Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
Like a large ungainly burden, a steamer trunk perhaps, stuffed with unwanted and outgrown clothing, shoes and the miscellany of an utterly ordinary and unexamined life, Woodrow Wilson sought to carry the weight of such anxiety to his mentor, and unburden himself of it, at his astonished elder’s feet.
It would not be the first time that “Tommy” Wilson had come to appeal to “Win” Slade, surreptitiously; but it would be the final time.
*
“Woodrow, hello! Come inside, please.”
A gust of wind, tinged with irony, accompanied Woodrow into the elder man’s library.
Reverend Slade grasped the younger man’s hand, that was rather chill, and limp; a shudder seemed to run from the one to the other, leaving the elder man slightly shaken.
“I gather that there is something troubling you, Woodrow? I hope—it isn’t—anything involving your family?”
Between the two, there had sometimes been talk, anxious on Woodrow’s side and consoling and comforting on Winslow’s, about Woodrow’s “marital relations”—(which is not to say “sexual relations”—the men would never have discussed so painfully private a matter)—and Woodrow’s disappointment at being the father of
only girls.
Woodrow, breathless from the wind-buffeted walk along Elm Road, where streetlights were few, and very little starlight assisted his way, and but a gauze-masked moon, stared at his friend for a moment without comprehending his question.
Family?
Was Winslow Slade alluding to Woodrow’s distant “cousin”—Yaeger Washington Ruggles?
Then, Woodrow realized that of course Winslow was referring to his wife, Ellen, and their daughters.
Family.
“No, Winslow. All is well there.” (Was this so? The answer came quickly, automatically; for it was so often asked.) “It’s another matter I’ve come to discuss with you. Except—I am very ashamed.”
“ ‘Ashamed’? Why?”
“But I must unburden my heart to you, Winslow. For I have no one else.”
“Please, Woodrow! Take a seat. Beside the fire, for you do look chilled. And would you like something to drink?—to warm you?”
No, no! Woodrow rarely drank.
Out of personal disdain, or, if he gave thought to it, out of revulsion for the excess of drinking he’d had occasion to observe in certain households in the South.
Woodrow shivered, sinking into a chair by the fireplace that faced his gracious host. Out of nervousness he removed his eyeglasses to polish them vigorously, a habit that annoyed others, though Winslow Slade took little notice.
“It is so peaceful
here
. Thank you, Dr. Slade, for taking time to speak with me!”
“Of course, Woodrow. You know that I am here, at any time, as your friend and ‘spiritual counselor’—if you wish.”
In his heightened state of nerves Woodrow glanced about the library, which was familiar to him, yet never failed to rouse him to awe. Indeed, Winslow Slade’s library was one of the marvels of the wealthy West End of Princeton, for the part-retired Presbyterian minister was the owner of a (just slightly damaged and incomplete) copy of the legendary Gutenberg Bible of 1445, which was positioned on a stand close by Winslow’s carved mahogany desk; on another pedestal was an early, 1895 edition of the
Oxford English Dictionary.
And there were first editions of works by Goethe, Kant, Hegel, Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher, Ritschl, James Hutchinson Stirling and Thomas Carlyle among others. In his youth Dr. Slade had been something of a classics scholar, and so there were volumes by Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and others in Greek, as well as Latin texts—Virgil, Caesar, Cicero, Seneca, Livy, Cato, and (surprisingly, considering the unmitigated pagan nature of their verse) Ovid, Catullus, and Petronius. And there were the English classics of course—the leather-bound works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Swift, Samuel Johnson through the Romantics—Wordsworth and Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats and, allegedly Dr. Slade’s favorite, the fated John Clare. The library was designed by the celebrated architect John McComb, Jr., famous for having designed Alexander Hamilton’s Grange: among its features were an ornate coffered ceiling, paneled walls of fifteenth-century tooled leather (reputedly taken from the home of Titian), and portraits of such distinguished Slade ancestors as General Elias Slade, the Reverend Azariah Slade, and the Reverend Jonathan Edwards (related by marriage to the original Slade family)—each rendered powerfully by John Singleton Copley. Portraits, daguerreotypes, and shadow drawings of Dr. Slade’s sons Augustus and Copplestone, and his grandchildren Josiah, Annabel, Todd, and little Oriana, also hung on the wall, just behind Dr. Slade’s desk; and should be mentioned here since all but the child Oriana will figure prominently in this chronicle.
