Donald Baumgart

Donald Baumgart is an actor whose abrupt blindness changes Guy Woodhouse’s career and becomes a crucial piece of evidence in Rosemary Woodhouse’s growing suspicion of the coven. His role in the story is shaped by a sharp contrast: first he is the absent rival whose catastrophe opens an opportunity for Guy; later, in a telephone conversation with Rosemary, he speaks for himself, making the consequences of blindness concrete without surrendering his wit or generosity.

Identity and Career

Donald is an actor competing with Guy for a part. The evidence does not give a detailed account of his earlier life or establish a close personal relationship between the two men. Their connection is chiefly professional, but it acquires greater significance when Donald’s sudden loss of sight is followed by Guy’s casting and, later, by Rosemary’s suspicion that the misfortune was deliberately caused.

Donald had performed well enough in the competition to win out over Guy, in Rosemary’s recollection. She also believes he must have been good at his work: his success had made him the obstacle between Guy and the role. Yet Donald himself later offers a less adversarial account. He tells Rosemary that, after their second audition, he thought Guy had been terrific and expected him to get the part. The difference between Rosemary’s image of a contest decided by Donald’s misfortune and Donald’s own recollection complicates the idea that Guy’s success depended entirely on his rival’s downfall.

The Sudden Loss of Sight

Guy learns the news during a telephone call from Mr. Weiss. On the Sunday and Monday before the call, he has kept himself busy with shelves, shoe racks, painting, and other work around the apartment, while remaining alert to every ring of the telephone. When it comes, Rosemary hears his dismay before she learns why he has been called: Donald has gone blind. He had awakened the previous day unable to see, and had tried to hang himself that morning. He is at Bellevue, under sedation.

The timing turns the call into a reversal. Guy has received the part, but the opportunity arrives through a fellow actor’s crisis rather than through an ordinary announcement of professional success. He tells Rosemary that he has got the role, calls the circumstances awful, and leaves to walk outside and absorb the news. Rosemary, meanwhile, holds two responses together: pity for Donald and relief that the part has gone to Guy. Her imagined future quickly branches from the casting, toward further roles, films, travel, and a family life with Guy. Donald’s catastrophe is thus presented both as a human emergency and as the event that appears to open a larger future for the Woodhouses.

Donald and Rosemary

Rosemary later calls Donald after obtaining his number from Actors' Equity Association. Her inquiry is prompted by uncertainty about whether the blindness was natural or caused by witchcraft, and by her unease over the benefit Guy has received. Donald answers with a joke about the luxurious life he imagines she now leads as Guy’s wife. The contrast between his teasing picture of her prosperity and her genuine concern makes the call an encounter between the person who has profited indirectly from his misfortune and the person living with its consequences.

Donald says that he is fine and describes improvement through small daily measures, while also recounting mishaps: he has broken glasses, fallen down stairs, and tapped in front of fire engines. The comic form of his account does not erase the practical hazards he faces. It gives those hazards specificity, and makes his blindness more than an offstage plot device. At the same time, he does not ask Rosemary to resolve his condition or make the conversation a plea for sympathy. His humor lets him describe a difficult adjustment on his own terms.

Rosemary tells him that she and Guy are unhappy that Guy received his break because of Donald’s misfortune. Donald pauses, then declines to blame Guy. He says that fortunes rise and fall, and that Guy would have done all right anyway. He recalls the second audition as evidence: Guy impressed him, and Donald had expected him to be chosen. The conversation therefore separates the timing of the casting from the question of Guy’s ability. Donald can acknowledge the unfair-looking result while maintaining that his rival deserved success on his own merits.

The Tie and Rosemary’s Suspicions

Donald’s blindness later returns to Rosemary’s thoughts as she tries to make sense of Guy’s connection with the coven. She considers the sequence that has followed the blindness: Guy’s part, the reviews, another play, and a movie offer. She also thinks that the Greenwich Village role might have gone to Donald if he had not inexplicably lost his sight. Her reasoning does not rest on certainty; it grows out of the unsettling closeness between Guy’s professional rise and Donald’s calamity, and Rosemary is still unsure what she believes about the coven and its power.

When she later confronts Guy, Rosemary asks why he traded ties with Donald. She then identifies the exchange as the means by which a personal belonging could be used in a spell against him. This gives the earlier professional coincidence a darker possible explanation: Donald had not simply become blind before Guy received his chance; in Rosemary’s understanding, the exchanged tie connected Guy to the act that caused it. The evidence presents this as Rosemary’s accusation and interpretation, not as Donald’s own knowledge of what happened. He remains outside the confrontation, even as the suspected tie makes him central to its stakes.

Narrative Role

Donald’s brief appearances create a moral and causal hinge in the story. His blindness supplies Guy with an opportunity, but Donald’s later testimony prevents him from being reduced to a faceless rival whose suffering exists only to advance another man’s career. His specific account of navigating daily life, his humor, and his generous judgment of Guy restore a measure of individuality to the figure Rosemary had first imagined from a distance.

The tie also changes the meaning of Donald’s misfortune. At first, the news reaches Rosemary as an appalling coincidence wrapped inside Guy’s professional breakthrough. Later, after she has begun to suspect the coven, the same blindness becomes a clue that links an ordinary object and an exchange between actors to possible supernatural harm. Donald himself neither confirms that explanation nor participates in Rosemary’s later confrontation. His narrative importance lies in the gap between what he can report about living with blindness and what Rosemary comes to believe about its cause.