Son of Rosemary

  Rosemary said, “Yes...”

  “I thought so. You may want to give these kids a hand. They’re doing a revival of it, off-Off-Broadway, just started rehearsals. It turns out the owner of the space is a Lutheran; he says it’s heresy and he’s kicking them out on some technicality. The check was two seconds late.”

  “If he’s a Lutheran why does he think it’s heresy?” Rosemary asked. “It’s a pro-Luther play.”

  “Do I know what’s in the man’s head? All I know is they’ve got two days before they’re out on the sidewalk, they’re having some kind of rally, and the director is the granddaughter of an old friend. If you could give them five minutes on freedom of speech, it would get them on the news and in the papers and save the day. That’s the theory. Frankly I don’t think the landlord will budge; he’s pulled crap like this before and gotten away with it.”

  Rosemary said, “Where and when is this rally?”

  She called Judy at her apartment. Got her message and held on. After the beep she said, “Judy, this is Rosemary. Could we possibly—”

  “I’m here, Rosemary. What is it?”

  “Hi,” she said. “Could we possibly make it a little later tonight? There’s this rally for some kids who are putting on a show...” She explained.

  “Yes, of course! Help them! What a terrible thing when people try to stop the expression of ideas! Although, if the check was late and the man owns the property—”

  “I’ll be back by nine, according to Diane,” Rosemary said, “but it’s on Carmine Street in the Village so let’s say nine-thirty to be safe.”

  “That’s fine for me. I’m packing; I can use the time.”

  “Don’t be in such a hurry,” she said. “Let’s talk a little.”

  “My mind is made up. Speak well. What do they say? Break a leg.”

  She called Diane. Said only a low-pitched “Okay.”

  “Oh good. It just may work; wouldn’t that be nice. I’ll arrange for a car. Seven-thirty?”

  “I’m going to call Joe,” she said. “If he wants to go, he may want to give his own car a workout. I’ll call back. Have you seen Andy today?”

  “I haven’t seen anyone except my maid. I’m in bed with sciatica.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Diane!”

  She called Joe at his apartment.

  “Yeah, sure. We can use my car. Will he be there?”

  “Andy?”

  “The Lutheran.”

  “Joe,” she said.

  “Maybe we have some friends in common, that’s all. I know theater owners. What time?”

  She called Diane and got the address. “Your contact is the stage manager, Phil something. Oh, and congratulations on the polls!” The buzzer buzzed, Andy’s buzz.

  “Andy’s here now,” Rosemary said. “I’ll let you know how it goes.”

  “Give him my—”

  She clapped the phone down and hurried to the door as Andy buzzed again. She opened and roses came at her, rose-smelling roses round and red like the roses surrounding MAGI.

  Andy beamed at her—too brightly? “Count them,” he said, giving her the bundle of stems wrapped in the lobby florist’s gold paper.

  “They’re beautiful,” she said, cradling the bouquet, “thank you”—watching his face as he came in and closed the door. “Is something wrong?” she asked.

  “You jest,” he said. “Count them.”

  Nine.

  “For the nine-point drop,” he said. “That’s radiation!”

  “That’s what I thought!” They pressed cheeks, kissed them. “Oh thank you, darling,” she said, “they really are beautiful!” She nuzzled her face in the roses.

  “Your hair looks different,” he said, unzipping his jacket.

  “You like it? Ernie got inspired.” She showed him both sides.

  Squinting, his head cocked, he said, ‘Mmmmm ... it’s going to take a teeny bit of getting used to.”

  “I love it,” she said, opening the kitchen as he took his jacket off and dropped it. “Where’ve you been all day?” She opened a cabinet.

  “The Mayor flew a bunch of us up to Albany,” he said, “to beg the Governor about the hospital bill.”

  She got out a cut-glass vase. “And that’s how you dressed?”

  “Yeah,” he said. Nodded. “And boy, was the Governor pissed off.” They smiled at each other. He leaned against the counter, watching her as she put the roses into the vase. He said, “The thing I had on for tonight was canceled. You want to go to a movie?”

