The Rescuer (7 page)

So too, my imagined words put to the director of the Newcomb program, were upsetting to me.
I want the University’s money, that is all I want. The rest is bullshit.

I had to have faith, more inspired words would come to me, as soon as I stepped onto the idyllic University campus that floated like a fairy-world just slightly above the polluted soil and waters of New Jersey.

Yet soon then it happened, after leaving the Grindell Park neighborhood, I became lost on Trenton’s one-way streets. Twenty minutes were required to get to Camden Avenue, to which I could have walked in half that time! But once I was on Camden Avenue, some miles north I decided to turn onto Route 206, thinking that this would be a sort of shortcut, but then, somehow, I found myself routed into driving south instead of north—when I realized my mistake I was being shunted over a bridge crossing the Delaware River into Pennsylvania.

By the time I exited, and returned to New Jersey, I was feeling very agitated. Worries about my brother’s health assailed me, and thoughts of Maralena, from whom I hadn’t heard since our trip to Atlantic City, though she and her friends owed me a considerable amount of money . . . At last I found myself turning onto Route 1 north; but shortly afterward, in a rush of thunderous truck-traffic, I was unable to change lanes out of an exit-only lane for Interstate 95, south toward Philadelphia.

Philadelphia! Always I seemed to be routed south, when I wanted to drive north.

Finally, I managed to exit the crowded interstate, and enter rushing traffic on Route 1 north. But by this time my head pounded with pain. A powerful yearning rose in me, to exit the state highway at Camden Avenue, and make my way home.

That is what I did, that day.

Harvey seemed annoyed to see me. Or maybe his grimace was meant to signal concern.

“Back so soon? I thought you were going to meet with your dissertation advisor . . .”

I couldn’t bear my brother’s jeering, mock-concern. I staggered into my bedroom and fell onto the sofa.

He wants to see me humbled. But if I am broken entirely, he will have no one.

Another day, a brightly sunny day that became inexplicably riddled with storm clouds within a few minutes after I left Grindell Park.

I retraced my original route to Route 1 north; I drove with care, remaining in the right lane despite impatient drivers behind me; but once I left Trenton, in the suburb of Lawrenceville, I seem to have made an error exiting, and was shunted around a gigantic cloverleaf that took me, like a transfixed child strapped in an amusement ride, to a gigantic mall—Quaker Bridge! Streams of traffic passed my car on both sides. I could not even see the highway any longer, nor guess where it was. In the parking lot behind a gigantic JCPenney’s I gripped the steering wheel and laid my head on my arms trying not to cry.

They are taking my fellowship from me. My career. They will deny that they know me. I am being peeled away from them, picked off their skin like lice.

* * *

It was that day, or that evening, that, returning to my brother’s apartment, I realized that the smell of rot had grown stronger.

Though I had not been gone for many hours, the apartment seemed to have been visited. My housekeeping had been confounded—the kitchen counters I’d cleaned were now sticky with spilled liquid, chairs were out of place in the kitchen and in the living room. Strangers had forced their way into my brother’s life, selling and buying dope. He had all but admitted it to me—he was helpless to keep the drug dealers out of his apartment that was, to them, so convenient a setting for drug deals. They had other residences in Trenton, they did not return to the same place for as long as a week sometimes, but they always returned. The smells of male perspiration, tobacco smoke, marijuana (?), hashish (?), beer, decay and rot made my nostrils constrict; turned my stomach; caused my head to ache. The futile effort to drive to the University had left me broken and defeated and there was Harvey sprawled in a ratty easy chair in the living room scribbling into his notebook. His hands were skeletal, but his fingers moved swiftly gripping a pen. His eyes were heavy-lidded, red-lidded. His lips were covered in scabs I had not noticed before. I shuddered to see that the smallest finger on his right hand was freshly bandaged—now, little more than a stub.

“Harvey? What is that terrible smell? How can you stand it . . .”

“ ‘Smell’? ‘Small smell quells all’—a haiku.”

“Has something died in here? Inside a wall?”

“ ‘Small smell quells all—inside a wall.’ No good.”

“We should open the windows, at least. We should try to find the source of the smell.”

