The Widows of Eastwick

by John Updike

  Adored me? Alexandra asked herself. Could it be true, when her own adoration tended toward Sukie, and both she and Sukie were slightly repelled by Jane’s livid aura of rage and doom? “We loved her,” Alexandra said, speaking softly, as if the slightest gust of air would shatter the apparition before her. Even the black folds of Mrs. Tinker’s silk mourning outfit looked perilously brittle.

  “I’m so glad, then,” she brought out in her husk of a voice, “she was with the two of you when her end came.”

  Her end—no euphemism here, no talk of “passing,” and yet no terror, no noisy modern nihilism. The phrase made death seem comfortable and limpid and natural, the fruit of year upon year, decade upon decade, its fall finally met with a vanished era’s stoic upper-class manners. Detecting Alexandra’s interest in the topic, Mrs. Tinker told her, “We must all come to the end.” Yet she said this with the lightness of one to whom it did not apply, and with a smile of startling elasticity in the mummified brown face—a stretch that tugged her scored cheeks with a darting, almost girlish tension. Her lips were no ruddier than the skin around them, but fleshier. She had been a beauty, Alexandra suddenly saw.

  As suddenly, she confessed to the ancient woman, “I haven’t quite assimilated that yet. I’m not sure Jane had, either. Her last look at me—do you want to know?”

  “Yes. Of course. One must always know whatever there is to know.”

  “—seemed indignant.”

  “Jane was vexed,” Mrs. Tinker pronounced. “And in a hurry. Like a metronome. Have you ever tried to play a musical instrument to a metronome?”

  “No,” Alexandra said, nervously, for she felt more guests behind her, coming in at the great front door. “I’m a musical dunce. I always envied Jane her talent.”

  “She was a metronome set too fast for my son’s and my taste,” the old woman resumed, blinking away the other’s interjection. “We had set a largo pace in this household, and I fear it chafed my daughter-in-law’s patience. And here is the lovely Suzanne,” she continued, turning just the small amount needed to change the angle of her attention, like a calibrated figure on a clock. Sukie had joined them, bringing her warmth and curiosity and determination to be noticed. “Hello again, my dear. What a sadness, since last we welcomed you to this house.”

  She is one of us, Alexandra saw. A heartless sharp-eyed witch. She is small and incisive and witty and wicked, like Jane. Men marry their mothers. Nat had married his mother, and of course the two women had hated being duplicated in the same house. The entire spiritual architecture of their household—the two women as mutually repellent as the like poles of two magnets, and suspended between them the little son-husband, taking shelter in his antiques, his clubs, his feckless good works—was bared to Alexandra in an instant of closing her eyes; she felt the tension still in the air, in the weight borne by the slanting, polish-soaked dark woodwork.

  Sukie, too, was experiencing second sight: she blurted to the widow Tinker, “I can’t believe Jane is really gone. I expect her to pop up at any second.”

  “And spoil my party,” the old lady rasped, giving another of her unexpectedly wide-lipped smiles; the girl she had once been shone through, from deep in the last century.

  The party was assembling, milling about awkwardly in the shadowy high hall. Jane’s mother-in-law turned and introduced Alexandra and Sukie to a bulky middle-aged man with a sloping back to his head, which was heavily thrust forward, like an American buffalo’s, and a gaunt woman wearing a desperate amount of makeup. “I’m sure you remember Jane’s wonderful children,” Mrs. Tinker said and, with a senile lack of ceremony, turned away.

  Thus confronted, Alexandra apologized to the two. “I didn’t recognize you. It’s been so long. You’re all grown up.”

  “And then some,” the fat-necked man said without smiling. “We remember you, though.”

  Of course. A fat boy and a skinny girl. They had been obtrusively present in Jane’s ranch house, running in and out of the kitchen begging for attention and for dinner, the night the three women had concocted Jenny’s fatal spell. Exploring their liberated powers, they had had little patience with their children. They had felt that stupid women since Eve had been docile, loving mothers—perhaps not Eve, considering how Abel and Cain turned out. At any rate, motherhood had been thoroughly tried, in sorrow and out of it, and it hadn’t been enough.

  There was a tense, resentful silence, which Sukie tried to fill, dredging up these children’s names with her reporter’s trained memory. “Roscoe and Mary Grace, right? And there were two others, younger or older, I forget which.”

