“It’s European,” Terry said. She leaned a hip against a washer and admired the ball, turning it one way and another. “The Castevets are the most wonderful people in the world, bar none,” she said. “They picked me up off the sidewalk-and I mean that literally; I conked out on Eighth Avenue-and they brought me here and adopted me like a mother and father. Or like a grandmother and grandfather, I guess.”
“You were sick?” Rosemary asked.
“That’s putting it mildly,” Terry said. “I was starving and on dope and doing a lot of other things that I’m so ashamed of I could throw up just thinking about them. And Mr. and Mrs. Castevet completely rehabilitated me. They got me off the H, the dope, and got food into me and clean clothes on me, and now nothing is too good for me as far as they’re concerned. They give me all kinds of health food and vitamins, they even have a doctor come give me regular check-ups! It’s because they’re childless. I’m like the daughter they never had, you know?”
Rosemary nodded.
“I thought at first that maybe they had some kind of ulterior motive,” Terry said. “Maybe some kind of sex thing they would want me to do, or he would want, or she. But they’ve really been like real grandparents. Nothing like that. They’re going to put me through secretarial school in a little while and later on I’m going to pay them back. I only had three years of high school but there’s a way of making it up.” She dropped the filigree ball back into her blouse.
Rosemary said, “It’s nice to know there are people like that, when you hear so much about apathy and people who are afraid of getting involved.”
“There aren’t many like Mr. and Mrs. Castevet,” Terry said. “I would be dead now if it wasn’t for them. That’s an absolute fact. Dead or in jail.”
“You don’t have any family that could have helped you?”
“A brother in the Navy. The less said about him the better.”
Rosemary transferred her finished wash to a dryer and waited with Terry for hers to be done. They spoke of Guy’s occasional role on Another World (“Sure I remember! You’re married to him?”), the Bramford’s past (of which Terry knew nothing), and the coming visit to New York of Pope Paul. Terry was, like Rosemary, Catholic but no longer observing; she was anxious, though, to get a ticket to the papal mass to be celebrated at Yankee Stadium. When her wash was done and drying the two girls walked together to the service elevator and rode to the seventh floor. Rosemary invited Terry in to see the apartment, but Terry asked if she could take a rain check; the Castevets ate at six and she didn’t like to be late. She said she would call Rosemary on the house phone later in the evening so they could go down together to pick up their dry laundry.
Guy was home, eating a bag of Fritos and watching a Grace Kelly movie. “Them sure must be clean clothes,” he said.
Rosemary told him about Terry and the Castevets, and that Terry had remembered him from Another World. He made light of it, but it pleased him. He was depressed by the likelihood that an actor named Donald Baumgart was going to beat him out for a part in a new comedy for which both had read a second time that afternoon. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “what kind of a name is Donald Baumgart?” His own name, before he changed it, had been Sherman Peden.
Rosemary and Terry picked up their laundry at eight o’clock, and Terry came in with Rosemary to meet Guy and see the apartment. She blushed and was flustered by Guy, which spurred him to flowery compliments and the bringing of ashtrays and the striking of matches. Terry had never seen the apartment before; Mrs. Gardenia and the Castevets had had a falling-out shortly after her arrival, and soon afterwards Mrs. Gardenia had gone into the coma from which she had never emerged. “It’s a lovely apartment,” Terry said.
“It will be,” Rosemary said. “We’re not even halfway furnished yet.”
“I’ve got it!” Guy cried with a handclap. He pointed triumphantly at Terry. “Anna Maria Alberghetti!”
A package came from Bonniers, from Hutch; a tall teakwood ice bucket with a bright orange lining. Rosemary called him at once and thanked him. He had seen the apartment after the painters left but not since she and Guy had moved in; she explained about the chairs that were a week late and the sofa that wasn’t due for another month. “For God’s sake don’t even think yet about entertaining,” Hutch said. “Tell me how everything is.”
Rosemary told him, in happy detail. “And the neighbors certainly don’t seem abnormal,” she said. “Except normal abnormal like homosexuals; there are two of them, and across the hall from us there’s a nice old couple named Gould with a place in Pennsylvania where they breed Persian cats. We can have one any time we want.”
“They shed,” Hutch said.
“And there’s another couple that we haven’t actually met yet who took in this girl who was hooked on drugs, whom we have met, and they completely cured her and are putting her through secretarial school.”
“It sounds as if you’ve moved into Sunnybrook Farm,” Hutch said; “I’m delighted.”
“The basement is kind of creepy,” Rosemary said. “I curse you every time I go down there.”
“Why on earth me?”
“Your stories. “
“If you mean the ones I write, I curse me too; if you mean the ones I told
you, you might with equal justification curse the fire alarm for the fire and the weather bureau for the typhoon.”
Rosemary, cowed, said, “It won’t be so bad from now on. That girl I mentioned is going down there with me.”
Hutch said, “It’s obvious you’ve exerted the healthy influence I predicted and the house is no longer a chamber of horrors. Have fun with the ice bucket and say hello to Guy.”
The Kapps in apartment 7D appeared; a stout couple in their middle thirties with an inquisitive two-year-old daughter named Lisa. “What’s your name?” Lisa asked, sitting in her stroller. “Did you eat your egg? Did you eat your Captain Crunch?”
“My name is Rosemary,” Rosemary said. “I ate my egg but I’ve never even heard of Captain Crunch. Who is he?”
On Friday night, September 17th, Rosemary and Guy went with two other couples to a preview of a play called Mrs. Dally and then to a party given by a photographer, Dee Bertillon, in his studio on West Forty- eighth Street. An argument developed between Guy and Bertillon over Actors Equity’s policy of blocking the employment of foreign actors-Guy thought it was right, Bertillon thought it was wrong-and though the others present buried the disagreement under a quick tide of jokes and gossip, Guy took Rosemary away soon after, at a few mintues past twelve-thirty.
The night was mild and balmy and they walked; and as they approached the Bramford’s blackened mass they saw on the sidewalk before it a group of twenty or so people gathered in a semicircle at the side of a parked car. Two police cars waited double-parked, their roof lights spinning red.
Rosemary and Guy walked faster, hand in hand, their senses sharpening. Cars on the avenue slowed questioningly; windows scraped open in the Bramford and heads looked out beside gargoyles’ heads. The night doorman Toby came from the house with a tan blanket that a policeman turned to take from him.
The roof of the car, a Volkswagen, was crumpled to the side; the windshield was crazed with a million fractures. “Dead,” someone said, and someone else said, “I look up and I think it’s some kind of a big bird zooming down, like an eagle or something.”
Rosemary and Guy stood on tiptoes, craned over people’s shoulders. “Get back now, will you?” a policeman at the center said. The shoulders separated, a sport-shined back moved away. On the sidewalk Terry lay, watching the sky with one eye, half of her face gone to red pulp. Tan blanket flipped over her. Settling, it reddened in one place and then another.
Rosemary wheeled, eyes shut, right hand making an automatic cross. She kept her mouth tightly closed, afraid she might vomit.
Guy winced and drew air in under his teeth. “Oh, Jesus,” he said, and groaned. “Oh my God.”
A policeman said, “Get back, will you?”
“We know her,” Guy said.
Another policeman turned and said, “What’s her name?”
“Terry.”
“Terry what?” He was forty or so and sweating. His eyes were blue and beautiful, with thick black lashes.
