The Witches of Eastwick

by John Updike

  "Killing her," Alexandra supplied.

  "Yes," said Sukie. "Because he wanted her out of the way once he had her legally and everything was different."

  Alexandra tried to think; it had been ages since she had felt her mind stretch itself, a luxurious feeling, almost muscular, probing those impalpable tunnels of the possible and the probable. "I really doubt," she decided, "that Darryl was ever organized in that way. He had to improvise on situations others created, and couldn't look very far ahead." As Alexandra talked, she saw him clearer and clearer—felt him from the inside, his caverns and seams and empty places. She had projected her spirit into a place of echoing des­olation. "He couldn't create, he had no powers of his own that way, all he could do was release what was already there in others. Even us: we had the coven before he came to town, and our powers such as they are. I think," she told Sukie, "he wanted to be a woman, like he said, but he wasn't even that."

  "Even," Sukie echoed, critically.

  "Well it is miserable a lot of time. It honestly is." Again, those sticks in the throat, the gateway of tears. But this sensation, like that resistant one of trying to think again, was somehow hopeful, a stiff beginning. She was ceasing to drift.

  "This might make you feel a little better," Sukie told her. "There's a good chance Jenny wasn't so sorry to die. Rebecca has been doing a lot of talking down at Nemo's, now that Fidel has run off with the other two, and she says some of the goings-on over there after we left would really curl your hair. Apparently it was no secret from Jenny what Chris and Darryl were up to, at least once she was safely married."

  "Poor little soul," Alexandra said. "I guess she was one of those perfectly lovely people the world for some reason never Finds any use for." Nature in her wisdom puts them to sleep.

  "Even Fidel was offended, Rebecca says," Sukie was saying, "but when she begged him to stay and live with her he told her he didn't want to be a lobsterman or a floor boy over at Dataprobe, and there was noth­ing else the people around here would let a spic like him do. Rebecca's heartbroken."

  "Men," Alexandra eloquently said.

  "Aren't they, though?"

  "How have people like the Hallybreads taken all this?"

  "Badly. Rose is nearly hysterical that Arthur is going to be involved financially in the terrible mess. Appar­ently he got rather interested in Darryl's selenium theories and even signed some sort of agreement mak­ing him a partner in exchange for his expertise; that was one of Darryl's things, getting people to sign pacts. Her back evidently is so bad now she sleeps on a mat on the floor and makes Arthur read aloud to her all day, these trashy historical novels. He can never get away any more."

  "Really, what a boring terrible woman," Alexandra said.

  "Vile," Sukie agreed. "Jane says her head looks like a dried apple packed in steel wool."

  "How is Jane? Really. I fear she got rather impa­tient with me this morning."

  "Well, she says Bob Osgood knows of a wonderful man in Providence, on Hope Street I think she said, who can replace the whole front plate of her Ceruti without changing the timbre, he's one of those sort of hippie Ph.D.'s who've gone to work in the crafts to spite their father or protest the System or something. But she's patched it with masking tape and plays it chewed and says she likes it, it sounds more human. I think she's in terrible shape. Very neurotic and par­anoid. I asked her to meet me downtown and have a sandwich at the Bakery or even Nemo's now that Rebecca doesn't blame us for everything any more, but she said no, she was afraid of being seen by those others. Brenda and Dawn and Greta, I suppose. I see them all the time along Dock Street. I smile, they smile. There's nothing left to fight about. Her color"— back to Jane—"is frightening. White as a clenched fist, and it's not even October."

  "Almost," Alexandra said. "The robins are gone, and you can hear the geese at night. I'm letting my tomatoes rot on the vine this year; every time I go into the cellar these jars and jars of last year's sauce reproach me. My awful children have absolutely rebelled against spaghetti, and, I must say, it does pack on the calories, which is scarcely what I need."

