Joyce Oates - The Accursed

“All opposition to my ideas would evaporate at once, like harmless smoke. All opposition.”

“Woodrow, what do you mean? What have you said?”

Had Woodrow spoken aloud? He was sure he had not.

Winslow Slade said, quietly, yet with feeling, “Sometimes I think you scarcely know me, Tommy. Or, indeed—anyone. You so surround yourself with fantasies of your own creation! For instance, you claim that I seem not to have known an enemy in my career, and that God has ‘blessed’ my efforts; but you must know, this was hardly the case. There was a very vocal opposition at the university, when I pushed forward my ‘reform’ of the curriculum, and insisted upon higher admissions standards; very nearly, a revolt among the trustees. And then, when I was governor of this contentious, politician-ridden state, there were days when I felt like a battered war veteran, and only the solace of my religion, and my church, kept me from despair. Yet, I tried not to complain, even to my dear Oriana; I tried never to make careless public remarks, or denunciations. This is not in keeping with our dignity. Remember the doomed Socrates of The Crito—a public man in his seventies condemned to death by the state: it was Socrates’ position that one abides by the laws of his time and place, and that death is preferable to banishment from society. So I’ve long kept my own counsel, and not even those closest to me have known of my secret struggles. So it is, dear Tommy, in the waning years of my life, I can’t allow myself to be drawn into ‘politics’ yet again. I know that your office is a sacred trust in your eyes, very like that of the pulpit; you are your father’s son, in many ways; and you have been driving yourself these past months with a superhuman energy. But it must be remembered, Woodrow, the university is not the church; and your inauguration, however splendid, should not be interpreted as an ordination.” Winslow paused, to allow his words to sink in. It was a misunderstanding of the elder Slade, that he was without sarcasm or irony, as he was without guile; that, being by nature good-hearted and generous, he was one to suffer fools gladly. “So, my counsel to you is compromise, President Wilson—compromise.”

Woodrow reacted like a child who has been slapped. Slowly, dazedly, he sank into his chair by the fireplace, facing his host. Waning firelight played on his tight, taut features; his stricken eyes were hidden behind the wink of his eyeglasses. In a hoarse voice he said: “Compromise!—what a thing to suggest! What—weakness, cowardice! Did our Savior compromise? Did He make a deal with his enemies? My father instructed me, either one is right, and compelled to act upon it; or one is in error, and should surrender the chalice to another man. Jesus declared, ‘I bring not peace but a sword.’ Does not our Lord declare everywhere in His holy writ, that one must be either for Him or against Him? I have reason to believe that all evil begins in compromise, Dr. Slade. Our great President Lincoln did not compromise with the slavers, as our Puritan ancestors did not compromise with the native Indians whom they discovered in the New World, pagan creatures who were not to be trusted—‘drasty Sauvages’ they were called. You might not know, Winslow, but our Wilson family motto—from the time of the Campbells of Argyll until now—God save us from compromise.”

When Winslow didn’t reply, only just shook his head, with an inscrutable expression, Woodrow said, a little sharply: “Ours is a proud heritage! And it would go hard against my father, as against my own conscience, if I weakened in this struggle.”

Winslow said, gently, “But after all, Tommy, you are not your father, however much you love and honor his memory. And you must bear in mind that he is no longer living; he has been dead this past year, and more.”

At these words the younger man stared into a corner of the room as if he had been taken by surprise: was his father dead?

And something else, someone else, another tormenting voice, had been beating at his thoughts, like buffeting waves—You can speak out against these atrocities. Christians like yourself.

Clumsily Woodrow removed his eyeglasses. His vision had never been strong; as a child, letters and numerals had “danced” in his head, making it very difficult for him to read and do arithmetic; yet, he had persevered, and had made of himself an outstanding student, as he was, in his youth, invariably the outstanding member of any class, any school, any group in which he found himself. Destined for greatness. But you must practice humility, not pride.

Woodrow wiped at his eyes with his shirt cuff, in manner and in expression very like a child. It seemed to be so, he did not recall that Joseph Ruggles Wilson, his father, had passed away; into the mysterious other world, into which his mother had passed away when Woodrow had been thirty-two, and his first daughter Margaret had been recently born. “You are right, Winslow—of course. Father has been dead more than two years. He has been gathered into the ‘Great Dark’—abiding now with his Creator, as we are told. Do you think that it is a realm of being contiguous with our own, if inaccessible? Or—is it accessible? I am intrigued by these ‘spiritualists’—I’ve been reading of their exploits, in London and Boston . . . Often I think, though Father is said to be deceased, is he entirely departed? Requiescat in pace. But—is he in peace? Are any of the dead departed—or in peace? Or do we only wish them so, that we can imagine ourselves free of their dominion?”

To which query Winslow Slade, staring into the now-waning fire, as shadows rippled across his face, seemed to have no ready reply.

REQUIESCAT IN PACE is the simple legend chiseled beneath the name winslow elias slade and the dates 14 december 1831–1 june 1906 on the Slade family mausoleum in the older part of the Princeton Cemetery, near the very heart of Princeton. It was said that the distressed gentleman, shortly before his death, left instructions with his family that he wished the somber inscription Pain Was My Portion would be engraved on his tomb; but that his son Augustus forbade it.

“We have had enough of pain, we Slades,” Augustus allegedly declared, “and now we are prepared for peace.”

This was at a time when the Crosswicks Curse, or, as it is sometimes called, the Crosswicks Horror, had at last lifted from Princeton, and peace of a kind had been restored.

I realize, the reader may be wondering: how could Reverend Winslow Slade, so beloved and revered a Princeton citizen, the only man from whom Woodrow Wilson sought advice and solace, have come to so despairing an end? How is this possible?

All I have are the myriad facts I have been able to unearth and assemble, that point to a plausible explanation: the reader will have to draw his or her own conclusions, perhaps.

At the time of our present narrative in March 1905, when Woodrow Wilson sought him out surreptitiously, Winslow Slade retained much of his commanding presence—that blend of authority, manly dignity, compassion, and Christian forbearance noted by his many admirers. No doubt these qualities were inherited with his blood: for Winslow’s ancestry may be traced on his father’s side to those religiously persecuted and religiously driven Puritans who sought freedom from the tyranny of the Church of England in the late 1600s; and on his mother’s side, to Scots-English immigrants in the early 1700s to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who soon acquired a measure of affluence through trade with England. Within two generations, a number of Slades had migrated from New England to the Philadelphia / Trenton area, as, in religious terms, they had migrated from the rigidity of belief of old-style Puritanism to the somewhat more liberal Presbyterianism of the day, tinged with Calvinist determinism as it was; these were compassionate Christians who sided with those who opposed the execution of Quakers as heretics, a Puritan obsession. Sometime later, in the Battle of Princeton of 1777, General Elias Slade famously distinguished himself, alongside his compatriot Lieutenant Colonel Aaron Burr, Jr. (Elias Slade, only thirty-two at the time of his death, had boldly surrendered his powerful positions in both the Royal Governor’s Council and the Supreme Court of the Crown Colony in order to support George Washington in the revolutionary movement—a rebellion by no means so clear-cut in the 1770s nor so seemingly inevitable as it appears to us today in our history textbooks. And what an irony it is that Aaron Burr, Jr., a hero in some quarters in his own time, has been relegated to a disreputable position scarcely more elevated than that of his former compatriot Benedict Arnold!)