because there aren’t likely to be many more. Trips, I mean. Would you like the perishables in my icebox? Send Guy over later on and I’ll load him up.”
Laura-Louise gave a bon voyage party Saturday night in her small dark tannis-smelling apartment on the twelfth floor. The Weeses and the Gilmores came, and Mrs. Sabatini with her cat Flash, and Dr. Shand. (How had Guy known that it vas Dr. Shand who played the recorder? Rosemary wondered.
And that it was a recorder, not a flute or a clarinet? She would have to ask him.) Roman told of his and Minnie’s planned itinerary, surprising Mrs. Sabatini, who couldn’t believe they were bypassing Rome and Florence. Laura-Louise served home-made cookies and a mildly alcoholic fruit punch. Conversation turned to tornadoes and civil rights. Rosemary, watching and listening to these people who were much like her aunts and uncles in Omaha, found it hard to maintain her belief that they were in fact a coven of witches. Little Mr. Wees, listening to Guy talking about Martin Luther King; could such a feeble old man, even in his dreams, imagine himself a caster of spells, a maker of charms? And dowdy old women like Laura-Louise and Minnie and Helen Wees; could they really bring themselves to cavort naked in mock-religious orgies? (Yet hadn’t she seen them that way, seen all of them naked? No, no, that was a dream, a wild dream that she’d had a long, long time ago.)
The Fountains phoned a good-by to Minnie and Roman, and so did Dr. Sapirstein and two or three other people whose names Rosemary didn’t know. Laura-Louise brought out a gift that everyone had chipped in for, a transistor radio in a pigskin carrying case, and Roman accepted it with an eloquent thank-you speech, his voice breaking. He knows he’s going to die, Rosemary thought, and was genuinely sorry for him.
Guy insisted on lending a hand the next morning despite Roman’s protests; he set the alarm clock for eight- thirty and, when it went off, hopped into chinos and a T shirt and went around to Minnie and Roman’s door. Rosemary went with him in her peppermint-striped smock. There was little to carry; two suitcases and a hatbox. Minnie wore a camera and Roman his new radio. “Anyone who needs more than one suitcase,” he said as he double-locked their door, “is a tourist, not a traveler.”
On the sidewalk, while the doorman blew his whistle at oncoming cars, Roman checked through tickets, passport, traveler’s checks, and French currency. Minnie took Rosemary by the shoulders. “No matter where we are,” she said, “our thoughts are going to be with you every minute, darling, till you’re all happy and thin again with your sweet little boy or girl lying safe in your arms.”
“Thank you,” Rosemary said, and kissed Minnie’s cheek. “Thank you for everything.”
“You make Guy send us lots of pictures, you hear?” Minnie said, kissing Rosemary back.
“I will. I will,” Rosemary said.
Minnie turned to Guy. Roman took Rosemary’s hand. “I won’t wish you luck,” he said, “because you won’t need it. You’re going to have a happy, happy life.”
She kissed him. “Have a wonderful trip,” she said, “and come back safely.”
“Perhaps,” he said, smiling. “But I may stay on in Dubrovnik, or Pescara or maybe Mallorca. We shall see, we shall see . . .”
“Come back,” Rosemary said, and found herself meaning it. She kissed him again.
A taxi came. Guy and the doorman stowed the suitcases beside the driver. Minnie shouldered and grunted her way in, sweating under the arms of her white dress. Roman folded himself in beside her. “Kennedy Airport,” he said; “the TWA Building.”
There were more good-by’s and kisses through open windows, and then Rosemary and Guy stood waving at the taxi that sped away with hands ungloved and white-gloved waving from either side of it.
Rosemary felt less happy than she had expected.
That afternoon she looked for All Of Them Witches, to reread parts of it and perhaps find it foolish and laughable. The book was gone. It wasn’t atop the Kinsey Reports or anywhere else that she could see. She asked Guy and he told her he had put it in the garbage Thursday morning.
“I’m sorry, honey,” he said, “but I just didn’t want you reading any more of that stuff and upsetting yourself.”
She was surprised and annoyed. “Guy,” she said, “Hutch gave me that book. He left it to me.”
“I didn’t think about that part of it,” Guy said. “I just didn’t want you upsetting yourself. I’m sorry.”
“That’s a terrible thing to do.”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking about Hutch.”
“Even if he hadn’t given it to me, you don’t throw away another person’s books. If I want to read something, I want to read it.”
“I’m sorry,” he said.
It bothered her all day long. And she had forgotten something that she meant to ask him; that bothered her too.
She remembered it in the evening, while they were walking back from La Scala, a restaurant not far from the house. “How did you know Dr. Shand plays the recorder?” she said.
He didn’t understand.
“The other day,” she said, “when I read the book and we argued about it; you said that Dr. Shand just happened to play the recorder. How did you know?”
“Oh,” Guy said. “He told me. A long time ago. And I said we’d heard a flute or something through the wall once or twice, and he said that was him. How did you think I knew?”
“I didn’t think,” Rosemary said. “I just wondered, that’s all.”
She couldn’t sleep. She lay awake on her back and frowned at the ceiling. The baby inside her was sleeping fine, but she couldn’t; she felt unsettled and worried, without knowing what she was worried about.
Well the baby of course, and whether everything would go the way it should. She had cheated on her exercises lately. No more of that; solemn promise.
It was really Monday already, the thirteenth. Fifteen more days. Two weeks. Probably all women felt edgy and unsettled two weeks before. And couldn’t sleep from being sick and tired of sleeping on their backs! The first thing she was going to do after it was all over was sleep twenty-four solid hours on her stomach, hugging a pillow, with her face snuggled deep down into it.
She heard a sound in Minnie and Roman’s apartment, but it must have been from the floor above or the floor below. Sounds were masked and confused with the air conditioner going.
They were in Paris already. Lucky them. Some day she and Guy would go, with their three lovely children.
The baby woke up and began moving.
Nine
She bought cotton balls and cotton swabs and talcum powder and baby lotion; engaged a diaper service and rearranged the baby’s clothing in the bureau drawers. She ordered the announcements-Guy would phone in the name and date later-and addressed and stamped a boxful of small ivory envelopes. She read a book called Summerhill that presented a seemingly irrefutable case for permissive child-rearing, and discussed it at Sardi’s East with Elise and Joan, their treat.
She began to feel contractions; one one day, one the next, then none, then two.
A postcard came from Paris, with a picture of the Arc de Triomphe and a neatly written message: Thinking of you both. Lovely weather, excellent food. The flight over was perfect. Love, Minnie.
The baby dropped low inside her, ready to be born.
Early in the afternoon of Friday, June 24th, at the stationery counter at Tiffany’s where she had gone for twenty-five more envelopes, Rosemary met Dominick Pozzo, who in the past had been Guy’s vocal coach. A short, swarthy, hump-backed man with a voice that was rasping and unpleasant, he seized Rosemary’s hand and congratulated her on her appearance and on Guy’s recent good fortune, for which he disavowed all credit. Rosemary told him of the play Guy was signing for and of the latest offer Warner Brothers had made. Dominick was delighted; now, he said, was when Guy could truly benefit from intensive coaching. He explained why, made Rosemary promise to have Guy call him, and, with final good wishes, turned toward the elevators. Rosemary caught his arm. “I never thanked you for the tickets to The Fantasticks, “ she said. “I just loved it. It’s going to go on and on
