Rosemary’s Baby

Rosemary and Guy Woodhouse had signed a lease on a five-room apartment in a geometric white house on First Avenue when they received word, from a woman named Mrs. Cortez, that a four-room apartment in the Bramford had become available. The Bramford, old, black, and elephantine, is a warren of high-ceilinged apartments prized for their fireplaces and Victorian detail. Rosemary and Guy had been on its waiting list since their marriage but had finally given up.

Guy relayed the news to Rosemary, stopping the phone against his chest. Rosemary groaned “Oh no!” and looked as if she would weep.

“It’s too late,” Guy said to the phone. “We signed a lease yesterday.” Rosemary caught his arm. “Couldn’t we get out of it?” she asked him. “Tell them something?”

“Hold on a minute, will you, Mrs. Cortez?” Guy stopped the phone again. “Tell them what?” he asked.

Rosemary floundered and raised her hands helplessly. “I don’t know, the truth. That we have a chance to get into the Bramford.”

“Honey,” Guy said, “they’re not going to care about that.”

“You’ll think of something, Guy. Let’s just look, all right? Tell her we’ll look. Please. Before she hangs up.”

“We signed a lease, Ro; we’re stuck.”

“Please! She’ll hang up!” Whimpering with mock anguish, Rosemary pried the phone from Guy’s chest and tried to push it up to -his mouth.

Guy laughed and let the phone be pushed. “Mrs. Cortez? It turns out there’s a chance we’ll be able to get out of it, because we haven’t signed the actual lease yet. They were out of the forms so we only signed a letter of agreement. Can we take a look at the apartment?”

Mrs. Cortez gave instructions: they were to go to the Bramford between eleven and eleven-thirty, find Mr. Micklas or Jerome, and tell whichever they found that they were the party she had sent to look at 7E. Then they were to call her. She gave Guy her number.

“You see how you can think of things?” Rosemary said, putting Peds and yellow shoes on her feet. “You’re a marvelous liar.”

Guy, at the mirror, said, “Christ, a pimple.”

“Don’t squeeze it.”

“It’s only four rooms, you know. No nursery.”

“I’d rather have four rooms in the Bramford,” Rosemary said, “than a whole floor in that-that white cellblock.”

“Yesterday you loved it.”

“I liked it. I never loved it. I’ll bet not even the architect loves it. We’ll make a dining area in the living room and have a beautiful nursery, when and if.”

“Soon,” Guy said. He ran an electric razor back and forth across his upper lip, looking into his eyes, which were brown and large. Rosemary stepped into a yellow dress and squirmed the zipper up the back of it.

They were in one room, that had been Guy’s bachelor apartment. It had posters of Paris and Verona, a large day bed and a pullman kitchen.

It was Tuesday, the third of August.

Mr. Micklas was small and dapper but had fingers missing from both hands, which made shaking hands an embarrassment, though not apparently for him. “Oh, an actor,” he said, ringing for the elevator with a middle finger. “We’re very popular with actors.” He named four who were living at the Bramford, all of them well known. “Have I seen you in anything?”

“Let’s see,” Guy said. “I did Hamlet a while back, didn’t I, Liz? And then we made The Sandpiper. . . “

“He’s joking,” Rosemary said. “He was in Luther and Nobody Loves An Albatross and a lot of television plays and television commercials.”

“That’s where the money is, isn’t it?” Mr. Micklas said; “the commercials.”

“Yes,” Rosemary said, and Guy said, “And the artistic thrill, too.”

Rosemary gave him a pleading look; he gave back one of stunned innocence and then made a leering vampire face at the top of Mr. Micklas’s head.

The elevator-oak-paneled, with a shining brass handrail all around-was run by a uniformed Negro boy with a locked-in-place smile. “Seven,” Mr. Micklas told him; to Rosemary and Guy he said, “This apartment has four rooms, two baths, and five closets. Originally the house consisted of very large apartments-the smallest was a nine-but now they’ve almost all been broken

up into fours, fives, and sixes. Seven E is a four that was originally the back part of a ten. It has the original kitchen and master bath, which are enormous, as you’ll soon see. It has the original master bedroom for its living room, another bedroom for its bedroom, and two servant’s rooms thrown together for its dining room or second bedroom. Do you have children?”

“We plan to,” Rosemary said.

“It’s an ideal child’s room, with a full bathroom and a large closet. The whole set-up is made to order for a young couple like yourselves.”

The elevator stopped and the Negro boy, smiling, chivied it down, up, and down again for a closer alignment with the floor rail outside; and still smiling, pulled in the brass inner gate and the outer rolling door. Mr. Micklas stood aside and Rosemary and Guy stepped out-into a dimly lighted hallway walled and carpeted in dark green. A workman at a sculptured green door marked 7B looked at them and turned back to fitting a peepscope into its cut-out hole.

Mr. Micklas led the way to the right and then to the left, through short branches of dark green hallway. Rosemary and Guy, following, saw rubbed away places in the wallpaper and a seam where it had lifted and was curling inward; saw a dead light bulb in a cut-glass sconce and a patched place of light green tape on the dark green carpet. Guy looked at Rosemary: Patched carpet? She looked away and smiled brightly: I love it; everything’s lovely!

“The previous tenant, Mrs. Gardenia,” Mr. Micklas said, not looking back at them, “passed away only a few days ago and nothing has been moved out of the apartment yet. Her son asked me to tell whoever looks at it that the rugs, the air conditioners, and some of the furniture can be had practically for the asking.” He turned into another branch of hallway papered in newer-looking green and gold stripes.

“Did she die in the apartment?” Rosemary asked. “Not that it-“

“Oh, no, in a hospital,” Mr. Micklas said. “She’d been in a coma for weeks. She was very old and passed away without ever waking. I’ll be grateful to go that way myself when the time comes. She was chipper right to the end; cooked her own meals, shopped the departments stores . . . She was one of the first women lawyers in New York State.”

They came now to a stairwell that ended the hallway. Adjacent to it, on the left, was the door of apartment 7E, a door without sculptured garlands, narrower than the doors they had passed. Mr. Micklas pressed the pearl bell button-L. Gardenia was mounted above it in white letters on black plastic - and turned a key in the lock. Despite lost fingers he worked the knob and threw the door smartly. “After you, please,” he said, leaning forward on his toes and holding the door open with the length of an outstretched arm.

The apartment’s four rooms were divided two and two on either side of a narrow central hallway that extended in a straight line from the front door.

The first room on the right was the kitchen, and at the sight of it Rosemary couldn’t keep from giggling, for it was as large if not larger than the whole apartment in which they were then living. It had a six-burner gas stove with two ovens, a mammoth refrigerator, a monumental sink; it had dozens of cabinets, a window on Seventh Avenue, a high high ceiling, and it even had -imagining away Mrs. Gardenia’s chrome table and chairs and roped bales of Fortune and Musical America-the perfect place for something like the blue-and-ivory breakfast nook she had clipped from last month’s House Beautiful.

Opposite the kitchen was the dining room or second bedroom, which Mrs. Gardenia had apparently used as a combination study and greenhouse. Hundreds of small plants, dying and dead, stood on ferry-built shelves under spirals of unlighted fluorescent tubing; in their midst a rolltop desk spilled over with books and papers. A handsome desk it was, broad and gleaming with age. Rosemary left Guy and Mr. Micklas talking by the door and went to it, stepping over a shelf of withered brown fronds. Desks like this were displayed in antique-store windows; Rosemary wondered, touching it, if it was one of the things that could be had practically for the asking. Graceful blue penmanship on mauve paper said than merely the intriguing pastime I believed it to be. I can no longer associate myself-and she caught herself snooping and looked up at Mr. Micklas turning from Guy. “Is this desk one of the things Mrs. Gardenia’s son wants to sell?” she asked.

“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 ghostlike 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!”

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 doesn’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.

Later on Monday they received a telephone call from Martin Gardenia, the son of the apartment’s previous tenant. They agreed to meet him at the apartment on Tuesday evening at eight, and, doing so, found him to be a tall man past sixty with a cheerful open manner. He pointed out the things he wanted to sell and named his prices, all of which were attractively low. Rosemary and Guy conferred and examined, and bought two air conditioners, a rosewood vanity with a petit-point bench, the living room’s Persian rug, and the andirons, fire screen, and tools. Mrs. Gardenia’s rolltop desk, disappointingly, was not for sale. While Guy wrote a check and helped tag the items to be left behind, Rosemary measured the living room and the bedroom with a six-foot folding rule she had bought that morning.

The previous March, Guy had played a role on Another World, a daytime television series. The character was back now for three days, so for the rest of the week Guy was busy. Rosemary winnowed a folder of decorating schemes she had collected since high school, found two that seemed appropriate to the apartment, and with those to guide her went looking at furnishings with Joan Jellico, one of the girls from Atlanta she had roomed with on coming to New York. Joan had the card of a decorator, which gave them entrance to wholesale houses and showrooms of every sort. Rosemary looked and made shorthand notes and drew sketches to bring to Guy, and hurried home spilling over with fabric and wallpaper samples in time to catch him on Another World and then run out again and shop for dinner. She skipped her sculpture class and canceled, happily, a dental appointment.

On Friday evening the apartment was theirs; an emptiness of high ceilings and unfamiliar dark into which they came with a lamp and a shopping bag, striking echoes from the farthest rooms. They turned on their air conditioners and admired their rug and their fireplace and Rosemary’s vanity; admired too their bathtub, doorknobs, hinges, molding, floors, stove, refrigerator, bay windows, and view. They picnicked on the rug, on tuna sandwiches and beer, and

made floor plans of all four rooms, Guy measuring and Rosemary drawing. On the rug again, they unplugged the lamp and stripped and made love in the nightglow of shadeless windows. “Shh!” Guy hissed afterwards, wide-eyed with fear. “I hear-the Trench sisters chewing!” Rosemary hit him on the head, hard.

They bought a sofa and a king-size bed, a table for the kitchen and two bentwood chairs. They called Con Ed and the phone company and stores and workmen and the Padded Wagon.

The painters came on Wednesday the eighteenth; patched, spackled, primed, painted, and were gone on Friday the twentieth, leaving colors very much like Rosemary’s samples. A solitary paperhanger came in and grumbled and papered the bedroom.

