The Accursed (71 page)

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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.

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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.

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As Annabel Slade’s surprising words are sure to puzzle the reader, as, initially, they puzzled me, I am obliged to note that, so far as I have been able to learn, the young woman had not ever personally gazed upon “foreign” or “exotic” individuals, whether female or male; but she had avidly read many books, of a more fancifully romantic cast than those read by her brother Josiah, namely novels by the Brontë sisters, of which her longtime favorite was
Wuthering Heights
as well as verse by Byron and Shelley; she had been told of a fabled colony of Russian and Polish Jews—the Alliance Israélite Universelle—which had settled in Woodbine, New Jersey, some years ago. (This settlement, too, had been threatened by zealots costumed in white sheets, to disguise their identities: very likely, these anonymous individuals were neighbors of the colony, as well as local law enforcement officers. A cross was burned, as a warning; when the warning was not obeyed, the main house of the Alliance Israélite Universelle was set on fire the following night, and its inhabitants routed into the wintry dark with what fates awaiting them, I do not know—the incident, or incidents, was not recorded in any detail in newspapers of the era.)

As for the basilisk reference—how perverse that a young, virginal girl from a highly sheltered background should seize upon so unlikely, and so ugly, an image; for the lizard of the genus
Basiliscus
resides in the more tropical zones of the Americas, and not in central New Jersey. Yet, the other day, while examining a carton of aged and mildewed books in my study, I came upon
The Castle of Kashmir
—a child’s book published by Lippincott Publishers, 1884, that had once belonged to Annabel Slade and her brother Josiah; the title page being inscribed with both their names. (It was a wild stroke of good luck, that, at an estate sale in Hopewell, I was able to buy this carton of books, among other prized items, for a mere eight dollars!) On the cover of this much-worn little picture book there is a (faded, but still stirring) illustration of a young knight on his steed, doing battle with a legendary species of basilisk, or dragon, possessed of cruel talons and teeth, and fiery breath, and eyes of glaring topaz: the very stare of Axson Mayte; as Axson Mayte is the very image, in corporeal form, of the demonic—wholly unguessed-at, at this time, by poor Annabel.

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This quote from Teddy Roosevelt’s letter to his Secretary of State John Hay was not, to be precisely accurate, a matter of public record in April 1905 and would not become known to historians until years after his death in 1919.

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The Clevelands remain a fascinating couple, seven decades later. Grover Cleveland, twenty-eight years older than his wife, was reputed to have first glimpsed her as an infant; after the death of her father, who was one of Cleveland’s oldest friends, Cleveland became the guardian of the eleven-year-old girl to whom, hardly a decade later, when she was an undergraduate at Wells College for Women, he proposed. At twenty-one, Frances was the youngest First Lady in history, as she remains the youngest to this day. The Clevelands had five children, of whom the firstborn, Ruth, died of a childhood illness in 1904, at the age of thirteen. Growing up in Princeton, I saw Mrs. Cleveland often—that is, as a widow—for her corpulent husband did not long survive the vicissitudes of the Crosswicks Curse, though an innocent victim of the scourge, it seems. My mother was a friendly acquaintance of Mrs. Cleveland both before and following her second marriage, at the age of forty-nine, to an archaeology professor at Princeton University; I wish I could claim to having spoken with her but I have only blurred memories of this striking dark-haired and dark-complected woman, rumored (by female detractors in Princeton) to have been a distant relative of an Indian chief in the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma!

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The Jersey Devil is a legendary creature whose natural habitat is the Pine Barrens of South Jersey, reputedly a seven-foot predator bird/reptile with a long neck and a long, very sharp beak and sharp talons. Historically, the Jersey Devil is said to be the thirteenth child of a witch named Mother Leeds, or, in some documents, Mother Spags, living in the Pine Barrens at the time of the Revolutionary War. (Yes, it is a coincidence, this repetition of the name “Spags”—the sort of awkwardness historians encounter more often than the layman would suspect. But there is no “meaning” to most coincidences, as I am sure there is no meaning here.) The Jersey Devil has been sighted hundreds of times in the twentieth century alone, and has been the object of many amateur searches; the Devil leaves behind enormous bird-feet prints in snow and mud, and mounds of scat so vile-smelling, dogs have been known to vomit, even to convulse and die, that have come imprudently too near. In 1909, the Jersey Devil was sighted in numerous areas in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, near the New Jersey border; most frequently in Camden, where, according to newspaper reports, the Devil “attacked” a group of worshippers at the First Methodist Church of Camden; and later, in another part of Camden, a social club. (By which is meant a gentlemen’s private club? Or, perhaps, “social club” was a journalist’s euphemism, indicating a tavern or saloon.) Camden police officers allegedly fired upon the Devil at this second sighting but the Devil escaped by taking flight over the Delaware River, resulting in such panic in South Jersey, schools and government offices were officially shut down for several days, until it appeared that the Jersey Devil had returned to the desolate swamp of the Pine Barrens. At the time of this writing, in 1984, the Jersey Devil endures still in legend, but has not been sighted, except by unreliable children and adolescents, in some time. For a detailed history, see
The Jersey Devil
by James F. McCloy and Ray Miller, Jr. (Middle Atlantic Press, 1976).

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It is a popular misconception, that President Abraham Lincoln said, upon being introduced to (the very petite, and very unprepossessing) Mrs. Stowe, “Here is the little lady who started the great war!” Thus the reader is made to think that a single individual, in this case a female novelist, might help direct the course of history for the better. Thus the reader is made to smile, as one might smile seeing an affable dog staggering upright on his hind legs. The historian is one who must expose and correct such misconceptions, in the service of authenticity.

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The popular Neftel treatment for nervous invalids involved a complex electrical mechanism by which “galvanic currents” were applied to the spinal column of the invalid, resulting in therapeutic shocks, spasms, or actual convulsions; the theory behind the radical treatment being that both the “nervous” and the “muscular” systems of the body operated on the basis of transmitted electrical messages which must, in afflicted persons, be radically redirected. Often it happened that the invalid exhibited some progress as a result of the therapy; then again, she frequently relapsed, & grew sicker, & more “high-strung” with the passage of time, lapsing finally into paralysis. Adelaide McLean Burr, the reader will be relieved to hear, is to be spared this tragic fate.

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That is, with the spirit of McKinley. For William McKinley, twenty-fifth President of the United States, had died in Buffalo, New York, at the hand of the self-proclaimed anarchist and admirer of Emma Goldman, Leon Czolgosz, on September 6, 1901; though police tried assiduously to tie the anarchist female to the assassination, they could discover no evidence linking the two; nor did informers step forward, to involve Goldman, who, nonetheless, refused to denounce the assassin. At this time, Teddy Roosevelt was vice president and was quickly sworn into office. It is not recorded that any assassin had ever threatened Grover Cleveland, during or following his term as President.