Rosemary's Baby (18 page)

“He thought
you
were going to get it,” Rosemary said. “And he was right.”

“Briefly.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t come along that day he came to visit you,” Rosemary said. “He asked me to, but I couldn’t.”

“Visit me? You mean the day we met for drinks?”

“Yes,” she said. “That’s what I meant.”

“It’s good you
didn’t
come,” he said; “they don’t allow women, do they? No, after four they
do
, that’s right; and it was after four. That was awfully good-natured of Guy. Most people wouldn’t have had the—well,
class
, I guess.
I
wouldn’t have had it, I can tell you that.”

“The loser buying the winner a drink,” Rosemary said.

“And little did we know that a week later—less than a week, in fact—”

“That’s right,” Rosemary said. “It was only a few days before you—”

“Went blind. Yes. It was a Wednesday or Thursday, because I’d been to a matinee—Wednesday, I think—and the following Sunday was when it happened. Hey”—he laughed—“Guy didn’t put anything
in
that drink, did he?”

“No, he didn’t,” Rosemary said. Her voice was shaking. “By the way,” she said, “he has something of yours, you know.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you know?”

“No,” he said.

“Didn’t you miss anything that day?”

“No. Not that I remember.”

“You’re sure?”

“You don’t mean my tie, do you?”

“Yes,” she said.

“Well he’s got mine and I’ve got his. Does he want his back? He can have it; it doesn’t matter to
me
what tie I’m wearing, or if I’m wearing one at all.”

“No, he doesn’t want it back,” Rosemary said. “I didn’t understand. I thought he had only borrowed it.”

“No, it was a trade. It sounded as if you thought he had
stolen
it.”

“I have to hang up now,” Rosemary said. “I just wanted to know if there was any improvement.”

“No, there isn’t. It was nice of you to call.”

She hung up.

It was nine minutes after four.

She put on her girdle and a dress and sandals. She took the emergency money Guy kept under his underwear—a not very thick fold of bills—and put it into her handbag, put in her address book too and the bottle of vitamin capsules. A contraction came and went, the second of the day. She took the suitcase that stood by the bedroom door and went down the hallway and out of the apartment.

Halfway to the elevator, she turned and doubled back.

She rode down in the service elevator with two delivery boys.

On Fifty-fifth Street she got a taxi.

Miss Lark, Dr. Sapirstein’s receptionist, glanced at the suitcase and said, smiling, “You aren’t in labor, are you?”

“No,” Rosemary said, “but I have to see the doctor. It’s very important.”

Miss Lark glanced at her watch. “He has to leave at five,” she said, “and there’s Mrs. Byron…”—she looked over at a woman who sat reading and then smiled at Rosemary—“but I’m sure he’ll see you. Sit down. I’ll let him know you’re here as soon as he’s free.”

“Thank you,” Rosemary said.

She put the suitcase by the nearest chair and sat down. The handbag’s white patent was damp in her hands. She opened it, took out a tissue, and wiped her palms and then her upper lip and temples. Her heart was racing.

“How is it out there?” Miss Lark asked.

“Terrible,” Rosemary said. “Ninety-four.”

Miss Lark made a pained sound.

A woman came out of Dr. Sapirstein’s office, a woman in her fifth or sixth month whom Rosemary had seen before. They nodded at each other. Miss Lark went in.

“You’re due any day now, aren’t you?” the woman said, waiting by the desk.

“Tuesday,” Rosemary said.

“Good luck,” the woman said. “You’re smart to get it over with before July and August.”

Miss Lark came out again. “Mrs. Byron,” she said, and to Rosemary, “He’ll see you right after.”

“Thank you,” Rosemary said.

Mrs. Byron went into Dr. Sapirstein’s office and closed the door. The woman by the desk conferred with Miss Lark about another appointment and then went out, saying good-by to Rosemary and wishing her luck again.

Miss Lark wrote. Rosemary took up a copy of
Time
that lay at her elbow.
Is God Dead?
it asked in red letters on a black background. She found the index and turned to Show Business. There was a piece on Barbra Streisand. She tried to read it.

“That smells nice,” Miss Lark said, sniffing in Rosemary’s direction. “What is it?”

“It’s called ‘Detchema,’” Rosemary said.

“It’s a big improvement over your regular, if you don’t mind my saying.”

“That wasn’t a cologne,” Rosemary said. “It was a good luck charm. I threw it away.”

“Good,” Miss Lark said. “Maybe the doctor will follow your example.”