  “Can’t,” she said, leaning back, squinting. “I’m speechifying, briefly.” She explained, jockeying the roses.

  He said, “I’d love to hear you.”

  “Come on along,” she said, “but Joe’s taking me in his car. “It’s a two-seater, isn’t it?”

  “Three,” he said.

  Running water into the vase with the spray hose, she looked at him and said, “On one condition.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Not one ‘old buddy,’ ‘old man,’ or ‘old pal,’ “ she said. “Not one in the entire evening.”

  “What are you talking about?” he said. “I don’t—”

  “Oh Andy,” she said, wiping the vase, “honestly! I really expect a little more subtlety from you. You know perfectly well what I mean.”

  “All right,” he said, walking away toward the TV, “all right, all right...”

  “I’m going inside,” she said, carrying the vase to the coffee table. “I want to rest and make some notes. If you’re staying, there’s half a ham-and-Swiss in the fridge. Or just take it with you if you want. I’m going to order something around six. Joe’s coming at seven-thirty.”

  “Here’s Van Buren.” Andy stood at the TV, holding the remote. “Did you hear? He cut both gun lines out of his stump speech.”

  “Because of the commercial?” she asked.

  “He reads polls.”

  Mike Van Buren, in a cowboy hat, against a blue sky, his breath pluming, said above several hand-held microphones, “—sides can cool down a little, don’t you? The Original Sons of Liberty now say that if they’re not being pushed, they’ll reconsider lighting, so it really does look as if, thanks to Rosemary’s thoughtful, heartfelt message, and Andy’s too of course, we’re all coming together as a nation.”

  Andy clapped his chest. “My career is over!” he cried.

  Laughing, Rosemary said, “Oh God, he’s moving toward the center; he’ll be the next president because of us!”

  Chuckling, channel-hopping, Andy said, “No way, I promise you.”

  “You never know in politics,” she said.

  “Trust me on this one,” he said.

  12

  A TRULY hellish night. The speech was just about the only thing that went well. The audience was smaller than Rosemary had expected—about thirty young men and women, the actors in the show and their friends—but they couldn’t have been more responsive and supportive; it was almost as if they were her partners in some kind of reading or rehearsal or happening. The space was a four-story brownstone’s ground floor, its platform stage smaller than the half-moon in GC’s amphitheater. Squeezing even a minimal Luther onto it was going to be a real challenge for Diane’s friend’s granddaughter (who was having a detached retina repaired at St. Vincent’s, Phil the stage manager said).

  Rosemary got easy laughs quoting some of Hutch’s put-downs of religious-fundamentalist library purifiers— he’d had a run-in with them over a scene in one of his boys’ adventure books where the boys went skinny-dipping and sat around the campfire eating beef jerky— and thanks to an assist from the information line of the New York Public Library, she was able to quote accurately from Tom Paine and Tom Jefferson too. She preached effectively to the converted, who gave her a really big hand then gathered round for autographs, congratulating her and telling her she was great and to go for it and things like that. Andy sat in a back corner of the room on one of the plastic stack chairs, his legs out a
nd crossed at the ankles, his arms folded, his head lowered. Joe, next to him, beamed at Rosemary, giving her two thumbs up and Andy an elbow.

  The hellishness came before and after.

  First there was the fire a few blocks east of Carmine Street—big enough to attract all approaching TV mobile units.

  Then, at eight-thirty, when Phil said they would wait no longer and make do with the footage from the video-cams in the audience, just as everyone was getting seated again and he was raising his hands for silence— came the police cars.

  And the bomb squad. With the truck and the dogs.

  A warning had been phoned in by someone representing a group called Lutherans Against Luther—the play, not the man, the woman had specified. They were claiming responsibility for a bomb that was going to go off at nine o’clock. Ninety-nine chances out of a hundred it was a hoax but the entire building had to be evacuated immediately and searched from top to bottom. Sorry, folks.

  Joe was ready to go get the car but Rosemary was more irked than ever at the incredible selfishness of some people who claimed to believe in Jesus Christ; and besides, being psyched up and having a sympathetic audience on tap, she felt the speech could be a good warm-up or tryout for longer speeches to tougher audiences.

