Petty Magic (5 page)

Most of the people they tortured and executed in those days weren’t even witches—and in those dark times you might accuse
any
woman of witchcraft. The charges were generally preposterous: if a destitute old woman was
really
a witch, wouldn’t she have made herself rich and beautiful—or at least rich? (Or in the case of one-legged Elizabeth Clark, first victim of the Chelmsford hysteria of 1645, she’d have grown herself a new limb.) Ergo: not a witch.

But back then it was only men with monstrous egos and no capacity for logic who banged the gavels and built the scaffolds. They accused you, imprisoned you and seized your assets, starved and tortured you until they extracted a false confession—but that’s not the worst of it, oh no! Once you were dead and buried in an unmarked grave, they sent your family a bill for the coal and wood they’d used to burn you—or, in the case of Goody Harbinger, the rope with which they’d strung her up.

It’s the flying on broomsticks that
really
amuses me. The reality isn’t quite so dramatic: I go by bus most days. Of course, we don’t generally travel along with the unwashed masses, but I must conserve my oomph for my seductions. (For this same reason I don’t, shall we say,
persuade
an ill-mannered man to give up his seat.) Our preferred means of transport is the “loo flue.” Why do we travel by toilet? First, it is the only public place in which one may find a few moments’ privacy. Second, your mind wanders while you’re on the throne, does it not? While you’re doing your business you are always thinking about being someplace else. The third reason is that toilets are fixed points: they are generally in frequent use even when their maintenance has ceased, so that it is easy to travel between them. We are never
inside
the sewer system, mind you; it is merely a navigational aid. Travel by privy is possible as well, though it’s best to use them only to go to the places you know by heart, and using a loo on a train or plane is like telling a ticket agent to surprise you.

Flying on broomsticks—“transvection,” those self-appointed witch-hunters called it—is only a small part of the hysterical mythology imposed upon us. They used to say we traveled in our dreams to a witches’ Sabbath, where we would feast on babies and take turns kissing the devil’s arse.

We have our own mythology, of course. I always found it rather poignant to read of the “Sons of Adam” and “Daughters of Eve” in the works of C. S. Lewis, but I roll my eyes whenever I hear those silly dabblers refer to themselves as the “Daughters of Lilith.”
We
are the daughters of Lilith. They say she was with child when Adam cast her out of the Garden and asked for a more obedient replacement, and that Lilith, exempt from the punishment imposed after the Affair of the Apple, walks the earth to this very day. This is why we, her descendants, live so much longer than ordinary women; it is only because of our fathers and grandfathers that we are not immortal.

Now, you might be wondering how we can go on living so long without anybody getting suspicious. It’s quite simple: we become our own daughters and granddaughters in the official census, and when anybody starts getting a little too nosy we distract him with a nice thick slab of ambrosia cake. We don’t worry about the neighbors anymore because our families are simply too big for them to keep track of.

Otherwise, our great-grandmothers were protofeminists who engaged in frequent and often underhanded acts of social subterfuge, dropping full-strength sleeping tonics in the pint glasses of all the local wife beaters and replacing the text in the Sunday missals with demands for universal suffrage. Others weren’t so subtle. Marion Peacock and Philomena Jester used to stand on dairy crates outside a millinery on Alabaster Street handing out leaflets explaining how corsetry was indirectly responsible for puerperal exhaustion and shouting things like “It is the men who dictate the fashion, for that is the means by which they enslave us.” Their shrill proclamations distracted their neighbors from ever suspecting they turned themselves into great golden Labradors to frolic in the town park on Saturday afternoons.

When I said Goody Harbinger arranged her daughter’s disappearance, it is the oomph to which I refer. A beldame may willingly hand her power to another, for an hour or a week, and when this is done she falls into a dead sleep that lasts until her sister’s return. And in rare instances, as in the story of my ancestor, she may also hand it over for keeps.

