Conjure Wife (2 page)

Flanked by cold cream jars was a small photograph of himself, with a little pile of small change, all dimes and quarters, in front of it.

He roused himself. This wasn’t the vaguely illegitimate spying he had intended. He pulled out a drawer at random, hastily scanned the pile of rolled-up stockings that filled it, shut it, took hold of the ivory knob of the next.

And paused.

This was rather silly, it occurred to him. Simultaneously he realized that he had just squeezed the last drop from the peak of his mood. As when he had turned from the window, but more ominously, the moment seemed to freeze, as if all reality, every bit of it he lived to this moment, were something revealed by a lightning flash that would the next instant blink out, leaving inky darkness. That rather common buzzing-in-the-ears, everything-too-real sensation.

From the doorway Totem looked up at him.

But sillier still to analyze a trifling whim, as if it could mean anything one way or the other.

To show it didn’t, he’d look in one more drawer.

It jammed, so he gave it a sharp tug before it jerked free.

A large cardboard box toward the back caught his eyes. He edged up the cover and took out one of the tiny glass-stoppered bottles that filled it. What sort of a cosmetic would this be? Too dark for face powder. More like a geologist’s soil specimen. An ingredient for a mud pack? Hardly. Tansy had a herb garden. Could that be involved?

The dry, dark-brown granules shifted smoothly, like sand in an hourglass, as he rotated the glass cylinder. The label appeared, in Tansy’s clear script. “Julia Trock, Roseland.” He couldn’t recall any Julia Trock. And why should the name Roseland seem distasteful? His hand knocked aside the cardboard cover as he reached for a second bottle, identical with the first, except that the contents had a somewhat reddish tinge and the label read, “Phillip Lassiter, Hill.” A third, contents same color as the first: “J. P. Thorndyke, Roseland.” Then a handful, quickly snatched up: “Emelyn Scatterday, Roseland.” “Mortimer Pope, Hill.” “The Rev. Bufort Ames, Roseland.” They were, respectively, brown, reddish, and brown.

The silence in the house grew thunderous; even the sunlight in the bedroom seemed to sizzle and fry, as his mind rose to a sudden pitch of concentration on the puzzle. “Roseland and Hill, Roseland and Hill, Oh we went to Roseland and Hill,” — like a nursery rhyme somehow turned nasty, making the glass cylinders repugnant to his fingers, “— but we never came back.”

Abruptly the answer came.

The two local cemeteries.

Graveyard dirt.

Soil specimens all right. Graveyard dirt from particular graves. A chief ingredient of Negro conjure magic.

With a soft thud Totem landed on the table and began to sniff inquisitively at the bottles, springing away as Norman plunged his hand into the drawer. He felt smaller boxes behind the big one, yanked suddenly at the whole drawer, so it fell to the floor. In one of the boxes were bent, rusty, worn bits of iron — horseshoe nails. In the other were calling-card envelopes, filled with snippings of hair, each labeled like the bottles. But he knew most of these names — “Hervey Sawtelle… Gracine Pollard… Hulda Gunnison…” And in one labeled “Evelyn Sawtelle” — red-lacquered nail clippings.

In the third drawer he drew blank. But the fourth yielded a varied harvest. Packets of small dried leaves and powdered vegetable matter — so that was what came from Tansy’s herb garden along with kitchen seasonings? Vervain, vinmoin, devil’s stuff, the labels said. Bits of lodestone with iron filings clinging to them. Goose quills which spilled quicksilver when he shook them. Small squares of flannel, the sort that Negro conjure doctors use for their “tricken bags” or “hands.” A box of old silver coins and silver filings — strong protective magic; giving significance to the silver coins in front of his photograph.

But Tansy was so sane, so healthily contemptuous of palmistry, astrology, numerology and all other superstitious fads. A hardheaded New Englander. So well versed, from her work with him, in the psychological background of superstition and primitive magic. So well versed —

He found himself thumbing through a dog-eared copy of his own
Parallelisms in Superstition and Neurosis
. It looked like the one he had lost around the house — was it eight years ago? Beside a formula for conjuration was a marginal notation in Tansy’s script: “Doesn’t work. Substitute copper filings for brass. Try in dark of moon instead of full.”

“Norman —”

Tansy was standing in the doorway.

