Rosemary’s Baby

Four

She had been eating her meat rare; now she ate it nearly raw-broiled only long enough to take away the refrigerator’s chill and seal in the juices.

The weeks before the holidays and the holiday season itself were dismal. The pain grew worse, grew so grinding that something shut down in Rosemarysome center of resistance and remembered well-being-and she stopped reacting, stopped mentioning pain to Dr. Sapirstein, stopped referring to pain even in her thoughts. Until now it had been inside her; now she was inside it; pain was the weather around her, was time, was the entire world. Numbed and exhausted, she began to sleep more, and to eat more too-more nearly raw meat.

She did what had to be done: cooked and cleaned, sent Christmas cards to the family-she hadn’t the heart for phone calls-and put new money into envelopes for the elevator men, doormen, porters, and Mr. Micklas. She looked at newspapers and tried to be interested in students burning draft cards and the threat of a city-wide transit strike, but she couldn’t: this was news from a world of fantasy; nothing was real but her world of pain. Guy bought Christmas presents for Minnie and Roman; for each other they agreed to buy nothing at all. Minnie and Roman gave them coasters.

They went to nearby movies a few times, but most evenings they stayed in or went around the hall to Minnie and Roman’s, where they met couples named Fountain and Gilmore and Wees, a woman named Mrs. Sabatini who always brought her cat, and Dr. Shand, the retired dentist who had made the chain for Rosemary’s tannis-charm. These were all elderly people who treated Rosemary with kindness and concern, seeing, apparently, that she was less than well. Laura-Louise was there too, and sometimes Dr. Sapirstein joined the group. Roman was an energetic host, filling glasses and launching new topics of conversation. On New Year’s Eve he proposed a toast “To 1966, The Year One”-that puzzled Rosemary, although everyone else seemed to understand and approve of it. She felt as if she had missed a literary or political reference-not that she really cared. She and Guy usually left early, and Guy would see her into bed and go back. He was the favorite of the women, who gathered around him and laughed at his jokes.

Hutch stayed as he was, in his deep and baffling coma. Grace Cardiff called every week or so. “No change, no change at all,” she would say. “They still don’t know. He could wake up tomorrow morning or he could sink deeper and never wake up at all.”

Twice Rosemary went to St. Vincent’s Hospital to stand beside Hutch’s bed and look down powerlessly at the closed eyes, the scarcely discernible breathing. The second time, early in January, his daughter Doris was there, sitting by the window working a piece of needlepoint. Rosemary had met her a year earlier at Hutch’s apartment; she was a short pleasant woman in her thirties, married to a Swedish-born psychoanalyst. She looked, unfortunately, like a younger wigged Hutch.

Doris didn’t recognize Rosemary, and when Rosemary had re-introduced herself she made a distressed apology.

“Please don’t,” Rosemary said, smiling. “I know. I look awful.”

“No, you haven’t changed at all,” Doris said. “I’m terrible with faces. I forget my children, really I do.”

She put aside her needlepoint and Rosemary drew up another chair and sat with her. They talked about Hutch’s condition and watched a nurse come in and replace the hanging bottle that fed into his taped arm.

“We have an obstetrician in common,” Rosemary said when the nurse had gone; and then they talked about Rosemary’s pregnancy and Dr. Sapirstein’s skill and eminence. Doris was surprised to hear that he was seeing Rosemary every week. “He only saw me once a month,” she said. “Till near the end, of course. Then it was every two weeks, and then every week, but only in the last month. I thought that was fairly standard.”

Rosemary could find nothing to say, and Doris suddenly looked distressed again. “But I suppose every pregnancy is a law unto itself,” she said, with a smile meant to rectify tactlessness.

“That’s what he told me,” Rosemary said.

That evening she told Guy that Dr. Sapirstein had only seen Doris once a month. “Something is wrong with me,” she said. “And he knew it right from the beginning.”

“Don’t be silly,” Guy said. “He would tell you. And even if he wouldn’t, he would certainly tell me. “

“Has he? Has he said anything to you?”

“Absolutely not, Ro. I swear to God.”

“Then why do I have to go every week?”

“Maybe that’s the way he does it now. Or maybe he’s giving you better treatment, because you’re Minnie and Roman’s friend.”

“ No.,

“Well I don’t know; ask him,” Guy said. “Maybe you’re more fun to examine than she was.”

She asked Dr. Sapirstein two days later. “Rosemary, Rosemary,” he said to her; “what did I tell you about talking to your friends? Didn’t I say that every pregnancy is different?”

“Yes, but-“

“And the treatment has to be different too. Doris Allert had had two deliveries before she ever came to me, and there had been no complications whatever. She didn’t require the close attention a first-timer does.”

“Do you always see first-timers every week?”

“I try to,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t. There’s nothing wrong with you, Rosemary. The pain will stop very soon.”

“I’ve been eating raw meat,” she said. “Just warmed a little.”

“Anything else out of the ordinary?”

“No,” she said, taken aback; wasn’t that enough?

“Whatever you want, eat it,” he said. “I told you you’d get some strange cravings. I’ve had women eat paper. And stop worrying. I don’t keep things from my patients; it makes life too confusing. I’m telling you the truth. Okay?”

She nodded.

“Say hello to Minnie and Roman for me,” he said. “And Guy too.”

She began the second volume of The Decline and Fall, and began knitting a red-and-orange-striped muffler for Guy to wear to rehearsals. The threatened transit strike had come about but it affected them little since they were both at home most of the time. Late in the afternoon they watched from their bay windows the slow-moving crowds far below. “Walk, you peasants!” Guy said. “Walk! Home, home, and be quick about it!”

