chairs, an abstract mural, and a single stainless-steel phone booth. A Negro girl was in the booth, but she finished soon and came out with a friendly smile. Rosemary slipped in and dialed the number at the apartment. After five rings Service answered; there were no messages for Rosemary, and the one message for Guy was from a Rudy Horn, not a Mr. Hutchins. She had another dime and used it to call Hutch’s number, thinking that his service might know where he was or have a message from him. On the first ring a woman answered with a worried non-service “Yes?”
“Is this Edward Hutchins’ apartment?” Rosemary asked.
“Yes. Who is this, please?” She sounded like a woman neither young nor old-in her forties, perhaps.
Rosemary said, “My name is Rosemary Woodhouse. I had an eleven o’clock appointment with Mr. Hutchins and he hasn’t shown up yet. Do you have any idea whether he’s coming or not?”
There was silence, and more of it. “Hello?” Rosemary said.
“Hutch has told me about you, Rosemary,” the woman said. “My name is Grace Cardiff. I’m a friend of his. He was taken ill last night. Or early this morning, to be exact.”
Rosemary’s heart dropped. “Taken ill?” she said.
“Yes. He’s in a deep coma. The doctors haven’t been able to find out yet what’s causing it. He’s at St. Vincent’s Hospital.”
“Oh, that’s awful, “ Rosemary said. “I spoke to him last night around ten-thirty and he sounded fine. “
“I spoke to him not much later than that,” Grace Cardiff said, “and he sounded fine to me too. But his cleaning woman came in this morning and found him unconscious on the bedroom floor.”
“And they don’t know what from?”
“Not yet. It’s early though, and I’m sure they’ll find out soon. And when they do, they’ll be able to treat him. At the moment he’s totally unresponsive.”
“How awful,” Rosemary said. “And he’s never had anything like this before?”
“Never,” Grace Cardiff said. “I’m going back to the hospital now, and if you’ll give me a number where I can reach you, I’ll let you know when there’s any change.”
“Oh, thank you,” Rosemary said. She gave the apartment number and then asked if there was anything she could do to help.
“Not really,” Grace Cardiff said. “I just finished calling his daughters, and that seems to be the sum total of what has to be done, at least until he comes to. If there should be anything else I’ll let you know.”
Rosemary came out of the Seagram Building and walked across the forecourt and down the steps and north to the corner of Fifty-third Street. She crossed Park Avenue and walked slowly toward Madison, wondering whether Hutch would live or die, and if he died, whether she (selfishness!) would ever again have anyone on whom she could so effortlessly and completely depend. She wondered too about Grace Cardiff, who sounded silver-gray and attractive; had she and Hutch been having a quiet middle-aged affair? She hoped so. Maybe this brush with death- that’s what it would be, a brush with death, not death itself; it couldn’t be-maybe this brush with death would nudge them both toward marriage, and turn out in the end to have been a disguised blessing. Maybe. Maybe.
She crossed Madison, and somewhere between Madison and Fifth found herself looking into a window in which a small creche was spotlighted, with exquisite porcelain figures of Mary and the Infant and Joseph, the Magi and the shepherds and the animals of the stable. She smiled at the tender scene, laden with meaning and emotion that survived her agnosticism; and then saw in the window glass, like a veil hung before the Nativity, her own reflection smiling, with the skeletal cheeks and black-circled eyes that yesterday had alarmed Hutch and now alarmed her.
“Well this is what I call the long arm of coincidence!” Minnie exclaimed, and came smiling to her when Rosemary turned, in a white mock-leather coat and a red hat and her neckchained eyeglasses. “I said to myself, ‘As long as Rosemary’s out, I might as well go out, and do the last little bit of my Christmas shopping.’ And here you are and here I am! It looks like we’re just two of a kind that go the same places and do the same things! Why, what’s the matter, dear? You look so sad and downcast.”
“I just heard some bad news,” Rosemary said. “A friend of mine is very sick. In the hospital.”
“Oh, no,” Minnie said. “Who?”
“His name is Edward Hutchins,” Rosemary said.
“The one Roman met yesterday afternoon? Why, he was going on for an hour about what a nice intelligent man he was! Isn’t that a pity! What’s troubling him?”
Rosemary told her.
“My land,” Minnie said, “I hope it doesn’t turn out the way it did for poor Lily Gardenia! And the doctors don’t even know? Well at least they admit it; usually they cover up what they don’t know with a lot of high-flown Latin. If the money spent putting those astronauts up where they are was spent on medical research down here, we’d all be a lot better off, if you want my opinion. Do you feel all right, Rosemary?”
“The pain is a little worse,” Rosemary said.
“You poor thing. You know what I think? I think we ought to be going home now. What do you say?”
“No, no, you have to finish your Christmas shopping.”
“Oh shoot,” Minnie said, “there’s two whole weeks yet. Hold onto your ears.” She put her wrist to her mouth and blew stabbing shrillness from a whistle on a gold-chain bracelet. A taxi veered toward them. “How’s that for service?” she said. “A nice big Checker one too.”
Soon after, Rosemary was in the apartment again. She drank the cold sour drink from the blue-and-green- striped glass while Minnie looked on approvingly.
Four
She had been eating her meat rare; now she ate it nearly raw-broiled only long enough to take away the refrigerator’s chill and seal in the juices.
The weeks before the holidays and the holiday season itself were dismal. The pain grew worse, grew so grinding that something shut down in Rosemarysome center of resistance and remembered well-being-and she stopped reacting, stopped mentioning pain to Dr. Sapirstein, stopped referring to pain even in her thoughts. Until now it had been inside her; now she was inside it; pain was the weather around her, was time, was the entire world. Numbed and exhausted, she began to sleep more, and to eat more too-more nearly raw meat.
She did what had to be done: cooked and cleaned, sent Christmas cards to the family-she hadn’t the heart for phone calls-and put new money into envelopes for the elevator men, doormen, porters, and Mr. Micklas. She looked at newspapers and tried to be interested in students burning draft cards and the threat of a city-wide transit strike, but she couldn’t: this was news from a world of fantasy; nothing was real but her world of pain. Guy bought Christmas presents for Minnie and Roman; for each other they agreed to buy nothing at all. Minnie and Roman gave them coasters.
They went to nearby movies a few times, but most evenings they stayed in or went around the hall to Minnie and Roman’s, where they met couples named Fountain and Gilmore and Wees, a woman named Mrs. Sabatini who always brought her cat, and Dr. Shand, the retired dentist who had made the chain for Rosemary’s tannis-charm. These were all elderly people who treated Rosemary with kindness and concern, seeing, apparently, that she was less than well. Laura-Louise was there too, and sometimes Dr. Sapirstein joined the group. Roman was an energetic host, filling glasses and launching new topics of conversation. On New Year’s Eve he proposed a toast “To 1966, The Year One”-that puzzled Rosemary, although everyone else seemed to understand and approve of it. She felt as if she had missed a literary or political reference-not that she really cared. She and Guy usually left early, and Guy would see her into bed and go back. He was the favorite of the women, who gathered around him and laughed at his jokes.
Hutch stayed as he was, in his deep and baffling coma. Grace Cardiff called every week or so. “No change, no change at all,” she would say. “They still don’t know. He could wake up tomorrow morning or he could sink deeper and never wake up at all.”
Twice Rosemary went to St. Vincent’s Hospital to stand beside Hutch’s bed and look down powerlessly at the closed eyes, the scarcely discernible breathing. The second time, early in January, his daughter Doris was there, sitting by the window working a piece of needlepoint. Rosemary had met her a year earlier at Hutch’s apartment;
