The Witches of Eastwick

confrontation between the factions of witches occurred. Greta had begun to yawn unstoppably, and Dawn's lusterless eyes furiously to itch, and the buckles of Franny Lovecraft's shoes had come undone; but all of these developments might be laid to natural causes, as might Sukie's discovering, the next time she looked in the mirror, eight or ten more gray hairs.

'Well, she died,' Sukie told Alexandra over the phone. 'At about four this morning. Only Chris was with her, and he had dozed off. It was the night nurse coming in realized she had no pulse.'

'Where was Darryl?'

'He'd gone home for some sleep. Poor guy, he really had tried to be a dutiful husband, night after night. It had been coming for weeks, and the doctors were surprised she had hung on so long. She was tougher than anybody thought.'

'She was,' Alexandra said, in simple salute. Her own heart with its burden of guilt had moved on, into an autumn mood, a calm of abdication. It was past Labor Day, and all along the edges of her yard spindly wild asters competed with goldenrod and the dark-leaved, burr-heavy thistles. The purple grapes in her arbor had ripened and what the grackles didn't get fell to form a pulp on the bricks; they were really too sour to eat, and this year Alexandra didn't feel up to making jelly: the steam, the straining, the little jars too hot to touch. As she groped for the next thing to say to Sukie, Alexandra was visited by a sensation more and more common to her: she felt outside her body, seeing it from not far away, in its pathetic spec­ificity, its mortal length and breadth. Another March, and she would be forty. Her mysterious aches and itches continued in the night, though Doc Paterson had found nothing to diagnose. He was a plump bald man with hands that seemed inflated, they were so broad and soft, so pink and clean. 'I feel rotten,' she announced.

'Oh don't bother,' Sukie sighed, herself sounding tired. 'People die all the time.'

'I just want to be held,' Alexandra surprisingly said.

'Honey, who doesn't?' 'That's all she wanted too.' 'And that's what she got.' 'You mean by Darryl.' 'Yes. The worst thing is—' 'There's worse?'

'I really shouldn't be telling even you, I got it from Jane in absolute secrecy; you know she's been seeing Bob Osgood, who got it from Doc Pat—'

'She was pregnant,' Alexandra told her.

'How did you know?'

'What else could the worst thing be? So sad,' she said.

'Oh I don't know. I'd hate to have been that kid. I don't see Darryl as cut out for fatherhood somehow.'

'What's he going to do?' The fetus hung disgust­ingly in Alexandra's mind's eye—a blunt-headed fish, curled over like an ornamental door knocker.

'Oh, I guess go on much as before. He has his new crowd now. I told you about church.'

'I read your squib in 'Eyes and Ears.' You made it sound like a biology lecture.'

'It was. It was a wonderful spoof. The kind of thing he loves to do. Remember 'The A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square Boogie'? I couldn't put anything in about Rose and Dawn and Greta, but honestly, when they put their heads together the cone of power that goes up is absolutely electric, it's like the aurora borealis.'

'I wonder what they look like skyclad,' Alexandra said. When she had this immediate detached vision of her own body it was always clothed, though not always clothed in what she was wearing at the time.

'Awful,' Sukie supplied. 'Greta like one of those lumpy rumpled engravings by the German, you know the one —'

'Diirer.'

'Right. And Rose skinny as a broom, and Dawn just a little smoochy waif with a big smooth baby tummy sticking out and no breasts. Brenda—Brenda I could go for,' Sukie confessed. 'I wonder now if Ed was just my way of communicating with Brenda.'

'I went back to the spot,' Alexandra confessed in turn, 'and picked up all the rusty pins, and stuck them in myself at various points. It still didn't do any good. Doc Pat says he can't find even a benign tumor.'

'Oh sweetie pie,' Sukie exclaimed, and Alexandra realized she had frightened her, the other woman wanted to hang up. 'You're really getting weird, aren't you?'

Some days later Jane Smart said over the phone, her voice piercing with its indignation, 'You can't mean you haven't already heard!'

More and more, Alexandra had the sensation that Jane and Sukie talked and then one or the other of them called her out of duty, the next day or later. Maybe they flipped a coin over who got the chore.

'Not even from Joe Marino?' Jane was going on. 'He's one of the principal creditors.'

'Joe and I don't see each other any more. Really.'

'What a shame,' Jane said. 'He was so dear. If you like Italian pixies.'

'He loved me,' Alexandra said, helplessly, know­ing how stupid the other woman felt her to be. 'But I couldn't let him leave Gina for me.'

'Well,' Jane said, 'that's a rather face-saving way of putting it.'

'Maybe so, Jane Pain. Anyway. Tell me your news.'

'Not just my news, the whole town's news. He's left. He's skipped, sugar pie. Il est disparu.' Her s's hurt, but they seemed to be stinging that other body, which Alexandra could get back into only when she slept.

From the wrathfully personal way Jane was taking it Alexandra could only think, 'Bob Osgood?'

'Darryl, darling. Please, wake up. Our dear Darryl. Our leader. Our redeemer from