The Accursed (21 page)
(From the secret journal of Mrs. Adelaide McLean Burr; June–October 1905)
_____ . Cruel! Very cruel. My hand trembles so that I can scarcely hold this pen.
Though six hours have passed since the ignominy; the bafflement; the inexplicable
hurt
.
For it seems to have come about, as in a malevolent tale of the Brothers Grimm, that my beloved Horace has
turned
—he is
not himself
—on the very eve of our fifteenth wedding anniversary; while my love for him remains as unsullied as when I was a bride.
_____ . I shall not weep another tear, for I have none. He loves me no longer—& I must die.
_____ . “One day, Adelaide, you will see, they
turn
,” my own dear mother whispered in my ear, when I was a girl. “Husbands
turn
because it is their nature: they cannot help themselves, & we cannot help them. & then there is little solace but the grave.”
_____ . Handsome stout-bodied curly-mustach’d husband Horace who has always adored & prized & pampered his dear little Puss; & laughed at her little breathless ways; & made light of her terrors; after 15 years of Christian matrimony of uncomplaining devotion, why, he has revealed another side to himself—a lewd & unlook’d-to aspect of the masculine soul.
_____ . “Horace,” I inquired of him, in a voice so faint it could hardly be heard over the sound of the man’s hoarse breathing, “why are you but partly clad? Why have you burst into my room in the night, & so afflicted me with the sight of you, my poor heart is near to bursting? And—can it be, you smell of
spirits
? Horace, please—come no closer! Or I shall ring for a servant!”
_____ . Or was it but a nightmare; the work of Dream-Hawks that swoop & stab & claw . . . This morning finds me disheveled & fainting, too weak to tolerate my new medicine, coaxed upon me by Hannah, who is very worried on my account; & midmorning Mrs. Joris our housekeeper ventured to see me, greatly troubled—for all the staff whispers of Mrs. Burr’s crisis of health.
_____ . (It has been thus, this crude behavior, laced with
spirits
, following Horace’s business visits to Manhattan, when he stays overnight at the Madison Club; for it is whispered by Mrs. Cleveland, women of a
loose reputation
are readily available there, to the most distinguished & dignified of gentlemen. & if the man does not succumb, yet, in his inflamed imagination, he has been tempted; & cannot control himself when he returns to his own household. & in my naiveté I said to Frances—“Ah, but not Horace! Not ever my dear Horace.”)
_____ . (It is not a secret, the coarse-mannered ruffian Grover Cleveland had “relations” with women before his marriage to Frances; & God knows, very likely afterward. For there is a beast in men, if once released cannot then be confined. & all the world knows, Mr. Cleveland sired a bastard child upon one of these wretched females, yet, our civilization being depraved as it has become, this fact was not held against the man, & did not prevent his being elected President of the United States—not once, but twice!)
_____ . So lonely & nervous & why does my heart pound so. I am a high-strung young lady, Dr. Boudinot declared, when I became mistress of Maidstone, “to be compared with a musical instrument of such subtlety & artistry as the Stradivarius violin”—for which little Puss was praised & admired, for as a girl of seventeen I had but an eighteen-inch waist
without corsetry
; & a complexion of such translucence, it was marveled that I resembled a
porcelain doll
.
In those happier years it seemed Horace—& many others—prized me for all that I was high-strung & “sensitive” & prone to fainting spells & required petting & comforting & the gentlest of caresses.
_____ . (What is happening in this house? In which I am “mistress”—yet captive? Horace is so often away, at his office on Bank Street, or in NYC; here, I am aware of the servants whispering & plotting behind our backs; there is evidence that they are stealing from us, that Horace discounts. Hannah is stiff in my presence & when reprimanded for a blunder, grows resentful; & Minnie has become close-mouthed; the boy Abraham, having grown inches within mere months, from gorging himself in the kitchen, I am sure, is stiff-faced in my presence & rudely mumbles
Mz Ad’laide
as if the taste of my name in his mouth was most bitter. Just now ringing & ringing the bell, & no one comes to my aid & if I had fallen into a faint, or worse . . . & so I think
Why, they could rise up against me, in this very house! Like slave massacres of old, and terrible things perpetrated upon helpless white women, of which no one will then speak for such are UNSPEAKABLE
.
