The Accursed. Joyce Carol Oates

deserted at this hour of the night; and past Bank, and Chambers; taking note of the forlorn cries of nighthawks, that made his skin shiver; and of the gauzy-masked moon overhead, like a face glimpsed out of the past. At the shadowy junction of Nassau and Stockton there came noisily a handsome ebony brougham drawn by a matched team of horses, that swung smartly past Woodrow to continue along Bayard Lane.

      Woodrow recognized the carriage as belonging to ex-President Grover Cleveland. Quickly he calculated that the Clevelands had been dining at the palatial home of the Morgans on Hibben Road; they were returning to Westland, their own palatial home on Hodge Road, absurdly named for Andrew Fleming West, who was an intimate friend of Grover Cleveland. (Who can comprehend such perversities? Woodrow would not even try.)

      “O God! If I am seen! They will know.”

      Fortunately, Frances Cleveland was so absorbed with her fretting, elderly and obese husband, who was suffering a bout of dyspepsia following a lavish four-hour dinner, that the usually sharp-eyed woman failed to notice Woodrow Wilson’s shadowy figure on the sidewalk; if she had recognized him, Mrs. Cleveland would have guessed at once that he was on a mission to Crosswicks Manse, and the tale would have spread through the village of Princeton by teatime of the following day.

      Note. As a disinterested and fair-minded historian it isn’t my place to delve into old local feuds and squabbles; to stir up old misunderstandings, slanders, and hatreds, dating back to the turn of the century; to evoke once again a time in our peaceful community in which everyone, not excepting schoolchildren, felt obliged to take sides in the dispute between Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Fleming West; and a good portion of the congregation of the First Presbyterian Church chose not to speak to the remainder.

      I hope I won’t compromise my objectivity as an historian, as to whether Woodrow Wilson ought to have been obeyed, as he wished, in every particular concerning major issues at the university; or whether his opponent, the strong-willed dean of the graduate school, ought to have had his way. (My van Dyck relatives were said to favor Woodrow; my Strachan relatives, Andrew West.) In any case the reader should know that Woodrow Wilson’s campaign for complete control over the university, as it parallels his campaign for complete control over the issue of whether the United States would go to war with Germany in 1917, when he was President, is a subordinate issue here, set beside the domestic tragedies to befall the leading Princeton families.

      —CROSSWICKS MANSE, the home of the Slades, has not been properly described; only just the interior of Winslow Slade’s library.

      As male readers have a predilection for military history, so female readers have a predilection for learning about houses, furnishings, and ornamentation. Yet I hope that both sexes are intrigued, to some degree, by the Slades’ residence on Elm Road, as fine a house as one could discover in the Princeton vicinity, including even the Henry Morgan estate on Hibben Road and the Carlyle estate on the Great Road.

      There was no more splendid example in all of New Jersey of the architectural style of early Georgian, in combination with the newer Palladian, the novelty being that the Manse was built along these lines reflecting classical Renaissance architecture at a time when, in England, the influence was yet very rare. The history of the Manse is most impressive, dating back to the early 1700s when one Bertram Slade of Margate, Massachusetts, purchased a large tract of land from William Penn in a region known as the “wilds of West New Jersey”; and encompassing that time when one of the great battles of the American Revolution was fought in Princeton, in 1777—indeed, scarcely one mile from the Manse itself in open parkland now designated Battle Park.

      What must it have been for our young people, Josiah and Annabel Slade, and how subtly and magically did it shape their lives, to have spent their childhood at Crosswicks Manse!—in that house of countless rooms, spacious courtyards, and splendid vistas opening onto terraces, and gardens, and mirror-like ponds. (As a boy, Josiah tried to count the rooms of Crosswicks Manse, but ended with a different number each time—twenty-six, twenty-nine, thirty-one; nor did Annabel, the more patient and exacting of the two, fare much better. “It is like a dream, living here,” Annabel said, “except the dream isn’t my own but another’s.”)

      It was in the Manse, for instance, that the fate of the young Republic was determined: for such illustrious men as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, General Nathanael Greene, Baron Steuben, “Light Horse Harry” Lee, Benedict Arnold, the Chevalier de la Luzerne, Don Juan de Mirailles, and many another figure of history, frequently met. If I had more space I would like nothing better than to dramatize the “unspeakable insult” endured by the Slade family when, in 1777, the British General Cornwallis seized the great house for his private headquarters and proved so little the gentleman that, when at last driven away by patriotic Continentals, he encouraged his soldiers to loot, desecrate, and burn the magnificent house. Ah, if he had only lived then!—so Josiah thought, as a boy. He would have sought out the cowardly general himself and demanded satisfaction—that is, insisted upon a duel—for the personal nature of the outrage.

      Yes, it is so—Josiah, born in 1881, in the waning years of the nineteenth century, naively yearned for a lost world in which, he believed, his courage and manhood might have been better tested, than at the present time; Josiah’s most impassioned readings were of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly Novels, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, any and all treatments of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and such homegrown American romances as Washington Irving’s Sketch Book and James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, his favorite being The Last of the Mohicans which he had virtually memorized by the age of twelve; more recently, he had fallen under the spell of Jack London’s Tales of the Klondike and The Call of the Wild, and Owen Wister’s The Virginian.

      “To be born ‘too late’—is it possible? Or am I born at just the right time, unknowingly?”

      Yet, God must have smiled upon the Slades of 1777: for damage to the beautiful house was minimal, in the end. Fires started by Cornwallis’s men soon smoldered out, in a cloudburst of autumnal rain as if indeed, as the Continental army was given to believe, God was on the rebels’ side.

      The Slades took particular pride in the fact that when the Continental Congress met in Princeton, in 1782, under the presidency of Elias Boudinot, it was at Crosswicks Manse that quite a few of the representatives stayed, and all of the representatives dined, before their formal congress in Nassau Hall. So the prized local legend, that Crosswicks Manse was the first “White House” of the Republic.

      It cannot be denied that the vision of the luminous Manse, even by partial moonlight, had the force of intimidating Woodrow Wilson, as he made his way up the graveled drive, beneath overarching white oaks; as he approached the side door, to Winslow Slade’s office, the troubled man swallowed hard, and shaped his lips in an inaudible prayer—Have mercy on me, O God: I am Your humble servant seeking only how best to serve You.

      —TO THE RESPECTFUL titles in Winslow Slade’s library on the eve of Ash Wednesday, 1905, there should be added others, not alphabetized, but stacked on tables, that failed to capture Woodrow Wilson’s full attention: the unscholarly but much-perused Phrenological Studies of Dr. Phineas Lutz; Beyond the Gates of Consciousness of Stanislav Zahn; Heaven and Hell of Emanuel Swedenborg; and that rare and arresting treatise in quarto Gothic, the manual of a “forgotten church”—the Vigiliae mortuorum secundum chorum ecclesiae maguntinae; still more, volumes in French, by the controversial Jean-Martin Charcot, and a recent copy of The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research of Cambridge, Mass., in which an essay by a founding member of the Society, Professor William James of Harvard, appeared under the title “Is There a ‘Natural’ Barrier to Consciousness?”

      Yes, the reader is correct in wondering why, when Charcot and James were mentioned by Woodrow Wilson, Winslow Slade remained silent and did not suggest in any way that he was familiar with the work of either man.

      —WINSLOW SLADE’S PREOCCUPATION on the night in question.

      It was Dr. Slade’s custom to dine with his family before eight o’clock, then to retire to the bachelor solitude of his library, which few in the family ever visited; nor did Dr. Slade encourage visits from the children who, when young, would have poked and pried