  Andy shrugged.

  Joe said, “You’re the boss”—to her, not him.

  She borrowed Phil’s phone—he was young and cheerful, with wide-set blue eyes like Leah Fountain’s, the same weak chin too—and backed across the crowded blocked-off street to the lee of a deli window, wrapping her coat more tightly around her. Everybody else—Andy, Joe, Phil, the actors, half of Carmine Street—was checking out the men and women coming down from the building’s top two floors, Dominique’s Dungeon.

  Flexible standards, that rat-fink landlord. She shook her head, waiting through Judy’s message. “It’s Rosemary,” she said. “Are you there?” She ought to have been; her apartment on West End Avenue was only a short walk from the Tower. “There’s no way I’m going to be back by nine-thirty,” Rosemary said, craning to see who or what the crowd was cheering. “We’ve had a bomb scare. Ten o’clock is more likely. I’ll call the desk and tell them to tell whoever’s on seven to let you in, in case I’m not back by then.”

  She did that.

  It was well past nine-thirty when she finally got up there in front of that sympathetic, responsive, supportive audience.

  The hellishness resumed when Andy, about to fold himself into the back of Joe’s classic black Alfa-Romeo roadster, discovered a three-inch, shiny-new scratch low on the left rear fender. Joe, scowling, silent, drove them around the block to the garage where the car had been parked; there he climbed out, reintroduced himself to the attendant, a large shaven-headed man with one gold earring, and invited him to see the scratch. The man said he was seeing it for the first time, which Joe found hard to believe. It was after ten when Rosemary persuaded him that she really wanted to get home, and that lawyers, not threats, were the next logical step if it was really that important.

  “If?” Joe said. “If?”

  That was roughly when the water main was bursting at the intersection of Eighth Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street.

  “I’m telling you, Rosie, you couldn’t have been better,” Joe said as they sat locked in traffic between Thirty-second and Thirty-third Streets. “You had them in the palm of your hand all the way.”

  “Oh please,” she said. “That was the friendliest audience anybody ever spoke to. I could have”—she shook her head, waved a hand at him—“the phone book.”

  “Go on, you were great.” He buffed at the dashboard with the heel of a hand. “Wasn’t she, Andy?”

  “You were.”

  Rosemary turned around, squinted at him, sitting huddled behind them. Glints of light brushed his hair, cheekbones, beard. “Are you all right?” she asked.

  He stayed silent, then said, “No, not really. I must have eaten something...” He moved a hand to his middle.

  “Ahhh,” she said, reaching over the seat, touching his other hand on his knee. “I hope it wasn’t that ham-and-Swiss...”

  “No, I don’t think so,” he said.

  “Ham, you got to be careful,” Joe said, putting a tape in the deck.

  They rolled, in a slow tide of taller traffic, across Thirty-third Street and up Tenth Avenue, while Ella Fitzgerald sang the Irving Berlin Songbook. She was more than halfway through it when, after eleven, they were finally back on Eighth Avenue heading up through the Forties. Rosemary didn’t fret unduly about Judy; she’d either be asleep on the sofa or, more likely, doing anagrams with the Scrabble tiles. Roast Mules! She’d have to beg her for the answer again, really literally get down on her knees and beg this time—just in case Judy did take off for parts unknown. Maddening, the time wasted pushing around those ten damn tiles!

  “Clear sailing from here on in,” Joe said.

  “Bite your tongue.”

  “No, you.” He watched in the mirror, easing to the right, slowing. A howling police car flinging red and white lights raced past them, another car following, lights flailing, the howls dropping pitch as they passed. Ella sang that as far as she was concerned, it was a lovely day, and everything was okay.

  “It’s a hellish night, Ella,” Rosemary said, watching the police-car lights shrinking ahead.

  Ella countered with, “Isn’t this a lovely day to he caught in the rain! You were going on your way, now you’ve got to remain—”

  “Get the news,” Rosemary said.

  “I like this.”

  “Me too,” Joe said, looking in the mirror, easing right and slowing again. Rosemary jabbed at the dash, pushed buttons. “Ooh!” Joe said. “Okay. Middle button. Take it easy.” An ambulance screamed past them. “Oho!” he said, smiling at her, his brows raised. “We’ve got our Irish up!”

