The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page B

had come to ask of him; and did not want to encourage him; yet, inevitably, Woodrow made his plea, with the blinking simplicity of a small child, his moist eyes gleaming behind his polished eyeglasses: “Dr. Slade, if you might indicate your support of me, or rather, your preference: Woodrow Wilson or Andrew West . . . It would be such a relief to me, as to my family.”
    Pained, Winslow explained that he thought it a wiser course, for one like himself in retirement from all politics, to remain neutral.
    “I am sure that, in the end, wise heads and wisdom will prevail. You will have a vote of the trustees, and that will decide it—soon, I would think?”
    “Winslow, that is—that is not—this is not quite the answer I had hoped for, in coming here . . .”
    Winslow persisted: “I prescribe for you, my dear friend, the simplest and most fundamental of all Christian remedies—prayer. By which I mean, Woodrow, a deep examination of your soul, your motives, and your ideals. Prayer .”
    The younger man blinked at Winslow, as a tic in his left cheek seemed to mock his enfeebled smile. “Yes, you are right—of course. You are invariably right, Dr. Slade. But, I’m afraid, you are uninformed—for I have already spent countless hours on my knees, in prayer, since this hellish situation first manifested itself, months ago. Of course, it has been a gathering storm. I have enlisted prayer from the start, yet the results have been disappointing: for West continues his sorties against me, even laughing behind my back, and God has not seen fit to intervene .”
    So astounded was Winslow Slade by these words, he could think of no adequate reply; and silence uneasily fell between them, as smoldering logs in the fireplace shifted, and darkened; and Woodrow reached out, in a nervous sort of curiosity, to take up a small jade snuffbox on a table, to examine closely. It was an engaging object, though hardly beautiful, covered in a patina of decades, its lid engraved with a miniature yet meticulously wrought serpent that, coiled, looked as if it were about to leap out at the observer. Strikingly, the cobra’s eyes were two inset rubies of the size of pumpkin seeds.
    Fascinating to Woodrow, in his somewhat dazed state, how these rubies glittered, with the fantastical potency of an actual serpent’s eyes . . .
    Now daringly Woodrow said, as he had been preparing to say, perhaps, this past half hour: “ He seeks power in a very different way, you know.”
    “He?”
    “West.”
    “Ah yes—West is still our subject?”
    “It is not mere rumor, Dr. Slade, it has been whispered everywhere in town, and Ellen was reluctant to upset me by repeating it—but Andrew West has consorted with clairvoyants and mesmerists; in a pretense of ‘scientific inquiry,’ like his Harvard psychologist-friend William James, he has delved into what we must call occult practices—that fly in the face of Christian teaching.”
    “ ‘Occult practices’—? Andrew West?”
    Winslow Slade laughed, for Andrew West had the solid, burly build of a wrestler; certainly an intelligent man, with degrees from Cambridge (England) as well as Harvard, yet not in any way a sensitive or inwardly-brooding person, of the kind who might take the occult seriously.
    “Yes, Dr. Slade, though you may smile at the prospect—‘occult practices.’ By which he hopes to influence ‘powers’—thereby, to influence the more impressionable minds in our community, and among the trustees. I told you, it is a battle—in an undeclared war.”
    “You are saying that our colleague and neighbor Andrew West, dean of the graduate school, is an—occultist?”
    “Well, I am saying that it is said—it is said by many—that West dabbles in the occult, in a pretense of scientific inquiry; one of his allies is Abraham Sparhawk, in philosophy; but a newfangled sort of philosophy in which up is proved to be down, and time and history not fixed points as we know them to be, but