The Accursed. Joyce Carol Oates

Church was coming to visit with Winslow Slade that day, and to enlist his support in the awkward matter of a “heresy trial” within the ranks of the Church.

      (Poor Grandfather! Annabel knew that he wanted very badly to be totally retired from his former life, yet fervently his “former life” pursued him!)

      Annabel knew little of such matters but understood that, through his many years of service in the Church, Reverend Winslow Slade had participated from time to time in such closed trials; for heresy was a terrible thing, and must be combated at the source, though such disagreeable matters upset him deeply. Josiah had told her that in such actions, their grandfather was not to be distinguished from any responsible Protestant clergyman of his day, charged with the mission that the “special character” of Anglo-Saxon Christianity be protected from “anarchist” assaults arising both within, and without, the Church.

      “Of course,” Annabel had said to her brother, in an undertone, so that no adult could hear, “these are not real trials—no one is imprisoned, or sentenced to death, I hope!”

      “Not in our time,” Josiah said. “Fortunately.”

      Annabel knew that, fierce as Protestants might be in their zealous protection of their Church, they were not nearly so fierce, or so bloodthirsty, as their Roman Catholic predecessors had been in the time, for instance, of the Inquisition; or the Thirty Years’ War, or the Crusades.

      So, judging the attractive stranger by his outward attire, and a certain air of good breeding in his manner, the innocently naïve Annabel Slade was led to believe that Axson Mayte was a gentleman of her own social station: a friend of her grandfather’s, in short.

      A profound misreading, as the historical record will show.

      VERY ODD, HOWEVER, Annabel was beginning to feel, how the stranger continued to hold the hand-sickle, at his side; now he’d turned to her, seeing her, yet without an air of surprise, as if he’d known she was there, observing him; he smiled, in a rapt sort of silence, as no gentleman would ever do, in fact; as if he and Annabel Slade had met by chance in a public place, or in some dimension in which the sexes might “meet” impersonally, like animals, with no names, no families—no identities. In that instant, Annabel felt both chilled and flushed with warmth; and somewhat faint; and had to resist the impulse to hide her (burning) face in the little bouquet of flowers she had picked, that the bold stranger would not stare so directly upon her with his penetrating gaze.

      A tawny-golden gaze it was, like a certain kind of beveled glass.

      Disturbing it was to her, that they had not been introduced, he had not said a word to her, yet the stranger smiled more insidiously at her, with thin, yet strangely sensual lips!

      I will ignore him. I will walk away, as if I were alone. We will be introduced at lunch, maybe—and if not, that can’t be helped.

      Yet Annabel failed to leave the garden, as she might have done, but only moved to another corner, where she reasoned she wouldn’t be so clearly observed by the strange bold visitor. Here was a lavish bed of wind-rippled daffodils that made her smile; for words of a favorite, memorized poem ran through her thoughts: “ ‘And then my heart with pleasure fills, and dances with the daffodils.’ ”

      In times of unease, excitement or dread, what comfort in rhyme!

      As poets of old well knew, and poets of our vulgar and atonal contemporary life seem to have forgotten.

      Unfortunately for Annabel, her brother Josiah wasn’t at home this morning, nor did anyone from the Manse appear to be taking notice.

      Annabel could not resist glancing back at the stranger with the hand-sickle. What a shock, he was still observing her.

      He is rude. I don’t like him. Dabney would not like him!

      If he is one of Grandfather’s associates, he must be older than he looks. His clothing is—old. Or, it may be—he is one of Father’s younger business associates—“brokers.”

      For his part, the stranger was drifting in Annabel’s direction, yet not very deliberately. As if, in some way, he were being drawn to her, by some (unconscious) motion or motive of Annabel herself.

      Why else, that smile? A smile of—was it recognition?

      Not wanting to betray her unease, and resisting the impulse to flee, Annabel continued picking flowers, though not liking it, how the narcissi broke between her fingers, and wetted them with a syrupy sort of liquid, she had to refrain from wiping on her skirt. And when she straightened, feeling just slightly light-headed, as if she were very hungry, she saw to her surprise that the stranger had somehow advanced close to her; he could not have been more than twelve feet away where, a moment before, Annabel would have sworn he was on the farther side of the garden.

      Why, he has moved in silence, seemingly without effort.

      Now, Annabel dared look at the visitor more openly: as she had surmised, he was in his early thirties perhaps; he was of more than medium height, as tall as her brother; slender in the shoulders, with a noble, well-shaped head, and very dark, silken, tight-curled hair. His skin may have been just slightly coarse, of a curious darkish-olive hue, that yet contained a sort of pallor, as if, beneath his robust masculine exterior, he was not entirely healthy. His eyes were large, and both slumberous and piercing; possessed of a fiery topaz glow that was not obscured, but the more enhanced, by the deep-shadowed sockets that enclosed them. The forehead was prominent, the eyebrows thick, of that hue of blackness of the raven’s wing; the teeth small, and pearly, and almost overly white, of a uniform regularity—except for one incisor, which jutted a half-inch below its fellows, to give an impression somewhat carnivorous.

      Though the stranger’s attire was in very good taste—a silk-and-woolen dark-blue suit, in a light texture; with wide-padded shoulders and a tight-waisted coat; white dress shirt, with silver cuff links, striped necktie, polished shoes—yet Annabel had begun to think the mysterious stranger was somehow foreign, exotic. A Persian prince perhaps, exiled in America; or, one of the Hebrew race—for is there not something most noble and melancholy about him? And his eyes—why, those are basilisk-eyes! *

      Descriptions of female beauty are tedious, and often unconvincing. Is a young woman really so beautiful as her admirers claim? Would Annabel Slade with her conventionally pretty, pleasing features—her shyly downcast eyes of blue, or deep violet; her perfectly shaped lips, untouched by cosmetics; her nose, the Roman nose of the Slades, but snubbed—have been so celebrated a Princeton beauty, were she the daughter and granddaughter of more ordinary Princetonians? What is the distinction, in fact, between beauty and prettiness—the one rare and austere, the other commonplace? It is frankly beyond my writerly powers to suggest the delicate and unstudied charm of Annabel Slade, unless by summoning the image of the narcissus—the most exquisite of spring flowers with its fragile, fluted petals and its miniature center, all but invisible at a glance, and its just-slightly-astringent perfume, in which resides the quicksilver essence of spring: fresh, unsullied, virgin.

      For if beauty is not virgin, it is despoiled. In the Princeton of 1905, such a sentiment was hallowed as a love and fear of the Protestant Almighty.

      The previous year, Annabel had “come out” at a number of balls and parties in Manhattan, Philadelphia, and Princeton; it was said of her, as perhaps it is said of many debutantes, that she was the most “beautiful” of the crop, along with being, to speak bluntly, one of the wealthiest. (The Slade wealth was in railroads, real estate, manufacturing, and banking; for some decades in the late 1700s and early 1800s, until high-minded Slades insisted upon divestiture, there was considerable revenue generated by the slave trade. Even divided among a number of heirs, it remained one of the great fortunes of the nineteenth century, having virtually doubled its worth in the era known as the Gilded Age. But Annabel, like her brother Josiah, gave little thought to the Slade fortune, not even to their probable inheritances which they took for granted as they took for granted the very air they breathed, which was not the coarse and smoke-sullied air of Trenton, New Brunswick, or Newark.)

      So famously sweet-tempered