Читать книгу The Accursed - Joyce Carol Oates - Страница 11

POSTSCRIPT: “ASH WEDNESDAY EVE, 1905”

It is not generally acknowledged to the reader that much is left out of any complex account. A reader must be trusting, and assume that what has been included is all that is necessary; what has been left out is extraneous.

But I am troubled, in assembling the previous chapter—for so much has been left out that might have been of interest, and might even be essential to a reader’s fullest understanding.

Therefore, I suggest: the reader who wants to know a little more of my chronicle should read this postscript, as well as the others to follow. (I am sure that there will be other postscripts to follow!) Readers who are satisfied that they know enough of Dr. Wilson and Dr. Slade should simply proceed to “Narcissus”—a total change of scene, I promise!

Here is a miscellany of details regarding Woodrow Wilson that could not find their way into the narrative.

—WOODROW’S “WIND-BUFFETED” walk to Crosswicks Manse was in fact an ordeal for the troubled man, who had not fully recovered from what he would recall as the unprovoked attack of his (alleged) kinsman from the hills of rural, western Virginia.

For, in leaving Prospect House, without telling his wife or daughters, all of whom (he assumed) were in bed, Woodrow Wilson was obliged to walk alone across the darkened Princeton University campus, and to pass close by undergraduate residences; though friendly to students by day, smiling his wide grimace of a presidential smile at virtually everyone he encountered, which never failed to enlist boys’ startled smiles and greetings, Woodrow quite dreaded being sighted at such a time; for a nocturnal journey, by foot, on the part of the president of the university, would seem suspicious—would it not?

So, Woodrow walked quickly, and furtively; more than once he ducked into a doorway, or around a corner, to avoid being seen by late-carousing undergraduates, returning from the Alchemist & Barrister pub on Witherspoon, or the rowdy taproom of the Nassau Inn.

The darkened tunnel of evergreens and rhododendron leading from Prospect to the inner campus was fraught with a kind of childish dread, which Woodrow recognized as unwarranted; but the deep, somehow writhing shadows behind the most Gothic of buildings, Pyne, gave him pause; nor did his fluttering heartbeat subside, at the rear of Alexander Hall with its fantastical towers, turrets, arches, walkways, and ornamental windows on all floors that, though darkened, seemed to wink with an extra-terrestrial light. (Did a voice faintly cry out from one of these high windows? Did a spectral face appear fleetingly? The hurrying man could not take time to pause, and did not dare to glance back.)

It was a sore point among the Princeton University administrators, that a high percentage of their undergraduate population were inveterate carousers for whom “clubs” were of more significance than academic studies, and persons of questionable repute of more significance than their revered professors. Indeed, an alarming number of carousers kept mistresses in rented rooms on Witherspoon, Bank, and Chambers streets, an old and seeming inextricable tradition at the university, despite its Presbyterian affiliation; as, at one time, Southern boys from slaveholding families were allowed to keep their personal slaves in the residence halls. (It had come to be a tradition among these boys, at least among the more affluent, that they would “free” their slaves upon graduation: with the result that many ex-slaves lived in the ramshackle neighborhood of lower Witherspoon, and swelled the local workforce with capable workers willing to work at very reasonable wages. Dr. Wilson’s house servants Clytie and Lucinda were descendants of freed slaves.)

Woodrow felt some relief when he left the university campus, and made his way southward along Nassau Street, quite deserted at this hour of the night; and past Bank, and Chambers; taking note of the forlorn cries of nighthawks, that made his skin shiver; and of the gauzy-masked moon overhead, like a face glimpsed out of the past. At the shadowy junction of Nassau and Stockton there came noisily a handsome ebony brougham drawn by a matched team of horses, that swung smartly past Woodrow to continue along Bayard Lane.

Woodrow recognized the carriage as belonging to ex-President Grover Cleveland. Quickly he calculated that the Clevelands had been dining at the palatial home of the Morgans on Hibben Road; they were returning to Westland, their own palatial home on Hodge Road, absurdly named for Andrew Fleming West, who was an intimate friend of Grover Cleveland. (Who can comprehend such perversities? Woodrow would not even try.)

