Rosemary's Baby

by Ira Levin

  “That would be wonderful,” Rosemary said. “I’d be much happier that way.”

  “That’s the main thing at this stage,” Dr. Sapirstein said, “keeping you happy.”

  Rosemary smiled. “If it’s a boy,” she said, “I may just name him Abraham Sapirstein Woodhouse.”

  “God forbid,” Dr. Sapirstein said.

  Guy, when he heard the news, was as pleased as Rosemary. “I’m sorry Roman is on his last lap,” he said, “but I’m glad for your sake that they’re going away. I’m sure you’ll feel more relaxed now.”

  “Oh, I will,” Rosemary said. “I feel better already, just knowing about it.”

  Apparently Dr. Sapirstein didn’t waste any time in telling Roman about Rosemary’s supposed feelings, for that same evening Minnie and Roman stopped by and broke the news that they were going to Europe. “Sunday morning at ten,” Roman said. “We fly directly to Paris, where we’ll stay for a week or so, and then we’ll go on to Zürich, Venice, and the loveliest city in all the world, Dubrovnik, in Yugoslavia.”

  “I’m green with envy,” Guy said.

  Roman said to Rosemary, “I gather this doesn’t come as a complete bolt from the blue, does it, my dear?” A conspirator’s gleam winked from his deep-socketed eyes.

  “Dr. Sapirstein mentioned you were thinking of going,” Rosemary said.

  Minnie said, “We’d have loved to stay till the baby came—”

  “You’d be foolish to,” Rosemary said, “now that the hot weather is here.”

  “We’ll send you all kinds of pictures,” Guy said.

  “But when Roman gets the wanderlust,” Minnie said, “there’s just no holding him.”

  “It’s true, it’s true,” Roman said. “After a lifetime of traveling I find it all but impossible to stay in one city for more than a year; and it’s been fourteen months now since we came back from Japan and the Philippines.”

  He told them about Dubrovnik’s special charms, and Madrid’s, and the Isle of Skye’s. Rosemary watched him, wondering which he really was, an amiable old talker or the mad son of a mad father.

  The next day Minnie made no fuss at all about leaving the drink and the cake; she was on her way out with a long list of going-away jobs to do. Rosemary offered to pick up a dress at the cleaner’s for her and buy toothpaste and dramamine. When she threw away the drink and the cake and took one of the large white capsules Dr. Sapirstein had sent, she felt just the slightest bit ridiculous.

  On Saturday morning Minnie said, “You know, don’t you, about who Roman’s father was.”

  Rosemary nodded, surprised.

  “I could tell by the way you turned sort of cool to us,” Minnie said. “Oh, don’t apologize, dear; you’re not the first and you won’t be the last. I can’t say that I really blame you. Oh, I could kill that crazy old man if he wasn’t dead already! He’s been the bane in poor Roman’s existence! That’s why he likes to travel so much; he always wants to leave a place before people can find out who he is. Don’t let on to him that you know, will you? He’s so fond of you and Guy, it would near about break his heart. I want him to have a real happy trip with no sorrows, because there aren’t likely to be many more. Trips, I mean. Would you like the perishables in my icebox? Send Guy over later on and I’ll load him up.”

  Laura-Louise gave a bon voyage party Saturday night in her small dark tannis-smelling apartment on the twelfth floor. The Weeses and the Gilmores came, and Mrs. Sabatini with her cat Flash, and Dr. Shand. (How had Guy known that it was Dr. Shand who played the recorder? Rosemary wondered. And that it was a recorder, not a flute or a clarinet? She would have to ask him.) Roman told of his and Minnie’s planned itinerary, surprising Mrs. Sabatini, who couldn’t believe they were bypassing Rome and Florence. Laura-Louise served home-made cookies and a mildly alcoholic fruit punch. Conversation turned to tornadoes and civil rights. Rosemary, watching and listening to these people who were much like her aunts and uncles in Omaha, found it hard to maintain her belief that they were in fact a coven of witches. Little Mr. Wees, listening to Guy talking about Martin Luther King; could such a feeble old man, even in his dreams, imagine himself a caster of spells, a maker of charms? And dowdy old women like Laura-Louise and Minnie and Helen Wees; could they really bring themselves to cavort naked in mock-religious orgies? (Yet hadn’t she seen them that way, seen all of them naked? No, no, that was a dream, a wild dream that she’d had a long, long time ago.)