  She drew a breath, relaxed into the bucket seat.

  A woman talked about flooded basements in Hell’s Kitchen, disrupted subway service. About the fire on West Houston Street—two people dead, ten families homeless four days before Christmas.

  Rosemary sighed, shook her head. Turned around as a howling police car raced past them, lights flailing. “How you doing?” she asked.

  “So-so.”

  “Andy,” she asked, her chin on her hand on the seat top, “who does Phil remind you of?”

  He stayed silent.

  She said, “Leah Fountain. The eyes? The chin?”

  He said, “Yes, you’re right.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  She turned. They were stopped for the light at Columbus Circle; up ahead, on the left, a dazzle of lights, red-white-amber, spun-flashed-blinked at the base of the Tower. She said, “Oh God...”

  Joe patted her coat-covered thigh. “Could be nothing,” he said. Left his hand there.

  Andy gave a laugh. “A bomb scare. Lutherans Against Luther.”

  “I’m glad you’re feeling better,” Rosemary said, squinting ahead against the flashing lights.

  Joe took his hand from her thigh and shifted into first.

  What gives?” he asked out the window.

  The cop letting them through to the garage entrance crouched and said, “A murder, that’s all they told me. Love you, Rosemary!”

  They drove down the ramp, down the ramp, down the ramp, down the ramp. On the lower level, Joe pulled up in front of the uniformed attendant; she hurried around the car, bent, and opened Rosemary’s door. “Hey, Rosemary!” she said. “You looked so cool over there!”

  “Thanks,” Rosemary said, climbing—with a hand from the attendant—out of the ridiculously low car. A man his age . . . Spotting the embroidered name, she said, “Thanks, Keesha,” and pointed upstairs. “Do you know anything about—”

  Keesha leaned close, brown eyes wide. “A woman been killed,” she said. “In the lobby, in a boutique. Blood all over.”

  Rosemary drew breath.

  “Where did you say?” Andy asked, looking up, halfway out of his bert
h. Rosemary gave him a hand. “A boutique,” she said along with Keesha.

  He stood up, frowning. Arched his back, kneading at it.

  “What is it?” Joe asked, standing on the other side.

  “A woman been killed,” Keesha said, going around the hood of the Alfa. “In a boutique. I don’t know which.”

  Rosemary said, “I want to get upstairs. Andy, you go right up to your place and take something and get into bed. You look awful. Do you have any Pepto-Bismol or anything like that?”

  “I’ll be okay,” he said.

  She put her hand to his forehead, held it there, looking away, frowning. He stood still, watching her. “You don’t have a fever,” she said, lowering her hand, looking at him, “but take a couple of aspirin anyway. Do you have tea? Make some, or order some.”

  “You were really good,” he said. “Even a tough audience would have started thinking.”

  She said, “Praise from the master. Merci. Do what I said.”

  She walked with him to the AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY door, kissed his cheek as he ran his card through the lock. Joe came over and held the door open while Andy carded the elevator door and went into the red-and-brass cab, turned to them. “Thanks for the wheels, Joe baby,” he said. Smiled at her as the cab closed.

  “Get him,” Joe said, letting the outer door close. “Joe Hollywood.”

  Smiling, she said, “Let’s call it a night, okay? I’m bushed.”

  “Me too,” he said. They linked arms and hands, and walked toward the elevators. “Slow driving like that is murder,” he said. “Wrong word.”

  “I wonder who she is, poor woman.” She shuddered.

  “We’ll hear tomorrow. I wonder which boutique. Talk about shit publicity.” He touched the button.

  They kissed each other.

  “You were great,” he said.

  “Thanks,” she said. “And thanks for taking us. I’m sorry about the scratch.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  When she came out of the elevator, Luís was at the desk, with the phone at his ear, pushing buttons, shaking his head. “I never saw anything like this before,” he told her, putting the phone down, standing up. “Every line is busy. Is it true? A murder in one of the boutiques? Dogs went crazy?”