Not long after telling Dr. Sapirstein about the nearly raw meat, Rosemary found herself chewing on a raw and dripping chicken heart-in the kitchen one morning at four-fifteen. She looked at herself in the side of the toaster, where her moving reflection had caught her eye, and then looked at her hand, at the part of the heart she hadn’t yet eaten held in red-dripping fingers. After a moment she went over and put the heart in the garbage, and turned on the water and rinsed her hand. Then, with the water still running, she bent over the sink and began to vomit.

When she was finished she drank some water, washed her face and hands, and cleaned the inside of the sink with the spray attachment. She turned off the water and dried herself and stood for a while, thinking; and then she got a memo pad and a pencil from one of the drawers and went to the table and sat down and began to write.

Guy came in just before seven in his pajamas.

She had the Life Cookbook open on the table and was copying a recipe out of it. “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

She looked at him. “Planning the menu,” she said. “For a party. We’re giving a party on January twenty-second. A week from next Saturday.” She looked among several slips of paper on the table and picked one up. “We’re inviting Elise Dunstan and her husband,” she said, “Joan and a date, Jimmy and Tiger, Allan and a date, Lou and Claudia, the Chens, the Wendells, Dee Bertillon and a date unless you don’t want him, Mike and Pedro, Bob and Thea Goodman, the Kapps”-she pointed in the Kapps’ direction-“and Doris and Axel Allen, if they’ll come. That’s Hutch’s daughter.”

“I know,” Guy said.

She put down the paper. “Minnie and Roman are not invited,” she said. “Neither is Laura-Louise. Neither are the Fountains and the Gilmores and the Weeses. Neither is Dr. Sapirstein. This is a very special party. You have to be under sixty to get in.”

“Whew,” Guy said. “For a minute there I didn’t think I was going to make it.

“Oh, you make it,” Rosemary said. “You’re the bartender.”

“Swell,” Guy said. “Do you really think this is such a great idea?”

“I think it’s the best idea I’ve had in months.”

“Don’t you think you ought to check with Sapirstein first?”

“Why? I’m just going to give a party; I’m not going to swim the English Channel or climb Annapurna.”

Guy went to the sink and turned on the water. He held a glass under it. “I’ll be in rehearsal then, you know,” he said. “We start on the seventeenth.”

“You won’t have to do a thing,” Rosemary said. “Just come home and be charming.”

“And tend bar.” He turned off the water and raised his glass and drank.

“We’ll hire a bartender,” Rosemary said. “The one Joan and Dick used to have. And when you’re ready to go to sleep I’ll chase everyone out.”

Guy turned around and looked at her.

“I want to see them,” she said. “Not Minnie and Roman. I’m tired of Minnie and Roman.”

He looked away from her, and then at the floor, and then at her eyes again. “What about the pain?” he asked.

She smiled drily. “Haven’t you heard?” she said. “It’s going to be gone in a day or two. Dr. Sapirstein told me so.”

Everyone could come except the Allerts, because of Hutch’s condition, and the Chens, who were going to be in London taking pictures of Charlie Chaplin. The bartender wasn’t available but knew another one who was. Rosemary took a loose brown velvet hostess gown to the cleaner, made an appointment to have her hair done, and ordered wine and liquor and ice cubes and the ingredients of a Chilean seafood casserole called chupe.

On the Thursday morning before the party, Minnie came with the drink while Rosemary was picking apart crabmeat and lobster tails. “That looks interesting,” Minnie said, glancing into the kitchen. “What is it?”

Rosemary told her, standing at the front door with the striped glass cold in her hand. “I’m going to freeze it and then bake it Saturday evening,” she said. “We’re having some people over.”

“Oh, you feel up to entertaining?” Minnie asked.

“Yes, I do,” Rosemary said. “These are old friends whom we haven’t seen in a long time. They don’t even know yet that I’m pregnant.”

“I’d be glad to give you a hand if you’d like,” Minnie said. “I could help you dish things out.”

“Thank you, that’s sweet of you,” Rosemary said, “but I really can manage by myself. It’s going to be buffet, and there’ll be very little to do.”

“I could help you take the coats.”

“No, really, Minnie, you do enough for me as it is. Really.”

Minnie said, “Well, let me know if you change your mind. Drink your drink now.”

Rosemary looked at the glass in her hand. “I’d rather not,” she said, and looked up at Minnie. “Not this minute. I’ll drink it in a little while and bring the glass back to you.”

Minnie said, “It doesn’t do to let it stand.”

“I won’t wait long,” Rosemary said. “Go on. You go back and I’ll bring the glass to you later on.”

“I’ll wait and save you the walk.”

“You’ll do no such thing,” Rosemary said. “I get very nervous if anyone watches me while I’m cooking. I’m going out later, so I’ll be passing right by your door.”

“Going out?”

“Shopping. Scoot now, go on. You’re too nice to me, really you are.”

Minnie backed away. “Don’t wait too long,” she said. “It’s going to lose its vitamins.”

Rosemary .closed the door. She went into the kitchen and stood for a moment with the glass in her hand, and then went to the sink and tipped out the drink in a pale green spire drilling straight down into the drain.

She finished the chupe, humming and feeling pleased with herself. When it was covered and stowed away in the freezer compartment she made her own drink out of milk, cream, an egg, sugar, and sherry. Shaken in a covered jar, it poured out tawny and delicious-looking. “Hang on, David-or-Amanda,” she said, and tasted it and found it great.