  The Fountains phoned a good-by to Minnie and Roman, and so did Dr. Sapirstein and two or three other people whose names Rosemary didn’t know. Laura-Louise brought out a gift that everyone had chipped in for, a transistor radio in a pigskin carrying case, and Roman accepted it with an eloquent thank-you speech, his voice breaking. He knows he’s going to die, Rosemary thought, and was genuinely sorry for him.

  Guy insisted on lending a hand the next morning despite Roman’s protests; he set the alarm clock for eight-thirty and, when it went off, hopped into chinos and a T shirt and went around to Minnie and Roman’s door. Rosemary went with him in her peppermint-striped smock. There was little to carry; two suitcases and a hatbox. Minnie wore a camera and Roman his new radio. “Anyone who needs more than one suitcase,” he said as he double-locked their door, “is a tourist, not a traveler.”

  On the sidewalk, while the doorman blew his whistle at oncoming cars, Roman checked through tickets, passport, traveler’s checks, and French currency. Minnie took Rosemary by the shoulders. “No matter where we are,” she said, “our thoughts are going to be with you every minute, darling, till you’re all happy and thin again with your sweet little boy or girl lying safe in your arms.”

  “Thank you,” Rosemary said, and kissed Minnie’s cheek. “Thank you for everything.”

  “You make Guy send us lots of pictures, you hear?” Minnie said, kissing Rosemary back.

  “I will. I will,” Rosemary said.

  Minnie turned to Guy. Roman took Rosemary’s hand. “I won’t wish you luck,” he said, “because you won’t need it. You’re going to have a happy, happy life.”

  She kissed him. “Have a wonderful trip,” she said, “and come back safely.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, smiling. “But I may stay on in Dubrovnik, or Pescara or maybe Mallorca. We shall see, we shall see…”

  “Come back,” Rosemary said, and found herself meaning it. She kissed him again.

  A taxi came. Guy and the doorman stowed the suitcases beside the driver. Minnie shouldered and grunted her way in, sweating under the arms of her white dress. Roman folded himself in beside her. “Kennedy Airport,” he said; “the TWA Building.”

  There were more good-by’s and kisses through open windows, and then Rosemary and Guy stood waving at the taxi that sped away with hands ungloved and white-gloved waving from either side of it.

  Rosemary felt less happy than she had expected.

  That afternoon she looked for All Of Them Witches, to reread parts of it and perhaps find it foolish and laughable. The book was gone. It wasn’t atop the Kinsey Reports or anywhere else that she could see. She asked Guy and he told her he had put it in the garbage Thursday morning.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” he said, “but I just didn’t want you reading any more of that stuff and upsetting yourself.”

  She was surprised and annoyed. “Guy,” she said, “Hutch gave me that book. He left it to me.”

  “I didn’t think about that part of it,” Guy said. “I just didn’t want you upsetting yourself. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to do.”

  “I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking about Hutch.”

  “Even if he hadn’t given it to me, you don’t throw away another person’s books. If I want to read something, I want to read it.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  It bothered her all day long. And she had forgotten something that she meant to ask him; that bothered her too.

  She remembered it in the evening, while they were walking back
from La Scala, a restaurant not far from the house. “How did you know Dr. Shand plays the recorder?” she said.

  He didn’t understand.

  “The other day,” she said, “when I read the book and we argued about it; you said that Dr. Shand just happened to play the recorder. How did you know?”

  “Oh,” Guy said. “He told me. A long time ago. And I said we’d heard a flute or something through the wall once or twice, and he said that was him. How did you think I knew?”

  “I didn’t think,” Rosemary said. “I just wondered, that’s all.”

  She couldn’t sleep. She lay awake on her back and frowned at the ceiling. The baby inside her was sleeping fine, but she couldn’t; she felt unsettled and worried, without knowing what she was worried about.

