The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

their revered professors. Indeed, an alarming number of carousers kept mistresses in rented rooms on Witherspoon, Bank, and Chambers streets, an old and seeming inextricable tradition at the university, despite its Presbyterian affiliation; as, at one time, Southern boys from slaveholding families were allowed to keep their personal slaves in the residence halls. (It had come to be a tradition among these boys, at least among the more affluent, that they would “free” their slaves upon graduation: with the result that many ex-slaves lived in the ramshackle neighborhood of lower Witherspoon, and swelled the local workforce with capable workers willing to work at very reasonable wages. Dr. Wilson’s house servants Clytie and Lucinda were descendants of freed slaves.)
    Woodrow felt some relief when he left the university campus, and made his way southward along Nassau Street, quite deserted at this hour of the night; and past Bank, and Chambers; taking note of the forlorn cries of nighthawks, that made his skin shiver; and of the gauzy-masked moon overhead, like a face glimpsed out of the past. At the shadowy junction of Nassau and Stockton there came noisily a handsome ebony brougham drawn by a matched team of horses, that swung smartly past Woodrow to continue along Bayard Lane.
    Woodrow recognized the carriage as belonging to ex-President Grover Cleveland. Quickly he calculated that the Clevelands had been dining at the palatial home of the Morgans on Hibben Road; they were returning to Westland, their own palatial home on Hodge Road, absurdly named for Andrew Fleming West, who was an intimate friend of Grover Cleveland. (Who can comprehend such perversities? Woodrow would not even try.)
    “O God! If I am seen! They will know .”
    Fortunately, Frances Cleveland was so absorbed with her fretting, elderly and obese husband, who was suffering a bout of dyspepsia following a lavish four-hour dinner, that the usually sharp-eyed woman failed to notice Woodrow Wilson’s shadowy figure on the sidewalk; if she had recognized him, Mrs. Cleveland would have guessed at once that he was on a mission to Crosswicks Manse, and the tale would have spread through the village of Princeton by teatime of the following day.
    Note. As a disinterested and fair-minded historian it isn’t my place to delve into old local feuds and squabbles; to stir up old misunderstandings, slanders, and hatreds, dating back to the turn of the century; to evoke once again a time in our peaceful community in which everyone, not excepting schoolchildren, felt obliged to take sides in the dispute between Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Fleming West; and a good portion of the congregation of the First Presbyterian Church chose not to speak to the remainder.
    I hope I won’t compromise my objectivity as an historian, as to whether Woodrow Wilson ought to have been obeyed, as he wished, in every particular concerning major issues at the university; or whether his opponent, the strong-willed dean of the graduate school, ought to have had his way. (My van Dyck relatives were said to favor Woodrow; my Strachan relatives, Andrew West.) In any case the reader should know that Woodrow Wilson’s campaign for complete control over the university, as it parallels his campaign for complete control over the issue of whether the United States would go to war with Germany in 1917, when he was President, is a subordinate issue here, set beside the domestic tragedies to befall the leading Princeton families.
     
    —CROSSWICKS MANSE, the home of the Slades, has not been properly described; only just the interior of Winslow Slade’s library.
    As male readers have a predilection for military history, so female readers have a predilection for learning about houses, furnishings, and ornamentation. Yet I hope that both sexes are intrigued, to some degree, by the Slades’ residence on Elm Road, as fine a house as one could discover in the Princeton vicinity, including even the Henry