The Witches of Eastwick Read online

  The Witches of Eastwick

  John Updike

  "A wry, raunchy, cleverly contemporary fable ...an entertaining romp...for those of us who enjoy laughing out loud while reading and losing ourselves in a familiar, yet subtly enchanted world, Updike's latest is a trick-or-treat fantasy that will not disappoint your sense of mischief—or of literature."

  Los Angeles Herald Examiner

  "Vintage Updike, which is to say among the best fiction we have."

  Newsday

  ''Charming... As for the witches themselves, there's a strong suggestion that they are products of Eastwick's—read America's—own fantasy life. If so, it's as well to know about them. That's the serious reason for reading this book. The other reasons have to do with the skill and inventiveness of the writing, the accuracy of the detail, the sheer energy of the witches and, above all, the practicality of the charms."

  Margaret Atwood The New York Times Book Review

  "The Witches of Eastwick manifests most of Updike's virtues; it is witty, ironic, engrossing, and punctuated by transports of spectacular prose. The witchcraft scenes are oddly convincing, thanks to their grounding in everyday detail."

  Time (more)

  "No writer working today can invoke process or memory—the precision of the one, the bitter pleasure of the other—with more satisfaction to

  the reader than John UpdikeUpdike is ample,

  risky, intelligent, a lover of our language and a celebrant of flesh, goods and needfulness."

  Frederick Busch Chicago Tribune

  "As broadly hilarious as it is gently profound. With his contemporary coven grounding the novel in mischief and midlife despair, Updike takes off on an ingenious survey of '60s manners and suburban morals. And if his view is rarely optimistic, it is always loving and unfailingly entertaining."

  New York Daily News

  "Perceptive, witty, and more lighthearted than Updike's recent fiction, his new novel immediately engages the reader with its audaciously conceived protagonists: three witches, all living in modern-day Rhode Island...the drama is deliciously slow

  in developingOnly Updike could come up with

  a funny, optimistic and satisfying ending to this richly imagined tale."

  Publishers Weekly

  "The Witches of Eastwick is John Updike with his shoes off.... vastly enjoyable...Updike captures the tone of women of a certain age and frame of mind—their crushing directness, their cynical optimism—with the lack of sentimentality that betokens a deep and honest love."

  New York Magazine

  "As he approaches his middle period as a writer, John Updike keeps giving evidence that it is possible to simply get better and better.... Updike is the most genial of writers....His intelligence delights in ambiguities and his wit angles always toward irony and paradox and the joys of parody.... this is his best in years."

  Ron Hansen San Francisco Chronicle Review

  "At the heart of the fantasy, with its Latin-American brand of baroque whimsy (the witches' victims spit feathers and bugs), is native New England sorcery and the seven deadly sins. It is an excess of one virtue—sympathy—that gets Eastwick's witches off the ground, if also into trouble. Mr. Updike's sympathy for them may be the closest some of us ever come to flying."

  The New Yorker

  FAWCETT CREST BOOKS By John Updike:

  BECH IS BACK

  THE CENTAUR

  THE COUP

  COUPLES

  MARRY ME

  A MONTH OF SUNDAYS OF THE FARM PIGEON FEATHERS THE POORHOUSE FAIR PROBLEMS RABBIT IS RICH RABBIT REDUX RABBIT, RUN TOO FAR TO GO

  THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK

  John Updike

  FAWCETT CREST · NEW YORK

  A Fawcett Crest Book Published by Ballantine Books Copyright © 1984 by John Updike

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Con­ventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Tomato.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 83-49048

  ISBN 0-449-20647-5

  AH places and persons represented in this novel are fictional, and any resemblance to actual places or persons living or dead is purely coinci­dental.

  This edition pubiished by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  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 Coven1

  Malefica 34

  Guilt236

  I

  The Coven

  "He was a meikle blak roch man, we rie 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; sh
e 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 as lazy, in taking a lover of a race so notoriously tolerant of corpulence.

