The Accursed. Joyce Carol Oates

profanities, still more obscenities, of the sort undergraduate carousers scrawled on walls in white chalk, for all to see in the bright daylight, truly shocked her, as if she were personally attacked. (Though, fortunately, Annabel had but the vaguest notion of what these crude words and expressions actually meant.)

      As the naïve young woman had but a vague notion of what it might mean to exchange such glances, and be the recipient of such smiles, with a man she had not glimpsed before this hour.

      In addition, Annabel was devoutly religious. She could not have clearly stated what set her Presbyterian faith apart from other Protestant faiths, or, except in the most obvious terms, how it was to be distinguished from Roman Catholicism, an old and much-feared enemy; though she had long outgrown the childish notion that Winslow Slade was God, she cherished in her heart the fervent belief that her grandfather was one of the chosen few in his generation; certainly, Grandfather had been the instrument by which countless individuals, many of them grave sinners, had been brought to Jesus Christ and to salvation. Unlike the more strident “outspoken” female—including Annabel’s friend Wilhelmina Burr—Annabel would never have wished to discuss with the “free thinkers” among her Princeton circle such fashionable issues as whether the Bible is literally, or figuratively, true; or whether it is revelation, or history. Those yet more disturbing new theories springing from Darwinists, Marxists, Bolsheviks, Anarchists, and other atheist-ideologies, were utterly perplexing to Annabel, who could not imagine why anyone wished to argue for such beliefs, that so lacked kindness and comfort. In her family it was considered unseemly for women to concern themselves with such matters—a very harsh judgment: “unladylike.” In the words of the poet—

      Be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever!

      —embroidered on one of Annabel’s hand-stitched pillows; a sentiment that has not lessened, in my opinion, with the passage of years.

      Annabel had been an excellent scholar at the Princeton Academy for Girls, as at the two-year collegiate Kingston Academy for Women, in nearby Kingston, New Jersey; her strongest subjects were poetry, art, and calligraphy; in her fantasies of an independent career, she had liked to imagine herself as an artiste of some sort, designing children’s book covers for instance, or creating original art for children; or, more ambitiously, illustrating her own verse in small, exquisitely designed books like those by Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Mary Anne Sadlier, and the wonderfully mysterious and cryptic Emily Dickinson, who had died in 1886, the year of Annabel’s birth—(Annabel’s favorite of these poets, though she understood that Dickinson’s verse was considered “rough” and lacking “feminine sentiment” by the literary establishment). She had not liked math, science, history—“So hobbled by facts! And facts are the least revealing, of any aspect of our lives.”

      Yet, Annabel had received reasonably high grades in these disliked subjects, for, lacking in aptitude as she was, she was yet more capable than the majority of her girl-classmates.

      On this weekday morning in April, Annabel was not showily dressed; though she wore beneath her clothes, on her already slender body, a straight-front corset tightened to make her small waist appear smaller still, so that she could scarcely breathe; this cruel restraining undergarment being mandated for her, since the age of fourteen when it was perceived by her uneasy elders that she was becoming womanly in the bosom and hips.

      Though it was not a rainy day, Annabel was wearing a “habit-back,” or “rainy-day” skirt of pale blue flannel-and-cotton; a skirt fashionable at the time, that dropped to shoe-top length, ideal for rainy days but proper enough for casual wear at home. Her silken white blouse sported stylish puff sleeves, with tight cuffs, and as many as twenty-five mother-of-pearl buttons at the front; her little bolero jacket was pale yellow quilted cotton; her straw hat, prudently worn in the sun, was trimmed with a green satin ribbon tied beneath the chin. Since Annabel would be seeing her fiancé Dabney Bayard later in the day, with the assistance of one of the younger Negro maids she had fashioned her silken hair into a sleek pompadour and numerous small curls. Annabel’s hair was a fair brown, that might appear blond, or even silvery, in certain lights; it was held in place by ornamental amber combs that had once belonged to her grandmother Oriana, a woman departed this life long before Annabel had been born.