)
_____ . Thus the accursed summer passes. Days & nights in hellish succession & poor Puss lies prostrate beneath the attacks of the Dream-Hawks—great carrion birds with wing-spans of ten feet & eyes of blazing coals & cruel talons to rake against my soft cheek & tangle in my hair. & the wisdom of Madame Blavatsky lies fallow in me now, I am not strong-minded enough to comprehend her; the most insipid Sunday school catechism is quite enough, for poor Puss’s strained mental state.
& nothing is further known of the unhappy Annabel Slade, now Mrs. Annabel Bayard; though it is believed that her brother Josiah has vowed to revenge himself upon her abductor, & reclaim her. Poor dear Annabel!—a mere child, not so canny as Puss; for Puss alone feels deep sorrow for her, & not a
frisson
of satisfaction, that the high & mighty Slades are in this vulnerable way laid low. For Annabel is lost to all society now, & all decent company; as she is lost to her beloved family. & my unhappy nephew Dabney Bayard has fallen into drunkenness & it is believed lewdness, of which his female relatives are not supposed to know. & Horace says, It is not our concern, Adelaide: do not think of it. & yet, which woman in Princeton, horrified by the public abduction of Annabel Slade, does not think of
it
.
_____ . To my horror & disgust I am ever more often visited by Horace, staggering in the dark, & smelling of bourbon; this partly-clad, disheveled stranger who mumbles, begs, threatens me, that I must “embrace” him—“as a wife should.” & in my bed he grovels, & grunts, & squeals, & groans; & collapses, like a sack of flour, weighing so heavily upon me, I am in danger of suffocation. & the shame is such, I must change my own bed linens in the morning, for fear that the servants will know, & pity me; or worse yet, laugh at me—mistress of Maidstone, no more respected than a harlot! & yet stranger visions come to me, in my troubled sleep, the frolicking ghost-shape of Ruth Cleveland who is far more familiar to me now in death than ever she had been in life; & little Oriana Slade, who was flower girl at Annabel’s wedding, now Ruth Cleveland’s nocturnal companion, it seems. & most upsetting, the transmogrified shape of cousin Wilhelmina who smiles at me & lisps
Dear Cousin Addie
! as she has never done in life; & contorts her young body in a most sinuous way as, by daylight, that high-minded & chaste young woman would never do, I am certain. & most hideous, the naked form of the house-boy Abraham, who is no more than thirteen years old, I am sure, yet, in such visions, a muscled & “developed” youth, & his skin as dark as the ebony inlaid in my bedroom bureau, & his white-rimmed lascivious eyes . . .
_____ . (Yet I have learned of bold women of our time who have themselves
turned
from the merely female, & acquiescent: the poet & suffragette Charlotte Perkins Gilman & the Jewish anarchist Emma Goldman of whom it is said she conspired to assassinate President McKinley! Would that poor Puss had such boldness, & such opportunity; would that poor Puss were not a pathetic
invalid
which is the most extreme state of that more general malady
femaleness
.
)
_____ . I shall not forgive any of them. My heart, that is frail, yet pounds hardily, & with pride. I am
sickened
by Horace in his transmogrified state, when he is cruel & swinish & “not himself”—afterward kneeling in the corridor outside my door & begging me through the keyhole,
O my darling forgive
me—for he knew not what he did, what pleas he has made to me, having over-indulged at sherry & bitters & smoked oysters at his accursed
gentlemen’s club
in the city.
