"01 - Rosemary's Baby (a)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Levin Ira)

Rosemary looked at Guy. He put down his fork and wiped his mouth. "It's silly," he said. "All right, a lot of unpleasant things have happened there. That doesn't mean that more of them are going to happen. I don't see why the Bramford is any more of a 'danger zone' than any other house in the city. You can flip a coin and get five heads in a row; that doesn't mean that the next five flips are going to be heads too, and it doesn't mean that the coin is any different from any other coin. It's coincidence, that's all."
"If there were really something wrong," Rosemary said, "wouldn't it have been demolished? Like the house in London?"
"The house in London," Hutch said, "was owned by the family of the last chap murdered there. The Bramford is owned by the church next door."
"There you are," Guy said, lighting a cigarette; "we've got divine protection."
"It hasn't been working," Hutch said.
The waiter lifted away their plates.
Rosemary said, "I didn't know it was owned by a church," and Guy said, "The whole city is, honey."
"Have you tried the Wyoming?" Hutch asked. "It's in the same block, I think."
"Hutch," Rosemary said, "we've tried everywhere. There's nothing, absolutely nothing, except the new houses, with neat square rooms that are all exactly alike and television cameras in the elevators. "Is that so terrible?" Hutch asked, smiling
"Yes," Rosemary said, and Guy said, "We were set to go into one, but we backed out to take this."
Hutch looked at them for a moment, then sat back and struck the table with wide-apart palms. "Enough," he said. "I shall mind my own business, as I ought to have done from the outset. Make fires in your working fireplace! I'll give you a bolt for the door and keep my mouth shut from this day forward. I'm an idiot; forgive me."

Rosemary, smiled. "The door already has a bolt," she said. "And one of those chain things and a peephole."
"Well, mind you use all three," Hutch said. "And don't go wandering through the halls introducing yourself to all and sundry. You're not in Iowa."
"Omaha."
The waiter brought their main courses.

On the following Monday afternoon Rosemary and Guy signed a two-year lease on apartment 7E at the Bramford. They gave Mrs. Cortez a check for five hundred and eighty-three dollars-a month's rent in advance and a month's rent as security-and were told that if they wished they could take occupancy of the apartment earlier than September first, as it would be cleared by the end of the week and the painters could come in on Wednesday the eighteenth.
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, fire screen, 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.
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 Germanaccented 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; Vitoria, 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 whis-

pered 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.