“An experimental haiku, I meant. A classical haiku has seventeen syllables.”

Maddening Harvey! He smelled the sickening odor of course but lacked the energy, volition, desire to seek out the source.

There were only a few pieces of furniture in the living room. The easy chair in which Harvey sprawled, and several other chairs; a two-cushion sofa, of badly worn leather, upon which Leander and Tin usually sat when they came to the apartment—(Leander to the right, Tin to the left, invariably). There were scattered tables, lamps of which at least one was unplugged.

The leather sofa had been shoved oddly into a corner, since I’d left the apartment. But behind the sofa, just visible from an angle, was what appeared to be a length of rolled-up carpet.

As I approached the carpet, the smell grew stronger. It was unmistakable now—organic decay, rot.

“Harvey? What is this? Something against the wall . . .”

I was having difficulty breathing, the smell was so strong.

Clumsily I pushed the sofa aside. For a small piece of furniture, it was heavy; and Harvey made no offer to help.

I squatted over the rolled-up carpet. Holding my breath until my head spun. Desperately I managed to tug off a length of twine that had been securing the rug. (This was a rug that had been on the floor of Harvey’s bedroom when I’d first arrived.) Boldly, recklessly I managed to tug off the other length of twine, and to unroll the carpet—and there, arms stretched above his head, flat yellowish face dull as a much-worn coin and his eyes and mouth gaping open like a fish’s, was Leander’s lieutenant Tin.

Tin’s flaccid torso was covered in a blood-soaked, dried-bloody T-shirt. He’d been shot, perhaps—or stabbed . . .

He didn’t look young now. Something terrible had happened to Tin’s face, straining the skin to bursting.

I screamed and stumbled back. I screamed and stumbled to Harvey. With a look of profound exasperation Harvey was regarding me as one might regard a lunatic. He’d had to set down his notebook and place his pen in his shirt pocket. As a schoolboy, Harvey was never without a pen or a pencil in his shirt pocket. In a disapproving voice he said, “God damn, Lydia—I told you not to look. Whatever you’ve found—it’s none of your concern. Just
stop.
”

“It’s Tin—he’s dead. It’s Tin’s body, rolled up in your carpet. We have to call the police . . .”

Harvey cursed me, in a lowered voice. In moments of acute exasperation he lapsed into one of his ancient, extinct languages—might’ve been Aramaic, Sanskrit or Greek. He said, “I told you this was not a good idea, Lydia—living here with me. I warned you it was not a good environment for you. I said—s
tay away
. And now.”

“Harvey, my God! We have to call the p-police . . . Tin is dead, Tin is behind the sofa, somebody has shot Tin in our apartment . . .”

“There were no gunshots, that I heard. And we will not ‘call the police.’ No.”

“A man has been murdered, in our apartment. We have to call the police . . .”

Sighing, Harvey swung himself out of the easy chair, that had sunken and shaped itself to his buttocks. It was always startling to me, that my brother had grown so
short
.

We would re-fit Tin’s heavy body into the blood-soaked interior of the carpet roll exactly as it had been fitted previously. We would re-roll the carpet and secure the ends with twine. Clearly, others had addressed the logistics of this problem, or the first stage of the problem; we could not have improved upon their method, and did not try. When Harvey did not respond to my desperate words, my emotion and my tears, I fell silent—like Harvey.

Had Tin’s body been in the apartment, without my knowing? Since when—the previous day? Two days? It had not seemed that he’d been murdered recently. The blood had ceased flowing, and had partially dried. Poor Tin! He’d looked at me with an expression of inarticulate longing, from time to time. Yet he’d never once uttered my name.

Now, it was too late.

“This problem would’ve been dealt with, Lydia, without your interference. But now you’ve interfered . . .”

I had no idea what Harvey was saying. His voice was edgy, not so calm as he’d tried to suggest; his jaws were trembling, as with a spell of extreme cold.

When it was sufficiently night, when Grindell Park was more or less vacated of dealers and customers and only a few homeless bundles of rags slept on the benches, and wouldn’t give so much as a glance to two figures struggling to drag a strangely heavy length of rolled-up carpet across the desiccated grass, we managed to transport Tin’s body into the most remote corner of the park where we hid it amid debris from tree cuttings, as children might try to hide something from the eyes of their elders.

