single week, from the stout, middle-aged Copplestone Slade, from taciturn Hamilton Hodge, from ministerial Dr. Woodrow Wilson of the university and Reverend Thaddeus Shackleton of the seminary, even from the gout-stricken Grover Cleveland, Willy receives unsolicited, unwelcome, and disagreeable attentions. Drivers have brought to her house sealed love-letters for her, and several prettily wrapped packages from the prestigious Hamilton Jeweler; so many packages from Edmund Sweet’s—chocolates, bonbons, Black Forest tortes, even jelly beans. (Jelly beans! Willy is baffled, for who would eat such juvenile candies, that had not the slightest appeal to her since she’d turned sixteen.) Flowers are of course the most favored gift: these have included dozens of long-stemmed roses from the Bank Street florist, plus gardenias, lilies, daisies and lilacs, potted orchids. Even at the seminary where Wilhelmina is Miss Burr, with a reputation for making her girl-students work, and with no patience for girlish silliness, she is the recipient of illicit letters pressed into her hands by these very girls, which is embarrassing to her; she is stern about declining gifts, even those from a girl’s grateful parents, given for “disinterested” reasons.
With a reluctant hand Willy opens one of the unsought
billets-doux
from a gentleman, sighing at the clichéd salutation—
My dear adored Miss Burr,
Dear Beauteous Miss Burr;
impatiently she skims the protestation of love, couched in the language of subtle male reproach, and notes the signature, or, as often happens, the absence of a signature.
“It is a kind of sickness, a plague. But who is to blame?”
When these unwanted attentions first began, sometime in the early spring of 1906, as the scandal and tragedy of Annabel Slade began to wane, and sightings of Annabel’s “bestial child” had all but ceased, Willy did feel, to her shame, a kind of girlish pleasure. These were not the sorts of attentions her mother had hoped for her, following her expensive coming-out in Manhattan, but they were authentic-seeming, and passionate. It is not surprising, nor should we judge Wilhelmina Burr harshly, that the young woman, only just twenty-one, would be flattered by such masculine interest; she may have interpreted the attentions from married men as but playful, and not serious. Perhaps such attentions are common in Princeton, and she has not known?
Regarding herself in the mirror, with an air of critical yet hopeful inquiry: “Can it be, ‘Willy’ is beautiful after all? And will
he
take notice—finally?”
For all such masculine interest is to Wilhelmina but a prelude to the interest of Josiah Slade, of whom she continues to think obsessively.
In her sweetest dreams, she feels Josiah’s lips—warm, assertive, yet tender—pressing against her mouth; for the impulsive kiss in the garden room, now months ago, is as vivid to her as if it had happened just the previous day. Wakened from this sweet sleep, she could weep aloud—whether for joy, or sorrow, she cannot know.
For Willy has learned, from numerous sources, that Josiah is
in retreat
from life, since Annabel’s death. Like a monk he seems to her, a penitent, and wholly admirable. She would never judge Josiah Slade harshly, as one who’d trifled with her feelings, as she would never have judged Annabel, her dearest friend.
Though Wilhelmina may have been flattered to receive cards and gifts, she knew that she must ignore the cards, and return the gifts when possible. (How is one to return flowers, though? Willy kept these, filling the garden room with such beauty and fragrances, visitors laughingly commented that one could
fall into a trance
in such surroundings.) It was also not possible to return gifts that were anonymously sent to her; or to reject the exquisite heirloom brooch that her aunt Adelaide had allegedly given her, by way of her uncle Horace.
(Willy thought it strange that there was no note from Adelaide accompanying the brooch. And that Horace thought it necessary to bring the brooch to her, in person, on a Sunday afternoon when no one else in the family was home, with the explanation that the antique brooch was too precious to trust to a delivery boy.) “But—how is Aunt Adelaide? Is she well, or—not so well?” Willy asked her stout mustached uncle, who told her, with a sorrowful smile, “Not so well, Willy, I’m afraid. Some days it seems almost poor Puss can’t fully
wake herself up
.”)
With the passing of weeks, however, Willy has begun to be vexed by such “attentions”—the more so, the majority of men who pursue her are older, and married, and in some inevitable way undesirable.
As disturbing as the men’s behavior, the behavior of the women is yet more disturbing.
