by Ira Levin
Later on Monday they received a telephone call from Martin Gardenia, the son of the apartment’s previous tenant. They agreed to meet him at the apartment on Tuesday evening at eight, and, doing so, found him to be a tall man past sixty with a cheerful open manner. He pointed out the things he wanted to sell and named his prices, all of which were attractively low. Rosemary and Guy conferred and examined, and bought two air conditioners, a rosewood vanity with a petit-point bench, the living room’s Persian rug, and the andirons, firescreen, and tools. Mrs. Gardenia’s rolltop desk, disappointingly, was not for sale. While Guy wrote a check and helped tag the items to be left behind, Rosemary measured the living room and the bedroom with a six-foot folding rule she had bought that morning.
The previous March, Guy had played a role on Another World, a daytime television series. The character was back now for three days, so for the rest of the week Guy was busy. Rosemary winnowed a folder of decorating schemes she had collected since high school, found two that seemed appropriate to the apartment, and with those to guide her went looking at furnishings with Joan Jellico, one of the girls from Atlanta she had roomed with on coming to New York. Joan had the card of a decorator, which gave them entrance to wholesale houses and showrooms of every sort. Rosemary looked and made shorthand notes and drew sketches to bring to Guy, and hurried home spilling over with fabric and wallpaper samples in time to catch him on Another World and then run out again and shop for dinner. She skipped her sculpture class and canceled, happily, a dental appointment.
On Friday evening the apartment was theirs; an emptiness of high ceilings and unfamiliar dark into which they came with a lamp and a shopping bag, striking echoes from the farthest rooms. They turned on their air conditioners and admired their rug and their fireplace and Rosemary’s vanity; admired too their bathtub, doorknobs, hinges, molding, floors, stove, refrigerator, bay windows, and view. They picnicked on the rug, on tuna sandwiches and beer, and made floor plans of all four rooms, Guy measuring and Rosemary drawing. On the rug again, they unplugged the lamp and stripped and made love in the nightglow of shadeless windows. “Shh!” Guy hissed afterwards, wide-eyed with fear. “I hear—the Trench sisters chewing!” Rosemary hit him on the head, hard.
They bought a sofa and a king-size bed, a table for the kitchen and two bentwood chairs. They called Con Ed and the phone company and stores and workmen and the Padded Wagon.
The painters came on Wednesday the eighteenth; patched, spackled, primed, painted, and were gone on Friday the twentieth, leaving colors very much like Rosemary’s samples. A solitary paperhanger came in and grumbled and papered the bedroom.
They called stores and workmen and Guy’s mother in Montreal. They bought an armoire and a dining table and hi-fi components and new dishes and silverware. They were flush. In 1964 Guy had done a series of Anacin commercials that, shown time and time again, had earned him eighteen thousand dollars and was still producing a sizable income.
They hung window shades and papered shelves, watched carpet go down in the bedroom and white vinyl in the hallway. They got a plug-in phone with three jacks; paid bills and left a forwarding notice at the post office.
On Friday, August 27th, they moved. Joan and Dick Jellico sent a large potted plant and Guy’s agent a small one. Hutch sent a telegram: The Bramford will change from a bad house to a good house when one of its doors is marked R. and G. Woodhouse.
CHAPTER 3
AND THEN ROSEMARY was busy and happy. She bought and hung curtains, found a Victorian glass lamp for the living room, hung pots and pans on the kitchen wall. One day she realized that the four boards in the hall closet were shelves, fitting across to sit on wood cleats on the side walls. She covered them with gingham contact paper and, when Guy came home, showed him a neatly filled linen closet. She found a supermarket on Sixth Avenue and a Chinese laundry on Fifty-fifth Street for the sheets and Guy’s shirts.
Guy was busy too, away every day like other women’s husbands. With Labor Day past, his vocal coach was back in town; Guy worked with him each morning and auditioned for plays and commercials most afternoons. At breakfast he was touchy reading the theatrical page—everyone else was out of town with Skyscraper or Drat! The Cat! or The Impossible Years or Hot September; only he was in New York with residuals-from-Anacin—but Rosemary knew that very soon he’d get something good, and quietly she set his coffee before him and quietly took for herself the newspaper’s other section.
The nursery was, for the time being, a den, with off-white walls and the furniture from the old apartment. The white-and-yellow wallpaper would come later, clean and fresh. Rosemary had a sample of it lying ready in Picasso’s Picassos, along with a Saks ad showing the crib and bureau.
