Conjure Wife

by Fritz Leiber

  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 marriag
e.

  “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?”

  “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 jeal
ousies 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.”