The Accursed Read online

  (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.

  Though Josiah was five years older than Annabel, and had not always had much time for his sister while they were growing up, he had always been fond of her, and protective; if by nature blunt-mannered, and inclined to impatience; yet it had always seemed to Annabel, that Josiah loved her dearly. (As he loved, or tried to love, their ever-restless and intrusive young cousin Todd, now eleven years old.) But when Annabel tried to take Josiah’s hands in hers—(ah! how large they were, how strong and big-boned)—he drew away with a frown; and when she begged him to have no secrets from her, as when they were children, he said, with a vexed sort of smile, “But Annabel, you must realize—we are children no longer.”

  WHILE THE SLADES’ numerous guests made their festive way from room to room upstairs, Annabel, Josiah, and Dabney Bayard continued to stand rather awkwardly before an empty fireplace, in one of the first-floor drawing rooms; no recent ashes littered this empty space, but rather some very fine bones, that had dried to splinters. Out of desperation Dabney said, “Your grandfather Winslow is the most remarkable man—it’s true, as everyone says. And he has been so generous . . .” Annabel agreed; but Josiah only grunted in reply, as if the inane remark did not warrant a serious response.

  Surreptitiously Annabel poked her brother in the ribs. She cast a sidelong glance at him, as if to implore Please don’t be rude. Don’t ruin this happy day.

  Six weeks before her wedding, Annabel Slade had never looked more beautiful, with her skin slightly heated, and her violet-blue eyes moist, and her lower lip trembling with emotion. For this Sunday brunch at the “old Craven house”—soon to be the “honeymoon cottage” of the young people—she was wearing a new dress of cream-colored crepe de chine in the “Fluffy Ruffles” fashion of the day; her lavishly feathered “picture” hat, of a hue matching her dress, was perched atop the mass of her honey-brown pompadour, with a bandeau secured beneath the crown for more height. In her shimmering cascade of ruffles, that trembled with her every intake of breath, Annabel struck the eye as the very emblem of feminine loveliness—of feminine mystery. For why was it, so adored a young lady, so clearly blessed a young lady, stood between her fiancé and her brother, her gaze downcast, and her forehead lined with worry?

  It would have taken a more perceptive observer even than Josiah, to note that Annabel was distracted, and her thoughts elsewhere; it may have been, the warning hiss Annabel! Annabel! could just faintly be heard, from the winter-ravaged, as yet untended, flower beds at the rear of the house.

  And it may have been, Annabel’s thoughts were moving surreptitiously to the memory of a hand-sickle wickedly glinting in the sun—fresh-cut wildflowers and grasses fallen into a heap, soon to rot—the memory of a bold grasp of her hand, and a yet bolder kiss on the back of her hand—chère mademoiselle! How kind you are! A rare quality in ladies of your station . . .

  Annabel had many times examined the back of her hand, looking for the imprint of the stranger’s sharp in
cisor. But the skin was smooth, quite thin and creamy-pale, with only a fine filigree of bones beneath, and a translucent web of bluish veins.

  As Annabel was glancing, another time, at her hand, there came from the second floor sudden cries, and shouts; female screams; and, following almost immediately, a sound of struggle, or scuffling—as of persons grappling about on the floor directly overhead.

  Josiah ran unhesitatingly upstairs, bounding the steps two and three at a time; Annabel and Dabney came following after, though not running. In her fear, Annabel had grasped Dabney’s arm; and Dabney leaned to her, as if to protect her.

  “Oh, what is it? Is someone hurt? It sounds like President Cleveland—is that his voice?” Annabel cried.

  Upstairs, Josiah discovered, in a bedroom of the Craven house, one of the most astonishing sights of his young life: Grover Cleveland, our former President, a rotund gentleman of nearly seventy years, and three hundred pounds, badly flushed in his face, and loudly wheezing, had fallen to the plank floor in a convulsive thrashing, being held in place, clumsily, by several persons including Josiah’s father, Augustus, and the distraught Mrs. Cleveland. The corpulent old gentleman, yet panting, and wheezing, so that one feared he was on the brink of an apoplectic seizure, would not cease his struggling, and cried in a grieving voice:

  “Let me up—please let me up—O stand back, if you have any heart! Here’s Pappa! Here’s Pappa, I say! My dear daughter, do not abandon us again!”

