The Witches of Eastwick

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, vanished; 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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