The Accursed Read online

  Young Upton Sinclair has become a best-selling author.

  Immersed in his work, he is scarcely conscious of his surroundings. Even when he reads aloud to his wife it is his own voice that absorbs him, not his wife’s presence; her comments are usually admiring, if quietly stated.

  Because he is committed to rationalist principles, as a Socialist, Upton refuses to “give in” to fears and fancies; even as he is inclined to believe in the local “curse” on the old Princeton families. For instance, during the intensity of his rapid-fire writing, or typing, of “The Condemned Meat Industry,” he has been distracted by distant figures in a field outside his window; at least once, a spectral face has appeared at the very window, a few feet away; but the young Socialist, hunched at his writing table, does not glance up. It is but a fancy. You know it is not “real.” Meta had warned him, his health would be affected if he continued his rigorous vegetarian diet, from which, on matters of principle, as he had lately worked it out, he felt obliged to exclude eggs—“For hens are the most exploited of creature-workers! First, their eggs are taken from them and devoured; then, they are themselves devoured.”

  Yet, as Meta protested, hens’ eggs were the least expensive of foods for her to prepare; if Upton refused to eat them, she would continue to prepare them for herself and David.

  She is questioning your authority. She is in rebellion.

  She is not a faithful wife. As you must know.

  At the windowpane the spectral face is mocking. Upton refuses to look, yet Upton sees.

  And a mirthful trill of fingernails, drawn downward against the pane.

  In his systematic way, Upton is refuting “J. Ogden Armour” point by point. He has already written a fifteen-page letter to the editors of the popular Saturday Evening Post listing these points; but the editors replied curtly to his letter, with a refusal to publish it. (It was an open secret, the meat-packing moguls, like their railroad and industrial cohorts, owned stock in prominent American magazines and newspapers, and so controlled the public press.) Armour’s hack-writer dared to claim that “not one atom” of any condemned animal or carcass found its way into any of Armour’s food products, continuing, in a loathsome sniggering way—

  Of course you know the sort of men many of the laborers in the meat-packing houses are—foreigners of a low grade of intelligence—and you know how impossible it is to control every individual. If these persons feel the urge to spit, why then they spit; but it is ridiculous to suppose that this goes in the meat, and not in the sawdust on the floor, thickly strewn about for that very purpose.

  The opening and closing paragraphs of the outrageous article vilified “subversive Socialist elements in America”—linking Socialists and anarchists, as the press so often did, as if there were no difference between the Socialist Party and the disorganized, unreasonable, and potentially violent Anarchist Party, with which the assassin of President McKinley had associated himself.

  Yet more disturbing than the meretricious article is the threat of a lawsuit against Upton Sinclair and his publisher, very likely to be brought against them by Armour & Co. for “libel”—“defamation of character”—“conspiracy to subvert trade.” Upton has not told Meta about this, yet; though thinking that it will be a good thing, to “clear the air”; the issue of who is telling the unadorned truth, and who is shamefully lying, to be settled in court. Upton has a vision of arguing his case, himself: before the U.S. Supreme Court.

  “Then it will be settled. With much publicity, which cannot hurt our cause.”

  So, Upton has been reading his article to Meta, who has been unusually quiet. As he reads aloud, he edits the manuscript; for Upton Sinclair is such a rapid writer, it seems at times that his whirling brain outraces his fingers.

  “Meta? What do you think?”

  Upton looks up, frowning. He’d thought that Meta was in the room, seated in a chair behind him; possibly, in the kitchen a short distance away, with the doors between the rooms open. (Upton is working now in the farmhouse, as the cabin roof so badly leaks; and this has been a wet, chill spring.)

  It is so, overwork has strained his eyesight. He should have his eyes examined, and new glasses prescribed. Often it isn’t a case of seeing spectral figures, but a case of not-seeing actual figures, which is the more alarming.

  “Meta—?”

  Irritated, Upton rises to his feet. Manuscript in hand, twenty pages of hastily typed and edited pages, he goes to seek out his wife in the kitchen, and in the dim little “parlor”—but there is no one.

