The Accursed. Joyce Carol Oates

concerning Wilson’s feud with Andrew West, the dean of the Graduate School, and considered the issue entirely trivial, smiled courteously and murmured a friendly/perfunctory response, eager to be on his way; but Dr. Wilson adroitly detained him, by laying a paternal hand on his arm, and inquiring after his family—the health of his parents, and his sister and young cousin, and his grandfather Winslow.

      How predictable, these social exchanges! How numbingly repetitive! And yet, how to escape them?—Josiah had a vision of himself breaking free, and running out to Nassau Street.

      That is madness. From madness, no turning back.

      Dr. Wilson was clearly eager to talk; there would be no easy escape. Despite the presence of the stranger from Virginia, whose gaze was fixed upon Josiah with a discomforting intensity, Wilson began to ask particularly after Annabel, for he knew that Josiah and his sister were unusually close; he said he’d heard a “most distressing, and curious” report the previous day regarding the health of Mr. Cleveland, and wondered if Josiah knew anything about the incident.

      Discreetly, Josiah said he did not. No.

      Discreetly, Josiah would have excused himself and slipped away, except that Woodrow Wilson detained him with a hand lightly on his arm; all the while smiling at the young man, with the familial warmth of Pearce van Dyck, yet with something more intense and more compelling beneath, a subtle sort of coercion. The conversation flailed about like a small bird in a large cage, as Wilson tried also to draw in “Mr. Mayte.”

      (How loathsome this “Mayte” struck Josiah!—his loathsomeness had little to do with mere physical ugliness, for such did not usually offend Josiah, but with the man’s fawning, craven, yet presuming manner, and the euphonious nature of his voice; even the inappropriate sportiness of his clothes—for, though he was Woodrow Wilson’s age or more, with a squat, stocky build, he wore a costume suitable for a Princeton undergraduate: a brick-colored blazer with wide-padded shoulders, and a white shirt and narrow dark tie; peg-top trousers, and circular-toed shoes, and a cap resembling a baseball cap set rakishly on his head. It would not have surprised Josiah to see “Mayte” with an eating-club insignia in his lapel, so absurdly did he try to emulate an undergraduate. When Axson Mayte smiled it was to reveal yellowed teeth of which one, an incisor, hooked a good half-inch below its fellows.

      Yet, to Josiah’s shrewd eye, the most repellent touch was the delicate white narcissus worn in Mayte’s lapel, that had begun to turn brown, and to wither.

      Though Annabel was admiring of the Wilson daughters Margaret, Jessie, and Eleanor, and always spoke in the most exalted terms of President Wilson, Josiah had never felt comfortable in the man’s presence, for he thought him pompous, and grasping, and ambitious, and far too interested in the Slade family. (Wilson would run for a major political office one day, Josiah believed. And he would want Winslow Slade’s public blessing, as well as some private cash.)

      It did not help Josiah’s uneasy feeling about Woodrow Wilson that, some years ago, when he’d been a young boy of about ten, and already a very good softball player, he’d overheard Wilson say to his father, Augustus, that he greatly envied him his manly son; for, as fortune would have it, he had only girls; and the venerable Wilson name was in danger of being lost. (“Yes, your Josiah is the child I would have wanted, if God had seen fit.”)

      Now, in Axson Mayte’s presence, Woodrow Wilson brought up the subject of Annabel’s wedding; he could not resist saying how pleased he was, that Jessie would be a bridesmaid; and all of Princeton was anticipating the happy event. Hearing this, Axson Mayte brightened, and said in a buttery Southern drawl to Josiah, “Why, I had not realized that you are Annabel Slade’s brother!—let me shake your hand again.”

      This was so ridiculous a request, Josiah would have drawn away in irritation; but Axson Mayte quickly reached out to shake Josiah’s hand a second time. Josiah felt a current of cold run up his arm.

      Fortunately, the bell of Old North began to sound. Within seconds undergraduate men swarmed along the path, many of them wearing oddly shaped hats, the arcane insignia of one or another club; there were sophomores “hazing” hapless-looking freshmen; in the roadway, bicyclists sped past. Josiah was able to make his excuses though Woodrow Wilson called after him, almost wistfully—“Please say hello to your grandfather for me, will you? And—of course—your mother . . .”

      Hurrying toward Nassau Street, where a stream of horse-drawn carriages and motor vehicles passed, Josiah couldn’t resist glancing back over his shoulder to see the tall thin ministerial figure of Woodrow Wilson beside the squat figure of Axson Mayte—both men gazing after him and engaged in conversation, Josiah hated to think, about him.

      Annabel Slade’s brother!—so that contemptible creature had called Josiah. What right had he to make so casual a reference to Annabel, as if he knew her?

      Did he know her? But—how?

      So shaken was Josiah by this unpleasant meeting, that grated against his sensitive nerves like a fingernail against a chalkboard, he began to feel faint; it was a sensation he’d had in the Craven house, as he’d stared at the fallen and terrified Grover Cleveland, and felt the hairs at the back of his neck stir in a kind of animal sympathy with the old man, that such horrors were imminent in his life, too.

      Suddenly, Josiah Slade doubted his strength to walk back to the Manse; and felt obliged to catch the Johnson trolley off Witherspoon, amid a gaggle of chattering women and schoolchildren; and, at the rear, dark-skinned workmen and laborers, some of whom were carrying lunch pails, who glanced up at him with veiled eyes, and faces emptied of expression.

      “Hello! Room for one more?”—so Josiah took his seat among the men, at the very rear of the trolley; hoping to relax among them, as he could not relax elsewhere; and trying to take no note that, with his arrival in their midst, the men had abruptly ceased talking.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: PRINCETON SNOBBERY

      In our egalitarian American society, it is considered a kind of evil to feel superior to other Americans; though the lower strata of all human societies yearn to feel superior to other, yet lower, strata, still it is sacrosanct to pretend that this is not so; that snobbery, in all its forms, is aberrant as well as evil.

      This may be a convenient time for me to provide to the reader some information concerning the subtle yet crucial differentiations in social rank between those persons in our chronicle who belong to the old “county” families, of long-established lineage and wealth, and those of a more recent sort who have but lately, that’s to say within the past century, migrated to the area.

      The original category is pilgrims, settlers, or colonists; the second, much vaster, is immigrants.

      On one hand we have the old Jersey families of the stature of the Slades, initially inhabitants of the Massachusetts Bay Colony who had moved to the Crown Colony of New Jersey at a time when “Princeton” did not exist, being but one of three small villages—“King’s Town,” “Queen’s Town,” and “Prince’s Town”—on the old pike road between New York and Philadelphia. Along with the Slades, if not rivaling them in reputation and wealth, are the Morgans, the FitzRandolphs, the Bayards, the van Dycks, the Pynes (of the magnificent mansion Drumthwacket, in more recent years the residence of the governor of New Jersey), the several families of Burrs (descended from Reverend Aaron Burr, Sr.)—and others, falling beyond the periphery of this history. That these noble old families predated Princeton University by decades should be kept in mind, for, in its earlier guise as the College of New Jersey, the institution was first founded in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and later moved, in 1748, by the Reverend Aaron Burr, Sr., to Newark; then, a decade later, the college was moved by President Samuel Davies to its present location in the village of Princeton, on Route 27, or Nassau Street as it is called, near the intersection with state highway 206. From this modest beginning, with its close ties to the Presbyterian Church, the university has grown, and grown—and has now overgrown itself, one might say, in a crowded and cramped campus in which “green” is scarcely glimpsed and unsightly high-rise structures fly in the face of the elegant Collegiate Gothic