The Witches of Eastwick

by John Updike

  Jenny was not here; she was back in the hospital, with uncontrollable internal bleeding. This was the sermon's undercurrent. Ray Neff was not here today either—he had accepted an invitation from Professor Hallybread to go sailing in Arthur's newly bought gaff-rigged Herreshoff 12½ across to Melville. Greta was here, though, sitting alone. It was hard to know about Greta—what she thought, what she wanted. Her being German, though her accent was never as bad as the people poking fun of it would have had you believe, put a kind of grid across her soul when you tried to look inside. Straight straw-dull hair, cut short, and amazing eyes the blue of dirty dishwater behind her granny glasses. She never missed a Sun­day, but it may have been simply the unreflective thor­oughness of her race, the German race, that admirable machine always waiting for a romantic demon to seize the levers.

  Van Home had been silent a while, pawing through the dictionary clumsily, as if his hands were gloves. Old Mrs. Lovecraft could now be heard as she leaned over to Mrs. Hallybread and distinctly asked, "Why is he using those filthy words?" Rose Hallybread looked exceedingly amused; she was a tall woman with a tiny head set in a nest of wiry gray and black hair frizzed way out. Her very small face was the color of a walnut, creased and recreased by decades of sun worship; what she whispered back was inaudible. On her other side sat Dawn Polanski; the girl had fascinating wide Mongolian cheekbones and smudged-looking skin and that impervious deadpan calm of the lawless. Between them she and Rose did pack a lot of psychic power.

  Van Home dimly heard the commotion and looked up, blinked, pushed his glasses higher on his nose, and apologetically pronounced, "I know this is taking plenty long enough but here, right on one page, I've just come across 'tapeworm' and 'tarantula.' 'Taran­tula: any of various large hairy spiders that are typ­ically rather sluggish and though capable of biting sharply are not significantly poisonous to man.' Thanks a lot. And his limp little buddy up here: 'Any of numerous cestode worms (as of the genus Taenia) parasitic when adult in the intestine of man or other vertebrates.' Numerous, mind you, not just one or two oddballs tucked back in some corner of Creation, any­body can make a mistake, but a lot of them, a lot of kinds, a terrific idea, Somebody must have thought. I don't know about the rest of you gathered here, wish­ing I'd pipe down and sit down probably, but I've always been fascinated by parasites. I mean fascinated in a negative way. They come in so many sizes, for one thing, from viruses and bacteria like your friendly syphilis spirochete to tapeworms thirty feet long and roundworms so big and fat they block up your big intestine. Intestines are where they're happiest, by and large. To sit around in the slushy muck inside somebody else's guts—that's their catbird seat. You doing all the digesting for 'em, they don't even need stomachs, just mouths and assholes, pardon my French. But boy, the ingenuity that old Great Designer spent with His lavish hand on these humble little dev­ils. Here, I scribbled down some notes, out of the En-cy-clo-pedia, as Jiminy Cricket used to say, if I can read 'em in this lousy light up here; Brenda, I don't see how you do it; week after week. If I were you I'd go on strike. O.K. Enough horsing around.

  "Your average intestinal roundworm, about the size of a lead pencil, lays its eggs in the faeces of the host; that's simple enough. Then, don't ask me how—there's a lot of unsanitary conditions in the world, once you get out of Eastwick—these eggs get up into your mouth and you swallow 'em, like it or not. They hatch in your duodenum, the little larvae worm through the gut wall, get into a blood vessel, and migrate to your lungs. But you don't think that's where they're gonna retire and live off their pension, do you? No sir, my dear friends, this little mother of a roundworm, he chews his way out of his cozy capillary there in the lungs and gets into an air sac and climbs what they call the res­piratory tree to the epiglottis, where you go and swal­low him again!—can you believe you'd be so stupid? Once he's had the second ride down he does settle in and becomes your average mature wage-earning roundworm.

