Conjure Wife (8 page)

“Dearest! It’s been ages since we’ve seen you!” Mrs. Carr embraced Tansy cuddlingly. “How are you? How are you?” The question sounded peculiarly eager and incisive. Norman put it down to typical Hempnell gush. “Oh, dear, I’m afraid I’ve got a cinder in my eye,” Mrs. Carr continued. “The wind’s getting quite fierce.”

“Gusty,” said Professor Carr of the mathematics department, showing harmless delight at finding the right word. He was a little man with red cheeks and a white Vandyke, as innocent and absent-minded as college professors are supposed to be. He gave the impression of residing permanently in a special paradise of transcendental and transfinite numbers and of the hieroglyphs of symbolic logic, for whose manipulations he had a nationally recognized fame among mathematicians. Russell and Whitehead may have invented those hieroglyphs, but when it came to handling, cherishing, arid coaxing the exasperating, riddlesome things, Carr was the champion prestidigitator.

“It seems to have gone away now,” said Mrs. Carr, waving aside Tansy’s handkerchief and experimentally blinking her eyes, which looked unpleasantly naked until she replaced her thick glasses. “Oh, that must be the others,” she added, as the chimes sounded. “Isn’t it
marvelous
that everyone at Hempnell is so punctual?”

As Norman started for the front door he imagined for one crazy moment that someone must be whirling a bull-roarer outside, until he realized it could only be the rising wind living up to Professor Carr’s description of it.

He was confronted by Evelyn Sawtelle’s angular form, wind whipping her black coat against her legs. Her equally angular face, with its shoe-button eyes, was thrust toward his own.

“Let us in, or it’ll blow us in,” she said. Like most of her attempts at coy or facetious humor, it did not come off, perhaps because she made it sound so stupidly grim.

She entered, with Hervey in tow, and made for Tansy.

“My dear, how are you? Whatever have you been doing with yourself?” Again Norman was struck by the eager and meaningful tone of the question. For a moment he wondered whether the woman had somehow gotten an inkling of Tansy’s eccentricity and the recent crisis. But Mrs. Sawtelle was so voiceconscious that she was always emphasizing things the wrong way.

There was a noisy flurry of greetings. Totem squeaked and darted out of the way of the crowd of human beings. Mrs. Carr’s voice rose above the rest, shrilling girlishly.

“Oh, Professor Sawtelle, I want to tell you how
much
we appreciated your talk on city planning. It was truly
significant!
” Sawtelle writhed.

Norman thought: “So now he’s the favorite for the chairmanship.”

Professor Carr had made a beeline for the bridge tables and was wistfully fingering the cards.

“I’ve been studying the mathematics of the shuffle,” he began with a brighteyed air, as soon as Norman drifted into range. “The shuffle is supposed to make it a matter of chance what hands are dealt. But that is not true at all.” He broke open a new pack of cards and spread the deck. “The manufacturers arrange these by suits — thirteen spades, thirteen hearts, and so on. Now suppose I make a perfect shuffle — divide the pack into equal parts and interleaf the cards one by one.”

He tried to demonstrate, but the cards got away from him.

“It’s really not as hard as it looks,” he continued amiably. “Some players can do it every time, quick as a wink. But that’s not the point. Suppose I make two perfect shuffles with a new pack. Then, no matter how the cards are cut, each player will get thirteen of a suit — an event that, if you went purely by the laws of chance, would happen only once in about one hundred and fifty-eight billion times as regards a
single
hand, let alone all four.”

Norman nodded and Carr smiled delightedly.

“That’s only one example. It comes to this: What is loosely termed chance is really the resultant of several perfectly definite factors — chiefly the play of cards on each hand, and the shufflehabits of the players.” He made it sound as important as the Theory of Relativity. “Some evenings the hands are very ordinary. Other evenings they keep getting wilder and wilder — long suits, voids and so on. Sometimes the cards persistently run north and south. Other times, east and west. Luck? Chance? Not at all! It’s the result of known causes. Some expert players actually make use of this principle to determine the probable location of key cards. They remember how the cards were played on the last hand, how the packets were put together, how the shufflehabits of the maker have disarranged the cards. Then they interpret that information according to the bids and opening leads the next time the cards are used. Why, it’s really quite simple — or would be for a blindfold chess expert. And of course any really good bridge player should —”

Norman’s mind went off at a tangent. Suppose you applied this principle outside bridge? Suppose that coincidence and other chance happenings weren’t really as chancy as they looked? Suppose there were individuals with a special aptitude for calling the turns, making the breaks? But that was a pretty obvious idea — nothing to give a person the shiver it had given him.

