The Witches of Eastwick

A signed first edition of this book has been privately printed by The Franklin Library.

Manufactured in the United Slates of America First Ballintine Books Edition: July 1985

Chapters

The Coven 1

Malefica 34

Guilt 236

_I

_{The Coven}

'He was a meikle blak roch man, werie cold.'

—Isobel Gowdxe, in 1662

'Now efter that the deuell had endit his admonitions, he cam down out of the pulpit, and caused all the company to com and kiss his ers, quhilk they said was cauld lyk yce; his body was hard lyk yrn, as they thocht that handled him.'

—Agnes Sampson, in 1590

And oh yes,' Jane Smart said in her hasty yet pur­poseful way; each s seemed the black tip of a just-extinguished match held in playful hurt, as children do, against the skin. 'Sukie said a man has bought the Lenox mansion.'

'A man?' Alexandra Spofford asked, feeling off-center, her peaceful aura that morning splayed by the assertive word.

'From New York,' Jane hurried on, the last syllable almost barked, its r dropped in Massachusetts style. 'No wife and family, evidently.'

'Oh. One of those.' Hearing Jane's northern voice bring her this rumor of a homosexual come up from Manhattan to invade them, Alexandra felt intersected where she was, in this mysterious crabbed state of

Rhode Island. She had been born in the West, where white and violet mountains lift in pursuit of the del­icate tall clouds, and tumbleweed rolls in pursuit of the horizon.

'Sukie wasn't so sure,' Jane said swiftly, her s's chastening. 'He appeared quite burly. She was struck by how hairy the backs of his hands were. He told the people at Perley Realty he needed all that space because he was an inventor with a lab. And he owns a number of pianos.'

Alexandra giggled; the noise, little changed since her Colorado girlhood, seemed produced not out of her throat but by a birdlike familiar perched on her shoulder. In fact the telephone was aching at her ear. And her forearm tingled, going numb. 'How many pianos can a man have?'

This seemed to offend Jane. Her voice bristled like a black cat's fur, iridescent. She said defensively, 'Well Sukie's only going by what Marge Perley told her at last night's meeting of the Horse Trough Committee.' This committee supervised the planting and, after vandalism, the replanting of a big blue marble trough for watering horses that historically stood at the center of Eastwick, where the two main streets met; the town was shaped like an L, fitted around its ragged bit of Narragansett Bay. Dock Street held the downtown businesses, and Oak Street at right angles to it was where the lovely big old homes were. Marge Perley, whose horrid canary-yellow For Sale signs leaped up and down on trees and fences as on the tides of eco­nomics and fashion (Eastwick had for decades been semi-depressed and semi-fashionable) people moved in and out of the town, was a heavily made-up, go- getting woman who, if one at all, was a witch on a different wavelength from Jane, Alexandra, and Sukie. There was a husband, a tiny fussy Homer Perley always trimming their forsythia hedge back to stubble, and this made a difference. 'The papers were passed in Providence,' Jane explained, pressing the nce hard into Alexandra's ear.

'And with hairy backs to his hands,' Alexandra mused. Near her face floated the faintly scratched and flecked and often repainted blankness of a wooden kitchen-cabinet door; she was conscious of the atomic fury spinning and skidding beneath such a surface, like an eddy of weary eyesight. As if in a crystal ball she saw that she would meet and fall in love with this man and that little good would come of it. 'Didn't he have a name?' she asked.

'That's the stupidest thing,' Jane Smart said. 'Marge told Sukie and Sukie told me but something's scared it right out of my head. One of those names with a 'van' or a 'von' or a 'de' in it.'

'How very swell,' Alexandra answered, already dilating, diffusing herself to be invaded. A tall dark European, ousted from his ancient heraldic inheri­tance, travelling under a curse... 'When is he sup­posed to move in?'

'She said he said soon. He could be in there now!' Jane sounded alarmed. Alexandra pictured the other woman's rather too full (for the rest of her pinched face) eyebrows lifting to make half-circles above her dark resentful eyes, whose brown was always a shade paler than one's memory of it. If Alexandra was the large, drifting style of witch, always spreading herself thin to invite impressions and merge with the land­scape, and in her heart rather lazy and entropically cool, Jane was hot, short, concentrated like a pencil point, and Sukie Rougemont, busy downtown all day long gathering news and smiling hello, had an oscil­lating essence. So Alexandra reflected, hanging up. Things fall into threes. And magic occurs all around us as nature seeks and finds the inevitable forms, things crystalline and organic falling together at angles of sixty degrees, the equilateral triangle being the mother of structure.

She returned to putting up Mason jars of spaghetti sauce, sauce for more spaghetti than she and her chil­dren could consume even if bewitched for a hundred years in an Italian fairy tale, jar upon jar lifted steam­ing from the white-speckled blue boiler on the trem­bling, singing round wire rack. It was, she dimly perceived, some kind of ridiculous tribute to her pres­ent lover, a plumber of Italian ancestry. Her recipe called for no onions, two cloves of garlic minced and sauteed for three minutes (no more, no less; that was the magic) in heated oil, plenty of sugar to counteract acidity, a single grated carrot, more pepper than salt; but the teaspoon of crumbled basil is what catered to virility, and the dash of belladonna provided the release without which virility is merely a murderous conges­tion. All this must be added to her own tomatoes, picked and stored on every window sill these weeks past and now sliced and fed to the blender: ever since, two summers ago, Joe Marino had begun to come into her bed, a preposterous fecundity had overtaken the staked plants, out in the side garden where the south­western sun slanted in through the line of willows each long afternoon. The crooked little tomato branches, pulpy and pale as if made of cheap green paper, broke under the weight of so much fruit; there was some­thing frantic in such fertility, a crying-out like that of children frantic to please. Of plants tomatoes seemed the most human, eager and fragile and prone to rot. Picking the watery orange-red orbs, Alexandra felt she was cupping a giant lover's testicles in her hand. She recognized as she labored in her kitchen the something sadly menstrual in all this, the bloodlike sauce to be ladled upon the white spaghetti. The fat white strings would become her own white fat. This female struggle of hers against her own weight: at the age of thirty-eight she found it increasingly unnatural. In order to attract love must she deny her own body, like a neurotic saint of old? Nature is the index and context of all health and if we have an appetite it is there to be satisfied, satisfying thereby the cosmic order. Yet she sometimes despised herself