The Witches of Eastwick / Иствикские ведьмы. Джон Апдайк
lt intersected where she was, in this mysterious sullen state of Rhode Island. She had been born in the West, where white and violet mountains lift in pursuit of the fluffy clouds, and tumbleweed rolls in pursuit of the horizon.
“Sukie isn't so sure,” Jane said swiftly. “He appears quite sturdy, and the backs of his hands are so hairy, she says. He told the people at Perley Realty he needed large space because he was an inventor with a lab. And he's got a number of pianos.”
Alexandra giggled. The sound of her laughter little changed since her Colorado girlhood; it seemed it was produced not out of her throat but by a little bird perched on her shoulder. “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, it's just what Marge Perley told Sukie 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 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 jumped up and down on trees and fences according to the tides of economics and fashion (Eastwick had for decades been semi-depressed and semi-fashionable) and people moved in or out of the town, was a heavily made-up, energetic woman who, if one at all, was a witch of a different type from Jane, Alexandra, and Sukie. There was a husband, a tiny fussy Homer Perley always trimming their hedge, and this made a difference. “The papers were passed in Providence,” Jane continued.
“And with hairy backs to his hands,” Alexandra mused. 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.
Jane only remembered that it was one of those names with a 'van' or a 'von' or a 'de' in it.”
“When is he going to move in?”
“He said soon. He could be in there now!” Jane sounded alarmed. Alexandra visualized the other woman's rather too thick (for the rest of her thin face) eyebrows lifting in halfcircles above her dark resentful eyes. If Alexandra was the large type of witch, always spreading herself thin, trying to merge with the landscape, and in her heart rather lazy and 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 nature. So Alexandra mused, hanging up. Things fall into threes. And magic occurs all around us when nature finds the predestined forms, and things crystalline and organic fall together at angles of sixty degrees, the equilateral triangle being the mother of structure.
She returned to putting jars of spaghetti sauce on the shelf, sauce for more spaghetti than she and her children could consume in a hundred years. It was, she vaguely felt, some kind of ridiculous tribute to her present lover, a plumber of Italian ancestry. She made that sauce of her own tomatoes. Ever since, two summers ago, Joe Marino had begun to come into her bed, an extravagant fecundity had overtaken the plants, out in the side garden where the southwestern sun shone through the line of willows each long afternoon. The little tomato branches broke under the weight of so much fruit. Tomatoes seemed the most human of all plants, eager and fragile and prone to rot. Picking the watery orange-red balls, Alexandra felt she was cupping a giant lover's testicles in her hand. She recognized as she worked in her kitchen the something sadly menstrual in all this, the bloodlike sauce that will be poured 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 the past? Nature is the index and context of all health and if we have an appetite it must be satisfied, satisfying thereby the cosmic order. Yet she sometimes despised herself as lazy, in taking a lover of a race so tolerant of stoutness.
Alexandra's lovers in a few years since her divorce had been 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 abilities 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 to a rival manufacturer in a 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. 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 at 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 b ed at night like a painted log or a stuffed baby alligator. By the time of their actual divorce her former lord and master had become just dirt – matter in the wrong place, as her mother had 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-husband, Sam, hung in the cellar of her ranch house among the dried herbs and was occasionally added to a love-philter, for piquancy; and Sukie Rougemont had reduced hers to plastic and used him as a place mat. This last had happened rather recently; Alexandra could still visualize Monty standing at cocktail parties in his Madras jacket and parsley-green slacks, relating the details of the day's golf round. Monty had had wonderful teeth, long and very even but not false, and, undressed, rather touching, thin bluish legs, much less muscular than his brown golfer's forearms. 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 dirty ring.
This air of Eastwick empowered women. Eastwick in its turn was at every moment kissed by the sea. Dock Street in part was built upon culverts and pilings, and saltwater slipped and slapped and slopped against them, 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-meal 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 in the eighteenth century. Aristocratic planters, rich in slaves and cattle, had paid social calls on horseback here. Where corn, that remarkable agricultural artifact of the Indians, had flourished for generations, windowless little plants with names like Dataprobe and Computech manufactured tiny electro-mechanical works.
Rhode Island is the smallest of the fifty states, but it contains some American vastnesses, tracts hardly explored amid industrial sprawl, heathlike marshes and desert shores on either side of the Bay. Through such a stretch Alexandra now drove to have a look again at the old Lenox mansion. She took her black Labrador, Coal, with her. She had left the last of the sterilized jars of sauce on the kitchen counter and had pinned a note to the refrigerator door for her four children:
Milk in frig. Oreos in breadbox.
Back in one hour. Love.
The Lenox family in the days when Roger Williams was still alive had tricked the chiefs of the Narragansett tribe out of land enough to form a European barony, but with years the family had taken a generally downward trend. When Alexandra arrived in Eastwick there was only one Lenox left in South County, an old widow, Abigail, in the stagnant village of Old Wick; she went about the village muttering, and children threw pebbles at her. Stopped by the local constable, they said that they were defending themselves against her evil eye. The vast Lenox lands had long been broken up. The Lenox mansion had been built of brick on an island the family still owned, in the tracts of salt marsh behind East Beach. It was a diminished but locally striking imitation of the palatial summer “cottages” erected in Newport during the Gilded Age.[1] There was a causeway between the shore and the island, but the mansion was always cut off during the high tide. It had been occupied by a succession of owners since 1920, and had been allowed by them to slip into disrepair. Yet, from afar, the mansion still looked rather grand, Alexandra thought. She had parked on the shoulder of the beach road to gaze across the quarter-mile of marsh.
This was September,
Gilded Age – ironically for 1870–1898 in the USA