forever, like that Agatha Christie play in London.”
“The Fantasticks?” Dominick said.
“You gave Guy a pair of tickets. Oh, long ago. In. the fall. I went with a friend. Guy had seen it already.”
“I never gave Guy tickets for The Fantasticks,” Dominick said.
“You did. Last fall.”
“No, my dear. I never gave anybody tickets to The Fantasticks; I never had any to give. You’re mistaken.”
“I’m sure he said he got them from you,” Rosemary said.
“Then he was mistaken,” Dominick said. “You’ll tell him to call me, yes?”
“Yes. Yes, I will.”
It was strange, Rosemary thought when she was waiting to cross Fifth Avenue. Guy had said that Dominick had given him the tickets, she was certain of it. She remembered wondering whether or not to send Dominick a thank-you note and deciding finally that it wasn’t necessary. She couldn’t be mistaken.
Walk, the light said, and she crossed the avenue.
But Guy couldn’t have been mistaken either. He didn’t get free tickets every day of the week; he must have remembered who gave them to him. Had he deliberately lied to her? Perhaps he hadn’t been given the tickets at all, but had found and kept them. No, there might have been a scene at the theater; he wouldn’t have exposed her to that.
She walked west on Fifty-seventh Street, walked very slowly with the bigness of the baby hanging before her and her back aching from withstanding its forward-pulling weight. The day was hot and humid; ninety-two already and still rising. She walked very slowly.
Had he wanted to get her out of the apartment that night for some reason? Had he gone down and bought the tickets himself? To be free to study the scene he was working on? But there wouldn’t have been any need for trickery if that had been the case; more than once in the old one-room apartment he had asked her to go out for a couple of hours and she had gone gladly. Most of the time, though, he wanted her to stay, to be his line-feeder, his audience.
Was it a girl? One of his old flames for whom a couple of hours hadn’t been enough, and whose perfume he had been washing off in the shower when she got home? No, it was tannis root not perfume that the apartment had smelled of that night; she had had to wrap the charm in foil because of it. And Guy had been far too energetic and amorous to have spent the earlier part of the night with someone else. He had made unusually violent love to her, she remembered; later, while he slept, she had heard the flute and the chanting at Minnie and Roman’s.
No, not the flute. Dr. Shand’s recorder.
Was that how Guy knew about it? Had he been there that evening? At a sabbath . . .
She stopped and looked in Henri Bendel’s windows, because she didn’t want to think any more about witches and covens and baby’s blood and Guy being over there. Why had she met that stupid Dominick? She should never have gone out today at all. It was too hot and sticky.
There was a great raspberry crepe dress that looked like a Rudi Gernreich. After Tuesday, after she was her own real shape again, maybe she would go in and price it. And a pair of lemon-yellow hip-huggers and a raspberry blouse . . .
Eventually, though, she had to go on. Go on walking, go on thinking, with the baby squirming inside her.
The book (which Guy had thrown away) had told of initiation ceremonies, of covens inducting novice members with vows and baptism, with anointing and the infliction of a “witch mark.” Was it possible (the shower to wash away the smell of a tannis anointing) that Guy had joined the coven? That he (no, he couldn’t be!) was one of them, with a secret mark of membership somewhere on his body?
There had been a flesh-colored Band-Aid on his shoulder. It had been there in his dressing room in Philadelphia (“That damn pimple,” he had said when she had asked him) and it had been there a few months before (“Not the same one!” she had said). Was it still there now?
She didn’t know. He didn’t sleep naked any more. He had in the past, especially in hot weather. But not any more, not for months and months. Now he wore pajamas every night. When had she last seen him naked?
A car honked at her; she was crossing Sixth Avenue. “For God’s sake, lady,” a man behind her said.
But why, why? He was Guy, he wasn’t a crazy old man with nothing better to do, with no other way to find purpose and self-esteem! He had a career, a busy, exciting, every-day-getting-better career! What did he need with wands and witch knives and censers and-and junk; with the Weeses and the Gilmores and Minnie and Roman? What could they give him that he couldn’t get elsewhere?
She had known the answer before she asked herself the question. Formulating the question had been a way to put off facing the answer.
The blindness of Donald Baumgart.
If you believed.
But she didn’t. She didn’t.
Yet there Donald Baumgart was, blind, only a day or two after that Saturday. With Guy staying home to grab the phone every time it rang. Expecting the news.
The blindness of Donald Baumgart.
Out of which had come everything; the play, the reviews, the new play, the movie offer . . . Maybe Guy’s part in Greenwich Village, too, would have been Donald Baumgart’s if he hadn’t gone inexplicably blind a day or two after Guy had joined (maybe) a coven (maybe) of witches (maybe).
There were spells to take an enemy’s sight or hearing, the book had said. All Of Them Witches. (Not Guy!) The united mental force of the whole coven, a concentrated battery of malevolent wills, could blind, deafen, paralyze, and ultimately kill the chosen victim.
Paralyze and ultimately kill.
“Hutch?” she asked aloud, standing motionless in front of Carnegie Hall. A girl looked up at her, clinging to her mother’s hand.
He had been reading the book that night and had asked her to meet him the next morning. To tell her that Roman was Steven Marcato. And Guy knew of the appointment, and knowing, went out for-what, ice cream?-and rang Minnie and Roman’s bell. Was a hasty meeting called? The united mental force . . . But how had they known what Hutch would be telling her? She hadn’t known herself; only he had known.
Suppose, though, that “tannis root” wasn’t “tannis root” at all. Hutch hadn’t heard of it, had he? Suppose it was-that other stuff he underlined in the book, Devil’s Fungus or whatever it was. He had told Roman he was going to look into it; wouldn’t that have been enough to make Roman wary of him? And right then and there Roman had taken one of Hutch’s gloves, because the spells can’t be cast without one of the victim’s belongings! And then, when Guy told them about the appointment for the next morning, they took no chances and went to work.
But no, Roman couldn’t have taken Hutch’s glove; she had shown him in and shown him out, walking along with him both times.
Guy had taken the glove. He had rushed home with his make-up still onwhich he never did-and had gone by himself to the closet. Roman must have called him, must have said, “This man Hutch is getting suspicious about ‘tannis root’; go home and get one of his belongings, just in case!” And Guy had obeyed. To keep Donald Baumgart blind.
Waiting for the light at Fifty-fifth Street, she tucked her handbag and the envelopes under her arm, unhooked the chain at the back of her neck, drew the chain and the tannis-charm out of her dress and dropped them together down through the sewer grating.
So much for “tannis root.” Devil’s Fungus.
She was so frightened she wanted to cry.
Because she knew what Guy was giving them in exchange for his success.
The baby. To use in their rituals.
He had never wanted a baby until after Donald Baumgart was blind. He didn’t like to feel it moving; he didn’t like to talk about it; he kept himself as distant and busy as if it weren’t his baby at all.
Because he knew what they were planning to do to it as soon as he gave it to them.
In the apartment, in the blessedly-cool shaded apartment, she tried to tell herself that she was mad. You’re going to have your baby in four days, Idiot Girl. Maybe even less. So you’re all tense and nutty and you’ve built up a whole lunatic persecution thing out of a bunch of completely unrelated coincidences. There are no real witches.