“O God! If I am seen! They will know.”

Fortunately, Frances Cleveland was so absorbed with her fretting, elderly and obese husband, who was suffering a bout of dyspepsia following a lavish four-hour dinner, that the usually sharp-eyed woman failed to notice Woodrow Wilson’s shadowy figure on the sidewalk; if she had recognized him, Mrs. Cleveland would have guessed at once that he was on a mission to Crosswicks Manse, and the tale would have spread through the village of Princeton by teatime of the following day.

Note. As a disinterested and fair-minded historian it isn’t my place to delve into old local feuds and squabbles; to stir up old misunderstandings, slanders, and hatreds, dating back to the turn of the century; to evoke once again a time in our peaceful community in which everyone, not excepting schoolchildren, felt obliged to take sides in the dispute between Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Fleming West; and a good portion of the congregation of the First Presbyterian Church chose not to speak to the remainder.

I hope I won’t compromise my objectivity as an historian, as to whether Woodrow Wilson ought to have been obeyed, as he wished, in every particular concerning major issues at the university; or whether his opponent, the strong-willed dean of the graduate school, ought to have had his way. (My van Dyck relatives were said to favor Woodrow; my Strachan relatives, Andrew West.) In any case the reader should know that Woodrow Wilson’s campaign for complete control over the university, as it parallels his campaign for complete control over the issue of whether the United States would go to war with Germany in 1917, when he was President, is a subordinate issue here, set beside the domestic tragedies to befall the leading Princeton families.

—CROSSWICKS MANSE, the home of the Slades, has not been properly described; only just the interior of Winslow Slade’s library.

As male readers have a predilection for military history, so female readers have a predilection for learning about houses, furnishings, and ornamentation. Yet I hope that both sexes are intrigued, to some degree, by the Slades’ residence on Elm Road, as fine a house as one could discover in the Princeton vicinity, including even the Henry Morgan estate on Hibben Road and the Carlyle estate on the Great Road.

There was no more splendid example in all of New Jersey of the architectural style of early Georgian, in combination with the newer Palladian, the novelty being that the Manse was built along these lines reflecting classical Renaissance architecture at a time when, in England, the influence was yet very rare. The history of the Manse is most impressive, dating back to the early 1700s when one Bertram Slade of Margate, Massachusetts, purchased a large tract of land from William Penn in a region known as the “wilds of West New Jersey”; and encompassing that time when one of the great battles of the American Revolution was fought in Princeton, in 1777—indeed, scarcely one mile from the Manse itself in open parkland now designated Battle Park.

What must it have been for our young people, Josiah and Annabel Slade, and how subtly and magically did it shape their lives, to have spent their childhood at Crosswicks Manse!—in that house of countless rooms, spacious courtyards, and splendid vistas opening onto terraces, and gardens, and mirror-like ponds. (As a boy, Josiah tried to count the rooms of Crosswicks Manse, but ended with a different number each time—twenty-six, twenty-nine, thirty-one; nor did Annabel, the more patient and exacting of the two, fare much better. “It is like a dream, living here,” Annabel said, “except the dream isn’t my own but another’s.”)

It was in the Manse, for instance, that the fate of the young Republic was determined: for such illustrious men as George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, General Nathanael Greene, Baron Steuben, “Light Horse Harry” Lee, Benedict Arnold, the Chevalier de la Luzerne, Don Juan de Mirailles, and many another figure of history, frequently met. If I had more space I would like nothing better than to dramatize the “unspeakable insult” endured by the Slade family when, in 1777, the British General Cornwallis seized the great house for his private headquarters and proved so little the gentleman that, when at last driven away by patriotic Continentals, he encouraged his soldiers to loot, desecrate, and burn the magnificent house. Ah, if he had only lived then!—so Josiah thought, as a boy. He would have sought out the cowardly general himself and demanded satisfaction—that is, insisted upon a duel—for the personal nature of the outrage.

