Gladys Reunited

by Sandi Toksvig

  I’d been to Salem before when I did the obligatory bus tour around America in my early twenties. I remembered the Witch Museum as being delightful and about as real as Ben Franklin’s place in Philadelphia. I couldn’t wait to show it off. The town itself was not as picturesque as I had remembered. It lies on the Massachusetts coast but lacks the charm of the smaller places we had already passed through. Much of the place looks tired now as if everyone has heard the story and can’t be bothered with the bloody witches.

  The Salem Witch Museum is in an old church which is either appropriate or ironic, I couldn’t decide. The woman behind the desk offered us tickets to watch the half-hourly presentation.

  ‘Do we have to watch the show?’ I asked, keen to get to the museum bit with the witch stuff in it.

  ‘That’s all we are,’ said the woman. ‘Well …‘ she looked at me as if I might be trusted with a glimpse of a cauldron or two hidden out the back ’… there is the gift shop.’

  The gift shop had everything you could want in witch vending as well as, curiously, Kate Atkinson’s novel Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and the history of golf in Boston.

  For the show we were ushered into a large black room about the size of a real tennis court. Here a series of tableaux told the story of the hysterical girls and the even more hysterical reaction of the religious fathers of the time. The entire thing was a sort of son et lumière with many effigies made out of papier mâché lit in sequence, accompanied by a poor recording in which many amateur actors had vainly screamed in the background. It was fantastic. I learned nothing but it was fantastic. One of the worst things I’ve ever seen. A complete joy.

  Spurred on to start my own coven we headed down to the harbour to see if we could find a witchcraft shop. In a small shopping arcade we saw a couple clearly dressed for Beelzebub bonanza. She was all in black with a long sleeveless coat, while he bobbed along in vivid purple knickerbockers and top. Polly and Peter Pagan out for the day. They were emerging from a witchcraft shop where they had obviously spent a fortune. In Boston I had already turned down the opportunity to buy a Jesus action doll, a paper cut-out figure of the Pope and a punching rabbi puppet. I looked around the shop and realised this wasn’t the retail opportunity for me. Rita conscientiously took her time to spend $7 on six coloured stones for her children. Each stone was advertised as having particular powers which she went through with enormous care.

  ‘Any kryptonite?’ I asked Winnie the Witch behind the counter but she just smiled. I don’t know if she was a real witch but she was certainly off with the fairies. There were lots of books about the craft, one of which suggested that many people first became interested after seeing the film The Witches of Eastwick. I saw that film and all I thought was that I never wanted to get as jowly as Jack Nicholson. Apparently, it’s a good time to join a coven because it ‘was much harder to be a witch only a few decades ago’. I was tempted to buy A Book of Shadows to keep my notes in but we moved on.

  Cohasset for beauty,

  Hingham for pride.

  If not for its herring,

  Weymouth had died.

  Late-sixteenth-century saying, but I have no idea by whom

  Not a popular verse in Weymouth I would guess. Now, here is one of those serendipitous things. Cohasset, a gorgeous town on the rocky Atlantic coast, is not just stunning to visit and home to the next Gladys, but it is where they shot the film The Witches of Eastwick and I didn’t know that till we got there. As I’ve been taking you along the coast of this fine state, I realise that I have quite neglected to go through the ‘things’ of Massachusetts and, truth be told, I don’t know if I can be bothered; the lists are all starting to look the same. All I will tell you is that the state insect is the ladybug, the state beverage is cranberry juice and no state muffin will look you in the eye unless it is made of corn. I know it’s someone’s job to think of these things, but really.