  "Or take—hold it, my notes are scrambled—take an appealing little number called the lung fluke. Its eggs get out in the world when people cough up spu­tum." Van Home hawked by way of illustration. "When they hatch in fresh water that's lying around in these crummy, sort of Third-World places, they move into certain snails they fancy, in the form now of larvae, these lung flukes, follow me? When they've had enough of living in snails they swim out and bore into the soft tissues of crayfish and crabs. And when the Japanese or whoever eat the crayfish or crabs raw or undercooked the way they like it, in they go, these pesky flukes, and chew out through the intestines and diaphragm to get into good old lung and begin this sputum routine all over again. Another of these watery little jobbies, Diphyllobothrium latum if I can read it right, the little swimming embryos are eaten first by water fleas, and then fish eat the water fleas, and bigger fish eat those fish, and finally man bites the bullet, and all the while these itty-bitty monsters instead of being digested have been chewing their way out through the various stomach linings and are thriving. Hoo boy. There're a ton of these stories, but I don't want to bore anybody or, you know, overmake my point here. Wait, though. You got to hear this. I'm quoting. 'Echinococcus granulosus is one of the few tape­worms parasitizing man in which the adult worm inhabits the intestine of the dog, while man is one of the several hosts for the larval stage. Moreover, the adult worm is minute, measuring only three to six millimeters. In contrast, the larva, known as a hydatid cyst, may be large as a football. Man acquires infec­tion'—get this—'from contact with the faeces of infected dogs.'

  "So here you have, aside from a lot of feces and sputum, Man, allegedly made in the image of God, as far as little Echinococcus is concerned just a way station on the way to the intestines of a dog. Now you mustn't think parasites don't dig each other; they do. Here's a cutie pie called Trichosomoides crasskauda, of whom we read, quote, 'The female of this species lives as a parasite in the bladder of the rat, and the degen­erate male lives inside the uterus of the female.' So degenerate, even the Encyclopedia thinks it's degen­erate. And, hey, how about this?—'What might be termed sexual phoresis is seen in the blood fluke Schis­tosoma haematobium, in which the smaller female is car­ried in a ventral body-wall groove, the gynecephoric canal, of the male.' They had a drawing in the book I wish I could share with you good people, the mouth up at the tip of something like a Finger and this big ventral sucker and the whole thing looking like a banana with its zipper coming undone. Trust me: it is nasty."

  And to those who were sitting restless now (for the sky in the top panes of the windows was brightening as if a flashlight were shining behind the paper, and the hollyhock tops nodded and shuffled in a clearing breeze, a breeze that nearly capsized Arthur and Ray out in the East Passage, near Dyer Island: Arthur was

  unaccustomed to handling the lively little daysailer; his heart began to fibrillate; a bird beat its wings in his chest and his brain chanted rapidly, Not yet. Lord, not yet) it appeared that Van Home's face, as it bobbed back and forth between his scrambled notes and a somehow blinded outward gaze toward the congre­gation, was dissolving, was thawing into nothingness. He tried to gather his thoughts toward the painful effort of conclusion. His voice sounded forced up from far underground.

  "So to wind this thing up it's not just, you know, the nice clean pounce of a tiger or a friendly shaggy lion. That's what they sell us with all those stuffed toys. Put a kid to bed with a stuffed liver fluke or a hairy tarantula would be more like it. You all eat. The way you feel toward sunset of a beautiful summer day, the first g-and-t or rum-and-Coke or Bloody Mary beginning to do its work mellowing those synapses, and some nice mild cheese and crackers all laid out like a poker hand on the plate on the glass table out there on the sundeck or beside the pool, honest to God, good people, that's the way the roundworm feels when a big gobbety mess of half-digested steak or moo goo gai pan comes sloshing down to him. He's as real a creature as you and me. He's as noble a creature, designwise—really lovingly designed. You got to pic­ture that Big Visage leaning down a
nd smiling through Its beard while those fabulous Fingers with Their angelic manicure fiddled with the last fine-tuning of old Schistosome's ventral sucker: that's Creation. Now I ask you, isn't that pretty terrible? Couldn't you have done better, given the resources? I sure as hell could have. So vote for me next time, O.K.? Amen."

