"Leiber,.Fritz.-.Conjure.Wife" - читать интересную книгу автора (Leiber Fritz)

He had never in his life spied on Tansy or seriously thought of doing so, any more than, so far as he knew, she had on him. It was one of those things they had taken for granted as a fundamental of marriage.
But this thing he was tempted toward couldn't be called spying. It was more like a gesture of illicit love, in any case a trifling transgression.
Besides, no human being has the right to consider himself perfect, or even completely adult, to bottle up all naughty urges.
Moreover, he had carried away from the sunny window a certain preoccupation with the riddle of Tansy, the secret of her ability to withstand and best the strangling atmosphere of catclawed Hempneil. Hardly a riddle, of course, and certainly not one to which you could hope to find the answer in her boudoir. Still . . .
He hesitated.
Totem, her white paws curled neatly under her black waistcoat, watched him.
He walked into Tansy's dressing room.
Totem sprang down from the bed and padded after him.
He switched on the rose-shaded lamp and surveyed the rack of dresses, the shelves of shoes. There was a slight disorder, very sane and lovable. A faint perfume conjured up agreeable memories.
He studied the photographs on the wall around the mirror. One of Tansy and himself in partial Indian costume, from three summers back when he had been studying the Yumas. They both looked solemn, as if trying very seriously to be good Indians. Another, rather faded, showed them in 1928 bathing suits, standing on an old pier smiling squintily with the sun in their eyes. That took him hack east to Bayport. the summer before they were married. A third showed an uproarious Negro baptism in midriver. That was when he had held the Hazelton Fellowship and been gathering materials for his _Social Patterns of the Southern Negro_ and later "Feminine Element in Superstition." Tansy had been invaluable to him that busy half-year when he had hammered out the groundwork of a reputation. She had accompanied him in the field, writing down the vivid, rambling recollections of ancient, bright-eyed men and women who remembered the slave days because they themselves had been slaves. He recalled how slight and boyish and intense she'd seemed, even a little gauche, that summer when they'd just left Gorham College before coming to Hempnell. She'd certainly gained remarkably in poise since then.
The fourth picture showed an old Negro conjure doctor with wrinkled face and proud high forehead under a battered slouch hat. He stood with shoulders back and eyes quietly flaring, as if surveying the whole dirty-pink culture and rejecting it because he had a deeper and stronger knowledge of his own. Ostrich plumes and scarified cheeks couldn't have made him look any more impressive. Norman remembered the fellow well -- he had been one of their more valuable and also more difficult informants, requiring several visits before the notebook had been satisfied.
He looked down at the dressing table and the ample array of cosmetics. Tansy had been the first of the Hempnell faculty wives to use lipstick and lacquer her nails. There had been veiled criticism and some talk of "the example we set our students," but she had stuck it out until Hulda Gunnison had appeared at the Faculty Frolic with what astronomically intense observation revealed was a careless but unmistakable crimson smear on her mouth. Then all had been well.
Flanked by cold cream jars was a small photograph of himself, with a little pile of small change, all dimes and quarters, in front of it.
He roused himself. This wasn't the vaguely illegitimate spying he had intended. He pulled out a drawer at random, hastily scanned the pile of rolled-up stockings that filled it, shut it, took hold of the ivory knob of the next.
And paused.
This was rather silly, it occurred to him. Simultaneously he realized that he had just squeezed the last drop from the peak of his mood. As when he had turned from the window, but more ominously, the moment seemed to freeze, as if all reality, every bit of it he lived to this moment, were something revealed by a lightning flash that would the next instant blink out, leaving inky darkness. That rather common buzzing-in-the-ears, everything-too-real sensation.
From the doorway Totem looked up at him.
But sillier still to analyze a trifling whim, as if it could mean anything one way or the other.
To show it didn't, he'd look in one more drawer.
It jammed, so he gave it a sharp tug before it jerked free.