  The history of Cohasset is like the history of the USA in miniature. It is a beautiful place of hills and ponds once carved out by some sweeping glacier. The name, corrupted from the Quonahasit tribe, means long, rocky place and that about covers it. It’s a stunning, long, rocky place. Here the Vikings came, the French and then the English. In 1633 King Charles I granted 20,000 acres of New World land to a small band of Puritans who settled the nearby town of Hingham. Then Cohasset was just used as cow pasture and that is what has happened to the world. Today I live in a converted barn in England and Cohasset is a town of rich people living where bovines used to bring their dinner up for another chew. We have all come to rest in the stable. Captain John Smith arrived with instructions to change the name of the town to London but the Puritans forgot. One white man carried either measles or scarlet fever and 2,700 of the 3,000 Native Americans living on the bay died in one year. One hundred and twenty of the 165 men in town fought in the Revolution and the splendid local son, Zealous B. Tower was a brigadier-general in the Civil War. It is quintessential New England.

  Rita and I were both excited to see our old drama teacher. In my seventeen years of formal education I only had three teachers to whom I still bend an imaginary knee and she was one of them. She was young and beautiful in 1972, with long, brown hair hanging down over a freckled face with an ever present smile. The sort of teacher you fell in love with in a minute. From the moment I met her she took me under her wing. Even when I had auditioned for the spring musical and had proved to be a double threat to the show — couldn’t sing, couldn’t dance — she had winked at Mr Aaron, the bandleader, and let me in.

  The year I left Mamaroneck High was her last year there as well. She had met a man called Jerry and they were to marry and move to Massachusetts. All the Gladyses and, indeed, all the Henrys went to the wedding. As the couple emerged from the church we all sang ‘Another Opening, Another Show’ from Kiss Me, Kate. Not surprisingly none of us was invited to the reception. Today she is still married to Jerry but I hadn’t seen her since.

  The drive to Cohasset was fabulous. It is one of the most stunning parts of America. Even though the light was fading as we arrived, we could see that we had entered a land of considerable wealth. We passed some incredible and vast colonial properties. Of all the people I had visited, my drama teacher was the one I felt most nervous about. Why would a teacher want to see you after all these years? Surely she had had many classes and many students and there was nothing to suggest that the year of the Gladyses was any more important to her than some other year. As I’ve explained, Rita had done all the arranging. She had had several conversations with the teacher but she hadn’t told her about my life. No matter how long I live I hate the endless ‘coming out’ of it all when you meet people. I had liked feeling comfortable, not having to explain myself to Anne and her partner and then Lisa and hers. I always sense people think it is some kind of confession and I hate watching their faces to see the reaction. I became progressively more irritable as we got closer. I wished Rita had been more of a gossip. Our teacher’s good opinion was very important to me.

  I tried to shut my mind down and turned on the radio. I couldn’t find any music. Instead there was a rather serious discussion about whether the US borders should be closed to keep aliens out. Being an alien myself this had an uncomfortable Orson Welles War of the Worlds ring to it. A journalist was trying to persuade a Republican senator that sealing off the country might not be a practical idea, that it might not be the best thing just to shut up shop and hide. The senator, who was a bear of little brain, finally backed down a bit and said, ‘Well, I suppose people with visas could come.’

  This seemed a strange notion of protection. As far as I know all the perpetrators of 9/11 bar one had had visas. I decided that British politicians go into Parliament because they’re no good at anything else and American ones do it … actually, I may have hit on a similarity here. We didn’t discuss it in the car. Politics had become a no-go area.

  Rita had been provided with many instructions so that we pulled into the sought-af
ter drive as if the car knew where to go. We parked beside a huge tree between the double garage and the wooden house. It was an old place, a beautiful, big old place. Well, it would need to be as three of us were spending the night there. I was so nervous I couldn’t remember how to turn off the lights in the car. Rita couldn’t remember how to turn off the lights. I became quite girly and felt sure Paul as a boy must know how to turn off the lights. He had no idea how to turn off the lights and …

  We were all feeling a little tired. Rita knocked on the back door but there was no reply. It was like being on a quiz show where they keep delaying the moment when they tell you if you’ve won or not. I quite wanted to leave now. It seemed silly to waste the perfectly good light spilling from the car and, anyway, we had tried to see her …

  Rita led our small band round the front and on to a grey porch. A dog wearing a bandana went mad and there was my old mentor.

