Season of the Witch

by James Leo Herlihy

  We talked for over an hour and then he said he had to catch the ferry.

  I said, “What ferry?”

  “Staten Island.”

  “You’re kidding!” I said.

  “No, why?”

  “Because that’s where I’m going.”

  Amazing, the things that come out of my mouth!

  “You live there?” he said.

  “No. Just visiting.”

  So I went with him. The ride was lovely. I saw the Statue of Liberty. He bought me an orange soda. We talked, but not the whole trip. Sometimes we just looked at the water and at the other boats. I began to wonder what I’d do when we got to Staten Island, but I decided to leave it to inspiration. For one brief moment I played the game of pretending we were a father and daughter who were really on their way home. Then I thought, I’ve come this far. I’m determined to see where he lives.

  “Does your wife meet the boat?” I asked.

  “No, she’s in Pittsburgh,” he said. “The kids, too. We’re separated.” He didn’t mention her again. I got the impression the subject was painful, but I couldn’t resist asking about “the kids.” After all, they are my siblings and I felt I had some sort of a right. He pulled out his wallet and showed me a photograph. There are two, which means I have a half-sister 11 and half-brother 9. I studied the photographs so carefully and for such a long time he asked me if I had some special interest in children. I said I did.

  My sister, whose name is Marie, looks like our father, and she looks like him in a way that makes me realize I do, too. It’s in the bones; we both have broad faces with sturdy cheeks and jaws. I’m blond and my father has dark hair, and perhaps that’s why I hadn’t noticed before how similar we were. Marie is blond, too. And my brother, whose name is Andrew, is dark like our father, but I can’t tell much else about him. In the photograph, he’s wearing a cowboy hat and most of his face is in shadow.

  Then I asked a dangerous question. I said, “Do you have any other children, or just these two?” And while he was thinking about the question, frowning and looking out across the water, I had to hang on to the railing because my legs had turned to spaghetti.

  “Why you ask so many questions?” he said. I tried to shrug it off lightly, but he kept looking at me with a certain smile he has—if you can call it a smile. Actually it’s just a way of holding his face; he squares his jaw and lets his mouth wrinkle up on one side. “You do,” he said. “You ask many questions.”

  I told him I’d always been inquisitive by nature. I said people often found my questions offensive, and I apologized.

  We were quiet for a while, and I thought, Why in the hell don’t I tell him he’s my father and get it over with? At the time, I couldn’t come up with an answer. I just felt some awful danger in the situation. But now I don’t know what the danger was. Partly of course I wanted to see what kind of man he was, see how he behaved with a girl he didn’t know. Maybe even get some clue about how he’d treated my mother. If he knew I was his daughter, he’d start acting like a parent, i.e., phony, and I’d never find out who he was.

  Apparently something in me really wanted to let him have the truth, because I kept saying dangerous things. Once, for instance, when he was looking at me like a woman (I was coming back from the ladies’ room and he was watching me walk toward him), I felt a certain alarm about leading him on, and decided to look for some way of turning his thoughts about me in a safer direction. So I said, “You know something? From far away, you look just like my father!”

  “Your father!”

  “Truly, you do!” I said. “Exactly, in fact!”

  He didn’t seem to care much for the comparison, so I tried to make it more palatable. “My father was a very handsome man, so you should be highly complimented.”

  “Okay. I’m complimented.”

  “Really! He was a wonderful man, too. Strong principles, and a terrific sense of—decency. You’d have liked each other. You have everything in common. Except of course, he’s dead. And you’re very much alive. Listen, do you know what I’d like to do? I’d like to cook for you some night. In fact, I’d love to! Would you let me?”

  “You want to cook for me?”

  “Yes!”

  “Tonight?”

  “Wonderful!”

  “I thought you got a date?”

  “That’s easy,” I said. “One little phone call. Okay? Will you let me?”

  “Okay. I let you cook. You know how, huh?”

  “Mm, I used to cook for my father.”

  “Am I gonna hear about him some more?”

  “No. I won’t mention him again, I promise. But you do remind me of him.”

  “I don’t know, maybe I don’t like that.”

  “Why? I told you he was handsome.”

  “Maybe I like to look like me.”

  “You do!” I said. “You look exactly like yourself.”

  Staten Island looks like small towns must have looked 40 years ago. Everything looks out of date. A stranger plunked down in the middle of it would never believe he was in New York City, especially not in 1969.

  We drove for about ten minutes in his ancient Ford station wagon and then turned down an old road lined with trees and into a driveway next to an enormous old wooden house. We got out of the car. Behind the house was a barn and the autumn remains of a vegetable garden, and all around the edges of the place were trees. In a place like this, I thought, I could finish my old dream. I could take off all my clothes and go naked into the trees and make awful noises and perform nature rites and . . .

  “It’s a farm!” I said. “You live on a farm!”

  “I know I live on a farm.” He was smiling. “You like farms?”

  “I love them! But I’ve never been on one before!”

