Rosemary's Baby (3 page)

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!”

H
UTCH, 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, firescreen, 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 27th, 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
.