  ‘It’s all right, Cassie, shhh now,’ she said to the little collie. After thirty years I’d have known her anywhere. Shorter hair, but otherwise the same smile and the same welcome. I felt thirteen again. Rita called her Regina. This seemed rather forward and took me some time to get used to. The house was superb: an eighteenth-century gem. A genuine piece of American history with polished floorboards and exquisite furniture that would have made Martha Stewart weep into her tomato cobbler. It was a house of many small sitting rooms, a vast kitchen and bedrooms which led away from corridors with sloping floors.

  ‘They say it’s haunted,’ said Regina as she led us upstairs. I did hope so. Jerry and Regina have three grown-up children who have flown the nest but the bedrooms they grew up in are still intact. Rita had the spare room, I had the daughter’s room in which I could admire many posters of ballet shoes while Paul was in the two sons’ quarters in the sprawling attic. Here he could admire pictures of girls not even wearing as much as ballet shoes.

  How odd to sleep in the white-canopied single bed of a young girl I had never met. How strange to think of Regina’s daughter lying there with her childhood dreams. Everything felt very surreal. Pieces of her childhood were all around me as I tried to piece back mine. It is quite the fashion to blame every grown-up character defect on your upbringing but this was a nice room. I suspected that Regina’s daughter had no need to wander the highways of adult life hugging her inner child.

  We had an enjoyable evening. We drank wine and it was all very adult but I still felt thirteen. I remembered the friends of my parents when I was growing up. Watching, it seemed to me, the men stride out in the world while the women led smaller, more confined lives. Marriages were different then. They had a different balance. Jerry was pleasant, Regina was lovely but their relationship was very different from anything I see with my friends now. We looked at their wedding photos. Two happy people about to drive off into wedded bliss in an old Jaguar. The car was Jerry’s pride and joy. He still had it in one of the double garages. It was sold to him by a man called Cyril who made him promise that no woman would ever drive it and no woman ever has. Jerry took Paul off for a spin and Regina laughed as if that might be funny.

  At supper she prepared the food and set the table while Jerry opened the wine. Jerry and I discussed an American organisation called the DAR or Daughters of the American Revolution. I was interested in the whole notion of snobbery in the States. It’s a much trickier subject to access than in England where aristocrats wear their badges of breeding on their tongue. The DAR is an obvious home for inherited snobbery. It is a patriotic society for women whose membership is dependent on proving lineal blood descent from a relative who directly aided America in gaining independence. Eligibility claims must be supported by a genealogical file of births, deaths and marriages. It is not good enough simply to claim that your distant aunt once slept with Paul Revere. While not a DAR den, Cohasset clearly has some class issues. Jerry, who is retired from the world of finance, wished he had put his name down for the golf club earlier in life. It took him sixteen years to get his boat in the water of the small harbour which you can just about see from the front garden. By the time he has a card to let him on the first golf tee he may be making up a four with players from the Gospels. It is not the egalitarian America portrayed in the movies. I was fascinated but the conversation veered away from any discussion on this. Jerry, like Rita’s husband Ron, liked to tell jokes. Maybe talking politics with women just wasn’t polite.

  We went through the past fairly rapidly. Oddly, it too had been an important year for Regina and she remembered it well. We talked of a boy who had had such perfect pitch that the orchestra used to tune to him. I wondered what had happened to him. Was this a useful skill to have been born with? Did he sit now as an adult next to some violinists, humming to keep them in line? We spoke of one of the Henrys, the handsome Ray, who is now Michael O’Keefe, an Oscar-nominated actor, and still talks about Regina’s influence.

  ‘Regina was an extra on one of his TV shows,’ said Jerry, smiling.

  ‘I called his producer and said I had been his drama teacher in high school. They said I could sit in one of the scenes with a lot of people. So Ray comes in and there’s all these people and the first thing he says, in front of everyone, is “Regina!”’ So he should, I thought.

  Roger, her cousin, who had choreographed for us, had died of Aids. It was a moment, perhaps, to talk about myself and my life but I couldn’t. In addition to bringing up her kids it seems our muse of drama has continued to inspire new generations. She worked at the local high school and included sex education in her lessons because no one else did.