They called stores and workmen and Guy’s mother in Montreal. They bought an armoire and a dining table and hi-fi components and new dishes and silverware. They were flush. In 1964 Guy had done a series of Anacin commercials that, shown time and time again, had earned him eighteen thousand dollars and was still producing a sizable income.

They hung window shades and papered shelves, watched carpet go down in the bedroom and white vinyl in the hallway. They got a plug-in phone with three jacks; paid bills and left a forwarding notice at the post office.

On Friday, August 27^th, they moved. Joan and Dick Jellico sent a large potted plant and Guy’s agent a small one. Hutch sent a telegram: The Bramford will change from a bad house to a good house when one of its doors is marked R. and G. Woodhouse.

And then Rosemary was busy and happy. She bought and hung curtains, found a Victorian glass lamp for the living room, hung pots and pans on the kitchen wall. One day she realized that the four boards in the hall closet were shelves, fitting across to sit on wood cleats on the side walls. She covered them with gingham contact paper and, when Guy came home, showed him a neatly filled linen closet. She found a supermarket on Sixth Avenue and a Chinese laundry on Fifty-fifth Street for the sheets and Guy’s shirts.

Guy was busy too, away every day like other women’s husbands. With Labor Day past, his vocal coach was back in town; Guy worked with him each morning and auditioned for plays and commercials most afternoons. At breakfast he was touchy reading the theatrical page-everyone else was out of town with Skyscraper or Drat! The Cat! or The Impossible Years or Hot September; only he was in New York with residuals-from-Anacin-but Rosemary knew that very soon he’d get something good, and quietly she set his coffee before him and quietly took for herself the newspaper’s other section.

The nursery was, for the time being, a den, with off-white walls and the furniture from the old apartment. The white-and-yellow wallpaper would come later, clean and fresh. Rosemary had a sample of it lying ready in Picasso’s Picassos, along with a Saks ad showing the crib and bureau.

She wrote to her brother Brian to share her happiness. No one else in the family would have welcomed it; they were all hostile now-parents, brothers,

sisters-not forgiving her for A) marrying a Protestant, B) marrying in only a civil ceremony, and C) having a mother-in-law who had had two divorces and was married now to a Jew up in Canada.

She made Guy chicken Marengo and vitello tonnato, baked a mocha layer cake and a jarful of butter cookies.

They heard Minnie Castevet before they met her; heard her through their bedroom wall, shouting in a hoarse midwestern bray. “Roman, come to bed! It’s twenty past eleven!” And five minutes later: “Roman? Bring me in some root beer when you come!”

“I didn’t know they were still making Ma and Pa Kettle movies,” Guy said, and Rosemary laughed uncertainly. She was nine years younger than Guy, and some of his references lacked clear meaning for her.

They met the Goulds in 7F, a pleasant elderly couple, and the Germanaccented Bruhns and their son Walter in 7C. They smiled and nodded in the hall to the Kelloggs, 7G, Mr. Stein, 7H, and the Messrs. Dubin and DeVore, 7B. (Rosemary learned everyone’s name immediately, from doorbells and from face-up mail on doormats, which she had no qualms about reading.) The Kapps in 7D, unseen and with no mail, were apparently still away for the summer; and the Castevets in 7A, heard (“Roman! Where’s Terry?”) but unseen, were either recluses or comers-and-goers-at-odd-hours. Their door was opposite the elevator, their doormat supremely readable. They got air mail letters from a surprising variety of places: Hawick, Scotland; Langeac, France; Vitoria, Brazil; Cessnock, Australia. They subscribed to both Life and Look.

No sign at all did Rosemary and Guy see of the Trench sisters, Adrian Marcato, Keith Kennedy, Pearl Ames, or their latter-day equivalents. Dubin and DeVore were homosexuals; everyone else seemed entirely commonplace.

Almost every night the midwestern bray could be heard, from the apartment which, Rosemary and Guy came to realize, had originally been the bigger front part of their own. “But it’s impossible to be a hundred per cent sure!” the woman argued, and, “If you want my opinion, we shouldn’t tell her at all; that’s my opinion!”

One Saturday night the Castevets had a party, with a dozen or so people talking and singing. Guy fell asleep easily but Rosemary lay awake until after two, hearing flat unmusical singing and a flute or clarinet that piped along beside it.

The only time Rosemary remembered Hutch’s misgivings and was made uneasy by them was when she went down to the basement every fourth day or so to do the laundry. The service elevator was in itself unsettling-small, unmanned, and given to sudden creaks and tremors-and the basement was an eerie place of once-whitewashed brick passageways where footfalls whis-

pered distantly and unseen doors thudded closed, where castoff refrigerators faced the wall under glary bulbs in wire cages.

It was here, Rosemary would remember, that a dead baby wrapped in newspaper had not so long ago been found. Whose baby had it been, and how had it died? Who had found it? Had the person who left it been caught and punished? She thought of going to the library and reading the story in old newspapers as Hutch had done; but that would have made it more real, more dreadful than it already was. To know the spot where the baby had lain, to have perhaps to walk past it on the way to the laundry room and again on the way back to the elevator, would have been unbearable. Partial ignorance, she decided, was partial bliss. Damn Hutch and his good intentions!

The laundry room would have done nicely in a prison: steamy brick walls, more bulbs in cages, and scores of deep double sinks in iron-mesh cubicles. There were coin-operated washers and dryers and, in most of the padlocked cubicles, privately owned machines. Rosemary came down on weekends or after five; earlier on weekdays a bevy of Negro laundresses ironed and gossiped and had abruptly fallen silent at her one unknowing intrusion. She had smiled all around and tried to be invisible, but they hadn’t spoken another word and she had felt self-conscious, clumsy, and Negro-oppressing.

One afternoon, when she and Guy had been in the Bramford a little over two weeks, Rosemary was sitting in the laundry room at 5:15 reading The New Yorker and waiting to add softener to the rinse water when a girl her own age came in-a dark-haired cameo-faced girl who, Rosemary realized with a start, was Anna Maria Alberghetti. She was wearing white sandals, black shorts, and an apricot silk blouse, and was carrying a yellow plastic laundry basket. Nodding at Rosemary and then not looking at her, she went to one of the washers, opened it, and began feeding dirty clothes into it.

Anna Maria Alberghetti, as far as Rosemary knew, did not live at the Bramford, but she could well have been visiting someone and helping out with the chores. A closer look, though, told Rosemary that she was mistaken; this girl’s nose was too long and sharp and there were other less definable differences of expression and carriage. The resemblance, however, was a remarkable one-and suddenly Rosemary found the girl looking at her with an embarrassed questioning smile, the washer beside her closed and filling.

“I’m sorry,” Rosemary said. “I thought you were Anna Maria Alberghetti, so I’ve been staring at you. I’m sorry.”

The girl blushed and smiled and looked at the floor a few feet to her side. “That happens a lot,” she said. “You don’t have to apologize. People have been thinking I’m Anna Maria since I was, oh, just a kid, when she first started out in Here Comes The Groom. “ She looked at Rosemary, still blushing but no longer smiling. “I don’t see a resemblance at all,” she said. “I’m of Italian parentage like she is, but no physical resemblance.”

“There’s a very strong one,” Rosemary said.

“I guess there is,” the girl said; “everyone’s always telling me. I don’t see it though. I wish I did, believe me.”

“Do you know her?” Rosemary asked.

“No.”

“The way you said ‘Anna Maria’ I thought-“

“Oh no, I just call her that. I guess from talking about her so much with everyone.” She wiped her hand on her shorts and stepped forward, holding it out and smiling. “I’m Terry Gionoffrio,” she said, “and I can’t spell it so don’t you try.”

Rosemary smiled and shook hands. “I’m Rosemary Woodhouse,” she said. “We’re new tenants here. Have you been here long?”

“I’m not a tenant at all,” the girl said. “I’m just staying with Mr. and Mrs. Castevet, up on the seventh floor. I’m their guest, sort of, since June. Oh, you know them?”

“No,” Rosemary said, smiling, “but our apartment is right behind theirs and used to be the back part of it.”

“Oh for goodness’ sake,” the girl said, “you’re the party that took the old lady’s apartment! Mrs.-the old lady who died!”

“Gardenia.”

“That’s right. She was a good friend of the Castevets. She used to grow herbs and things and bring them in for Mrs. Castevet to cook with.”

Rosemary nodded. “When we first looked at the apartment,” she said, “one room was full of plants.”

“And now that she’s dead,” Terry said, “Mrs. Castevet’s got a miniature greenhouse in the kitchen and grows things herself.”

“Excuse me, I have to put softener in,” Rosemary said. She got up and got the bottle from the laundry bag on the washer.

“Do you know who you look like?” Terry asked her; and Rosemary, unscrewing the cap, said, “No, who?”

“Piper Laurie.”

Rosemary laughed. “Oh, no,” she said. “It’s funny your saying that, because my husband used to date Piper Laurie before she got married.”

“No kidding? In Hollywood?”

“No, here.” Rosemary poured a capful of the softener. Terry opened the washer door and Rosemary thanked her and tossed the softener in.

“Is he an actor, your husband?” Terry asked.

Rosemary nodded complacently, capping the bottle.

“No kidding! What’s his name?”

“Guy Woodhouse,” Rosemary said. “He was in Luther and Nobody Loves An Albatross, and he does a lot of work in television.”

“Gee, I watch TV all day long,” Terry said. “I’ll bet I’ve seen him!” Glass crashed somewhere in the basement; a bottle smashing or a windowpane. “Yow,” Terry said.

Rosemary hunched her shoulders and looked uneasily toward the laundry room’s doorway. “I hate this basement,” she said.

“Me too,” Terry said. “I’m glad you’re here. If I was alone now I’d be scared stiff.”

“A delivery boy probably dropped a bottle,” Rosemary said.

Terry said; “Listen, we could come down together regular. Your door is by the service elevator, isn’t it? I could ring your bell and we could come down together. We could call each other first on the house phone.”

“That would be great,” Rosemary said. “I hate coming down here alone.”

