The Accursed (8 page)
Yet, Annabel had received reasonably high grades in these disliked subjects, for, lacking in aptitude as she was, she was yet more capable than the majority of her girl-classmates.
On this weekday morning in April, Annabel was not showily dressed; though she wore beneath her clothes, on her already slender body, a straight-front corset tightened to make her small waist appear smaller still, so that she could scarcely breathe; this cruel restraining undergarment being mandated for her, since the age of fourteen when it was perceived by her uneasy elders that she was becoming
womanly
in the bosom and hips.
Though it was not a rainy day, Annabel was wearing a “habit-back,” or “rainy-day” skirt of pale blue flannel-and-cotton; a skirt fashionable at the time, that dropped to shoe-top length, ideal for rainy days but proper enough for casual wear at home. Her silken white blouse sported stylish puff sleeves, with tight cuffs, and as many as twenty-five mother-of-pearl buttons at the front; her little bolero jacket was pale yellow quilted cotton; her straw hat, prudently worn in the sun, was trimmed with a green satin ribbon tied beneath the chin. Since Annabel would be seeing her fiancé Dabney Bayard later in the day, with the assistance of one of the younger Negro maids she had fashioned her silken hair into a sleek pompadour and numerous small curls. Annabel’s hair was a fair brown, that might appear blond, or even silvery, in certain lights; it was held in place by ornamental amber combs that had once belonged to her grandmother Oriana, a woman departed this life long before Annabel had been born.
As her fair complexion was too delicate to brave even the rays of an April sun, Annabel kept the rim of her straw hat strategically lowered over her eyes; yet it must be presumed that Axson Mayte, staring so frankly at her, as at an exotic animal-specimen on display, could see how arrestingly
pretty
she was, and how fragile, like the very narcissi she held in her hands.
Suddenly there issued out of the wind-rippled flowers at Annabel’s feet a faint hissing whisper—
Annabel, Annabel!
In her confusion, Annabel thought
It is Grandmother Oriana. She is worried about her amber combs, she regrets leaving them for me.
(This was a curious thought, since Annabel had not known her grandmother, who’d died many years before her birth; nor had she known her grandfather’s second wife, Tabitha.)
Yet, a moment later Annabel had forgotten the whisper. So distracted was she by the stranger in her grandfather’s garden, she couldn’t seem to concentrate. That she had not turned away from the man with the hand-sickle, and walked quickly up to the house, as she had every opportunity to do, seemed to encourage him for, smiling still, the tip of his pink tongue darting at his lips, he stepped forward again in a single gliding stride, now less than five feet from her.
Now, surely, he would speak to her?—but he did not.
Annabel lifted her bouquet of flowers and in a kind of child-miming gesture indicated that the visitor should note her task, and its urgency, and not detain her any longer; aloud she murmured, for the visitor to hear, or not—“I have tarried too long, already.” For overhead the sunny sky was becoming riddled with rain clouds; a giant thumb and finger pinched shut the sun. Yet for some reason, as if she were paralyzed, Annabel didn’t turn away; and again the hissing
Annabel, Annabel!
seemed to rise from the wind-buffeted petals of the flowers at her feet.
Then—in the literal blink of an eye!—there stood the gentleman before her, now just twelve inches from her; for now he did seem like one of Winslow Slade’s emissary-gentlemen, on a churchly mission that would be kept secret from the rest of the family, who were but lay-Presbyterians in the faith. Out of giddy nervousness Annabel may have murmured “H-Hello” or “G-Good morning”—which had the immediate effect of unlocking the gentleman’s silence at last. For now he bowed a second time, with an eager sort of stiffness, and announced that his name was “Axson Mayte, of Charleston, South Carolina”—“an associate of Winslow Slade’s”—“overcome with rapture,
chère mademoiselle,
at the prospect of making
your
acquaintance.”
At this, Annabel stammered her name, for she could not think of a polite way of avoiding it: “I am—Dr. Slade’s granddaughter—Annabel Slade . . .”