  "Don't be silly. You have lost weight. I saw you coming out of the Superette the other day—I was stuck in the Word, interviewing this incredibly imma­ture and pompous new harbormaster, he's just a kid with hair down to his shoulders, younger than Toby even, and just happened to look out the window— and thought to myself, 'Doesn't Lexa look fabulous.' Your hair was up in that big pigtail and you had on that brocaded Iranian—"

  "Algerian."

  "—Algerian jacket you wear in the fall, and had

  Coal on a leash, a long rope."

  "I had been at the beach," Alexandra volunteered. "It was lovely. Not a breath of wind." Though they talked on some minutes more, trying to rekindle the old coziness, that collusion which related to the yieldingness and vulnerability of their bodies, Alexandra and—her intuition suddenly, unmistakably told her— Sukie as well deadeningly felt that it had all been said before.

  There comes a blessed moment in the year when we know we are mowing the lawn for the last time. Alexandra's elder son, Ben, was supposed to earn his allowance with yard work, but now he was back in high school and trying to be a fledgling Lance Alworth at football practice afterwards—sprinting, weaving, leaping to feel that sweet hit of leather on outstretched fingertips ten feet off the ground. Marcy had a part-time job waitressing at the Bakery Coffee Nook, which was serving evening meals now, and regrettably she had become involved with one of those shaggy sinister boys who hung out in front of the Superette. The two younger children, Linda and Eric, had entered the fifth and seventh grades respectively, and Alexandra had found cigarette butts in a paper cup of water beneath Eric's bed. Now she pushed her snarling, smoking Toro, which hadn't had its oil changed since the days of Oz's home maintenance, once more back and forth across her unkempt lawn, littered with long yellow featherlike willow leaves and all bumpy as the moles were digging in for the winter. She let the Toro run until it had burned up all its gas, so none would clog the carburetor next spring. She thought of drain­ing the sludgy ancient oil but that seemed too good and workmanlike of her. On her way back to the kitchen from the gardening-tool shed she passed through her workroom and saw her stalled armature at last for what it was: a husband. The clumsily nailed and wired-together one-by-twos and two-by-fours had that lankiness she admired and that Ozzie had dis­played before being a husband had worn his corners down. She remembered how his knees and elbows had jabbed her in bed those early years when nightmares twitched him; she had rather loved him for those nightmares, confessions as they were of his terror as life in all its length and responsibility loomed to his young manhood. Toward the end of their marriage he slept like a thing motionless and sunk, sweating and exuding oblivious little snuffles. She took his mul­ticolored dust down from the shelf and sprinkled a little on the knotty piece of pine two-by-four that did for the armature's shoulders. She worried less about the head and face than the feet; it was the extremities, she realized, that mattered most to her about a man. Whatever went on in the middle, she had to have in her ideal man a gauntness and delicacy in the feet— Christ's feet as they looked overlapped and pegged on crucifixes, tendony and long-toed and limp as if in ilight—and something hardened and work-broadened about the hands; Darryl's rubbery-looking hands had been his most repulsive feature. She worked her ideas up sketchily in clay, in the last of the pure white kaolin taken from the widow's back yard in Cov­entry. One foot and one hand were enough, and sketchiness didn't matter; what was important was not her finished product but the message etched on the air and sent to those powers that could form hands and fingers to the smallest phalange and fascia, those pow­ers that spilled the marvels of all anatomies forth from Creation's berserk precise cornucopia. For the head she settled on a modest-sized pumpkin she bought at that roadside stand on Route 4, which for ten months of the year looks hopelessly dilapidated and aban­doned but comes to life at harvest time. She hollowed out the pumpki
n and put in some of Ozzie's dust, but not too much, for she wanted him duplicated only in his essential husbandliness. One crucial ingredient was almost impossible to find in Rhode Island: western soil, a handful of dry sandy sage-supporting earth. Moist eastern loam would not do. One day she hap­pened to spot parked on Oak Street a pickup truck with Colorado plates, those white numbers on a green silhouette of mountains. She reached inside the back fender and scraped some tawny dried mud down into her palm and took it home and put it in with Ozzie's dust. Also she needed a cowboy hat for the pumpkin, and had to go all the way to Providence in her Subaru to search for a costume store that would cater to Brown students with their theatricals and carnivals and pro­test demonstrations. While there, she thought to en­roll herself as a part-time student in the Rhode Island School of Design; she had gone as far as she could as a sculptress with being merely primitive. The other students were scarcely older than her children, but one of the instructors, a ceramist from Taos, a leath­ery limping man well into his forties and weathered by the baths and blasts of life, took her eye, and she his, in her sturdy voluptuousness a little like that of cattle (which Joe Marino had hit upon in calling her, while rutting, his vacca). After several terms and turnings-away they did marry and Jim took her and his stepchildren back west, where the air was ecstat­ically thin and all the witchcraft belonged to the Hopi and Navajo shamans.