Terry laughed happily, seemed to seek words, and then, still laughing, said, “I’ve got a good luck charm that’ll maybe do for both of us!” She pulled away the collar of her blouse, drew out a silver neckchain, and showed Rosemary on the end of it a silver filigree ball a little less than an inch in diameter.

“Oh, that’s beautiful,” Rosemary said.

“Isn’t it?” Terry said. “Mrs. Castevet gave it to me the day before yesterday. It’s three hundred years old. She grew the stuff inside it in that little greenhouse. It’s good luck, or anyway it’s supposed to be.”

Rosemary looked more closely at the charm Terry held out between thumb and fingertip. It was filled with a greenish-brown spongy substance that pressed out against the silver openwork. A bitter smell made Rosemary draw back.

Terry laughed again. “I’m not mad about the smell either,” she said. “I hope it works!”

“It’s a beautiful charm,” Rosemary said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“It’s European,” Terry said. She leaned a hip against a washer and admired the ball, turning it one way and another. “The Castevets are the most wonderful people in the world, bar none,” she said. “They picked me up off the sidewalk-and I mean that literally; I conked out on Eighth Avenue-and they brought me here and adopted me like a mother and father. Or like a grandmother and grandfather, I guess.”

“You were sick?” Rosemary asked.

“That’s putting it mildly,” Terry said. “I was starving and on dope and doing a lot of other things that I’m so ashamed of I could throw up just thinking about them. And Mr. and Mrs. Castevet completely rehabilitated me. They got me off the H, the dope, and got food into me and clean clothes on me, and now nothing is too good for me as far as they’re concerned. They give me all kinds of health food and vitamins, they even have a doctor come give me regular check-ups! It’s because they’re childless. I’m like the daughter they never had, you know?”

Rosemary nodded.

“I thought at first that maybe they had some kind of ulterior motive,” Terry said. “Maybe some kind of sex thing they would want me to do, or he would want, or she. But they’ve really been like real grandparents. Nothing like that. They’re going to put me through secretarial school in a little while and later on I’m going to pay them back. I only had three years of high school but there’s a way of making it up.” She dropped the filigree ball back into her blouse.

Rosemary said, “It’s nice to know there are people like that, when you hear so much about apathy and people who are afraid of getting involved.”

“There aren’t many like Mr. and Mrs. Castevet,” Terry said. “I would be dead now if it wasn’t for them. That’s an absolute fact. Dead or in jail.”

“You don’t have any family that could have helped you?”

“A brother in the Navy. The less said about him the better.”

Rosemary transferred her finished wash to a dryer and waited with Terry for hers to be done. They spoke of Guy’s occasional role on Another World (“Sure I remember! You’re married to him?”), the Bramford’s past (of which Terry knew nothing), and the coming visit to New York of Pope Paul. Terry was, like Rosemary, Catholic but no longer observing; she was anxious, though, to get a ticket to the papal mass to be celebrated at Yankee Stadium. When her wash was done and drying the two girls walked together to the service elevator and rode to the seventh floor. Rosemary invited Terry in to see the apartment, but Terry asked if she could take a rain check; the Castevets ate at six and she didn’t like to be late. She said she would call Rosemary on the house phone later in the evening so they could go down together to pick up their dry laundry.

Guy was home, eating a bag of Fritos and watching a Grace Kelly movie. “Them sure must be clean clothes,” he said.

Rosemary told him about Terry and the Castevets, and that Terry had remembered him from Another World. He made light of it, but it pleased him. He was depressed by the likelihood that an actor named Donald Baumgart was going to beat him out for a part in a new comedy for which both had read a second time that afternoon. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “what kind of a name is Donald Baumgart?” His own name, before he changed it, had been Sherman Peden.

Rosemary and Terry picked up their laundry at eight o’clock, and Terry came in with Rosemary to meet Guy and see the apartment. She blushed and was flustered by Guy, which spurred him to flowery compliments and the bringing of ashtrays and the striking of matches. Terry had never seen the apartment before; Mrs. Gardenia and the Castevets had had a falling-out shortly after her arrival, and soon afterwards Mrs. Gardenia had gone into the coma from which she had never emerged. “It’s a lovely apartment,” Terry said.

“It will be,” Rosemary said. “We’re not even halfway furnished yet.”

“I’ve got it!” Guy cried with a handclap. He pointed triumphantly at Terry. “Anna Maria Alberghetti!”

A package came from Bonniers, from Hutch; a tall teakwood ice bucket with a bright orange lining. Rosemary called him at once and thanked him. He had seen the apartment after the painters left but not since she and Guy had moved in; she explained about the chairs that were a week late and the sofa that wasn’t due for another month. “For God’s sake don’t even think yet about entertaining,” Hutch said. “Tell me how everything is.”

Rosemary told him, in happy detail. “And the neighbors certainly don’t seem abnormal,” she said. “Except normal abnormal like homosexuals; there are two of them, and across the hall from us there’s a nice old couple named Gould with a place in Pennsylvania where they breed Persian cats. We can have one any time we want.”

“They shed,” Hutch said.

“And there’s another couple that we haven’t actually met yet who took in this girl who was hooked on drugs, whom we have met, and they completely cured her and are putting her through secretarial school.”

“It sounds as if you’ve moved into Sunnybrook Farm,” Hutch said; “I’m delighted.”

“The basement is kind of creepy,” Rosemary said. “I curse you every time I go down there.”

“Why on earth me?”

“Your stories. “

“If you mean the ones I write, I curse me too; if you mean the ones I told

you, you might with equal justification curse the fire alarm for the fire and the weather bureau for the typhoon.”

Rosemary, cowed, said, “It won’t be so bad from now on. That girl I mentioned is going down there with me.”

Hutch said, “It’s obvious you’ve exerted the healthy influence I predicted and the house is no longer a chamber of horrors. Have fun with the ice bucket and say hello to Guy.”

The Kapps in apartment 7D appeared; a stout couple in their middle thirties with an inquisitive two-year-old daughter named Lisa. “What’s your name?” Lisa asked, sitting in her stroller. “Did you eat your egg? Did you eat your Captain Crunch?”

“My name is Rosemary,” Rosemary said. “I ate my egg but I’ve never even heard of Captain Crunch. Who is he?”

On Friday night, September 17^th, Rosemary and Guy went with two other couples to a preview of a play called Mrs. Dally and then to a party given by a photographer, Dee Bertillon, in his studio on West Forty-eighth Street. An argument developed between Guy and Bertillon over Actors Equity’s policy of blocking the employment of foreign actors-Guy thought it was right, Bertillon thought it was wrong-and though the others present buried the disagreement under a quick tide of jokes and gossip, Guy took Rosemary away soon after, at a few mintues past twelve-thirty.

The night was mild and balmy and they walked; and as they approached the Bramford’s blackened mass they saw on the sidewalk before it a group of twenty or so people gathered in a semicircle at the side of a parked car. Two police cars waited double-parked, their roof lights spinning red.

Rosemary and Guy walked faster, hand in hand, their senses sharpening. Cars on the avenue slowed questioningly; windows scraped open in the Bramford and heads looked out beside gargoyles’ heads. The night doorman Toby came from the house with a tan blanket that a policeman turned to take from him.

The roof of the car, a Volkswagen, was crumpled to the side; the windshield was crazed with a million fractures. “Dead,” someone said, and someone else said, “I look up and I think it’s some kind of a big bird zooming down, like an eagle or something.”

Rosemary and Guy stood on tiptoes, craned over people’s shoulders. “Get back now, will you?” a policeman at the center said. The shoulders separated, a sport-shined back moved away. On the sidewalk Terry lay, watching the sky with one eye, half of her face gone to red pulp. Tan blanket flipped over her. Settling, it reddened in one place and then another.

Rosemary wheeled, eyes shut, right hand making an automatic cross. She kept her mouth tightly closed, afraid she might vomit.

Guy winced and drew air in under his teeth. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, and groaned. “Oh my God.”

A policeman said, “Get back, will you?”

“We know her,” Guy said.

Another policeman turned and said, “What’s her name?”

“Terry.”

“Terry what?” He was forty or so and sweating. His eyes were blue and beautiful, with thick black lashes.

Guy said, “Ro? What was her name? Terry what?”

Rosemary opened her eyes and swallowed. “I don’t remember,” she said. “Italian, with a G. A long name. She made ‘a joke about spelling it. Not being able to.”

Guy said to the blue-eyed policeman, “She was staying with people named Castevet, in apartment seven A.”

“We’ve got that already,” the policeman said.

Another policeman came up, holding a sleet of pale yellow notepaper. Mr. Micklas was behind him, tight-mouthed, in a raincoat over striped pajamas. “Short and sweet,” the policeman said to the blue-eyed one, and handed him the yellow paper. “She stuck it to the window sill with a Band-Aid so it wouldn’t blow away.”

“Anybody there?”

The other shook his head.

The blue-eyed policeman read what was written on the sheet of paper, sucking thoughtfully at his front teeth. “Theresa Gionoffrio,” he said. He pronounced it as an Italian would. Rosemary nodded.

Guy said, “Wednesday night you wouldn’t have guessed she had a sad thought in her mind.”

“Nothing but sad thoughts,” the policeman said, opening his pad holder. He laid the paper inside it and closed the holder with a width of yellow sticking out.

“Did you know her?” Mr. Micklas asked Rosemary.

“Only slightly,” she said.

“Oh, of course,” Mr. Micklas said; “you’re on seven too.”

Guy said to Rosemary, “Come on, honey, let’s go upstairs.”

The policeman said, “Do you have any idea where we can find these people Castevet?”

“No, none at all,” Guy said. “We’ve never even met them.”

“They’re usually at home now,” Rosemary said. “We hear them through the wall. Our bedroom is next to theirs.”

Guy put his hand on Rosemary’s back. “Come on, hon,” he said. They nodded to the policeman and Mr. Micklas, and started toward the house.

“Here they come now,” Mr. Micklas said. Rosemary and Guy stopped and turned. Coming from downtown, as they themselves had come, were a tall, broad, white-haired woman and a tall, thin, shuffling man. “The Castevets?” Rosemary asked. Mr. Micklas nodded.