  “Younger,” said the sullenly staring hulk, in his double-breasted black suit. It was he, Sukie realized, who was the Internet bridge player, his huge head thrust forward toward the four-sided computer screen, the dummy imaged for all to see. “We were four. The four little Smarts.” Unexpectedly, his lips flicked back in a mirthless smile, revealing small, stained teeth.

  “Everybody had four children back then,” Sukie gamely offered.

  Alexandra asked, “Your father. Sam Smart. Is he still alive?”

  “No” was the monosyllabic answer.

  The gaunt woman, her eyelids loaded with turquoise tint, decided to join in. “Dad died,” she explained, exposing her own teeth; they were long and unnaturally straight.

  “I’m so sorry,” Alexandra said.

  “He and Mom are together again now,” the man said.

  “Really? How will Mr. Tinker like that arrangement?”

  Roscoe’s impressive brow lowered in her direction. “It’s all explained in the Bible.” His face was doleful and gray.

  “Is it really? I must look up the passage.” Alexandra revised her opinion; it wasn’t that Jane had been neglectful, it was that her children, fat or skinny, were odious.

  Sukie politely intervened. “The other two. Are they here, too?”

  “No,” came the reluctant answer. “Jed’s in Hawaii. Nora married a Frenchman and they can’t be reached in August.

  They’re skin-diving and doing dope in Mozambique.”

  “How extraordinary the world is!” Sukie desperately exclaimed. “Everything coming closer. We’re widows now, and we love travelling. Your mother travelled with us.”

  “Roscoe hates travelling,” his sister said. “He gets claustrophobia in the airplane and then agoraphobia when it lands.”

  “You think about it too much,” Sukie advised him, as pert as a maiden facing up to the Minotaur. “Take two drinks at the airport bar and you’ll wake up wherever you’re going.”

  The conversation was mercifully cut short by the sharp thump, three times, of the ancient hostess’s cane on the foyer floor. With one paper-brown hand bunched on the cane’s handle and the other clinging to the bent arm of a broad-backed African-American in a driver’s uniform, Mrs. Tinker led the assembled mourners out into the sticky white sunshine. A line of cars glared and sparkled blindingly in the driveway, stretching from the porte cochere back to the curb and out along the street. The mourning mother-in-law was settled into the lead Cadillac, behind black windows; next came the two dreary children and their spouses, who for this family observance had demurely donned cloaks of invisibility. Sukie and Alexandra followed far down the line, in Lennie Mitchell’s navy-blue BMW. Nat Tinker’s pet Jaguar had been swiftly reclaimed, along with Jane’s pathetic leavings of clothes and toiletries, as part of her estate.

  In the privacy of the car, Sukie urgently announced, “I saw him.”

  “Saw who?”

  “Him. The man Jane saw on Vane Street, outside Doc Pat’s.”

  “Really?”

  “Really. He looks just like she said, like an angel gone a little heavy and seedy. He was at the back of the crowd in the foyer, coming out of the other room as we shuffled out. I saw him just for a second, but he stood out. He wasn’t wearing the proper sober kind of clothes.”

  The church was not far away in the twisting, tree-shaded streets—a modestly posh str
ucture, half-timbered in requisite Episcopal style, of iron-tinged fieldstone. This was a memorial, not a burial, service. Jane’s body, that flat-chested round-assed little body that had tempted Sam Smart and Raymond Neff and Arthur Hallybread and Nat Tinker into coitus, was a canister of ashes now, no more than would fill a saucepan: all those bones and tendons and bodily fluids, that agile tongue and insistent sibilant voice and the glittering wet light of her tortoiseshell-brown eyes reduced to gray powder and calcite chips and already slipped into a small square hole in Mount Auburn Cemetery two miles away across the Charles. This had been her world, and her two companions in bygone mischief listened as a Jane they had scarcely known was exposed to public view.

  The pair of adult children present read aloud excerpts from letters Jane had written to Samuel Smart when he was in the Army waiting to be shipped to Korea—a different Jane, more kittenish and collegiate than the one Sukie and Alexandra had met in Eastwick, by which time Sam Smart had become a comic memory, a pinch of the dead past sprinkled into the conversation for piquancy. She missed him, the letters declared, she prayed for his safe return, she lived in hopes of bearing his children, knowing they would be beautiful and precious.