_____ . Thank God for my female friends!—as Mother had warned, in the end you will have only women to rely upon, & to love you. For here is Johanna van Dyck bringing me the sweetest honeycomb, from her groundskeeper’s bee hives; & she & Mandy concerned that I am looking “very pale, & sickly”; & reading to me from Mr. Ade’s amusing
The College Widow
, & Mrs. Corelli’s
The Wicked Suitor
; & frothy glamour pieces out of
The Smart Set
. (When these & other ladies come to visit, sly Puss hides her Theosophical & anarchist texts, & Charlotte Gilman’s
In This Our World & The Yellow Wallpaper & Other Stories
; it is enough, that I betray to them that I am reading Mrs. Wharton’s
The House of Mirth
which is faulted, in the very best families of New York & Newport, as a crude & unfair satire of their society, with a heroine who behaves in a most unladylike fashion.) & there is the solace of Gossip, that rages unabated through the summer & into autumn, that the Slade family is
accursed
, in the way of the Hebrew God testing Job; & that the feud between prune-face Woodrow Wilson & Dean Sixty-Two-Around-the-Vest Andrew West grows more heated each week. Tongues wag freely in town, some merrily & some in distress; for it is said, not one, not two, not three, but
all four of the Wilson females
are suffering Woodrow’s chagrin; & poor Jessie, hardly eighteen years old, has badly suffered the loss of her friend Annabel Slade, to whom she looked as an ideal friend, & a model of behavior. Elsewhere, in Wilmington, the elderly Mrs. Pyne clings fast to her millions of dollars as she clings to her crabbed life, & plays Wilson & West against each other: whether she will leave her husband’s fortune to Princeton University under the direction of Wilson or of West: quite the trick, my girl, to make these pompous “academicians” dance to your tune! A fresh development, however: yet a second elderly millionaire is drawn into the squabble, one Isaac Wyman of Boston, Mass., Princeton Class of ’86, who is said to be leaning “just slightly Westward” with his bequeath of four million dollars. Horace shakes his head over these developments, for he is sympathetic with President Wilson, who is so very earnest a man; yet, Horace is sympathetic with Andrew West too, for Andrew preceded Wilson by many years at the university, and is seen to have been slighted by the board of trustees, in not having been offered the presidency. Wilson’s latest humiliation is that the site he has proposed for the new graduate school, in defiance of the dean’s proposal, has turned out to be unfit for reasons of sanitation; evidently, the acreage had been at one time a
sewer field
. (& yet it did shock me, that there was anything like a
sewer field
in Princeton Borough! I am sure, I have never heard of it until now.)
_____ . Next day, perusing
The House of Mirth
, I find that the novel is ugly & grating, as it had been suggested; disagreeable for its cruelty toward that very set to which Edith Newbold Jones was born, if I am not mistaken. Hurriedly skimming the pages, I find that it is even worse, that the arriviste Jew Mr. Rosedale should prove in the end
gentlemanly
—as if in rebuke to the Christians. I shall toss the novel into the trash where it belongs for Mrs. Wharton is indeed a traitor to her class, like her dear friend the buffoon “Teddy” as well.
_____ . Thrilling, to learn that as a young woman, Emma Goldman conspired with an anarchist comrade to murder Henry Clay Frick of Carnegie Steel; for Andrew Carnegie is not a favorite in this household, nor a friend of the Burrs. So much is confused & complicated in the world, it is very exciting to think of
murder
, as a solution. For, how the men in Princeton worry & fret! Poor Augustus Slade, since his daughter’s shameful “abduction,” is said to be miserable with ulcers & arthritis; my Burr relatives are distressed with the financial scene, on Wall Street; & of course the van Dycks, & the Strachans, & the Bayards, & Horace. For the world threatens to turn upside down, & Roosevelt for the mere purpose of publicity hammers away at what it pleases the bully to call TRUSTS; & his conspiracy with the outlaw Mitchell, “president” of the miners, is scarcely to be believed. Like his friend Mrs. Wharton, Roosevelt is a class traitor, yet strutting & preening before us—a friend to the Socialist Labor Party (as the anarchists call themselves) & sympathetic doubtless with the riots & arsonists of Paterson. Ah, I hate them all: I am tired of hearing of them: riffraff, rubble, the unwashed & the unlettered & the poor. Mr. Armour, Horace’s friend, is sorely abused by a series of attacks in a Socialist newspaper; all about town it is whispered, his meat-packing companies in Chicago have been “exposed” by a young muckraker named Sinclair, who has published a series called
The Jungle
—Dr. Boudinot shudders to speak of it saying that Adelaide must never so much as glance at this infamy, she would be violently sick to her stomach, & could never again eat meat, nor suffer it to be eaten in her presence. If Mrs. Armour comes to tea this week, I will offer her my sympathy, for if Horace were “exposed” in the public press, how should his Puss respond! We must take solace from the wisdom of the ages as Reverend Beecher has preached
God intended the great to be great, and the little to be little; and the workingman who cannot live on one dollar a day, and bread and water, is not fit to live
.
This, a Christian preacher of great renown & reputation.