The Witches of Eastwick (26 page)

"I've always thought it was too short. Stubby. I've always hated my neck."

"Oh, you shouldn't have. Long necks are grotesque, except on black people."

"Brenda Parsley has an Adam's apple."

"Let's not be unkind. Let's think serene-making thoughts."

"Do me. Do me next, Jenny," Sukie nagged in a piping child's voice; she reverted quite dramatically, and while stoned was not above sucking her thumb.

Alexandra groaned. "What indecent bliss. I feel like a big sow rolling around."

"Thank God you don't smell that way," Jane Smart said. "Or does she, Jenny?"

"She smells very sweet and clean," Jenny primly said. From within that transparent bell of innocence or unknowing her slightly nasal voice came from as if far away, though distinctly; in the mirrors she was, kneeling, the shape and size and luster of one of those hollow porcelain birds, with holes at either end, from which children produce a few whistled notes.

"Jenny, the backs of my thighs," Sukie begged. "Just slowly along the backs, incredibly slowly. And use your fingernails. Don't be afraid of the insides of the thighs. The backs of the knees are wonderful. Wonderful. Oh my God." Her thumb slid into her mouth.

"We're going to wear Jenny out," Alexandra warned in a considerate, drifting, indifferent voice.

"No, I like it," the girl said. "You're all so appreciative."

"We'll do you," Alexandra promised. "As soon as we get over this drugged feeling."

"I don't really care about being rubbed that much," Jenny confessed. "I'd rather do it than have it done to me, isn't that perverse?"

"It works out very well for us," Jane said, hissing the last word.

"Yes it does," Jenny agreed politely.

Van Home, out of respect perhaps for the delicate initiate, seldom bathed with them now, or if he did he left the room swiftly, his hairy body wrapped from waist to knees in a towel, to keep Chris entertained with a game of chess or backgammon in the library.

He made himself available afterwards, however, wearing clothes of increasing foppishness—a silk paisley strawberry-colored bathrobe, for instance, with bell-bottom slacks of a fine green vertical stripe protruding below,
and a mauve foulard stuffed ab
out his throat— and affecting an ever-more-preening manner of magisterial benevolence, to preside over tea or drinks or a quick supper of Dominican
sancocho
or Cuban
mon
dongo,
of Mexican
polio picado con tocino
or Colombian
souffle de sesos.
Van Home watched his female guests gobble these spicy delicacies rather ruefully, puffing tinted cigarettes through a curious twisted horn holder he lately brandished; he had himself lost weight and seemed feverish with hopes for his selenium-based solution to the problem of energy. Away from this topic, he often fell apathetically silent, and sometimes left the room abruptly. In retrospect, Alexandra and Sukie and Jane Smart might have concluded that he was bored with them; but they were themselves so far from bored with him that boredom did not enter their imaginations. His v
ast home, which they had nick
named Toad Hall, expanded their meagre domiciles; in Van Home's realm they left their children behind and became children themselves.

Jane came faithfully for her sessions of Hindemith and Brahms and, most recently attempted, Dvorak's swirling, dizzying Concerto for cello in B Minor. Sukie as that winter slowly melted away began to trip back and forth with notes and diagrams for her novel, which she and her mentor believed could be pre
-
planned and engineered, a simple verbal machine for the arousal and then the relief of tension. And Alexandra timidly invited Van Home to come view the large, weightless, enamelled statues of floating women she had patted together with gluey hands and putty knives and wooden salad spoons. She felt shy, having him to her house, which needed fresh paint in all the downstairs rooms and new linoleum on the kitchen floor; and between her walls he did seem diminished and aged, his jaw blue and the collar of his button-down Oxford frayed, as if shabbiness were infectious. He was wearing that baggy green-and-black tweed jacket with leather elbow-patches in which she had first met him, and he seemed so much an unemployed professor, or one of those sad men who as eternal graduate students haunt every university town, that she wondered how she had ever read into him so much magic and power. But he praised her work: "Baby, I think you've found your
shtik!’
That sort of corny carny quality Lindner has, but with you there's not that metallic hardness, more of a Mir
ó
feeling, and sexy—sex-ee, hoo boy!" With an alarming speed and clumsiness, he loaded three of her papier-mach
é
- figures into the back seat of his Mercedes, where they looked to Alexandra like gaudy little hitchhikers, corky bright limbs tangled and the wires that would suspend them from a ceiling snarled. "I'm driving to New York day after tomorrow more or less, and I'll show these to my guy on Fifty-seventh Street. He'll nibble, I'll bet my bottom buck; you've really caught something in the cultural works now, a sort of end-of-the-party feel. That unreality. Even the clips of the war on TV look unreal, we've all seen too many war movies."

