Free The Accursed by Joyce Carol Oates Page B

robust masculine exterior, he was not entirely healthy. His eyes were large, and both slumberous and piercing; possessed of a fiery topaz glow that was not obscured, but the more enhanced, by the deep-shadowed sockets that enclosed them. The forehead was prominent, the eyebrows thick, of that hue of blackness of the raven’s wing; the teeth small, and pearly, and almost overly white, of a uniform regularity—except for one incisor, which jutted a half-inch below its fellows, to give an impression somewhat carnivorous.
    Though the stranger’s attire was in very good taste—a silk-and-woolen dark-blue suit, in a light texture; with wide-padded shoulders and a tight-waisted coat; white dress shirt, with silver cuff links, striped necktie, polished shoes—yet Annabel had begun to think the mysterious stranger was somehow foreign, exotic. A Persian prince perhaps, exiled in America; or, one of the Hebrew race—for is there not something most noble and melancholy about him? And his eyes—why, those are basilisk-eyes! *
    Descriptions of female beauty are tedious, and often unconvincing. Is a young woman really so beautiful as her admirers claim? Would Annabel Slade with her conventionally pretty, pleasing features—her shyly downcast eyes of blue, or deep violet; her perfectly shaped lips, untouched by cosmetics; her nose, the Roman nose of the Slades, but snubbed—have been so celebrated a Princeton beauty, were she the daughter and granddaughter of more ordinary Princetonians? What is the distinction, in fact, between beauty and prettiness —the one rare and austere, the other commonplace? It is frankly beyond my writerly powers to suggest the delicate and unstudied charm of Annabel Slade, unless by summoning the image of the narcissus—the most exquisite of spring flowers with its fragile, fluted petals and its miniature center, all but invisible at a glance, and its just-slightly-astringent perfume, in which resides the quicksilver essence of spring: fresh, unsullied, virgin.
    For if beauty is not virgin, it is despoiled. In the Princeton of 1905, such a sentiment was hallowed as a love and fear of the Protestant Almighty.
    The previous year, Annabel had “come out” at a number of balls and parties in Manhattan, Philadelphia, and Princeton; it was said of her, as perhaps it is said of many debutantes, that she was the most “beautiful” of the crop, along with being, to speak bluntly, one of the wealthiest. (The Slade wealth was in railroads, real estate, manufacturing, and banking; for some decades in the late 1700s and early 1800s, until high-minded Slades insisted upon divestiture, there was considerable revenue generated by the slave trade. Even divided among a number of heirs, it remained one of the great fortunes of the nineteenth century, having virtually doubled its worth in the era known as the Gilded Age. But Annabel, like her brother Josiah, gave little thought to the Slade fortune, not even to their probable inheritances which they took for granted as they took for granted the very air they breathed, which was not the coarse and smoke-sullied air of Trenton, New Brunswick, or Newark.)
    So famously sweet-tempered was Annabel, she could not bear to hear ill of anyone, and often became downcast when an unkind or a thoughtless word was uttered in her presence; profanities, still more obscenities, of the sort undergraduate carousers scrawled on walls in white chalk, for all to see in the bright daylight, truly shocked her, as if she were personally attacked. (Though, fortunately, Annabel had but the vaguest notion of what these crude words and expressions actually meant.)
    As the naïve young woman had but a vague notion of what it might mean to exchange such glances, and be the recipient of such smiles, with a man she had not glimpsed before this hour.
    In addition, Annabel was devoutly religious. She could not have clearly stated what set her Presbyterian faith apart from other Protestant faiths, or,