The Accursed. Joyce Carol Oates

of decades ago, and, of course, the invaluable Gutenberg Bible, one of but forty-eight copies remaining in all of the world, of that first monumental printing. (That Dr. Slade’s copy of the Gutenberg Bible was not complete scarcely diminished its worth, for very few of the original copies remained undamaged by the incursions of centuries.)

      Often, Winslow absorbed himself in fireside reading, of newer books (like those listed above); more recently, in the late winter of 1905, he had taken up the task of revising his sermons for a collection which a Philadelphia publisher of theological texts had pressed him into completing. (“Why would anyone want to read my old sermons?” Winslow asked wryly; and the publisher rejoined, “The mere name ‘Winslow Slade’ will assure quite a sale in New Jersey and the Mid-Atlantic states generally.”) When this task proved too boring, Winslow turned with more enthusiasm to his translations of one or another book of the Apocrypha, upon which he’d been laboring for years, with the assistance of a Hebrew scholar at the seminary; his particular interest was “The Epistle of Jeremy” and the Books of Esdra and Tobit, and, in the New Testament, those curious gospels attributed to Thomas, Matthias, and Judas.

      “Of all Biblical figures, surely Judas is the most misunderstood, as he is the most condemned!”—so Winslow believed.

      For it had always seemed evident to him, Jesus adored his faithless Judas above the other disciples.

      As Winslow was frequently plagued by insomnia, but resisted taking the myriad “home remedies” favored in great doses by his young friend Woodrow Wilson, out of a fear of clouding his thoughts, so he reserved for the early hours of the morning his transactions with his journal: not a single volume but more than a dozen eight-by-twelve “scribblers.”

      The reader will naturally think that I have had recourse to Dr. Slade’s journals—would that were so! It is a tragic fact, all volumes of the journal were destroyed, with most of Winslow Slade’s personal papers, in a bizarre act of self-mortification that seemed to have occurred in late May 1906, shortly before Dr. Slade’s death.

      —WOODROW WILSON’S MYRIAD physical ailments.

      Why people are, or were, so intensely interested in Woodrow Wilson’s panorama of ailments, as in the ailments of U.S. Presidents generally, I am not so certain. It is not to be attributed to mere morbidity, I am sure—perhaps rather more a wish to peer into the private lives of exalted others, to compare with our more meager estates.

      In addition to what I have already mentioned, and to reiterate—among Woodrow’s medical complaints were gastric crises, raging headaches, neuritis, nervous hyperesthesia, arrhythmic heartbeat, “night sweats” and “night-mares,” and the like. In some quarters, as early as Woodrow’s first years as president of Princeton University, the question was raised, if the man was “entirely” sane, given his intense preoccupations and obsessions with enemies real and imagined; and his frantic need never to compromise.

      It had been a passionate belief of the Campbells of Argyll, that battle was preferable to peace, if that peace was determined by compromise.

      There was not a conspiracy exactly, but certainly an understanding, among Woodrow’s intimates, that talk of the man’s ailments should be curtailed. With much justification, Woodrow felt that if it became generally known that his health was erratic, confidence in his leadership might be undermined.

      In fact it was impressive how Dr. Wilson soared above such shackles of the spirit, frequently climbing out of his sickbed to attend to university affairs, or to travel by rail to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, even so far as Chicago and St. Louis, to give a speech. “The flesh may be weak,” Woodrow quipped, “but the spirit is willing.” As a precocious young boy Woodrow had sent away for a mail-order chart depicting the postures and declamatory gestures of classical oratory, in order to learn the art of public speaking; as a result, he had unwittingly become imprinted with a set of mechanical gestures, and in times of stress and fatigue he was likely to lapse into them, as his students had soon discovered, in his lecture courses at Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, and Princeton. (In those days, students suggested discontent and boredom by shuffling their feet. How Woodrow had come to dread, and to abhor, that shuffling sound, as of brooms being swept along floors, maddeningly; and when students were reprimanded by university proctors at Princeton for shuffling their feet during chapel sermons, Woodrow was not at all sympathetic, and refused to mitigate expulsions from the university.)

      Yet, audiences felt positive about him: for he was so very earnest, and so idealistic. He had hoped to be loved by multitudes, he said, but, failing love, to evoke admiration, awe, and even fear in audiences was not such a bad thing.

      Sow yourself in every field of the world’s influence; knead yourself into its every possible loaf of soul-nourishing bread. Be vitalizing wheat, indeed—hide not your talents. So Woodrow’s father Joseph Ruggles Wilson had warmly advised him.

      —THE KU KLUX KLAN lynching in Camden, New Jersey, on March 7, 1905: had Woodrow Wilson entirely forgotten about this, and his impetuous kinsman’s request, when he visited Winslow Slade; or had Woodrow Wilson, in the heat of his greater concern, simply brushed all thought of the terrible incident from his mind?

      And did Winslow Slade know of the incident?

      Could Winslow Slade not have known of it?

NARCISSUS

      Excuse me—hello?”

      On a sun-warmed morning in early spring she saw him, at a little distance: a man of indeterminate age, his face turned from her, who seemed at first to be one of her grandfather’s gardener’s assistants, as he was gripping in his gloved hand a small hand-sickle, cruelly hooked and gleaming in the sun; and, at his feet, stricken flowers, presumably past their prime, and a heaping of last-year’s grasses, that had been cut down.

      Annabel had never seen this man before, she was sure. Though often there came to Crosswicks Manse, to visit with Grandfather Slade, individuals not known to her, of significance.

      She supposed that the stranger, not in gardening attire but in formal, just slightly old-fashioned clothes, like clothes Winslow Slade had worn decades ago, was one of her grandfather’s visitors: possibly a Presbyterian minister, or seminarian, who’d wandered out of Dr. Slade’s shadowed library to breathe in the freshness of the April morning; and, out of restlessness perhaps, had decided to try his hand here, with the sharp little sickle.

      “Hello! Are you a friend of Grandfather’s?”

      There was laughter in Annabel’s voice, as there was so often a light sort of laughter, or joyousness, in her face.

      The reader must not think that nineteen-year-old Annabel Slade was accustomed to addressing strange men, even in her grandfather’s garden; she was not a bold girl, still less a brash girl; but some sort of childish elation had come over her, on this perfect April morning, with her diamond engagement ring—(square-cut, fourteen carats, surrounded by miniature rubies, an heirloom of the Bayard family)—sparkling on the third finger of her slender left hand, in the sun. When Woodrow Wilson had spoken critically of “headstrong” young women born in the North, lacking the natural graciousness of his daughter Margaret, as of his wife, Ellen, both Southern-born, he would certainly not have included Annabel Slade in this category!

      Strange it seemed to Annabel, yet not alarming, that the mysterious visitor didn’t seem to hear her, or to acknowledge her—“Hel-lo?”—as with childlike persistence she called out to him again, though shyly too, smiling as her mother might smile, or her grandmother Slade, in the feminine role of welcoming a guest to the house.

      On this April morning several weeks after Woodrow Wilson’s visit to Crosswicks Manse, Winslow Slade’s beloved granddaughter Annabel was picking flowers for the dining room of Crosswicks Manse. In her hands was a small gathering of jonquils, Grecian windflowers, daffodils and narcissi—how fragrant, narcissi!—almost, Annabel felt light-headed. It seemed probable to her, this stranger would be dining with them at lunch, which gave to her task an added urgency.

      She