The visitor seized Annabel’s small hand, and bent as if to bestow a kiss upon it, in the German manner—hardly more than a sociable gesture, with no actual touching of the lips to the back of the hand, yet Annabel felt the imprint of a considerable, impassioned kiss; she was certain, she’d felt the imprint of the snaggle-tooth incisor against her sensitive skin. And she’d smelled the stranger’s breath—harsh and dry as ashes.
In that instant, the very marrow of her bones seemed to shiver, and the satin tie beneath her chin felt dangerously tight, like the long straight-front corset, too tightly laced that morning by Harriet, the frowning Negro girl who seemed both fond of her young white-skinned charge, and resentful of her. Half-fainting Annabel yet clearly thought—
Must I pay now for my vanity! O God have mercy.
If Axson Mayte of Charleston, South Carolina, had taken note of Annabel’s shudder of distress, he gave no sign; for he was a smooth-mannered gentleman, with his sharp deep-set eyes and sidelong glances, that might have been as ironic as they were yearning. He proceeded to cut for Annabel, with his borrowed hand-sickle—(the blade of which was wickedly sharp, Annabel saw with a shiver)—a dozen or more fresh flowers: daffodils, miniature iris, star-of-Bethlehems, narcissi—which he then made a gallant ceremony of presenting to her, with another grave bow.
“Oh! Thank you, sir.”
Annabel felt that she had no choice but to accept these flowers, though juices from their cut stems dripped, and darkened her rainy-day skirt in tiny splotches; she had no choice but to thank Mr. Mayte, for he
was
very kind; and as gallant, she was sure, as any Princeton gentleman.
More gallant than her fiancé, certainly! For Dabney could be curt and ill-tempered, when he and Annabel were alone, with no elders to observe him; Dabney could confound Annabel with paradoxes she wasn’t sure were serious, or mocking: “Do you
think
? Your face is so like a doll’s—a painted ceramic doll.”
Annabel saw with relief that Axson Mayte had set aside the wickedly sharp hand-sickle, letting it fall carelessly on the path.
The gardener would discover it there, or—possibly—Annabel’s mother, Henrietta, who “gardened” in pleasant weather, in beds kept weeded and lushly fertilized by the grounds staff.
In a confused sort of happiness Annabel was smiling. Or—perhaps it was sheer nerves, unease. So many spring flowers, some were falling from her hands. Impulsively she selected a long-stemmed narcissus to offer Axson Mayte, for his buttonhole.
“Compliments of Crosswicks Manse!”
Mayte seemed genuinely surprised by this gesture; warmly and effusively he thanked her. “From the depths of my soul,
chère mademoiselle,
I thank you—you are too kind—you cannot know, in fact, how kind you are—a rare quality in ‘ladies’ of your station, in my experience.”
Though Mayte’s words were flattering, or were meant to be, the man next behaved in an odd, crude manner: he shortened the narcissus stem by clamping his strong teeth upon it near the flower and biting down hard, that it might fit with ease in his buttonhole—where in fact it looked very striking.
“Will you, mademoiselle—?”
Looming over Annabel, from his height of at least six feet, Axson Mayte extended his arm for Annabel to take, hesitantly, that he might escort her back up to the Manse where now, on the rear terrace, Winslow Slade himself was waving and calling urgently to them.
N
ow, we arrive at the first
public
manifestation of the Curse, on Sunday morning 20 April 1905—except that no previous history credits this episode, nor did any of the principals know, or could have guessed, what the vision of the Spectral Daughter portended.
That is, what the vision portended for those like the Slades, and Lieutenant Dabney Bayard, who might have supposed themselves mere bystanders, astonished and pitying witnesses to a mental collapse of ex-President Grover Cleveland.
This chapter, intended to be brief, is pivotal in my chronicle, and difficult to execute, I think—for, prior to this, my dramatized scenes were between but two persons; now, I am attempting a larger
dramatis personae,
and must try to hint to the reader, without being over-explicit, some of the subtleties of emotion that existed among the young people Josiah, Annabel, and Annabel’s fiancé, Dabney Bayard.