She wrote to her brother Brian to share her happiness. No one else in the family would have welcomed it; they were all hostile now—parents, brothers, sisters—not forgiving her for A) marrying a Protestant, B) marrying in only a civil ceremony, and C) having a mother-in-law who had had two divorces and was married now to a Jew up in Canada.
She made Guy chicken Marengo and vitello tonnato, baked a mocha layer cake and a jarful of butter cookies.
They heard Minnie Castevet before they met her; heard her through their bedroom wall, shouting in a hoarse midwestern bray. “Roman, come to bed! It’s twenty past eleven!” And five minutes later: “Roman? Bring me in some root beer when you come!”
“I didn’t know they were still making Ma and Pa Kettle movies,” Guy said, and Rosemary laughed uncertainly. She was nine years younger than Guy, and some of his references lacked clear meaning for her.
They met the Goulds in 7F, a pleasant elderly couple, and the German-accented Bruhns and their son Walter in 7C. They smiled and nodded in the hall to the Kelloggs, 7G, Mr. Stein, 7H, and the Messrs. Dubin and DeVore, 7B. (Rosemary learned everyone’s name immediately, from doorbells and from face-up mail on doormats, which she had no qualms about reading.) The Kapps in 7D, unseen and with no mail, were apparently still away for the summer; and the Castevets in 7A, heard (“Roman! Where’s Terry?”) but unseen, were either recluses or comers-and-goers-at-odd-hours. Their door was opposite the elevator, their doormat supremely readable. They got air mail letters from a surprising variety of places: Hawick, Scotland; Langeac, France; Vitória, Brazil; Cessnock, Australia. They subscribed to both Life and Look.
No sign at all did Rosemary and Guy see of the Trench sisters, Adrian Marcato, Keith Kennedy, Pearl Ames, or their latter-day equivalents. Dubin and DeVore were homosexuals; everyone else seemed entirely commonplace.
Almost every night the midwestern bray could be heard, from the apartment which, Rosemary and Guy came to realize, had originally been the bigger front part of their own. “But it’s impossible to be a hundred per cent sure!” the woman argued, and, “If you want my opinion, we shouldn’t tell her at all; that’s my opinion!”
One Saturday night the Castevets had a party, with a dozen or so people talking and singing. Guy fell asleep easily but Rosemary lay awake until after two, hearing flat unmusical singing and a flute or clarinet that piped along beside it.
The only time Rosemary remembered Hutch’s misgivings and was made uneasy by them was when she went down to the basement every fourth day or so to do the laundry. The service elevator was in itself unsettling—small, unmanned, and given to sudden creaks and tremors—and the basement was an eerie place of once-whitewashed brick passageways where footfalls whispered distantly and unseen doors thudded closed, where castoff refrigerators faced the wall under glary bulbs in wire cages.
It was here, Rosemary would remember, that a dead baby wrapped in newspaper had not so long ago been found. Whose baby had it been, and how had it died? Who had found it? Had the person who left it been caught and punished? She thought of going to the library and reading the story in old newspapers as Hutch had done; but that would have made it more real, more dreadful than it already was. To know the spot where the baby had lain, to have perhaps to walk past it on the way to
the laundry room and again on the way back to the elevator, would have been unbearable. Partial ignorance, she decided, was partial bliss. Damn Hutch and his good intentions!
The laundry room would have done nicely in a prison: steamy brick walls, more bulbs in cages, and scores of deep double sinks in iron-mesh cubicles. There were coin-operated washers and dryers and, in most of the padlocked cubicles, privately owned machines. Rosemary came down on weekends or after five; earlier on weekdays a bevy of Negro laundresses ironed and gossiped and had abruptly fallen silent at her one unknowing intrusion. She had smiled all around and tried to be invisible, but they hadn’t spoken another word and she had felt self-conscious, clumsy, and Negro-oppressing.
One afternoon, when she and Guy had been in the Bramford a little over two weeks, Rosemary was sitting in the laundry room at 5:15 reading The New Yorker and waiting to add softener to the rinse water when a girl her own age came in—a dark-haired cameo-faced girl who, Rosemary realized with a start, was Anna Maria Alberghetti. She was wearing white sandals, black shorts, and an apricot silk blouse, and was carrying a yellow plastic laundry basket. Nodding at Rosemary and then not looking at her, she went to one of the washers, opened it, and began feeding dirty clothes into it.
Anna Maria Alberghetti, as far as Rosemary knew, did not live at the Bramford, but she could well have been visiting someone and helping out with the chores. A closer look, though, told Rosemary that she was mistaken; this girl’s nose was too long and sharp and there were other less definable differences of expression and carriage. The resemblance, however, was a remarkable one—and suddenly Rosemary found the girl looking at her with an embarrassed questioning smile, the washer beside her closed and filling.
