The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online

professionally.
    “It’s my considered belief that the present age will compose, through Winslow Slade, its spiritual autobiography ”—so the famed Reverend Henry Ward Beecher declared on the occasion of Winslow Slade’s inauguration as president of Princeton University in 1877.
    As a popular Presbyterian minister, who had studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, Winslow Slade had long perfected the art of pleasing—indeed, mesmerizing large audiences.
    Though, in contrast to such preachers as Reverend Beecher, Winslow Slade never stooped to rhetorical tricks or empty oratorical flourishes. His Biblical texts were usually familiar ones, though not simple; he chose not to astonish, or perplex, or amuse, or, like some men of the cloth, including his formidable relative Jonathan Edwards, to terrify his congregation. His quiet message of the uniqueness of the Christian faith—as it is a “necessary outgrowth and advancement of the Jewish faith”—is that the Christian must think of himself as choosing Jesus Christ over Satan at every moment; an inheritance from his Puritan ancestors, but rendered in such a way as not to alarm or affright his sensitive followers.
    It is no surprise that Reverend Slade’s grandchildren, when very young, imagined that he was God Himself—delivering his sermons in the chaste white interior of the First Presbyterian Church on Nassau Street. These were Josiah, Annabel, and Todd; and, in time, little Oriana; when these children shut their eyes in prayer, it was Grandfather Winslow’s face they saw, and Grandfather Slade to whom they appealed.
    As The Accursed is a chronicle of, mostly, the Slade grandchildren, it seems fitting for the historian to note that Winslow Slade loved these children fiercely, rather more, it seems, than he had loved his own children, who had been born when Winslow was deeply engaged in his career, and not so deeply engaged with family life, like many another successful public man. While recovering from a bout of influenza in his early sixties, watching Josiah and Annabel frolic together for hours in the garden at Crosswicks Manse, he had declared to his doctor that it was these children, and no other remedy, that had brought him back to health.
    “The innocence of such children doesn’t answer our deepest questions about this vale of tears to which we are condemned, but it helps to dispel them. That is the secret of family life.”
     
    “AND HOW IS your daughter Jessie?”
    “Jessie? Why—Jessie is well, I think.”
    Woodrow’s eighteen-year-old daughter, the prettiest of the Wilson daughters, was to be a bridesmaid in the wedding of Winslow Slade’s granddaughter Annabel and a young U.S. Army lieutenant named Dabney Bayard, of the Hodge Road Bayards.
    Winslow had thought to divert his young friend from the thoughts that so agitated him, that seemed, to Winslow, but trivial and transient; but this new subject, unexpectedly, caused Woodrow to fret and frown; and to say, in a very careful voice, “It is always a—a surprise—to me—that my girls are growing into—women. For it seems only yesterday, they were the most delightful little girls.”
    Woodrow spoke gravely, with a just perceptible frisson of dread.
    For the intimate lives of females was a painful subject for a man of his sensitivity to consider, even at a little distance.
    Winslow smiled, however, with grandfatherly affection. For it was the more remarkable to him, his “fairy child” Annabel was now nineteen years old, and about to take her place in society as Mrs. Dabney Bayard.
    “Ah, Lieutenant Bayard!—I think I’ve glimpsed the young man once or twice,” Woodrow said, without the slightest edge of reproach in that, perhaps, his wife and he had been excluded from recent social occasions at Crosswicks Manse, “and he seems to me an upstanding Christian youth, and a patriot as well: the grandson, isn’t he, of John Wilmington Bayard?—hearty Presbyterian stock, and