The Accursed. Joyce Carol Oates

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СКАЧАТЬ has stoked & teased into a blaze. & Horace is less irritable, since his meeting with our broker; our wills have been drawn up, & I have signed, without taxing my eyes, as Horace advised, in attempting to read the arcane legal-babble. & the unease with the unions has subsided, I think. At least, Horace is not raging over it now. Innocently I inquired of Horace, has any progress been made in solving the murder?—& he seemed quite startled, that I knew it was murder; & did not consent to this knowledge, but spoke vaguely that he knew of no serious crime in the Borough, in recent years. Then taking up Mr. Tarkington’s novel, & beginning to read; & I lay my hand on his wrist & begged of him, not to condescend to me; for I wanted to know the Truth, & would know the Truth, as all Theosophists must. & Horace said to me, with a laugh, that the only upset in Princeton of which he has heard, at the Nassau Club, was of some undergraduate pranksters again hammering down a section of Dr. Wilson’s wrought iron fence, he had had built to surround Prospect House; for the boys do take offense, that the president & his family of females should seek privacy for themselves, in the very midst of the campus. (“Dr. Wilson is one of those persons,” Horace has gravely stated, “who may one day succeed in impressing the world, but who can’t be taken seriously in Princeton, New Jersey.”) Later I fell into a headachey sulk, & scarcely consented to take my medicine from Horace’s hand, & dear Horace sought to comfort me, & perhaps wished to cuddle; so I allowed him to lie on top of the quilt & to press his weight gently against me, but very gently—for Horace has grown stout these past few years. & some other exertions may have transpired on Horace’s part, of which I took no heed; for already Puss’s eyelids were drooping. “Do you regret it”—so I asked in a whisper, & the dear gentleman kissed my closed eyes—“do you regret your invalid wife, that never yet has been a wife, nor ever shall be” & he denied all emphatically, as he always does; & hummed a gentle little tune; & his curly mustache tickled, & I thought of the ravaged child in the marsh, & felt an exquisite pain in the very core of my being, & in the next instant—was gone . . .

      _____ . Here is a surprise: there was no child of eleven murdered in Princeton, nor of any age. There were two persons said to be murdered—“executed”—for misbehavior & insult to their superiors—not in Princeton but in Camden, New Jersey. These persons, of whom I have been reading in the Philadelphia Inquirer, discovered by chance in Horace’s study, were called Jester & Desdra Pryde of Camden. All that was done to them, or why, was not explained in the paper, in a brief article on page eight; but the sheriff of Camden County stated that, of 500 persons observing the executions, “not a single eyewitness” has stepped forward. It is an ugly story but too distant from Princeton for pity, I am afraid. & you would know from the intent of the article, that the Prydes were Negroes, & not white; & that they were punished for misbehaving of some sort, that might have been avoided by more discreet judgment on their part.

      _____ . & so, there is no UNSPEAKABLE crime in Princeton after all, but, as Horace warned, a swirl of mere gossip. I am not sure if I am relieved, or disappointed. Poor Puss, misled!

      I have put away Horace’s newspaper where he will not know that it has been touched; & next is nap, & teatime in the late afternoon & ah!—B O R E D O M in gusts like airborne ether.

THE BURNING GIRL

      One afternoon in late May, Annabel Slade, Wilhelmina Burr, and Annabel’s cousin Todd were walking along the bank of Stony Brook Creek, at the edge of Crosswicks Forest; the young women were intensely engaged in conversation as the boy—(at this time eleven years old but looking and behaving like a younger child)—frolicked about, and shouted commandments to the Slades’ dog Thor, who was accompanying the small party in their ramble.

      “Thor, here! Thor, obey.”

      The boy’s voice was sharp, provoking the dog to bark. The dog was a mature German shepherd with a gunmetal gray, whorled coat.

      “Thor, run! Go!”

      How noisy the boy was! And the handsome dog, that did not ordinarily bark, was barking now, excitedly.

      Out of the May sunshine and into the splotched light of the forest the boy and the dog ran. The young women could hear their crashing into the underbrush, like a deliberate thrashing of sticks.

      Annabel called: “Todd? Please! Wait for us.”

      Yet deeper into the forest the child ran, driving the dog before him.

      Unless the dog was on the trail of some creature, and leading the boy forward in an ecstasy of blood-excitement.

      “Todd! You promised . . .”

      Vainly—laughingly—Annabel called after her headstrong cousin.

      But Annabel was not truly complaining of Todd, her little cousin whom she loved dearly. His unfailing energy was a marvel to her, who was herself capable of walking for miles, in her good hiking shoes, in Crosswicks Forest and along the creek bank; nearly as far as the Craven house, and back again, on Rosedale Road. And Wilhelmina was an even more experienced hiker.

      On this May afternoon the young women were very sensibly dressed for out-of-doors: Annabel in a blue-striped shirtwaist, with a high collar and a tight-clasped belt; Wilhelmina, or “Willy,” in stylish Turkish trousers and a belted blouse. Annabel had tucked a water iris into the silken coil of hair gathered at the nape of her neck: a flower of extreme delicacy that mimicked the violet-blue of her eyes. Her straw sailor hat gave her a pleasing and piquant childlike air and, once out of the sight of the Manse, she had, in imitation of her bolder companion, lifted her chiffon veil off her face, for she found it confining, and disagreeably warm. “Mother worries about my ‘fragile, English’ complexion,” Annabel said, “but I can’t think that the sun will make an aged crone of me in a single hour.”

      “Not a single hour, but an accumulation of hours. That is the danger our elders perceive.”

      But Willy spoke lightly, dismissively. Annabel’s schoolgirl friend had long cast off a daughterly reverence for her mother’s cautious admonitions, and had a way of speaking so impetuously, Annabel had to laugh.

      “Well. We must take the risk, then. After all, the century is very young—it will go on for a long time.”

      In Princeton circles, it was acknowledged that Annabel Slade and “Willy” Burr were close as sisters, though very different. While Annabel possessed the sylphid grace of a fairy-tale princess, unstudied and seemingly spontaneous, yet with a dreamy air, Willy presented a dramatic contrast: brash, brusque, heavy-jawed, with eyes that engaged too directly, and too often ironically. Willy’s considerable charm was at first obscured, to the superficial eye, by a certain stolidity in her figure, as in her character. She was a brunette, with a somewhat dark, and very healthy, complexion, while Annabel was ivory-pale, with very fair hair, and very blond eyelashes and brows; Willy was more forceful, as Annabel seemed to glide; yet both young women were likely to be gay-hearted in each other’s company, and to whisper together, and laugh a good deal. (“If only Dabney could make me laugh, as Willy does!”—Annabel said sighing.) Young men complained of Wilhelmina Burr that she was given to unpredictable—“unprovoked”—moods; she could not be relied upon, to turn up when she’d promised; if engaged in croquet, lawn tennis, or court tennis, she could not be relied upon to graciously lose to her male opponents, but seemed rather too intent upon winning; and, having won, was likely to express some satisfaction. Nor did Willy take care with her hair, or her clothes and grooming, as other young Princeton ladies did, conscientiously; Willy’s “Turkish trousers” would have been appropriate for a girl-cyclist, or even a girl hockey player; the plain straw hat on her head looked as if it had been hurriedly clamped in place, СКАЧАТЬ