“I wonder what’s holding up the Gunnisons?” Professor Carr was saying. “We might start one table now. Perhaps we can get in an extra rubber,” he added hopefully.

A peal from the chimes settled the question.

Gunnison looked as if he had eaten his dinner too fast and Hulda seemed rather surly.

“We had to rush so,” she muttered curtly to Norman as he held open the door.

Like the other two women, she almost ignored him and concentrated her greetings on Tansy. It gave him a vaguely uneasy feeling as when they had first come to Hempnell and faculty visits had been a nerveracking chore. Tansy seemed at a disadvantage, unprotected, in contrast to the aggressive air animating the other three.

But what of it? — he told himself. That was normal for Hempnell faculty wives. They acted as if they lay awake nights plotting to poison the people between their husband and the president’s chair.

Whereas Tansy — But that was like what Tansy had been doing or rather what Tansy had said they were doing.
She
hadn’t been doing it. She had only been — His thoughts started to gyrate confusingly and he switched them off.

They cut for partners.

The cards seemed determined to provide an illustration for the theory Carr had explained. The hands were uniformly commonplace — abnormally average. No long suits. Nothing but 4-4-3-2 and 4-33-8 distribution. Bid one; make two. Bid two; down one.

After the second round, Norman applied his private remedy for boredom — the game of “Spot the Primitive.” You played it by yourself, secretly. It was just an exercise for an ethnologist’s imagination. You pretended that the people around you were members of a savage race, and you tried to figure out how their personalities would manifest themselves in such an environment.

Tonight it worked almost too well.

Nothing unusual about the men. Gunnison, of course, would be a prosperous tribal chieftain; perhaps a little fatter, and tended by maidens, but with a jealous and vindictive wife waiting to pounce. Carr might figure as the basket maker of the village — a spry old man, grinning like a little monkey, weaving the basket fibers into intricate mathematical matrices. Sawtelle, of course, would be the tribal scapegoat, butt of endless painful practical jokes.

But the women!

Take Mrs. Gunnison, now his partner. Give her a brown skin. Leave the red hair, but twist some copper ornaments in it. She’d be heftier if anything, a real mountain of a woman, stronger than most of the men in the tribe, able to wield a spear or club. The same brutish eyes, but the lower lip would jut out in a more openly sullen and domineering way. It was only too easy to imagine what she’d do to the unlucky maidens in whom her husband showed too much interest. Or how she would pound tribal policy into his head when they retired to their hut. Or how her voice would thunder out the death chants the women sang to aid the men away at war.

Then Mrs. Sawtelle and Mrs. Carr, who had progressed to the top table along with himself and Mrs. Gunnison. Mrs. Sawtelle first. Make her skinnier. Scarify the fiat cheeks with ornamental ridges. Tattoo the spine. Witch woman. Bitter as quinine bark because her husband was ineffectual. Think of her prancing before a spike-studded fetish. Think of her screeching incantations and ripping off a chicken’s head…

“Norman, you are playing out of turn,” said Mrs. Gunnison.

“Sorry.”

And Mrs. Carr. Shrivel her a bit. Leave only a few wisps of hair on the parchment skull. Take away the glasses, so her eyes would be gummy. She’d blink and peer short-sightedly, and leer toothiessly, and flutter her bony claws. A nice harmless old squaw, who’d gather the tribe’s children around her (always that hunger for youth!) and tell them legends. But her jaw would still be able to snap like a steel trap, and her clawlike hands would be deft at applying arrow poison, and she wouldn’t really need her eyes because she’d have other ways of seeing things, and oven the bravest warrior would grow nervous if she looked too long in his direction.

“Those experts at the top table are awfully quiet,” called Gunnison with a laugh. “They must be taking the game very seriously.”

Witch women, all three of them, engaged in booting their husbands to the top of the tribal hierarchy.

From the dark doorway at the far end of the room, Totem was peering curiously, as if weighing some similar possibility.