  Then, striking a balance between the husbands, a tall, square-shouldered, ostentatiously lean gentleman in a blazer and close haircut stiffly climbed up into the pulpit. He spoke at first with a diffident hesitancy that made the congregation nervously shift in their pews. Then, warming as he adjusted to the height and sacrosanct strangeness of the pulpit, he assumed the sonorous ease of a well-practiced toastmaster; he leaned out toward his audience and confidentially shared his impression of how his old friend Nat Tinker, whom he had known since they had been shy, puny first-graders together at Browne & Nichols School, and with whom in the years since he had golfed and sailed and shot quail in South Carolina and elk in Alaska and sat on many worthy boards—how dear old Nat had bloomed, had “come out of himself” once married to the late, “far-from-plain” Jane. He had never, he asserted, while his lean, white-capped head tilted this way and that like a hungry gull’s, seen such a transformation as had overtaken his beloved friend upon his marriage, on the far side of forty—when he should have been, by all actuarial charts, beyond redemption—his marriage to this “ineffable soulmate,” dear departed Jane.

  “Not even on the occasion,” he amplified, “of his getting a hole-in-one at the twelfth at the Country Club—a short but testing, as I need not explain to many of this congregation, par-three on a platform green from an elevated tee—did Nat radiate the satisfaction and, can I say, the primal joy which his bride mysteriously inspired in him.” What an old chauvinist pig this fancy talker is, Alexandra was thinking. There was nothing mysterious: Jane knew how to be dirty, and men need dirty, especially class-bound cases of delayed development and excess propriety like poor little Nat Tinker, pussy-whipped by a mother who even now didn’t deign to die. The eulogist archly suggested as much: “Jane rescued him, it seems not too much to say, from his cherished antiques; she brought into his life of bachelor connoisseurship and conscientious altruism a beautiful object—a ‘piece,’ as they say in the trade—he could touch without fear of its breaking.” Shock muffled the responsive tittering from the pews; old-fashioned decorum regained some of its lost force in an Episcopal church—the Gothic arches and crock-ets in sombre dark woodwork, the Gospel illustrations in leaded stained glass, the brass cross suspended overhead like a giant draftsman’s tool, a pattern of rectitude. The Yankee eulogist winced, swallowing his disappointment at his jest’s miscarrying. He hurried on: “Jane brought to the marriage an ease with Boston ways, an impudent wit, a dazzling smile, and a wicked sense of humor—her puns!—that swept into the well-stocked chambers of my old friend’s staid life like a gust of April air when in the days of our youth the maids would energetically throw open the windows for spring cleaning.” He reared back in the pulpit, tucking back his shoulders, to gauge the reaction to this sally. It fascinated Alexandra to see how the courtly oldster, with his long beak and crest of fresh-cut white hair, preened on the fact of his own continuing survival as he gaily danced on the edge of gossip and scandal. In a gentler tone, confidingly leaning into a patent untruth, he told the congregation, “The harmony and affection instantly kindled between Jane and her mother-in-law was beautiful to behold and to feel in their shared home, as within a castle doubly secured by the rule of two magnificent queens.” He bowed his head to the front pew. “We all unite in sympathy, Iona, with you in your recent double loss—a beloved only son and a daughter-in-law who came to be loved as a daughter—knowing that in your century of gracing this Earth you have acquired strength and wisdom enough to sustain not only your own soul in this needful hour but that of your kin as well. Bless you, my dear treasured friend.”

  Iona Tinker, whose antique first name Alexandra had not heard before, sat unflinching in the front pew, rigidly enduring this stately tirade, in her weeds of faded, brittle silk, beside Jane’s two neglected children and their self-effacing spouses and a few youthful samples of the third generation and even some restless infants from the fourth. The tribe continues, though its individual members fall.

