Suspicion

Before he is even formally introduced, the character of "the man with the hairy backs to his hands" is surrounded in intrigue. In an already ambiguous beginning, the characters' curiosity about this newcomer shrouded in mystery builds the reader's interest to a paramount. The man is an inventor, has no wife or family, and owns what seems to be an unnecessarily sizeable number of pianos. While his name escapes Jane when Alexandra inquires, she does remember that his name has a "''van', 'von', or 'de' in it'"[pg 7]. Which gives the inevitable impression that this man is one of old money, and though the audience may not admit it, the thought of the possibility that this new character could be a vampire crosses the mind.
He is a descendant of the once grand and influential Lenox family that has dimished to a sparse, unknown and somewhat depressed rag tag of straggling leftover progeny. The generation of the Lenoxes elder to him consists only of a widow by the name of Abigail who is serving out the rest of her miserable existence in Eastwick. Among children, she has the ironic reputation of a witch and she "[goes] about the lanes muttering and cringing from the pebbles thrown at her by children who, called to account by the local constable, claim they are defending themselves against her evil eye".[pg 19]

Not only do the remnants of the Lenox family itself possess an eerie and haunted air, their former residence, the East Beach Mansion, is described in a manner that sketches it in the reader's mind as a dangerously delapidated building that has been "slipping into disrepair since the early 1920s"[pg 21]. The mansion in many ways mirrors the family itself, once luxurious and admired, only to decline into nothing more than a cold and drafty foundation. Updike encourages the cultivation of this image by using contradicting extravagant and gloomy adjectives to contrast the mansion's formerly glamourous state with its current decrepitude:

"The great roof slates, some reddish and some bluish gray, came crashing unobserved in the winter storms and lay like nameless tombstones in summer's lank tangle of uncut grass; the cunningly fashioned copper gutters and flashing turned green and rotten; the ornate octagonal cupola with a view to all points of the compass developed a list to the west; the massive end chimneys, articulated like bumdles of organ pipes or thickly muscled throats, needed mortar and were dropping bricks." [pg 22]
The deteriorated glory of both the Lenox family and the East Beach mansion add to their overall feel of gloomy hauntings and eerie suspicion. The reader can't decide if this new man in the witches' lives is going to be a friend or foe.