  Well the baby of course, and whether everything would go the way it should. She had cheated on her exercises lately. No more of that; solemn promise.

  It was really Monday already, the thirteenth. Fifteen more days. Two weeks. Probably all women felt edgy and unsettled two weeks before. And couldn’t sleep from being sick and tired of sleeping on their backs! The first thing she was going to do after it was all over was sleep twenty-four solid hours on her stomach, hugging a pillow, with her face snuggled deep down into it.

  She heard a sound in Minnie and Roman’s apartment, but it must have been from the floor above or the floor below. Sounds were masked and confused with the air conditioner going.

  They were in Paris already. Lucky them. Some day she and Guy would go, with their three lovely children.

  The baby woke up and began moving.

  CHAPTER 9

  SHE BOUGHT cotton balls and cotton swabs and talcum powder and baby lotion; engaged a diaper service and rearranged the baby’s clothing in the bureau drawers. She ordered the announcements—Guy would phone in the name and date later—and addressed and stamped a boxful of small ivory envelopes. She read a book called Summerhill that presented a seemingly irrefutable case for permissive child-rearing, and discussed it at Sardi’s East with Elise and Joan, their treat.

  She began to feel contractions; one one day, one the next, then none, then two.

  A postcard came from Paris, with a picture of the Arc de Triomphe and a neatly written message: Thinking of you both. Lovely weather, excellent food. The flight over was perfect. Love, Minnie.

  The baby dropped low inside her, ready to be born.

  Early in the afternoon of Friday, June 24th, at the stationery counter at Tiffany’s where she had gone for twenty-five more envelopes, Rosemary met Dominick Pozzo, who in the past had been Guy’s vocal coach. A short, swarthy, hump-backed man with a voice that was rasping and unpleasant, he seized Rosemary’s hand and congratulated her on her appearance and on Guy’s recent good fortune, for which he disavowed all credit. Rosemary told him of the play Guy was signing for and of the latest offer Warner Brothers had made. Dominick was delighted; now, he said, was when Guy could truly benefit from intensive coaching. He explained why, made Rosemary promise to have Guy call him, and, with final good wishes, turned toward the elevators. Rosemary caught his arm. “I never thanked you for the tickets to The Fantasticks,” she said. “I just loved it. It’s going to go on and on forever, like that Agatha Christie play in London.”

  “The Fantasticks?” Dominick said.

  “You gave Guy a pair of tickets. Oh, long ago. In the fall. I went with a friend. Guy had seen it already.”

  “I never gave Guy tickets for The Fantasticks,” Dominick said.

  “You did. Last fall.”

  “No, my dear. I never gave anybody tickets to The Fantasticks; I never had any to give. You’re mistaken.”

  “I’m sure he said he got them from you,” Rosemary said.

  “Then he was mistaken,” Dominick said. “You’ll tell him to call me, yes?”

  “Yes. Yes, I will.”

  It was strange, Rosemary thought when she was waiting to cross Fifth Avenue. Guy had said that Dominick had given him the tickets, she was certain of it. She remembered wondering whether or not to send Dominick a thank-you note and deciding finally that it wasn’t necessary. She couldn’t be mistaken.

  Walk, the light said, and she crossed the avenue.

  But Guy couldn’t have been mistaken either. He didn’t get free tickets every day of the week; he must have remembered who gave them to him. Had he deliberately lied to her? Perhaps he hadn’t been given the tickets at all, but had found and kept them. No, there might have been a scene at the theater; he wouldn’t have exposed her to that.

  She walked west on Fifty-seventh Street, walked very slowly with the bigness of the baby hanging before her and her back aching from withstanding its forward-pulling weight. The day was hot and humid; ninety-two already and still rising. She walked very slowly.

  Had he wanted to get her out of the apartment that night for some reason? Had he gone down and bought the tickets himself? To be free to study the scene he was working on? But there wouldn’t have been any need for trickery if that had been the case; more than once in the old one-room apartment he had asked her to go out for a couple of hours and she had gone gladly. Most of the time, though, he wanted her to stay, to be his line-feeder, his audience.

