Rosemary's Baby Read Online Free Page A

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, 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,