Out in the open air, next to her car, dressed in a sheepskin coat with grimy cuffs and elbows, the matching sheepskin hat too small for his bushy head, he looked to Alexandra beyond capture, a lost cause; but, with an unpredictable lurch, he yielded to the bend of her mind and came back into the house with her and, breathing wheezily, up to her bedroom, to the bed she had lately denied to Joe Marino. Gina was pregnant again and tha
t made it just too heavy. Darry’
s potency had something infallible and unfeeling about it, and his cold penis hurt, as if it were covered with tiny little scales; but today, his taking her poor creations so readily with him to sell, and his stitched-together, slightly withered appearance, and the grotesque peaked sheepskin hat on his head, all had melted her heart and turned her vulva super-receptive. She could have mated with an elephant, thinking of becoming the next Niki de Saint-Phalle.

The three women, meeting downtown on Dock Street, checking in with one another by telephone, silendy shared the sorority of pain that went with being the dark man's lover. Whether Jenny too carried this pain her aura did not reveal. When discovered by an afternoon visitor in the house, she always was wearing her lab coat and a frontal, formal attitude of efficiency. Van Home used her, in part, because she was opaque, with her slightly brittle, deferential manner, her trait of letting certain vibrations and insinuations pass right through her, the somehow schematic roundness to her body. Within a group each member falls into a slot of special usefulness, and Jenny's was to be condescended to, to be "brought along," to be treasured as a version of each mature, divorced, disillusioned, empowered woman's younger self, though none had been quite like Jenny, or had lived alone with her younger brother in a house where her parents had met violent deaths. They loved her on their own terms, and, in fairness, she never indicated what terms she would have preferred. The most painful aspect of the afterimage the girl left, at least in Alexandra's mind, was the impression that she had trusted them, had confided herself to them as a woman usually first confides herself to a man, risking destruction in the determination to
know.
She had knelt among them like a docile slave and let her white round body shed the glow of its perfection upon their darkened imperfect forms sprawled wet on black cushions, under a roof that never slid back after, one icebound night, Van Home had pushed the button and a flash made a glove of blue fire around his hairy hand.

Insofar as they were witches, they were phantoms in the communal mind. One smiled, as a citizen, to greet Sukie's cheerful pert face as it breezed along the crooked sidewalk; one saluted a certain grandeur in Alexandra as in her sandy riding boots and old green brocaded jacket she stood chatting with the proprietress of the Yapping Fox—Mavis Jessup, herself divorced, and hectic in complexion, and her dyed red hair hanging loose in Medusa ringlets. One credited to Jane Smart's angry dark brow, as she slammed herself into her old moss-green Plymouth Valiant, with its worn door latch, a certain distinction, an inner boiling such as had in other cloistral towns produced Emily Dickinson's verses and Emily Bronte's inspired novel. The women returned hellos, paid bills, and in the Armenians' hardware store tried, like everybody else, to describe with finger sketches in the air the peculiar thingamajiggy needed to repair a decaying home, to combat entropy; but we all knew there was something else about them, something as monstrous and obscene as what went on in the bedroom of even the assistant high-school principal and his wife, who both looked so blinky and tame as they sat in the bleachers chaperoning a record hop with its bloodcurdling throbbing.

