Chapter One
The Coven Reconstituted
Those of us acquainted with their sordid and scandalous story were not surprised
to hear, by way of rumors from the various localities where the sorceresses had
settled after fleeing our venerable town of Eastwick, Rhode Island, that the
husbands whom the three Godforsaken women had by their dark arts concocted for
themselves did not prove durable. Wicked methods make weak products. Satan
counterfeits Creation, yes, but with inferior goods.
Alexandra, the oldest in age, the broadest in body, and the nearest in character
to normal, generous-spirited humanity, was the first to become a widow. Her
instinct, as with so many a wife suddenly liberated into solitude, was to
travel-as if the world at large, by way of flimsy boarding cards and tedious
airport delays and the faint but undeniable risk of flight in a time of rising
fuel costs, airline bankruptcy, suicidal terrorists, and accumulating metal
fatigue, could be compelled to yield the fruitful aggravation of having a mate.
Jim Farlander, the husband she had conjured for herself from a hollowed pumpkin,
a cowboy hat, and a pinch of Western soil scraped from inside the back fender of
a pickup truck with Colorado plates that she had seen parked, looking eerily out
of place, on Oak Street in the early 1970s, had, as their marriage settled and
hardened, proved difficult to budge from his ceramics studio and
little-frequented pottery shop on a side street in Taos, New Mexico.
Jim’s idea of a trip had been the hour’s drive south to Santa Fe; his idea of a
holiday was spending a day in one of the Indian reservations-Navajo, Zuni,
Apache, Acoma, Isleta Pueblo-spying out what the Native American potters were
offering in the reservation souvenir shops, and hoping to pick up cheap in some
dusty Indian Bureau commissary an authentic old black-and-white geometric Pueblo
jar or a red-on-buff Hohokam storage jar, with its spiral-and-maze pattern,
which he could peddle for a small fortune to a newly endowed museum in one of
the burgeoning resort cities of the Southwest. Jim liked where he was, and
Alexandra liked that in him, since she as his wife was part of where he was. She
liked his lean build (a flat stomach to the day he died, and never performed a
sit-up in his life) and the saddle smell of his sweat and the scent of clay that
clung, like a sepia aura, to his strong and knowing hands. They had met, on the
natural plane, when she, for some time divorced, had taken a course at the Rhode
Island School of Design, where he had been enlisted as a fill-in instructor. The
four stepchildren-Marcy, Ben, Linda, Eric-that she saddled him with couldn’t
have asked for a calmer, more soothingly taciturn father-substitute. He was
easier for her children-half out of the nest in any case, Marcy being all of
eighteen-to relate to than their own father, Oswald Spofford, a small
manufacturer of kitchen fixtures from Norwich, Connecticut. Poor Ozzie had
become so earnestly involved in Little League baseball and company bowling that
no one, not even his children, could take him seriously.
People had taken Jim Farlander seriously, women and children especially, giving
him back his own coiled silence. His level gray eyes had the glint of a gun from
within the shade of his wide-brimmed hat, its crown darkened where his thumb and
fingers pinched it. When he was at the pottery wheel he tied a faded blue
bandana around his head to keep his long hair-gray but still streaked with its
original sun-bleached auburn and gathered behind into an eight-inch ponytail-out
of the clay, wet and spinning on the foot-powered wheel. A fall in his teens
from a horse had left him with a limp, and the wheel, which he refused to
electrify, limped with him, while out of the spinning his masculine hands shaped
blobs upward into graceful vessels with slender waists and swelling bottoms.
It was in bed she first felt his death coming. His erections began to wilt just
as she might have come if he had held on; instead, in his body upon hers, there
was a palpable loosening in the knit of his sinews. There had been a challenging
nicety in the taut way Jim dressed himself-pointy vanilla-colored boots,
butt-hugging jeans with rivet-bordered pockets, and crisp checked shirts
double-buttoned at the cuff. Once a dandy of his type, he began to wear the same
shirt two and even three days in a row. His jaw showed shadows of white whisker
underneath, from careless shaving or troubled eyesight. When the ominous blood
counts began to arrive from the hospital, and the shadows in the X-rays were
visible to even her untrained eyes, he greeted the news with stoic lassitude;
Alexandra had to fight to get him out of his crusty work clothes into something
decent. They had joined the legion of elderly couples who fill hospital waiting
rooms, as quiet with nervousness as parents and children before a recital. She
felt the other couples idly pawing at them with their eyes, trying to guess
which of the two was the sick one, the doomed one; she didn’t want it to be
obvious. She wanted to present Jim as a mother presents a child going to school
for the first time, as a credit to her. They had lived, these thirty-plus years
since she had lived in Eastwick, by their own rules, up in Taos; there the free
spirits of the Lawrences and Mabel Dodge Luhan still cast a sheltering cachet
over the remnant tribe of artistic wannabes, a hard-drinking, New
Age-superstitious, artsy-craftsy crowd who aimed their artifacts, in their
shop-window displays, more and more plaintively at scrimping, low-brow tourists
rather than the well-heeled local collectors of Southwestern art. Alexandra for
a time had revived her manufacture of little ceramic “bubbies”-faceless,
footless little female figures, pleasant to hold in the hand and roughly painted
in clothes worn as close to the skin as tattoos-but Jim, jealous and dictatorial
in his art as true artists are, had been less than gracious about sharing his
kiln. In any case, the miniature women, their vulval cleft boldly dented into
the clay with a toothpick or nail file held sideways, belonged to an
uncomfortable prior period of her life, when she had practiced, with two other
Rhode Island divorcees, a half-baked suburban variety of witchcraft.
