The Accursed. Joyce Carol Oates

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