  "My God," Sukie said to her over the phone before she left. "What was your secret?"

  "It's not for print," Alexandra told her sternly. Sukie had risen to be editor of the Word, and in keeping with the shamelessly personal tone of the emerging postwar era had to run scandal or confession every week, squibs of trivial daily rumor that Clyde Gabriel would have fastidiously killed.

  "You must imagine your life," Alexandra confided to the younger woman. "And then it happens."

  Sukie relayed this piece of magic to Jane, and dear angry Jane, who was in danger of being an embittered and crabbed old maid, so that her piano students asso­ciated the black and white of the keys with bones and the darkness of the pit, with everything dead and strict and menacing, hissed her disbelief; she had long since disowned Alexandra as a trustworthy sister.

  But in secrecy even from Sukie she had taken splin­ters of the cello-front replaced by the dedicated hippie restorer on Hope Street and wrapped them in her dead father's old soot-colored tuxedo and stuffed into one pocket of the jacket some crumbs of the dried herb Sam Smart had become, hanging in her ranch-house basement, and into the other pocket put the confetti of a torn-up twenty-dollar bill—for she was tired, boringly tired, of being poor—and sprinkled the still-shiny wide lapels of the tuxedo with her per­fume and her urine and her menstrual blood and enclosed the whole odd-smelling charm in a plastic-cleaner's bag and laid it between her mattress and her springs. Upon its subtle smothered hump she slept each night. One horrendously cold weekend in Jan­uary, she was visiting her mother in the Back Bay, and a perfectly suitable little man in a tuxedo and patent-leather pumps as shiny as boiling tar dropped in for tea; he lived with his parents in Chestnut Hill and was on his way to a gala at the Tavern Club. He had heavy-lidded protruding eyes the pale question­ing blue of a Siamese cat's; he did not drop by so briefly as to fail to notice—he who had never married and who had been written off by those he might have courted as hopelessly prissy, too sexless even to be called gay—something dark and sharp and dirty in Jane that might stir the long-dormant amorous part of his being. We wake at different times, and the gallantest flowers are those that bloom in the cold. His glance also detected in Jane a brisk and formi­dable potential administrator of the Chippendale and Duncan Phyfe antiques, the towering cabinets of Chinese lacquerwork, the deep-stored cases of vintage wine, the securities and silver he would one day inherit from his parents, though both were still alive, as were indeed two of his grandparents—ancient erect women changeless as crystal in their corners of Milton and Salem. This height of family, and the claims of the brokerage clients whose money he diffidently tended, and the requirements of his delicate allergic nature (milk, sugar, alcohol, and sodium were among the substances he must avoid) all suggested a manageress; he called Jane next morning before she had time to fly away in her battered Valiant and invited her for drinks that evening at the Copley bar. She refused; and then a picture-book blizzard collapsed on the brick precincts and held her fast. His call that evening pro­posed lunch upstairs at the snowbound Ritz. Jane resisted him all the way, scratching and singeing with her murderous tongue; but her accent spoke to him, and he made her finally his prisoner in a turreted ironstone fantasy in Brookline designed by a disciple of H. H. Richardson.