A large cardboard box toward the back caught his eyes. He edged up the cover and took out one of the tiny glass-stoppered bottles that filled it. What sort of a cosmetic would this be? Too dark for face powder. More like a geologist's soil specimen. An ingredient for a mud pack? Hardly. Tansy had a herb garden. Could that be involved?
The dry, dark-brown granules shifted smoothly, like sand in an hourglass, as he rotated the glass cylinder. The label appeared, in Tansy's clear script. "Julia Trock, Roseland." He couldn't recall any Julia Trock. And why should the name Roseland seem distasteful? His hand knocked aside the cardboard cover as he reached for a second bottle, identical with the first, except that the contents had a somewhat reddish tinge and the label read, "Phillip Lassiter, Hill." A third, contents same color as the first: "J. P. Thorndyke, Roseland." Then a handful, quickly snatched up: "Emelyn Scatterday, Roseland." "Mortimer Pope, Hill." "The Rev. Bufort Ames, Roseland." They were, respectively, brown, reddish, and brown.
The silence in the house grew thunderous; even the sunlight in the bedroom seemed to sizzle and fry, as his mind rose to a sudden pitch of concentration on the puzzle. "Roseland and Hill, Roseland and Hill, Oh we went to Roseland and Hill," -- like a nursery rhyme somehow turned nasty, making the glass cylinders repugnant to his fingers, "-- but we never came back."
Abruptly the answer came.
The two local cemeteries.
Graveyard dirt.
Soil specimens all right. Graveyard dirt from particular graves. A chief ingredient of Negro conjure magic.
With a soft thud Totem landed on the table and began to sniff inquisitively at the bottles, springing away as Norman plunged his hand into the drawer. He felt smaller boxes behind the big one, yanked suddenly at the whole drawer, so it fell to the floor. In one of the boxes were bent, rusty, worn bits of iron -- horseshoe nails. In the other were calling-card envelopes, filled with snippings of hair, each labeled like the bottles. But he knew most of these names -- "Hervey Sawtelle . . . Gracine Pollard . . . Hulda Gunnison . . ." And in one labeled "Evelyn Sawtelle" -- red-lacquered nail clippings.
In the third drawer he drew blank. But the fourth yielded a varied harvest. Packets of small dried leaves and powdered vegetable matter -- so that was what came from Tansy's herb garden along with kitchen seasonings? Vervain, vinmoin, devil's stuff, the labels said. Bits of lodestone with iron filings clinging to them. Goose quills which spilled quicksilver when he shook them. Small squares of flannel, the sort that Negro conjure doctors use for their "tricken bags" or "hands." A box of old silver coins and silver filings -- strong protective magic; giving significance to the silver coins in front of his photograph.
But Tansy was so sane, so healthily contemptuous of palmistry, astrology, numerology and all other superstitious fads. A hardheaded New Englander. So well versed, from her work with him, in the psychological background of superstition and primitive magic. So well versed --
He found himself thumbing through a dog-eared copy of his own _Parallelisms in Superstition and Neurosis_. It looked like the one he had lost around the house -- was it eight years ago? Beside a formula for conjuration was a marginal notation in Tansy's script: "Doesn't work. Substitute copper filings for brass. Try in dark of moon instead of full."
"Norman --"
Tansy was standing in the doorway.









2


It is the people we know best who can, on rare occasions, seem most unreal to us. For a moment the familiar face registers as merely an arbitrary arrangement of colored surfaces, without even the shadowy personality with which we invest a strange face glimpsed in the street.
Norman Saylor felt he wasn't looking at his wife, but at a painting of her. It was as if some wizardly Renoir or Toulouse-Lautrec had painted Tansy with the air for a canvas -- boldly blocked in the flat cheeks in pale flesh tones faintly undertinged with green, drew them together to a small defiant chin; smudged crosswise with careless art the red thoughtful lips, the gray-green maybe humorous eyes, the narrow low-arched brows with single vertical furrow between; created with one black stroke the childishly sinister bangs, swiftly smeared the areas of shadowed white throat and wine-colored dress; caught perfectly the feel of the elbow that hugged a package from the dressmaker's, as the small ugly hands lifted to remove a tiny hat that was another patch of the wine color with a highlight representing a little doodad of silvered glass.
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.