Conjure Wife (3 page)

“That’s right.”

Norman sat back. “Oh Lord,” he said.

“What’s the matter, dear? You don’t feel I’m trying to take any credit away from you for the book’s success?”

Norman half laughed, half snorted. “Good Lord, no. But —” He stopped himself. “Well, that takes us to 1930. Go on from there.”

8:58:
Norman reached over and switched on the light, winced at its glare. Tansy ducked her head.

He stood up, massaging the back of his neck.

“The thing that gets me,” he said, “is the way it invaded every nook and corner of your life, bit by bit, so that finally you couldn’t take a step, or rather let me take one, without there having to be some protective charm. It’s almost like —” He was going to say, “some kinds of paranoia.”

Tansy’s voice was hoarse and whispery. “I even wear hooks-and-eyes instead of zippers because the hooks are supposed to catch evil spirits. And the mirror-decorations on my hats and bags and dresses — you’ve guessed it, they’re Tibetan magic to reflect away misfortune.”

He stood in front of her, “Look Tansy, whatever made you do it?”

“I’ve just told you.”

“I know, but what made you stick to it year after year, when as you’ve admitted, you always suspected you were just fooling yourself? I could understand it with another woman, but with you… .”

Tansy hesitated. “I know you’ll think I’m being romantic and trite, but I’ve always felt that women were more primitive than men, closer to ancient feelings.” She hurried over that. “And then there were things I remembered from childhood. Queer mistaken ideas I got from my father’s sermons. Stories one of the old ladies there used to tell us. Hints.” (Norman thought: Country parsonage! Healthy mental atmosphere, not!) “And then — oh, there were a thousand other things. But I’ll try to tell them to you.”

“Swell,” he said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “But we’d better eat something along with it.”

9:17:
They were sitting facing each other in the jolly red-and-white kitchen. On the table were untasted sandwiches and halfsipped cups of black coffee. It was obvious that the situation between them had changed. Now it was Norman who looked away and Tansy who studied expressions anxiously.

“Well, Norman,” she managed to say finally, “Do you think I’m crazy, or going crazy?”

It was just the question he had needed. “No, I don’t,” he said levelly. “Though Lord only knows what an outsider would think if he found out what you’d been doing. But just as surely as you aren’t crazy, you are neurotic — like all of us — and your neurosis has taken a darned unusual form.”

Suddenly aware of hunger, he picked up a sandwich and began to munch it as he talked, nibbling the edge all around and then beginning to work in.

“Look, all of us have private rituals — our own little peculiar ways of eating and drinking and sleeping and going to the bathroom. Rituals we’re hardly conscious of, but that would look mighty strange if analyzed. You know, to step or not to step on cracks in the sidewalk. Things like that. Now I’d say that your private rituals, because of the special circumstances of your life, have gotten all tangled up with conjure magic, so you can hardly tell which is which.” He paused. “Now here’s an important thing. So long as only you knew what you were doing, you didn’t tend to criticize your entanglement with conjure magic any more than the average person criticizes his magic formula for going to sleep. There was no social conflict.”

He started to pace, still eating the sandwich.

“Good Lord, haven’t I devoted a good part of my life to investigating how and why men and women are superstitious? And shouldn’t I have been aware of the contagious effect of that study on you? And what is superstition, but misguided, unobjective science? And when it comes down to that, is it to be wondered if people grasp at superstition in this rotten, hate-filled, half-doomed world of today? Lord knows, I’d welcome the blackest of black magic, if it could do anything to stave off the atom bomb.”

Tansy had risen. Her eyes looked unnaturally large and bright.

“Then,” she faltered, “you honestly don’t hate me, or think I’m going crazy?”

He put his arms around her. “Hell, no!”

She began to cry.

9:33:
They were sitting on the davenport again. Tansy had stopped crying, but her head still rested against his shoulder.

For a while they were quiet. Then Norman spoke. He used the deceptively mild tones of a doctor telling a patient that another operation will be necessary.

“Of course, you’ll have to quit doing it now.”

Tansy sat up quickly. “Oh no, Norm, I couldn’t.”

“Why not? You’ve just agreed it was all nonsense. You’ve just thanked me for opening your eyes.”

“I know that, but still — don’t make me, Norm!”