Yes, it is so—Josiah, born in 1881, in the waning years of the nineteenth century, naively yearned for a lost world in which, he believed, his courage and manhood might have been better tested, than at the present time; Josiah’s most impassioned readings were of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly Novels, Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, any and all treatments of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, and such homegrown American romances as Washington Irving’s Sketch Book and James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, his favorite being The Last of the Mohicans which he had virtually memorized by the age of twelve; more recently, he had fallen under the spell of Jack London’s Tales of the Klondike and The Call of the Wild, and Owen Wister’s The Virginian.

“To be born ‘too late’—is it possible? Or am I born at just the right time, unknowingly?”

Yet, God must have smiled upon the Slades of 1777: for damage to the beautiful house was minimal, in the end. Fires started by Cornwallis’s men soon smoldered out, in a cloudburst of autumnal rain as if indeed, as the Continental army was given to believe, God was on the rebels’ side.

The Slades took particular pride in the fact that when the Continental Congress met in Princeton, in 1782, under the presidency of Elias Boudinot, it was at Crosswicks Manse that quite a few of the representatives stayed, and all of the representatives dined, before their formal congress in Nassau Hall. So the prized local legend, that Crosswicks Manse was the first “White House” of the Republic.

It cannot be denied that the vision of the luminous Manse, even by partial moonlight, had the force of intimidating Woodrow Wilson, as he made his way up the graveled drive, beneath overarching white oaks; as he approached the side door, to Winslow Slade’s office, the troubled man swallowed hard, and shaped his lips in an inaudible prayer—Have mercy on me, O God: I am Your humble servant seeking only how best to serve You.

—TO THE RESPECTFUL titles in Winslow Slade’s library on the eve of Ash Wednesday, 1905, there should be added others, not alphabetized, but stacked on tables, that failed to capture Woodrow Wilson’s full attention: the unscholarly but much-perused Phrenological Studies of Dr. Phineas Lutz; Beyond the Gates of Consciousness of Stanislav Zahn; Heaven and Hell of Emanuel Swedenborg; and that rare and arresting treatise in quarto Gothic, the manual of a “forgotten church”—the Vigiliae mortuorum secundum chorum ecclesiae maguntinae; still more, volumes in French, by the controversial Jean-Martin Charcot, and a recent copy of The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research of Cambridge, Mass., in which an essay by a founding member of the Society, Professor William James of Harvard, appeared under the title “Is There a ‘Natural’ Barrier to Consciousness?”

Yes, the reader is correct in wondering why, when Charcot and James were mentioned by Woodrow Wilson, Winslow Slade remained silent and did not suggest in any way that he was familiar with the work of either man.

—WINSLOW SLADE’S PREOCCUPATION on the night in question.

It was Dr. Slade’s custom to dine with his family before eight o’clock, then to retire to the bachelor solitude of his library, which few in the family ever visited; nor did Dr. Slade encourage visits from the children who, when young, would have poked and pried amid his special collections, like the (allegedly) Malaysian jade snuffbox, that had been a gift to Winslow Slade by a woman friend, a world-traveler of decades ago, and, of course, the invaluable Gutenberg Bible, one of but forty-eight copies remaining in all of the world, of that first monumental printing. (That Dr. Slade’s copy of the Gutenberg Bible was not complete scarcely diminished its worth, for very few of the original copies remained undamaged by the incursions of centuries.)

Often, Winslow absorbed himself in fireside reading, of newer books (like those listed above); more recently, in the late winter of 1905, he had taken up the task of revising his sermons for a collection which a Philadelphia publisher of theological texts had pressed him into completing. (“Why would anyone want to read my old sermons?” Winslow asked wryly; and the publisher rejoined, “The mere name ‘Winslow Slade’ will assure quite a sale in New Jersey and the Mid-Atlantic states generally.”) When this task proved too boring, Winslow turned with more enthusiasm to his translations of one or another book of the Apocrypha, upon which he’d been laboring for years, with the assistance of a Hebrew scholar at the seminary; his particular interest was “The Epistle of Jeremy” and the Books of Esdra and Tobit, and, in the New Testament, those curious gospels attributed to Thomas, Matthias, and Judas.