Mrs. Castevet was wrapped in light blue, with snow-white dabs of gloves, purse, shoes, and hat. Nurselike she supported her husband’s forearm. He was dazzling, in an every-color seersucker jacket, red slacks, a pink bow tie, and a gray fedora with a pink band. He was seventy-five or older; she was sixtyeight or -nine. They came closer with expressions of young alertness, with friendly quizzical smiles. The policeman stepped forward to meet them and their smiles faltered and fell away. Mrs. Castevet said something worryingly; Mr. Castevet frowned and shook his head. His wide, thin-upped mouth was rosy-pink, as if lipsticked; his cheeks were chalky, his eyes small and bright in deep sockets. She was big-nosed, with a sullen fleshy underlip. She wore pink-rimmed eyeglasses on a neckchain that dipped down from behind plain pearl earrings.

The policeman said, “Are you folks the Castevets on the seventh floor?”

“We are,” Mr. Castevet said in a dry voice that had to be listened for.

“You have a young woman named Theresa Gionoffrio living with you?”

“We do,” Mr. Castevet said. “What’s wrong? Has there been an accident?”

“You’d better brace yourselves for some bad news,” the policeman said. He waited, looking at each of them in turn, and then he said, “She’s dead. She killed herself.” He raised a hand, the thumb pointing back over his shoulder. “She jumped out of the window.”

They looked at him with no change of expression at all, as if he hadn’t spoken yet; then Mrs. Castevet leaned sideways, glanced beyond him at the red-stained blanket, and stood straight again and looked him in the eyes. “That’s not possible,” she said in her loud midwestern Roman-bring-me-someroot-beer voice. “It’s a mistake. Somebody else is under there.”

The policeman, not turning from her, said, “Artie, would you let these people take a look, please?”

Mrs. Castevet marched past him, her jaw set.

Mr. Castevet stayed where he was. “I knew this would happen,” he said. “She got deeply depressed every three weeks or so. I noticed it and told my wife, but she pooh-poohed me. She’s an optimist who refuses to admit that everything doesn’t always turn out the way she wants it to.”

Mrs. Castevet came back. “That doesn’t mean that she killed herself,” she said. “She was a very happy girl with no reason for self-destruction. It must have been an accident. She must have been cleaning the windows and lost her hold. She was always surprising us by cleaning things and doing things for us.”

“She wasn’t cleaning windows at midnight,” Mr. Castevet said.

“Why not?” Mrs. Castevet said angrily. “Maybe she was!”

The policeman held out the pale yellow paper, having taken it from his pad holder.

Mrs. Castevet hesitated, then took it and turned it around and read it. Mr. Castevet tipped his head in over her arm and read it too, his thin vivid lips moving.

“Is that her handwriting?” the policeman asked.

Mrs. Castevet nodded. Mr. Castevet said, “Definitely. Absolutely.”

The policeman held out his hand and Mrs. Castevet gave him the paper. He said, “Thank you. I’ll see you get it back when we’re done with it.”

She took off her glasses, dropped them on their neckchain, and covered both her eyes with white-gloved fingertips. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “I just don’t believe it. She was so happy. All her troubles were in the past.” Mr. Castevet put his hand on her shoulder and looked at the ground and shook his head.

“Do you know the name of her next-of-kin?” the policeman asked.

“She didn’t have any,” Mrs. Castevet said. “She was all alone. She didn’t have anyone, only us.”

“Didn’t she have a brother?” Rosemary asked.

Mrs. Castevet put on her glasses and looked at her. Mr. Castevet looked up from the ground, his deep-socketed eyes glinting under his hat brim.

“Did she?” the policeman asked.

“She said she did,” Rosemary said. “In the Navy.”

The policeman looked to the Castevets.

“It’s news to me,” Mrs. Castevet said, and Mr. Castevet said, “To both of us.”

The policeman asked Rosemary, “Do you know his rank or where he’s stationed?”

“No, I don’t,” she said, and to the Castevets: “She mentioned him to me the other day, in the laundry room. I’m Rosemary Woodhouse.”

Guy said, “We’re in seven E.”

“I feel just the way you do, Mrs. Castevet,” Rosemary said. “She seemed so happy and full of-of good feelings about the future. She said wonderful things about you and your husband; how grateful she was to both of you for all the help you were giving her.”

“Thank you,” Mrs. Castevet said, and Mr. Castevet said, “It’s nice of you to tell us that. It makes it a little easier.”

The policeman said, “You don’t know anything else about this brother except that he’s in the Navy?”

“That’s all,” Rosemary said. “I don’t think she liked him very much.”

“It should be easy to find him,” Mr. Castevet said, “with an uncommon name like Gionoffrio.”

Guy put his hand on Rosemary’s back again and they withdrew toward the house. “I’m so stunned and so sorry,” Rosemary said to the Castevets, and Guy said, “It’s such a pity. It’s-“

Mrs. Castevet said, “Thank you,” and Mr. Castevet said something long and sibilant of which only the phrase “her last days” was understandable.

They rode upstairs (“Oh, my!” the night elevator man Diego said; “Oh, my! Oh, my!”), looked ruefully at the now-haunted door of 7A, and walked through the branching hallway to their own apartment. Mr. Kellogg in 7G peered out from behind his chained door and asked what was going on downstairs. They told him.

They sat on the edge of their bed for a few minutes, speculating about Terry’s reason for killing herself. Only if the Castevets told them some day what was in the note, they agreed, would they ever learn for certain what had driven her to the violent death they had nearly witnessed. And even knowing what was in the note, Guy pointed out, they might still not know the full answer, for part of it had probably been beyond Terry’s own understanding. Something had led her to drugs and something had led her to death; what that something was, it was too late now for anyone to know.

“Remember what Hutch said?” Rosemary asked. “About there being more suicides here than in other buildings?”

“Ah, Ro,” Guy said, “that’s crap, honey, that ‘danger zone’ business.”

“Hutch believes it.”

“Well, it’s still crap.”

“I can imagine what he’s going to say when he hears about this.”

“Don’t tell him,” Guy said. “He sure as hell won’t read about it in the papers.” A strike against the New York newspapers had begun that morning, and there were rumors that it might continue a month or longer.

They undressed, showered, resumed a stopped game of Scrabble, stopped it, made love, and found milk and a dish of cold spaghetti in the refrigerator. Just before they put the lights out at two-thirty, Guy remembered to check the answering service and found that he had got a part in a radio commercial for Cresta Blanca wines.

Soon he was asleep, but Rosemary lay awake beside him, seeing Terry’s pulped face and her one eye watching the sky. After a while, though, she was at Our Lady. Sister Agnes was shaking her fist at her, ousting her from leadership of the second-floor monitors. “Sometimes I wonder how come you’re the leader of anything!” she said. A bump on the other side of the wall woke Rosemary, and Mrs. Castevet said, “And please don’t tell me what Laura-Louise said because I’m not interested!” Rosemary turned over and burrowed into her pillow.

Sister Agnes was furious. Her piggy-eyes were squeezed to slits and her nostrils were bubbling the way they always did at such moments. Thanks to Rosemary it had been necessary to brick up all the windows, and now Our Lady had been taken out of the beautiful-school competition being run by the World-Herald. “If you’d listened to me, we wouldn’t have had to do it!” Sister Agnes cried in a hoarse midwestern bray. “We’d have been all set to go now instead of starting all over from scratch!” Uncle Mike tried to hush her. He was the principal of Our Lady, which was connected by passageways to his body shop in South Omaha. “I told you not to tell her anything in advance,” Sister Agnes continued lower, piggy-eyes glinting hatefully at Rosemary. “I told you she wouldn’t be open-minded. Time enough later to let her in on it.” (Rosemary had told Sister Veronica about the windows being bricked up and

Sister Veronica had withdrawn the school from the competition; otherwise no one would have noticed and they would have won. It had been right to tell, though, Sister Agnes notwithstanding. A Catholic school shouldn’t win by trickery.) “Anybody! Anybody!” Sister Agnes said. “All she has to be is young, healthy, and not a virgin. She doesn’t have to be a no-good drug-addict whore out of the gutter. Didn’t I say that in the beginning? Anybody. As long as she’s young and healthy and not a virgin.” Which didn’t make sense at all, not even to Uncle Mike; so Rosemary turned over and it was Saturday afternoon, and she and Brian and Eddie and Jean were at the candy counter in the Orpheum, going in to see Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal in The Fountainhead, only it

was live, not a movie..

On the following Monday morning Rosemary was putting away the last of a double armload of groceries when the doorbell rang; and the peephole showed Mrs. Castevet, white hair in curlers under a blue-and-white kerchief, looking solemnly straight ahead as if waiting for the click of a passport photographer’s camera.

Rosemary opened the door and said, “Hello. How are you?”

Mrs. Castevet smiled bleakly. “Fine,” she said. “May I come in for a minute?”

“Yes, of course; please do.” Rosemary stood back against the wall and held the door wide open. A faint bitter smell brushed across her as Mrs. Castevet came in, the smell of Terry’s silver good luck charm filled with spongy greenish-brown. Mrs. Castevet was wearing toreador pants and shouldn’t have been; her hips and thighs were massive, dabbed with wide bands of fat. The pants were lime green under a blue blouse; the blade of a screwdriver poked from her hip pocket. Stopping between the doorways of the den and kitchen, she turned and put on her neckchained glasses and smiled at Rosemary. A dream Rosemary had had a night or two earlier sparked in her mind-something about Sister Agnes bawling her out for bricking up windows-and she shook it away and smiled attentively, ready to hear what Mrs. Castevet was about to say.

“I just came over to thank you,” Mrs. Castevet said, “for saying those nice things to us the other night, poor Terry telling you she was grateful to us for what we done. You’ll never know how comforting it was to hear something like that in such a shock moment, because in both of our minds was the thought that maybe we had failed her in some way and drove her to it, although her note made it crystal clear, of course, that she did it of her own free will; but anyway it was a blessing to hear the words spoken out loud like that by somebody Terry had confided in just before the end.”

“Please, there’s no reason to thank me,” Rosemary said. “All I did was tell you what she said to me.”

“A lot of people wouldn’t have bothered,” Mrs. Castevet said. “They’d have just walked away without wanting to spend the air and the little bit of musclepower. When you’re older you’ll come to realize that acts of kindness are few and far between in this world of ours. So I do thank you, and Roman does too. Roman is my hubby.”

