The Accursed (58 page)
Miss Charmian screamed: “Oh—stop him! Murderer! He has killed our prince! The greatest literary genius of our time!”
“But—you are all witnesses . . .”
Josiah looked about for Upton Sinclair, but his friend was sitting on the floor where he’d fallen, very white-faced, tremulous; a froth of vomit shone at his mouth, and his shirtfront was stained. No help there! Josiah fumbled to wrap a napkin around London’s head to stanch the bleeding, but his hands shook badly, and the wounded man continued to flail feebly at him, and curse him; Josiah let the blood-soaked napkin fall to the floor and backed away from the table, desperate now to escape. As if seeing something terrible in his face, unknown to Josiah Slade, the others shrank from him; a path opened for him amid the crowded restaurant; he found himself staggering out onto Forty-second Street where the night air was startlingly fresh. In Josiah’s wake were cries
Stop him! Call police! Murderer!
—dimly heard, as in a fading dream.
Quickly Josiah ducked into an alley beside MacDougal’s. From the alley, though he had never been in this terrible place before, and had only the vaguest sense of what he was doing, deftly he made his way to another alley, and so to Forty-first Street, and then Broadway, near-deserted at this time of night, where he found himself half-running, north, in the direction—he believed it was the direction—of his apartment building on Eleventh Avenue and Thirty-sixth.
The clothes he’d chosen for the evening’s rally which he’d hoped to attend—beige flannel trousers, a dark-brown coat, white cotton shirt—were torn, and smelled shamefully of alcohol; his fair, fawn-colored hair was disheveled, his cheeks were lacerated and bleeding as if clawed by a cat; both his ears smarted and stung and on the following morning, in the stark clear light reflected from the Hudson River a short distance away, he would discover that part of his left earlobe had been torn or bitten off, the tiny wound encrusted with a black, brackish little blood-button.
“Demons! I have entered a region of demons, and narrowly escaped with my life.”
L
enora.”
Low and level and calm-seeming, the pronouncement of the faithless wife’s name.
Incriminating letters—was the proper term
billets-doux
?—clutched in his hand.
As Copplestone made his grunting way up the staircase, and along the second-floor corridor at Wheatsheaf, in the direction of Lenora’s morning-room, where she had sequestered herself in the pretense of writing urgent letters on behalf of the New Jersey Society of the Colonial Dames of America, seeking funds for a restoration of “historical landmarks” in the state.
“Len-
ora
.”
Her maternal carelessness had cost Copplestone his sole male heir as well as his beautiful little daughter. Even if he could find it in his heart to forgive his wife’s adultery—(and Copplestone’s heart was of the size of a walnut, and maggoty)—he could never forgive her for
that
.
And in her morning-room, with lattice-windows overlooking the spring profusion of the garden two floors below, and a stand of tall elms and oaks some distance away, Lenora sat very still at her writing table, a fountain pen in her trembling hand; she was swathed in black, as a widow; though not a widow but the bereft mother of two beloved children, who had departed this earth prematurely, and terribly. After a servant had brought her breakfast on a tray—(mostly untouched, for Lenora no longer had any appetite for food)—she had dared to
lock the door
against her husband, and could only hope that he would not discover it, and fly into a rage.
Touching the tip of the fountain pen to a sheet of stiff stationery embossed with a gilt rendering of Wheatsheaf, in its original, Colonial-era state, Lenora wrote, as if her life depended upon it:
It has lately come to our attention that the “Dolly Lambert” house at Washington’s Crossing is in dire need of repair . . . We are hoping that you will aid us in the restoration of this crucial . . .
NOT FAR AWAY,
at Mora House, Amanda FitzRandolph was softly singing a lullaby to little Terence in his crib. The infant had wakened, as he usually did, at about 4:30 a.m., and had not left off crying, whimpering, thrashing, and kicking until after 9 a.m.; the nanny was diligent, and uncomplaining, but clearly exhausted; and so Amanda had intervened, soon after breakfast, in her muslin “at-home” gown and a beribboned housecap. In this phase of her life Amanda FitzRandolph was determined to be a very good mother; she was determined to abjure forever the temptations of the secular and sensual world, that is the
madding crowd;
despite the attractions of that world, and the figure of the Count, she would plunge ever more deeply into motherhood, even widowhood . . . Softly singing, to the small figure in the crib, that was beginning by degrees to cease fretting: “Little Baby Bunting, Father’s gone a-hunting . . . Gone to get a new fur skin, to wrap the Baby Bunting in . . .”
