Double damn! If they were living together and not married she would have been pregnant fifty times by now!
Seven
The following evening after dinner Guy went over to the Castevets’. Rosemary straightened up the kitchen and was debating whether to work on the windowseat cushions or get into bed with Manchild in The Promised Land when the doorbell rang. It was Mrs. Castevet, and with her another woman, short, plump, and smiling, with a Buckley-for-Mayor button on the shoulder of a green dress.
“Hi, dear, we’re not bothering you, are we?” Mrs. Castevet said when Rosemary had opened the door. “This is my dear friend Laura-Louise McBurney, who lives up on twelve. Laura-Louise, this is Guy’s wife Rosemary.”
“Hello, Rosemary! Welcome to the Bram!”
“Laura-Louise just met Guy over at our place and she wanted to meet you too, so we came on over. Guy said you were staying in not doing anything. Can we come in?”
With resigned good grace Rosemary showed them into the living room.
“Oh, you’ve got new chairs,” Mrs. Castevet said. “Aren’t they beautiful!” “They came this morning,” Rosemary said.
“Are you all right, dear? You look worn.”
“I’m fine,” Rosemary said and smiled. “It’s the first day of my period.”
“And you’re up and around?” Laura-Louise asked, sitting. “On my first days I experienced such pain that I couldn’t move or eat or anything. Dan had to give me gin through a straw to kill the pain and we were one-hundred-percent Temperance at the time, with that one exception.”
“Girls today take things more in their stride than we did,” Mrs. Castevet said, sitting too. “They’re healthier than we were, thanks to vitamins and better medical care.”
Both women had brought identical green sewing bags and, to Rosemary’s surprise, were opening them now and taking out crocheting (Laura-Louise) and darning (Mrs. Castevet); settling down for a long evening of needlework and conversation. “What’s that over there?” Mrs. Castevet asked. “Seat covers?”
“Cushions for the window seats,” Rosemary said, and thinking Oh all right, I will, went over and got the work and brought it back and joined them.
Laura-Louise said, “You’ve certainly made a tremendous change in the apartment, Rosemary.”
“Oh, before I forget,” Mrs. Castevet said, “this is for you. From Roman and me.” She put a small packet of pink tissue paper into Rosemary’s hand, with a hardness inside it.
“For me?” Rosemary asked. “I don’t understand.”
“It’s just a little present is all,” Mrs. Castevet said, dismissing Rosemary’s puzzlement with quick hand-waves. “For moving in.”
“But there’s no reason for you to . . .” Rosemary unfolded the leaves of used-before tissue paper. Within the pink was Terry’s silver filigree ball-charm and its clustered-together neckchain. The smell of the ball’s filling made Rosemary pull her head away.
“It’s real old,” Mrs. Castevet said. “Over three hundred years.”
“It’s lovely,” Rosemary said, examining the ball and wondering whether she should tell that Terry had shown it to her. The moment for doing so slipped by.
“The green inside is called tannis root,” Mrs. Castevet said. “It’s good luck.”
Not for Terry, Rosemary thought, and said, “It’s lovely, but I can’t accept such a-“
“You already have,” Mrs. Castevet said, darning a brown sock and not looking at Rosemary. “Put it on.”
Laura-Louise said, “You’ll get used to the smell before you know it.”
“Go on,” Mrs. Castevet said.
“Well, thank you,” Rosemary said; and uncertainly she put the chain over her head and tucked the ball into the collar of her dress. It dropped down between her breasts, cold for a moment and obtrusive. I’ll take it off when they go, she thought.
Laura-Louise said, “A friend of ours made the chain entirely by hand. He’s a retired dentist and his hobby is making jewelry out of silver and gold. You’ll meet him at Minnie and Roman’s on-on some night soon, I’m sure, because they entertain so much. You’ll probably meet all their friends, all our friends.”
Rosemary looked up from her work and saw Laura-Louise pink with an embarrassment that had hurried and confused her last words. Minnie was busy darning, unaware. Laura-Louise smiled and Rosemary smiled back.
“Do you make your own clothes?” Laura-Louise asked.
“No, I don’t,” Rosemary said, letting the subject be changed. “I try to every once in a while but nothing ever hangs right.”
It turned out to be a fairly pleasant evening. Minnie told some amusing stories about her girlhood in Oklahoma, and Laura-Louise showed Rosemary two useful sewing tricks and explained feelingly how Buckley, the Conservative mayoral candidate, could win the coming election despite the high odds against him.
Guy came back at eleven, quiet and oddly self-contained. He said hello to the women and, by Rosemary’s chair, bent and kissed her cheek. Minnie said, “Eleven? My land! Come on, Laura-Louise.” Laura-Louise said, “Come and visit me any time you want, Rosemary; I’m in twelve F.” The two women closed their sewing bags and went quickly away.
“Were his stories as interesting as last night?” Rosemary asked.
“Yes,” Guy said. “Did you have a nice time?”
“All right. I got some work done.”
“So I see.”
“I got a present too.”
She showed him the charm. “It was Terry’s,” she said. “They gave it to her; she showed it to me. The police must have-given it back.”
“She probably wasn’t even wearing it,” Guy said.
“I’ll bet she was. She was as proud of it as-as if it was the first gift anyone had ever given her.” Rosemary lifted the chain off over her head and held the chain and the charm on her palm, jiggling them and looking at them.
“Aren’t you going to wear it?” Guy asked.
“It smells,” she said. “There’s stuff in it called tannis root.” She held out her hand. “From the famous greenhouse.”
Guy smelled and shrugged. “It’s not bad,” he said.
Rosemary went into the bedroom and opened a drawer in the vanity where she had a tin Louis Sherry box full of odds and ends. “Tannis, anybody?” she asked herself in the mirror, and put the charm in the box, closed it, and closed the drawer.
Guy, in the doorway, said, “If you took it, you ought to wear it.”
That night Rosemary awoke and found Guy sitting beside her smoking in the dark. She asked him what was the matter. “Nothing,” he said. “A little insomnia, that’s all.”
Roman’s stories of old-time stars, Rosemary thought, might have depressed him by reminding him that his own career was lagging behind Henry Irving’s and Forbes-Whosit’s. His going back for more of the stories might have been a form of masochism.
She touched his arm and told him not to worry.
“About what?”
“About anything.”
“All right,” he said, “I won’t.”
“You’re the greatest,” she said. “You know? You are. And it’s all going to come out right. You’re going to have to learn karate to get rid of the photographers.”
He smiled in the glow of his cigarette.
“Any day now,” she said. “Something big. Something worthy of you.”
“I know,” he said. “Go to sleep, honey.”
“Okay. Watch the cigarette.”
“I will.”
“Wake me if you can’t sleep.”
“Sure.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, Ro.”
A day or two later Guy brought home a pair of tickets for the Saturday night performance of The Fantasticks, given to him, he explained, by Dominick, his vocal coach. Guy had seen the show years before when it first opened; Rosemary had always been meaning to see it. “Go with Hutch,” Guy said; “it’ll give me a chance to work on the Wait Until Dark scene.”