Rosemary ducked her head in concession, smiled, and said, “You’re welcome. I’m glad that I helped.”

“She was cremated yesterday morning with no ceremony,” Mrs. Castevet said. “That’s the way she wanted it. Now we have to forget and go on. It certainly won’t be easy; we took a lot of pleasure in having her around, not having children of our own. Do you have any?”

“No, we don’t,” Rosemary said.

Mrs. Castevet looked into the kitchen. “Oh, that’s nice,” she said, “the pans hanging on the wall that way. And look how you put the table, isn’t that interesting.”

“It was in a magazine,” Rosemary said.

“You certainly got a nice paint job,” Mrs. Castevet said, fingering the door jamb appraisingly. “Did the house do it? You must have been mighty openhanded with the painters; they didn’t do this kind of work for us.”

“All we gave them was five dollars each,” Rosemary said.

“Oh, is that all?” Mrs. Castevet turned around and looked into the den. “Oh, that’s nice,” she said, “a TV room.”

“It’s only temporary,” Rosemary said. “At least I hope it is. It’s going to be a nursery.”

“Are you pregnant?” Mrs. Castevet asked, looking at her.

“Not yet,” Rosemary said, “but I hope to be, as soon as we’re settled.”

“That’s wonderful,” Mrs. Castevet said. “You’re young and healthy; you ought to have lots of children.”

“We plan to have three,” Rosemary said. “Would you like to see the rest of the apartment?”

“I’d love to,” Mrs. Castevet said. “I’m dying to see what you’ve done to it. I used to be in here almost every day. The woman who had it before you was a dear friend of mine.”

“I know,” Rosemary said, easing past Mrs. Castevet to lead the way; “Terry told me.”

“Oh, did she,” Mrs. Castevet said, following along. “It sounds like you two had some long talks together down there in the laundry room.”

“Only one,” Rosemary said.

The living room startled Mrs. Castevet. “My goodness!” she said. “I can’t get over the change! It looks so much brighter! Oh and look at that chair. Isn’t that handsome?”

“It just came Friday,” Rosemary said.

“What did you pay for a chair like that?”

Rosemary, disconcerted, said, “I’m not sure. I think it was about two hundred dollars.”

“You don’t mind my asking, do you?” Mrs. Castevet said, and tapped her nose. “That’s how I got a big nose, by being nosy.”

Rosemary laughed and said, “No, no, it’s all right. I don’t mind.”

Mrs. Castevet inspected the living room, the bedroom, and the bathroom, asking how much Mrs. Gardenia’s son had charged them for the rug and the vanity, where they had got the night-table lamps, exactly how old Rosemary was, and if an electric toothbrush was really any better than the old kind. Rosemary found herself enjoying this open forthright old woman with her loud voice and her blunt questions. She offered coffee and cake to her.

“What does your hubby do?” Mrs. Castevet asked, sitting at the kitchen table idly checking prices on cans of soup and oysters. Rosemary, folding a Chemex paper, told her. “I knew it!” Mrs. Castevet said. “I said to Roman yesterday, ‘He’s so good-looking I’ll bet he’s a movie actor’! There’s three-four of them in the building, you know. What movies was he in?”

“No movies,” Rosemary said. “He was in two plays called Luther and Nobody Loves An Albatross and he does a lot of work in television and radio.”

They had the coffee and cake in the kitchen, Mrs. Castevet refusing to let Rosemary disturb the living room on her account. “Listen, Rosemary,” she said, swallowing cake and coffee at once, “I’ve got a two-inch-thick sirloin steak sitting defrosting right this minute, and half of it’s going to go to waste with just Roman and me there to eat it. Why don’t you and Guy come over and have supper with us tonight, what do you say?”

“Oh, no, we couldn’t,” Rosemary said.

“Sure you could; why not?”

“No, really, I’m sure you don’t want to-“

“It would be a big help to us if you would,” Mrs. Castevet said. She looked into her lap, then looked up at Rosemary with a hard-to-carry smile. “We had friends with us last night and Saturday,” she said, “but this’ll be the first night we’ll be alone since-the other night.”

Rosemary leaned forward feelingly. “If you’re sure it won’t be trouble for you,” she said.

“Honey, if it was trouble I wouldn’t ask you,” Mrs. Castevet said. “Believe me, I’m as selfish as the day is long.”

Rosemary smiled. “That isn’t what Terry told me,” she said. “Well,” Mrs. Castevet said with a pleased smile, “Terry didn’t know what she was talking about.”

“I’ll have to check with Guy,” Rosemary said, “but you go ahead and count on us.”

Mrs. Castevet said happily, “Listen! You tell him I won’t take no for an answer! I want to be able to tell folks I knew him when!”

They ate their cake and coffee, talking of the excitements and hazards of an acting career, the new season’s television shows and how bad they were, and the continuing newspaper strike.

“Will six-thirty be too early for you?” Mrs. Castevet asked at the door.

“It’ll be perfect,” Rosemary said.

“Roman don’t like to eat any later than that,” Mrs. Castevet said. “He has stomach trouble and if he eats too late he can’t get to sleep. You know where we are, don’t you? Seven A, at six-thirty. We’ll be looking forward. Oh, here’s your mail, dear; I’ll get it. Ads. Well, it’s better than getting nothing, isn’t it?”

Guy came home at two-thirty in a bad mood; he had learned from his agent that, as he had feared, the grotesquely named Donald Baumgart had won the part he had come within a hair of getting. Rosemary kissed him and installed him in his new easy chair with a melted cheese sandwich and a glass of beer. She had read the script of the play and not liked it; it would probably close out of town, she told Guy, and Donald Baumgart would never be heard of again.

“Even if it folds,” Guy said, “it’s the kind of part that gets noticed. You’ll see; he’ll get something else right after.” He opened the corner of his sandwich, looked in bitterly, closed it, and started eating.

“Mrs. Castevet was here this morning,” Rosemary said. “To thank me for telling them that Terry was grateful to them. I think she really just wanted to see the apartment. She’s absolutely the nosiest person I’ve ever seen. She actually asked the prices of things.”

“No kidding,” Guy said.

“She comes right out and admits she’s nosy, though, so it’s kind of funny and forgivable instead of annoying. She even looked into the medicine chest.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. And guess what she was wearing.”

“A Pillsbury sack with three X’s on it.”

“No, toreador pants.”

“Toreador pants?”

“Lime-green ones.”

“Ye gods.”

Kneeling on the floor between the bay windows, Rosemary drew a line on brown paper with crayon and a yardstick and then measured the depth of the window seats. “She invited us to have dinner with them this eveping,” she said,

and looked at Guy. “I told her I’d have to check with you, but that it would probably be okay.”

“Ah, Jesus, Ro,” Guy said, “we don’t want to do that, do we?”

“I think they’re lonely,” Rosemary said. “Because of Terry.”

“Honey,” Guy said, “if we get friendly with an old couple like that we’re never going to get them off our necks. They’re right here on the same floor with us, they’ll be looking in six times a day. Especially if she’s nosy to begin with.”

“I told her she could count on us,” Rosemary said.

“I thought you told her you had to check first.”

“I did, but I told her she could count on us too.” Rosemary looked helplessly at Guy. “She was so anxious for us to come.”

“Well it’s not my night for being kind to Ma and Pa Kettle,” Guy said. “I’m sorry, honey, call her up and tell her we can’t make it.”

“All right, I will,” Rosemary said, and drew another line with the crayon and the yardstick.

Guy finished his sandwich. “You don’t have to sulk about it,” he said.

“I’m not sulking,” Rosemary said. “I see exactly what you mean about them being on the same floor. It’s a valid point and you’re absolutely right. I’m not sulking at all.”

“Oh hell,” Guy said, “we’ll go.”

“No, no, what for? We don’t have to. I shopped for dinner before she came, so that’s no problem.”

“We’ll go,” Guy said.

“We don’t have to if you don’t want to. That sounds so phony but I really mean it, really I do.”

“We’ll go. It’ll be my good deed for the day.”

“All right, but only if you want to. And we’ll make it very clear to them that it’s only this one time and not the beginning of anything. Right?”

“Right.”

Six

At a few minutes past six-thirty Rosemary and Guy left their apartment and walked through the branches of dark green hallway to the Castevets’ door. As Guy rang the doorbell the elevator behind them clanged open and Mr. Dubin or Mr. DeVore (they didn’t know which was which) came out carrying a suit swathed in cleaner’s plastic. He smiled and, unlocking the door of 7B next to them, said, “You’re in the wrong place, aren’t you?” Rosemary and Guy made friendly laughs and he let himself in, calling “Me!” and allowing them a glimpse of a black sideboard and red-and-gold wallpaper.

The Castevets’ door opened and Mrs. Castevet was there, powdered and rouged and smiling broadly in light green silk and a frilled pink apron. “Perfect timing!” she said. “Come on in! Roman’s making Vodka Blushes in the blender. My, I’m glad you could come, Guy! I’m fixing to tell people I knew you when! ‘Had dinner right off that plate, he did-Guy Woodhouse in person!’ I’m not going to wash it when you’re done; I’m going to leave it just as is!”

Guy and Rosemary laughed and exchanged glances; Your friend, his said, and hers said, What can I do?

There was a large foyer in which a rectangular table was set for four, with an embroidered white cloth, plates that didn’t all match, and bright ranks of ornate silver. To the left the foyer opened on a living room easily twice the size of Rosemary and Guy’s but otherwise much like it. It had one large bay window instead of two smaller ones, and a huge pink marble mantel sculptured with lavish scrollwork. The room was oddly furnished; at the fireplace end there were a settee and a lamp table and a few chairs, and at the opposite end an officelike clutter of file cabinets, bridge tables piled with newspapers, overfilled bookshelves, and a typewriter on a metal stand. Between the two ends of the room was a twenty-foot field of brown wall-to-wall carpet, deep and new-looking, marked with the trail of a vacuum cleaner. In the center of it, entirely alone, a small round table stood holding Life and Look and Scientific American.