(Yet it was startling to Amanda, as to members of her family, that she seemed at times to have “forgotten” her husband of many years, Edgerstoune FitzRandolph; or rather to remember the man as but one of her numerous Princeton acquaintances, including those relatives for whom she felt dutiful but dull affection. Edgerstoune had died of an accidental poisoning—(by jellyfish)—in Bermuda, scarcely a month before; the accident had happened on the beach, and out of Amanda’s sight; only the Count had been a witness, and without him, Amanda did not think she could have survived; certainly, she could not have arranged to send the poor man’s body home for burial, as the Count so efficiently did. Yet, though Edgerstoune’s remains were buried in Princeton Cemetery, Amanda retained the notion that Edgerstoune was still in Bermuda, dozing, in sunshine, a copy of the
Wall Street Journal
on his lap, on the flagstone terrace at
Sans Souci
.)
As the baby drifted into sleep, Amanda studied again his strangely dark-hued, ineffably “Indian”—(“Asian”?)—skin and features; the Count had counseled her, not to dwell over-much on such superficial qualities, for it was the soul of the child that mattered. “As it is your soul, dear Mandy, and not your physical beauty, that so mesmerizes me.”
Amanda laughed, hearing the Count’s whispered words. The blushing widow/mother glanced about the nursery, to make sure that she was alone; and not observed by any of the servants as she continued to sing her tuneless song, the words of which she was obliged to repeat as she could remember but a single stanza:
“Little Baby Bunting . . .”
CLOSE BY,
in Westland, the pale yellow Colonial set so far back from Hodge Road it could scarcely be seen through a scrim of trees, Mrs. Grover Cleveland was similarly attired in an “at-home” gown (by Worth), standing lost in thought: staring with eyes of dull rage into her invalid-husband’s bedroom where, propped up against pillows, the aged, obese man panted, and wheezed, and grunted, and muttered to himself, while scribbling notes to be transcribed by a stenographer; for it was Grover’s latest delusion that he was involved in “business as usual”: writing out commandments to his fellow trustees at the university pertaining to an action certain of the trustees wish to undertake, to force Woodrow Wilson’s resignation; preparing memos to underlings at the Equitable Life Assurance Society, which Mr. Cleveland was flattered into “chairing” in the twilight years of his life.
Watching him, the former Frances Folsom brooded over not the loss of her daughter in Buzzards Bay, not the loss of her father so many years ago (which ill luck propelled the teenaged girl into the arms of her father’s old political crony-friend Cleveland, in the desperation of her loss), but over the convention that, as she is not yet a widow, she cannot keep company with any man beside her husband, or risk the cruelest censure; and she does not wish to keep company with
him
.
It grieved the handsome dark-haired woman too, that her aged husband did everything so
slowly
.
“It will take him forever to die! He is so
absent-minded
.”
The Count has come several times to call. The Count is a friend of Grover Cleveland’s, it is known; or rather, it is said; for Mrs. Cleveland knows that she must not allow any of her Princeton friends to guess that it is she, and not the ex-President, who has drawn the Count to Westland.
Yet the Count has only just shaken Frances’s hand; he has stroked the fingers tenderly, and fixed her with a “piercing” gaze, and—
murmured not a word.
IN THE HEART
of the green-leafed university campus, in his attic bower at Prospect, Thomas Woodrow Wilson (as he lately thinks of himself) is toiling over a much-revised poem, that had originated in a sonnet addressed to the young woman who had rejected his first proposal for marriage years ago; recast then as a sonnet addressed to Ellen (who had been deeply moved by it); now, recast in a more daringly modern, “thrusting” mode of poetry addressed to his dear friend Mrs. Peck. Downstairs Dr. Wilson’s adoring women-folk, including now a spinster sister-in-law, tiptoe about to spare him any distraction, with not the slightest suspicion that the middle-aged swain is not toiling over his commencement speech (“The Role of the Christian Gentleman in the Nation’s Service”); that his pulses beat erratically, and he is cruelly taxing his already strained nerves in the invention of such bold verse—
You are the song I have waited for—
I find in you the vision sweet—
The grace, the strain of noble sounds,
The form, the mien, the mind, the heart,
That I have lacked and thought to find
Within some spring within my mind,
Dearest Cybella!