“The freezing air will impede the decay. The Trenton police won’t be able to calculate when he died, or where.”

Harvey spoke shrewdly, as if this were a statement of fact he’d had occasion to pronounce in the past.

When we returned to the apartment it was nearly 4:00
A.M.
In two hours, it would be dawn. Though we were exhausted and light-headed we took time to open all the windows, in my bedroom and in Harvey’s bedroom as well. Not soon, but eventually, the putrid odor would fade. Or, the putrid odor would mingle with other, near-similar odors in the old house as in the air of Trenton, New Jersey—smells of smoldering rubber, diesel exhaust from giant rigs lumbering along Camden Avenue, the toxic-sweet odors from chemical companies long extinct. And one balmy April afternoon when I was returning from ShopRite, on a crumbling Camden Avenue sidewalk there stood a brash young man with dreadlocks tumbling down his back and a Maori tattoo on half his face, a velvety-dark-skinned Leander who sighting me shot out his hand, his large thumb, to hitch a ride with me in the Mazda—(only with me, his friend Lydia, for he hadn’t been hitchhiking a moment before, I was sure)—and shrewdly I thought
Oh no! not a chance
even as my car braked to a stop, yes it was too late, yes but it was an instinctive involuntary gesture and so I heard myself say as Leander in tight-fitting suede deep-purple jacket, vest, trousers opened the passenger’s door and slid his long legs inside with a wide grin and an air of companionable ease—“Well, all right. I can give you a ride. But I’m not going farther than Grindell Park.”

Please enjoy this preview from Joyce Carol Oates’s new novel
The Accursed
, coming from Ecco in March 2013.

A major historical novel from “one of the great artistic forces of our time” (
The Nation
),
The Accursed
is an eerie, unforgettable story of possession, power, and loss in early-twentieth-century Princeton, a cultural crossroads of the powerful and the damned.

Princeton, New Jersey, at the turn of the twentieth century: a tranquil place to raise a family, a genteel town for genteel souls. But something dark and dangerous lurks at the edges of the town, corrupting and infecting its residents. Vampires and ghosts haunt the dreams of the innocent. A powerful curse besets the elite families of Princeton—their daughters begin disappearing. A young bride on the verge of the altar is seduced and abducted by a dangerously compelling man—a shape-shifting, vaguely European prince who might just be the devil, and who spreads his curse upon a richly deserving community of white Anglo-Saxon privilege. And in the Pine Barrens that border the town, a lush and terrifying underworld opens up.

When the bride’s brother sets out against all odds to find her, his path will cross those of Princeton’s most formidable people, from Grover Cleveland, fresh out of his second term in the White House and retired to town for a quieter life, to soon-to-be commander in chief Woodrow Wilson, president of the university and a complex individual obsessed to the point of madness with his need to retain power; from the young Socialist idealist Upton Sinclair to his charismatic comrade Jack London, and the most famous writer of the era, Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain—all plagued by “accursed” visions.

An utterly fresh work from Oates,
The Accursed
marks new territory for the masterful writer—narrated with her unmistakable psychological insight, it combines beautifully transporting historical detail with chilling supernatural elements to stunning effect.

Ash Wednesday Eve, 1905

1.

Fellow historians will be shocked, dismayed, and perhaps incredulous—I am daring to suggest that the Curse did not first manifest itself on June 4, 1905, which was the disastrous morning of Annabel Slade’s wedding, and generally acknowledged to be the initial public manifestation of the Curse, but rather earlier, in the late winter of the year, on the eve of Ash Wednesday in early March.

This was the evening of Woodrow Wilson’s (clandestine) visit to his longtime mentor Winslow Slade, but also the evening of the day when Woodrow Wilson experienced a considerable shock to his sense of family, indeed racial
identity
.