  “Meta, God damn. Where are . . .”

  Only then recalling, to his chagrin, that of course Meta isn’t there: she has taken their son David and returned to New York, to “temporary quarters” with her parents who live on Staten Island.

  His wife’s parents have never approved of Upton Sinclair, and were not impressed with the success of The Jungle except that—“at last”—their daughter and young grandson might live in better quarters; but this has not happened yet.

  Upton, disappointed, yet not discouraged, returns to his writing table. His hands are not steady: he must devise a way to type with his elbows firmly on the table, to provide strength. Like Zarathustra, he thinks: “I have begun my down-going to the masses of unenlightened mankind.”

  The torch! The torch! For the air of this sepulcher wants warming.

  Josiah’s most persistent voice. If he presses his hands against his ears, the voice is louder.

  So frequently now do father and son disagree—on politics, religion, ideas—Josiah now avoids dining with his parents, with the excuse that he must be elsewhere. Especially since the uproar of The Jungle and the “defense” in the Saturday Evening Post, about which everyone in Princeton is talking, and generally siding with the Armours, Josiah and Augustus find it difficult to be civil to each other; even Henrietta, the most tractable and accommodating of women, has tried to appeal to Josiah to be more reasonable.

  “You know, your father has suffered so, since—since Annabel . . . You should not upset him further, if you love him.”

  “That I ‘love’ my father is no excuse for being a hypocrite, like everyone else in Princeton! If he can’t accept that, then I will have to move away.”

  “Move away—where?”

  Henrietta spoke agitatedly; Josiah does not like to see the sick, pleading look in his mother’s face.

  “Why can’t you see, Mother, that we are ‘cannibals’—people like us? Not just the meat we eat, but—the exploited among us—who are invisible to us . . .” Josiah begins to falter, seeing that his mother is near tears; quickly he excuses himself, and hurries to his room on the second floor of the house. There he paces, anxiously; he is not unaware of the fact that, at the age of twenty-five, he should not be living at home, in any case; but where exactly he should go, that would not suggest an abandonment of Annabel, and the “curse” on his family, he isn’t certain. How much easier a decision Shakespeare’s Hamlet had to make: to kill the king, or not. For the king, Claudius, was the murderer of Hamlet’s beloved father, and the seducer of Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude; in Hamlet’s very eyes, King Claudius existed. Yet, so far as Josiah can see, and he has sought out his enemy in many places, the Fiend does not exactly exist.

  What is upsetting to Josiah is that, with the passage of only a few months, certain individuals with whom he has spoken seem only vaguely to recall “Axson Mayte”; and no two of them agree on what he looked like. Josiah’s perusal of Pearce van Dyck’s Scheme of Clues has further confused him, for his former professor seemed to have inserted, among much that was shrewd and doubtless accurate, a good deal of speculation. His fixation on the illegitimacy of his own son, for instance, seems to Josiah a pure delusion: for the baby he has seen, in Johanna van Dyck’s arms, by this time given a proper name, and a baptism, is a perfectly normal, healthy baby of no unusual distinction at all.

  (Though the baby far more resembles Mrs. van Dyck than Pearce. And his eyes are a curious slate-bl
ue, unlike the eyes of either van Dyck.)

  Josiah wonders: should he join the Socialists, and move to New York City? Or—should he cast his lot with a polar expedition, soon to embark for the South Pole?

  He has meant to seek out Upton Sinclair. He’d heard that the young Socialist is living in a derelict farmhouse on the Rosedale Road, near Province Line Road, less than four miles away; once, he’d driven out into the country in his motorcar, and was directed to “that Socialist boy’s” rented house, but no one seemed to be home, nor did the farmhouse appear to be inhabited at the time.

  “We must meet. We must join forces. Maybe!”

  In the meantime, Josiah’s voice torments him as he paces about his room, hand over his ears.

  The torch! The torch! For the air of this sepulcher wants warming.

  Sometimes, the voice takes on a pernicious dulcet tone Josiah would swear was Annabel’s, if he did not know better.