We all dream, and we all stand aghast at the mouth of the caves of our deaths; and this is our way in. Into the nether world. Before plumbing, in the old outhouses, in winter, the accreted shit of the family would mount up in a spiky frozen stalagmite, and such phenomena help us to believe that there is more to life than the airbrushed ads at the front of magazines, the
Platonic forms of perfume bottles and nylon nightgowns and Rolls-Royce fenders. Perhaps in the passageways of our dreams we meet, more than we know: one white lamplit face astonished by another. Certainly the fact of witchcraft hung in the consciousness of Eastwick; a lump, a cloudy density generated by a thousand translucent overlays, a sort of heavenly body, it was rarely breathed of and, though dreadful, offered the consolation of completeness, of rounding out the picture, like the gas mains underneath Oak Street and the television aerials scraping
Kojak
and Pepsi commercials out of the sky. It had the uncertain outlines of something seen through a shower door and was viscid, slow to evaporate: for years after the events
gropingly and even reluctantl
y related here, the rumor of witchcraft stained this corner of Rhode Island, so that a prickliness of embarrassment and unease entered the atmosphere with the most innocent mention of Eastwick.

III
.
Guilt

Recall the famous wi
lch trials: t
he most acute and humane judges were in no doubt as to the guilt of the accused; the "witches"
themselves, did not doubt it
—and yet there was no guilt.

—Friedrich Nietzsche
, 1887

You
hav
e
?" Alexandra asked Sukie,
over the phone. It was April; spring made Alexandra feel dopey and damp, slow to grasp even the simplest thing through the omnipresent daze of sap running again, of organic filaments warming themselves once again to crack the mineral earth and make it yield yet more life. She had turned thirty-nine in March and there was a weight to this too. But Sukie sounded more energetic than ever, breathless with her triumph. She had sold the Gabriel place.

"Yes, a lovely serious rather elderly couple called Hallybread. He teaches physics over at the University in Kingston and she I think counsels people, at
least she kept asking me what I
thought, which I guess is part of the technique they learn. They had a house
in Kingston for twenty years but he wants to be nearer the sea now that he's retired and have a sailboat. They don't mind the house's not being painted yet, they'd rather pick the color themselves, and they have grandchildren and step-grandchildren that come and visit so they can use those rather dreary rooms on the third floor where Clyde kept all his old magazines, it's a wonder the weight didn't break the beams."

"What about the emanations, will that bother them?" For some of the other prospects who had looked at the house this winter had read of the murder and suicide and were scared off. People are still superstitious, even with all of modern science.

"Oh yes, they had read about it when it happened. It made a big splash in every paper in the state except the
Word.
They were amazed when somebody, not me, told them this had been the house. Professor Hallybread looked at the staircase and said Clyde must have been a clever man to make the rope just long enough so his feet didn't hit the stairs. I said, Yes, Mr. Gabriel had been very clever, always reading Latin and these abstruse astrological things, and I guess I began to look teary, thinking of Clyde, because Mrs. Hallybread put her arm around me and began to act, you know, like a counsellor. I think it may have helped sell the house actually, it put us on this footing where they could hardly say no."

"What are their names?" Alexandra asked, wondering if the can of clam chowder she was warming on the stove would boil over. Sukie's voice through the telephone wire was seeking painfully to infuse her with vernal vitality. Alexandra tried to respond and take an interest in these people she had never met, but her brain cells were already so littered with people she had met and grown to know and got excited by and even loved and then had forgotten. That cruise on the
Coronia
to Europe twenty years ago with Oz had by itself generated enough acquaintances to populate a lifetime—their mates at the table with the edge that came up in rough weather, the people in blankets beside them on the deck having bouillon at elevenses, the couples they met in the bar at midnight, the stewards, the captain with his square-cut ginger beard, everyone so friendly and interesting because they were young, young; youth is a kind of money, it makes people fawn. Plus the people she had gone to high school and Conn. College with. The boys with motorcycles, the pseudo-cowboys. Plus a million faces on city streets, mustached men carrying umbrellas, curvaceous women pausing to straighten a stocking in the doorway of a shoe store, cars like cartons of faces like eggs
driving constantly by—all real, all with
names, all with souls they used to say, now compacted in her mind like dead gray coral.

"Kind of cute names," Sukie was saying. "Arthur and Rose. I don't know if you'd like them or not, they seemed practical more than artistic."

