The Accursed. Joyce Carol Oates

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ in her unhappiness, does Wilhelmina care for her supposed intellectual and artistic talents, if no one loves her; if Josiah Slade does not love her. Her heart beats rapidly with the mean wish that Josiah might be wracked with bitter jealousy over her, for her appeal to a rival-gentleman. Then he would suffer as I have suffered. We would be well matched for life.

      Somewhere near this hour, in the vast lecture hall in McCosh, on the Princeton University campus, Professor Pearce van Dyck is interrupted in the midst of a lecture on Kantian ethics, to turn aside from the lectern and cough into a handkerchief; Professor van Dyck has been suffering from a mysterious allergy, or infection of a lung, for several weeks, intermittently; the malady does not appreciably worsen, yet it does not go away; as some fifty undergraduate men stare at him in a fascinated sort of pity, Professor van Dyck coughs, coughs, coughs; tears shimmer in his eyes, behind his wire-rimmed glasses, and threaten to spill onto his cheeks as in desperation he tries to clear his throat; tries to wrangle, out of the depths of his lungs, or his sinuses, whatever viscous substance it is, that threatens to choke him; until at last the young preceptor, who sits in the front row, rises to his feet, to approach him in trepidation—“Professor van Dyck? May I help you?”

      As, on Nassau Street, at Witherspoon, Dean Andrew West encounters the dark-brow’d and richly dressed Mrs. Grover Cleveland, shopping in town with one of her daughters, and accompanied by a Negro maid; and engages in several minutes’ amiable conversation with the lady during the course of which a subtle sort of flirtation ensues; or, rather, the semblance of a flirtation; for neither Andrew West nor Frances Cleveland feel any genuine attraction for the other, except a “social” attraction; Andrew West learns that Mr. Cleveland’s health has been “fully restored”—Grover has so recuperated from his nervous prostration of several weeks before, he is now able to take his customary breakfast, which Mrs. Cleveland delights in reciting, for such is proof of her husband’s well-being: beefsteak, Virginia ham, pork chops, whiting, and fried smelt; even, occasionally, corned beef and cabbage, while he perused his usual fare of several newspapers—“For Grover is very O current, you know; it is his very life’s-blood.” All this while, Andrew West listens with an air of extreme interest, for it is the man’s dean-temperament, to make the most of any opportunity. So it is, Mrs. Cleveland says, turning the ivory handle of her sunshade, “that the rumors that have been circulating in Princeton, about Grover, are entirely unfounded; and I hope, Mr. West, you will do your part in combating them.”

      According to the diary kept by Henrietta Slade, Winslow’s daughter-in-law, Dr. Slade is, at this hour, sequestered away in his favorite corner of the jardin anglais at the Manse, immersed in one of his scholarly pursuits; whether work on Biblical translations, or labor at assembling his old sermons, or scribbling entries in his journal—(this journal to be, unhappily, destroyed in the spring of 1906)—she does not know; but Henrietta does note a “troubling change” in her father-in-law, who had always been of an even, placid disposition, as well-disposed to his family as to his public, rarely irritable or even fatigued or distracted; but lately, Winslow has been “not himself”—quite irritable, fatigued, distracted; and less inclined to spend time with his family, or with friends in the habit of dropping by to visit him in his library, than he had been. Perhaps he is anxious about the wedding, for so many people have been invited. Perhaps he is worrying about the weather, for an outdoor fete is planned here at the Manse. And Henrietta, mother of the bride-to-be, drifts onto pages of fretting about the wedding, of very little interest to History.

      And Josiah Slade makes the impulsive decision to join several friends bear hunting in the Poconos, though it is but a few days before his sister’s wedding, in which he is to play a prominent role. “But what if—something happens to you?” Annabel asks, pleading; and Josiah says laughingly, “Nothing will happen to me, I promise,” and Annabel says, “You will return, won’t you? The night before? No later? Josiah? ”—almost begging her brother, You will return, you won’t leave me alone to this—will you?

