Rosemary's Baby (9 page)

“Catholics only,” he said, smiling. “I wish we weren’t bound by these prejudices, but unfortunately we are.”

“But what about Sarah Churchill?” Rosemary asked. She turned to point, but Sarah Churchill was gone and the family was there in her place: Ma, Pa, and everybody, with the husbands, wives, and children. Margaret was pregnant, and so were Jean and Dodie and Ernestine.

Guy was taking off her wedding ring. She wondered why, but was too tired to ask. “Sleep,” she said, and slept.

It was the first time the Sistine Chapel had been opened to the public and she was inspecting the ceiling on a new elevator that carried the visitor through the chapel horizontally, making it possible to see the frescoes exactly as Michelangelo, painting them, had seen them. How glorious they were! She saw God extending his finger to Adam, giving him the divine spark of life; and the underside of a shelf partly covered with gingham contact paper as she was carried backward through the linen closet. “Easy,” Guy said, and another man said, “You’ve got her too high.”

“Typhoon!” Hutch shouted from the dock amid all his weather-forecasting equipment. “Typhoon! It killed fifty-five people in London and it’s heading this way!” And Rosemary knew he was right. She must warn the President. The ship was heading for disaster.

But the President was gone. Everyone was gone. The deck was infinite and bare, except for, far away, the Negro mate holding the wheel unremittingly on its course.

Rosemary went to him and saw at once that he hated all white people, hated her. “You’d better go down below, Miss,” he said, courteous but hating her, not even waiting to hear the warning she had brought.

Below was a huge ballroom where on one side a church burned fiercely and on the other a black-bearded man stood glaring at her. In the center was a bed. She went to it and lay down, and was suddenly surrounded by naked men and women, ten or a dozen, with Guy among them. They were elderly, the women grotesque and slack-breasted. Minnie and her friend Laura-Louise were there, and Roman in a black miter and a black silk robe. With a thin black wand he was drawing designs on her body, dipping the wand’s point in a cup of red held for him by a sun-browned man with a white moustache. The point moved back and forth across her stomach and down ticklingly to the insides of her thighs. The naked people were chanting—flat, unmusical, foreign-tongued syllables—and a flute or clarinet accompanied them. “She’s awake, she sees!” Guy whispered to Minnie. He was large-eyed, tense. “She
don’t
see,” Minnie said. “As long as she ate the mouse she can’t see nor hear. She’s like dead. Now sing.”

Jackie Kennedy came into the ballroom in an exquisite gown of ivory satin embroidered with pearls. “I’m so sorry to hear you aren’t feeling well,” she said, hurrying to Rosemary’s side.

Rosemary explained about the mouse-bite, minimizing it so Jackie wouldn’t worry.

“You’d better have your legs tied down,” Jackie said, “in case of convulsions.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” Rosemary said. “There’s always a chance it was rabid.” She watched with interest as white-smocked interns tied her legs, and her arms too, to the four bedposts.

“If the music bothers you,” Jackie said, “let me know and I’ll have it stopped.”

“Oh, no,” Rosemary said. “Please don’t change the program on my account. It doesn’t bother me at all, really it doesn’t.”

Jackie smiled warmly at her. “Try to sleep,” she said. “We’ll be waiting up on deck.” She withdrew, her satin gown whispering.

Rosemary slept a while, and then Guy came in and began making love to her. He stroked her with both hands—a long, relishing stroke that began at her bound wrists, slid down over her arms, breasts, and loins, and became a voluptuous tickling between her legs. He repeated the exciting stroke again and again, his hands hot and sharp-nailed, and then, when she was ready-ready-more-than-ready, he slipped a hand in under her buttocks, raised them, lodged his hardness against her, and pushed it powerfully in. Bigger he was than always; painfully, wonderfully big. He lay forward upon her, his other arm sliding under her back to hold her, his broad chest crushing her breasts. (He was wearing, because it was to be a costume party, a suit of coarse leathery armor.) Brutally, rhythmically, he drove his new hugeness. She opened her eyes and looked into yellow furnace-eyes, smelled sulphur and tannis root, felt wet breath on her mouth, heard lust-grunts and the breathing of onlookers.

This is no dream
, she thought.
This is real, this is happening
. Protest woke in her eyes and throat, but something covered her face, smothering her in a sweet stench.