  In every congregation there has to be a stranger. The solitary uninvited today was Sukie Rougemont, sitting in the back wearing a wide-rimmed straw hat to hide her beautiful pale orange hair, and great round spectacles, so she could see to read the hymnal and to take notes on the margin of her mimeographed program. Her scurrilous column "Eastwick Eyes and Ears" had been reinstated, to make the Word more "sexy." She had gotten wind of Darryl's secular ser­mon and come to cover it. Brenda and Darryl, from their position on the altar dais, must have seen her slip in during the first hymn, but not Greta nor Dawn nor Rose Hallybread had been aware of her presence, and since she slipped out in the first stanza of "Father, Who on Man Doth Shower," no confrontation between the factions of witches occurred. Greta had begun to yawn unstoppably, and Dawn's lusterless eyes furiously to itch, and the buckles of Franny Lovecraft's shoes had come undone; but all of these developments might be laid to natural causes, as might Sukie's discovering, the next time she looked in the mirror, eight or ten more gray hairs.

  "Well, she died," Sukie told Alexandra over the phone. "At about four this morning. Only Chris was with her, and he had dozed off. It was the night nurse coming in realized she had no pulse."

  "Where was Darryl?"

  "He'd gone home for some sleep. Poor guy, he really had tried to be a dutiful husband, night after night. It had been coming for weeks, and the doctors were surprised she had hung on so long. She was tougher than anybody thought."

  "She was," Alexandra said, in simple salute. Her own heart with its burden of guilt had moved on, into an autumn mood, a calm of abdication. It was past Labor Day, and all along the edges of her yard spindly wild asters competed with goldenrod and the dark-leaved, burr-heavy thistles. The purple grapes in her arbor had ripened and what the grackles didn't get fell to form a pulp on the bricks; they were really too sour to eat, and this year Alexandra didn't feel up to making jelly: the steam, the straining, the little jars too hot to touch. As she groped for the next thing to say to Sukie, Alexandra was visited by a sensation more and more common to her: she felt outside her body, seeing it from not far away, in its pathetic spec­ificity, its mortal length and breadth. Another March, and she would be forty. Her mysterious aches and itches continued in the night, though Doc Paterson had found nothing to diagnose. He was a plump bald man with hands that seemed inflated, they were so broad and soft, so pink and clean. "I feel rotten," she announced.

  "Oh don't bother," Sukie sighed, herself sounding tired. "People die all the time."

  "I just want to be held," Alexandra surprisingly said.

  "Honey, who doesn't?" "That's all she wanted too." "And that's what she got." "You mean by Darryl." "Yes. The worst thing is—" "There's worse?"

  "I really shouldn't be telling even you, I got it from Jane in absolute secrecy; you know she's been seeing Bob Osgood, who got it from Doc Pat—"

  "She was pregnant," Alexandra told her.

  "How did you know?"

  "What else could the worst thing be? So sad," she said.

  "Oh I don't know. I'd hate to have been that kid. I don't see Darryl as cut out for fatherhood somehow."

  "What's he going to do?" The fetus hung disgust­ingly in Alexandra's mind's eye—a blunt-headed fish, curled over like an ornamental door knocker.

  "Oh, I guess go on much as before. He has his new crowd now. I told you about church."

  "I read your squib in 'Eyes and Ears.' You made it sound like a biology lecture."

  "It was. It was a wonderful spoof. The kind of thing he loves to do. Remember 'The A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square Boogie'? I couldn't put anything in about Rose and Dawn and Greta, but honestly, when they put their heads together the cone of power that goes up is absolutely electric, it's like the aurora borealis."

  "I wonder what they look like skyclad," Alexandra said. When she had this immediate detached vision of her own body it was always clothed, though not always clothed in what she was wearing at the time.

  "Awful," Sukie supplied. "Greta like one of those lumpy rumpled engravings by the German, you know the one—"

  "Diirer."

  "Right. And Rose skinny as a broom, and Dawn just a little smoochy waif with a big smooth baby tummy sticking out and no breasts. Brenda—Brenda I could go for," Sukie confessed. "I wonder now if Ed was just my way of communicating with Brenda."