(Is this unobtrusively done? I am a historian, and not a literary stylist; so must “intercalate” such details very consciously, that the reader will take note of them; yet not so obtrusively, that the sensitive reader is offended by over-explicitness.)
In this gracious room, commanding a position of prominence, was a fireplace of stately proportions in whose marble mantel was carved, in Gothic letters, HIC HABITAT FELICITAS—which caught Woodrow’s eye, as always it did when he visited Winslow Slade. With a morose smile Woodrow leaned over to run his fingertips over the chiseled inscription, saying, “
Here,
Dr. Slade, I have no doubt that happiness abides; but at my home, and in the president’s office in Nassau Hall—not likely.”
During the conversation to follow, the fire in the fireplace blazed and waned; and blazed again, and again waned; until, without either man noticing, the logs collapsed in a crumbling of smoldering coals, like distant, dying suns, into darkness and oblivion which not even a belated poker-stirring, by the younger man, could revive.
At this time, before the terrible incursions of the Curse would prematurely age him, Winslow Slade, partly retired from his longtime pastorship at the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton, was a vigorous gentleman of seventy-four, who looked at least a decade younger; as his visitor, not yet fifty, yet looked, with such strain in his face, and his eyes shadowed in the firelight, at least a decade older than his age.
Since the death of his second wife Tabitha some years before, Dr. Slade had remained a widower, and took what melancholy joy he could largely from his several grandchildren.
Though fallen now into quasi-oblivion, known only to historians of the era, Winslow Slade was, in the early years of the twentieth century, one of New Jersey’s most prominent citizens, who had served as a distinguished president of Princeton University, three decades before, in the troubled aftermath of the Civil War and into the early years of Reconstruction, when the academic state of the school was threatened, and Dr. Slade had brought some measure of academic excellence and discipline into the school; and, in the late 1880s, when Dr. Slade had served a term as governor of New Jersey, in a particularly tumultuous and partisan era in which a gentleman of Dr. Slade’s qualities, by nature congenial, inclined rather more to compromise than to fight, and in every way a Christian, found “politics” far too stressful to wish to run for a second term. In Princeton, a far more civilized community than the state capitol in Trenton, Winslow Slade was generally revered as a much-beloved pastor of the Presbyterian church and community leader; and how much more so, than Woodrow Wilson could ever hope to be!
Not that the younger man was jealous of the elder: he was not. But, quite consciously, he
wished to learn
from the elder.
Though very likely Winslow Slade knew a good deal of the animosity blooming between the university president and his most powerful dean, being the beneficiary of his wife’s network of local news, yet Winslow tactfully asked his young friend if it was a faculty matter, that was troubling him?—or, an undergraduate issue?
Woodrow’s reply was reluctantly uttered: “No, Dr. Slade. I think that I have won the boys over, after some initial coolness—they like me now. This generation is more concerned with making their own worldly way than I would wish, but we understand each other.” Half-consciously Woodrow rose to his feet, to pick up, from Winslow Slade’s desk, a brass letter-opener, and to turn it in his fingers. A thin smile distended his lips. “The mischief of boys I would welcome, Dr. Slade, at this point—if it could spare me this other.”
“ ‘This other’—?”
For an unsettling moment Woodrow lost the thread of his concentration: he was hearing a muted yet vehement voice daring to accuse him.
The horror of lynching is, no one speaks against it.
Behind the silvery glint of his glasses his eyes filled with tears of vexation. The little brass letter-opener slipped from his fingers to fall onto Winslow Slade’s desk. He said, “I’m speaking of—of certain underhanded challenges to my authority—as president of our university. You know, Dr. Slade, I take my responsibility to be—well, God-ordained; certainly I would not have had this exceptional honor bestowed upon me, if God
had not wished it
. And so, I am baffled by the calculated insults, malicious backbiting, and plotting among my administrative colleagues—and their secret liaisons with the trustees. Surely by now you’ve heard how my enemies conspire against me in skirmishes that have not the dignity of
battle,
still less of declared
war.
