The Accursed (22 page)

_____ . Late September & yet humid & oppressive as midsummer. & the Slade girl has not yet been found; & poor Dabney has resigned his commission, out of shame. & it is said, divorce proceedings have been initiated, not by Dabney but by the Bayards; for the two families, that had once been friends, are now irrevocably split. & Puss is often vexed & peevish & has little patience for fools. Reverend FitzRandolph came for tea & I quite shocked the man saying I wished to drop two of my charity cases—Sarah Crum, of Kingston, who has presented the world with yet another unwanted Crum—this, the seventh, I believe—&
truly enough
. & the Windvogel family as well, scarcely less fecund, though the father is said to be crippled, & the mother diabetic; they have moved out to Valley Road, & can no longer be considered in our parish. Reverend FitzRandolph, who will never recover from the shock & shame of having “wed” Annabel Slade & Dabney Bayard, & being in a sense responsible for some part of the scandal, purses his lips at me & worries that it will be difficult to explain to the Windvogel father, badly injured in a furnace mishap in the cellar of Nassau Hall, & without insurance, that the Burrs’ charity must cease, as his father has moved a few miles from their original home, since they are not able to afford Princeton Borough taxes & expenses. Whereupon Puss’s temper & wit flared up & I said, “Why, dear Reverend, shall our charity—by which I mean yours, and not just ours—so inflate itself to encompass the entire globe?” & the good reverend gaped at me, quite unable to reply.

So much for the Crums & the Windvogels. I have been sick of their mewling & begging for years. It is a good thing, I am sure that Emma Goldman would concur, to XXXX these creatures from my charity list & XXXX them from my conscience.

Ah, I am weakened by my Neftel treatment
*
—& Dr. Boudinot by my bedside overseeing the treatment, murmuring to me, as if it were a well-known & controversial fact, that the tragedy of the Slades would never have occurred, if he had been allowed to perform his “delicate surgery” on Annabel, at the age of seven, as he had recommended to the Slades; for as a young child, the little girl was deemed to be “over-sensitive” & of an “inflamed imagination”; but the family unwisely declined, with the explanation that such young children must be allowed to develop as they will, naturally; without medical or even adult interference. The Neftel procedure is one that Dr. Boudinot & other physicians are often called upon to perform as, in pre-pubescent females, it is adamant that they be spared the indecencies of certain types of physiological sensation; & spared all risk of succumbing to madness by way of the habit of
unspeakable practices
. Thus Dr. Boudinot prattles, & sighs; in the service of the many invalids of Princeton, the doctor has grown white-haired, & elderly; bestowing a kindly paternal tapping on my wrist & commending my parents for having acted prudently in my case. (Yet I remember little. Or nothing. A chloroformed handkerchief, perhaps; a stinging & burning sensation afterward, when required to “make water”—(as Nanny called it); ah, is it not distasteful, ugly—& too trifling to be recalled.)

Autumn, & yet warm. Strange solar winds blow through Princeton & vicinity, it is said. Horace, of late restless nearly all the time, & thinner-cheeked than he was even a few months ago, has installed an
electric fan
in our household, from Dr. Schulyer Skaats Wheeler’s famed laboratory of invention in Ampere, New Jersey; a curious yet wonderfully effective contraption. (& how did Horace learn of it?—by way of my cousin Wilhelmina, it seems; for the two quite by chance sat together on the train to New York, Willy paging through the
Post
& commenting on the diverse advertisements therein, of which one was for Dr. Wheeler’s novelty invention.) & so here it is, in Puss’s boudoir, where it is much appreciated. Idly I switch the noisy motor on & off & on & off amusing myself with the fresh little breeze it generates against my heated cheeks & unloos’d tresses. “You are so good to your Puss, dear Horace,” I whisper; & Horace says, “Dear Puss, it is the least that a husband might do.”

_____ .
Inspired by E. Goldman I am in a nervous ecstasy thinking how all of them might be dispatched including the crude sweating Husband, their food laced with arsenic; for arsenic is a white powder, I believe, & might be dissolved in milk, or stirred in mashed potatoes; & spooned into suety grits, which the servants particularly favor. & who would suspect? For the poor invalid Mrs. Burr is scarcely able to lift herself from her divan, on most days; let alone make her way into the rear of the house, where she has not ventured for years. & she is not likely to even know of arsenic, let alone how to employ it
.