Innocently it began: at Nassau Hall, in the president’s office, with a visit from a young seminarian named Yaeger Washington Ruggles who had also been employed as Latin preceptor at the university, to assist in the instruction of undergraduates. (Intent upon reforming the quality of education at Princeton, with its reputation as a Southern-biased, largely Presbyterian boys’ school set beside which its rival Harvard University was a paradigm of academic excellence, Woodrow Wilson had initiated a new pedagogy in which bright young men were hired to assist older professors in their lecture courses; Yaeger Ruggles was one of these young preceptors, popular in the better homes of Princeton as at the university, as eligible bachelors are likely to be in a university town.) Yaeger Ruggles was a slender, slight, soft-spoken fellow Virginian, a distant cousin of Wilson’s who had introduced himself to the university president after he’d enrolled in his first year at the Princeton Theological Seminary; Wilson had personally hired him to be a preceptor, impressed with his courtesy, bearing, and intelligence. At their first meeting, Yaeger Ruggles had brought with him a letter from an elderly aunt, living in Roanoke, herself a cousin of Wilson’s father’s aunt. This web of intricate connections was very Southern; despite the fact that Woodrow Wilson’s branch of the family was clearly more affluent, and more socially prominent than Yaeger Ruggles’s family, who dwelt largely in the mountainous area west of Roanoke, Woodrow Wilson had made an effort to befriend the young man, inviting him to the larger receptions and soirees at his home, and introducing him to the sons and daughters of his well-to-do Princeton associates and neighbors. Though older than Ruggles by more than twenty years, Woodrow Wilson saw in his young kinsman something of himself, at an earlier age when he’d been a law student in Virginia with an abiding interest in theology. (Woodrow Wilson was the son of a preeminent Presbyterian minister who’d been a chaplain for the Confederate Army; his maternal grandfather was a Presbyterian minister in Rome, Georgia, also a staunch religious and political conservative.) At the time of Yaeger Ruggles’s visit to President Wilson, in his office in Nassau Hall, the two had been acquainted for more than two years. Woodrow Wilson had not seen so much of his young relative as he’d wished, for his Princeton social life had to be spent in cultivating the rich and influential. “A private college requires donors. Tuition alone is inadequate”—so Woodrow Wilson said often, in speeches as in private conversations. He did regret not seeing more of Yaeger, for he had but three daughters and no son; and now, with his wife’s chronic ill health, that had become a sort of malaise of the spirit, as well as her advancing age, it was not likely that Woodrow would ever have a son. Yaeger’s warm dark intelligent eyes invariably moved Woodrow to an indefinable emotion, with the intensity of memory. His hair was very dark, as Woodrow’s had once been, but thick and springy, where Woodrow’s was rather thin, combed flat against his head. And there was something thrilling about the young man’s softly modulated baritone voice also, that seemed to remind Wilson of a beloved voice or voices of his childhood in Virginia and Georgia. It had been a wild impulse of Woodrow’s—(since childhood in his rigid Presbyterian household, Woodrow had been prone to near-irresistible urges and impulses of every kind, to which he’d rarely given in)—to begin singing in Yaeger’s presence, that the younger man might join him; for Woodrow had loved his college glee clubs, and liked to think that he had a passably fair tenor voice, if untrained and, in recent years, unused.

But it would be a Protestant hymn Woodrow would sing with Yaeger, something melancholy, mournful, yearning, and deliciously submissive—
Rock of Ages, cleft for me! Let me hide myself in Thee! Let the water and the blood, that thy wounded side did flow . . .

Woodrow had not yet heard Yaeger speak in public, but he’d predicted, in Princeton circles, and to the very dean of the seminary himself, that his young “Virginian cousin” would one day be an excellent minister—at which time, Woodrow wryly thought, Yaeger too would understand the value of cultivating the wealthy at the expense of one’s own predilections.

But this afternoon, Yaeger Washington Ruggles was not so composed as he usually was. He appeared to be short of breath, as if he’d bounded up the stone steps of Nassau Hall; he did not smile so readily and so
sympathetically
as he usually did. Nor was his hurried handshake so firm, or so warm. Woodrow saw with a pang of displeasure—(for it pained him, to feel even an inward rebuke of anyone whom he liked)—that the seminarian’s shirt collar was open at his throat, as if, in an effort to breathe, he’d unconsciously tugged at it; he had not shaved fastidiously and his skin, ordinarily of a more healthy tone than Woodrow’s own, seemed darkened as by a shadow.

