Rosemary's Baby

by Ira Levin

  “I don’t know,” Mr. Micklas said. “I could find out for you, though.”

  “It’s a beauty,” Guy said.

  Rosemary said “Isn’t it?” and smiling, looked about at walls and windows. The room would accommodate almost perfectly the nursery she had imagined. It was a bit dark—the windows faced on a narrow courtyard—but the white-and-yellow wallpaper would brighten it tremendously. The bathroom was small but a bonus, and the closet, filled with potted seedlings that seemed to be doing quite well, was a good one.

  They turned to the door, and Guy asked, “What are all these?”

  “Herbs, mostly,” Rosemary said. “There’s mint and basil…I don’t know what these are.”

  Farther along the hallway there was a guest closet on the left, and then, on the right, a wide archway opening onto the living room. Large bay windows stood opposite, two of them, with diamond panes and three-sided window seats. There was a small fireplace in the right-hand wall, with a scrolled white marble mantel, and there were high oak bookshelves on the left.

  “Oh, Guy,” Rosemary said, finding his hand and squeezing it. Guy said “Mm” noncommittally but squeezed back; Mr. Micklas was beside him.

  “The fireplace works, of course,” Mr. Micklas said.

  The bedroom, behind them, was adequate—about twelve by eighteen, with its windows facing on the same narrow courtyard as those of the dining-room-second-bedroom-nursery. The bathroom, beyond the living room, was big, and full of bulbous white brass-knobbed fixtures.

  “It’s a marvelous apartment!” Rosemary said, back in the living room. She spun about with opened arms, as if to take and embrace it. “I love it!”

  “What she’s trying to do,” Guy said, “is get you to lower the rent.”

  Mr. Micklas smiled. “We would raise it if we were allowed,” he said. “Beyond the fifteen-per-cent increase, I mean. Apartments with this kind of charm and individuality are as rare as hen’s teeth today. The new—” He stopped short, looking at a mahogany secretary at the head of the central hallway. “That’s odd,” he said. “There’s a closet behind that secretary. I’m sure there is. There are five: two in the bedroom, one in the second bedroom, and two in the hallway, there and there.” He went closer to the secretary.

  Guy stood high on tiptoes and said, “You’re right. I can see the corners of the door.”

  “She moved it,” Rosemary said. “The secretary; it used to be there.” She pointed to a peaked silhouette left ghost-like on the wall near the bedroom door, and the deep prints of four ball feet in the burgundy carpet. Faint scuff-trails curved and crossed from the four prints to the secretary’s feet where they stood now against the narrow adjacent wall.

  “Give me a hand, will you?” Mr. Micklas said to Guy.

  Between them they worked the secretary bit by bit back toward its original place. “I see why she went into a coma,” Guy said, pushing.

  “She couldn’t have moved this by herself,” Mr. Micklas said; “she was eighty-nine.”

  Rosemary looked doubtfully at the closet door they had uncovered. “Should we open it?” she asked. “Maybe her son should.”

  The secretary lodged neatly in its four footprints. Mr. Micklas massaged his fingers-missing hands. “I’m authorized to show the apartment,” he said, and went to the door and opened it. The closet was nearly empty; a vacuum cleaner stood at one side of it and three or four wood boards at the other. The overhead shelf was stacked with blue and green bath towels.

  “Whoever she locked in got out,” Guy said.

  Mr. Micklas said, “She probably didn’t need five closets.”

  “But why would she cover up her vacuum cleaner and her towels?” Rosemary asked.

  Mr. Micklas shrugged. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. She may have been getting senile after all.” He smiled. “Is there anything else I can show you or tell you?”

  “Yes,” Rosemary said. “What about the laundry facilities? Are there washing machines downstairs?”

  They thanked Mr. Micklas, who saw them out onto the sidewalk, and then they walked slowly uptown along Seventh Avenue.

  “It’s cheaper than the other,” Rosemary said, trying to sound as if practical considerations stood foremost in her mind.

  “It’s one room less, honey,” Guy said.

  Rosemary walked in silence for a moment, and then said, “It’s better located.”

  “God, yes,” Guy said. “I could walk to all the theaters.”