One of the reasons for Alexandra's depression was that Darryl had some weeks ago returned from New York with the word that the manager of the gallery on Fifty-seventh Street had thought her sculptures were too much like those of Niki de Saint-Phalle. Furthermore, two of the three had returned damaged; Van Home had taken Chris Gabriel along to help with the driving (Darryl became hysterical on the Connecticut Turnpike: the trucks tailgating him, hissing and knocking on ail sides of him, these repulsive obese drivers glaring down at his Mercedes from their high dirty cabs) and on the way home they had picked up a hitchhiker in the Bronx, so the pseudo-Nanas riding in the back were shoved over to make room. When Alexandra had pointed out to Van Home the bent limbs, the creases in the fragile papier-mache, and the one totally torn-off thumb, his face had gone into its patchy look, his eyes and mouth too disparate to focus, the glassy left eye drifting outward toward his ear and saliva escaping the corners of his lips. "Well Christ," he had said, "the poor kid was standing out there on the Deegan a couple blocks from the worst slum in the fucking country, he coulda got mugged and killed if we hadn't picked him up." He thought like a taxi driver, Alexandra realized. Later he asked her, "Why don'tcha try working in wood at least? You think Michelangelo ever wasted his time with gluey old newspapers?"

"But where will Chris and Jenny go?" she mustered the wit to ask. Also on her mind uncomfortably was Joe Marino, who even while admitting that Gina was in a family way again was increasingly tender and husbandly toward his former mistress, coming by at odd hours and tossing sticks at her windows and talking in all seriousness down in her kitchen (she wouldn't let him into the bedroom any more) about his leaving Gina and their setting themselves up with Alexandra's four children in a house somewhere in the vicinity but out of Eastwick, perhaps in Coddington Junction. He was a shy decent man with no thought of finding another mistress; that would have been disloyal to the team he had assembled. Alexandra kept biting back the truth that she would rather lie single than a plumber's wife; it had been bad enough with Oz and his chrome. But just thinking a thought so snobbish and unkind made her feel guilty enough to relent and take Joe upstairs to her bed. She had put on seven pounds during the winter and that little extra layer of fat may have been making it harder for her to have an orgasm; Joe's naked body felt like an incubus and when she opened her eyes it seemed his hat was still on his head, that absurd checked wool hat with the tiny brim and little iridescent brown feather.

Or it may have been that somewhere someone had tied an
aiguillette
attached to Alexandra's sexuality.

"Who knows?" Sukie asked in turn. "I don't think they know. They don't want to go back where they came from, I kn
ow that. Jenny is so sure Darryl’
s close to making a breakthrough in the lab she wants to put all her share of the house money into his project."

This did shock Alexandra, and drew her full attention, either because any talk of money is magical, or because it had not occurred to her that Darryl Van Home needed money. That
they
all needed money— the child-support checks ever later and later, and dividends down because of the war and the overheated economy, and the parents resisting even a dollar raise in the price of a half-hour's piano lesson by Jane Smart, and Alexandra's new sculptures worth less than the newspapers shredded to make them, and Sukie having to stretch her smile over the weeks between commissions—was assumed, and gave a threadbare gallantry to their little festivities, the extravagance of a fresh bottle of Wild Turkey
or ajar of whole cashews or a ca
n of anchovies. And in these times of national riot, with an entire generation given over to the marketing and consumption of drugs, ever more rarely came the furtive wife knocking on the back door for a gram of dried orchis to stir into an aphrodisiac broth for her flagging husband, or the bird-loving widow wanting henbane with which to poison her neighbor's cat, or the timid teen-ager hoping to deal for an ounce of distilled moonwort or woadwaxen so as to work his will upon a world still huge in possibilities and packed like a honeycomb with untasted treasure. Nightclad and giggling, in the innocent days when they were freshly liberated from the wraps of housewifery, the witches used to sally out beneath the crescent moon to
gather such herbs where they nee
ded at the rare and delicate starlit junction of suitable soil and moisture and shade. The market for all their magic was drying up, so common and multiform had sorcery become; but if they were poor, Van Home was rich, and his wealth theirs to enjoy for their dark hours of holiday from their shabby sunlit days. That Jenny Gabriel might offer him money of her own, and he accept, was a transaction Alexandra had never envisioned. "Did you talk to
her
about this?"