  Alexandra's lovers in the handful of years since her divorce had tended to be odd husbands let stray by the women who owned them. Her own former hus­band, Oswald Spofford, rested on a high kitchen shelf in a jar, reduced to multi-colored dust, the cap screwed on tight. Thus she had reduced him as her powers unfolded after their move to Eastwick from Norwich, Connecticut. Ozzie had known all about chrome and had transferred from a Fixture factory in that hilly city with its too many peeling white churches to a rival manufacturer in a half-mile-long cinder-block plant south of Providence, amid the strange industrial vastness of this small state. They had moved seven years ago. Here in Rhode Island her powers had expanded like gas in a vacuum and she had reduced dear Ozzie as he made his daily trek to work and back along Route 4 first to the size of a mere man, the armor of patriar­chal protector falling from him in the corrosive salt air of Eastwick's maternal beauty, and then to the size of a child as his chronic needs and equally chronic acceptance of her solutions to them made him appear pitiful, manipulable. He quite lost touch with the expanding universe within her. He had become much involved with their sons' Little League activities, and with the Fixture company's bowling team. As Alex­andra accepted first one and then several lovers, her cuckolded husband shrank to the dimensions and dry­ness of a doll, lying beside her in her great wide recep­tive bed at night like a painted log picked up at a roadside stand, or a stuffed baby alligator. By the time of their actual divorce her former lord and master had become mere dirt—matter in the wrong place, as her mother bad briskly defined it long ago—some polychrome dust she swept up and kept in a jar as a souvenir.

  The other witches had experienced similar trans­formations in their marriages; Jane Smart's ex, Sam, hung in the cellar of her ranch house among the dried herbs and simples and was occasionally sprinkled, a pinch at a time, into a philtre, for piquancy; and Sukie Rougemont had permanized hers in plastic and used him as a place mat. This last had happened rather recently; Alexandra could still picture Monty standing at cocktail parties in his Madras jacket and parsley-green slacks, braying out the details of the day's golf round and inveighing against the slow feminine four­some that had held them up all day and never invited them to play through. He had hated uppity women— female governors, hysterical war protesters, "lady" doctors, Lady Bird Johnson, even Lynda Bird and Luci Baines. He had thought them all butch. Monty had had wonderful teeth when he brayed, long and very even but not false, and, undressed, rather touch­ing, thin bluish legs, much less muscular than his brown golfer's forearms. And with that puckered droop to his buttocks common to the softening flesh of middle-aged women. He had been one of Alexandra's first lovers. Now, it felt queer and queerly satisfying to set a mug of Sukie's tarry coffee upon a glossy plastic Madras, leaving a gritty ring.

  This air of Eastwick empowered women. Alexan­dra had never tasted anything like it, except perhaps a corner of Wyoming she had driven through with her parents when she was about eleven. They had let her out of the car to pee beside some sagebrush and she had thought, seeing the altitudinous dry earth for the moment dampened in a dark splotch, It doesn't matter. It will evaporate. Nature absorbs all. This girl­hood perception had stayed forever with her, along with the sweet sage taste of thai roadside moment. Eastwick in its turn was at every moment kissed by the sea. Dock Street, its trendy shops with their per­fumed candles and stained-glass shade-pulls aimed at the summer tourists and its old-style aluminum diner next to a bakery and its barber's next to a framer's and its little clattering newspaper office and long dark hardware store run by Armenians, was intertwined with saltwater as it slipped and slapped and slopped against the culverts and pilings the street in part was built upon, so that an unsteady veiny aqua sea-glare shimmered and shuddered on the faces of the local matrons as they carried orange juice and low-fat milk, luncheon meat and whole-wheat bread and fil­tered cigarettes out of the Bay Superette. The real supermarket, where one did a week's shopping, lay inland, in the part of Eastwick that had been farm­land; here, in the eighteenth century, aristocratic planters, rich in slaves and cattle, had paid social calls on horseback, a slave galloping ahead of them to open the fence gates one after the other. Now, above the asphalted acres of the shopping-mall parking lot, exhaust fumes dyed with leaden vapors air within memory oxygenated by fields of cabbages and pota­toes. Where corn, that remarkable agricultural artifact of the Indians, had flourished for generations, windowless little plants with names like Dataprobe and Computech manufactured my
steries, components so fine the workers wore plastic caps to keep dandruff from falling into the tiny electro-mechanical works.