For instance, encountering the three Wilson daughters in Edmund Sweet’s, Willy smiles her friendliest smile and invites the young women to sit at her table with her, and have some tea and cakes; but the eldest, Margaret, sharply shakes her head
no,
and Jessie and Eleanor nervously decline; for it seems, their father awaits their return from an errand at the pharmacy, and they have come only to purchase a few little cakes, to eat on their walk. Not long after this, Mrs. Johanna van Dyck, who has always been so sensible and friendly, turns away with a frown when she and Willy chance to meet at Micawber; and Mrs. Cleveland, buxom and glamorous in sable coat, hat, and muff, and high-buttoned kidskin boots, so cruelly “cuts” the smiling young Wilhelmina in Palmer Square, poor Willy feels faint with shock.
And, in days and weeks following, Willy is also snubbed by Mrs. Sparhawk, Mrs. Morgan, Mrs. Pyne, Mrs. Armour and her daughter Eloise; even Mandy FitzRandolph (about whom ominous whisperings have begun to accrue), who had always been her friend. Thinking
Oh Annabel, if you could help me! What have I done, what can I do to make amends?
Most upsetting to Willy is the fact that Josiah Slade has not dropped by to see her, nor even contacted her, since the day of that sudden kiss. Several times she has imagined she’d seen him, in Princeton, but at a distance; she had not wanted to pursue him, so unmistakably, and risk another snub. And once, to her astonishment, she was sure she’d seen Josiah making his way along a crowded sidewalk at Fourteenth Street and Fifth Avenue, in the vicinity of the New York School of Art, which was her destination; again, Willy suppressed the impulse to run after Josiah, and to call to him—“For in Manhattan, perhaps Josiah doesn’t want to be confused with
Josiah Slade
of Princeton.
”
“YES! THIS BEGINS
to be
vexing
.”
With a sigh Willy unwraps a little present from LaVake Custom-Made Gifts, and stares inside the box at what appears to be a gold collar-necklace adorned at its center with a square-cut diamond. The unsigned card reads, bizarrely—
To the Cruel & Beauteous Bluestocking Temptress
From One Who Harbors no Ebullition Against Her
For All She has Prick’d Him in Torment of Love.
Your Faithfull Suitor
How beautiful, the gold necklace; yet how frightening, its resemblance to a dog collar.
And the hand? Though far looser and scrawling than normal, with a clumsy attempt at disguise, Willy is sure she recognizes it, with a sharp intake of breath, as that of her uncle Horace Burr, her father’s younger brother, and husband of poor Puss.
T
hrough Princeton it began to be remarked upon how, in a time of general sorrow and strife in the Slade households, the boy Todd, Copplestone and Lenora’s “idiot” son, was undergoing an unexpected change; less in his appearance, for Todd was yet very young for his age, with a spindly nervous frame and darting eyes, than in his behavior.
So strangely, Todd seemed to have taught himself the rudiments of
reading and writing,
which tutors and governesses had despaired of teaching him for years.
Since his beloved cousin Annabel’s death, Todd was less conspicuously vexing than he’d been to his family; he did not incur Copplestone’s wrath quite so often, or provoke his mother to tears. Where previously the very sight of a book might throw him into a fit, unless it was a children’s picture-book, now Todd was spending hours in the library at Wheatsheaf, which was not a room much frequented by either of his parents.
Of course, Todd’s handwriting was primitive, set beside that of any twelve-year-old Princeton schoolboy; it fell between script and “printing,” and was executed at great cost to the boy, who concentrated so fiercely, perspiration shone on his forehead, and his fingers sometimes gripped a pencil so tight that it snapped. One afternoon, while visiting Crosswicks Manse with his mother, Todd hid himself away in a corner of the drawing room and wrote out, in labored letters resembling Gothic—
Vammovv ivanmcct omnomomiia
—which no one could read; until, by chance, Woodrow Wilson dropped by to visit Dr. Slade, and was shown the curious printing, and, holding the sheet of paper at a slant, read straight out—
AMOR VINCIT OMNIA
—which thrilled Todd, very much.
How delighted everyone was!—Todd’s first
writing
.
