by Ira Levin
Far away she heard the Castevets’ doorbell give one short ring. Probably it was Guy, asking them if they wanted ice cream or a morning paper. Nice of him.
The pain sharpened inside her.
CHAPTER 3
THE FOLLOWING MORNING Rosemary called Minnie on the house phone and asked her not to bring the drink over at eleven o’clock; she was on her way out and wouldn’t be back until one or two.
“Why, that’s fine, dear,” Minnie said. “Don’t you worry about a thing. You don’t have to take it at no fixed time; just so you take it sometime, that’s all. You go on out. It’s a nice day and it’ll do you good to get some fresh air. Buzz me when you get back and I’ll bring the drink in then.”
It was indeed a nice day; sunny, cold, clear, and invigorating. Rosemary walked through it slowly, ready to smile, as if she weren’t carrying her pain inside her. Salvation Army Santa Clauses were on every corner, shaking their bells in their fool-nobody costumes. Stores all had their Christmas windows; Park Avenue had its center line of trees.
She reached the Seagram Building at a quarter of eleven and, because she was early and there was no sign yet of Hutch, sat for a while on the low wall at the side of the building’s forecourt, taking the sun on her face and listening with pleasure to busy footsteps and snatches of conversation, to cars and trucks and a helicopter’s racketing. The dress beneath her coat was—for the first satisfying time—snug over her stomach; maybe after lunch she would go to Bloomingdale’s and look at maternity dresses. She was glad Hutch had called her out this way (but what did he want to talk about?); pain, even constant pain, was no excuse for staying indoors as much as she had. She would fight it from now on, fight it with air and sunlight and activity, not succumb to it in Bramford gloom under the well-meant pamperings of Minnie and Guy and Roman. Pain, begone! she thought; I will have no more of thee! The pain stayed, immune to Positive Thinking.
At five of eleven she went and stood by the building’s glass doors, at the edge of their heavy flow of traffic. Hutch would probably be coming from inside, she thought, from an earlier appointment; or else why had he chosen here rather than someplace else for their meeting? She scouted the outcoming faces as best she could, saw him but was mistaken, then saw a man she had dated before she met Guy and was mistaken again. She kept looking, stretching now and then on tiptoes; not anxiously, for she knew that even if she failed to see him, Hutch would see her.
He hadn’t come by five after eleven, nor by ten after. At a quarter after she went inside to look at the building’s directory, thinking she might see a name there that he had mentioned at one time or another and to which she might make a call of inquiry. The directory proved to be far too large and many-named for careful reading, though; she skimmed over its crowded columns and, seeing nothing familiar, went outside again.
She went back to the low wall and sat where she had sat before, this time watching the front of the building and glancing over occasionally at the shallow steps leading up from the sidewalk. Men and women met other men and women, but there was no sign of Hutch, who was rarely if ever late for appointments.
At eleven-forty Rosemary went back into the building and was sent by a maintenance man down to the basement, where at the end of a white institutional corridor there was a pleasant lounge area with black modern chairs, an abstract mural, and a single stainless-steel phone booth. A Negro girl was in the booth, but she finished soon and came out with a friendly smile. Rosemary slipped in and dialed the number at the apartment. After five rings Service answered; there were no messages for Rosemary, and the one message for Guy was from a Rudy Horn, not a Mr. Hutchins. She had another dime and used it to call Hutch’s number, thinking that his service might know where he was or have a message from him. On the first ring a woman answered with a worried non-service “Yes?”
“Is this Edward Hutchins’ apartment?” Rosemary asked.
“Yes. Who is this, please?” She sounded like a woman neither young nor old—in her forties, perhaps.
Rosemary said, “My name is Rosemary Woodhouse. I had an eleven o’clock appointment with Mr. Hutchins and he hasn’t shown up yet. Do you have any idea whether he’s coming or not?”
There was silence, and more of it. “Hello?” Rosemary said.
“Hutch has told me about you, Rosemary,” the woman said. “My name is Grace Cardiff. I’m a friend of his. He was taken ill last night. Or early this morning, to be exact.”