_____ . (For so it was argued of Lizzie Borden of Fall River, Mass., no “lady” could take an ax & murder her parents; & so the jurors agreed, idiot sheep as they are. & under the law, Lizzie Borden is as innocent as you or I; the more so, as guilt was never proved against her, & guilt might yet be proved against you or I.)

_____ . Boudinot & his son Boudinot, Jr., & a new specialist Dr. Danke from Philadelphia shake their heads & mumble of
neurasthenia, rheumatic gout, nervous hyperesthesia, spinal neurosis, temporal lobe inflammation, & the newest & most virulent of plagues from the Orient: Laotian sleeping sickness which paralyzes the brain & spine
—& so they recommend a new therapy called Motorpathic Treatment. So, Puss is meant to comply; & not to shriek at the carrion birds, they have come to Maidstone because Mr. & Mrs. Burr are well-to-do Princetonians, & can pay for such quack remedies. So, my temper flared & I wept & thrashed my legs beneath the comforter & told them to leave, to leave at once, I will not succumb to more medical experimentation & more pain that quacks may enrich & amuse themselves. & Dr. Boudinot who has known me since my girlhood stared at me in astonishment, & alarm—“Why Adelaide, this is not like you,” etc.—“Why then, Adelaide, we must appeal to Horace.”

_____ . To defy them, & quite surprise Horace when he learns of it, I ventured out today to my first tea of the autumn; in fact, it is the first time I have left Maidstone since hideous 4 June when poor Annabel was abducted before our eyes by that beast. Would that the tea were more significant, but it was a welcome respite from my sickbed: our hostess was Mrs. Wilson at Prospect, that poor-man’s “Tuscan mansion” on the university campus, about which the Wilsons make such a fuss, giving themselves airs & at the same time complaining that the boys look into their windows! (Who would care to look into
these windows
?) Henrietta Slade kindly stopped for me, to be driven with her in the Slades’ new motorcar, a handsome Pierce-Arrow a-gleam with brass fittings; dear Henrietta is solicitous of my health, for the poor woman misses her daughter, of course; & of her daughter no one dares speak. At Prospect, there was the disappointment of so many faculty wives & wives of the Seminary instructors (who are all ordained ministers, I believe)—all very stiff & self-conscious & most of mediocre breeding & shockingly badly dressed in outdated “fashions” of the kind West End ladies have passed on to the poor years ago; Henrietta & I were very quiet, though Mrs. Cleveland condescended to speak with her usual warmth, with Mrs. Wilson, to humor the vain woman, who has announced her intention to establish a women’s club—“The Present Day Club”—with a meeting-place on Stockton Street. (So, we were made to realize, this invitation to tea was but a ruse to involve West End ladies in this club—a mingling of West End Princeton & academic Princeton
that will never be
.) Departing, Mrs. Cleveland laughed slyly into my ear—as if we were making our escape but narrowly—& in the Pierce-Arrow, Henrietta said not a word but seemed to be weeping quietly into a lace handkerchief. The company of women—
the wrong sort of women
—is very shrill & wearying. And now, I am headachey & out of sorts & must pay for my dash for freedom, with some of the new medication, & a nap.

Item
. Henrietta Slade, fortified by several strong cups of tea, shocked a circle of ladies with a tragic & repulsive episode of the other day, at Crosswicks; the Slades’ dog Thor, a handsome German shepherd, was attacked by an unidentified species of snake, black-scaled & very thick of body & unnaturally long: the creature having thrust its wicked head into the poor dog’s mouth & forced itself down his throat for some fifteen inches of its hideous length! And this horror, at the edge of the beautiful rose garden at Crosswicks. At this, several of us, certainly including Puss, were feeling very faint; & disgusted; & Johanna turned quite white; & Mrs. Wilson ran to fetch ether-and-water, to revive us. We knew not which was more horrific & perplexing, the strangulation of a dog under such circumstances, or Henrietta Slade speaking in such a way—for the poor woman smiled inanely, as she recounted the horror, saying several times
But as we Slades are accursed, anything may happen to us now. No one will mark it
.

_____ .
Accursed
! The very word rippled through us, like an electric current. For now the Slades’ fate had been defined, it would soon seem to us, who would wish to imagine ourselves but observers, that this was our general fate, as inhabitants of Princeton.

_____ . “All is not well at Westland.” This bleak declaration, from out of the beautifully shaped lips of Mrs. Grover Cleveland, came unexpectedly, the next day; & poor Puss quite amazed, to be told by the excitable Hannah that “Mrs. Cleveland” is downstairs & awaiting her, as if a visit had been planned beforehand, which assuredly it had not.