To this, he signs
Your Thomas
—as “Woodrow” now seems to him stiff, pompous, and pretentious.
I
f you wish not to burn in Hell with your fellow Slades why then set out for the Polar region, and save your devil’s hide!
So persistent was this voice in the days following Josiah Slade’s disillusionment with Jack London, he succumbed at last; and cast his lot with an expedition set to leave within a week for the South Pole, under the auspices of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in cooperation with a private American financier named Winthrop Moody, a relative of Josiah’s through his mother’s family.
From boyhood Josiah had read avidly of the great expeditions to the Polar regions, dating from antiquarian histories of Viking explorations in the North to latter-day records of voyages by Ross, Parry, Nordenskiöld, and Nansen. It seemed that just the other day the world had thrilled to the triumphant sea-journey of Amundsen’s
Gjoa,
which crossed the great “Dome of America” from east to west for the first, and perhaps the only, time in history; in the autumn of 1905, Captain Robert Falcon Scott’s
The Voyage of the “Discovery”
had been published in two volumes, illustrated by drawings and photographs that had entranced Josiah Slade, as they had entranced Adelaide Burr. Immense icy bergs, fields of snow that blinded the eye, and those mountains of the South Pole “rearing their lofty heads” as Scott described, “in desolate grandeur.” These were astonishing sights, indeed—as lethal as they were spectacular in the chill of minus-fifty-degrees Centigrade, and the purity of their brief sunshine; mesmerizing in isolation, mystery, and the powerful attraction of
terra incognita
to the civilized man. In the words of the great Shackleton: “You can’t comprehend the yearning, the heroic compulsion, to eradicate all that is
terra incognita;
and to set your foot on places of this Earth where man has never trod.”
Reading such words, Josiah felt inspired, and filled with yearning. For he was one of those who did comprehend.
Wanting to write to Upton Sinclair, whom he took for a sort of soul mate, though the young Socialist was lamentably thin, and ashy-skinned; rather anemic Josiah thought him, and disappointing in the brawl of the other night, when Josiah had needed a comrade. Yet, he would have liked to write to Upton Sinclair these words which he could record only in his morocco-leather-bound notebook:
It seems to me that this world is sullied almost beyond redemption in hypocrisy, lies, and outright evil. Even Socialism, I fear, is tainted—a demon lies within the very best intentions. And so whether to save my hide or not, I had better flee terra cognita.
JOSIAH’S MOTHER’S THIRD
cousin Esdra Moody had put Josiah in contact with Winthrop Moody, who’d put Josiah in contact with Captain Eric Campbell Oates, the younger brother of the famed “Soldier” Captain Lawrence E. G. Oates,
*
who was at this time seeking funds for a spring expedition to the South Pole, and signing up recruits in New York City. (Such linkages sound more complicated than they are, for very little occurs in this world, in polar expeditions as in politics, without such connections among relatives, friends, acquaintances, and club members!) So certain was Josiah that an expedition to the South Pole would save his life, if not his soul, he went to Captain Oates in the man’s lavish suite at the Waldorf and nearly begged to be taken on though he couldn’t claim any experience as a sailor or as an explorer, apart from hiking in the Rocky Mountains and in Yosemite. He offered only a “strong back,” as he said, and an “indomitable will”; and a passionate desire, which all but glared out of his eyes, to escape the temperate zone, and to make his way into
terra incognita.
Eric Campbell Oates regarded his handsome and very fit-looking petitioner with a kindly, if dubious eye. He knew, from his friend Winthrop Moody, a little of the dolorous events of Princeton, New Jersey, over the last year, and more; but he’d ceased listening when the man had begun to prattle about a “curse”—
he,
Captain Oates, knew enough of
curses,
and could not imagine that anything truly wicked could emerge in the lily-white enclave of Princeton, New Jersey, set beside the places Captain Oates had seen in his travels, not excluding the so-called Belgian Congo. He told Josiah that
terra incognita
is more than a mere expression of romantic yearning, it is also a place—“And a very dangerous place, for one who has never left the temperate zone.”
