The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike

the beautiful pale herons who customarily nest in the lee of the property seek temporary refuge elsewhere. Progress has its price!
    Van Home, though a genial host, is modest about his many enterprises and hopes to enjoy seclusion and opportunity for meditation in his new residence.
    "I was attracted," he told your inquiring reporter, "to Rhode Island by the kind of space and beauty it affords, rare along the Eastern Seaboard in these troubled and overpopulated times. I feel at home here already.
    "This is one heck of a spot!" he added informally, standing with your reporter on the ruins of the old Lenox dock and gazing out upon the vista of marsh, drumlin, channel, low-lying shrubland, and distant ocean horizon visible from the second floor.
    The house with its vast stretches of parqueted maple floor and high ceiling bearing chandelier rosettes of molded plaster plus dentil molding along the sides felt chilly on the day of our fall visit, with much of the new "master's" equipment and furniture still in its sturdy packing cases, but he assured your reporter that the coming winter held no terrors for our resourceful host.
    Van Home plans to install a number of solar panels over the slates of the great roof and furthermore feels close to the eventual perfection of a closely guarded process that will render consumption of fossil fuels needless in the near future. Speed the day!
    The grounds now abandoned to sumac, ailanthus, chokecherry and other weed trees the new proprietor envisions as a semi-tropical paradise brimming with exotic vegetation sheltered for the winter in the Lenox mansion's elaborate sohirium-cum-greenhou se. The period statuary adorning the once-Versailles-like mall, now unfortunately so eroded by years of weather that many figures lack noses and hands, the proud owner plans to restore indoors, substituting Fiberglas replicas along the stately mall (well remembered in its glory by elderly citizens of this area) in the manner of the celebrated caryatids at the Parthenon in At hens, Greece .
    The causeway, Van Home said with an expansive gesture so characteristic of the man, could be improved by the addition of anchored aluminum pontoon sections at the lowest portions.
    "A dock would be a lot of fun," he volunteered in a possibly humorous vein. "You could run a Hovercraft over to Newport or up to Providence."
    Van Home shares his extensive residence with no more c ompany than an assistant-cum-butl er, Mr. Fidel Malaguer, and an adorable fluffy Angora kitten whimsically yclept Thumbkin, because the animal has extra thumbs on several paws.
    A man of impressive vision and warmth, your reporter welcomed the newcomer to this fabled region of South County confident that she spoke on behalf of many neighbors.
    The Lenox Manse has again become a place to keep an eye on!
    "You went there!" Alexandra jealously accused Sukie, over the phone, having read the article in the Word.
    "Sweetie, it was an assignment."
    "And whose idea was the assignment?"
    "Mine," Sukie admitted. "Clyde wasn't sure it was news. And sometimes in cases like this when you talk about what a lovely home et cetera the person gets robbed the next week and sues the newspaper." Clyde Gabriel, a stringy weary man with a disagreeable do-gooding wife, edited the Word. Apologetically Sukie asked. "What did you think of the piece?"
    "Well, honey, it had color, but you do run on a bit and honestly—now don't be offended—you must watch your participles. They dangle all over the place."
    "If it's less than five paragraphs you don't get a byline. And he got me drunk. First it was rum in the tea and then it was rum without the tea. That creepy spic kept bringing it on this enormous silver tray. I never saw such a big tray; it was like a tabletop, all engraved and chased or whatever."
    "What about him? How did he act? Darryl Van Home."
    "Well he talked a blue streak I must say. Giving me a saliva bath half the time. It was hard to know how seriously to take some of