Rosemary, after a moment, said, “Dr. Sapirstein?”

Miss Lark said, “Mm-hmm. He has the after-shave. But it isn’t, is it? Then he has a good luck charm. Only he isn’t superstitious. I don’t
think
he
is. Anyway
, he has the same
smell
once in a while,
whatever
it is, and when he does, I can’t come within five feet of him. Much stronger than yours was. Haven’t you ever noticed?”

“No,” Rosemary said.

“I guess you haven’t been here on the right days,” Miss Lark said. “Or maybe you thought it was your own you were smelling. What is it, a chemical thing?”

Rosemary stood up and put down
Time
and picked up her suitcase. “My husband is outside; I have to tell him something,” she said. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

“You can leave your suitcase,” Miss Lark said.

Rosemary took it with her though.

S
HE WALKED
up Park to Eighty-first Street, where she found a glass-walled phone booth. She called Dr. Hill. It was very hot in the booth.

A service answered. Rosemary gave her name and the phone number. “Please ask him to call me back right away,” she said. “It’s an emergency and I’m in a phone booth.”

“All right,” the woman said and clicked to silence.

Rosemary hung up and then lifted the receiver again but kept a hidden finger on the hook. She held the receiver to her ear as if listening, so that no one should come along and ask her to give up the phone. The baby kicked and twisted in her. She was sweating.
Quickly, please, Dr. Hill. Call me. Rescue me
.

All of them. All of them. They were all in it together. Guy, Dr. Sapirstein, Minnie, and Roman. All of them witches.
All Of Them Witches
. Using her to produce a baby for them, so that they could take it and—
Don’t you worry, Andy-or-Jenny, I’ll kill them before I let them touch you!

The phone rang. She jumped her finger from the hook. “Yes?”

“Is this Mrs. Woodhouse?” It was the service again.

“Where’s Dr.
Hill?
” she said.

“Did I get the name right?” the woman asked. “Is it ‘Rosemary Woodhouse’?”

“Yes!”

“And you’re Dr. Hill’s patient?”

She explained about the one visit back in the fall. “Please, please,” she said, “he
has
to speak to me! It’s important! It’s—
please. Please tell him to call me
.”

“All right,” the woman said.

Holding the hook again, Rosemary wiped her forehead with the back of her hand.
Please, Dr. Hill
. She cracked open the door for air and then pushed it closed again as a woman came near and waited. “Oh, I didn’t know that,” Rosemary said to the mouthpiece, her finger on the hook. “Really? What else did he say?” Sweat trickled down her back and from under her arms. The baby turned and rolled.

It had been a mistake to use a phone so near Dr. Sapirstein’s office. She should have gone to Madison or Lexington. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “Did he say anything else?” At this very moment he might be out of the door and looking for her, and wouldn’t the nearest phone booth be the first place he’d look? She should have gotten right into a taxi, gotten far away. She put her back as much as she could in the direction he would come from if he came. The woman outside was walking away, thank God.

And now, too, Guy would be coming home. He would see the suitcase gone and call Dr. Sapirstein, thinking she was in the hospital. Soon the two of them would be looking for her. And all the others too; the Weeses, the—

“Yes?”—stopping the ring in its middle.

“Mrs. Woodhouse?”

It was Dr. Hill, Dr. Savior-Rescuer-Kildare-Wonderful-Hill. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you for calling me.”

“I thought you were in California,” he said.

“No,” she said. “I went to another doctor, one some friends sent me to, and he isn’t good, Dr. Hill; he’s been lying to me and giving me unusual kinds of—drinks and capsules. The baby is due on Tuesday—remember, you told me, June twenty-eighth?—and I want
you
to deliver it. I’ll pay you whatever you want, the same as if I’d been coming to you all along.”

“Mrs. Woodhouse—”

“Please, let me talk to you,” she said, hearing refusal. “Let me come and explain what’s been going on. I can’t stay too long where I am right now. My husband and this doctor and the people who sent me to him, they’ve all been involved in—well, in a plot; I know that sounds crazy, Doctor, and you’re probably thinking, ‘My God, this poor girl has completely flipped,’ but I
haven’t
flipped, Doctor, I swear by all the saints I haven’t. Now and then there
are
plots against people, aren’t there?”

“Yes, I suppose there are,” he said.

“There’s one against me and my baby,” she said, “and if you’ll let me come talk to you I’ll tell you about it. And I’m not going to ask you to do anything unusual or wrong or anything; all I want you to do is get me into a hospital and deliver my baby for me.”