Rosemary’s heart dropped. “Taken ill?” she said.
“Yes. He’s in a deep coma. The doctors haven’t been able to find out yet what’s causing it. He’s at St. Vincent’s Hospital.”
“Oh, that’s awful,” Rosemary said. “I spoke to him last night around ten-thirty and he sounded fine.”
“I spoke to him not much later than that,” Grace Cardiff said, “and he sounded fine to me too. But his cleaning woman came in this morning and found him unconscious on the bedroom floor.”
“And they don’t know what from?”
“Not yet. It’s early though, and I’m sure they’ll find out soon. And when they do, they’ll be able to treat him. At the moment he’s totally unresponsive.”
“How awful,” Rosemary said. “And he’s never had anything like this before?”
“Never,” Grace Cardiff said. “I’m going back to the hospital now, and if you’ll give me a number where I can reach you, I’ll let you know when there’s any change.”
“Oh, thank you,” Rosemary said. She gave the apartment number and then asked if there was anything she could do to help.
“Not really,” Grace Cardiff said. “I just finished calling his daughters, and that seems to be the sum total of what has to be done, at least until he comes to. If there should be anything else I’ll let you know.”
Rosemary came out of the Seagram Building and walked across the forecourt and down the steps and north to the corner of Fifty-third Street. She crossed Park Avenue and walked slowly toward Madison, wondering whether Hutch would live or die, and if he died, whether she (selfishness!) would ever again have anyone on whom she could so effortlessly and completely depend. She wondered too about Grace Cardiff, who sounded silver-gray and attractive; had she and Hutch been having a quiet middle-aged affair? She hoped so. Maybe this brush with death—that’s what it would be, a brush with death, not death itself; it couldn’t be—maybe this brush with death would nudge them both toward marriage, and turn out in the end to have been a disguised blessing. Maybe. Maybe.
She crossed Madison, and somewhere between Madison and Fifth found herself looking into a window in which a small crèche was spotlighted, with exquisite porcelain figures of Mary and the Infant and Joseph, the Magi and the shepherds and the animals of the stable. She smiled at the tender scene, laden with meaning and emotion that survived her agnosticism; and then saw in the window glass, like a veil hung before the Nativity, her own reflection smiling, with the skeletal cheeks and black-circled eyes that yesterday had alarmed Hutch and now alarmed her.
“Well this is what I call the long arm of coincidence!” Minnie exclaimed, and came smiling to her when Rosemary turned, in a white mock-leather coat and a red hat and her neckchained eyeglasses. “I said to myself, ‘As long as Rosemary’s out, I might as well go out, and do the last little bit of my Christmas shopping.’ And here you are and here I am! It looks like we’re just two of a kind that go the same places and do the same things! Why, what’s the matter, dear? You look so sad and downcast.”
“I just heard some bad news,” Rosemary said. “A friend of mine is very sick. In the hospital.”
“Oh, no,” Minnie said. “Who?”
“His name is Edward Hutchins,” Rosemary said.
“The one Roman met yesterday afternoon? Why, he was going on for an hour about what a nice intelligent man he was! Isn’t that a pity! What’s troubling him?”
Rosemary told her.
“My land,” Minnie said, “I hope it doesn’t turn out the way it did for poor
Lily Gardenia! And the doctors don’t even know? Well at least they admit it; usually they cover up what they don’t know with a lot of high-flown Latin. If the money spent putting those astronauts up where they are was spent on medical research down here, we’d all be a lot better off, if you want my opinion. Do you feel all right, Rosemary?”
“The pain is a little worse,” Rosemary said.
“You poor thing. You know what I think? I think we ought to be going home now. What do you say?”
“No, no, you have to finish your Christmas shopping.”
“Oh shoot,” Minnie said, “there’s two whole weeks yet. Hold onto your ears.” She put her wrist to her mouth and blew stabbing shrillness from a whistle on a gold-chain bracelet. A taxi veered toward them. “How’s that for service?” she said. “A nice big Checker one too.”
