St. Vincent’s Hospital is the setting for Edward Hutchins’s prolonged coma and death, and for Rosemary Woodhouse’s two visits to his bedside. The hospital gives physical form to a crisis that remains medically unexplained: Hutchins is alive but unresponsive, while the people who care about him can only wait. Its role later resonates with Rosemary’s own pregnancy, when she expects to give birth in a different hospital but is instead prevented from choosing where and how she will be treated.

Hutchins’s Coma

Hutchins is taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital after his cleaning woman finds him unconscious on his bedroom floor. He had sounded well the previous night, both to Rosemary, who spoke with him at about ten-thirty, and to Grace Cardiff, a friend of his. The abrupt change makes the cause of his condition especially baffling: the doctors have not yet been able to determine why he has fallen into a deep coma.

The hospital becomes the site of an extended uncertainty rather than a diagnosis or recovery. Hutchins remains in the coma, and Grace Cardiff calls Rosemary every week or so with news that nothing has changed. The possibility of waking and the possibility of sinking deeper are both left open; neither the doctors nor the visitors can say whether he will regain consciousness. His condition is presented through its stark physical signs: closed eyes and breathing so faint it is scarcely discernible.

Rosemary’s Visits

Rosemary goes to St. Vincent’s Hospital twice to stand beside Hutchins’s bed. She is present but powerless, able only to look down at him. The second visit, in early January, brings her together with Hutchins’s daughter Doris, whom Rosemary had met a year earlier at his apartment. Doris sits by the window doing needlepoint. She does not recognize Rosemary at first, and apologizes in distress when Rosemary introduces herself again. Rosemary answers with a smile, acknowledging that she looks awful.

The exchange places Rosemary’s changed appearance beside Hutchins’s unchanging condition. The scene does not offer a conversation with the patient or a moment of recognition from him; instead, the visitors share the work of being near someone who cannot respond. For Rosemary, the hospital visit is also part of a period in which her pregnancy has left her visibly unwell. Her presence at Hutchins’s bedside therefore carries both concern for an old friend and an awareness of her own bodily vulnerability.

Death and Its Aftermath

On Friday, June 3, Hutchins dies in his bed at St. Vincent’s Hospital. His son-in-law, Axel Allert, calls Rosemary the next morning with the news and tells her that a memorial service will be held on Tuesday at the Ethical Culture Center on West Sixty-fourth Street. The hospital is thus the place where the prolonged uncertainty ends, while the service and the public acknowledgment of Hutchins’s death take place elsewhere.

Rosemary weeps both for Hutchins and from guilt. In the preceding months she has almost forgotten him: although Grace Cardiff called and Rosemary once called Doris Allert, she did not visit again after her two trips to the hospital. She had seen little point in returning while Hutchins remained frozen in a coma, and, after her own health improved, she became reluctant to be near someone sick. She feared that proximity might somehow endanger her or the baby. The hospital visits therefore acquire a painful afterlife in her recollection: she had been present, but not often enough to quiet her sense that she had failed him.

Guy Woodhouse’s reaction adds another consequence to Hutchins’s death. When he hears the news, he turns bloodless gray and withdraws into silence for several hours. Rosemary is surprised by the depth of his response. She attends the memorial alone because Guy is filming and cannot get free, while Joan declines because of a virus. The hospital death consequently affects not only Rosemary’s private grief but also her understanding of Guy’s attachment to Hutchins.

Pregnancy and the Hospital Contrast

St. Vincent’s Hospital is not the hospital Rosemary expects to use for childbirth. Late in her pregnancy she packs a suitcase with nightgowns, nursing brassieres, and a new quilted housecoat, and leaves it by the bedroom door in preparation for going to the hospital. During the eventual labor crisis, she thinks specifically of Doctors Hospital, expecting its equipment, nurses, and clean, sterile surroundings. That expectation throws the circumstances of her confinement into sharp relief: she is held in place by the people around her rather than taken to the hospital she had planned to use.

The contrast does not make St. Vincent’s part of Rosemary’s labor; Hutchins’s coma and death are the events actually tied to it. Instead, the hospital’s earlier association with helpless bedside waiting supplies a distinct counterpoint to the coercion of the birth scene. At St. Vincent’s, Rosemary cannot rouse Hutchins or learn what has happened to him. Later, during labor, she is herself the person whose body is acted upon while her stated expectation of hospital care is overridden. Across these episodes, the hospital marks the limits of what medical knowledge and presence can secure, while the planned but unreachable Doctors Hospital sharpens the difference between anticipated care and the experience Rosemary is forced to endure.