The Witches of Eastwick

went with the drugs and now with the radiation directed into her semi-weekly as she lay strapped and swathed upon that giant turntable of chrome and cold steel, which lifted her this way and that until she felt seasick. The clicked-off seconds of its radioactive humming could not be cleansed from her ears and persisted even in sleep.

'There is a brand of evil,' Brenda was saying, 'we must fight. It must not be tolerated, it must not be explained, it must not be excused. Sociology, psy­chology, anthropology: in this one instance all these creations of the modern mind must be denied their mitigations.'

I will never see icicles dripping from the eaves again, Jenny thought, or a sugar maple catching fire. Or that moment in late winter when the snow is all dirty and eaten by thaw into rotten, undercut shapes. These realizations were like a child's finger rubbing a hole in a befogged windowpane above a radiator on a bitterly cold day; through the clear spot Jenny looked into a bottomless never.

Brenda, her hair shimmering down to her shoul­ders—had it been like that at the beginning of the service, or had it come unpinned in her ardor?—was rallying invisible forces. 'For these women—and let us not in our love of our sex and pride in our sex deny that they are women—have long exerted a malign influence in this community. They have been pro­miscuous. They have neglected at best and at worst abused their children, nurturing them in blasphemy. With their foul acts and unspeakable charms they have driven some men to deranged acts. They have driven some men—I Firmly believe this—have driven some men to their deaths. And now their demon has alighted—now their venom has descended—their wrath hath—' As from the bell of a hollyhock a bum­blebee sleepily emerged from between Brenda's plump painted lips and dipped on its questing course over the heads of the congregation.

Jenny uttered, to herself. Greta's hand gave another squeeze. On her far side Ray Neff snorted. Both the Neffs wore glasses: oval steel-rimmed grannies for Greta, squarish rimless on Ray. Each Neff seemed a single big lens, and I sit between them, Jenny thought, like a nose. An aghast silence focused upon Brenda, erect in her pulpit. Above her head hung not the tarnished brass cross that had been suspended there for years in irrelevant symbolism but a solid new brass circle, symbol of perfect unity and peace. The circle had been Brenda's idea. She took a shallow breath and tried to speak out through the something else gathering in her mouth.

'Their wrath has tainted the very air we breathe,' she proclaimed, and a pale blue moth, and then its little tan sister, emerged; the second fell to the lectern, which was miked, with an amplified thud, then found its wings and beat its way toward the sky locked high behind the tall windows.

'Their jealousy hath poithoned uth all—' Brenda bent her head, and her mouth gave birth to an espe­cially vivid, furry, foul-tasting monarch butterfly, its orange wings rimmed thickly in black, its flickering light casual and indolent beneath the white-painted rafters.

Jenny felt a tense swelling within her poor wasting body, as if it were a chrysalis.

'Help me,' Brenda brokenly uttered down toward the lectern, where the crisp pages of her sermon had been speckled with saliva and insect slime. She seemed to be gagging. Her long platinum-blond hair swung and the brass O shone in the shafts of sunlight. The congregation broke its stunned silence; voices were raised. Franny Lovecraft, in the loud tones of the deaf, suggested that the police be called. Raymond Neff took it upon himself to leap up and shake his fist in the sun-riddled air; his jowls shook. Jenny giggled; the hilarity pressing within her could no longer be stifled. It was, somehow, the animation of it all that was so funny, the irrepressible cartoon cat that rises from being flattened to resume the chase. She burst into laughter—high-voiced, pure, a butterfly of sorts—and yanked her hand from Greta's sympa­thetic, squeezing grasp. She wondered who was doing it: Sukie, everybody knew, would be in bed with that sly Arthur Hallybread while his wife was at church; sly old elegant Arthur had been fucking his physics students for thirty years in Kingston. Jane Smart had gone all the way up to Warwick to play the Hammond organ for a cell of Moonies starting up in an aban­doned Quaker meetinghouse; the ambience (Jane had told Mavis Jessup, who had told Rose Hallybread, who had told Jenny) was depressing, all these brainwashed upper-middle-class kids with Marine haircuts, but the money was good. Alexandra would be making her bubbies or weeding her mums. Perhaps none of the three was willing this, it was something they had loosed on the air, like those nuclear scientists cooking up the atomic bomb to beat Hitler and Tojo and now so remorseful, like Eisenhower refusing to sign the truce with Ho Chi Minh that would have ended all the trou­ble, like the late-summer wildflowers, goldenrod and Queen Anne's lace, now loosed from dormant seeds upon the shaggy fallow fields where once black slaves had opened the gates for galloping squires in swal­lowtail coats and top hats of beaver and felt. At any rate it was all so funny. Herbie Prinz, his jowly greedy thin-skinned face liverish in agitation, pushed past Alma Sifton and beat his way down the aisle and nearly knocked over Mrs. Hallybread, who like the other women was instinctively covering her mouth as, stiff-backed, she rose to flee.

'Pray!' Brenda shouted, seeing she had lost control of the occasion. Something was pouring over her lower lip, making her chin shine. 'Pray!' she shouted in a hollow man's voice, as if she were a ventriloquist's dummy.

Jenny, hysterical with laughter, had to be led out­side, where the apparition of her staggering between the bespectacled Neffs nonplussed the God-fearing burghers washing their automobiles at this hour along Cocumscussoc Way.

Jane Smart retired when her children did, often going straight to bed after tucking the two littlest in and falling asleep while the older ones watched an illicit half-hour of Mannix or some other car-chase series set in southern California. Around two or two-thirty she would awaken as abruptly as if the tele­phone had rung once and then fallen silent, or as if an intruder had tested the front door or carefully broken a windowpane and was holding his breath. Jane would listen, then smile in the dark, remember­ing that this was her hour of rendezvous. Arising in a translucent nylon nightie, she would settle her little quilted satin bed jacket around her shoulders and put milk on the stove to heat for cocoa. Randolph, her avid young Doberman, would come rattling his claws into the kitchen and she would give him a Chew-Z, a rock-hard bone-shaped biscuit to gnaw on; he would take the bribe into his corner and make evil music upon it with his long teeth and serrated purplish lips. The milk would boil, she would take the cocoa up the six steps to the living-room level and release her cello from its case— its red wood lustrous and alive like a superior kind of flesh. 'Good baby,' Jane might say aloud, since the silence in the flat tracts of the devel­opment all around—no traffic, no children crying; Cove Homes rose and retired in virtual synchrony— was so absolute as to be frightening. She would scan her splintered floor for a hole to brace her pin in and, dragging music stand and three-way floorlamp and straight-backed chair into place, would play. Tonight she would tackle the Second of Bach's suites for unac­companied cello. It was one of her favorites; certainly she preferred it to the rather stolid First and the dreadfully difficult Sixth, black with sixty-fourth notes and impossibly high, written as it had been for an instrument with five strings. But always, in even Bach's most clockworklike ringing of changes, there was something to discover, something to hear, a moment when a voice cried out amid the turning of the wheels. Bach had been happy at Kothen, but for his wife

Maria's sudden death and the so simpatico and musical Prince Leopold's marriage to his young cousin, Hen­rietta of Anhalf, Bach called the little bride an 'amusa,' that is, a person opposed to the muses. Henrietta yawned during courdy concerts, and her demands deflected princely attention away from the Kapell­meister, a deflection that helped prompt his seeking the cantorship in Leipzig. He took the new post even though the unsympathetic princess herself surpris­ingly died before Bach had left Kothen. In the Second Suite, there was a theme—a melodic succession of rising diirds and a descent