Soon after, Rosemary was in the apartment again. She drank the cold sour drink from the blue-and-green-striped glass while Minnie looked on approvingly.
CHAPTER 4
SHE HAD BEEN EATING her meat rare; now she ate it nearly raw—broiled only long enough to take away the refrigerator’s chill and seal in the juices.
The weeks before the holidays and the holiday season itself were dismal. The pain grew worse, grew so grinding that something shut down in Rosemary—some center of resistance and remembered well-being—and she stopped reacting, stopped mentioning pain to Dr. Sapirstein, stopped referring to pain even in her thoughts. Until now it had been inside her; now she was inside it; pain was the weather around her, was time, was the entire world. Numbed and exhausted, she began to sleep more, and to eat more too—more nearly raw meat.
She did what had to be done: cooked and cleaned, sent Christmas cards to the family—she hadn’t the heart for phone calls—and put new money into envelopes for the elevator men, doormen, porters, and Mr. Micklas. She looked at newspapers and tried to be interested in students burning draft cards and the threat of a city-wide transit strike, but she couldn’t: this was news from a world of fantasy; nothing was real but her world of pain. Guy bought Christmas presents for Minnie and Roman; for each other they agreed to buy nothing at all. Minnie and Roman gave them coasters.
They went to nearby movies a few times, but most evenings they stayed in or went around the hall to Minnie and Roman’s, where they met couples named Fountain and Gilmore and Wees, a woman named Mrs. Sabatini who always brought her cat, and Dr. Shand, the retired dentist who had made the chain for Rosemary’s tannis-charm. These were all elderly people who treated Rosemary with kindness and concern, seeing, apparently, that she was less than well. Laura-Louise was there too, and sometimes Dr. Sapirstein joined the group. Roman was an energetic host, filling glasses and launching new topics of conversation. On New Year’s Eve he proposed a toast—“To 1966, The Year One”—that puzzled Rosemary, although everyone else seemed to understand and approve of it. She felt as if she had missed a literary or political reference—not that she really cared. She and Guy usually left early, and Guy would see her into bed and go back. He was the favorite of the women, who gathered around him and laughed at his jokes.
Hutch stayed as he was, in his deep and baffling coma. Grace Cardiff called every week or so. “No change, no change at all,” she would say. “They still don’t know. He could wake up tomorrow morning or he could sink deeper and never wake up at all.”
Twice Rosemary went to St. Vincent’s Hospital to stand beside Hutch’s bed and look down powerlessly at the closed eyes, the scarcely discernible breathing. The second time, early in January, his daughter Doris was there, sitting by the window working a piece of needlepoint. Rosemary had met her a year earlier at Hutch’s apartment; she was a short pleasant woman in her thirties, married to a Swedishborn psychoanalyst. She looked, unfortunately, like a younger wigged Hutch.
Doris didn’t recognize Rosemary, and when Rosemary had re-introduced herself she made a distressed apology.
“Please don’t,” Rosemary said, smiling. “I know. I look awful.”
“No, you haven’t changed at all,” Doris said. “I’m terrible with faces. I forget my children, really I do.”
She put aside her needlepoint and Rosemary drew up another chair and sat with her. They talked about Hutch’s condition and watched a nurse come in and replace the hanging bottle that fed into his taped arm.
“We have an obstetrician in common,” Rosemary said when the nurse had gone; and then they talked about Rosemary’s pregnancy and Dr. Sapirstein’s skill and eminence. Doris was surprised to hear that he was seeing Rosemary every week. “He only saw me once a month,” she said. “Till near the end, of course. Then it was every two weeks, and then every week, but only in the last month. I thought that was fairly standard.”
Rosemary could find nothing to say, and Doris suddenly looked distressed again. “But I suppose every pregnancy is a law unto itself,” she said, with a smile meant to rectify tactlessness.
“That’s what he told me,” Rosemary said.
That evening she told Guy that Dr. Sapirstein had only seen Doris once a month. “Something is wrong with me,” she said. “And he knew it right from the beginning.”
“Don’t be silly,” Guy said. “He would tell you. And even if he wouldn’t, he would certainly tell me.”