“Now be reasonable, Tansy,” he said. “You’ve taken this like a major so far. I’m proud of you. But don’t you see, you can’t stop half way. Once you’ve started to face this weakness of yours logically, you’ve got to keep on. You’ve got to get rid of all that stuff in your dressing room, all the charms you’ve hidden around, everything.”

She shook her head. “Don’t make me, Norm,” she repeated. “Not all at once. I’d feel naked.”

“No you won’t. You’ll feel stronger. Because you’ll find out that what you half thought might be magic, is really your own unaided ability.”

“No, Norm. Why do I have to stop? What difference does it make? You said yourself it was just nonsense — a private ritual.”

“But now that I know about it, it’s not private any more. And in any case,” he added, almost dangerously, “it’s a pretty unusual ritual.”

“But couldn’t I just quit by degrees?” She pleaded, like a child. “You know, not lay any new charms, but leave the old ones?”

He shook his head. “No,” he said, “it’s like giving up drink — it has to be a clean break.”

Her voice began to rise. “But, Norm, I can’t do it. I simply can’t!”

He began to feel she was a child. “Tansy, you must.”

“But there wasn’t ever anything bad about my magic.” The childishness was getting frightening. “I never used it to hurt anyone or to ask for unreasonable things, like making you president of Hempnell overnight. I only wanted to protect you.”

“Tansy, what difference does that make!”

Her breasts were heaving. “I tell you, Norm, I won’t be responsible for what happens to you if you make me take away those protections.”

“Tansy, be reasonable. What on earth do I need with protections of that sort?”

“Oh, so you think that everything you’ve won in life is just the result of your own unaided abilities? You don’t recognize the luck in it?”

Norman remembered thinking the same thing himself this afternoon and that made him angrier. “Now Tansy —”

“And you think that everyone loves you and wishes you well, don’t you? You think all those beasts over at Hempnell are just a lot of pussies with their claws clipped? You pass off their spites and jealousies as something trivial, beneath your notice. Well let me tell you —”

“Tansy, stop screaming!”

“— that there are those at Hempnell who would like to see you dead — and who would have seen you dead a long time ago, if they could have worked it!”

“Tansy!”

“What do you suppose Evelyn Sawtelle feels toward you for the way you’re nosing out her flutterbudget of a husband for the Sociology chairmanship? Do you think she wants to bake you a cake? One of her cherry-chocolate ones? How do you suppose Hulda Gunnison likes the influence you have acquired over her husband? It’s mainly because of you that she no longer runs the Dean of Men’s office. And as for that libidinous old bitch Mrs. Carr, do you imagine that she enjoys the way your freedom-andfrankness policy with the students is cutting into her holier-than-thou respectability, her ‘Sex is just an ugly word’ stuff. What do you think those women have been doing for their husbands?”

“Oh Lord, Tansy, why drag in that old faculty jealousies business?”

“Do you suppose they’d stop at mere protection? Do you imagine women like that would observe any distinction between white magic and black?”

“Tansy! You don’t know what you’re saying. If you mean to imply — Tansy, when you talk that way, you actually sound like a witch.”

“Oh, I do?” For a moment her expression was so tight her face looked all skull. “Well maybe I am. And maybe it’s lucky for you I’ve been one.”

He grabbed her by the arm. “Listen, I’ve been patient with you about all this ignorant nonsense. But now you’re going to show some sense and show it quick.”

Her lips curled, nastily. “Oh, I see. It’s been the velvet glove so far, but now it’s going to be the iron hand. If I don’t do just as you say, I get packed off to an asylum. Is that it?”

“Of course not! But you’ve just got to be sensible.”

“Well, I tell you I won’t!”

“Now, Tansy —”

10:13:
The folded comforter jounced as Tansy flopped on the bed. New tears had streaked and reddened her face and dried. “All right,” she said, in a stuffy voice. “I’ll do what you want. I’ll burn all my things.”

Norman felt light-headed. The thought came into his mind, “And to think I dared to tackle it without a psychiatrist!”

“There’ve been enough times when I’ve wanted to stop,” she added. “Just like there’ve been times I’ve wanted to stop being a woman.”