  AT THE DOOR to the president’s office in Nassau Hall, Dr. Wilson’s secretary knocks hesitantly.

  Seated behind his desk, his long, lantern-jawed face grave in the execution, through the long day, of duty, Dr. Wilson says, with an air of exasperated patience, “Yes, Matilde? What is it?”

  “A telegram has come for you, sir, from Western Union. It seems to be urgent.”

  Urgent! Woodrow Wilson wants to retort to this foolish woman, there is nothing in the president’s life that is not urgent.

  What an arduous day! Dr. Wilson has had a succession of appointments of which several are crucial, even key. He knows himself the captain of a great but floundering ship; he knows himself destined to “make history”; his father had many times prophesied for Woodrow that, as his life paralleled that of Jesus Christ, he must accept opposition and derision, even “martyrdom”—to a degree. “As there are myriad faces of evil, so there are myriad ‘crucifixions.’ But you will rise again, Woodrow—each time your enemies cast you down. ‘For I am a light shining in darkness.’ ”

  In truth, Woodrow does not always feel like a light shining in darkness but rather a feeble light, struggling not to be extinguished.

  Of late, however, he has been racking up victories at the university. Now that his enemies can see that he will not give in to their demands and objections, but is rather strengthened by them, like a Scots warrior in the guise of a Puritan schoolteacher, perhaps they have changed their tack; and the death of Pearce van Dyck, now decidedly a consequence, Dr. Wilson believes, of the adversarial behavior of Dean West, can’t have failed to sober them, and cause them to feel remorse.

  “For my sake! Poor Pearce. I will name a philosophy preceptorship in his honor.”

  A rare smile crosses Dr. Wilson’s face as he thinks of hog-shaped Andrew West confounded by the recent vote of the board of trustees—to repudiate the million-dollar gift that would have been diverted to the graduate dean’s office. All of Princeton has been buzzing of this victory, he is sure. Unprecedented in the history of Princeton University. Unprecedented ( perhaps) in the history of any American university.

  If his Graduate College proposals, and his campaign to shut down the eating clubs, do not succeed—(this is a story he has told himself many times)—he will resign his office, immediately.

  How astounded the trustees will be, then! How astounded and repentant, those faculty members who have stubbornly resisted him!

  I have made my decision and it is final.

  It will be a matter of pride, and dignity. Either you are for Woodrow Wilson or you are against him—there is no comfortable, cringing middle way.

  Of course, he can’t say this. He must find other, more noble words to express his convictions. Even before accepting his conspicuous office he knew that, in a democracy, the “court of public opinion” must always be manipulated. He knows that his personality does not appeal to all—did not appeal to the many who so admire the gregarious buffoon “TR”—but he understands that sincerity might be his trump card.

  Like Christ. Yet, a kingdom of this world!

  How my enemies will be devastated . . .

  Woodrow has to remind himself, of late he has been acquiring victories. With Grover Cleveland absent from two recent meetings of the trustees, the vote is more likely to go in Dr. Wilson’s favor; slowly, doggedly, he has been nipping at Cleveland’s influence, which is an indirect expression of Andrew West’s will. If he would die. Or—have a stroke and be incapacitated and never return to cause mischief at our university.

  And this day, the May chill seems to have lifted. Woodrow has been willing to allow Matilde to tug up the window behind his desk and through the narrow opening comes fresh air in a thin, startling current that has alternately distracted him, and stirred his spirit. And now Matilde has handed him a telegram, that would seem to require immediate attention, before the stack of letters placed in a wire tray on his desk for him to read—letters of duty, of responsibility and obligation, that fail to nourish the soul. Woodrow feels the injustice of this, that a telegram will take precedence over a mere letter; yet takes it from Matilde with boyish excitement.

  “Thank you, Matilde. You may go, and close the door.”

  Eagerly tearing the envelope open, and reading, with eyes that mist over and with a quick-pounding heart—

  Dear Tommy you reside in my heart & my thoughts

  constantly. Please say there is a place in which

  in your life might dwell

  your friend

  Cybella Peck

  So stirred, so thrilled, Dr. Wilson is obliged to read the telegram a second time, and a third.