“Woodrow! I must speak with you.”

“But of course, Yaeger—we
are
speaking.”

Woodrow half-rose from his chair, behind his massive desk; then remained seated, in his rather formal posture. The office of the president was booklined, floor to ceiling; windows opened out onto the cultivated green of Nassau Hall’s large and picturesque front lawn, that swept to Nassau Street and the wrought iron gates of the university; and, to the rear, another grassy knoll, that led to Clio and Whig Halls, stately Greek temples of startling if somewhat incongruous Attic beauty amid the darker, Gothic university architecture. Behind Woodrow on the wall was a bewigged portrait of Aaron Burr, Sr., Princeton University’s first president to take office in Nassau Hall.

“Yaeger, what is it? You seem troubled.”

“You have heard, Woodrow? The terrible thing that happened yesterday in Camden?”

“Why, I think that I—I have not ‘heard’ . . . What is it?”

Woodrow smiled, puzzled. His polished eyeglasses winked.

In fact, Woodrow had been hearing, or half-hearing, of something very ugly through the day, at the Nassau Club where he had had lunch with several trustees and near the front steps of Nassau Hall where he’d overheard several preceptors talking together in lowered voices. (It was a disadvantage of the presidency, as it had not been when Woodrow was a popular professor at the university, that, sighting him, the younger faculty in particular seemed to freeze, and to smile at him with expressions of forced courtesy and affability.) And it seemed to him too, that morning at breakfast, in his home at Prospect, that their Negro servant Clytie had been unusually silent, and had barely responded when Woodrow greeted her with his customary warm bright smile—“Good morning, Clytie! What have you prepared for us today?” (For Clytie, though born in Newark, New Jersey, had Southern forebears and could prepare breakfasts of the sort Woodrow had had as a boy in Augusta, Georgia, and elsewhere in the South; she was wonderfully talented, and often prepared a surprise treat for the Wilson family—butternut corn bread, sausage gravy and biscuits, blueberry pancakes with maple syrup, creamy cheese grits and ham-scrambled eggs of which Woodrow, with his sensitive stomach, could eat only a sampling, but which was very pleasing to him as a way of beginning what would likely be one of his complicated, exhausting, and even hazardous days in Nassau Hall.)

Though Woodrow invited Yaeger Ruggles to sit down, the young seminarian seemed scarcely to hear and remained standing; in fact, nervously pacing about in a way that grated on his elder kinsman’s nerves, as Yaeger spoke in a rambling and incoherent manner of—(the term was so vulgar, Woodrow held himself stiff as if in opposition to the very sound)—an incident that had occurred the previous night in Camden, New Jersey—
lynching.

And another ugly term which made Woodrow very uneasy, as parents and his Virginian and Georgian relatives were not unsympathetic to the Protestant organization’s goals if not its specific methods—
Ku Klux Klan.

“There were two victims, Woodrow! Ordinarily, there is just one—a helpless man—a helpless black man—but last night, in Camden, in that hellish place, which is a center of ‘white supremacy’—there was a male victim, and a
female
. A nineteen-year-old boy and his twenty-three-year-old sister, who was
pregnant
. You won’t find their names in the newspapers—the Trenton paper hasn’t reported the lynching at all, and the Newark paper placed a brief article on an inside page. The Klan led a mob of people—not just men but women, and young children—who were looking for a young black man who’d allegedly insulted a white man on the street—whoever the young black man was, no one was sure—but they came across another young man named Pryde who was returning home from work, attacked him and beat him and dragged him to be hanged, and his sister tried to stop them, tried to attack some of them and was arrested by the sheriff of Camden County and handcuffed, then turned over to the mob. By this time—”

“Yaeger, please! Don’t talk so loudly, my office staff will hear. And please—if you can—stop your nervous
pacing
.”

Woodrow removed a handkerchief from his pocket, and dabbed at his warm forehead. How faint-headed he was feeling! This ugly story was not something Woodrow had expected to hear, amid a succession of afternoon appointments in the president’s office in Nassau Hall.