Mrs. Castevet showed them across the brown carpet and seated them on the settee; and as they sat Mr. Castevet came in, holding in both hands a small tray on which four cocktail glasses ran over with clear pink liquid. Staring at the rims of the glasses he shuffled forward across the carpet, looking as if with every next step he would trip and fall disastrously. “I seem to have overfilled the glasses,” he said. “No, no, don’t get up. Please. Generally I pour these out as precisely as a bartender, don’t I, Minnie?”

Mrs. Castevet said, “Just watch the carpet.”

“But this evening,” Mr. Castevet continued, coming closer, “I made a little too much, and rather than leave the surplus in the blender, I’m afraid I thought I . . . There we are. Please, sit down. Mrs. Woodhouse?”

Rosemary took a glass, thanked him, and sat. Mrs. Castevet quickly put a paper cocktail napkin in her lap.

“Mr. Woodhouse? A Vodka Blush. Have you ever tasted one?”

“No,” Guy said, taking one and sitting.

“Minnie,” Mr. Castevet said.

“It looks delicious,” Rosemary said, smiling vividly as she wiped the base of her glass.

“They’re very popular in Australia,” Mr. Castevet said. He took the final glass and raised it to Rosemary and Guy. “To our guests,” he said. “Welcome to our home.” He drank and cocked his head critically, one eye partway closed, the tray at his side dripping on the carpet.

Mrs. Castevet coughed in mid-swallow. “The carpet!” she choked, pointing.

Mr. Castevet looked down. “Oh dear,” he said, and held the tray up uncertainly.

Mrs. Castevet thrust aside her drink, hurried to her knees, and laid a paper napkin carefully over the wetness. “Brand-new carpet,” she said. “Brand-new carpet. This man is so clumsy!”

The Vodka Blushes were tart and quite good.

“Do you come from Australia?” Rosemary asked, when the carpet had been blotted, the tray safely kitchened, and the Castevets seated in straight-backed chairs.

“Oh no,” Mr. Castevet said, “I’m from right here in New York City. I’ve been there though. I’ve been everywhere. Literally.” He sipped Vodka Blush, sitting with his legs crossed and a hand on his knee. He was wearing black loafers with tassels, gray slacks, a white blouse, and a blue-and-gold striped ascot. “Every continent, every country,” he said. “Every major city. You name a place and I’ve been there. Go ahead. Name a place.”

Guy said, “Fairbanks, Alaska.”

“I’ve been there,” Mr. Castevet said. “I’ve been all over Alaska: Fairbanks, Juneau, Anchorage, Nome, Seward; I spent four months there in 1938 and I’ve made a lot of one-day stop-overs in Fairbanks and Anchorage on my way to places in the Far East. I’ve been in small towns in Alaska too: Dillingham and Akulurak.”

“Where are you folks from?” Mrs. Castevet asked, fixing the folds at the bosom of her dress.

“I’m from Omaha,” Rosemary said, “and Guy is from Baltimore.”

“Omaha is a good city,” Mr. Castevet said. “Baltimore is too.”

“Did you travel for business reasons?” Rosemary asked him.

“Business and pleasure both,” he said. “I’m seventy-nine years old and I’ve been going one place or another since I was ten. You name it, I’ve been there.”

“What business were you in?” Guy asked.

“Just about every business,” Mr. Castevet said. “Wool, sugar, toys, machine parts, marine insurance, oil . . .”

A bell pinged in the kitchen. “Steak’s ready,” Mrs. Castevet said, standing up with her glass in her hand. “Don’t rush your drinks now; take them along to the table. Roman, take your pill.”

“It will end on October third,” Mr. Castevet said; “the day before the Pope gets here. No Pope ever visits a city where the newspapers are on strike.”

“I heard on TV that he’s going to postpone and wait till it’s over,” Mrs. Castevet said.

Guy smiled. “Well,” he said, “that’s show biz.”

Mr. and Mrs. Castevet laughed, and Guy along with them. Rosemary smiled and cut her steak. It was overdone and juiceless, flanked by peas and mashed potatoes under flour-laden gravy.

Still laughing, Mr. Castevet said, “It is, you know! That’s just what it is; show biz!”

“You can say that again,” Guy said.

“The costumes, the rituals,” Mr. Castevet said; “every religion, not only Catholicism. Pageants for the ignorant.”

Mrs. Castevet said, “I think we’re offending Rosemary.”

“No, no, not at all,” Rosemary said.

“You aren’t religious, my dear, are you?” Mr. Castevet asked.

“I was brought up to be,” Rosemary said, “but now I’m an agnostic. I wasn’t offended. Really I wasn’t.”

“And you, Guy?” Mr. Castevet asked. “Are you an agnostic too?”

“I guess so,” Guy said. “I don’t see how anyone can be anything else. I mean, there’s no absolute proof one way or the other, is there?”

“No, there isn’t,” Mr. Castevet said.

Mrs. Castevet, studying Rosemary, said, “You looked uncomfortable before, when we were laughing at Guy’s little joke about the Pope.”

“Well he is the Pope,” Rosemary said. “I guess I’ve been conditioned to have respect for him and I still do, even if I don’t think he’s holy any more.”

“If you don’t think he’s holy,” Mr. Castevet said, “you should have no respect for him at all, because he’s going around deceiving people and pretending he is holy.”

“Good point,” Guy said.

“When I think what they spend on robes and jewels,” Mrs. Castevet said.

“A good picture of the hypocrisy behind organized religion,” Mr. Castevet said, “was given, I thought, in Luther. Did you ever get to play the leading part, Guy?”

“Me? No,” Guy said.

“Weren’t you Albert Finney’s understudy?” Mr. Castevet asked.

“No,” Guy said, “the fellow who played Weinand was. I just covered two of the smaller parts.”

“That’s strange,” Mr. Castevet said; “I was quite certain that you were his understudy. I remember being struck by a gesture you made and checking in the program to see who you were; and I could swear you were listed as Finney’s understudy.”

“What gesture do you mean?” Guy asked.

“I’m not sure now; a movement of your-“

“I used to do a thing with my arms when. Luther had the fit, a sort of involuntary reaching-“

“Exactly,” Mr. Castevet said. “That’s just what I meant. It had a wonderful authenticity to it. In contrast, may I say, to everything Mr. Finney was doing.”

“Oh, come on now,” Guy said.

“I thought his performance was considerably overrated,” Mr. Castevet said. “I’d be most curious to see what you would have done with the part.”

Laughing, Guy said, “That makes two of us,” and cast a bright-eyed glance at Rosemary. She smiled back, pleased that Guy was pleased; there would be no reproofs from him now for an evening wasted talking with Ma and Pa Settle. No, Kettle.

“My father was a theatrical producer,” Mr. Castevet said, “and my early years were spent in the company of such people as Mrs. Fiske and ForbesRobertson, Otis Skinner and Modjeska. I tend, therefore, to look for something more than mere competence in actors. You have a most interesting inner quality, Guy. It appears in your television work too, and it should carry you very far indeed; provided, of course, that you get those initial ‘breaks’ upon which even the greatest actors are to some degree dependent. Are you preparing for a show now?”

“I’m up for a couple of parts,” Guy said.

“I can’t believe that you won’t get them,” Mr. Castevet said.

“I can,” Guy said.

Mr. Castevet stared at him. “Are you serious?” he asked.

Dessert was a homemade Boston cream pie that, though better than the steak and vegetables, had for Rosemary a peculiar and unpleasant sweetness. Guy, however, praised it heartily and ate a second helping. Perhaps he was only acting, Rosemary thought; repaying compliments with compliments.

After dinner Rosemary offered to help with the cleaning up. Mrs. Castevet accepted the offer instantly and the two women cleared the table while Guy and Mr. Castevet went into the living room.

The kitchen, opening off the foyer, was small, and made smaller still by the miniature greenhouse Terry had mentioned. Some three feet long, it stood on a large white table near the room’s one window. Goosenecked lamps leaned close around it, their bright bulbs reflecting in the glass and making it blinding white rather than transparent. In the remaining space the sink, stove, and refrigerator stood close together with cabinets jutting out above them on all sides. Rosemary wiped dishes at Mrs. Castevet’s elbow, working diligently and conscientiously in the pleasing knowledge that her own kitchen was larger and more graciously equipped. “Terry told me about that greenhouse,” she said.

“Oh yes,” Mrs. Castevet said. “It’s a nice hobby. You ought to do it too.”

“I’d like to have a spice garden some day,” Rosemary said. “Out of the city, of course. If Guy ever gets a movie offer we’re going to grab it and go live in Los Angeles. I’m a country girl at heart.”

“Do you come from a big family?” Mrs. Castevet asked.

“Yes,” Rosemary said. “I have three brothers and two sisters. I’m the baby.”

“Are your sisters married?”

“Yes, they are.”

Mrs. Castevet pushed a soapy sponge up and down inside a glass. “Do they have children?” she asked.

“One has two and the other has four,” Rosemary said. “At least that was the count the last I heard. It could be three and five by now.”

“Well that’s a good sign for you,” Mrs. Castevet said, still soaping the glass. She was a slow and thorough washer. “If your sisters have lots of children, chances are you will too. Things like that go in families.”

“Oh, we’re fertile, all right,” Rosemary said, waiting towel in hand for the glass. “My brother Eddie has eight already and he’s only twenty-six.”

“My goodness!” Mrs. Castevet said. She rinsed the glass and gave it to Rosemary.

“All told I’ve got twenty nieces and nephews,” Rosemary said. “I haven’t even seen half of them.”

“Don’t you go home every once in a while?” Mrs. Castevet asked.

“No, I don’t,” Rosemary said. “I’m not on the best of terms with my family, except one brother. They feel I’m the black sheep.”

QI

“Oh? How is that?”

“Because Guy isn’t Catholic, and we didn’t have a church wedding.”

“Tsk,” Mrs. Castevet said. “Isn’t it something the way people fuss about religion? Well, it’s their loss, not yours; don’t you let it bother you any.”

“That’s more easily said than done,” Rosemary said, putting the glass on a shelf. “Would you like me to wash and you wipe for a while?”

“No, this is fine, dear,” Mrs. Castevet said.

Rosemary looked outside the door. She could see only the end of the living room that was bridge tables and file cabinets; Guy and Mr. Castevet were at the other end. A plane of blue cigarette smoke lay motionless in the air.

