they might still not know the full answer, for part of it had probably been beyond Terry’s own understanding. Something had led her to drugs and something had led her to death; what that something was, it was too late now for anyone to know.
“Remember what Hutch said?” Rosemary asked. “About there being more suicides here than in other buildings?”
“Ah, Ro,” Guy said, “that’s crap, honey, that ‘danger zone’ business.”
“Hutch believes it.”
“Well, it’s still crap.”
“I can imagine what he’s going to say when he hears about this.”
“Don’t tell him,” Guy said. “He sure as hell won’t read about it in the papers.” A strike against the New York newspapers had begun that morning, and there were rumors that it might continue a month or longer.
They undressed, showered, resumed a stopped game of Scrabble, stopped it, made love, and found milk and a dish of cold spaghetti in the refrigerator. Just before they put the lights out at two-thirty, Guy remembered to check the answering service and found that he had got a part in a radio commercial for Cresta Blanca wines.
Soon he was asleep, but Rosemary lay awake beside him, seeing Terry’s pulped face and her one eye watching the sky. After a while, though, she was at Our Lady. Sister Agnes was shaking her fist at her, ousting her from leadership of the second-floor monitors. “Sometimes I wonder how come you’re the leader of anything!” she said. A bump on the other side of the wall woke Rosemary, and Mrs. Castevet said, “And please don’t tell me what Laura-Louise said because I’m not interested!” Rosemary turned over and burrowed into her pillow.
Sister Agnes was furious. Her piggy-eyes were squeezed to slits and her nostrils were bubbling the way they always did at such moments. Thanks to Rosemary it had been necessary to brick up all the windows, and now Our Lady had been taken out of the beautiful-school competition being run by the World-Herald. “If you’d listened to me, we wouldn’t have had to do it!” Sister Agnes cried in a hoarse midwestern bray. “We’d have been all set to go now instead of starting all over from scratch!” Uncle Mike tried to hush her. He was the principal of Our Lady, which was connected by passageways to his body shop in South Omaha. “I told you not to tell her anything in advance,” Sister Agnes continued lower, piggy-eyes glinting hatefully at Rosemary. “I told you she wouldn’t be open-minded. Time enough later to let her in on it.” (Rosemary had told Sister Veronica about the windows being bricked up and
Sister Veronica had withdrawn the school from the competition; otherwise no one would have noticed and they would have won. It had been right to tell, though, Sister Agnes notwithstanding. A Catholic school shouldn’t win by trickery.) “Anybody! Anybody!” Sister Agnes said. “All she has to be is young, healthy, and not a virgin. She doesn’t have to be a no-good drug-addict whore out of the gutter. Didn’t I say that in the beginning? Anybody. As long as she’s young and healthy and not a virgin.” Which didn’t make sense at all, not even to Uncle Mike; so Rosemary turned over and it was Saturday afternoon, and she and Brian and Eddie and Jean were at the candy counter in the Orpheum, going in to see Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal in The Fountainhead, only it
was live, not a movie..
On the following Monday morning Rosemary was putting away the last of a double armload of groceries when the doorbell rang; and the peephole showed Mrs. Castevet, white hair in curlers under a blue-and-white kerchief, looking solemnly straight ahead as if waiting for the click of a passport photographer’s camera.
Rosemary opened the door and said, “Hello. How are you?”
Mrs. Castevet smiled bleakly. “Fine,” she said. “May I come in for a minute?”
“Yes, of course; please do.” Rosemary stood back against the wall and held the door wide open. A faint bitter smell brushed across her as Mrs. Castevet came in, the smell of Terry’s silver good luck charm filled with spongy greenish-brown. Mrs. Castevet was wearing toreador pants and shouldn’t have been; her hips and thighs were massive, dabbed with wide bands of fat. The pants were lime green under a blue blouse; the blade of a screwdriver poked from her hip pocket. Stopping between the doorways of the den and kitchen, she turned and put on her neckchained glasses and smiled at Rosemary. A dream Rosemary had had a night or two earlier sparked in her mind-something about Sister Agnes bawling her out for bricking up windows-and she shook it away and smiled attentively, ready to hear what Mrs. Castevet was about to say.