(Yet, some readers will complain: the chronicle is
too subtle
. Even as others will complain,
it is not subtle enough
.)
ON THIS MORNING,
following Sunday church services in Princeton, a party of approximately two dozen persons traveled to the “old Craven estate” on Rosedale Road, which had recently been purchased by the Slades, as its grounds of several acres abutted the three-hundred-acre property of Crosswicks Manse, that stretched back from Elm Road; the revelation being, that the elder Slades were making the Craven estate a wedding gift to the young couple, for them to take occupancy there following their honeymoon in Italy.
Of course, I have seen photographs of the “old Craven estate” which was razed years later, to make way for a larger and grander country estate at the height of the economic boom of the 1920s; at this time, among the Slades and their party, the house was considered a “honeymoon cottage” though it contained as many as twenty rooms, with twelve high, narrow front windows bracketed by black shutters; its steep roof was made of gleaming Holland tile. So large a house, with an impressive exterior of Boonton limestone—(incidentally, from the Slades’ quarry at Boonton)—would not seem, to most readers, unfamiliar with the vagaries of the rich, appropriately designated a
cottage
.
Later, the house was to acquire an ironic, or perhaps a purely ignorant misnomer—“the old Bayard estate”—though neither Lieutenant Bayard nor his bride Annabel was ever to live in it, nor even spend a single night beneath its roof; at the time of this narrative, in 1905, the house was still named for its original owner, the Revolutionary hero Major Dunglass Craven, who, as George Washington’s most intimate aide, uncovered the scheme of the spy André, and brought about his execution.
It was a gay and splendidly dressed party, driving out in several surreys trimmed in pink dogwood from Princeton for brunch at the house, which was to be presented by Crosswicks kitchen staff on-site, as china, cutlery, tables and chairs and linens, and a vast quantity of food and drink, had to be brought from Crosswicks, to the (vacated) house. So far as I have been able to determine, from various diaries and letters, the party consisted of Grover and Frances Cleveland, Pearce and Johanna van Dyck, Edgerstoune and Amanda FitzRandolph, Ezra and Cecelia Bayard (Dabney’s uncle and aunt), Dr. Aaron Burr III and his wife Jennifer, and her daughter Wilhelmina (who was to be Annabel’s maid of honor at the wedding), the Reverend Nathaniel FitzRandolph (since Winslow Slade’s retirement, the full-time pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton) and Mrs. FitzRandolph and the Reverend Thaddeus Shackleton, head of the Princeton Theological Seminary, as well as a number of the Slades—Winslow and his son and daughter-in-law Augustus and Henrietta, and Copplestone and Lenora Slade, Annabel’s uncle and aunt, and their young son Todd, as well as Annabel and Dabney, and Annabel’s brother Josiah.
“Grandfather! You are so kind! You make us happy as children—we scarcely know what to say . . .”
So Annabel exclaimed, seeing the house with its somewhat austere and even forbidding limestone exterior, and the great weight of the Holland tiles, that looked like an avalanche about to flow; yet the greening grasses and overarching elms and oaks, just beginning to come into leaf, gave the scene a picturesque air, like a fairy-tale dwelling; Lieutenant Bayard stammered his gratitude as well, having lost some of his usual composure at the sight of the property, soon to be deeded to
him.
It would be disclosed afterward that negotiations to acquire the house had been discussed with Dabney’s father and his uncle and aunt, before the Slades had moved forward with the purchase. But Dabney himself had not guessed—the plot was kept secret from him, as from Annabel.
(Though very likely, as a shrewd young military officer who had graduated with honors in his class at West Point, Dabney had surmised that the wealthy Slades would give their dear Annabel and her bridegroom a gift commensurate with their love, and their wealth.)