Jim’s illness drove her and Jim down from safe, arty Taos into the wider
society, the valleys of the ailing, a vast herd moving like stampeded bison
toward the killing cliff. The socialization forced upon her-interviews with
doctors, most of them unsettlingly young; encounters with nurses, demanding
merciful attentions the hospitalized patient was too manly and depressed to ask
for himself; commisera- tion with others in her condition, soon-to-be widows and
widowers she would have shunned on the street but now, in these antiseptic
hallways, embraced with shared tears-prepared her for travel in the company of
strangers.
She could not believe it-how totally Jim was gone, his morning absence as vivid
as a rooster’s wake-up crow, his evening non-appearance a refusal bound, she
felt, to be cancelled, any moment, by the scuffling sound of his boots limping
across the entry hall or the squeak, two rooms away, of his potter’s wheel.
Three months after his death, she signed up for a ten-day tour of the Canadian
Rockies. Her old, married, cosseted self, a bohemian snob proud of her careless,
mannish clothes and high-desert privacy, would have sneered at the feigned
camaraderie of an organized group tour. She foresaw the daily duty to rise and
gorge on cafeteria-style hotel breakfasts and submit to more marvels, and the
resisted but irresistible naps in the swaying bus in clammy proximity to an
alien body, usually that of another plucky widow, overweight and remorselessly
talkative. Then there would be the sleepless hours, amid worrisome small noises
and mysterious tiny red lights, in a king-size bed built for a couple. Hotel
pillows were always too stuffed, too full, and lifted her head too high, so she
woke, groggily dumfounded to have slept at all, with a stiff neck. The pillow
next to hers would be undented. It would dawn on her that she would never be one
of a couple again.
But, born in Colorado, she thought it an amusing idea to follow the Rockies
north into another country, where a dramatic landscape did not flatter the
rapacious vanity of the United States. And Canada, she discovered, did have its
good points: airports not bribed to install television sets pouring forth an
inescapable babble, and voices whose familiar North American accent was braced
by a few leftover Scots vowels, and a gray imperial gravity of public
architecture. This national identity had been created by the sensible spirit of
business enterprise, linking the provinces like great beads on an iron railroad
line, rather than by any evangelical preachment of a Manifest Destiny-manifest
only to its Anglo perpetrators-that had hurled the agglutinated United States
westwards and then outwards, across all the oceans, where its boy soldiers lost
limbs and died. The daily death-tolls from Iraq were worth escaping.
On the other hand, in Canada hotel restaurants still seemed to think Frank
Sinatra and Nat “King” Cole the latest thing in background music, and the giant
cruise ships docked in Vancouver were headed off to dreary cold Alaska. Canada,
its tundra and icefields and miles of forest pressing its population down tight
against the forty-ninth parallel, had in self-defense embraced Green-ness,
trying to make a pet of it, mining for tourist dollars the nostalgia and
righteousness inherent in its cause. Bring Back Nature-who could object to that?
But for Alexandra, totem poles and emblematic moose had a basic boringness. She
felt, up here, trapped in an attic of stuffed animals. Nature had been her ally
in witchcraft, but still she distrusted it, as a conscienceless killer,
spendthrift and blind.
After a day in Vancouver, and another in determinedly quaint Victoria, the
tour-forty travellers, none of them young and eight of them Australian-boarded a
sleeper train and were dragged northwards through the dark. They woke amid
mountains dazzling with the yellow of turning aspens. The tour had reserved a
viewing car for their party, and Alexandra, hesitantly entering, after a heavy
breakfast fetched by lurching waiters in the dining car, was greeted with
hesitant smiles from the already seated couples. She took one of the few seats
left and was conscious of the vacancy at her side, as if of a monstrous wen
throwing her face off balance.
But, then, she could never have talked Jim into coming on such an adventure. He
hated foreign countries, even the Virgin Islands, where, a few times early in
their marriage, she had persuaded him to take her, as a break from the long Taos
winter and the ski-season traffic jams along Route 522. They had arrived in St.
Thomas, as it turned out, in the late afternoon, and were caught, in their
rented Volkswagen Beetle, in the evening rush hour, Jim trying to drive for the
first time in his life on the wrong side of the road. More unfortunately still,
they were surrounded by black drivers who took a racist pleasure in tailgating
them and in rebuking every sign of automotive uncertainty with prolonged,
indignant honking. Though eventually they found the resort, at the end of a
poorly marked road, Jim got sunburned the first day, having scorned her repeated
offer of sunscreen, and then got deadly sick on some conch salad. Whenever, ever
after, he felt bested in an exchange of accusations, he would remind her, in
detail, of that week that almost-twenty-five years before he really
died-killed him.
