“Well this is what I call the long arm of coincidence!” Minnie exclaimed, and came smiling to her when Rosemary turned, in a white mock-leather coat and a red hat and her neckchained eyeglasses. “I said to myself, ‘As long as Rosemary’s out, I might as well go out, and do the last little bit of my Christmas shopping.’ And here you are and here I am! It looks like we’re just two of a kind that go the same places and do the same things! Why, what’s the matter, dear? You look so sad and downcast.”
“I just heard some bad news,” Rosemary said. “A friend of mine is very sick. In the hospital.”
“Oh, no,” Minnie said. “Who?”
“His name is Edward Hutchins,” Rosemary said.
“The one Roman met yesterday afternoon? Why, he was going on for an hour about what a nice intelligent man he was! Isn’t that a pity! What’s troubling him?”
Rosemary told her.
“My land,” Minnie said, “I hope it doesn’t turn out the way it did for poor Lily Gardenia! And the doctors don’t even know? Well at least they admit it; usually they cover up what they don’t know with a lot of high-flown Latin. If the money spent putting those astronauts up where they are was spent on medical research down here, we’d all be a lot better off, if you want my opinion. Do you feel all right, Rosemary?”
“The pain is a little worse,” Rosemary said.
“You poor thing. You know what I think? I think we ought to be going home now. What do you say?”
“No, no, you have to finish your Christmas shopping.”
“Oh shoot,” Minnie said, “there’s two whole weeks yet. Hold onto your ears.” She put her wrist to her mouth and blew stabbing shrillness from a whistle on a gold-chain bracelet. A taxi veered toward them. “How’s that for service?” she said. “A nice big Checker one too.”
Soon after, Rosemary was in the apartment again. She drank the cold sour drink from the blue-and-green-striped glass while Minnie looked on approvingly.
Four
She had been eating her meat rare; now she ate it nearly raw-broiled only long enough to take away the refrigerator’s chill and seal in the juices.
The weeks before the holidays and the holiday season itself were dismal. The pain grew worse, grew so grinding that something shut down in Rosemarysome center of resistance and remembered well-being-and she stopped reacting, stopped mentioning pain to Dr. Sapirstein, stopped referring to pain even in her thoughts. Until now it had been inside her; now she was inside it; pain was the weather around her, was time, was the entire world. Numbed and exhausted, she began to sleep more, and to eat more too-more nearly raw meat.
She did what had to be done: cooked and cleaned, sent Christmas cards to the family-she hadn’t the heart for phone calls-and put new money into envelopes for the elevator men, doormen, porters, and Mr. Micklas. She looked at newspapers and tried to be interested in students burning draft cards and the threat of a city-wide transit strike, but she couldn’t: this was news from a world of fantasy; nothing was real but her world of pain. Guy bought Christmas presents for Minnie and Roman; for each other they agreed to buy nothing at all. Minnie and Roman gave them coasters.
They went to nearby movies a few times, but most evenings they stayed in or went around the hall to Minnie and Roman’s, where they met couples named Fountain and Gilmore and Wees, a woman named Mrs. Sabatini who always brought her cat, and Dr. Shand, the retired dentist who had made the chain for Rosemary’s tannis-charm. These were all elderly people who treated Rosemary with kindness and concern, seeing, apparently, that she was less than well. Laura-Louise was there too, and sometimes Dr. Sapirstein joined the group. Roman was an energetic host, filling glasses and launching new topics of conversation. On New Year’s Eve he proposed a toast “To 1966, The Year One”-that puzzled Rosemary, although everyone else seemed to understand and approve of it. She felt as if she had missed a literary or political reference-not that she really cared. She and Guy usually left early, and Guy would see her into bed and go back. He was the favorite of the women, who gathered around him and laughed at his jokes.
Hutch stayed as he was, in his deep and baffling coma. Grace Cardiff called every week or so. “No change, no change at all,” she would say. “They still don’t know. He could wake up tomorrow morning or he could sink deeper and never wake up at all.”
Twice Rosemary went to St. Vincent’s Hospital to stand beside Hutch’s bed and look down powerlessly at the closed eyes, the scarcely discernible breathing. The second time, early in January, his daughter Doris was there, sitting by the window working a piece of needlepoint. Rosemary had met her a year earlier at Hutch’s apartment; she was a short pleasant woman in her thirties, married to a Swedish-born psychoanalyst. She looked, unfortunately, like a younger wigged Hutch.
Doris didn’t recognize Rosemary, and when Rosemary had re-introduced herself she made a distressed apology.
“Please don’t,” Rosemary said, smiling. “I know. I look awful.”
“No, you haven’t changed at all,” Doris said. “I’m terrible with faces. I forget my children, really I do.”
She put aside her needlepoint and Rosemary drew up another chair and sat with her. They talked about Hutch’s condition and watched a nurse come in and replace the hanging bottle that fed into his taped arm.
“We have an obstetrician in common,” Rosemary said when the nurse had gone; and then they talked about Rosemary’s pregnancy and Dr. Sapirstein’s skill and eminence. Doris was surprised to hear that he was seeing Rosemary every week. “He only saw me once a month,” she said. “Till near the end, of course. Then it was every two weeks, and then every week, but only in the last month. I thought that was fairly standard.”
Rosemary could find nothing to say, and Doris suddenly looked distressed again. “But I suppose every pregnancy is a law unto itself,” she said, with a smile meant to rectify tactlessness.
“That’s what he told me,” Rosemary said.
That evening she told Guy that Dr. Sapirstein had only seen Doris once a month. “Something is wrong with me,” she said. “And he knew it right from the beginning.”
“Don’t be silly,” Guy said. “He would tell you. And even if he wouldn’t, he would certainly tell me. “
“Has he? Has he said anything to you?”
“Absolutely not, Ro. I swear to God.”
“Then why do I have to go every week?”
“Maybe that’s the way he does it now. Or maybe he’s giving you better treatment, because you’re Minnie and Roman’s friend.”
“ No.,
“Well I don’t know; ask him,” Guy said. “Maybe you’re more fun to examine than she was.”
She asked Dr. Sapirstein two days later. “Rosemary, Rosemary,” he said to her; “what did I tell you about talking to your friends? Didn’t I say that every pregnancy is different?”
“Yes, but-“
“And the treatment has to be different too. Doris Allert had had two deliveries before she ever came to me, and there had been no complications whatever. She didn’t require the close attention a first-timer does.”
“Do you always see first-timers every week?”
“I try to,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t. There’s nothing wrong with you, Rosemary. The pain will stop very soon.”
“I’ve been eating raw meat,” she said. “Just warmed a little.”
“Anything else out of the ordinary?”
“No,” she said, taken aback; wasn’t that enough?