Still, confronted with the “Craven estate” on this sun-lit morning in April, in the midst of a gathering of jovial well-wishers, Dabney seemed quite surprised, and somewhat tongue-tied. A fierce blush rose into his face and in his eyes too sprang some sort of moisture which surreptitiously he brushed away with his fingertips.
The atmosphere of this outing was light, admiring, and festive, for the spring day was perfection, and the stone house with its handblown leaded-glass windows, and its Tiffany-stained glass framing the front door, struck all as ideal for the “honeymoon couple.” Hearing the words
honeymoon couple
caused Annabel to blush, and Dabney to smile awkwardly; though Annabel couldn’t fail to have noticed a certain reserve in her brother Josiah, and a matching discomfort in Dabney when, a few minutes later, by chance the three young people found themselves together in a downstairs room, while the rest of the party ascended to the second floor, to admire the several bedrooms and the splendid vistas framed by each window. (Most of the rooms were empty of course, but Annabel’s mother, Henrietta, had been out to the house numerous times with a retinue of servants on a confidential errand of “decorating” the house in a temporary sort of way. The real effort of decorating, and of furnishing, would fall to the young married couple.)
“How exquisite!—how
very
lovely! I quite envy the young couple”—Mrs. Cleveland’s forceful soprano voice carried down the staircase—“the house is a
tablet rosea—
they will make of it their own. Unlike the house I stepped into, as a young bride . . .”
(Mrs. Cleveland was coyly referring, as often she did, to the White House: she had married the much older President Cleveland in the East Wing of that house, as a girl scarcely out of school.)
And there came Grover Cleveland’s booming voice, in a playful sort of rejoinder—“Dear Frances! You have overcome your initial disadvantage, that is certain. Many times!”
Out of a stubborn sort of diffidence, perhaps, the three young people had stayed behind. Dabney Bayard, erect and handsome in his dress uniform, made a game effort to engage Josiah Slade in a quasi-masculine conversation on one or another topic: the fortunes of the New York Highlanders against their rivals the Cincinnati Reds, and the caliber of both teams set beside the Boston Americans; horses, most hopefully—for Dabney was something of a horseman; and the latest antics of the President—Teddy Roosevelt proudly photographed with a spread of animal-corpses at his feet—wild sheep, bison, deer and pumas on a lavish hunting expedition in the West; Teddy threatening to intervene in Venezuela, that was defaulting on its debts (“It will show the Dagos that they will have to behave decently”
*
); Teddy in virtually every edition of every daily newspaper, grinning out and eyeglasses winking as he trumpeted the virtues of the imperialist Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
Lieutenant Bayard was particularly interested in discussing the “outlaw mining strikes” in eastern Pennsylvania, lately the focus of much newspaper coverage. How “itching” Dabney was, to be involved in some sort of U.S. Army intervention! (That morning, Reverend FitzRandolph at the pulpit had alluded to the “anarchist and atheistical outrages” perpetrated by the United Mine Workers of America against the mine owners and, by extension, against the “law-abiding citizenry” of the American people as a whole.) Yet, though the Slades of Crosswicks had investments in the Pennsylvania mines, as in New Jersey and Pennsylvania textile mills, and Josiah might be expected to concur with Dabney’s sentiments, Josiah only shrugged indifferently, and held himself aloof; and Annabel stood blushing at her fiancé’s side, not knowing whether to be distressed by her brother’s rudeness, or vexed.
(Josiah had no way of knowing that Annabel had, that morning, happened to overhear a brief exchange between him and their mother, Henrietta; and that Annabel was wounded, to hear of Josiah’s studied indifference regarding the day’s outing. If he joined the party, Josiah said, it was only to please
her,
and the other, elder Slades; for he doubted that his sister, so distracted by wedding plans, would notice if he accompanied them, or not.)