  Heartened, Rosemary leaped from practicality. “Oh Guy, let’s take it! Please! Please! It’s such a wonderful apartment! She didn’t do anything with it, old Mrs. Gardenia! That living room could be—it could be beautiful, and warm, and—oh please, Guy, let’s take it, all right?”

  “Well sure,” Guy said, smiling. “If we can get out of the other thing.”

  Rosemary grabbed his elbow happily. “We will!” she said. “You’ll think of something, I know you will!”

  Guy telephoned Mrs. Cortez from a glass-walled booth while Rosemary, outside, tried to lip-read. Mrs. Cortez said she would give them until three o’clock; if she hadn’t heard from them by then she would call the next party on the waiting list.

  They went to the Russian Tea Room and ordered Bloody Mary’s and chicken salad sandwiches on black bread.

  “You could tell them I’m sick and have to go into the hospital,” Rosemary said.

  But that was neither convincing nor compelling. Instead Guy spun a story about a call to join a company of Come Blow Your Horn leaving for a four-month USO tour of Vietnam and the Far East. The actor playing Alan had broken his hip and unless he, Guy, who knew the part from stock, stepped in and replaced him, the tour would have to be postponed for at least two weeks. Which would be a damn shame, the way those kids over there were slugging away against the Commies. His wife would have to stay with her folks in Omaha…

  He ran it twice and went to find the phone.

  Rosemary sipped her drink, keeping her left hand all-fingers-crossed under the table. She thought about the First Avenue apartment she didn’t want and made a conscientious mental list of its good points; the shiny new kitchen, the dishwasher, the view of the East River, the central air conditioning…

  The waitress brought the sandwiches.

  A pregnant woman went by in a navy blue dress. Rosemary watched her. She must have been in her sixth or seventh month, talking back happily over her shoulder to an older woman with packages, probably her mother.

  Someone waved from the opposite wall—the red-haired girl who had come into CBS a few weeks before Rosemary left. Rosemary waved back. The girl mouthed something and, when Rosemary didn’t understand, mouthed it again. A man facing the girl turned to look at Rosemary, a starved-looking waxen-faced man.

  And there came Guy, tall and handsome, biting back his grin, with yes glowing all over him.

  “Yes?” Rosemary asked as he took his seat opposite her.

  “Yes,” he said. “The lease is void; the deposit will be returned; I’m to keep an eye open for Lieutenant Hartman of the Signal Corps. Mrs. Cortez awaits us at two.”

  “You called her?”

  “I called her.”

  The red-haired girl was suddenly with them, flushed and bright-eyed. “I said ‘Marriage certainly agrees with you, you look marvelous,’” she said.

  Rosemary, ransacking for the girl’s name, laughed and said, “Thank you! We’re celebrating. We just got an apartment in the Bramford!”

  “The Bram?” the girl said. “I’m mad about it! If you ever want to sub-let, I’m first, and don’t you forget it! All those weird gargoyles and creatures climbing up and down between the windows!”

  CHAPTER 2

  HUTCH, SURPRISINGLY, tried to talk them out of it, on the grounds that the Bramford was a “danger zone.”

  When Rosemary had first come to New York in June of 1962 she had joined another Omaha girl and two girls from Atlanta in an apartment on lower Lexington Avenue. Hutch lived next door,
and though he declined to be the full-time father-substitute the girls would have made of him—he had raised two daughters of his own and that was quite enough, thank you—he was nonetheless on hand in emergencies, such as The Night Someone Was on The Fire Escape and The Time Jeanne Almost Choked to Death. His name was Edward Hutchins, he was English, he was fifty-four. Under three different pen names he wrote three different series of boys’ adventure books.

  To Rosemary he gave another sort of emergency assistance. She was the youngest of six children, the other five of whom had married early and made homes close to their parents; behind her in Omaha she had left an angry, suspicious father, a silent mother, and four resenting brothers and sisters. (Only the next-to-the-oldest, Brian, who had a drink problem, had said, “Go on, Rosie, do what you want to do,” and had slipped her a plastic handbag with eighty-five dollars in it.) In New York Rosemary felt guilty and selfish, and Hutch bucked her up with strong tea and talks about parents and children and one’s duty to oneself. She asked him questions that had been unspeakable in Catholic High; he sent her to a night course in philosophy at NYU. “I’ll make a duchess out of this cockney flower girl yet,” he said, and Rosemary had had wit enough to say “Garn!”