  Rhode Island, though famously the smallest of the fifty stales, yet contains odd American vastnesses, tracts scarcely explored amid industrial sprawl, abandoned homesteads and forsaken mansions, vacant hinter­lands hastily traversed by straight black roads, heath­like marshes and desolate shores on either side of the Bay, that great wedge of water driven like a stake clean to the state's heart, its trustfully named capital. "The fag end of creation" and "the sewer of New England," Cotton Mather called the region. Never meant to be a separate polity, settled by outcasts like the bewitch­ing, soon-to-die Anne Hutchinson, this land holds manifold warps and wrinkles. Its favorite road sign is a pair of arrows pointing either way. Swampy poor in spots, elsewhere it became a playground of the exceedingly rich. Refuge of Quakers and antinomians, those final distillates of Puritanism, it is run by Catholics, whose ruddy Victorian churches loom like freighters in the sea of bastard architecture. There is a kind of metallic green stain, bitten deep into Depression-era shingles, that exists nowhere else. Once you cross the state line, whether at Pawtucket or Westerly, a subtle change occurs, a cheerful di-shevelment, a contempt for appearances, a chimerical uncaring. Beyond the clapboard slums yawn lunar stretches where only an abandoned roadside stand offering the ghost of last summer's Cukes betrays the yearning, disruptive presence of man.

  Through such a stretch Alexandra now drove to steal a new look at the old Lenox mansion. She took with her, in her pumpkin-colored Subaru station wagon, her black Labrador, Coal. She had left the last of the sterilized jars of sauce to cool on the kitchen counter and with a magnet shaped like Snoopy had pinned a note to the refrigerator door for her four children to find: milk in frig, oreos in breadbox.

  back in one hour. love.

  The Lenox family in the days when Roger Williams was still alive had cozened the sachems of the Narragansett tribe out of land enough to form a European barony, and though a certain Major Lenox had he­roically fallen in the Great Swamp Fight in King Philip's War, and his great-great-great-grandson Emory had eloquently urged New England's secession from the Union at the Hartford Convention of 1815, the family had taken a generally downward trend. By the time of Alexandra's arrival in Eastwick there was not a Lenox left in South County save one old widow, Abi­gail, in the stagnant quaint village of Old Wick; she went about the lanes muttering and cringing from the pebbles thrown at her by children who, called to account by the local constable, claimed they were defending themselves against her evil eye. The vast Lenox lands had long been broken up. The last of the effective male Lenoxes had caused to be built on an island the family still owned, in the tracts of salt marsh behind East Beach, a brick mansion in dimin­ished but locally striking imitation of the palatial sum­mer "cottages" being erected in Newport during this gilded age. Though a causeway had been constructed and repeatedly raised by fresh importation of gravel, the mansion always suffered the inconvenience of being cut off when the tide was high, and had been occupied fitfully by a succession of owners since 1920, and had been allowed by them to slide into disrepair. The great roof slates, some reddish and some a bluish gray, came crashing unobserved in the winter storms and lay like nameless tombstones in summer's lank tangle of uncut grass; the cunningly fashioned copper gutters and flashing turned green and rotten; the ornate octagonal cupola with a view to all points of the compass developed a list to the west; the massive end chimneys, articulated like bundles of organ pipes or thickly muscled throats, needed mortar and were dropping bricks. Yet the silhouette the mansion pre­sented from afar was still rather chasteningly grand, Alexandra thought. She had parked on the shoulder of the beach road to gaze across the quarter-mile of marsh.