Donald Baumgart’s blindness

Donald Baumgart’s blindness is both a lasting upheaval in his life and a turning point in Guy Woodhouse’s career. The abrupt loss of sight takes Baumgart out of the way of a role Guy wants, and the news reaches Guy as the opportunity passes to him. Later, Rosemary Woodhouse connects the timing to Guy’s association with a coven and to a tie he had exchanged with Baumgart. The novel makes the blindness consequential in two registers: it is a severe, continuing change in Baumgart’s life, and, for Rosemary, a possible sign that an occult threat has touched the ordinary machinery of professional success.

The news and Guy’s casting

Guy is at home when a call brings news about Baumgart. He listens with the phone in one hand and a can of Red Devil paint remover in the other, asking whether anyone knows what is causing the blindness. The caller is Mr. Weiss; Guy also refers him to Allan Stone, his agent, about the professional arrangements. While Rosemary waits, she recognizes that the call may bring the major career opportunity Guy has been hoping for.

Guy tells Rosemary that Baumgart woke up the previous day unable to see. Baumgart has tried to take his own life that morning and is at Bellevue under sedation. Guy then tells her he has got the part. His response refuses any simple triumph: he calls it a terrible way to receive the role, sets the paint remover on the night table, and says he needs to go outside and absorb the news. Rosemary lets him leave. In a single sequence, the part changes hands and the cost of that change becomes impossible to treat as mere good fortune.

Baumgart’s continuing life after the onset

Baumgart’s blindness is not presented as a brief obstacle that disappears once Guy gets the role. Some time later, at a gathering, Tiger asks whether Baumgart is still blind. Guy does not know. Portia Haynes answers that he is, and that those around him have largely given up hope of his recovering his sight. She describes him as having a very hard time adjusting.

Portia also reports a different development: Baumgart is writing a play. She considers its first two scenes powerful, and explains that he dictates while Zöe Piper writes. The account places creative work alongside the difficulty of adjustment without suggesting that it cancels or resolves the blindness. Baumgart remains a person whose circumstances have changed profoundly, not merely the absent competitor in Guy’s career story. When Rosemary asks again whether he is still blind, she is seeking information about his continuing condition as well as testing the significance she has begun to assign to it.

Timing as evidence in Rosemary’s suspicion

The chronology gives Rosemary a reason to dwell on the blindness. She recalls that Baumgart went blind only a day or two after the Saturday when Guy may have joined a coven. She remembers Guy staying home to answer each phone call while awaiting news. The sequence, as she reconstructs it, binds the professional benefit to the period when she suspects occult activity has begun around her.

Her thoughts return repeatedly to Baumgart’s blindness. She considers how much followed from it: Guy’s part, the favorable reviews, a new play, and a film offer. She also wonders whether a part in a Greenwich Village production might have belonged to Baumgart had he not inexplicably lost his sight. These are Rosemary’s suspicions and counterfactuals, not confirmed explanations of the casting or the cause of the blindness. Her uncertainty remains explicit: she considers whether Guy joined a coven, and whether the blindness was caused by it, while struggling to believe that either possibility is real.

Rosemary recalls that the book All Of Them Witches describes spells that can take an enemy’s sight or hearing, as well as collective magic that could disable or kill a chosen victim. In this context, Baumgart’s condition becomes a possible instance of a threat she has encountered in her reading. The text does not establish that a spell caused his blindness. Instead, it shows Rosemary using the book’s claims to reinterpret the timing and consequence of an event that otherwise has no known explanation in the evidence available to her.

The exchanged tie

A small personal object makes Rosemary’s suspicion more specific. When she speaks with Baumgart, she recalls that he went blind on the Sunday after a Wednesday or Thursday when she had attended a matinee. Baumgart jokes that Guy did not put anything in his drink. Rosemary denies that he did and then tells Baumgart that Guy has something of his. Baumgart guesses that she means his tie; he says that he and Guy each have the other’s and offers to take his back if Guy wants it.

Later, Rosemary asks Guy why he traded ties with Baumgart. She proposes that he needed one of Baumgart’s personal belongings so a spell could be cast to blind him. Guy responds with surprise and says he exchanged ties because he liked Baumgart’s and disliked his own, while Baumgart preferred Guy’s. Guy adds that he had not told Rosemary because, afterward, he felt embarrassed by what he regarded as an awkwardly intimate gesture. His account supplies an ordinary motive for the exchange, while Rosemary’s interpretation makes the same exchange look like a means of magical harm. The tie is therefore a clue within her theory, but the exchange alone does not verify that theory.

Narrative significance

The blindness links an apparently inexplicable personal catastrophe to a visible professional consequence: Guy gets the role Baumgart can no longer pursue. That conjunction gives Rosemary’s suspicion its force, while the later report of Baumgart’s difficult adjustment and dictated writing keeps his experience from vanishing into the plot mechanics of Guy’s success. The difference between what Rosemary fears and what the evidence confirms remains important. Baumgart is blind, has attempted suicide, and is working to adapt; the cause is not established. Guy benefits from the casting change and explains the tie exchange differently. By returning to the blindness as both a real and continuing condition and a possible sign of occult interference, the novel turns the event into a test of how Rosemary reads coincidence, motive, and evidence.