The Accursed. Joyce Carol Oates

      Between the philosophy professor and the young man there had long existed a relaxed and companionable relationship, for their families were acquainted, and van Dyck had known Josiah since earliest childhood. In his classes, Josiah was enough of a good student to merit high grades; at times, even a brilliant and capricious student, but not one subject to troubling moods, or at least not in van Dyck’s company. The professor, a specialist in Kantian idealism, was middle-aged at this time, taciturn by nature, scholarly and earnest rather than “popular” with his students; Josiah did not feel nearly so comfortable with his own father, as he did with Pearce van Dyck.

      The great value of philosophy is, one cuts through subterfuge at once; one “goes for the jugular.” And so Josiah said, with no preamble, before he’d even taken a seat in van Dyck’s office, “Professor, what do you make of this?”—holding out for van Dyck to see, in both his hands, a gathering of broken and bruised lily petals, and a few stems and leaves, badly desiccated and pungent-smelling.

      Van Dyck stared at the lily-remnants, that seemed, in the unsparing sunshine that slanted through a tall window, to be rather a simulacrum of lilies than the actual flowers.

      “I think these are ‘calla lilies’—it’s hard to tell, they are so rotted. Where did you get them?”

      “I found them.”

      “ ‘Found them’—? Where?”

      “Beneath my feet, where I happened to be walking. I looked down—and there they were.”

      Josiah did not explain that he’d stepped on the calla lily petals when he’d left the Craven house, after the Sunday visit. Glancing down, and he’d seen the desiccated petals, and felt a shiver of recognition.

      The dead girl left these behind. The dead child is making a claim on us.

      Josiah’s motive for coming to Professor van Dyck was more than merely personal: for van Dyck was known, in addition to his scholarly pursuits, for his extensive amateur’s knowledge of botany and horticulture; the van Dyck garden, behind the family’s house at 87 Hodge Road, was one of the glories of Princeton’s West End.

      “I don’t recall where I found these, Professor van Dyck. But I wondered what you thought of them. How you would identify them.”

      Josiah spoke slowly, like one who is weighing his words with care.

      Van Dyck had spread the bruised petals, the broken stems and leaves, out on his desk. He peered at them, frowning. “The blooms seem aged—very old. Not an ordinary sort of decomposition but something else . . .” He lowered his head to smell, and recoiled at once with a look of consternation. “Why, the odor is vile.”

      “A sort of chemical odor, I thought. Not organic.”

      “Why, look! They are visibly decomposing . . .”

      Josiah and Pearce van Dyck observed the desiccated lilies crumbling to pieces, and then to dust. A few dried wisps of leaf remained, a single calyx, a near-nauseating odor of rot.

      “It must be the reaction of the strong sunlight on the lilies. Some sort of accelerated chemical process . . .”

      Van Dyck’s effort to explain the eerie phenomenon seemed to Josiah the very essence of the philosophical temperament: to wrench some sort of sense out of senselessness; to determine logic where there is none. Like the rhyming of poetry, such an effort gives an illusion of comfort.

      “Yes. A ‘chemical process.’ I think that must be so.”

      “But where did you say you found these? ‘Underfoot’?”

      “It was at the Craven house, Professor. On Sunday.”

      As Pearce van Dyck and his wife had been at the house also, it was natural for Josiah to explain; but, a moment later, he regretted having said these words, that had the effect of intriguing van Dyck, and whetting his curiosity.

      “But—no one had ‘funeral’ lilies there, I’m certain? And these are so aged . . .”

      “I was just wondering—what you might think. Since you are a horticulturalist.”

      Josiah, restless, was on his feet. In his face was an expression of excitement and fatigue—as if he had not slept well the previous night, but had been “tossing and turning” in the grip of Paradox.

      A predatory bird with a great sharp beak and vicious talons—Paradox. To be in its grip is to suffer, yet so exquisitely, one might mistake the experience for a kind of ecstasy.

      Josiah shook his head, to rid it of such cobwebs of thought. Ah, he was not himself this morning! He had not been “himself”—to a degree—since the episode at the old Craven house, when Grover Cleveland had collapsed; and Annabel had confided in him that the Clevelands’ dead child had come to her in dreams, and had beckoned to her.

      “Josiah, why don’t you sit down, please? You are in no hurry to leave, I assume?”

      Josiah, who hadn’t been aware that he was on his feet, and pacing about the office, could not think how to reply. Was he in a hurry? But to arrive—where?

      “There’s a sort of beating pulse in my head, Professor. If I become very still, it is more noticeable, and distracting.”

      Van Dyck squinted at him. He had been stooped over his desk, examining the crumbled remains of the calla lilies, and now looked up at Josiah, concerned.

      “I hope it wasn’t the smell of these flowers that has made you ill, Josiah. It’s fading now, but it doesn’t seem a natural smell . . .”

      “Well, Professor! Thank you! You have been very helpful and now—now—I’ll say good-bye.”

      “My dear Josiah,” van Dyck protested, “you aren’t leaving so soon, are you? Why don’t you sit down—we can talk about that extraordinary episode on Sunday—poor Grover Cleveland, quite raving, and out of his mind . . . There had been an old story of the Craven house being haunted by the deceitful André, bent on revenging himself on Major Craven. Yet, it seemed, Mr. Cleveland hadn’t seen the ghost of the executed spy but that of his poor daughter Ruth—what do you make of that?”

      “There are no ‘spirits’ in Christendom. That’s what I make of it.”

      Not quite rudely, Josiah walked away with an airy wave of his hand; and Pearce van Dyck was left behind, baffled that his young friend should be in so curious a mental state, over a handful of desiccated funeral flowers.

      Carelessly then Pearce brushed away most of the flower-debris, not noticing that some curled little petals, and fragments of a stem, remained in an opened copy of Spinoza’s Ethics, at the very beginning of Part IV, Of Human Bondage, or, of the Strength of the Emotions.

      CROSSING THE UNIVERSITY campus, at a rapid clip, his broad shoulders hunched in his tweed coat and his head slightly bowed, Josiah was intercepted near the steps of Chancellor Green by the president of the university, Woodrow Wilson, who called out familiarly to him, and who smiled with warmth as if Josiah were one of his family. With a sinking heart Josiah thought Waylaid! Damn.

      Of course Josiah did not continue on his way, as he’d have liked; instead, he paused to speak with Woodrow Wilson, or rather, to allow Woodrow Wilson to speak with him.

      Wilson was in the company of a stranger, to whom he introduced Josiah: a singularly ugly man Josiah thought him, with a flaccid skin, fish-belly-white, and close-set eyes of some intense though unnatural-seeming color like bronze; and a reptilian manner about the lips, his tongue quick-darting and moist, as he smiled an unctuous smile that Josiah found particularly offensive. Yet it was not possible to escape, for Woodrow Wilson insisted upon introducing the stranger to Josiah, and Josiah to the stranger, as if the exchange gave him inordinate pride.

      So it happened, Josiah Slade found himself forced to shake hands with “Axson Mayte,” here identified as a lawyer from Carnahan, Virginia, with an association with the Presbyterian Church, whose services, Wilson