Ira Levin - Rosemary’s Baby

“Maybe Minnie gave him a good luck charm, just the way she gave you one. You mean only witches use it? That doesn’t sound very likely.”

Rosemary was silent.

“Let’s face it, darling,” Guy said, “you had the prepartum crazies. And now you’re going to rest and get over them.” He leaned closer to her and took her hand. “I know this has been the worst thing that ever happened to you,” he said, “but from now on everything’s going to be roses. Warners is within an inch of where we want them, and suddenly Universal is interested too. I’m going to get some more good reviews and then we’re going to blow this town and be in the beautiful hills of Beverly, with the pool and the spice garden and the whole schmeer. And the kids too, Ro. Scout’s honor. You heard what Abe said.” He kissed her hand. “Got to run now and get famous.”

He got up and started for the door.

“Let me see your shoulder,” she said.

He stopped and turned.

“Let me see your shoulder,” she said.

“Are you kidding?”

“No,” she said. “Let me see it. Your left shoulder.”

He looked at her and said, “All right, whatever you say, honey.”

He undid the collar of his shirt, a short-sleeved blue knit, and peeled the bottom of it up and over his head. He had a white T shirt on underneath. “I generally prefer doing this to music,” he said, and took off the T shirt too. He went close to the bed and, leaning, showed Rosemary his left shoulder. It was unmarked. There was only the faint scar of a boil or pimple. He showed her his other shoulder and his chest and his back.

“This is as far as I go without a blue light,” he said.

“All right,” she said.

He grinned. “The question now,” he said, “is do I put my shirt back on or do I go out and give Laura-Louise the thrill of a lifetime.”

Her breasts filled with milk and it was necessary to relieve them, so Dr. Sapirstein showed her how to use a rubber-bulbed breast pump, like a glass auto horn; and several times a day Laura-Louise or Helen Wees or whoever was there brought it in to her with a Pyrex measuring cup. She drew from each breast an ounce or two of thin faintly-green fluid that smelled ever so slightly of tannis root-in a process that was a final irrefutable demonstration of the baby’s absence. When the cup and the pump had been carried from the room she would lie against her pillows broken and lonely beyond tears.

Joan and Elise and Tiger came to see her, and she spoke with Brian for twenty minutes on the phone. Flowers came-roses and carnations and a yellow azalea plant-from Allan, and Mike and Pedro, and Lou and Claudia. Guy bought a new remote-control television set and put it at the foot of the bed. She watched and ate and took pills that were given to her.

A letter of sympathy came from Minnie and Roman, a page from each of them. They were in Dubrovnik.

The stitches gradually stopped hurting.

One morning, when two or three weeks had gone by, she thought she heard a baby crying. She rayed off the television and listened. There was a frail faraway wailing. Or was there? She slipped out of bed and turned off the air conditioner.

Florence Gilmore came in with the pump and the cup.

“Do you hear a baby crying?” Rosemary asked her.

Both of them listened.

Yes, there it was. A baby crying.

“No, dear, I don’t,” Florence said. “Get back into bed now; you know you’re not supposed to be walking around. Did you turn off the air conditioner? You mustn’t do that; it’s a terrible day. People are actually dying, it’s so hot.”

She heard it again that afternoon, and mysteriously her breasts began to leak . . .

“Some new people moved in,” Guy said out of nowhere that evening. “Up on eight.”

“And they have a baby,” she said.

“Yes. How did you know?”

She looked at him for a moment. “I heard it crying,” she said.

She heard it the next day. And the next.

She stopped watching television and held a book in front of her, pretending to read but only listening, listening . . .

It wasn’t up on eight; it was right there on seven.

And more often than not, the pump and the cup were brought to her a few minutes after the crying began; and the crying stopped a few minutes after her milk was taken away.

“What do you do with it?” she asked Laura-Louise one morning, giving her back the pump and the cup and six ounces of milk.

“Why, throw it away, of course,” Laura-Louise said, and went out.

That afternoon, as she gave Laura-Louise the cup, she said, “Wait a minute,” and started to put a used coffee spoon into it.

Laura-Louise jerked the cup away. “Don’t do that,” she said, and caught the spoon in a finger of the hand holding the pump.

“What difference does it make?” Rosemary asked.

“It’s just messy, that’s all,” Laura-Louise said.

It was alive.

It was in Minnie and Roman’s apartment.

They were keeping it there, feeding it her milk and please God taking care of it, because, as well as she remembered from Hutch’s book, August first was one of their special days, Lammas or Leamas, with special maniacal rituals. Or maybe they were keeping it until Minnie and Roman came back from Europe. For their share.

But it was still alive.

She stopped taking the pills they gave her. She tucked them down into the fold between her thumb and her palm and faked the swallowing, and later pushed the pills as far as she could between the mattress and the box spring beneath it.

She felt stronger and more wide-awake.

Hang on, Andy! I’m coming!

She had learned her lesson with Dr. Hill. This time she would turn to no one, would expect no one to believe her and be her savior. Not the police, not Joan or the Dunstans or Grace Cardiff, not even Brian. Guy was too good an actor, Dr. Sapirstein too famous a doctor; between the two of them they’d have even him, even Brian, thinking she had some kind of post-losing-the-baby madness. This time she would do it alone, would go in there and get him herself, with her longest sharpest kitchen knife to fend away those maniacs.

And she was one up on them. Because she knew-and they didn’t know she knew-that there was a secret way from the one apartment to the other. The door had been chained that night-she knew that as she knew the hand she was looking at was a hand, not a bird or a battleship-and still they had all come pouring in. So there had to be another way.

Which could only be the linen closet, barricaded by dead Mrs. Gardenia, who surely had died of the same witchery that had frozen and killed poor Hutch. The closet had been put there to break the one big apartment into two smaller ones, and if Mrs. Gardenia had belonged to the coven-she’d given Minnie her herbs; hadn’t Terry said so?-then what was more logical than to open the back of the closet in some way and go to and fro with so many steps saved and the Bruhns and Dubin-and-DeVore never knowing of the traffic?

It was the linen closet.

In a dream long ago she had been carried through it. That had been no dream; it had been a sign from heaven, a divine message to be stored away and remembered now for assurance in a time of trial.

Oh Father in heaven, forgive me for doubting! Forgive me for turning from you, Merciful Father, and help me, help me in my hour of needl Oh Jesus, dear Jesus, help me save my innocent baby!

The pills, of course, were the answer. She squirmed her arm in under the mattress and caught them out one by one. Eight of them, all alike; small white tablets scored across the middle for breaking in half. Whatever they were, three a day had kept her limp and docile; eight at once, surely, would send LauraLouise or Helen Wees into sound sleep. She brushed the pills clean, folded them up in a piece of magazine cover, and tucked them away at the bottom of her box of tissues.