  ‘Do you know there were sixteen-year-olds who didn’t know how to put on a condom?’

  I suspected that the world was packed with them but it had never occurred to me to do anything about it.

  ‘What did you do?’ asked Rita, despite the fact that we were eating.

  Regina laughed. ‘I bought some condoms and a bunch of bananas.’

  ‘Wasn’t everyone embarrassed?’ I asked, clear that this would be worse than catching something which needed penicillin to cure it.

  ‘Well, we laughed a lot but they learned.’

  Jerry sat at the head of the highly polished, dark wood table and talked about their kids, two boys and a girl. Regina explained softly that one of her boys wanted to be an artist. Jerry laughed. The boy had obviously been absurd. Jerry came from the world of stocks and shares.

  ‘I got him a job working a trade floor in the San Francisco stock exchange. He loves the excitement,’ he said, convinced that it was true. Jerry did not stop there; he got his daughter her job as well.

  ‘So, you sorted two of your kids’ careers out,’ I said, because I can’t shut up. He looked surprised but I don’t know at what. My audacity at pointing it out, perhaps. It seemed only one boy had gone his own path. He had become a ski instructor in Jackson, Wyoming. Good for him, I thought, but there was no escape.

  ‘It’s a hard life,’ said Jerry, ‘so we bought a house out there and in the fall we’re going to live there for six months with him.’

  Jerry was a devoted father, a watchful father, an ever present father, still paying out for and controlling the kids’ expenses. He and his wife bickered about one son’s cellphone bill.

  ‘He has to be able to call with the bridges and everything,’ worried his mother. A fresh announcement had been made that morning warning that the bridges of San Francisco were under terrorist threat.

  ‘He has to learn to budget,’ said his father and, bridges or no bridges, the discussion was over. I looked at my old teacher and was back at the tables of my past where wives sat to the side and were not in charge. Maybe it was the wine but I could see her eyes had faded. I thought the house probably was haunted but that the ghosts were recent.

  The more he looked inside the more Piglet wasn’t there.

  A. A. Milne

  I was staffing to have the strangest sensation of disappearing. I had established for myself that I was as Danish as Channy would grow up
to be Cambodian. It was a genetic starting point, not a blueprint for life. Now I was beginning to see that though I had grown up in and loved America, I no longer instinctively under-stood the place.

  The next morning at about six, I was reading when I heard Jerry in the kitchen. He had been out and returned with a cup of coffee in a cardboard cup. This struck me as bizarre, as coffee is so unfailingly terrible in shops and the nice thing about being at home is that you have proper cups. Breakfast was jolly and then we went for a walk to the ancient graveyard which lies between their house and the sea. Regina, ever the teacher, was keen to point out the glacial formations which had sculpted and carved gardens and byways in the town. Roads swooped and dipped and the graves rose and fell on small hillocks. Many of the dead had escaped this life in the 1800s. There was a Celtic cross commemorating some shipwreck which stated that ‘about forty-five’ men had been lost. This seemed rather vague and you could only wonder if they had come ashore in bits so that no one could be confident of a head count. And all the time I could not talk about myself. I was vague about the children and my life and everything I had said to Mandy and Lisa about truth was made a nonsense. I don’t think for a moment Regina would have been anything other than marvellous but I didn’t want to take the risk.

  We had lunch at the seaside in Hull. Here the properties were cheaper and the place had a down-at-heel Atlantic City feel. Jerry wanted to eat at Jakes in Hull. We drove there and then drove to several other places Regina preferred. There was something wrong with each one and we drove back to Jakes. I don’t know why we had pretended to try the places she wanted — it was clear from the outset that Jerry would decide. It was raining. Across the road I could just see through a glass pane to the bright colours of the Great Carousel of Hull. Galloping horses frozen for the season. People ordered fish but everyone had an instruction about how it had to be cooked. I had never heard fish ordered ‘well done ‘before.