  Now, every month or so, Rosemary and Guy had dinner with Hutch, either in their apartment or, when it was his turn, in a restaurant. Guy found Hutch a bit boring but always treated him cordially; his wife had been a cousin of Terence Rattigan, the playwright, and Rattigan and Hutch corresponded. Connections often proved crucial in the theater, Guy knew, even connections at second hand.

  On the Thursday after they saw the apartment, Rosemary and Guy had dinner with Hutch at Klube’s, a small German restaurant on Twenty-third Street. They had given his name to Mrs. Cortez on Tuesday afternoon as one of three references she had asked for, and he had already received and answered her letter of inquiry.

  “I was tempted to say that you were drug addicts or litterbugs,” he said, “or something equally repellent to managers of apartment houses.”

  They asked why.

  “I don’t know whether or not you know it,” he said, buttering a roll, “but the Bramford had rather an unpleasant reputation early in the century.” He looked up, saw that they didn’t know and went on. (He had a broad shiny face, blue eyes that darted enthusiastically, and a few strands of wetted-down black hair combed crossways over his scalp.) “Along with the Isadora Duncans and Theodore Dreisers,” he said, “the Bramford has housed a considerable number of less attractive personages. It’s where the Trench sisters performed their little dietary experiments, and where Keith Kennedy held his parties. Adrian Marcato lived there too; and so did Pearl Ames.”

  “Who were the Trench sisters?” Guy asked, and Rosemary asked, “Who was Adrian Marcato?”

  “The Trench sisters,” Hutch said, “were two proper Victorian ladies who were occasional cannibals. They cooked and ate several young children, including a niece.”

  “Lovely,” Guy said.

  Hutch turned to Rosemary. “Adrian Marcato practiced witchcraft,” he said. “He made quite a splash in the eighteen-nineties by announcing that he had succeeded in conjuring up the living Satan. He showed off a handful of hair and some claw-parings, and apparently people believed him; enough of them, at least, to form a mob that attacked and nearly killed him in the Bramford lobby.”

  “You’re joking,” Rosemary said.

  “I’m quite serious. A few years later the Keith Kennedy business began, and by the twenties the house was half empty.”

  Guy said, “I knew about Keith Kennedy and about Pearl Ames, but I didn’t know Adrian Marcato lived there.”

  “And those sisters,” Rosemary said with a shudder.

  “It was only World War Two and the housing shortage,” Hutch said, “that filled the place up again, and now it’s acquired a bit of Grand-Old-Apartment-House prestige; but in the twenties it was called Black Bramford and sensible people stayed away. The melon is for the lady, isn’t it, Rosemary?”

  The waiter placed their appetizers. Rosemary looked questioningly at Guy; he pursed his brow and gave a quick headshake: It’s nothing, don’t let him scare you.

  The waiter left. “Over the years,” Hutch said, “the Bramford has had far more than its share of ugly and unsavory happenings. Nor have all of them been in the distant past. In 1959 a dead infant was found wrapped in newspaper in the basement.”

  Rosemary said, “But—awful things probably happen in every apartment house now and then.”

  “Now and then,” Hutch said. “The point is, though, that at the Bramford awful things happen a good deal more frequently than ‘now and then.’ There are less spectacular irregularities too. There’ve been more suicides there, for instance, than in houses of comparable size and age.”

  “What’s the answer, Hutch?” Guy said, playing serious-and-concerned. “There must be some kind of explanation.”

  Hutch looked at him for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said. “Perhaps it’s simply that the notoriety of a pair of Trench sisters attracts an Adrian Marcato, and his notoriety attracts a Keith Kennedy, and eventually a house becomes a—a kind of rallying place for people who are more prone than others to certain types of behavior. Or perhaps there are things we don’t know yet—about magnetic fields or electrons or whatever—ways in which a place can quite literally be malign. I do know this, though: the Bramford is by no means unique. There was a house in London, on Praed Street, in which five separate brutal murders took place within sixty years. None of the five was in any way connected with any of the others; the murderers weren’t related nor were the victims, nor were all the murders committed for the same moonstone or Maltese falcon. Yet five separate brutal murders took place within sixty years. In a small house with a shop on the street and an apartment overhead. It was demolished in 1954—for no especially pressing purpose, since as far as I know the plot was left empty.”