And Woodrow was seriously concerned that his office staff, his secretary Matilde and her assistants, might overhear the seminarian’s raised voice and something of his words, which could not fail to appall them.

Yaeger protested, “But, Woodrow—the Klan murdered two innocent people last night, hardly more than fifty miles from Princeton—from this very office! That they are ‘Negroes’ does not make their suffering and their deaths any less horrible. Our students are talking of it—some of them, Southerners, are joking of it—your faculty colleagues are talking of it—every Negro in Princeton knows of it, or something of it—the most hideous part being, after the Klan leaders hanged the young man, and doused his body with gasoline and lighted it, his sister was brought to the same site, to be murdered beside him. And the sheriff of Camden County did nothing to prevent the murders and made no attempt to arrest or even question anyone afterward. There were said to have been more than seven hundred people gathered at the outskirts of Camden, to witness the lynchings. Some were said to have crossed the bridge from Philadelphia—the lynching must have been planned beforehand. The bodies burned for some time—some of the mob was taking pictures. What a nightmare! In our Christian nation, forty years after the Civil War! It makes me ill—sick to death . . . These lynchings are common in the South, and the murderers never brought to justice, and now they have increased in New Jersey, there was a lynching in Zarephath only a year ago—where the ‘white supremacists’ have their own church—the Pillar of Fire—and in the Pine Barrens, and in Cape May . . .”

“These are terrible events, Yaeger, but—why are you telling me about them, at such a time? I am upset too, of course—as a Christian, I cannot countenance murder—or any sort of mob violence—we must have a ‘rule of law’—not passion—but—if law enforcement officers refuse to arrest the guilty, and local sentiment makes a criminal indictment and a trial unlikely—what are we, here in Princeton, to do? There are barbarous places in this country, as in the world—at times, a spirit of infamy—evil . . .”

Woodrow was speaking rapidly. By now he was on his feet, agitated. It was not good for him, his physician had warned him, to become excited, upset, or even emotional—since childhood, Woodrow had been an over-sensitive child, and had suffered ill health well into his teens; he could not bear it, if anyone spoke loudly or emotionally in his presence, his heart beat rapidly and erratically bearing an insufficient amount of blood to his brain, that began to “faint”—and so now Woodrow found himself leaning forward, resting the palms of his hands on his desk blotter, his eyesight blotched and a ringing in his ears; his physician had warned him, too, of high blood pressure, which was shared by many in his father’s family, that might lead to a stroke; even as his inconsiderate young kinsman dared to interrupt him with more of the lurid story, more ugly and unfairly accusatory words—“You, Woodrow, with the authority of your office, can speak out against these atrocities. You might join with other Princeton leaders—Winslow Slade, for instance—you are a good friend of Reverend Slade’s, he would listen to you—and others in Princeton, among your influential friends. The horror of lynching is that
no one stops it;
among influential Christians like yourself,
no one speaks against it
.”

Woodrow objected, this was not true: “Many have spoken against—that terrible mob violence—‘lynchings.’ I have spoken against—‘l-lynchings.’ I hope that my example as a Christian has been—is—a model of—Christian belief—‘Love thy neighbor as thyself’—it is the lynchpin of our religion . . .” (Damn!—he had not meant to say
lynchpin:
a kind of demon had tripped his tongue, as Yaeger stared at him blankly. ) “You should know, Yaeger—of course you know—it has been my effort here, at Princeton, to reform the university—to transform the undergraduate curriculum, for instance—and to instill more
democracy
wherever I can. The eating clubs, the entrenched ‘aristocracy’—I have been battling them, you must know, since I took office. And this enemy of mine—Dean West!
He
is a nemesis I must defeat, or render less powerful—before I can take on the responsibility of—of—” Woodrow stammered, not knowing what he meant to say. It was often that his thoughts flew ahead of his words, when he was in an emotional mood; which was why, as he’d been warned, and had warned himself, he must not be
carried away
by any rush of emotion. “—of confronting the Klan, and their myriad supporters in the state, who are not so many as in the South and yet—and yet—they are many . . .”