Joyce Oates - The Accursed

Not that the younger man was jealous of the elder: he was not. But, quite consciously, he wished to learn from the elder.

Though very likely Winslow Slade knew a good deal of the animosity blooming between the university president and his most powerful dean, being the beneficiary of his wife’s network of local news, yet Winslow tactfully asked his young friend if it was a faculty matter, that was troubling him?—or, an undergraduate issue?

Woodrow’s reply was reluctantly uttered: “No, Dr. Slade. I think that I have won the boys over, after some initial coolness—they like me now. This generation is more concerned with making their own worldly way than I would wish, but we understand each other.” Half-consciously Woodrow rose to his feet, to pick up, from Winslow Slade’s desk, a brass letter-opener, and to turn it in his fingers. A thin smile distended his lips. “The mischief of boys I would welcome, Dr. Slade, at this point—if it could spare me this other.”

“ ‘This other’—?”

For an unsettling moment Woodrow lost the thread of his concentration: he was hearing a muted yet vehement voice daring to accuse him. The horror of lynching is, no one speaks against it. Behind the silvery glint of his glasses his eyes filled with tears of vexation. The little brass letter-opener slipped from his fingers to fall onto Winslow Slade’s desk. He said, “I’m speaking of—of certain underhanded challenges to my authority—as president of our university. You know, Dr. Slade, I take my responsibility to be—well, God-ordained; certainly I would not have had this exceptional honor bestowed upon me, if God had not wished it. And so, I am baffled by the calculated insults, malicious backbiting, and plotting among my administrative colleagues—and their secret liaisons with the trustees. Surely by now you’ve heard how my enemies conspire against me in skirmishes that have not the dignity of battle, still less of declared war.”

There followed an embarrassed silence. The elder man, regarding his friend with grave sympathy, could not think how to reply. It was kept fairly secret among Woodrow Wilson’s family and intimates that he had already suffered several mysterious collapses in his lifetime, the earliest as a young adolescent; Woodrow had even had a “mild” stroke at the premature age of thirty-nine. (At the time, Woodrow had been teaching jurisprudence at Princeton, preparing his lectures with great urgency and intensity, and working on the multivolume A History of the American People that would one day solidify his reputation.) Now, a decade later, Woodrow’s nerves were so keenly strung, he seemed at times to resemble a puppet jerked about by cruel, whimsical fingers. Yet, like any sensitive, proud man, he shrank from being comforted.

With a wry smile Woodrow confessed to his friend that, as pressure on him lately increased, he suffered from such darting pains in his head and abdomen as he lay sleepless through much of the night, he half wondered if his enemies—(“Led by that careerist whose name I do not care to speak”)—were devouring his very soul, as a sinister species of giant water spider sucks the life out of its helpless frog prey.

Winslow responded with a wincing smile, “Woodrow, my dear friend, I wish I could banish from your vocabulary such words as battle, war, enemy—even, perhaps, soul. For your nature is to take a little too seriously matters that are only local and transient, and you see conspiracy where there may be little more than a healthy difference of opinion.”

Woodrow stared at his elder friend with a look of hurt and alarm.

“ ‘Healthy difference of opinion’—? I don’t understand, Winslow. This is life or death—my life or death, as president of the university.”

“When the issue is whether to build the new Graduate College at the heart of the campus or, as Dean West prefers, at the edge? That is a matter of your life or death?”

“Yes! Yes, it is. And the eating clubs as well—my enemies are massing against me, to defeat my plan of colleges within the university, of a democratic nature. You know, I believe that the highest executive office must centralize power—whether the chief executive is the President of the United States, or of a distinguished university. And right here at home, I am met with mutiny.”

“Woodrow, really! ‘Mutiny.’ ” Winslow Slade smiled.

“Mutiny, yes,” Woodrow repeated grimly, “and I have no doubt that they are meeting in secret at this very minute, somewhere close by.”

For Woodrow had learned, from a remark of Mrs. Wilson’s when she’d returned from a luncheon at the Princeton Women’s Club two days before, that Andrew Fleming West was to be a houseguest at a dinner party at the home of the Burrs, of FitzRandolph Place, to which the Wilsons had conspicuously not been invited.

Winslow Slade murmured that none of this boded well for the university, if it was true; still less for Woodrow and his family.

“Dr. Slade, it is true,” Woodrow said irritably, “the prediction around town that I will be ‘outflanked’ by Easter, cornered like a rat and made to resign the presidency! Please don’t deny it, sir, in the interests of kindness or charity, for I know very well that Princeton whispers of nothing else—even the washerwomen, and the Negro servants, and every sort of local riffraff, gloat over my distress.”

At this, Winslow Slade leaned over to touch the younger man’s tensed arm. “Tommy—d’you mind if I call you ‘Tommy’?—I hope you remember the advice I gave you, when you accepted the trustees’ offer of the presidency: ‘A wise administrator never admits to having enemies, and a yet wiser administrator never has enemies.’ ”

“A banal platitude, sir, if I may say so,” Woodrow said, with increasing vexation, “—that might have been put to the ‘enemies’ of Napoleon, as his armies swept over them and devastated them utterly. It is easy for you to think in such a way—you who have never known an enemy in your life, and have been blessed by God in all your efforts.”

“I had political enemies enough, when I was governor of the state,” Winslow said. “I think you are forgetting the vicissitudes of real life, in your airy allegorical dramas.”

Woodrow, pacing in front of the fireplace, spoke now rapidly, and heedlessly—saying that Ellen and his daughters were “sick with worry” over his health; his doctor, Melrick Hatch, had warned him that the palliative medications he’d been taking for years to steady his nerves might soon have a “reverse” effect. (One of Woodrow’s medications was the morphine-laced Mrs. Wycroff’s Soothing Syrup; another, McCormick’s Glyco-Heroin Throat Lozenges; yet another, Boehringer & Soehne’s Antiseptique, with its high quotient of opium. Woodrow was also somewhat addicted to such home remedies as syrupy calomel, bismuth, and Oil of Olmay; cascara sagrada and Tidwell’s Purge.) Again, Woodrow picked up the brass letter-opener, to turn it restlessly in his fingers—“The dean, it’s said, boasts that he intends to drive me into an ‘early grave’ and take my place as president. And a majority of the trustees align themselves with him.”

“Woodrow, please! This isn’t worthy of you. I think that you and Dean West must meet face to face, and stop this absurd plotting. I would guess that Andrew goes about Princeton complaining of you, and declaring that you should drive him to an early grave, if you had your way.”

Woodrow stiffened at this remark. For indeed, it had frequently come to him, even when he knelt in prayer at Sunday church services, feeling himself an empty vessel to be filled with the grace of God, that, if something would happen to his enemy Andrew Fleming West: how easy then, his life would become!