He said, “Come to my office tomorrow after—”

“Now,” she said. “Now. Right now. They’re going to be looking for me.”

“Mrs. Woodhouse,” he said, “I’m not at my office now, I’m home. I’ve been up since yesterday morning and—”

“I beg you,” she said. “I beg you.”

He was silent.

She said, “I’ll come there and explain to you. I can’t stay here.”

“My office at eight o’clock,” he said. “Will that be all right?”

“Yes,” she said. “Yes. Thank you. Dr. Hill?”

“Yes?”

“My husband may call you and ask if I called.”

“I’m not going to speak to
anyone
,” he said. “I’m going to take a nap.”

“Would you tell your service? Not to say that I called? Doctor?”

“All right, I will,” he said.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Eight o’clock.”

“Yes. Thank you.”

A man with his back to the booth turned as she came out; he wasn’t Dr. Sapirstein though, he was somebody else.

She walked to Lexington Avenue and uptown to Eighty-sixth Street, where she went into the theater there, used the ladies’ room, and then sat numbly in the safe cool darkness facing a loud color movie. After a while she got up and went with her suitcase to a phone booth, where she placed a person-to-person collect call to her brother Brian. There was no answer. She went back with her suitcase and sat in a different seat. The baby was quiet, sleeping. The movie changed to something with Keenan Wynn.

At twenty of eight she left the theater and took a taxi to Dr. Hill’s office on West Seventy-second Street. It would be safe to go in, she thought; they would be watching Joan’s place and Hugh and Elise’s, but not Dr. Hill’s office at eight o’clock, not if his service had said she hadn’t called. To be sure, though, she asked the driver to wait and watch until she was inside the door.

Nobody stopped her. Dr. Hill opened the door himself, more pleasantly than she had expected after his reluctance on the telephone. He had grown a moustache, blond and hardly noticeable, but he still looked like Dr. Kildare. He was wearing a blue-and-yellow-plaid sport shirt.

They went into his consulting room, which was a quarter the size of Dr. Sapirstein’s, and there Rosemary told him her story. She sat with her hands on the chair arms and her ankles crossed and spoke quietly and calmly, knowing that any suggestion of hysteria would make him disbelieve her and think her mad. She told him about Adrian Marcato and Minnie and Roman; about the months of pain she had suffered and the herbal drinks and the little white cakes; about Hutch and
All Of Them Witches
and the
Fantasticks
tickets and black candles and Donald Baumgart’s necktie. She tried to keep everything coherent and in sequence but she couldn’t. She got it all out without getting hysterical though; Dr. Shand’s recorder and Guy throwing away the book and Miss Lark’s final unwitting revelation.

“Maybe the coma and the blindness were only coincidences,” she said, “or maybe they
do
have some kind of ESP way of hurting people. But that’s not important. The important thing is that they want the baby. I’m sure they do.”

“It certainly seems that way,” Dr. Hill said, “especially in light of the interest they’ve taken in it right from the beginning.”

Rosemary shut her eyes and could have cried. He believed her. He didn’t think she was mad. She opened her eyes and looked at him, staying calm and composed. He was writing. Did all his patients love him? Her palms were wet; she slid them from the chair arms and pressed them against her dress.

“The doctor’s name is Shand, you say,” Dr. Hill said.

“No, Dr. Shand is just one of the group,” Rosemary said. “One of the coven. The doctor is Dr. Sapirstein.”

“Abraham Sapirstein?”

“Yes,” Rosemary said uneasily. “Do you know him?”

“I’ve met him once or twice,” Dr. Hill said, writing more.

“Looking at him,” Rosemary said, “or even talking to him, you would never think he—”

“Never in a million years,” Dr. Hill said, putting down his pen, “which is why we’re told not to judge books by their covers. Would you like to go into Mount Sinai right now, this evening?”

Rosemary smiled. “I would
love
to,” she said. “Is it possible?”

“It’ll take some wire-pulling and arguing,” Dr. Hill said. He rose and went to the open door of his examining room. “I want you to lie down and get some rest,” he said, reaching into the darkened room behind him. It blinked into ice-blue fluorescent light. “I’ll see what I can do and then I’ll check you over.”

Rosemary hefted herself up and went with her handbag into the examining room. “Anything they’ve got,” she said. “Even a broom closet.”