And how nice it was of Woodrow Wilson, president of Princeton University, to take the time to decipher the boy’s writing and to very kindly speak to him of his own childhood, and the difficulties he’d had with reading and writing himself. “My family thought I was ‘lazy’ when in fact I could not ‘make sense’ of words as others did. I’m embarrassed to admit that I was at least your age, Todd, before I could read with any ease. I was always a poor student, and my undergraduate performance at Princeton was so undistinguished, I graduated
fiftieth
in my class, a fact I don’t know whether to hide or reveal, so that other boys may take heart from my example.” Seeing that Todd Slade was listening raptly to his words, and staring at him with his uncanny dark-liquid eyes, Dr. Wilson said: “I’ll tell you a secret, Todd—what seems a curse may prove a blessing. For those of us who begin our lives with ‘disabilities’ quickly learn to work much harder than those who find their studies easy; and as the race proceeds, we commonly pull ahead.” Dr. Wilson’s sallow skin glowed with an inner fervor.
“ ‘Race’—like a horse-race? Are you a horse-race-rider, Mr. Wilson?”
“No, Todd! I meant metaphorically. ‘The race is not to the swift’—it’s an old saying.”
“But—is it a horse-race? Or just on foot?”
“Neither, Todd. I’m sorry to confuse you.”
“Why don’t you know, Mr. Wilson, if it’s a horse-race or a foot-race? Which did you do?”
“A foot-race, I suppose.”
Pointedly, Todd looked at Dr. Wilson’s feet, in narrow black shoes with neatly tied black laces.
“A race,” Dr. Wilson said, with some feeling, “that never ceases, and with every sort of obstacle put in the runner’s path to make his victory, when it comes, all the sweeter.”
THAT NIGHT,
Todd woke the household at Wheatsheaf, that had settled in to sleep, with excited shouts.
For it turned out, the restless boy had only pretended to go to bed; instead, he’d sat at his little desk with a single light burning, covering sheets of paper with hopeless scribblings, unintelligible even to him. When his mother hurried to him he told her that there was a “message” that was meant to come to him, through his fingertips, which he would record on paper; but the message was trapped inside him somewhere, and could not get free.
Todd knew not why, but he understood that it was urgent to warn Mrs. Cleveland across the lane, and the Strachans, and the van Dycks, and Annabel’s friend Wilhelmina Burr, that something
very bad
would happen soon, he thought at the Rocky Hill school where Miss Burr taught.
Oriana, wakened, quavered at her brother’s side; for it seemed that the little girl, too, had had a dream of something
very bad
.
“Todd! Oriana!
You
are bad children, to be up at this time of night!”—so Lenora cried, in fear and dismay.
Todd stood resolute; Oriana began to cry, so piteously that Lenora hugged the child, and assured her that all would be well.
Lenora hurried to wake her husband to tell him of this development, but Copplestone had little patience for her.
“Todd says we should warn these people. At least—we might warn Wilhelmina.”
But irritable Copplestone thought not. “There are enough ridiculous rumors circulating about us, without inviting more. You will make fools of us. Go back to sleep.”
In this way, no “warnings” were sent. It is a temptation for the historian to speculate what the effect of Todd’s premonition would have been, in Wilhelmina’s life, if the boy’s father had not responded so dismissively.
All the following day, the children remained together, subdued and shivering. It was not like Todd to tolerate the presence of his much-younger sister, who was only nine; yet, this day, he seemed to take pity on her, for she was looking forlorn; and very shyly confessed to him, that Annabel had come to her, in her sleep—“She is very pretty, like before. She said to me, ‘Oriana, there is a place for you here—you must come to me!’ But when I tried to, I could not—there was something like a door in the way.”
“Annabel is in Heaven, Oriana. You can’t go
there
.”
“Yes I can. Annabel says so.”
“You
can’t.
”
“I
can
.”
“I said, stupid—
you can’t
.”
At this, Oriana began to cry as if her heart had broken.
IF CROSSWICKS WAS,
as Winslow Slade accepted, an
accursed
household, so Wheatsheaf, close by, appeared to be cursed by ill luck as well. It was an open secret in Copplestone’s business life that over the past eighteen months he’d become ever more immersed in a scheme in which certain South American countries as well as Cuba, Haiti, and Puerto Rico, were to form a military and trade alliance under the auspices of an (unnamed) American company; the primary problem being, as Copplestone and his associates lamented, the “resistance of the little monkeys to being civilized.”
Copplestone tried to appeal directly to Theodore Roosevelt, for (
sub rosa
) support; but Roosevelt was elsewhere engaged, in other political battles.
And too, though this was certainly not known by Lenora, rumor had it that Copplestone had been several times sighted in the Hopewell area, in his Winton motorcar, in the company of a wanly pretty young woman twenty or more years his junior, a stranger to the West End entirely, with a Scots flush to her cheeks and the pert manner of one who has risen above her station.