The hugeness kept driving in her, the leathery body banging itself against her again and again and again.

The Pope came in with a suitcase in his hand and a coat over his arm. “Jackie tells me you’ve been bitten by a mouse,” he said.

“Yes,” Rosemary said. “That’s why I didn’t come see you.” She spoke sadly, so he wouldn’t suspect she had just had an orgasm.

“That’s all right,” he said. “We wouldn’t want you to jeopardize your health.”

“Am I forgiven, Father?” she asked.

“Absolutely,” he said. He held out his hand for her to kiss the ring. Its stone was a silver filigree ball less than an inch in diameter; inside it, very tiny, Anna Maria Alberghetti sat waiting.

Rosemary kissed it and the Pope hurried out to catch his plane.

“H
EY, IT’S AFTER NINE
,” Guy said, shaking her shoulder.

She pushed his hand away and turned over onto her stomach. “Five minutes,” she said, deep in the pillow.

“
No
,” he said, and yanked her hair. “I’ve got to be at Dominick’s at ten.”

“Eat out.”

“The hell I will.” He slapped her behind through the blanket.

Everything came back: the dreams, the drinks, Minnie’s chocolate mousse, the Pope, that awful moment of not-dreaming. She turned back over and raised herself on her arms, looking at Guy. He was lighting a cigarette, sleep-rumpled, needing a shave. He had pajamas on. She was nude.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Ten after nine.”

“What time did I go to sleep?” She sat up.

“About eight-thirty,” he said. “And you didn’t go to sleep, honey; you passed out. From now on you get cocktails
or
wine, not cocktails
and
wine.”

“The dreams I had,” she said, rubbing her forehead and closing her eyes. “President Kennedy, the Pope, Minnie and Roman…” She opened her eyes and saw scratches on her left breast; two parallel hairlines of red running down into the nipple. Her thighs stung; she pushed the blanket from them and saw more scratches, seven or eight going this way and that.

“Don’t yell,” Guy said. “I already filed them down.” He showed short smooth fingernails.

Rosemary looked at him uncomprehendingly.

“I didn’t want to miss Baby Night,” he said.

“You mean you—”

“And a couple of my nails were ragged.”

“While I was—out?”

He nodded and grinned. “It was kind of fun,” he said, “in a necrophile sort of way.”

She looked away, her hands pulling the blanket back over her thighs. “I dreamed someone was—raping me,” she said. “I don’t know who. Someone—unhuman.”

“Thanks a lot,” Guy said.

“You were there, and Minnie and Roman, other people…It was some kind of ceremony.”

“I tried to wake you,” he said, “but you were out like a light.”

She turned further away and swung her legs out on the other side of the bed.

“What’s the matter?” Guy asked.

“Nothing,” she said, sitting there, not looking around at him. “I guess I feel funny about your doing it that way, with me unconscious.”

“I didn’t want to miss the night,” he said.

“We could have done it this morning or tonight. Last night wasn’t the only split second in the whole month. And even if it
had
been…”

“I thought you would have wanted me to,” he said, and ran a finger up her back.

She squirmed away from it. “It’s supposed to be shared, not one awake and one asleep,” she said. Then: “Oh, I guess I’m being silly.” She got up and went to the closet for her housecoat.

“I’m sorry I scratched you,” Guy said. “I was a wee bit loaded myself.”

She made breakfast and, when Guy had gone, did the sinkful of dishes and put the kitchen to rights. She opened windows in the living room and bedroom—the smell of last night’s fire still lingered in the apartment—made the bed, and took a shower; a long one, first hot and then cold. She stood capless and immobile under the downpour, waiting for her head to clear and her thoughts to find an order and conclusion.

Had last night really been, as Guy had put it, Baby Night? Was she now, at this moment, actually pregnant? Oddly enough, she didn’t care. She was unhappy—whether or not it was silly to be so. Guy had taken her without her knowledge, had made love to her as a mindless body (“kind of fun in a necrophile sort of way”) rather than as the complete mind-and-body person she was; and had done so, moreover, with a savage gusto that had produced scratches, aching soreness, and a nightmare so real and intense that she could almost see on her stomach the designs Roman had drawn with his red-dipped wand. She scrubbed soap on herself vigorously, resentfully. True, he had done it for the best motive in the world, to make a baby, and true too he had drunk as much as she had; but she wished that no motive and no number of drinks could have enabled him to take her that way, taking only her body without her soul or self or she-ness—whatever it was he presumably loved. Now, looking back over the past weeks and months, she felt a disturbing presence of overlooked signals just beyond memory, signals of a shortcoming in his love for her, of a disparity between what he said and what he felt. He was an actor; could anyone know when an actor was true and not acting?