“Rosemary?”

She turned. Mrs. Castevet, smiling, held out a wet plate in a green rubbergloved land.

It took almost an hour to do the dishes and pans and silver, although Rosemary felt she could have done them alone in less than half that time. When she and Mrs. Castevet came out of the kitchen and into the living room, Guy and Mr. Castevet were sitting facing each other on the settee, Mr. Castevet driving home point after point with repeated strikings of his forefinger against his palm.

“Now Roman, you stop bending Guy’s ear with your Modjeska stories,” Mrs. Castevet said. “He’s only listening ‘cause he’s polite.”

“No, it’s interesting, Mrs. Castevet,” Guy said.

“You see?” Mr. Castevet said.

“Minnie,” Mrs. Castevet told Guy. “I’m Minnie and he’s Roman; okay?” She looked mock-defiantly at Rosemary. “Okay?”

Guy laughed. “Okay, Minnie,” he said.

They talked about the Goulds and the Bruhns and Dubin-and-DeVore, about Terry’s sailor brother who had turned out to be in a civilian hospital in Saigon; and, because Mr. Castevet was reading a book critical of the Warren Report, about the Kennedy assassination. Rosemary, in one of the straightbacked chairs, felt oddly out of things, as if the Castevets were old friends of Guy’s to whom she had just been introduced. “Do you think it could have been a plot of some kind?” Mr. Castevet asked her, and she answered awkwardly, aware that a considerate host was drawing a left-out guest into conversation. She excused herself and followed Mrs. Castevet’s directions to the bathroom, where there were flowered paper towels inscribed For Our Guest and a book called Jokes for The John that wasn’t especially funny.

They left at ten-thirty, saying “Good-by, Roman” and “Thank you, Minnie” and shaking hands with an enthusiasm and an implied promise of more such evenings together that, on Rosemary’s part, was completely false. Rounding the first bend in the hallway and hearing the door close behind them, she blew out a relieved sigh and grinned happily at Guy when she saw him doing exactly the same.

“Naow Roman,” he said, working his eyebrows comically, “yew stop bendin’ Guy’s ee-yurs with them that Mojesky sto-tees!”

Laughing, Rosemary cringed and hushed him, and they ran hand in hand on ultra-quiet tiptoes to their own door, which they unlocked, opened, slammed, locked, bolted, chained; and Guy nailed it over with imaginary beams, pushed up three imaginary boulders, hoisted an imaginary drawbridge, and mopped his brow and panted while Rosemary bent over double and laughed into both hands.

“About that steak,” Guy said.

“Oh my God!” Rosemary said. “The pie! How did you eat two pieces of it? It was weird!”

“Dear girl,” Guy said, “that was an act of superhuman courage and selfsacrifice. I said to myself, ‘Ye gods, I’ll bet nobody’s ever asked this old bat for seconds on anything in her entire life! So I did it.” He waved a hand grandly. “Now and again I get these noble urges.”

They went into the bedroom. “She raises herbs and spices,” Rosemary said, “and when they’re full-grown she throws them out the window.”

“Shh, the walls have ears,” Guy said. “Hey, how about that silverware?”

“Isn’t that funny?” Rosemary said, working her feet against the floor to unshoe them; “only three dinner plates that match, and they’ve got that beautiful, beautiful silver.”

“Let’s be nice; maybe they’ll will it to us.”

“Let’s be nasty and buy our own. Did you go to the bathroom?”

“There? No.”

“Guess what they’ve got in it.”

“A bidet.”

“No, Jokes for The John. “

“No.

Rosemary shucked off her dress. “A book on a hook,” she said. “Right next to the toilet.”

Guy smiled and shook his head. He began taking out his cufflinks, standing beside the armoire. “Those stories of Roman’s, though,” he said, “were pretty damn interesting, actually. I’d never even heard of Forties-Robertson before, but he was a very big star in his day.” He worked at the second link, having trouble with it. “I’m going to go over there again tomorrow night and hear some more,” he said.

Rosemary looked at him, disconcerted. “You are?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, “he asked me.” He held out his hand to her. “Can you get this off for me?”

She went to him and worked at the link, feeling suddenly lost and uncertain. “I thought we were going to do something with Jimmy and Tiger,” she said.

“Was that definite?” he asked. His eyes looked into hers. “I thought we were just going to call and see.”

“It wasn’t definite,” she said.

He shrugged. “We’ll see them Wednesday or Thursday.”

She got the link out and held it on her palm. He took it. “Thanks,” he said. “You don’t have to come along if you don’t want to; you can stay here.”

“I think I will,” she said. “Stay here.” She went to the bed and sat down.

“He knew Henry Irving too,” Guy said. “It’s really terrifically interesting.”

Rosemary unhooked her stockings. “Why did they take down the pictures?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Their pictures; they took them down. In the living room and in the hallway leading back to the bathroom. There are hooks in the wall and clean places. And the one picture that is there, over the mantel, doesn’t fit. There are two inches of clean at both sides of it.”

Guy looked at her. “I didn’t notice,” he said.

“And why do they have all those files and things in the living room?” she asked.

“That he told me,” Guy said, taking off his shirt. “He puts out a newsletter for stamp collectors. All over the world. That’s why they get so much foreign mail.”

“Yes, but why in the living room?” Rosemary said. “They have three or four other rooms, all with the doors closed. Why doesn’t he use one of those?”

Guy went to her, shirt in hand, and pressed her nose with a firm fingertip. “You’re getting nosier than Minnie,” he said, kissed air at her, and went out to the bathroom.

Ten or fifteen minutes later, while in the kitchen putting on water for coffee, Rosemary got the sharp pain in her middle that was the night-before signal of her period. She relaxed with one hand against the corner of the stove, letting the pain have its brief way, and then she got out a Chemex paper and the can of coffee, feeling disappointed and forlorn.

She was twenty-four and they wanted three children two years apart; but Guy “wasn’t ready yet”-nor would he ever be ready, she feared, until he was as big as Marlon Brando and Richard Burton put together. Didn’t he know how handsome and talented he was, how sure to succeed? So her plan was to get pregnant by “accident”; the pills gave her headaches, she said, and rubber gadgets were repulsive. Guy said that subconsciously she was still a good Catholic, and she protested enough to support the explanation. Indulgently he studied the calendar and avoided the “dangerous days,” and she said, “No, it’s safe today, darling; I’m sure it is.”

And again this month he had won and she had lost, in this undignified contest in which he didn’t even know they were engaged. “Damn!” she said, and banged the coffee can down on the stove. Guy, in the den, called, “What happened?

“I bumped my elbow!” she called back.

At least she knew now why she had become depressed during the evening.

Double damn! If they were living together and not married she would have been pregnant fifty times by now!

Seven

The following evening after dinner Guy went over to the Castevets’. Rosemary straightened up the kitchen and was debating whether to work on the windowseat cushions or get into bed with Manchild in The Promised Land when the doorbell rang. It was Mrs. Castevet, and with her another woman, short, plump, and smiling, with a Buckley-for-Mayor button on the shoulder of a green dress.

“Hi, dear, we’re not bothering you, are we?” Mrs. Castevet said when Rosemary had opened the door. “This is my dear friend Laura-Louise McBurney, who lives up on twelve. Laura-Louise, this is Guy’s wife Rosemary.”

“Hello, Rosemary! Welcome to the Bram!”

“Laura-Louise just met Guy over at our place and she wanted to meet you too, so we came on over. Guy said you were staying in not doing anything. Can we come in?”

With resigned good grace Rosemary showed them into the living room.

“Oh, you’ve got new chairs,” Mrs. Castevet said. “Aren’t they beautiful!” “They came this morning,” Rosemary said.

“Are you all right, dear? You look worn.”

“I’m fine,” Rosemary said and smiled. “It’s the first day of my period.”

“And you’re up and around?” Laura-Louise asked, sitting. “On my first days I experienced such pain that I couldn’t move or eat or anything. Dan had to give me gin through a straw to kill the pain and we were one-hundred-percent Temperance at the time, with that one exception.”

“Girls today take things more in their stride than we did,” Mrs. Castevet said, sitting too. “They’re healthier than we were, thanks to vitamins and better medical care.”

Both women had brought identical green sewing bags and, to Rosemary’s surprise, were opening them now and taking out crocheting (Laura-Louise) and darning (Mrs. Castevet); settling down for a long evening of needlework and conversation. “What’s that over there?” Mrs. Castevet asked. “Seat covers?”

“Cushions for the window seats,” Rosemary said, and thinking Oh all right, I will, went over and got the work and brought it back and joined them.

Laura-Louise said, “You’ve certainly made a tremendous change in the apartment, Rosemary.”

“Oh, before I forget,” Mrs. Castevet said, “this is for you. From Roman and me.” She put a small packet of pink tissue paper into Rosemary’s hand, with a hardness inside it.

“For me?” Rosemary asked. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s just a little present is all,” Mrs. Castevet said, dismissing Rosemary’s puzzlement with quick hand-waves. “For moving in.”

“But there’s no reason for you to . . .” Rosemary unfolded the leaves of used-before tissue paper. Within the pink was Terry’s silver filigree ball-charm and its clustered-together neckchain. The smell of the ball’s filling made Rosemary pull her head away.

“It’s real old,” Mrs. Castevet said. “Over three hundred years.”

“It’s lovely,” Rosemary said, examining the ball and wondering whether she should tell that Terry had shown it to her. The moment for doing so slipped by.

“The green inside is called tannis root,” Mrs. Castevet said. “It’s good luck.”

Not for Terry, Rosemary thought, and said, “It’s lovely, but I can’t accept such a-“

“You already have,” Mrs. Castevet said, darning a brown sock and not looking at Rosemary. “Put it on.”

Laura-Louise said, “You’ll get used to the smell before you know it.”

“Go on,” Mrs. Castevet said.

“Well, thank you,” Rosemary said; and uncertainly she put the chain over her head and tucked the ball into the collar of her dress. It dropped down between her breasts, cold for a moment and obtrusive. I’ll take it off when they go, she thought.

Laura-Louise said, “A friend of ours made the chain entirely by hand. He’s a retired dentist and his hobby is making jewelry out of silver and gold. You’ll meet him at Minnie and Roman’s on-on some night soon, I’m sure, because they entertain so much. You’ll probably meet all their friends, all our friends.”