  “Come look.” He led the way to the barn. There was a hayloft without any hay in it, and several storage bins with potatoes and carrots and onions and apples in them. He handed me a basket.

  “You come to cook,” he said, “get vegetables.”

  While the stew was cooking, my father showed me every little corner of the farm. He has three and a half acres with lots of trees, a house with seven bedrooms, a big barn and two small ones, a chicken coop, twelve chickens, three ducks, two cats. As I inspected it all, I kept whispering to myself, “Witch, you are the farmer’s daughter!” Somehow his not knowing it made it more true.

  I could tell this farmer wasn’t used to having company. He was feeling the same things I feel when I let a special person read something I’ve written. I read it with them—using their eyes. And that’s what Hank was doing. He was looking at his place through my eyes. Naturally, I let him know how wonderful I thought it was, and this fresh view of his kingdom brought him a great deal of excitement. Before dinner he had a second drink, which he said was unusual. He asked me why I didn’t drink, and I said because it didn’t make me high.

  “Me either,” he said, “but I like the fire.” He pointed at his chest and belly.

  Dinner was all right. There was no wine for the stew, but I used lots of garlic and lemon. I noticed something was depressing him, but I don’t think it could have been the food, because, even though he didn’t offer any praise, he ate a lot of it. For dessert the only thing I could find was some home-canned peaches in a little pantry off the kitchen. There must have been a dozen jars there. I asked him if it was all right to use them and he said, “No,” very decisively. Then he said, “You eat some if you want. Not for me.” Obviously, the peach discussion had made him even sadder. I suppose his wife had canned them in happier times, so I left them on the shelf and had bread and jam for dessert.

  It was dark outside now and very quiet. I felt as if we were way off in the country somewhere. My father’s mood became heavier and heavier until pretty soon the entire house was forlorn. I was tempted to try to bring the place to life by chattering, but something told me not to. I made coffee. He used bourbon in it instead of cream and kept sipping it in silence. Eve
ry once in a while he’d say something so declarative it didn’t seem to invite an answer. “I’m not a drinker.” “There’s no woman here any more.” “Sunset comes too soon.” “This place is big.” And he’d look around the huge old dining room and out the window into the dark. The only time he looked at me was when he thought I wasn’t noticing. He liked my being there, but still I knew my presence made him feel awkward about himself. After one especially long silence, I said, “I like it here.” He looked around, using my eyes again.

  “It used to be better,” he said.

  I know he was talking about the days when his wife and Andrew and Marie were still with him. My father is an extremely articulate person—not in his speech but in his face and body. I knew what had happened between him and his family without being told. I can’t be really sure, of course, but still I would bet my eyes I’m right in many of my guesses about him and his life. Some of my guesses might have been set off by certain scraps of information that came out, but most of them are based on the feelings I could see passing through him, especially in his eyes. When the liquor had relaxed something behind them, they became completely open and naked. And all the troubles that usually live in his forehead moved into these big brown show windows.

  Fifteen years ago, he’d married one of his students. They’d lived together in some awful Manhattan slum where they began to dream of a good life somewhere in the country. One day when the children, my brother and sister (I love writing “my brother and sister”), were still small, they took a ride on the Staten Island Ferry and spent the afternoon driving around the island. The station wagon was probably new in those days. Anyway, they bought the farm and moved in, and somehow, after only two or three years, the dream began to go sour. Maybe it was too hard teaching in the city and working the farm at the same time. I feel certain, too, that he began to expect too much from his woman and from the two children, that he’d been really hard on them and had finally driven them away. And now he was full of loneliness and regrets and confusion and pride. It would be hard to guess which of those things was the most painful for him to bear. Probably the regrets and the pride.

  There must be something in me that’s terribly attracted to sadness. I suppose that’s sick and I wonder about it but I don’t really care. Yes, I do. I care. But I care more about the sadness. I have this tremendous desire to make it go away. I’ve always known this about myself, but I’d never experienced it so sharply as I did just an hour ago at my father’s table. And it caused me to do something foolish. Really foolish. But I don’t really regret it. (Furthermore, I’m getting pretty sick of being told by myself that I’m foolish! So cool it! I am who I am.)

  I got up from the table and walked around to my father and stood behind him. I put my hands on his head, rested them on his forehead, and prayed that something in them would cause everything in his whole heart and mind and soul to be soothed. But in my eagerness to heal, I’d forgotten that this poor lonely beautiful man has a body, too, and that he could easily misunderstand my affection for him. And of course he did. Completely. After a few seconds, he took my hand and lowered it to his mouth and kissed it. And he kissed it in a way that caused me to realize I’d made a really ghastly blunder. Then he stood up and pulled me toward him and pressed himself close to me and kissed me. Suddenly I found myself trembling and crying. I felt the most tremendous love for him, and at the same time an overwhelming horror at the situation I’d created. It seemed hopeless. And while I stood there crying and trembling, I said—to myself, I think, or was it out loud? I hope not—I said, God help me, what have I done? And whether it was out loud or not, something in him heard me. He put one of his thumbs on my face and took some of my tears and licked them off. “Crying tastes good,” he said. But he wasn’t smiling, he was dead serious. “What you think I am?” he said. “Some old man with the fire gone out? I’m forty-four years old, far from dead yet. I like to lick tears from a girl’s face. And that’s not all. I like to lie with them, too. Oh, boy, look at you, big surprise, huh? Ach! Come on. I take you to the ferry, crazy dumb chick.”