Morven has done this for me on occasion. Well, all right: in truth, she does it all the time. I have long since ceased to ask when I might reciprocate, and whenever I make even the slightest hint she responds with a knowing but good-natured sigh. I kiss her cheek and make other expressions of blithe gratitude as she eases herself into bed. She simply hasn’t a taste for boys
or
travel, which are really the only reasons one would need more oomph anyway.

But she’s a great one for the needles. When a person knits, she frequently and inadvertently weaves stray strands of her own hair into her work. So Morven might knit a pair of pullovers for two old chums whose friendship is floundering, pick the strands from their brushes and weave them into one another’s sweaters, and their problems will prove surmountable. This sympathetic magic works on ordinary people, too. My sister and her friends spend much of their time knitting receiving blankets for preemies and pompom caps for cancer patients. Each stitch has its own therapeutic value: diamond stitch for immune deficiencies, brioche stitch for clinical depression, seed stitch for rheumatism, and so forth. They generally do prefer to knit for strangers, as the consequences of an imperfect garment can spark a feud that wears on for decades. Back around the time the Harveysville Inn started boasting of Washington’s apocryphal visit, young Lilith Peacock knit a pair of baby booties for one of the Jester girls. Poor Lilith dropped a stitch but never noticed her mistake, and when the baby died she was ostracized by most of the coven for well on forty years afterward. Grudges can form all too easily when you live as long as we do.

But don’t go thinking we’re as heartless as all that. Honestly, most of the time we’re more Christian than the Christians. We believe in an omnipotent power, and the law of karma, and the innate goodness of humankind despite all the piles of evidence to the contrary. We believe in the immortality of the soul and in its frequent recycling. We go on, of this I am certain; but before we die we leave a little piece of ourselves in a certain object kept in the family home, so that the wisdom accrued over a long, long lifetime will never be lost.

Well, perhaps not
never
. Hard-earned wisdom is like an old leather shoe—no matter how serviceable, it outlasts its usefulness eventually. After a hundred years or two—once her children and grandchildren are old enough to follow her—an ancestor generally decides she’s ready for a do-over. So she comes back, usually within the same family, though she’ll have no recollection of who she was before—just like an ordinary human.

The Warrens of New York City

7.

I
LIVE IN
an old tenement building on Cross Street, though you may not have heard of it since my block was torn down in 1898. On the Lower East Side there used to be three streets, Anthony, Cross, and Orange, that converged into the Five Points, and the folks who lived there called it Cat’s Hollow. Most of the old flophouses are gone now, in the ordinary world I mean, but our neighborhood is still called Cat’s Hollow—and we, unlike its original inhabitants, will never live in the shadow of eviction.

This is precisely why we reside off the map. Rent control doesn’t exceed the century mark, see, so if you want to live on an ordinary street you’ll have to contend with your landlord asking pointedly after your health (and you
will
have to move in the end, lest the buzzard report you to the Feds). My bathtub’s in the kitchen, the floor slopes, and I often hear spectral children whimpering in the middle of the night, but I’ve been here more than sixty years now and I won’t be moving again. It’s so much simpler to live in a reclaimed building, though it does make entertaining outside the covens rather impossible. Urban witchcraft is fraught with such mundane considerations.

There are twenty-seven under-neighborhoods on the island of Manhattan, warrens we call them, and as you’d expect they are mostly concentrated in the island’s southernmost districts. We have our own shops, libraries, night schools, banks, cafés, and theaters, and all within buildings long since demolished in ordinary Manhattan.

We have converted into apartments such vanished gems as the Singer and New York World buildings. It’s still possible to take a stroll through the Vauxhall Gardens on a Sunday afternoon. You can catch
She Stoops to Conquer
at the Nassau Street Theatre or diving horses at the Hippodrome. We use the old Pennsylvania Station for an exhibition space. The printing houses that put out seditious pamphlets during the Revolutionary era still produce our weekly newspapers, though if you remove them from the warren the words vanish off the page.