“Please give me a chance, Captain Oates! I will do anything you ask—any task, however menial. And I can contribute something to the expedition, as Winthrop Moody has probably told you—not very much, but virtually all of my savings.”
Which persuaded Captain Oates of his seriousness and worth.
SO IT HAPPENED
with dizzying rapidity, at the end of May 1906, as the first-year anniversary of his sister’s abduction and public shame approached, Josiah Slade left his home, and took lodgings in New York City; joined the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, and came close to murdering his hero Jack London; and signed up with Captain Eric Campbell Oates for the
Balmoral
expedition to the South Pole, and set sail the following week, leaving behind a most peculiar farewell note to his stricken parents:
Dearest Mother, & dearest Father—
I shall depart
terra cognita
for 18 months, they promise, at the
very least; & if I &
terra cognita
are fortunate, for longer than
that. Do not expend your parental love on me as I have been
unworthy of it; do not pray for me, who will sail beyond the
range of earthly prayer.
The Southern sky has no history, it is promised, & no
memory; no mind. For God has not yet been made man in
that place, nor ever God. So it is promised & so I believe.
Is it your son Josiah who writes these stark words, or
another?—no matter: we sail to
terra incognita
as one.
Believe that I love you, even so. But do not pray for me, as I
have asked you—that is the purest love.
Josiah
FOR THE FIRST
several days at sea, Josiah’s malicious “voice” was quelled, as if by the hardships of the sea voyage with its rocking, and tossing, and pitching, and dipping; and the slow-dawning realization among the crew that the handsome
Balmoral,
a sailing ship of three hundred tons, was far less seaworthy than her owners claimed. Though the ship was graceful enough in harbor, and impressive to the untutored eye with her slender hull and numerous dark-hued sails, a photographer’s “prize” to be published in the
New York Herald
and elsewhere, it soon developed that she was a vessel of considerable age and service, having been under the command of many men from the time of the ill-fated Captain Franklin to the present day.
Josiah soon learned that the
Balmoral
was overloaded, as a consequence of Captain Oates’s frugality, and that of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society generally. Despite the ship’s modest weight and proportions, and despite the fact that she was bound for the most desolate and treacherous waters on earth, the
Balmoral
was handicapped by many tons of coal, pony fodder, and wooden huts; sledges, cans of gasoline and kerosene; scientific equipment, and clothing; and cases of diverse practicability ranging from sweetbreads and kidneys to canned mutton. Of dog food alone there were hundreds of pounds, not to mention the restless animals themselves (at least thirty-five huskies); and not least, a gallant little battalion of ponies (at least two dozen). The ponies Josiah took pity on at once, for he had always loved horses, and had had a young horse in the Crosswicks stables, for years, which he’d often ridden; as the ponies gazed at him with frightened eyes he could feel their terror, and share their sense of doom; for were these beautiful creatures not fated to perish in the heaving sea, or in the wilds of the Antarctic, or as food for dogs, or for men? “I will protect you, if I can,” Josiah promised the ponies, who stamped and snorted and switched their tails; he stroked their heads to calm them, and took note of their rolling eyes and bared teeth. “I won’t allow anyone to slaughter you and eat you, I swear!” It was a sign of Josiah’s growing weakness of judgment that, before a week on the ocean had passed, he was often prone to tears whenever he visited the ponies in the dank, smelly hold; indeed, that he allowed himself to visit the ponies so frequently was a sign of encroaching infirmity.
As the voyage proceeded, with day following day in a stupor of boredom or in a paroxysm of alarm, depending upon the weather, it became clear that Captain Oates of the
Balmoral
was not quite the Captain Oates of the
Waldorf
. So seemingly forthright on land, unpretentious and matter-of-fact, Oates began to reveal an unpredictable and petty temper at sea; so lost to the minimal courtesies of his class as to appear on the
Balmoral
deck unshaven, with collar and cuffs lacking freshness. Most bewildering to Josiah was the captain’s habit of joking with the rudest of his sailing crew, while he turned away from the few gentlemen-explorers on board, and the two or three “men of science”; and turned from Josiah with a sneer, if Josiah tried to approach him.
