The Accursed. Joyce Carol Oates

that Cleveland forgot that Ruth was dead, and had been buried; in a frenzy he shoved the window as high as it would go, leaning out, reaching his arms to her, begging her to come to him. Giving no thought for his own safety and trying, despite the handicaps of age and girth, to force himself through the open window, he cried, “Ruth! Dear Ruth! It is you! Do not step off—your Pappa begs you, darling—here!—here’s Pappa! Come to Pappa! O my poor darling! My little one! My angel! Do not step off! Come to Pappa’s arms, O do—”

      The phantom at the edge of the roof could not be seen by the others, evidently; yet, as they rushed into the room, the situation was instinctively grasped—at least, that Grover Cleveland was suffering a violent hallucination, and was trying to force himself out a narrow window, to his probable death on the ground below, if he was not restrained.

      So it was, the struggle ensued, which Josiah a moment later witnessed: the elderly rotund gentleman being wrestled to the floor by several persons including his wife, who threw aside her silken parasol, and hiked up her heavy skirts and petticoats, enjoining Cleveland, in a ringing voice, to cease his struggles at once: “Why, what is this! What can you mean! Dear husband, what can you mean!”

      “Frances, it’s Ruth—our daughter, Ruth! Look! She is beckoning to me—to us! Let me go, please—”

      “Ruth? What do you mean? Where?”—now Mrs. Cleveland was on the verge of hysteria, crouching at the opened window; but she seemed not to see any apparition on the roof, unless, by this time, the apparition had vanished.

      Soon then, held down against the hardwood floor, the raving man lapsed into a merciful faint; his plump, roughened face covered in sickly perspiration, and his breath stertorous and terrible to hear. His tight-starched collar was torn open by his rescuers, and his vest, and shirtfront; his face was sprinkled with water, and wiped with a cold compress. One of the surrey drivers was sent to fetch Cleveland’s physician Dr. Boudinot, who resided at Lilac Lane, that intersected with Hodge, and was not far from Rosedale; by the time the doctor arrived, the immediate danger to Cleveland’s life appeared to be past, though such a seizure did not bode well for the future, and Mrs. Cleveland tearfully begged the party that they should not spread the unhappy news.

      Of all of the party, only three others seemed to have “seen” or “sensed” the apparition, so far as I can determine.

      Eleven-year-old Todd Slade, Annabel’s and Josiah’s cousin, the son of Copplestone and Lenora Slade, had not actually witnessed Mr. Cleveland’s collapse, nor had he been allowed to enter the nursery afterward; yet, the excitable child would wake from nightmares for several nights in succession afterward, claiming that a girl-ghost was chasing him.

      Then there was the adamant testimony of Amanda FitzRandolph who insisted afterward that she had glimpsed a “shimmering efflorescence” of some sort on the roof, exactly where Cleveland had been pointing; but she could not have identified it as poor Ruth Cleveland for “wraiths so resemble one another, returning from the Other Side.”

      Less clearly, there appeared to have been a distinctive emotional reaction from Winslow Slade, who had entered the nursery after the others, when the stricken Mr. Cleveland had lost consciousness, yet who seemed to grasp the situation immediately: what it was outside the window that had “beckoned” to Mr. Cleveland, with so catastrophic a result.

      For, in the confusion of the moment, when help was being summoned, and Mrs. Cleveland was weeping loudly in distress, Winslow had tried to comfort her by saying it would be all right now, as “the spirit of your little daughter appears to have left us.”

      Though asked afterward by Josiah and Annabel if he’d seen the apparition, Winslow Slade said, curtly: “No. There are no ‘spirits’ in Christendom.”

      While in the company of the distressed others, Annabel had said very little; but when at last they were alone together, in the evening, at Crosswicks Manse, Annabel confided in Josiah: “Ruth, you say? He saw his daughter Ruth outside the window? Oh the poor child—you know, Josiah, I had rarely seen her, in life—but lately in dreams, since her death, Ruth has beckoned to me, too—I am so frightened why.”

ANGEL TRUMPET; OR, “MR. MAYTE OF VIRGINIA”

      It was just two days later, on the Princeton University campus, that Josiah Slade had an adventure of sorts of a significance he couldn’t have guessed at the time; though he felt its disagreeable nature and was chilled to the soul, as if sensing some of what lay ahead.

      His mission was to visit Professor Pearce van Dyck, a former philosophy teacher of his, whose office was on the second floor of the new Gothic building called Pyne, eventually to be known as East Pyne; and whose advice, or informed counsel, Josiah very much desired. Josiah recalled his undergraduate days at Princeton when he had flailed about in his studies, never quite knowing what he wanted to do: study ancient languages, including Hebrew and Aramaic, that he might read the Holy Scripture for himself, to satisfy the many questions raised by the King James translation, which his grandfather Slade had not been able to answer for him; or was he inclined to science—botany, biology, geology; or was he inclined to history—the blood-steeped soil of Europe, or the more virginal, though scarcely less bloodied, soil of the New World? As he had grown restless after a few weeks at West Point, so Josiah had been restless as an undergraduate, taking time off from his studies to “travel”—to “prowl about,” at times not unlike a common vagabond, under the spell of Jack London’s Klondike tales or, less desperately, the Mark Twain of Life on the Mississippi. (In some way not entirely explained, Josiah had earned a fair amount of money in the West; though the sum was being rapidly depleted, he did not yet have to depend upon his family to support him.)

      At Princeton, Josiah had been conscripted to play on the football team, and on the hockey and softball teams; he’d spent a few back-aching weeks on the crew team, practice-rowing in the chill dawn through spectral mists rising from Lake Carnegie with the consoling thought that such a cooperative sport was a rebuke to the exhibitionist athlete he so disliked, and recognized in himself. And Josiah had ignored a bid from the most exclusive eating–(and drinking)–club on Prospect Avenue, Ivy, without offering any explanation to his surprised, disappointed and disapproving club-brothers, other than a shrug of the shoulders: “One evening is fairly much all evenings, at Ivy; having sampled three and a half weeks of such evenings, I am satisfied that I have sampled them all.”

      There was a spirit of forced camaraderie among the Princeton boys—or as they wished to think of themselves, young men. As if nothing mattered so much as one another: to be respected, to be liked, to be admired, to be “popular.” Grades scarcely mattered—if you studied, you were mocked as a poler. A gentleman had no need of a grade beyond “C”—for a gentleman was not going to make his living by his wits, surely. And so you joined a club, or two clubs; or three. You went out for sports as others did, in an affable herd. But, as at West Point he would soon learn that marching in uniform was deeply boring, so too Josiah had learned at Princeton that any effort that reached no higher than the height of his classmates had not the power to engage him for very long.

      To please his father, he’d persevered at Princeton until after several years he was granted a B.A. degree. The sheepskin diploma he hid away at once, and may have lost.

      Such independence filled him with a reckless sort of elation—but then, he felt such a reaction of melancholy, he could not bear to be alone. And so he sought out his most sympathetic instructor, Pearce van Dyck, who had always welcomed him into his commodious office with its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, leather chairs and sofa, and a view, through leaded-glass windows, of the university “chapel”—large and impressive as any church.

      Josiah thought Professor van Dyck will speak frankly. Of all persons I know.

      So it happened, Josiah knocked on the opened door of van Dyck’s office, and was invited inside; Pyne Hall was agreeably bustling, and populated by undergraduates hurrying to lectures, or departing lectures in thunderous herds on the stairs, and no