CHAPTER 1

ASH WEDNESDAY EVE, 1905

Fellow historians will be shocked, dismayed, and perhaps incredulous — Iam daring to suggest that the Curse did not first manifest itself onJune 4, 1905, which was the disastrous morning of Annabel Slade'swedding, and generally acknowledged to be the initial public manifestationof the Curse, but rather earlier, in the late winter of the year, on the eve ofAsh Wednesday in early March.

This was the evening of Woodrow Wilson's (clandestine) visit tohis longtime mentor Winslow Slade, but also the evening of the day whenWoodrow Wilson experienced a considerable shock to his sense of family,indeed racial identity.

Innocently it began: at Nassau Hall, in the president's office, witha visit from a young seminarian named Yaeger Washington Ruggles whohad also been employed as Latin preceptor at the university, to assist inthe instruction of undergraduates. (Intent upon reforming the quality ofeducation at Princeton, with its reputation as a Southern-biased, largelyPresbyterian boys' school set beside which its rival Harvard Universitywas a paradigm of academic excellence, Woodrow Wilson had initiateda new pedagogy in which bright young men were hired to assist olderprofessors in their lecture courses; Yaeger Ruggles was one of these youngpreceptors, popular in the better homes of Princeton as at the university,as eligible bachelors are likely to be in a university town.) Yaeger Ruggles,was a slender, slight, soft-spoken fellow Virginian, a distant cousinof Wilson's who had introduced himself to the university president afterhe'd enrolled in his first year at the Princeton Theological Seminary;Wilson had personally hired him to be a preceptor, impressed with hiscourtesy, bearing, and intelligence. At their first meeting, Yaeger Ruggleshad brought with him a letter from an elderly aunt, living in Roanoke,herself a cousin of Wilson's father's aunt. This web of intricate connectionswas very Southern; despite the fact that Woodrow Wilson's branchof the family was clearly more affluent, and more socially prominent thanYaeger Ruggles's family, who dwelt largely in the mountainous area westof Roanoke, Woodrow Wilson had made an effort to befriend the youngman, inviting him to the larger receptions and soirees at his home, andintroducing him to the sons and daughters of his well-to-do Princetonassociates and neighbors. Though older than Ruggles by more than twentyyears, Woodrow Wilson saw in his young kinsman something of himself,at an earlier age when he'd been a law student in Virginia with an abidinginterest in theology. (Woodrow Wilson was the son of a preeminentPresbyterian minister who'd been a chaplain for the Confederate Army;his maternal grandfather was a Presbyterian minister in Rome, Georgia,also a staunch religious and political conservative.) At the time of YaegerRuggles's visit to President Wilson, in his office in Nassau Hall, thetwo had been acquainted for more than two years. Woodrow Wilson hadnot seen so much of his young relative as he'd wished, for his Prince tonsocial life had to be spent in cultivating the rich and influential. "A privatecollege requires donors. Tuition alone is inadequate"— so WoodrowWilson said often, in speeches as in private conversations. He did regretnot seeing more of Yaeger, for he had but three daughters and no son; andnow, with his wife's chronic ill health, that had become a sort of malaiseof the spirit, as well as her advancing age, it was not likely that Woodrowwould ever have a son. Yaeger's warm dark intelligent eyes invariablymoved Woodrow to an indefinable emotion, with the intensity ofmemory. His hair was very dark, as Woodrow's had once been, but thickand springy, where Woodrow's was rather thin, combed flat against hishead. And there was something thrilling about the young man's softlymodulated baritone voice also, that seemed to remind Wilson of a belovedvoice or voices of his childhood in Virginia and Georgia. It had been a wildimpulse of Woodrow's — (since childhood in his rigid Presbyterian household,Woodrow had been prone to near-irresistible urges and impulses ofevery kind, to which he'd rarely given in) — to begin singing in Yaeger'spresence, that the younger man might join him; for Woodrow had lovedhis college glee clubs, and liked to think that he had a passably fair tenorvoice, if untrained and, in recent years, unused.

But it would be a Protestant hymn Woodrow would sing with Yaeger,something melancholy, mournful, yearning, and deliciously submissive — Rockof Ages, cleft for me! Let me hide myself in Thee! Let the waterand the blood, that thy wounded side did flow ...

Woodrow had not yet heard Yaeger speak in public, but he'd predicted,in Princeton circles, and to the very dean of the seminary himself,that his young "Virginian cousin" would one day be an excellent minister — atwhich time, Woodrow wryly thought, Yaeger too would understandthe value of cultivating the wealthy at the expense of one's ownpredilections.

But this afternoon, Yaeger Washington Ruggles was not so composedas he usually was. He appeared to be short of breath, as if he'dbounded up the stone steps of Nassau Hall; he did not smile so readily andso sympathetically as he usually did. Nor was his hurried handshake so firm,or so warm. Woodrow saw with a pang of displeasure — (for it pained him,to feel even an inward rebuke of anyone whom he liked) — that the seminarian'sshirt collar was open at his throat, as if, in an effort to breathe, he'dunconsciously tugged at it; he had not shaved fastidiously and his skin,ordinarily of a more healthy tone than Woodrow's own, seemed darkened as by a shadow.

"Woodrow! I must speak with you."

"But of course, Yaeger — we are speaking."

Woodrow half-rose from his chair, behind his massive desk; then remainedseated, in his rather formal posture. The office of the president wasbook lined, floor to ceiling; windows opened out onto the cultivated greenof Nassau Hall's large and picturesque front lawn, that swept to NassauStreet and the wrought iron gates of the university; and, to the rear, anothergrassy knoll, that led to Clio and Whig Halls, stately Greek templesof startling if somewhat incongruous Attic beauty amid the darker, Gothicuniversity architecture. Behind Woodrow on the wall was a bewigged portraitof Aaron Burr, Sr., Princeton University's first president to take officein Nassau Hall.

"Yaeger, what is it? You seem troubled."

"You have heard, Woodrow? The terrible thing that happened yesterdayin Camden?"

"Why, I think that I — I have not 'heard' ... What is it?"

Woodrow smiled, puzzled. His polished eyeglasses winked.

In fact, Woodrow had been hearing, or half-hearing, of somethingvery ugly through the day, at the Nassau Club where he had had lunchwith several trustees and near the front steps of Nassau Hall where he'doverheard several preceptors talking together in lowered voices. (It was adisadvantage of the presidency, as it had not been when Woodrow was apopular professor at the university, that, sighting him, the younger facultyin particular seemed to freeze, and to smile at him with expressions offorced courtesy and affability.) And it seemed to him too, that morningat breakfast, in his home at Prospect, that their Negro servant, Clytie, hadbeen unusually silent, and had barely responded when Woodrow greetedher with his customary warm bright smile — "Good morning, Clytie! Whathave you prepared for us today?" (For...