  He took out his keys. I got my bag and followed him out to the car. We drove in silence for a while. Then I said, “I wasn’t teasing you. Honestly I wasn’t. I like you an awful lot. I think you’re a wonderful man. I just didn’t realize—how I was acting.”

  After a moment he looked at me. “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Why you call yourself Witch?”

  “It’d take a long time to explain.”

  “Crazy name. I don’t like it. What’s your real name?”

  “On my birth certificate it’s—well it’s complicated. I don’t use my real name.”

  He shrugged. Then he said, “You never have any experience—with a man?”

  I tried to think what I might say, and how it might sound to him, and nothing seemed right. The reason is obvious to me now. Nothing would have been right—except the truth. And the truth was something I was no longer even tempted to tell. So I kept quiet.

  At the ferry building, he stopped the car and as he reached past me to open the door, he said, “Good meal.”

  I said, “Thank you, and I’m awfully sorry I—”

  “Why don’t you shut up?” he said.

  I admitted that was a good idea, and then I kissed him on the cheek and got out. He drove away without looking at me.

  The father drove away without looking at his daughter.

  Why can’t my mind stop playing with these simple facts? Why can’t I get it through my head that except for some meaningless accident of blood, this man and I are nothing to each other?

  CANAL STREET, WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 24, 1969

  Roy wasn’t here all day yesterday. I started out the day merely worried and ended up obsessed. I tried to work on some pornography for a while in the afternoon, partly to get my mind off Roy, but I couldn’t really get behind it. That worries me, too, because I’ve got to come up with some way of making money.

  This afternoon Doris asked me where I thought Roy and Archie were. I tried to play it lighthearted and unconcerned. I said I supposed they were out on some mad adventure. Ha ha ha. (When will I stop being such a phony?) Saying it out loud was the first time I’d actually formed the thought —some mad adventure—and the words scared me. Not the words, but the possibilities that lurked behind them. When I’m worried like this, my witch sense is none too reliable. It’s got too much imagination mixed up in it and all it does is present me with clammy little still photos from horror movies that couldn’t possibly be true.

  But why not? This is the city where those movies take place! Roy’s already had a knife aimed at his gizzard and one cooling off his throat simultaneously, and I personally have come within inches of being beaten to death by a black lesbian prostitute. For all I know, he’s been mashed by Godzilla and turned into hambu

  Someone’s coming up the stairs. Let it be him.

  Half an hour later

  It was. It was Roy. We’ve had a talk and a hug and now he’s taking a nap. I’m supposed to think everything’s okay. But I don’t. He doesn’t look right and he doesn’t act right. He’s all splotchy-looking and pale, and his eyes have disappeared. He’s not behind them.

  He said Archie had the use of a pad on Spring Street that belonged to some friend who’d gone to California, and they’d gotten hung up over there with “these people.”

  I said, “What people?”

  “Just people Archie knows.”

  “Roy, where are you? You’re not behind your eyes.”

  “Oh, that’s only because I’m asleep. The rest of me is sitting up talking to you, but I’m really asleep.”

  “Well, then, you’d better go join yourself on the bed.”

  I went upstairs with him, mother-style, plumped the pillow, fussed with the sheets. I said, “Roy, I hope we’ll do something together tomorrow. Because I’ve been missing you something awful.”

  He said, “Okay, sure.”


  He got in bed and I tucked him in and kissed him. Then I thought what an icky female trick I’d just pulled, beating him over the head with how much I’d missed him, making him promise to spend tomorrow with me.

  I said, “Roy we don’t have to. I was just . . . “

  But his eyes were closed, and I thought, Oh, Witch, shut up and let the poor kid sleep!

  CANAL STREET, 7:10 P.M., THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 1969

  Peter is back and all hell has broken loose. I’ve borrowed Jeanette’s typewriter so I can work fast. We’re having dinner at eight-thirty and I’m giving myself until then to get this up to date. I have a feeling this is going to be the most interesting evening since we arrived in New York.

  He got here at about five while Roy and I were out shopping, and the place has been in an uproar ever since. I’m in an absolute panic to get it all written down. If events continue to pile up at the present rate, my autobiography is going to be the longest book ever written.

  Our first view of Peter Friedman could hardly have been more terrifying. He was in a rage, like a wild man. His eyes were shooting flames and his face was pure white, he was making violent noises with his hands by socking them together, and he was shouting at the top of his voice. He’s quite tall and his shoulders are massive. He has a high forehead with black wavy longish-but-not-long hair, and sideburns that are so full they’re semi-muttonchops. I don’t know whether or not to describe him as handsome. The word impressive seems more accurate.