  TODD SLADE, twelve years old. At which time, in May 1906, the boy meets a bizarre fate.

  After his grandfather Winslow Slade’s “confession” in the cemetery, which was directed, primarily, at Todd and Josiah, Todd has been unusually quiet and withdrawn. Like Josiah, he avoids his parents. He avoids any and all adults. Though he still has difficulty reading and writing, he doesn’t so readily flare up in a fit of temper when he tries, and fails, at these.

  “But why does it matter if words are spelled correctly, and used correctly, if they’re lies? No one can explain.”

  Todd had been frightened by his grandfather’s public confession. He’d been frightened to be forced to imagine a man, a young man, who’d behaved as his grandfather had behaved fifty years before; and to imagine that this young man was somehow, at the same time, Grandfather Slade.

  Since then, Todd has found his way to Crosswicks, uninvited. He wanders in the garden and has been seen—(Henrietta has seen him)—talking with the gardeners; he drifts in the direction of Crosswicks Forest.

  The German shepherd Thor doesn’t accompany him now, for Thor has passed away, of a mysterious malady, in the late winter.

  And Annabel is gone, of course. And Wilhelmina Burr, her friend—gone.

  Henrietta sees Todd from one or another window and waves to him, but gets no response; if she calls to him, he pretends not to hear.

  When he isn’t wandering at Crosswicks he is likely to be in the Princeton Cemetery, in the area of the Slade family mausoleum.

  The cemetery groundskeeper sees Todd Slade there, knows who he is, and doesn’t approach him. There are those who drift about the old cemetery, that dates to pre-Revolutionary times, like living ghosts—the groundskeeper knows to keep his distance, for they are mourners who do not want their mourning assuaged.

  Though it is unusual that one of these mourners is so young.

  In the cemetery, Todd speaks with Annabel. Much of the time, Todd is child-like, as he’d been of old in his cousin’s presence; he had liked her to scold him, and he had liked to surprise and shock her, a bit. Now, there is no one he cares enough to shock.

  “But why did you go away? Where did you go?”

  Todd leans the side of his face against the granite vault, and listens to hear if Annabel replies to him; but there is never any sound, except the rustling of leaves overhead, a trilling of birds and in the near distance a sound of traf
fic on Witherspoon Street.

  “Annabel! Where did you go?”

  Todd has to remind himself, his little sister Oriana is buried in the vault, too. But he has no question to put to her—she is too young to help him.

  Yet once, when Todd had spoken to Annabel, and received no reply as usual, he heard, or seemed to hear, a rejoinder from Oriana—Go away, Todd! We don’t want you.

  But Todd is reluctant to go home. Often, Todd sleeps in the cemetery, sprawled beneath the marble portico of the mausoleum. He feels a feathery touch on his face—the wings of a small bird? He feels a light touch across his hands—the scurrying feet of a field mouse? To the despair of his mother, and the annoyance of his father, Todd spends more and more time in the cemetery; until, on a morning in late May, the groundskeeper makes a remarkable discovery: a new statue has been added to the company of seraphim, crosses, and other somber monuments, that of a young boy.

  And yet, who has placed the statue here? A sculpted-stone statue of a boy seated on the grasses near the Slade mausoleum; an exquisite, uncannily lifelike specimen of the stonecutter’s art; a boy carved so fastidiously, even the most minuscule vein of his forehead, or a crease in his clothes, is perfectly rendered. Why, even the eyelashes are lifelike; even the air of stubborn resolution that emanates from the face.

  The groundskeeper hurries to Wheatsheaf, to report what he has found; at about the time that the boy’s nanny has discovered that Todd Slade is missing from his room.

  LIEUTENANT BAYARD BY NIGHT

  Why did you resign your commission? Why so precipitously? And is it gone forever—your dream of being a soldier?”

  IN HIS HEART still he was lieutenant. In a fit of despair and rage after the public humiliation on his wedding day he’d resigned his commission, against his family’s wishes; then, when he began to feel differently, it was too late to reclaim it.