  In the doorway Josiah stood transfixed. What was this? Had the world suddenly gone mad? It was like a scene out of a film—The Great Train Robbery which everyone had seen, two years before—calamitous excitement, jerky and uncoordinated movements, a rapid, headlong pace, sensational music to rouse the blood—yet, though you stared at the moving images, you could not make immediate sense of them; you could not slow them, to comprehend.

  Grover Cleveland, it seemed, had fallen to the floor, or had possibly been pushed to the floor, to save him from falling out a window that opened out onto a section of tile roof; it seemed that Josiah’s father was wrestling Cleveland down, and Mrs. Cleveland herself—ripely Junoesque, darkly handsome, and, ordinarily, complacent and composed in her every gesture—was trying to pin her husband to the floor by the rough application of a silken knee, to his immense midriff; which effort had bared the woman’s shapely leg, in a sheer white stocking, that drew Josiah’s astonished attention, like nothing he had ever seen in actual life, nor had even imagined.

  IT IS TRUE: my fellow historians have bungled this episode, having not a clue of what had happened in the old Craven house on Rosedale Road, at midday of 20 April 1905; their collective failure is to be attributed to the zeal of Frances Cleveland in suppressing the lurid facts, that she might protect her elderly husband from censure and ridicule; for the former First Lady was most sensitive to cruel remarks made behind her husband’s (massive) back, correctly assuming that such derision reflected upon her, as well. After Cleveland left the presidency, under a considerable cloud, in 1897, and sought to retire to the “sleepy village” of Princeton, New Jersey, it fell to his young wife to shield him from over-excitement, as from over-eating and –drinking, for it was said that Grover could “no more stop himself from gluttony, than a gold fish in a bowl, that eats all that is given to him, until his stomach bursts.” Despite her youth, Mrs. Cleveland soon cultivated an arch and imperial style in society, as in public; so it was, knowing her and her husband both sought-after, and shamelessly talked-of, Mrs. Cleveland was not one to suffer fools gladly. Not just Woodrow Wilson, as we have seen, but many a Princeton citizen, of a higher social rank than he, came to fear the woman’s flashing eye, sarcastic tongue, and her power to enhance, or damage, one’s social ranking, depending upon her whim.*

  Despite the confusion of this incident at the old Craven house, I have managed to piece together, like a skilled, if somewhat eccentric, maker of quilts, a more or less coherent narrative, as follows.

  After ascending to the second floor of the house, which was an exertion for one of his girth, Grover Cleveland idled at the rear of the excited little group making their way through the rooms, hoping to catch his breath; while others were elsewhere, marveling at one or another charming feature of the house, Cleveland wandered into an empty room, as it happened, a children’s nursery; he chanced to pass one of the tall windows in this room, that was part-shuttered, and overlooked a steep corner of the roof; there, he saw, or seemed to see, a terrifying sight, there at the very edge of the roof; imagining it at first to be a large, ungainly bird, a great blue heron perhaps, for such prehistoric-looking waterbirds were not uncommon in rural Princeton, the affrighted man literally rubbed his eyes to see a child, a young girl, perched at the edge of the roof; playfully, or prankishly?—the girl was tearing into pieces a handful of calla lilies, letting their torn petals fall to the ground below; her wavy dark hair tumbled loose down her back; her gown long, and white, and curiously soiled; her bare feet ghastly pale—all of her skin ghastly pale, with the unmistakable pallor of the grave. Oblivious to the astonished observer, the child managed to get to her feet, at the edge of the roof, laughing, and tossing the remainder of the calla lilies into the air, as if she were about to step off into space; and how should Cleveland save her?

  He shouted—“No! No! Stop! You must not!”