What followed struck Norman as weirdly anticlimactic. First the ransacking of Tansy’s dressing room for hidden charms and paraphernalia. Norman found himself remembering those old two-reel comedies in which scores of people pile out of a taxicab — it seemed impossible that a few shallow drawers and old shoe boxes could hold so many wastepaper baskets of junk. He tossed the dog-eared copy of
“Parallelisms”
on top of the last one, picked up Tansy’s leatherbound diary. She shook her head reassuringly. After the barest hesitation he put it back unopened.

Then the rest of the house. Tansy moving faster and faster, darting from room to room, deftly recovering flannel-wrapped “hands” from the upholstery of the chairs, the under sides of table tops, the interior of vases, until Norman dizzily marveled that he had lived in the house for more than ten years without chancing on any.

“It’s rather like a treasure hunt, isn’t it?” she said with a rueful smile.

There were other charms outside — under front and back doorsteps, in the garage, and in the car. With every handful thrown on the roaring fire he had built in the living room, Norman’s sense of relief grew. Finally Tansy opened the seams of the pillows on his bed and carefully fished out two little matted shapes made of feathers bound with fine thread so that they blended with the fluffy contents of the pillow.

“See, one’s a heart, the other an anchor. That’s for security,” she told him. “New Orleans feather magic. You haven’t taken a step for years without being in the range of one of my protective charms.”

The feather figures puffed into flame.

“There,” she said. “Feel any reaction?”

“No,” he said. “Any reason I should?”

She shook her head. “Except that those were the last ones. And so, if there were any hostile forces that my charms were keeping at bay…” .

He laughed tolerantly. Then for a moment his voice grew hard. “You’re sure they’re all gone? Absolutely certain you haven’t overlooked any?”

“Absolutely certain. There’s not one left in the house or near it, Norm — and I never planted any anywhere else because I was afraid of… well, interference. I’ve counted them all over in my mind a dozen times and they’ve all gone —” She looked at the fire, “— pouf. And now,” she said quietly, “I’m tired, really tired. I want to go straight to bed.”

Suddenly she began to laugh. “Oh, but first I’ll have to stitch up those pillows, or else there’ll be feathers all over the place.”

He put his arms around her. “Everything okay now?”

“Yes, darling. There’s only one thing I want to ask you — that we don’t talk about this for a few days at least. Not even mention it. I don’t think I could… . Will you promise me that, Norm?”

He pulled her closer. “Absolutely, dear. Absolutely.”

Leaning forward from the worn leather edge of the old easy chair, Norman played with the remnants of the fire, tapped the fang of the poker against a glowing board until it collapsed into tinkling embers, over which swayed almost invisible blue flames.

From the floor beside him Totem watched the flames, head between outstretched paws.

Norman felt tired. He really ought to have followed Tansy to bed long ago, except he wanted time for his thoughts to unkink. Rather a bother, this professional need to assimilate each new situation, to pick over its details mentally, turning them this way and that, until they became quite shopworn. Whereas Tansy had turned out her thoughts like a light and plunged into sleep. How like Tansy! — or perhaps it was just the more finely attuned, hyperthyroid female physiology.

In any case, she’d done the practical, sensible thing. And that was like Tansy, too. Always fair. Always willing, in the long run, to listen to logic (in a similar situation would he have dared try reasoned argument on any other woman?) Always… yes… empirical. Except that she had gotten off on a crazy sidetrack.

Hempnell was responsible for that, it was a breeding place for neurosis, and being a faculty wife put a woman in one of the worst spots. He ought to have realized years ago the strain she was under and taken steps. But she’d been too good an actor for him. And he was always forgetting just how deadly seriously women took faculty intrigues. They couldn’t escape like their husbands into the cool, measured worlds of mathematics, microbiology or what have you.

Norman smiled. That had been an odd notion Tansy had let slip towards the end — that Evelyn Sawtelle and Harold Gunnison’s wife and old Mrs. Carr were practising magic too, of the venomous black variety. And not any too hard to believe, either, if you knew them! That was the sort of idea with which a clever satirical writer could do a lot. Just carry it a step farther — picture most women as glamor-conscious witches, carrying on their savage warfare of deathspell and countercharm, while their reality-befuddled husbands went blithely about their business. Let’s see, Barrie had written
What Every Woman Knows
to show that men never realized how their wives were responsible for their successes. Being that blind, would men be any more apt to realize that their wives used witchcraft for the purpose?