It would take more than a shower to wash away these thoughts. She turned the water off and, between both hands, pressed out her streaming hair.

On the way out to shop she rang the Castevets’ doorbell and returned the cups from the mousse. “Did you like it, dear?” Minnie asked. “I think I put a little too much cream de cocoa in it.”

“It was delicious,” Rosemary said. “You’ll have to give me the recipe.”

“I’d love to. You going marketing? Would you do me a teeny favor? Six eggs and a small Instant Sanka; I’ll pay you later. I hate going out for just one or two things, don’t you?”

There was distance now between her and Guy, but he seemed not to be aware of it. His play was going into rehearsal November first—
Don’t I Know You From Somewhere?
was the name of it—and he spent a great deal of time studying his part, practicing the use of the crutches and leg-braces it called for, and visiting the Highbridge section of the Bronx, the play’s locale. They had dinner with friends more evenings than not; when they didn’t, they made natural-sounding conversation about furniture and the ending-any-day-now newspaper strike and the World Series. They went to a preview of a new musical and a screening of a new movie, to parties and the opening of a friend’s exhibit of metal constructions. Guy seemed never to be looking at her, always at a script or TV or at someone else. He was in bed and asleep before she was. One evening he went to the Castevets’ to hear more of Roman’s theater stories, and she stayed in the apartment and watched
Funny Face
on TV.

“Don’t you think we ought to talk about it?” she said the next morning at breakfast.

“About what?”

She looked at him; he seemed genuinely unknowing. “The conversations we’ve been making,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“The way you haven’t been looking at me.”

“What are you
talking
about? I’ve been looking at you.”

“No you haven’t.”

“I have
so
. Honey, what is it? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. Never mind.”

“No, don’t say that. What is it? What’s bothering you?”

“Nothing.”

“Ah look, honey, I know I’ve been kind of preoccupied, with the part and the crutches and all; is that it? Well gee whiz, Ro, it’s
important
, you know? But it doesn’t mean I don’t love you, just because I’m not riveting you with a passionate
gaze
all the time. I’ve got to think about
practical
matters too.” It was awkward and charming and sincere, like his playing of the cowboy in
Bus Stop
.

“All right,” Rosemary said. “I’m sorry I’m being pesty.”

“You? You couldn’t be pesty if you tried.”

He leaned across the table and kissed her.

Hutch had a cabin near Brewster where he spent occasional weekends. Rosemary called him and asked if she might use it for three or four days, possibly a week. “Guy’s getting into his new part,” she explained, “and I really think it’ll be easier for him with me out of the way.”

“It’s yours,” Hutch said, and Rosemary went down to his apartment on Lexington Avenue and Twenty-fourth Street to pick up the key.

She looked in first at a delicatessen where the clerks were friends from her own days in the neighborhood, and then she went up to Hutch’s apartment, which was small and dark and neat as a pin, with an inscribed photo of Winston Churchill and a sofa that had belonged to Madame Pompadour. Hutch was sitting barefoot between two bridge tables, each with its typewriter and piles of paper. His practice was to write two books at once, turning to the second when he struck a snag on the first, and back to the first when he struck a snag on the second.

“I’m really looking forward to it,” Rosemary said, sitting on Madame Pompadour’s sofa. “I suddenly realized the other day that I’ve never been alone in my whole life—not for more than a few hours, that is. The idea of three or four days is heaven.”

“A chance to sit quietly and find out who you are; where you’ve been and where you’re going.”

“Exactly.”

“All right, you can stop forcing that smile,” Hutch said. “Did he hit you with a lamp?”

“He didn’t hit me with anything,” Rosemary said. “It’s a very difficult part, a crippled boy who
pretends
that he’s adjusted to his crippled-ness. He’s got to work with crutches and leg-braces, and naturally he’s preoccupied and—and, well, preoccupied.”

