Ira Levin - Rosemary’s Baby

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-“

She 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, ‘ ~ ndy-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.

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

“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.”

“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.”