"I told her I thought it would be crazy. Arthur Hallybread teaches physics and he says there is absolutely no foundation in electromagnetic reality for what Darryl is trying to do."

"Isn't that the sort of thing professors always say, to anybody with an idea?"

"Don't be so defensive, darling. I didn't know you cared."

"I don't care, really," Alexandra said, "what Jenny does with her money. Except she
is
another woman. How did she react when you said this to her?"

"Oh, you know. Her eyes got bigger and stared and her chin turned a little more pointy and it was as if she hadn't heard me. She has this stubborn streak underneath all the docility. She's too good for this world."

"Yes, that is the message she gives off, I suppose," Alexandra said slowly, sorry to feel that they were turning on her, their own fair creature, their
ingenu
é
.

Jane Smart called a week or so later, furious. "Couldn't you have
guessed?
Alexandra, you
do
seem abstracted these days." Her s's hurt, stinging lik
e match tips. "She's moving in!
He's invited her and that foul little brother to move in!"

"Into Toad Hall?"

"Into the old
Lenox
place," Jane said, discarding the pet name they had once given it as if Alexandra were stupidly babbling. "It's what she's been angling for all along, if we'd just opened our foolish eyes. We were so
nice
to that vapid girl, taking her in, doing our thing, though she always
did
hold back as if really she were above it all and time would tell, like some smug little Cinderella squatting in the ashes knowing there was this glass sl
ipper in her future—oh, the priss
iness of her now is what gets me, swishing about in her cute little white lab coat and getting
paid
for it, when he owes everybody in town and the bank is thinking of foreclosing but it doesn't want to get stuck with the property, the upkeep is a
nightmare.
Do you know what a new slate roof for that pile would run to?"

"Baby," Alexandra said, "you sound so financial. Where did you learn all this?"

The fat yellow lilac buds had released their first small bursts of heart-shaped leaves and the arched wands of forsythia, past bloom, had turned chartreuse like miniature willows. The gray squirrels had stopped coming to the feeder, too busy mating to eat, and the grapevines, which look so dead all winter, were beginning to shade the arbor again. Alexandra felt less sodden this week, as spring muddiness dried to green; she had returned to making her little clay bubbies, getting ready for the summer trade, and they were slightly bigger, with subtler anatomies and a deliberately Pop intensity to their coloring: she had learned something over the winter, by her artistic misadventure. So in this mood of rejuvenation she had trouble quickly sharing Jane's outrage; the pain of the Gabriel children's moving into a house that had felt fractionally hers sank in slowly. She had always held to the conceited fantasy that in spite of Sukie's superior beauty and liveliness and Jane's greater intensity and commitment to witc
hiness, she, Alexandra, was Dar
ryl's favorite—in size and in a certain psychic breadth most nearly his match, and destined, somehow, to
reign
with him. It had been a lazy assumption.

Jane was saying, "Bob Osgood told me." He was the president of the Old Stone Bank downtown: stocky, the same physical type as Raymond Neff, but without a teacher's softness and that perspiring bullying manner teachers get; solid and confident, rather, from association with money Bob Osgood was, and utterly, beautifully bald, with a freshly minted shine to his skull and a skinned pinkness catching at his ears and his eyelids and nostrils, even his tapering quick fingers, as if he had stepped fresh from a steam room.

"You
see
Bob Osgood?"

Jane paused, registering distaste at the direct question as much as uncertainty how to answer. "His daughter Deborah is the last lesson on Tuesdays, and picking her up he's stayed once or twice for a beer. You know what an impossible bore Harriet Osgood is; poor Bob can't get it up to go home to her."

"Get it up" was one of those phrases the young had made current; it sounded a bit false and harsh in Jane's mouth. But then Jane
was
harsh, as people from Massachusetts tend to be. Puritanism had landed smack on that rock and after regaining its strength at the expense of the soft-hearted Indians had thrown its steeples and stone walls all across Connecticut, leaving Rhode Island to
the Quakers and Jews and antino
mians and women.