“I see,” Hutch said. “We’ll change the subject. The
News
had a lovely rundown the other day of all the gore we missed during the strike. Why didn’t you tell me you’d had another suicide up there at Happy House?”

“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” Rosemary asked.

“No, you didn’t,” Hutch said.

“It was someone we knew. The girl I told you about; the one who’d been a drug addict and was rehabilitated by the Castevets, these people who live on our floor. I’m
sure
I told you
that
.”

“The girl who was going to the basement with you.”

“That’s right.”

“They didn’t rehabilitate her very successfully, it would seem. Was she living with them?”

“Yes,” Rosemary said. “We’ve gotten to know them fairly well since it happened. Guy goes over there once in a while to hear stories about the theater. Mr. Castevet’s father was a producer around the turn of the century.”

“I shouldn’t have thought Guy would be interested,” Hutch said. “An elderly couple, I take it?”

“He’s seventy-nine; she’s seventy or so.”

“It’s an odd name,” Hutch said. “How is it spelled?”

Rosemary spelled it for him.

“I’ve never heard it before,” he said. “French, I suppose.”

“The name may be but they aren’t,” Rosemary said. “He’s from right here and she’s from a place called—believe it or not—Bushyhead, Oklahoma.”

“My God,” Hutch said. “I’m going to use that in a book. That one. I know just where to put it. Tell me, how are you planning to get to the cabin? You’ll need a car, you know.”

“I’m going to rent one.”

“Take mine.”

“Oh no, Hutch, I couldn’t.”

“Do, please,” Hutch said. “All I do is move it from one side of the street to the other. Please. You’ll save me a great deal of bother.”

Rosemary smiled. “All right,” she said. “I’ll do you a favor and take your car.”

Hutch gave her the keys to the car and the cabin, a sketch-map of the route, and a typed list of instructions concerning the pump, the refrigerator, and a variety of possible emergencies. Then he put on shoes and a coat and walked her down to where the car, an old light-blue Oldsmobile, was parked. “The registration papers are in the glove compartment,” he said. “Please feel free to stay as long as you like. I have no immediate plans for either the car or the cabin.”

“I’m sure I won’t stay more than a week,” Rosemary said. “Guy might not even want me to stay that long.”

When she was settled in the car, Hutch leaned in at the window and said, “I have all kinds of good advice to give you but I’m going to mind my own business if it kills me.”

Rosemary kissed him. “Thank you,” she said. “For that and for this and for everything.”

She left on the morning of Saturday, October 16th, and stayed five days at the cabin. The first two days she never once thought about Guy—a fitting revenge for the cheerfulness with which he had agreed to her going. Did she
look
as if she needed a good rest? Very well, she would
have
one, a long one, never once thinking about him. She took walks through dazzling yellow-and-orange woods, went to sleep early and slept late, read
Flight of The Falcon
by Daphne du Maurier, and made glutton’s meals on the bottled-gas stove. Never once thinking about him.

On the third day she thought about him. He was vain, self-centered, shallow, and deceitful. He had married her to have an audience, not a mate. (Little Miss Just-out-of-Omaha, what a
goop
she had been! “Oh, I’m
used
to actors; I’ve been here almost a year now.” And she had all but followed him around the studio carrying his newspaper in her mouth.) She would give him a year to shape up and become a good husband; if he didn’t make it she would pull out, and with no religious qualms whatever. And meanwhile she would go back to work and get again that sense of independence and self-sufficiency she had been so eager to get rid of. She would be strong and proud and ready to go if he failed to meet her standards.

Those glutton’s meals—man-size cans of beef stew and chili con carne—began to disagree with her, and on that third day she was mildly nauseated and could eat only soup and crackers.

On the fourth day she awoke missing him and cried. What was she doing there, alone in that cold crummy cabin? What had he done that was so terrible? He had gotten drunk and had grabbed her without saying may I. Well that was really an earth-shaking offense, now wasn’t it? There he was, facing the biggest challenge of his career, and
she
—instead of being there to help him, to cue and encourage him—was off in the middle of nowhere, eating herself sick and feeling sorry for herself. Sure he was vain and self-centered; he was an actor, wasn’t he? Laurence
Olivier
was probably vain and self-centered. And yes he might lie now and then; wasn’t that exactly what had attracted her and still did?—that freedom and nonchalance so different from her own boxed-in propriety?