”
There followed an embarrassed silence. The elder man, regarding his friend with grave sympathy, could not think how to reply. It was kept fairly secret among Woodrow Wilson’s family and intimates that he had already suffered several mysterious collapses in his lifetime, the earliest as a young adolescent; Woodrow had even had a “mild” stroke at the premature age of thirty-nine. (At the time, Woodrow had been teaching jurisprudence at Princeton, preparing his lectures with great urgency and intensity, and working on the multivolume
A History of the American People
that would one day solidify his reputation.) Now, a decade later, Woodrow’s nerves were so keenly strung, he seemed at times to resemble a puppet jerked about by cruel, whimsical fingers. Yet, like any sensitive, proud man, he shrank from being comforted.
With a wry smile Woodrow confessed to his friend that, as pressure on him lately increased, he suffered from such darting pains in his head and abdomen as he lay sleepless through much of the night, he half wondered if his enemies—(“Led by that careerist whose name I do not care to speak”)—were devouring his very soul, as a sinister species of giant water spider sucks the life out of its helpless frog prey.
Winslow responded with a wincing smile, “Woodrow, my dear friend, I wish I could banish from your vocabulary such words as
battle, war, enemy
—even, perhaps,
soul
. For your nature is to take a little too seriously matters that are only local and transient, and you see
conspiracy
where there may be little more than a healthy difference of opinion.”
Woodrow stared at his elder friend with a look of hurt and alarm.
“ ‘Healthy difference of opinion’—? I don’t understand, Winslow. This is life or death—my life or death, as president of the university.”
“When the issue is whether to build the new Graduate College at the heart of the campus or, as Dean West prefers, at the edge?
That
is a matter of your life or death?”
“Yes! Yes, it is. And the eating clubs as well—my enemies are massing against me, to defeat my plan of colleges within the university, of a democratic nature. You know, I believe that the highest executive office must centralize power—whether the chief executive is the President of the United States, or of a distinguished university. And right here at home, I am met with
mutiny.
”
“Woodrow, really! ‘Mutiny.’ ” Winslow Slade smiled.
“
Mutiny,
yes,” Woodrow repeated grimly, “and I have no doubt that they are meeting in secret at this very minute, somewhere close by.”
For Woodrow had learned, from a remark of Mrs. Wilson’s when she’d returned from a luncheon at the Princeton Women’s Club two days before, that Andrew Fleming West was to be a houseguest at a dinner party at the home of the Burrs, of FitzRandolph Place, to which the Wilsons had conspicuously not been invited.
Winslow Slade murmured that none of this boded well for the university, if it was true; still less for Woodrow and his family.
“Dr. Slade, it
is
true,” Woodrow said irritably, “the prediction around town that I will be ‘outflanked’ by Easter, cornered like a rat and made to resign the presidency! Please don’t deny it, sir, in the interests of kindness or charity, for I know very well that Princeton whispers of nothing else—even the washerwomen, and the Negro servants, and every sort of local riffraff, gloat over my distress.”
At this, Winslow Slade leaned over to touch the younger man’s tensed arm. “Tommy—d’you mind if I call you ‘Tommy’?—I hope you remember the advice I gave you, when you accepted the trustees’ offer of the presidency: ‘A wise administrator never admits to having enemies, and a yet wiser administrator never has enemies.’ ”
“A banal platitude, sir, if I may say so,” Woodrow said, with increasing vexation, “—that might have been put to the ‘enemies’ of Napoleon, as his armies swept over them and devastated them utterly. It is easy for you to think in such a way—
you
who have never known an enemy in your life, and have been blessed by God in all your efforts.”
“I had political enemies enough, when I was governor of the state,” Winslow said. “I think you are forgetting the vicissitudes of real life, in your airy allegorical dramas.”
Woodrow, pacing in front of the fireplace, spoke now rapidly, and heedlessly—saying that Ellen and his daughters were “sick with worry” over his health; his doctor, Melrick Hatch, had warned him that the palliative medications he’d been taking for years to steady his nerves might soon have a “reverse” effect. (One of Woodrow’s medications was the morphine-laced Mrs. Wycroff’s Soothing Syrup; another, McCormick’s Glyco-Heroin Throat Lozenges
;
yet another, Boehringer & Soehne’s Antiseptique, with its high quotient of opium. Woodrow was also somewhat addicted to such home remedies as syrupy calomel, bismuth, and Oil of Olmay; cascara sagrada and Tidwell’s Purge.) Again, Woodrow picked up the brass letter-opener, to turn it restlessly in his fingers—“The dean, it’s said, boasts that he intends to drive me into an ‘early grave’ and take my place as president. And a majority of the trustees align themselves with
him
.”