“What, my lad? Is’t some special favor you want? Only just wait—a ‘special favor’ will come, I am sure.”
Josiah was aggrieved and hurt, as a boy would have been in his place.
Only because Captain loves you. Lusts after you. Dreams of enticing you between his sheets. And indeed Josiah could do worse than succumb. For once locked in his cabin you might strangle the brute with your bare hands, for very joy.
SO IT HAPPENED
that Josiah’s dreaded “voice” returned, as in the recrudescence of a disease, to prove just the first of numerous urgings of which some were no more than a whisper but often so hollow and echoing in Josiah’s skull, the accursed young man worried he might be overheard by one of his comrades. Just below the equatorial meridian the voice informed Josiah that a
mystical vision
was gained if one climbed like a monkey to the very top of the main mast; for he might then gaze not only beyond the ocean’s horizon, but beyond the polar mountains as well, to Heaven itself—where God’s face glared white-hot and seething.
But a moment’s effort, Josiah—yet it will calm your seething soul forevermore.
As the ship made her perilous journey past the Falkland Islands, beyond that ice-locked coast of Antarctica known as King Edward VII Land, the voice urged Josiah to throw off his bulky clothing, and bare his head, and leap overboard, that he might test the elasticity of the waves at this latitude; for it was a never-recorded phenomenon of the Ross Sea, that though the black waves heaved and churned, and spat up frothy skeins of white like the strait between Scylla and Charybdis, they were yet not comprised of water dense enough to support a man’s wake.
A man of science would experiment in such a setting: how the great seabirds float, that are nearly Josiah’s size, float and dip with the waves, and never sink; and mock you with their bird-courage, as something less than a man.
“Josiah, no! Stop him, for Christ’s sake. If you must, throw him
down
. Tie him
up
.”
Later Josiah would learn that he’d been prevented from throwing himself overboard by several of the sailing crew, and carried by force down to his cabin; and made to sleep, by ingesting a quantity of brandy and laudanum from the captain’s private store. But Josiah wondered if such tales were malicious, as he’d learned to “turn a deaf ear” to the blandishments of the Curse.
“It seems that I will never have peace, and never for a moment inhabit my being with the ease with which the albatross inhabits his.”
ONE THING WAS CLEAR:
the eye-piercing sunlight of the Antarctic was beautiful beyond all human language, and Josiah counted himself blessed to have come so far unscathed. So frigid was the air, one could not easily judge whether it was injurious to the lungs and heart, or communicated a voluptuous thrill as it pinched, pricked, stabbed, slashed, and seared white-hot, seeking entry into the human body at every exposed pore.
I do not hurt! I give no pain!
—so promises the Cold.
I shall numb your senses in the sweetest oblivion.
“I wish you’d told me of such an enchanted place, Grandfather,” Josiah said to Winslow Slade who stood beside him one day at the ship’s railing, “—why so much preaching from the pulpit of God, and of Heaven, and of the bloodstained cross when you might have spoken the truth?”
Winslow Slade in a heavy coarse-textured oak-colored coat, a woolen cap on his head; his ravaged yet dignified features squinting against the perilous sun; white eyebrows thicker than Josiah recalled, and fine pale lines bracketing his mouth that twitched in a murmured response. And what Winslow Slade spoke, Josiah could not hear for the wind rushing about them.
“Grandfather, what? What are you saying?”
And again Winslow Slade spoke, his pale mouth moving in near-silence.
Forgive me
.
THE WONDROUS UNFATHOMED
ocean—polar mountains jutting upward into the stark-blue sky—the sea spray clinging to all surfaces of the
Balmoral,
and freezing to an exquisite radiance; mile upon mile, hundreds and thousands of miles, vast acre upon acre and field upon field of icebergs and glacial rock; the crevices, the glittering knolls, the needle-like stalagmites that pulsed with godly incandescence from within: were these not mesmerizing?—and did they not obliterate all human senses and memory?
How distant, how inconsequential the village of Princeton, New Jersey, from the underside of the world!
Raise your arm before you, and bare the wrist. Clamp your carnivore’s teeth upon it, and bite and bite and bite. For there’s your consolation, my dear grandson.