Accursed households, are they not!—
so Josiah’s jeering voices assailed him, often out of nowhere, as his thoughts were attuned to other subjects entirely—
that should be put to the torch, to purify Princeton.
OBLIVIOUS OF HIS
adult relatives’ preoccupations, Todd continued with his “studies,” more or less unaided; a young male tutor, hastily hired by Lenora, met with opposition in the boy, and quit after a few lessons. Though often alone, Todd did not appear lonely; he tramped about the Wheatsheaf estate in a heavy hooded jacket and boots, creating eerily lifelike snow-sculpted forms of human figures and animals, and “disappearing” as he’d often done, for hours at a time. When Lenora called for him, and sent a servant to find him, it was revealed that Todd’s footprints in the snow ceased abruptly, as if the boy had taken flight, or been snatched up, from the ground, by a great-taloned bird. Later, it was discovered that Todd had managed to escape over the twelve-foot stone wall at Wheatsheaf and hike to the Princeton Cemetery a mile away, to visit his cousin’s grave.
Have I noted the engraved letters beneath
Annabel Oriana Slade
(1886–1906)—PAIN WAS MY PORTION, JESUS MY SAVIOR.
And beneath this a single, brief line—BABY SLADE (1906).
Returned home, Todd was silent, brooding; then irritable, and restless; when Lenora tried to comfort him he exploded in startling bitterness against his cousin, saying that “Todd will not forgive Annabel for leaving him and going to that place on the hill with the doors locked against him. Todd wants dynamite, to burst it open!”
One day, in late winter, about eight weeks after Annabel’s funeral, Todd discovered a glass owl beneath one of the tall fir trees behind Wheatsheaf. He’d been shoveling snow with a child’s shovel, to fashion another of his lifelike figures, when the glass owl glittered at his feet, and he pried it free of snow and ice to examine it in the bright winter sun.
Here was an artifact of striking beauty and detail, the size of a barn owl, made of clouded milk-glass, with agate-eyes. Each feather was distinct, even the downy feathers in the creature’s pricked-up ears. The sharp talons were particularly life-like.
“How did you know that Todd would find you, Owl? Can you see through the snow, Owl?”
This curiosity the child brought back to the house to show to the servants, in great excitement, as he believed it must be a “good luck sign”; but the housekeeper and the cook believed it must be an omen of
bad
luck—possibly because Todd Slade had found it.
“Better to take it away, Master Slade. Not keep it here.”
Todd ignored the pleading servants, as he often ignored the pleas of adults. And the dark-skinned household staff was always so
worried,
that something terrible would happen because of Todd, or to Todd, and they would be blamed.
The child was convinced that the glass bird was somehow “real”—an actual, living bird that had frozen in the cold—for were the feathers not precisely defined, snowy-white edged with pale gray; and the eyes lifelike, starkly open and staring, a milky orange with black pupils that seemed, uncannily, to possess sight?
So, Todd busied himself with “bringing the owl back to life”; fussing and crooning over it in the warmth of the kitchen, and rubbing it vigorously with his hands; until, after an hour or more, the “glass” owl did in fact revive, and came suddenly to life, to the terror of the servants. For now, the owl was a sharp-taloned bird, with a sharp beak; its snowy feathers edged with gray were wet, and smelled. Except that Todd gripped it tightly, the owl would have flapped its wings and risen into the air.
“Get it away! Get it away!”—so the servants begged, as Todd laughed at their discomfort; boasting that he’d heard the owl’s heartbeat as soon as he’d pried it out of the snow. Before anyone could stop him Todd ran back outside coatless and hatless to release the bird, which was now struggling in his hands, flinging it into the air crying, “Fly away! Fly away! Go to
her,
and bid her come back, Todd is waiting
for her
.”
The servants talked of nothing else but Master Todd’s “devil-owl” but not in the hearing of their employers. So, when Lenora saw that Todd’s hands were covered in fresh scratches, of which some were still bleeding, she was utterly astonished. “Todd, what has happened to you? What have you
done
?”
“Who? ‘Todd’ done—what?”
Lenora could get no straight or coherent answer from her son, whom she hurried to a bathroom, that she might wash his wounded hands, and affix bandages where she could, all the while sobbing beneath her breath, for indeed pain was Lenora Slade’s portion no less than Annabel Slade’s, she understood; even as the restless twelve-year-old squirmed and laughed at her.
“Fly away! Fly away! One day Todd will join you!”