  Cleveland was at the window, grunting to raise it, and to push open the shutters, shouting wildly—with the result that, to his further astonishment, and horror, he saw the girl turn to him to reveal herself as his own beloved daughter Ruth—who had died but the previous year, of diphtheria, at the Clevelands’ summer home at Buzzards Bay, Massachusetts.

  Ah, what was this? How could it be? Cleveland’s beloved Ruth, of whom he so often dreamt, and for whom he continued to grieve in the privacy of his thoughts—why had she appeared to him here? And what must be done?

  It is a fact, though Grover Cleveland suffered from a battery of ailments, beyond even those of Woodrow Wilson, yet he had never suffered from any mental illness, or hallucinations.

  Priding himself on being the most commonsensical of men, with scarcely a thought of an “after-life” or a “realm of spirits,” yet Cleveland did not hesitate for a moment, convinced that his daughter had returned to him, in this mysterious way; attired in the very raiments of the grave, and peeking over her shoulder at him, with that look of coquettish mischief that, in life, Ruth had often looked at her dear Pappa, to tease, and to make him laugh.

  It is no wonder that Cleveland forgot that Ruth was dead, and had been buried; in a frenzy he shoved the window as high as it would go, leaning out, reaching his arms to her, begging her to come to him. Giving no thought for his own safety and trying, despite the handicaps of age and girth, to force himself through the open window, he cried, “Ruth! Dear Ruth! It is you! Do not step off—your Pappa begs you, darling—here!—here’s Pappa! Come to Pappa! O my poor darling! My little one! My angel! Do not step off! Come to Pappa’s arms, O do—”

  The phantom at the edge of the roof could not be seen by the others, evidently; yet, as they rushed into the room, the situation was instinctively grasped—at least, that Grover Cleveland was suffering a violent hallucination, and was trying to force himself out a narrow window, to his probable death on the ground below, if he was not restrained.

  So it was, the struggle ensued, which Josiah a moment later witnessed: the elderly rotund gentleman being wrestled to the floor by several persons including his wife, who threw aside her silken parasol, and hiked up her heavy skirts and petticoats, enjoining Cleveland, in a ringing voice, to cease his struggles at once: “Why, what is this! What can you mean! Dear husband, what can you mean!”

  “Frances, it’s Ruth—our daughter, Ruth! Look! She is beckoning to me—to us! Let me go, please—”

  “Ruth? What do you mean? Where?”—now Mrs. Cleveland was on the verge of hysteria, crouching at the opened window; but she seemed not to see any apparition on the roof, unless, by this time,
the apparition had vanished.

  Soon then, held down against the hardwood floor, the raving man lapsed into a merciful faint; his plump, roughened face covered in sickly perspiration, and his breath stertorous and terrible to hear. His tight-starched collar was torn open by his rescuers, and his vest, and shirtfront; his face was sprinkled with water, and wiped with a cold compress. One of the surrey drivers was sent to fetch Cleveland’s physician Dr. Boudinot, who resided at Lilac Lane, that intersected with Hodge, and was not far from Rosedale; by the time the doctor arrived, the immediate danger to Cleveland’s life appeared to be past, though such a seizure did not bode well for the future, and Mrs. Cleveland tearfully begged the party that they should not spread the unhappy news.

  Of all of the party, only three others seemed to have “seen” or “sensed” the apparition, so far as I can determine.

  Eleven-year-old Todd Slade, Annabel’s and Josiah’s cousin, the son of Copplestone and Lenora Slade, had not actually witnessed Mr. Cleveland’s collapse, nor had he been allowed to enter the nursery afterward; yet, the excitable child would wake from nightmares for several nights in succession afterward, claiming that a girl-ghost was chasing him.

  Then there was the adamant testimony of Amanda FitzRandolph who insisted afterward that she had glimpsed a “shimmering efflorescence” of some sort on the roof, exactly where Cleveland had been pointing; but she could not have identified it as poor Ruth Cleveland for “wraiths so resemble one another, returning from the Other Side.”