“I’m sorry,” Rosemary said. “I thought you were Anna Maria Alberghetti, so I’ve been staring at you. I’m sorry.”
The girl blushed and smiled and looked at the floor a few feet to her side. “That happens a lot,” she said. “You don’t have to apologize. People have been thinking I’m Anna Maria since I was, oh, just a kid, when she first started out in Here Comes The Groom.” She looked at Rosemary, still blushing but no longer smiling. “I don’t see a resemblance at all,” she said. “I’m of Italian parentage like she is, but no physical resemblance.”
“There’s a very strong one,” Rosemary said.
“I guess there is,” the girl said; “everyone’s always telling me. I don’t see it though. I wish I did, believe me.”
“Do you know her?” Rosemary asked.
“No.”
“The way you said ‘Anna Maria’ I thought—”
“Oh no, I just call her that. I guess from talking about her so much with everyone.” She wiped her hand on her shorts and stepped forward, holding it out and smiling. “I’m Terry Gionoffrio,” she said, “and I can’t spell it so don’t you try.”
Rosemary smiled and shook hands. “I’m Rosemary Woodhouse,” she said. “We’re new tenants here. Have you been here long?”
“I’m not a tenant at all,” the girl said. “I’m just staying with Mr. and Mrs. Castevet, up on the seventh floor. I’m their guest, sort of, since June. Oh, you know them?”
“No,” Rosemary said, smiling, “but our apartment is right behind theirs and used to be the back part of it.”
“Oh for goodness’ sake,” the girl said, “you’re the party that took the old lady’s apartment! Mrs.—the old lady who died!”
“Gardenia.”
“That’s right. She was a good friend of the Castevets. She used to grow herbs and things and bring them in for Mrs. Castevet to cook with.”
Rosemary nodded. “When we first looked at the apartment,” she said, “one room was full of plants.”
“And now that she’s dead,” Terry said, “Mrs. Castevet’s got a miniature greenhouse in the kitchen and grows things herself.”
“Excuse me, I have to put softener in,” Rosemary said. She got up and got the bottle from the laundry bag on the washer.
“Do you know who you look like?” Terry asked her; and Rosemary, unscrewing the cap, said, “No, who?”
“Piper Laurie.”
Rosemary laughed. “Oh, no,” she said. “It’s funny your saying that, because my husband used to date Piper Laurie before she got married.”
“No kidding? In Hollywood?”
“No, here.” Rosemary poured a capful of the softener. Terry opened the washer door and Rosemary thanked her and tossed the softener in.
“Is he an actor, your husband?” Terry asked.
Rosemary nodded complacently, capping the bottle.
“No kidding! What’s his name?”
“Guy Woodhouse,” Rosemary said. “He was in Luther and Nobody Loves An Albatross, and he does a lot of work in television.”
“Gee, I watch TV all day long,” Terry said. “I’ll bet I’ve seen him!” Glass crashed somewhere in the basement; a bottle smashing or a windowpane. “Yow,” Terry said.
Rosemary hunched her shoulders and looked uneasily toward the laundry room’s doorway. “I hate this basement,” she said.
“Me too,” Terry said. “I’m glad you’re here. If I was alone now I’d be scared stiff.”
“A delivery boy probably dropped a bottle,” Rosemary said.
Terry said, “Listen, we could come down together regular. Your door is by the service elevator, isn’t it? I could ring your bell and we could come down together. We could call each other first on the house phone.”
“That would be great,” Rosemary said. “I hate coming down here alone.”
Terry laughed happily, seemed to seek words, and then, still laughing, said, “I’ve got a good luck charm that’ll maybe do for both of us!” She pulled away the collar of her blouse, drew out a silver neckchain, and showed Rosemary on the end of it a silver filigree ball a little less than an inch in diameter.
“Oh, that’s beautiful,” Rosemary said.
“Isn’t it?” Terry said. “Mrs. Castevet gave it to me the day before yesterday. It’s three hundred years old. She grew the stuff inside it in that little greenhouse. It’s good luck, or anyway it’s supposed to be.”
Rosemary looked more closely at the charm Terry held out between thumb and fingertip. It was filled with a greenish-brown spongy substance that pressed out against the silver openwork. A bitter smell made Rosemary draw back.
Terry laughed again. “I’m not mad about the smell either,” she said. “I hope it works!”
“It’s a beautiful charm,” Rosemary said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“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.