  Rosemary worked her spoon in melon. “Maybe there are good houses too,” she said; “houses where people keep falling in love and getting married and having babies.”

  “And becoming stars,” Guy said.

  “Probably there are,” Hutch said. “Only one never hears of them. It’s the stinkers that get the publicity.” He smiled at Rosemary and Guy. “I wish you two would look for a good house instead of the Bramford,” he said.

  Rosemary’s spoon of melon stopped halfway to her mouth. “Are you honestly trying to talk us out of it?” she asked.

  “My dear girl,” Hutch said, “I had a perfectly good date with a charming woman this evening and broke it solely to see you and say my say. I am honestly trying to talk you out of it.”

  “Well, Jesus, Hutch—” Guy began.

  “I am not saying,” Hutch said, “that you will walk into the Bramford and be hit on the head with a piano or eaten by spinsters or turned to stone. I am simply saying that the record is there and ought to be considered along with the reasonable rent and the working fireplace: the house has a high incidence of unpleasant happenings. Why deliberately enter a danger zone? Go to the Dakota or the Osborne if you’re dead set on nineteenth century splendor.”

  “The Dakota is co-op,” Rosemary said, “and the Osborne’s going to be torn down.”

  “Aren’t you exaggerating a little bit, Hutch?” Guy said. “Have there been any other ‘unpleasant happenings’ in the past few years? Besides that baby in the basement?”

  “An elevator man was killed last winter,” Hutch said. “In a not-at-the-dinner-table kind of accident. I was at the library this afternoon with the Times Index and three hours of microfilm; would you care to hear more?”

  Rosemary looked at Guy. He put down his fork and wiped his mouth. “It’s silly,” he said. “All right, a lot of unpleasant things have happened there. That doesn’t mean that more of them are going to happen. I don’t see why the Bramford is any more of a ‘danger zone’ than any other house in the city. You can flip a coin and get five heads in a row; that d
oesn’t mean that the next five flips are going to be heads too, and it doesn’t mean that the coin is any different from any other coin. It’s coincidence, that’s all.”

  “If there were really something wrong,” Rosemary said, “wouldn’t it have been demolished? Like the house in London?”

  “The house in London,” Hutch said, “was owned by the family of the last chap murdered there. The Bramford is owned by the church next door.”

  “There you are,” Guy said, lighting a cigarette; “we’ve got divine protection.”

  “It hasn’t been working,” Hutch said.

  The waiter lifted away their plates.

  Rosemary said, “I didn’t know it was owned by a church,” and Guy said, “The whole city is, honey.”

  “Have you tried the Wyoming?” Hutch asked. “It’s in the same block, I think.”

  “Hutch,” Rosemary said, “we’ve tried everywhere. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing, except the new houses, with neat square rooms that are all exactly alike and television cameras in the elevators.”

  “Is that so terrible?” Hutch asked, smiling.

  “Yes,” Rosemary said, and Guy said, “We were set to go into one, but we backed out to take this.”

  Hutch looked at them for a moment, then sat back and struck the table with wide-apart palms. “Enough,” he said. “I shall mind my own business, as I ought to have done from the outset. Make fires in your working fireplace! I’ll give you a bolt for the door and keep my mouth shut from this day forward. I’m an idiot; forgive me.”

  Rosemary smiled. “The door already has a bolt,” she said. “And one of those chain things and a peephole.”

  “Well, mind you use all three,” Hutch said. “And don’t go wandering through the halls introducing yourself to all and sundry. You’re not in Iowa.”

  “Omaha.”

  The waiter brought their main courses.

  On the following Monday afternoon Rosemary and Guy signed a two-year lease on apartment 7E at the Bramford. They gave Mrs. Cortez a check for five hundred and eighty-three dollars—a month’s rent in advance and a month’s rent as security—and were told that if they wished they could take occupancy of the apartment earlier than September first, as it would be cleared by the end of the week and the painters could come in on Wednesday the eighteenth.