      As her fair complexion was too delicate to brave even the rays of an April sun, Annabel kept the rim of her straw hat strategically lowered over her eyes; yet it must be presumed that Axson Mayte, staring so frankly at her, as at an exotic animal-specimen on display, could see how arrestingly pretty she was, and how fragile, like the very narcissi she held in her hands.

      Suddenly there issued out of the wind-rippled flowers at Annabel’s feet a faint hissing whisper—Annabel, Annabel! In her confusion, Annabel thought It is Grandmother Oriana. She is worried about her amber combs, she regrets leaving them for me.

      (This was a curious thought, since Annabel had not known her grandmother, who’d died many years before her birth; nor had she known her grandfather’s second wife, Tabitha.)

      Yet, a moment later Annabel had forgotten the whisper. So distracted was she by the stranger in her grandfather’s garden, she couldn’t seem to concentrate. That she had not turned away from the man with the hand-sickle, and walked quickly up to the house, as she had every opportunity to do, seemed to encourage him for, smiling still, the tip of his pink tongue darting at his lips, he stepped forward again in a single gliding stride, now less than five feet from her.

      Now, surely, he would speak to her?—but he did not.

      Annabel lifted her bouquet of flowers and in a kind of child-miming gesture indicated that the visitor should note her task, and its urgency, and not detain her any longer; aloud she murmured, for the visitor to hear, or not—“I have tarried too long, already.” For overhead the sunny sky was becoming riddled with rain clouds; a giant thumb and finger pinched shut the sun. Yet for some reason, as if she were paralyzed, Annabel didn’t turn away; and again the hissing Annabel, Annabel! seemed to rise from the wind-buffeted petals of the flowers at her feet.

      Then—in the literal blink of an eye!—there stood the gentleman before her, now just twelve inches from her; for now he did seem like one of Winslow Slade’s emissary-gentlemen, on a churchly mission that would be kept secret from the rest of the family, who were but lay-Presbyterians in the faith. Out of giddy nervousness Annabel may have murmured “H-Hello” or “G-Good morning”—which had the immediate effect of unlocking the gentleman’s silence at last. For now he bowed a second time, with an eager sort of stiffness, and announced that his name was “Axson Mayte, of Charleston, South Carolina”—“an associate of Winslow Slade’s”—“overcome with rapture, chère mademoiselle, at the prospect of making your acquaintance.”

      At this, Annabel stammered her name, for she could not think of a polite way of avoiding it: “I am—Dr. Slade’s granddaughter—Annabel Slade . . .”

      The visitor seized Annabel’s small hand, and bent as if to bestow a kiss upon it, in the German manner—hardly more than a sociable gesture, with no actual touching of the lips to the back of the hand, yet Annabel felt the imprint of a considerable, impassioned kiss; she was certain, she’d felt the imprint of the snaggle-tooth incisor against her sensitive skin. And she’d smelled the stranger’s breath—harsh and dry as ashes.

      In that instant, the very marrow of her bones seemed to shiver, and the satin tie beneath her chin felt dangerously tight, like the long straight-front corset, too tightly laced that morning by Harriet, the frowning Negro girl who seemed both fond of her young white-skinned charge, and resentful of her. Half-fainting Annabel yet clearly thought—Must I pay now for my vanity! O God have mercy.

      If Axson Mayte of Charleston, South Carolina, had taken note of Annabel’s shudder of distress, he gave no sign; for he was a smooth-mannered gentleman, with his sharp deep-set eyes and sidelong glances, that might have been as ironic as they were yearning. He proceeded to cut for Annabel, with his borrowed hand-sickle—(the blade of which was wickedly sharp, Annabel saw with a shiver)—a dozen or more fresh flowers: daffodils, miniature iris, star-of-Bethlehems, narcissi—which he then made a gallant ceremony of presenting to her, with another grave bow.

      “Oh!