But Norman could not fit Tansy into the picture. He could visualize physical changes, like frizzing her hair and putting some big rings in her ears and a painted design on her forehead. But he could not picture her as belonging to the same tribe. She persisted in his imagination as a stranger woman, a captive, eyed with suspicion and hate by the rest. Or perhaps a woman of the same tribe, but one who had done something to forfeit the trust of all the other women. A priestess who had violated taboo. A witch who had renounced witchcraft.

Abruptly his field of vision narrowed to the score pad. Evelyn Sawtelle was idly scribbling stick figures as Mrs. Carr deliberated over a lead. First the stick figure of a man with arms raised and three or four balls above his head, as if he were juggling. Then the stick figure of a queen, indicated by crown and skirt. Then a little tower with battlements. Then an L-shaped thing with a stick figure hanging from it — a gallows. Finally, a crude vehicle — a rectangle with two wheels — bearing down on a man whose arms were extended toward it in fear.

Just five scribbles. But Norman knew that four of them were connected with a bit of unusual knowledge buried somewhere in his mind. A glance at the exposed dummy gave him the clue.

Cards.

But this bit of knowledge was from the ancient history of cards, when the whole deck was drenched with magic, when there was a Knight between the Jack and Queen, when the suits were swords, batons, cups, and money, and when there were twenty-two special tarot, or fortunetelling cards in the pack, of which today only the Joker remained.

But Evelyn Sawtelle knowing about anything as recondite as tarot cards? Knowing them so well she doodled them? Stupid, affected, conventional Evelyn Sawtelle? It was unthinkable. Yet — four of the tarot cards were the Juggler, the Empress, the Tower, and the Hanged Man.

Only the fifth stick figure, that of the man and vehicle, did not fit in. Juggernaut? The fanatical, finally cringing victim about to die under the wheels of the vast, trundling idol? That was closer — and chalk one more up to the esoteric scholarship of stupid Evelyn Sawtelle.

Suddenly it came to him. Himself and a truck. A great big truck. That was the meaning of the fifth stick figure.

But Evelyn Sawtelle knowing his pet phobia?

He stared at her. She scratched out the stick figures and looked at him sullenly.

Mrs. Gunnison leaned forward, lips moving as if she might be counting trump.

Mrs. Carr smiled, and made her lead. The risen wind began to make the same intermittent roaring sound it had for a moment earlier in the evening.

Norman suddenly chuckled whistlingly, so that the three women looked at him. Why, what a fool he was! Worrying about witchcraft, when all Evelyn Sawtelle had been doodling was a child playing ball — the child she couldn’t have; a stick queen — herself; a tower — her husband’s office as chairman of the sociology department, or some other and more fundamental potency; a hanged man — Hervey’s impotence (that was an idea!); fearful man and truck — her own sexual energy horrifying and crushing Hervey.

He chuckled again, so that the three women lifted their eyebrows. He looked around at them enigmatically.

“And yet,” he asked himself, continuing his earlier ruminations, in what was, at first, a much lighter vein, “why not?”

Three witch women using magic as Tansy had, to advance their husbands’ careers and their own.

Making use of their husbands’ special knowledge to give magic a modern twist. Suspicious and worried because Tansy had given up magic; afraid she’d found a much stronger variety and was planning to make use of it.

And Tansy — suddenly unprotected, possibly unaware of the change in their attitude toward her because, in giving up magic, she had lost her sensitivity to the supernatural, her “woman’s intuition.”

Why not carry it a step further? Maybe all women were the same. Guardians of mankind’s ancient customs and traditions, including the practice of witchcraft. Fighting their husbands’ battles from behind the scenes, by sorcery. Keeping it a secret; and on those occasions when they were discovered, conveniently explaining it as feminine susceptibility to superstitious lads.

Half of the human race still actively practicing sorcery.

Why not?

“It’s your play, Norman,” said Mrs. Sawtelle, sweetly.

“You look as if you had something on your mind,” said Mrs. Gunnison.

“How are you getting along up there, Norm?” her husband called. “Those women got you buffaloed?”

Buffaloed? Norman came back to reality with a jerk. That was just what they almost had done. And all because the human imagination was a thoroughly unreliable instrument, like a rubber ruler. Let’s see, if he played his king it might set up a queen in Mrs. Gunnison’s hand so she could get in and run her spades.