  Sukie sprinkled powdered nutmeg on the circular glass of her hand mirror until there was nothing left of the image but the gold-freckled green eyes or, when she slightly moved her head, her monkeyish and over-lipsucked lips. With these lips she recited in a solemn whisper seven times the obscene and sacred prayer to Cernunnos. Then she took the tired old plaid plastic-place mats off the kitchen table and put them into the trash for Tuesday's collection. The very next day a jaunty sandy-haired man from Connecticut showed up at the Word office, to place an ad: he was looking for a pedigreed Weimaraner to mate with his bitch. He was renting a cottage in Southwick with his small children (he was recently divorced; he had helped his wife go belatedly to law school and her first action had been to file for mental cruelty) and the poor creature had decided to come into heal; the bitch was in torment. This man had a long off-center nose, like Ed Parsley; an aura of regretful intelligence, like Clyde Gabriel; and something of Arthur Hallybread's professional starchiness. In his checked suit he looked excessively alert, like a gimcrack salesman from upstate New York or a song-and-dance man about to move sideways across a stage, strumming a banjo. Like Sukie, he wanted to be amusing. He was really from Stam­ford, where he worked in an infant industry, selling and servicing glamorized computers called word pro­cessors. On hers she now rapidly writes paperback romances, with a few taps of her fingertips transpos­ing paragraphs, renaming characters, and glossarizing for re-use standard passions and crises.

  Sukie was the last to leave Eastwick; the afterimage of her in her nappy suede skirt and orange hair swing­ing her long legs and arms past the glinting shop-fronts, lingered on Dock Street like the cool-colored ghost the eye retains after staring at something bright. This was years ago. The young harbormaster with whom she had her last affair has a paunch now, and three children; but he still remembers how she used to bite his shoulder and say she loved to taste the salt of the sea-mist condensed on his skin. Dock Street has been repaved and widened to accept more traffic, and from the old horse trough to Landing Square, as it tends to be called, all the slight zigzags in the line of the curb have been straightened. New people move to town; some of them live in the old Lenox mansion, which has indeed been turned into condominiums. The tennis court has been kept up, though the per­ilous experiment with the air-supported canvas can­opy has not been repeated. An area has been dredged and a dock and small marina built, as tenant induce­ment. The egrets nest elsewhere. The causeway has been elevated, with culverts every fifty yards, so it never floods—or has only once so far, in the great February blizzard of 78. The weather seems generally tamer in these times; there are rarely any thunder­storms.

  Jenny Gabriel lies with her parents under polished granite flush with the clipped grass in the new section of Cocumscussoc Cemetery. Chris, her brother and their son, has been, with his angelic visage and love of comic books, swallowed by the Sodom of New York. Lawyers now think that Darryl Van Home was an assumed name. Yet several patents under that name do exist. Residents at the condo have reported mys­terious crackling noises from some of the painted win­dow sills, and wasps dead of shock. The facts of the financial imbroglio lie buried in vaults and drawers of old paperwork, silted over in even this short a span of time and of no great interest. What is of interest is what our minds retain, what our lives have given to the air. The witches are gone, v
anished; we were just an interval in their lives, and they in ours. But as Sukie's blue-green ghost continues to haunt the sun-struck pavement, and Jane's black shape to flit past the moon, so the rumors of the days when they were solid among us, gorgeous and doing evil, have fla­vored the name of the town in the mouths of others, and for those of us who live here have left something oblong and invisible and exciting we do not under­stand. We meet it turning the corner where Hemlock meets Oak; it is there when we walk the beach in off­season and the Atlantic in its blackness mirrors the dense packed gray of the clouds: a scandal, life like smoke rising twisted into legend.

  About the Author

  John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year as a Knox Fellow at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England. From 1955 to 1957 he was a staff member of The New Yorker, to which he has contributed short stories, poems, and book reviews. Since 1957 he has lived in Massachusetts.

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