      And handsome Lieutenant Dabney Bayard, being fitted in an Egyptian cotton shirt, and slim-tapered trousers, chances to note, out of boredom, a small black insect on the neck of the Italian tailor kneeling before him; idly he reaches down to pinch the thing in his fingers, and give it a sharp dig with his nails, with the result that the tailor screams in surprise and pain, and lurches away from Dabney—for the black speck isn’t an insect but a mole or tiny wart, deeply rooted in the man’s flesh.

THE SPECTRAL WIFE

      On the humid morning of June 4, 1905, which was the very morning of the Slade-Bayard nuptials, young Upton Sinclair, who lived with his wife and infant son in a ramshackle farmhouse on the Rosedale Road not so very far from the old Craven estate, had walked several miles into town, badly needing to stretch his legs after a long stint of writing; and, knowing nothing of the wedding, and nothing of the principals except, dimly, the name Slade, with which the young Socialist naturally associated the extremities of capitalist exploitation of the masses, he chanced to see, on Nassau Street, a stream of stately motor vehicles and horse-drawn carriages, as in some sort of royal procession—“Not a funeral, for there seems to be no hearse. A wedding?”

      For some minutes, Upton Sinclair stood on the sidewalk gazing at the conspicuous opulence on display: for the motor vehicles arriving at the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton were exclusively luxury touring cars, of such manufacturers as Pierce-Arrow, Lambert, Halladay, Buick, Cadillac, and Oldsmobile; the fittings were all of brass, very smartly gleaming, as the windshields were of gleaming glass. And the horse-drawn carriages, which were fewer each year, being inexorably displaced by motorcars, here exuded an air of the timeless and romantic, very smart too. Upton, who owned neither a motorcar nor a horse, looked on with an abashed smile, for in his subdued state of mind the young Socialist wasn’t roused to indignation, but rather to a kind of envy—not of the opulence, but of the evidence here of families, and couples. Here was the ruling class of the province, Upton supposed; yet, when you considered them, they were a tribe comprised essentially of families; and at the heart of each, a couple.

      It was a bourgeois social institution: the family, and at its heart the couple. Yet, Upton considered it with much wistfulness.

      His own marriage, his own dear wife Meta—ah! how troubled, and how precarious, lately; Upton had walked into town, rather than borrow a horse and buggy from his neighboring landlord-farmer, to escape the confines of his writing-cabin and the confines of his brain, lately obsessed with his marital dilemma to the detriment of his creative energies.

      For Upton dearly loved his wife: yet, he knew that such love is hobbling, and enervating; and not worthy of the Socialist ideal. And he knew that such love can be precarious, based upon a bedrock of sheer emotion, and not the intellectual rigor of Marx, Engels, and other Revolutionary thinkers.

      In the open air, that was just slightly over-warm, and distinctly humid, Upton brooded upon his wife: her unhappiness, her desperation, her mysterious change of personality, in the past several weeks. How was he, in his mid-twenties, untutored in the skills of marriage and parenthood, to contend with such an alteration? Just the previous night after a botched dinner she had prepared in the ill-equipped farmhouse kitchen Meta had been weeping angrily, and then weeping hopelessly; declaring that she “could not go on, but prayed for the strength to be delivered from her misery”; to the horror of her husband, Meta had dared to press the barrel of a revolver against her forehead, and could not be persuaded to surrender the weapon to Upton for at least ten agonized minutes.

      At this time, their infant son was sleeping in his cradle in the next room.

      So, the immediate crisis had passed. But Upton was left stunned, demoralized and confused; as dazed as if he’d been struck a blow to the head with that very revolver, that his wife had brought with her when they’d married. (That is, Meta had brought the weapon with her in secret, that had belonged to her father, an ex–army officer whom Upton had not yet met.)

      Yet, СКАЧАТЬ