“I just came over to thank you,” Mrs. Castevet said, “for saying those nice things to us the other night, poor Terry telling you she was grateful to us for what we done. You’ll never know how comforting it was to hear something like that in such a shock moment, because in both of our minds was the thought that maybe we had failed her in some way and drove her to it, although her note made it crystal clear, of course, that she did it of her own free will; but anyway it was a blessing to hear the words spoken out loud like that by somebody Terry had confided in just before the end.”
“Please, there’s no reason to thank me,” Rosemary said. “All I did was tell you what she said to me.”
“A lot of people wouldn’t have bothered,” Mrs. Castevet said. “They’d have just walked away without wanting to spend the air and the little bit of musclepower. When you’re older you’ll come to realize that acts of kindness are few and far between in this world of ours. So I do thank you, and Roman does too. Roman is my hubby.”
Rosemary ducked her head in concession, smiled, and said, “You’re welcome. I’m glad that I helped.”
“She was cremated yesterday morning with no ceremony,” Mrs. Castevet said. “That’s the way she wanted it. Now we have to forget and go on. It certainly won’t be easy; we took a lot of pleasure in having her around, not having children of our own. Do you have any?”
“No, we don’t,” Rosemary said.
Mrs. Castevet looked into the kitchen. “Oh, that’s nice,” she said, “the pans hanging on the wall that way. And look how you put the table, isn’t that interesting.”
“It was in a magazine,” Rosemary said.
“You certainly got a nice paint job,” Mrs. Castevet said, fingering the door jamb appraisingly. “Did the house do it? You must have been mighty openhanded with the painters; they didn’t do this kind of work for us.”
“All we gave them was five dollars each,” Rosemary said.
“Oh, is that all?” Mrs. Castevet turned around and looked into the den. “Oh, that’s nice,” she said, “a TV room.”
“It’s only temporary,” Rosemary said. “At least I hope it is. It’s going to be a nursery.”
“Are you pregnant?” Mrs. Castevet asked, looking at her.
“Not yet,” Rosemary said, “but I hope to be, as soon as we’re settled.”
“That’s wonderful,” Mrs. Castevet said. “You’re young and healthy; you ought to have lots of children.”
“We plan to have three,” Rosemary said. “Would you like to see the rest of the apartment?”
“I’d love to,” Mrs. Castevet said. “I’m dying to see what you’ve done to it. I used to be in here almost every day. The woman who had it before you was a dear friend of mine.”
“I know,” Rosemary said, easing past Mrs. Castevet to lead the way; “Terry told me.”
“Oh, did she,” Mrs. Castevet said, following along. “It sounds like you two had some long talks together down there in the laundry room.”
“Only one,” Rosemary said.
The living room startled Mrs. Castevet. “My goodness!” she said. “I can’t get over the change! It looks so much brighter! Oh and look at that chair. Isn’t that handsome?”
“It just came Friday,” Rosemary said.
“What did you pay for a chair like that?”
Rosemary, disconcerted, said, “I’m not sure. I think it was about two hundred dollars.”
“You don’t mind my asking, do you?” Mrs. Castevet said, and tapped her nose. “That’s how I got a big nose, by being nosy.”
Rosemary laughed and said, “No, no, it’s all right. I don’t mind.”
Mrs. Castevet inspected the living room, the bedroom, and the bathroom, asking how much Mrs. Gardenia’s son had charged them for the rug and the vanity, where they had got the night-table lamps, exactly how old Rosemary was, and if an electric toothbrush was really any better than the old kind. Rosemary found herself enjoying this open forthright old woman with her loud voice and her blunt questions. She offered coffee and cake to her.
“What does your hubby do?” Mrs. Castevet asked, sitting at the kitchen table idly checking prices on cans of soup and oysters. Rosemary, folding a Chemex paper, told her. “I knew it!” Mrs. Castevet said. “I said to Roman yesterday, ‘He’s so good-looking I’ll bet he’s a movie actor’! There’s three-four of them in the building, you know. What movies was he in?”