“Has he? Has he said anything to you?”
“Absolutely not, Ro. I swear to God.”
“Then why do I have to go every week?”
“Maybe that’s the way he does it now. Or maybe he’s giving you better treatment, because you’re Minnie and Roman’s friend.”
“No.”
“Well I don’t know; ask him,” Guy said. “Maybe you’re more fun to examine than she was.”
She asked Dr. Sapirstein two days later. “Rosemary, Rosemary,” he said to her; “what did I tell you about talking to your friends? Didn’t I say that every pregnancy is different?”
“Yes, but—”
“And the treatment has to be different too. Doris Allert had had two deliveries before she ever came to me, and there had been no complications whatever. She didn’t require the close attention a first-timer does.”
“Do you always see first-timers every week?”
“I try to,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t. There’s nothing wrong with you, Rosemary. The pain will stop very soon.”
“I’ve been eating raw meat,” she said. “Just warmed a little.”
“Anything else out of the ordinary?”
“No,” she said, taken aback; wasn’t that enough?
“Whatever you want, eat it,” he said. “I told you you’d get some strange cravings. I’ve had women eat paper. And stop worrying. I don’t keep things from my patients; it makes life too confusing. I’m telling you the truth. Okay?”
She nodded.
“Say hello to Minnie and Roman for me,” he said. “And Guy too.”
She began the second volume of The Decline and Fall, and began knitting a red-and-orange striped muffler for Guy to wear to rehearsals. The threatened transit strike had come about but it affected them little since they were both at home most of the time. Late in the afternoon they watched from their bay windows the slow-moving crowds far below. “Walk, you peasants!” Guy said. “Walk! Home, home, and be quick about it!”
Not long after telling Dr. Sapirstein about the nearly raw meat, Rosemary found herself chewing on a raw and dripping chicken heart—in the kitchen one morning at four-fifteen. She looked at herself in the side of the toaster, where her moving reflection had caught her eye, and then looked at her hand, at the part of the heart she hadn’t yet eaten held in red-dripping fingers. After a moment she went over and put the heart in the garbage, and turned on the water and rinsed her hand. Then, with the water still running, she bent over the sink and began to vomit.
When she was finished she drank some water, washed her face and hands, and cleaned the inside of the sink with the spray attachment. She turned off the water and dried herself and stood for a while, thinking; and then
she got a memo pad and a pencil from one of the drawers and went to the table and sat down and began to write.
Guy came in just before seven in his pajamas. She had the Life Cookbook open on the table and was copying a recipe out of it. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.
She looked at him. “Planning the menu,” she said. “For a party. We’re giving a party on January twenty-second. A week from next Saturday.” She looked among several slips of paper on the table and picked one up. “We’re inviting Elise Dunstan and her husband,” she said, “Joan and a date, Jimmy and Tiger, Allan and a date, Lou and Claudia, the Chens, the Wendells, Dee Bertillon and a date unless you don’t want him, Mike and Pedro, Bob and Thea Goodman, the Kapps”—she pointed in the Kapps’ direction—“and Doris and Axel Allert, if they’ll come. That’s Hutch’s daughter.”
“I know,” Guy said.
She put down the paper. “Minnie and Roman are not invited,” she said. “Neither is Laura-Louise. Neither are the Fountains and the Gilmores and the Weeses. Neither is Dr. Sapirstein. This is a very special party. You have to be under sixty to get in.”
“Whew,” Guy said. “For a minute there I didn’t think I was going to make it.”
“Oh, you make it,” Rosemary said. “You’re the bartender.”
“Swell,” Guy said. “Do you really think this is such a great idea?”
“I think it’s the best idea I’ve had in months.”
“Don’t you think you ought to check with Sapirstein first?”
“Why? I’m just going to give a party; I’m not going to swim the English Channel or climb Annapurna.”
Guy went to the sink and turned on the water. He held a glass under it. “I’ll be in rehearsal then, you know,” he said. “We start on the seventeenth.”
“You won’t have to do a thing,” Rosemary said. “Just come home and be charming.”