Now, in Canada, there was not a road or car in sight, just the tracks and
tunnels ahead as the train bored upward through mountains splashed with quaking
golden leaves. “There’s Mount Robson!” a woman behind Alexandra excitedly told
her husband.
An Australian across the aisle, in an attempt at friendliness, said to
Alexandra, “Mount Robson ahead,” as if she were deaf as well as alone.
From behind this speaker, another voice-not Australian, less peppy, with a
tinge of the American Southern tinge-explained to her, everybody around her
suddenly solicitous, as if of a defective in their midst, “The tallest peak in
the Canadian Rockies.”
“Really? Already?” Alexandra asked, knowing she sounded stupid and covering
herself with “I mean, shouldn’t they have saved it for later in the tour?”
Nobody laughed, perhaps not hearing, or understanding, her little joke. The
train was taking a long curve, and the gleaming mountain-tip sank from view
behind the aspens; the peak had been oddly regular, like a pyramid in a set of
child’s blocks, but white. “How high is it?” she asked aloud, determined to
combat her sense of non-existence.
Again, she had struck a silencing note. “Nearly four thousand meters,” an
Australian voice volunteered.
She had trouble translating out of the metric system, and, borrowing a bit of
her late husband’s xenophobia, refused to try. The slightly Southern voice
understood, and explained, “Nearly thirteen thousand feet, ma’am.”
“My goodness!” Alexandra said, beginning to enjoy her own inanity. She turned
her head to look at her informant. He was lanky, like Jim, and lean-faced, with
deep creases and a mustache just long enough to droop. His costume, too- faded
tight blue jeans and a long-sleeved red-checked shirt- reminded her of Jim.
“Thank you,” she said, with more warmth than she had strictly intended. Perhaps
this man with his air of dignified sorrow was a widower. Or was waiting for some
slow-moving wife to join him here in the viewing car.
“Mount Robson isn’t on the tour,” the wife behind Alexandra was saying in her
ear, in a penetrating, slightly vexed voice. “It’s in a separate national park
from Jasper.”
“I really haven’t done my homework,” Alexandra apologized, backwards,
experiencing a flash of hatred-the old impatient, witchy, bug-zapping kind of
hate she thought she had long outgrown. Why should this woman, common and
shrewish from the sound of her voice, have a live husband, when she, Alexandra,
did not, sitting here exposed on all sides to these well-meant interventions
from strangers?
“That’s my style, too,” a male Australian reassured her.
“Learn as you go. It’s my wife reads the books ahead.”
“And sees to the tickets and passports, you lazy sod,” the wife said, in the
humorous tone of a practiced complaint.
The train, smoother-running than American trains, on Canadian National Railway
tracks welded and upheld by the government, continued to nose skyward. Mount
Robson again appeared above the trees, its whiteness marked now by black
striations-by snow-striped patches, faceted as if the peak had been carved to a
point like a flint weapon. The hard cobalt of a picture-postcard sky pressed on
these concave contours until the peak disappeared again behind the waves of
yellow leaves. “It says here,” the Australian wife loudly announced, holding a
guidebook, “it was first climbed in 1913, by an Austrian bloke named Kain.
K-A-I-N. It says the Canadian mountain men didn’t like it when foreigners were
the first to climb their mountains to the top. Got their ruddy noses out of
joint.”
Alexandra sighed and closed her lids, excusing herself from hearing any more.
She wanted to relieve them all of having to pay her any further attention. Being
a big woman, tall and somewhat broad, her full head of chestnut-brown hair still
only half white, had given her a presence when she was younger but now that she
was old and mateless made her conspicuous, an embarrassment to herself. Kain,
Cain, she thought. The first man to do a truly wicked deed, worse even than
eating the apple of knowledge. Slew his brother, Abel. Thirty years ago
Alexandra had slain a sister witch: she and Sukie Rougemont and Jane Smart had
killed little Jenny Gabriel, though the death certificate blamed metastasized
malignancy of the ovaries. The curse of it was always there, inside Alexandra,
even when she didn’t close her eyes, a sour gnawing. As negligible as a worm in
the earth during the daylight hours, at night in her dreams the curse grew large
and threatened to eat her alive. Again and again her dreams returned her to that
hectic period, when Darryl Van Horne had taken as wife not one of the three of
them but a younger woman, fair and ivory-skinned, with innocent, ice-blue
eyes-too damned innocent, the older witches had felt. Had Jenny been less
innocent, had she been as corrupt as they were, they would have accepted her
besting them as part of a game among equals, marrying a man who after all hadn’t
cared for women, it turned out, and was not even rich, as they had been led to
believe. They had imagined him, conjured him out of their own needs.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Widows of Eastwick
by John Updike
Copyright © 2008 by John Updike.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Knopf
Copyright © 2008
John Updike
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-307-26960-7
