The Accursed. Joyce Carol Oates

and you know it. You big Burr: mirror. The reverse side of a mirror, its back. Like your back, telling no lies, as a face does. Now, give me another fig bar! Thor and I are hungry.”

      Annabel protested: “Todd! You must not be rude.”

      Todd said, “You must not be rude, the two of you, to pretend not to know my riddle.”

      So mercurial were Todd’s moods, however, he soon quieted after devouring the second fig bar, which he broke in half to share with the eager German shepherd; and insisted that Annabel and Willy stop where they were, for it was time for a story—had not Annabel promised Todd a story, if he was good on their walk; and he was sure that he had been good, for he and Thor might have been so much less good.

      The young women had not intended to sit down just at this time, or in this place; but Todd found for them some exposed, gnarled tree roots, that formed a kind of seat; so they sat down, beside the quietly flowing Stony Brook Creek, and Annabel took out of her straw bag a children’s book, to read to Todd that tale of Hans Christian Andersen’s which was Todd’s favorite, “The Ugly Duckling”; and taking care not to intrude, Willy sketched her friend in pastels; for she very much wanted an intimate portrait of Annabel as she was before her wedding, to keep as a memento; as Willy felt, for some reason, that she would lose her closest friend once the young woman became Mrs. Dabney Bayard and lived in the old Craven house.

      (Yes, it is strange that Todd, at eleven years of age, would request being read to, as if he were a very young child; but Todd did not easily “read,” claiming that letters and numerals were “scrambled” in his eyes, when he tried to make sense of them.)

      At the end of the story Todd clapped his hands and declared that when he became a swan, he wouldn’t be so kind to the ducklings who had mocked him—“For Todd has a very good memory for wrongs, and will not forget or forgive his enemies.” Which provoked Annabel to say, in reprimand: “But once you are a swan, Todd you will be a swan, and have a swan’s code of conduct—that is, you will be manly and noble.”

      “But will Todd be Todd, then?”—the child’s query was couched with some anxiety.

      “Why yes! Of course.”

      Resting in the grass, the boy considered this statement of his cousin’s, with an air of mock gravity; but responded then in typical Todd-fashion by rolling onto his back, kicking frantically, and protesting in a high-pitched whine as if he were being tickled, or attacked, by an invisible adversary.

      (POOR TODD SLADE!—the reader may be curious about him, particularly in the light of developments to follow; for surely of the “accursed,” Todd was primary.)

      Through Todd’s first two years he had seemed to be displaying superior traits—(walking, talking, even “reasoning” to a degree)—of a precocious sort, but then, for no reason anyone could know, he had seemed to “regress”—as if wishing to remain an infant a little longer, and a particularly difficult infant displaying flashes of brightness, even brilliance, amid much else that was infantile. In stature Todd wasn’t below the average for a child of his age, being in fact somewhat tall; but his frame was peculiarly under-developed, and his head over-large, and his feet so poorly coordinated that he was always stumbling, or falling down, to the dismay of his parents and the derision of other boys. Yet more puzzling, Todd often reached for things that were not there—but rather a few inches to one side. The more futile his behavior, the more frustrated and impatient he was.

      Todd particularly upset his father Copplestone, a man of shrewd business acumen, and financial success in trade; who prided himself on his speaking and writing abilities, as he had been head of the Princeton Debate Club, and a popular “man on campus” during his undergraduate years; and who could not bear it, that his only son “refused” (as Copplestone put it) to learn to read, and write; and was so stubborn as to hold a book several inches to one side of his head, or even upside-down. This “prank” as Copplestone judged it was especially infuriating, and had to be met with discipline—“Why, the child is either a devil, or harbors one,” Copplestone would declare to Todd’s weeping mother, after one of their father-son contests, which, in the matter of sheer lung volume, and franticness of behavior, Todd triumphed, sending Copplestone charging out of the room.

      (Yet it was said, perhaps irresponsibly, that, in private, Copplestone applied “discipline” to his unruly son: whether by hand, or switch or belt, is not known. Certainly, Winslow Slade was not known to have disciplined his sons Copplestone and Augustus, nor even to have raised his voice to them when they were young.)

      Yet Todd would not learn his ABC’s, still less arithmetic, despite the efforts of his father and of numerous tutors; with the result that, by his twelfth year, his family had given up forcing him, and had become reconciled to the boy’s stubbornness, obstinacy, or whatever it might be called. (Later, when Todd was older, after the trauma of the Curse had run its course, it would seem that he could “read” and even “write” after a fashion; even, it was claimed, that Todd was “above average” in many respects; for Todd was enrolled in the Princeton Academy, when I entered first grade there in 1911, and must have been taking regular courses.) Though prone to temper tantrums, Todd could also behave very sweetly; he had long been taken up by his cousin Annabel as a favorite; and even, from time to time, by Josiah, who lacked his sister’s patience for their young cousin. (Josiah was most frustrated that, in board games like checkers and chess, Todd often won; not because Todd was a superior player but because Todd so shamelessly and skillfully cheated, with a touch so light he was rarely caught. “He will make a brilliant politician at Tammany Hall, where money evaporates in plain air,” Josiah said, “if, unlike some at Tammany Hall, he can stay out of jail long enough.”)

      Wilhelmina instructed herself that Todd Slade was only a child—only a boy of eleven; yet she feared something precocious and penetrant in his gaze, and halfway wondered if the child might be possessed of clairvoyant powers. For one Sunday at Crosswicks, a few months before this time, Todd made his way through a gathering of adults most deliberately to Wilhelmina, to shake her hand gravely and offer his condolences in a low, insinuating voice; saying that, as Josiah was absent from the party, Miss Burr was condemned to a “mere mastication of tasteless food” and the “auscultation of tuneless music”—a statement so preposterous out of the mouth of a child, Willy could scarcely believe what she’d heard. Then, when the impish lad repeated his words, eyeing her with a semblance of genuine sympathy, she flushed crimson, and found it difficult to breathe, to realize that Todd Slade knew—(could it be general knowledge through Princeton?)—the secret of her love for Josiah Slade.

      But I have not told anyone! Not even Annabel.

      Following this, Wilhelmina felt very cautious about Todd Slade, yet grateful to him, he had not divulged her secret to any other person, so far as she knew.

      So it was, Todd still wished to be read to, and not to read; and Annabel liked to indulge him, for it made him happy, as if he were a child of but three or four, to be so easily made happy. After “The Ugly Duckling” Todd requested “The Hill of the Elves,” an old nursery favorite, and after that “The Snow Queen”—which Annabel hesitated to read, for reasons of her own. Yet Todd so persisted, kicking his heels against the ground, and rolling his eyes back into his head, that she had no choice but to give in; but her voice seemed thinner, and her manner less animated, and after a few minutes Todd grew bored, and hummed, and sighed, and began to yank out clumps of grass to toss at Thor, and excite him. When Annabel read of the little boy’s sleigh ride with the Snow Queen, and of how they “flew” over woods and lakes, over sea and land, while beneath them the cold wind howled, and the wolves cried, and the deathly snow glittered, Todd nervously yawned, as if he were indifferent to such terrors; and at last knocked the storybook out of his cousin’s hands!—then, before the startled Annabel could protest, he leapt to his feet and ran in the direction of the forest, driving the excited dog before him, both child and dog barking with a crazed sort of elation.

      Wilhelmina said, “Annabel, you’ve spoiled your cousin. He will only get worse, if you persevere.”

      “But—what would I do? What would any of us do? Todd is—as Todd is.”

      “Are