All our neighborhoods have retained their original character. The Pandora Securities Company is located in the Gillender Building on Wall Street, for instance; there’s Boston Avenue for the swanky gals (who still throw nightly cocktail parties at the Stewart and Astor mansions), Little Hammersley for the fauxhemians, and Cat’s Hollow for those of us who don’t mind the lingering whiff of squalor. Oh, it’s not so grim as you might suppose; only the structurally sound tenements have been preserved by the reclamation board, and they’ve long since cleared the riffraff out of Mulberry Bend. No one’s training polecats or picking pockets these days—quieter and cleaner than your ordinary Chinatown, now, that’s for sure.

Life must be easier in old-world cities, where “demolition” is a four-letter word, and so there is little need for hidden streets and all the requisite jiggery-pokery at post office and electric company. In places like London, Paris, and Edinburgh there are plenty of dark nooks where one may dwell undisturbed, where we doddering biddies of impossible age merely add to the atmosphere. European beldames have their warrens too, but they’re smaller, and the buildings inside them are often a thousand years older than ours are.

Our graveyards are hidden everywhere, though—urban or rural, old-world or new—to avoid the troublesome truth that the deceased was two hundred fifty years of age. We have our own undertakers.

Now, you might be wondering how one gets into a warren, provided one lives there. We enter our neighborhoods through gated alleyways: red-bricked, ivy poking through the wrought-iron slats so you can’t see in. Posh but inconspicuous, like the entrances to Grove Court or Milligan Place. There are such crannies all over the city, no matter how completely the skyscrapers and hotels appear to have gobbled up the landscape.

But where one would expect to see a lot of quaint old town houses around a leafy courtyard, one finds instead the places vanished long since: a stable yard without any horses; a tiny swath of virgin forest above a tinkling stream; or a colonial cemetery, headstones poking out of the tall grass at precarious angles and inhabitants with names like Amos or Josiah. Let’s say I pass through the gate on West Houston. I’ll cut through one such graveyard, full of shadows even at noon because of the apartment buildings all around it. I turn the corner at the end of the alley and I’m on Little Hammersley Street, with its brownstones gutted in fires and corner gardens lost to the concrete jungle.

In the downtown warrens especially one finds a gallimaufry of architectural styles, rustic colonial dwellings wedged between posh Beaux Arts office buildings and so forth. Some warrens are always bustling and others look deserted in the daytime. Population-wise, the only thing that sets our neighborhoods apart is that they’re disproportionately female, and the absence of automobile traffic is, of course, another remarkable aspect. Otherwise, they look much like ordinary streets: chic young women sail by on vintage three-speeders and sip vanilla lattes in the parlors of old brothels; folks take a tipple at any of the clapboard taverns erected by the Dutch, with their low doorways and empty kegs lined up along the curb, those last few drops of ale ever dripping from the bungholes onto the cobblestones. Grannies thumb through leather-bound grimoires in secondhand bookshops or climb the steps into a crumbling church, now a covenstead, for a spell of quiet reflection. We save all the churches the Christians tear down—it’s the irony we relish above all else.

Now, I know what you’ve been thinking: Evelyn, that doesn’t make any sense. How can you live in a building that was torn down a century ago? I shall endeavor to explain.

All over the world there are isolated pockets in which time and space cease to correspond, so that more than one person or edifice or what have you can be said to coexist in exactly the same location. Whether or not they exist at precisely the same
time
is still a matter of dispute among our physicists. Who knows, we might be living on the lip of a wormhole.

In the evening sometimes I look out my back window and watch the traffic on the East River, and I see awfully strange ships, boats looking entirely too old to float, furling their sails as they pull into the old slips. But I don’t spend much time thinking about it. We’re all of us living in the past anyhow, so what does it matter? Nostalgia poisons the present, that’s what I always say—but somehow I can never seem to help myself.