“I’m sure we can do better than that,” Dr. Hill said. He came in after her and turned on an air conditioner in the room’s blue-curtained window. It was a noisy one.

“Shall I undress?” Rosemary asked.

“No, not yet,” Dr. Hill said. “This is going to take a good half-hour of high-powered telephoning. Just lie down and rest.” He went out and closed the door.

Rosemary went to the day bed at the far end of the room and sat down heavily on its blue-covered softness. She put her handbag on a chair.

God bless Dr. Hill.

She would make a sampler to that effect some day.

She shook off her sandals and lay back gratefully. The air conditioner sent a small stream of coolness to her; the baby turned over slowly and lazily, as if feeling it.

Everything’s okay now, Andy-or-Jenny. We’re going to be in a nice clean bed at Mount Sinai Hospital, with no visitors and—

Money. She sat up, opened her handbag, and found Guy’s money that she had taken. There was a hundred and eighty dollars. Plus sixteen-and-change of her own. It would be enough, certainly, for any advance payments that had to be made, and if more were needed Brian would wire it or Hugh and Elise would lend it to her. Or Joan. Or Grace Cardiff. She had plenty of people she could turn to.

She took the capsules out, put the money back in, and closed the handbag; and then she lay back again on the day bed, with the handbag and the bottle of capsules on the chair beside her. She would give the capsules to Dr. Hill; he would analyze them and make sure there was nothing harmful in them. There
couldn’t
be. They would want the baby to be healthy, wouldn’t they, for their insane rituals?

She shivered.

The—monsters.

And Guy.

Unspeakable, unspeakable.

Her middle hardened in a straining contraction, the strongest one yet. She breathed shallowly until it ended.

Making three that day.

She would tell Dr. Hill.

She was living with Brian and Dodie in a large contemporary house in Los Angeles, and Andy had just started talking (though only four months old) when Dr. Hill looked in and she was in his examining room again, lying on the day bed in the coolness of the air conditioner. She shielded her eyes with her hand and smiled at him. “I’ve been sleeping,” she said.

He pushed the door all the way open and withdrew. Dr. Sapirstein and Guy came in.

Rosemary sat up, lowering her hand from her eyes.

They came and stood close to her. Guy’s face was stony and blank. He looked at the walls, only at the walls, not at her. Dr. Sapirstein said, “Come with us quietly, Rosemary. Don’t argue or make a scene, because if you say anything more about witches or witchcraft we’re going to be forced to take you to a mental hospital. The facilities there for delivering the baby will be less than the best. You don’t want that, do you? So put your shoes on.”

“We’re just going to take you home,” Guy said, finally looking at her. “No one’s going to hurt you.”

“Or the baby,” Dr. Sapirstein said. “Put your shoes on.” He picked up the bottle of capsules, looked at it, and put it in his pocket.

She put her sandals on and he gave her her handbag.

They went out, Dr. Sapirstein holding her arm, Guy touching her other elbow.

Dr. Hill had her suitcase. He gave it to Guy.

“She’s fine now,” Dr. Sapirstein said. “We’re going to go home and rest.”

Dr. Hill smiled at her. “That’s all it takes, nine times out of ten,” he said.

She looked at him and said nothing.

“Thank you for your trouble, Doctor,” Dr. Sapirstein said, and Guy said, “It’s a shame you had to come in here and—”

“I’m glad I could be of help, sir,” Dr. Hill said to Dr. Sapirstein, opening the front door.

They had a car. Mr. Gilmore was driving it. Rosemary sat between Guy and Dr. Sapirstein in back.

Nobody spoke.

They drove to the Bramford.

The elevator man smiled at her as they crossed the lobby toward him. Diego. Smiled because he liked her, favored her over some of the other tenants.

The smile, reminding her of her individuality, wakened something in her, revived something.

She snicked open her handbag at her side, worked a finger through her key ring, and, near the elevator door, turned the handbag all the way over, spilling out everything except the keys. Rolling lipstick, coins, Guy’s tens and twenties fluttering, everything. She looked down stupidly.

They picked things up, Guy and Dr. Sapirstein, while she stood mute, pregnant-helpless. Diego came out of the elevator, making tongue-teeth sounds of concern. He bent and helped. She backed in to get out of the way and, watching them, toed the big round floor button. The rolling door rolled. She pulled closed the inner gate.

Diego grabbed for the door but saved his fingers; smacked on the outside of it. “Hey, Mrs. Woodhouse!”

Sorry, Diego
.

She pushed the handle and the car lurched upward.