Rosemary looked up from her work and saw Laura-Louise pink with an embarrassment that had hurried and confused her last words. Minnie was busy darning, unaware. Laura-Louise smiled and Rosemary smiled back.

“Do you make your own clothes?” Laura-Louise asked.

“No, I don’t,” Rosemary said, letting the subject be changed. “I try to every once in a while but nothing ever hangs right.”

It turned out to be a fairly pleasant evening. Minnie told some amusing stories about her girlhood in Oklahoma, and Laura-Louise showed Rosemary two useful sewing tricks and explained feelingly how Buckley, the Conservative mayoral candidate, could win the coming election despite the high odds against him.

Guy came back at eleven, quiet and oddly self-contained. He said hello to the women and, by Rosemary’s chair, bent and kissed her cheek. Minnie said, “Eleven? My land! Come on, Laura-Louise.” Laura-Louise said, “Come and visit me any time you want, Rosemary; I’m in twelve F.” The two women closed their sewing bags and went quickly away.

“Were his stories as interesting as last night?” Rosemary asked.

“Yes,” Guy said. “Did you have a nice time?”

“All right. I got some work done.”

“So I see.”

“I got a present too.”

She showed him the charm. “It was Terry’s,” she said. “They gave it to her; she showed it to me. The police must have-given it back.”

“She probably wasn’t even wearing it,” Guy said.

“I’ll bet she was. She was as proud of it as-as if it was the first gift anyone had ever given her.” Rosemary lifted the chain off over her head and held the chain and the charm on her palm, jiggling them and looking at them.

“Aren’t you going to wear it?” Guy asked.

“It smells,” she said. “There’s stuff in it called tannis root.” She held out her hand. “From the famous greenhouse.”

Guy smelled and shrugged. “It’s not bad,” he said.

Rosemary went into the bedroom and opened a drawer in the vanity where she had a tin Louis Sherry box full of odds and ends. “Tannis, anybody?” she asked herself in the mirror, and put the charm in the box, closed it, and closed the drawer.

Guy, in the doorway, said, “If you took it, you ought to wear it.”

That night Rosemary awoke and found Guy sitting beside her smoking in the dark. She asked him what was the matter. “Nothing,” he said. “A little insomnia, that’s all.”

Roman’s stories of old-time stars, Rosemary thought, might have depressed him by reminding him that his own career was lagging behind Henry Irving’s and Forbes-Whosit’s. His going back for more of the stories might have been a form of masochism.

She touched his arm and told him not to worry.

“About what?”

“About anything.”

“All right,” he said, “I won’t.”

“You’re the greatest,” she said. “You know? You are. And it’s all going to come out right. You’re going to have to learn karate to get rid of the photographers.”

He smiled in the glow of his cigarette.

“Any day now,” she said. “Something big. Something worthy of you.”

“I know,” he said. “Go to sleep, honey.”

“Okay. Watch the cigarette.”

“I will.”

“Wake me if you can’t sleep.”

“Sure.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, Ro.”

A day or two later Guy brought home a pair of tickets for the Saturday night performance of The Fantasticks, given to him, he explained, by Dominick, his vocal coach. Guy had seen the show years before when it first opened; Rosemary had always been meaning to see it. “Go with Hutch,” Guy said; “it’ll give me a chance to work on the Wait Until Dark scene.”

Hutch had seen it too, though, so Rosemary went with Joan Jellico, who confided during dinner at the Bijou that she and Dick were separating, no longer having anything in common except their address. The news upset Rosemary. For days Guy had been distant and preoccupied, wrapped in something he would neither put aside nor share. Had Joan and Dick’s estrangement begun in the same way? She grew angry at Joan, who was wearing too much make-up and applauding too loudly in the small theater. No wonder she and Dick could find nothing in common; she was loud and vulgar, he was reserved, sensitive; they should never have married in the first place.

When Rosemary came home Guy was coming out of the shower, more vivacious and there than he had been all week. Rosemary’s spirits leaped. The show had been even better than she expected, she told him, and bad news, Joan and Dick were separating. They really were birds of completely different feathers though, weren’t they? How had the Wait Until Dark scene gone? Great. He had it down cold.

“Damn that tannis root,” Rosemary said. The whole bedroom smelled of it. The bitter prickly odor had even found its way into the bathroom. She got a piece of aluminum foil from the kitchen and wound the charm in a tight triple wrapping, twisting the ends to seal them.

“It’ll probably lose its strength in a few days,” Guy said.

“It better,” Rosemary said, spraying the air with a deodorant bomb. “If it doesn’t, I’m going to throw it away and tell Minnie I lost it;”

They made love-Guy was wild and driving-and later, through the wall, Rosemary heard a party in progress at Minnie and Roman’s; the same flat unmusical singing she had heard the last time, almost like religious chanting, and the same flute or clarinet weaving in and around and underneath it.

Guy kept his keyed-up vivacity all through Sunday, building shelves and shoe racks in the bedroom closets and inviting a bunch of Luther people over for Moo Goo Gai Woodhouse; and on Monday he painted the shelves and shoe racks and stained a bench Rosemary had found in a thrift shop, canceling his session with Dominick and keeping his ear stretched for the phone, which he caught every time before the first ring was finished. At three in the afternoon it rang again, and Rosemary, trying out a different arrangement of the living room chairs, heard him say, “Oh God, no. Oh, the poor guy.”

She went to the bedroom door.

“Oh God,” Guy said.

He was sitting on the bed, the phone in one hand and a can of Red Devil paint remover in the other. He didn’t look at her. “And they don’t have any idea what’s causing it?” he said. “My God, that’s awful, just awful.” He listened, and straightened as he sat. “Yes, I am,” he said. And then, “Yes, I would. I’d hate to get it this way, but I-“ He listened again. “Well, you’d have to speak to Allan about that end of it,” he said-Allan Stone, his agent “but I’m sure there won’t be any problem, Mr. Weiss, not as far as we’re concerned.”

He had it. The Something Big. Rosemary held her breath, waiting.

“Thank you, Mr. Weiss,” Guy said. “And will you let me know if there’s any news? Thanks.”

He hung up and shut his eyes. He sat motionless, his hand staying on the phone. He was pale and dummylike, a Pop Art wax statue with real clothes and props, real phone, real can of paint remover.

“Guy?” Rosemary said.

He opened his eyes and looked at her.

“What is it?” she asked.

He blinked and came alive. “Donald Baumgart,” he said. “He’s gone blind. He woke up yesterday and-he can’t see.”

“Oh no,” Rosemary said.

“He tried to hang himself this morning. He’s in Bellevue now, under sedation.”

They looked painfully at each other.

“I’ve got the part,” Guy said. “It’s a hell of a way to get it.” He looked at the paint remover in his hand and put it on the night table. “Listen,” he said, “I’ve got to get out and walk around.” He stood up. “I’m sorry. I’ve got to get outside and absorb this.”

“I understand, go ahead,” Rosemary said, standing back from the doorway.

He went as he was, down the hall and out the door, letting it swing closed after him with its own soft slam.

She went into the living room, thinking of poor Donald Baumgart and lucky Guy; lucky she-and-Guy, with the good part that would get attention even if the show folded, would lead to other parts, to movies maybe, to a house in Los Angeles, a spice garden, three children two years apart. Poor Donald Baumgart with his clumsy name that he didn’t change. He must have been good, to have won out over Guy, and there he was in Bellevue, blind and wanting to kill himself, under sedation.

Kneeling on a window seat, Rosemary looked out the side of its bay and watched the house’s entrance far below, waiting to see Guy come out. When would rehearsals begin? she wondered. She would go out of town with him, of course; what fun it would be! Boston? Philadelphia? Washington would be exciting. She had never been there. While Guy was rehearsing afternoons, she could sightseer and evenings, after the performance, everyone would meet in a restaurant or club to gossip and exchange rumors . . .

She waited and watched but he didn’t come out. He must have used the Fifty-fifth Street door.

Now, when he should have been happy, he was dour and troubled, sitting with nothing moving except his cigarette hand and his eyes. His eyes followed her around the apartment; tensely, as if she were dangerous. “What’s wrong?” she asked a dozen times.

“Nothing,” he said. “Don’t you have your sculpture class today?”

“I haven’t gone in two months.”

“Why don’t you go?”

She went; tore away old plasticine, reset the armature, and began anew, doing a new model among new students. “Where’ve you been?” the instructor asked. He had eyeglasses and an Adam’s apple and made miniatures of her torso without watching his hands.

“In Zanzibar,” she said.

“Zanzibar is no more,” he said, smiling nervously. “It’s Tanzania.”

One afternoon she went down to Macy’s and Gimbels, and when she came home there were roses in the kitchen, roses in the living room, and Guy coming out of the bedroom with one rose and a forgive-me smile, like a reading he had once done for her of Chance Wayne in Sweet Bird.

“I’ve been a living turd,” he said. “It’s from sitting around hoping that Baumgart won’t regain his sight, which is what I’ve been doing, rat that I am.”

“That’s natural,” she said. “You’re bound to feel two ways about-“

“Listen,” he said, pushing the rose to her nose, “even if this thing falls through, even if I’m Charley Cresta Blanca for the rest of my days, I’m going to stop giving you the short end of the stick.”

“You haven’t-“

“Yes I have. I’ve been so busy tearing my hair out over my career that I haven’t given Thought One to yours. Let’s have a baby, okay? Let’s have three, one at a time.”

She looked at him.

“A baby,” he said. “You know. Goo, goo? Diapers? Waa, waa?”

“Do you mean it?” she asked.

“Sure I mean it,” he said. “I even figured out the right time to start. Next Monday and Tuesday. Red circles on the calendar, please.”

“You really mean it, Guy?” she asked, tears in her eyes.

“No, I’m kidding,” he said. “Sure I mean it. Look, Rosemary, for God’s sake don’t cry, all right? Please. It’s going to upset me very much if you cry, so stop right now, all right?”

“All right,” she said. “I won’t cry.”

“I really went rose-nutty, didn’t I?” he said, looking around brightly. “There’s a bunch in the bedroom too.”