  Was it a girl? One of his old flames for whom a couple of hours hadn’t been enough, and whose perfume he had been washing off in the shower when she got home? No, it was tannis root not perfume that the apartment had smelled of that night; she had had to wrap the charm in foil because of it. And Guy had been far too energetic and amorous to have spent the earlier part of the night with someone else. He had made unusually violent love to her, she remembered; later, while he slept, she had heard the flute and the chanting at Minnie and Roman’s.

  No, not the flute. Dr. Shand’s recorder.

  Was that how Guy knew about it? Had he been there that evening? At a sabbath…

  She stopped and looked in Henri Bendel’s windows, because she didn’t want to think any more about witches and covens and baby’s blood and Guy being over there. Why had she met that stupid Dominick? She should never have gone out today at all. It was too hot and sticky.

  There was a great raspberry crepe dress that looked like a Rudi Gernreich. After Tuesday, after she was her own real shape again, maybe she would go in and price it. And a pair of lemon-yellow hip-huggers and a raspberry blouse…

  Eventually, though, she had to go on. Go on walking, go on thinking, with the baby squirming inside her.

  The book (which Guy had thrown away) had told of initiation ceremonies, of covens inducting novice members with vows and baptism, with anointing and the infliction of a “witch mark.” Was it possible (the shower to wash away the smell of a tannis anointing) that Guy had joined the coven? That he (no, he couldn’t be!) was one of them, with a secret mark of membership somewhere on his body?

  There had been a flesh-colored Band-Aid on his shoulder. It had been there in his dressing room in Philadelphia (“That damn pimple,” he had said when she had asked him) and it had been there a few months before (“Not the same one!” she had said). Was it still there now?

  She didn’t know. He didn’t sleep naked any more. He had in the past, especially in hot weather. But not any more, not for months and months. Now he wore pajamas every night. When had she last seen him naked?

  A car honked at her; she was crossing Sixth Avenue. “For God’s sake, lady,” a man behind her said.

  But why, why? He was Guy, he wasn’t a crazy old man with nothing better to do, with no other way to find purpose and self-esteem! He had a career, a busy, exciting, every-day-getting-better career! What did he need with wands and witch knives and censers and—and junk; with the Weeses and the Gilmores and Minnie and Roman? What could they give him that he couldn’t get elsewhere?

  She had known the answer before she asked herself the question. Formulating the question had been a way to put off facing the answer.

  The blindness of Donald Baumgart.

  If you believed.
r />   But she didn’t. She didn’t.

  Yet there Donald Baumgart was, blind, only a day or two after that Saturday. With Guy staying home to grab the phone every time it rang. Expecting the news.

  The blindness of Donald Baumgart.

  Out of which had come everything; the play, the reviews, the new play, the movie offer…Maybe Guy’s part in Greenwich Village, too, would have been Donald Baumgart’s if he hadn’t gone inexplicably blind a day or two after Guy had joined (maybe) a coven (maybe) of witches (maybe).

  There were spells to take an enemy’s sight or hearing, the book had said. All Of Them Witches. (Not Guy!) The united mental force of the whole coven, a concentrated battery of malevolent wills, could blind, deafen, paralyze, and ultimately kill the chosen victim.

  Paralyze and ultimately kill.

  “Hutch?” she asked aloud, standing motionless in front of Carnegie Hall. A girl looked up at her, clinging to her mother’s hand.

  He had been reading the book that night and had asked her to meet him the next morning. To tell her that Roman was Steven Marcato. And Guy knew of the appointment, and knowing, went out for—what, ice cream?—and rang Minnie and Roman’s bell. Was a hasty meeting called? The united mental force…But how had they known what Hutch would be telling her? She hadn’t known herself; only he had known.

  Suppose, though, that “tannis root” wasn’t “tannis root” at all. Hutch hadn’t heard of it, had he? Suppose it was—that other stuff he underlined in the book, Devil’s Fungus or whatever it was. He had told Roman he was going to look into it; wouldn’t that have been enough to make Roman wary of him? And right then and there Roman had taken one of Hutch’s gloves, because the spells can’t be cast without one of the victim’s belongings! And then, when Guy told them about the appointment for the next morning, they took no chances and went to work.