Imagine my surprise, that dark-eyed & olive-skinned Frances Cleveland falteringly confessed, over several cups of Earl Grey liberally sweetened by honey, that
all was not well
in the stately old Colonial on Hodge Road; for, since the episode at the Craven house, poor Grover could scarcely sleep of a night; cannot seem to find a position to accommodate his stomach, or his back-side, or his chest; thus, he wanders the house in his nightgown & night-cap; is discovered in prayer, or in tears, or rants pertaining to his lawyering days; refuting charges made against him by the Tammany Hall villains, or the Republicans in their cruel campaign that Cleveland had fathered a bastard child & was thus unfit to be President. & most grievous of all for the effect it had upon him, his tearful pleadings with McKinley on issues of the War, & the
Maine
, & whether Grover had profited from the assassination & rejoiced in it.
*
“He is closeted away with the old President for hours at a time,” Mrs. Cleveland confided in me, “and, one wretched night last week—(indeed, the very worst night of our married life!)—Grover woke from sleep shouting in terror, believing that the assassin Leon Colzigna—Czolginga?—Czolgoz-something—was in the room with us, with a fire-arm. Grover had broken into a chill sweat and I could not calm him, nor even attempt to calm him, for he pushed away my arms and seemed not to recognize me. I did not see the anarchist assassin but Grover certainly seemed to see the man, except the creature was now partly decayed, it seemed; as, after his electrocution, quicklime and acid were heaped onto the body. ‘He is here, Frances!—the anarchist!—they have come for me at last! My crimes were so petty—my faults, my flaws—yet, they have come for me and will drag me to Hell.’ ” Mrs. Cleveland fell silent, as if exhausted by this account; and poor Puss scarcely knew what to say, for a fit of shivering and queasiness. & soon after, Mrs. Cleveland departed, with a squeeze of my chill little hand—“Pray, Adelaide, it will never happen to you, that your beloved husband
turns
.”

Item
. Having resigned his U.S. Army commission, my troubled nephew Dabney Bayard is said to be glimpsed often at the Belmont, Saratoga, & Pimlico racetracks; more grievously, he is said to be a patron of
illicit & illegal gambling establishments
in New York City.

(No doubt, Dabney frequents worse establishments, even the mention of which we ladies are spared.) Henrietta Slade speaks in a tremulous voice of this unhappy young man, whose marriage to her daughter was just recently annulled by a decision of the local court; for it seems, unjustly, Dabney has become an enemy of the Slades & refuses to communicate with them, etc. There is a prevailing rumor that Dabney & Josiah Slade will soon fight a duel; that each young man has chosen his dueling pistol; yet, Henrietta insists: “Josiah is a young man of Christian morals & fortitude who would never be party to an act of forbidden violence. He commiserates with Dabney as he would with a
bereaved brother
.”

When Mrs. Slade absented herself from the drawing room at Wheatsheaf for a few minutes, we ladies spoke excitedly of her revelation; & compared notes, that, so strangely, there has been no news of Annabel from any quarter, as if the young woman and her abductor had indeed vanished
into thin air
. Josiah is often absent from Princeton, rumored to be ceaselessly searching for his sister in every part of Jersey—cities, towns, hamlets & wild forests and mountains to the Northwest, along the Delaware River. (For Jersey is a greatly varied state, its rural regions scarcely imagined by inhabitants of its cities, or visitors from New York City.) Johanna van Dyck confided in us that in meeting Josiah one didn’t immediately grasp the nature & degree of his obsession; nor had his appearance altered greatly, except for the fact that he had lost weight—his handsome face just slightly gaunt, & his eyes unpleasantly glittering; it seems too that he has cultivated a rough sort of beard. When he returns to Crosswicks, he is said to be “very quiet”—“melancholy & resigned”—yet hides away in his grandfather’s library perusing old maps, even, it’s said, maps drawn up in Colonial times, of little accuracy now. “The most pathetic of all tales of Josiah,” Johanna said, in a lowered voice, “was told to Pearce by several undergraduates who were camping last weekend near the Water Gap, and wakened from sleep before dawn by a ‘bearded young hunter’ tramping in the forest alone, armed with a deer rifle, and wearing a backpack, searching, as he said, for his
lost sister
. The campers roused themselves to give aid, for, being Princeton boys, they are naturally gracious and schooled in courtesy; but were taken aback to learn that the
lost sister
had been missing for ninety-seven days, and had been last seen on Nassau Street, Princeton. Have you ever heard a more piteous tale?”