  "I went back to the spot," Alexandra confessed in turn, "and picked up all the rusty pins, and stuck them in myself at various points. It still didn't do any good. Doc Pat says he can't find even a benign tumor."

  "Oh sweetie pie," Sukie exclaimed, and Alexandra realized she had frightened her, the other woman wanted to hang up. "You're really getting weird, aren't you?"

  Some days later Jane Smart said over the phone, her voice piercing with its indignation, "You can't mean you haven't already heard!"

  More and more, Alexandra had the sensation that Jane and Sukie talked and then one or the other of them called her out of duty, the next day or later. Maybe they flipped a coin over who got the chore.

  "Not even from Joe Marino?" Jane was going on. "He's one of the principal creditors."

  "Joe and I don't see each other any more. Really."

  "What a shame," Jane said. "He was so dear. If you like Italian pixies."

  "He loved me," Alexandra said, helplessly, know­ing how stupid the other woman felt her to be. "But I couldn't let him leave Gina for me."

  "Well," Jane said, "that's a rather face-saving way of putting it."

  "Maybe so, Jane Pain. Anyway. Tell me your news."

  "Not just my news, the whole town's news. He's left. He's skipped, sugar pie. Il est disparu." Her s's hurt, but they seemed to be stinging that other body, which Alexandra could get back into only when she slept.

  From the wrathfully personal way Jane was taking it Alexandra could only think, "Bob Osgood?"

  "Darryl, darling. Please, wake up. Our dear Darryl. Our leader. Our redeemer from Eastwick ennui. And he's taken Chris Gabriel with him."

  "Chris?"

  "You were right in the first place. He was one of those."

  "But he—"

  "Some of them can. But it isn't real to them. They don't bring to it the illusions that normal men do."

  Har, liar, diable, diable, saute ici, saute l à . There she had been, Alexandra remembered, a year ago, moon­ing over that mansion from a distance, then worrying about her thighs looking too fat and white when she had to wade. "Well," she said now. "Weren't we silly?"

  "'Naive' is the way I'd rather put it. How could we not be, living in a ridiculous backwater like this? Why are we here, did you ever ask yourself that? Because our husbands planted us here, and we like dumb dai­sies just stay."

  "So you think it was little Chris—"

  "All along. Obviously. He married Jenny just to cinch his hold. I could kill them both, frankly." "Oh Jane, don't even say it."

  "And her money, of course. He needed that pathetic little money she got from the house to keep his cred­itors at bay. And now there's all the hospital bills. Bob says it's a terrible mess, the bank is hearing from everybody because they're stuck with the mortgage on the Lenox place. He did admit there may be just enough equity if they can find the right developers; the place would be ideal for condominiums, if they can get it by the Planning Board. Bob thinks Herbie Prinz might be persuadable; he takes these expensive winter vacations."

  "But did he leave all his laboratory behind? The paint that would make solar energy—"

  "Lexa, don't you understand? There was never anything there. We imagined him."

  "But the pianos. And the art."

  "We have no idea how much of that was paid for. Obviously there are
some assets. But a lot of that art surely has depreciated dreadfully; I mean, really, stuffed penguins spattered with car paint—"

  "He loved it," Alexandra said, still loyal. "He didn't fake that, I'm sure. He was an artist, and he wanted to give us all an artistic experience. And he did. Look at your music, all that Brahms you used to play with him until your awful Doberman ate your cello and you began to talk just like some unctuous banker."

  "You're being very stupid," Jane said sharply, and hung up. It was just as well, for words had begun to stick in Alexandra's throat, the croakiness of tears aching to flow.

  Sukie called within the hour, the last gasp of their old solidarity. But all she could seem to say was "Oh my God. That little wimp Chris. I never heard him put two words together."

  "I think he wanted to love us," Alexandra said, able to speak only of Darryl Van Home, "but he just didn't have it in him."

  "Do you think he wanted to love Jenny?"

  "It could be, because she looked so much like Chris."

  "He was a model husband."

  "That could have been irony of a sort."

  "I've been wondering, Lexa, he must have known what we were doing to Jenny, is it possible—"

  "Go on. Say it."

  "We were doing his will by, you know—"