It is the people we know best who can, on rare occasions, seem most unreal to us. For a moment the familiar face registers as merely an arbitrary arrangement of colored surfaces, without even the shadowy personality with which we invest a strange face glimpsed in the street.

Norman Saylor felt he wasn’t looking at his wife, but at a painting of her. It was as if some wizardly Renoir or Toulouse-Lautrec had painted Tansy with the air for a canvas — boldly blocked in the flat cheeks in pale flesh tones faintly undertinged with green, drew them together to a small defiant chin; smudged crosswise with careless art the red thoughtful lips, the gray-green maybe humorous eyes, the narrow low-arched brows with single vertical furrow between; created with one black stroke the childishly sinister bangs, swiftly smeared the areas of shadowed white throat and wine-colored dress; caught perfectly the feel of the elbow that hugged a package from the dressmaker’s, as the small ugly hands lifted to remove a tiny hat that was another patch of the wine color with a highlight representing a little doodad of silvered glass.

If he were to reach out and touch her, Norman felt, the paint would peel down in strips from the empty air, as from some walking sister-picture of Dorian Gray.

He stood stupidly staring at her, the open book in his hand. He didn’t hear himself say anything, thought he knew that if words had come to his lips at that moment, his voice would have sounded to him like another’s — some fool professor’s.

Then, without saying anything either, and without any noticeable change of expression, Tansy turned on her heel and walked rapidly out of the bedroom. The package from the dressmaker’s fell to the floor. It was a moment before Norman could stir himself.

He caught up with her in the living room. She was headed for the front door. When he realized she wasn’t going to turn or stop, he threw his arms around her. And then, at last, she did react. She struggled like an animal, but with her face turned sharply away and her arms flat against her sides, as if tied there.

Through taut mouth-slit, in a very low voice, but spittingly, she said, “Don’t touch me.”

Norman strained and braced his feet. There was something horrible about the way she threw herself from side to side, trying to break his embrace. There flickered in his mind the thought of a woman in a straitjacket.

She kept repeating “Don’t touch me” in the same tones, and he kept imploring, “But Tansy —”

Suddenly she stopped struggling. He dropped his arms and stepped back.

She didn’t relax. She just stood there rigidly, her face twisted to one side — and from what he could see of it, the eyes were winced shut and the lips bitten together. Some kindred tightness, inside him, hurt his heart.

“Darling!” he said. “I’m ashamed of what I did. No matter what it led to, it was a cheap, underhanded, unworthy action. But —”

“It’s not that!”

He hesitated. “You mean, you’re acting this way because you’re, well, ashamed of what I found out?”

No reply.

“Please, Tansy, we’ve got to talk about it.”

Still no reply. He unhappily fingered the air. “But I’m sure everything will be all right. If you’ll just tell me…”

“Tansy, please…”

Her posture didn’t alter, but her lips arched and the words were spat out: “Why don’t you strap me and stick pins in me? They used to do that.”

“Darling, I’d do anything rather than hurt you! But this is something that just has to be talked about.”

“I can’t. If you say another word about it, I’ll scream!”

“Darling, if I possibly could, I’d stop. But this is one of those things. We’ve just got to talk it over.”

“I’d rather die.”

“But you’ve got to tell me. You’ve got to!”

He was shouting.

For a moment he thought she was going to faint. He reached forward to catch her. But it was only that her body had abruptly gone slack. She walked over to the nearest chair, dropped her hat on a small table beside it, sat down listlessly.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s talk about it.”

6:37P.M.:
The last rays of sunlight sliced the bookcase, touched the red teeth of the left-hand devil mask. Tansy was sitting on one end of the davenport, while Norman was at the other, turned sideways with one knee on the cushion, watching her.

Tansy switched around, flirting her head irritably, as if there were in the air a smoke of words which had grown unendurably thick. “All right, have it your own way then! I was seriously trying to use conjure magic. I was doing everything a civilized woman shouldn’t. I was trying to put spells on people and things. I was trying to change the future. I was… oh, the whole works!”

Norman gave a small jerky nod. It was the same sort of nod he gave at student conferences, when after seeming hours of muddled discussion, some blank-faced young hopeful would begin to get a glimmering of what they were really talking about. He leaned towards her.