What was wrong, Annabel wondered; why could not the three of them be easy in one another’s company? Before Josiah had realized that Dabney Bayard was “interested in” Annabel, he’d seemed to like the robust young man well enough; the two had attended the Princeton-Yale homecoming football game, the previous fall, with a rowdy contingent of other young Princeton males. But Josiah had soon surmised Dabney’s reasons for visiting Crosswicks, and had begun to withdraw from him, though he was too polite, or, in a way too shy, to speak of any reservations he had for Dabney to Annabel.
Annabel wished that her friend Wilhelmina had stayed downstairs with them, at this crucial time. But Wilhelmina—“Willy”—had been the first one to dash upstairs, on an impromptu tour of the house.
Frequently, since early April, Annabel was finding herself lapsing into silence when she and her fiancé were alone together: for their romantic acquaintanceship had been fashioned amid parties and social gatherings, and the tricky matter of “intimate conversation” seemed to baffle them both. Of what did one speak, if no one else overheard? And too, Annabel was beginning to sense that for all his Virginian predecessors, Dabney was not always so well mannered and patient; she had reason to believe that he had a considerable temper, for she’d overheard him speak sharply to servants, waiters, and the like; he had never spoken harshly to her of course, but, at times, his remarks were tinged with a light sort of irony, putting her in mind of the young, greenish thorns on her mother’s prize rosebushes, that looked harmless yet could inflict some small damage if one were not careful.
As to Lieutenant Bayard’s temper, Annabel thought:
He is only expressing his nature. He is a man, and he is a soldier.
For all of Dabney’s pose of confidence, however, he was often unsettled by Josiah Slade, who was, at twenty-four, two years younger than he; but of the two, the more seemingly self-reliant, whose habits of silence made Dabney uneasy, and prone to talk all the more, sometimes boastfully; though he was not, he believed, a boastful person—the most impressive army officers, it was well known, were those who remained reticent, while others told of their exploits.
It was an awkwardness between them, that Josiah Slade had attended West Point after his graduation from Princeton—but only for four months. Abruptly, he had renounced his appointment, quit, and spent several months traveling in the West, before returning home. (When asked why he’d dropped out of West Point, about which he’d been so enthusiastic before enrolling, Josiah had said, with a shrug, that he’d had more than enough of “marching in uniform” for one lifetime.) During the months he’d traveled in Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, and northern California, no one in the family had known very clearly what Josiah was doing though, like a loving son, he wrote home each week, if briefly, to assure his family that he was alive and well.
And so, confronted with his fiancée’s brother, Dabney Bayard was often at a loss for words. How unnerving it was, and how maddening!—for young Bayard, with close-clipped chestnut hair in undulant waves, and long eyelashes, and a quick forthcoming smile, was accustomed to the admiration of women, and of his elders; and yearned only for the admiration, or, at least, the acceptance, of young men of his own age and background, like Josiah Slade.
“Is there some reason you don’t like Dabney?”—so Annabel had asked her brother, shyly; but Josiah had said, with as much sincerity as he could muster, “No! Not at all. What matters, Annabel, is that
you
like
him
.”
This was an oblique answer, which Annabel did not know how to decode. But she noted the bland
like
and not the more forceful
love
out of her brother’s mouth.
And what of Josiah Slade? His character is so complex, and contradictory, and problematic, and, it may as well be said, so “fated,” I don’t feel qualified to analyze it here, as I would not feel qualified to analyze the character of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, of whom Josiah sometimes reminds me. A young man of deep-smoldering passion overcome by too-cerebral meditations; a young man of an “elevated” family, not at ease in society; a young man set upon a course of destiny—with no knowledge of what his destiny must be.
Since Augustus Slade had accepted the suit of Dabney Bayard for Annabel’s hand, effectively cutting off, at the knees, a small battalion of suitors about to declare themselves, Josiah had behaved strangely—capriciously. Yet, when Annabel approached him with her tentative query, he seemed stiff with her, and evasive: “You must follow your heart, Annabel. And Father has said ‘yes’—it can only be up to you, to persevere in the engagement.”
Persevere in the engagement!
Annabel laughed, somewhat hurt; as if marrying Dabney Bayard were some sort of military campaign.