“Of all Biblical figures, surely Judas is the most misunderstood, as he is the most condemned!”—so Winslow believed.

For it had always seemed evident to him, Jesus adored his faithless Judas above the other disciples.

As Winslow was frequently plagued by insomnia, but resisted taking the myriad “home remedies” favored in great doses by his young friend Woodrow Wilson, out of a fear of clouding his thoughts, so he reserved for the early hours of the morning his transactions with his journal: not a single volume but more than a dozen eight-by-twelve “scribblers.”

The reader will naturally think that I have had recourse to Dr. Slade’s journals—would that were so! It is a tragic fact, all volumes of the journal were destroyed, with most of Winslow Slade’s personal papers, in a bizarre act of self-mortification that seemed to have occurred in late May 1906, shortly before Dr. Slade’s death.

—WOODROW WILSON’S MYRIAD physical ailments.

Why people are, or were, so intensely interested in Woodrow Wilson’s panorama of ailments, as in the ailments of U.S. Presidents generally, I am not so certain. It is not to be attributed to mere morbidity, I am sure—perhaps rather more a wish to peer into the private lives of exalted others, to compare with our more meager estates.

In addition to what I have already mentioned, and to reiterate—among Woodrow’s medical complaints were gastric crises, raging headaches, neuritis, nervous hyperesthesia, arrhythmic heartbeat, “night sweats” and “night-mares,” and the like. In some quarters, as early as Woodrow’s first years as president of Princeton University, the question was raised, if the man was “entirely” sane, given his intense preoccupations and obsessions with enemies real and imagined; and his frantic need never to compromise.

It had been a passionate belief of the Campbells of Argyll, that battle was preferable to peace, if that peace was determined by compromise.

There was not a conspiracy exactly, but certainly an understanding, among Woodrow’s intimates, that talk of the man’s ailments should be curtailed. With much justification, Woodrow felt that if it became generally known that his health was erratic, confidence in his leadership might be undermined.

In fact it was impressive how Dr. Wilson soared above such shackles of the spirit, frequently climbing out of his sickbed to attend to university affairs, or to travel by rail to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Richmond, even so far as Chicago and St. Louis, to give a speech. “The flesh may be weak,” Woodrow quipped, “but the spirit is willing.” As a precocious young boy Woodrow had sent away for a mail-order chart depicting the postures and declamatory gestures of classical oratory, in order to learn the art of public speaking; as a result, he had unwittingly become imprinted with a set of mechanical gestures, and in times of stress and fatigue he was likely to lapse into them, as his students had soon discovered, in his lecture courses at Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, and Princeton. (In those days, students suggested discontent and boredom by shuffling their feet. How Woodrow had come to dread, and to abhor, that shuffling sound, as of brooms being swept along floors, maddeningly; and when students were reprimanded by university proctors at Princeton for shuffling their feet during chapel sermons, Woodrow was not at all sympathetic, and refused to mitigate expulsions from the university.)

Yet, audiences felt positive about him: for he was so very earnest, and so idealistic. He had hoped to be loved by multitudes, he said, but, failing love, to evoke admiration, awe, and even fear in audiences was not such a bad thing.

Sow yourself in every field of the world’s influence; knead yourself into its every possible loaf of soul-nourishing bread. Be vitalizing wheat, indeed—hide not your talents. So Woodrow’s father Joseph Ruggles Wilson had warmly advised him.

—THE KU KLUX KLAN lynching in Camden, New Jersey, on March 7, 1905: had Woodrow Wilson entirely forgotten about this, and his impetuous kinsman’s request, when he visited Winslow Slade; or had Woodrow Wilson, in the heat of his greater concern, simply brushed all thought of the terrible incident from his mind?

And did Winslow Slade know of the incident?

Could Winslow Slade not have known of it?