“But why?”

“To protect you and your career.” She was looking at her lap. “But knowing all you did about the background of superstition, how did you ever come to believe — ?” His voice wasn’t loud now. It was cool, almost a lawyer’s.

She twisted. “I don’t know. When you put it that way… of course. But when you desperately want things to happen, or not to happen, to someone you love… I was only doing what millions of others have done. And then, you see, Norm, the things I did… well, they seemed to work… at least most of the time.”

“But don’t you see,” he continued smoothly, “that those very exceptions prove that the things you were doing
didn’t
work? That the successes were just coincidences?”

Her voice rose a trifle. “I don’t know about that. There might have been counter-influences at work

— ” She turned toward him impulsively. “Oh, I don’t know what I believe! I’ve never really been sure that my charms worked. There was no way of telling. Don’t you see, once I’d started, I didn’t dare stop?”

“And you’ve been doing it all these years?”

She nodded unhappily. “Ever since we came to Hempnell.”

He looked at her, trying to comprehend it. It was almost impossible to take at one gulp the realization that in the mind of this trim modern creature he had known in completest intimacy, there was a whole great area he had never dreamed of, an area that was part and parcel of the dead practices he analyzed in books, an area that belonged to the Stone Age and never to him, an area plunged in darkness, a crouch with fear, blown by giant winds. He tried to picture Tansy muttering charms, stitching up flannel hands by candlelight, visiting graveyards and God knows what other places, in search of ingredients. His imagination almost failed. And yet it had all been happening right under his nose.

The only faintly suspicious aspect of Tansy’s behavior that he could recall, was her whim for taking “little walks” by herself. If he had ever wondered about Tansy and superstitions at all, it had only been to decide, with a touch of self-congratulation, that for a woman she was almost oddly free from irrationality.

“Oh Norm, I’m so confused and miserable,” she broke in. “I don’t know what to say or how to start.”

He had an answer for that, a scholar’s answer.

“Tell me how it all happened, right from the beginning.”

7:54:
They were still sitting on the davenport. The room was almost dark. The devil masks were irregular ovals of gloom. Tansy’s face was a pale smudge. Norman couldn’t study its expression, but judging from her voice, it had become animated.

“Hold on a minute,” he interrupted. “Let’s get some things straight. You say you were very much afraid when we first came to Hempnell to arrange about my job, before I went south on the Hazelton Fellowship?”

“Oh yes, Norm. Hempnell terrified me. Everyone was so obviously antagonistic and so deadly respectable. I knew I’d be a flop as a professor’s wife — I was practically told so to my face. I don’t know which was worse, Hulda Gunnison looking me up and down and grunting contemptuously, ‘I guess you’ll do,’ when I made the mistake of confiding in her, or old Mrs. Carr petting my arm and saying, ‘I know you and your husband will be very happy here at Hempnell. You’re young, but Hempnell loves nice young folk!’ Against those women I felt completely unprotected. And your career too.”

“Right. So when I took you south and plunged you into the midst of the most superstition-swayed area in the whole country, exposed you to the stuff night and day, you were ripe for its promise of magical security.”

Tansy laughed half-heartedly. “I don’t know about the ripe part, but it certainly impressed me. I drank in all I could. At the back of my mind, I suppose, was the feeling: Some day I may need this. And when we went back to Hempnell in the fall, I felt more confident.”

Norman nodded. That fitted. Come to think of it, there had been something unnatural about the intense, silent enthusiasm with which Tansy had plunged into boring secretarial work right after their marriage.

“But you didn’t actually try any conjure magic,” he continued, “until I got pneumonia that first winter?”

“That’s right. Until then, it was just a cloud of vaguely reassuring ideas — scraps of things I’d find myself saying over when I woke in the middle of the night, things I’d unconsciously avoid doing because they were unlucky, like sweeping the steps after dark or crossing knives and forks. And then when you got pneumonia, well, when the person you love is near death, you’ll try anything.”

For a moment Norman’s voice was sympathetic. “Of course.” Then the Classroom tone came back. “But I gather that it wasn’t until I had that brush with Pollard over sex education and came off decently, and especially until my book came out in 1931 and got such, well, pretty favorable reviews, that you really began to believe that your magic was working?”