  And as to Jane, their wicked witchy Jane, the more she was extolled, the more absent she seemed—a little square hole in the church’s atmosphere, suspended above their heads like the rectilinear cross. The ideally unnoticed suspension wires stretching from its arms to the dark-stained ceiling beams caught accidental bits of light like the brief streaks of shooting stars. The suave eulogist reluctantly wound up, searching in vain for the perfect word to close Jane’s case. He had not liked her, it was clear to Alexandra. Nobody here had. She was of their sort and yet not, and that was worse than being a raw outsider, anxious to conform, easy to excuse. Only other witches could have liked Jane, in their collusion of rebellion against the oppressions of respectability. And the eulogist had failed to mention the one passion that had lifted her into selflessness—her music, her cello, the pain in her left, fingering hand.

  With relief the congregation fell back into the Book of Common Prayer. The voices rose in petition, a monotonously growling beast snapping up each morsel of the martyred Cranmer’s phrasing. The Prayers of the People were led by Roscoe’s pale, frail wife, hitherto invisible. Her reedy voice bored in with the insistence of a weevil’s jaws: “Lord, who consoled Martha and Mary in their distress; draw nearer to us who mourn for Jane, and dry the tears of those who weep.”

  “Hear us, Lord.”

  “You wept at the grave of Lazarus your friend; comfort us in our sorrow.”

  “Hear us, Lord.”

  “You raised the dead to life; give to our sister Jane eternal life.”

  “Hear us, Lord.”

  “You promised Paradise to the thief who repented; bring our sister Jane to the joys of Heaven.”

  “Hear us, Lord.”

  Alexandra’s eyes burned and watered as her tongue and throat joined in the huge, futile chorus. Jane was gone; she, Alexandra, would be next. Already, from the remote provinces of her body, her numb feet and the disused interior of her womb, bulletins foretelling her death kept arriving; fits of dizziness and nausea signalled that her organic fabric was rubbing thin; the wall between inner and outer had become permeable. Tears broke down her face.

  At her side, Sukie asked in a whisper, “What does going ‘from strength to strength’ mean? ‘In the life of perfect service’?”

  Sukie had never had a churchgoing husband; both Monty Rougemont and Lennie Mitchell had been modern men, dapper scoffers at otherworldly consolations. Whereas Alexandra’s Oswald Spofford had been dutifully devout, serving on church councils and bribing the children to go to Sunday school, and Jim Farlander had some supernatural inklings left over from his days as a peyote-smoking hippie. “It’s about the levels of Heaven,” she answered, as the first line of the concluding hymn, “Morning Is Breaking,” surged on all sides in the uplifted voices of elder Brookline. “Life goes on,” she quickly
continued to explain. “Change goes on. Heaven is not static. It’s a place where things continue to happen, like Earth.”

  At the service’s conclusion, as they filed out, Sukie asked, like an annoying child, “What does it mean, ‘The peace that passeth human understanding’?”

  “Obviously, dear, it means it’s beyond understanding. Use your head, for Heaven’s sake.” Was this to be their new relationship, mother and querulous child? Embarrassment over her tears for Jane, which Sukie must have noticed, had shortened Alexandra’s temper.

  “There’s a reception afterwards, in the parish house,” the younger, rebuked woman said. “Do you want to go to it?”

  “No. Do you?”

  “Yes,” Sukie said.

  “Why? Haven’t you had enough of this scene?”

  “No.” She tried to explain: “Churches interest me. They’re so fantastic. And suppose the silver man comes?”

  “Silver man?”

  “That Jane saw, outside Doc Pat’s.”

  “Sweetie, please don’t go crazy on me.” Yet Alexandra allowed Sukie to follow the drift of the crowd, not down the aisle to the narthex but through a double swinging door to one side of the chancel, down a linoleum-floored hall past the choir-robing room and some ministerial offices, on into the parish hall, already a sociable hubbub. There were more people than had been privileged to gather at the Tinker mansion. Mrs. Tinker, closely tended by the dapper paid minion whose snotty telephone voice offended Alexandra years ago, formed a reception line with Roscoe Smart and his skeletal sister Mary Grace. Again, Alexandra thrilled to the touch of the old lady’s warm brown hand, the four fingers laid parallel into her palm like pretzel sticks. Beyond, a long table covered with a white cloth held plates of cookies and watercress and pimiento-spread sandwiches from which the bread crust had been trimmed, and a crystal bowl filled with a punch the chemical color of lemon Jell-O. The parish hall extended, in subdued form, the ecclesiastical mode of the church itself: dark-stained beams crisscrossed overhead, creating triangular cobweb sites.