Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (10 page)

Cynthia’s excited speech, borrowed from one of the more intellectual women’s fashion magazines for which she occasionally did an article, was queerly interrupted, either owing to her excitement over ideas, or her standing in an awkward position with her legs apart, for she made, as Cabot Wright’s mother Daisy described such occurrences, “a noise.”

Cynthia reddened furiously and said, “I’m sorry,” like a little girl.

Until recently unaware both of his wife’s philosophic “ideas” from women’s magazines, as well as her digestive characteristics, Cabot muttered:

“We all do it, Mrs. Cabot Wright Junior.”

“But we
don’t,
” she contradicted him.

“Did it ever occur to you what you just did is proof you’re tinglingly alive?… I mean,” Cabot attempted to explain, when he saw the look of fury and outrage come over her face. She seized one of her favorite monthly New York magazines and ran off to barricade herself in the bedroom, which was to become a regular practice with her.

As Cabot grew more and more tired, finally, with his wife’s reluctant permission, he decided to consult a doctor who was said to have great success with the tired feeling. Dr. Bigelow-Martin, new to the Heights, did not believe in psychotherapy, analysis, the old tried and true remedies for nervous disorders.He was even said not to believe in psychology. Of course he did not treat the “insane,” a word Cabot still insisted on employing despite Cynthia’s insistence it was meaningless today.

No one, Cynthia said, thought Cabot was any more than run-down. He worked too hard, she lectured him, and perhaps was not yet “motivated” by his after-all-very-recent-translation to Wall Street. Interest would come, she was sure, as salary and responsibility and maturity increased. “We grow, dear,” Cynthia spoke to him from under a kind of spectacles, just come into vogue, based on a model one saw in ancient daguerreotypes.

Cabot found Dr. Bigelow-Martin himself a very nervous man, and in a great hurry, although he insisted on taking down his new patient’s case history, rather than entrusting it to a nurse.

“A really classic case!” the doctor exclaimed after a series of mumbled comments on Cabot’s symptoms. “Suffering from chronic fatigue,” he wrote down on his pad. “Good. You know you’re tired. Good.”

He continued to write everything down Cabot said, even though what he said was both sparse and repetitive.

Cabot Wright was extremely surprised, though not exactly upset, to discover from Dr. Bigelow-Martin that he had been tired, actually, from the age of a small boy.

“You have reacted to your life-experience by assuming fatigue,” the doctor explained to him. “But miracle of miracles, you know you’re tired. Most people, most Americans,” here the doctor coughed, “don’t know they are dropping with fatigue. You know you are. That’s a hopeful sign.” Dr. Bigelow-Martin now rose to his full height. “We’ll begin treatments next visit.”

Cabot showed disappointment the treatments could not begin immediately, but the doctor was emphatic. Next time was time enough, and he smiled considerately at his young patient’s use of the phrase “tinglingly alive,” which he rejected as non-scientific.

MRS. CABOT WRIGHT
Junior was at work at her drawing-table when Cabot came home from the doctor.

“Did he cure you, sweety?” she asked, laying down a charcoal crayon.

Cabot was considerably depressed. Perhaps he saw the long slow hard climb back to health. He merely grunted and sat down, his straw hat fell to the floor, and he slipped back into the frame of his chair.

“Well, tell me the bad news too,” she came up to him.

“I’m suffering from chronic fatigue,” he informed her.

Puzzled by the diagnosis, she nonetheless brightened and said, “But that’s not going to kill you!”

“But I’ve had it
all my life!
” He felt the horror more now than he had in the doctor’s office.

“Darling, you’ve not been tired all your life. It’s not possible,” Cynthia corrected sweetly, but a hint of uneasiness caused her to raise her own voice.

“According to the Doc I have,” he said with emphasis. “Just think, Cynthia, to be this way since you were a boy!”

“Come now,” she responded, “the doctor, I’m sure, was speaking only figuratively.”

She took up her New York magazine again, hunting a column of text here and there among the bright ads.

“You’ll be all right, dearest,” she said. “And while you were out, I bought you something as a surprise. Some nice Holland beer. Wouldn’t you like that?”

He looked at her with an expression that seemed to fall between hunger and amnesia.

“Yeah,” he answered when she had put her question again. “Though beer makes me sleepy, you know.”

She went out into the kitchen.

“Is being sleepy the same physiological thing as tired?” he called out to her. She evidently thought the question over a moment before answering: “Yes, dear, I’d say they’re exactly the same.”

“This is the loveliest beer in the world, Cabot,” she said, coming in with a tray and two bottles. “Why can’t American beer be as good?”

“I’ll have to ask my colleagues in Wall Street,” he quipped.

“Cabot,” she cried, seeing the strange look come again on his face, “what is the doctor going to do to you?”

He jumped at her question. “Cure me,” he giggled. He went on giggling for a time. Then he kissed his wife on the face.

“
You
cure me,” Cabot whispered.

She gave him a slight peck in return.

“Do you love me?” she said suddenly.

He stared at her a moment before replying.

“I adore it,” he said.

“Cabot!” she cried, alarmed now by something different in him.

He had already unbuttoned her blouse, and had pushed her back under his torrent of kisses.

SWEAT POURED DOWN
from Cabot’s armpits as he walked into Dr. Bigelow-Martin’s office for his first treatment. He had never felt so apprehensive since he reported to the induction center for the army.

“We are beginning a new life,” Dr. Bigelow-Martin intoned, putting his hand on Cabot’s knee. “You are about to study yourself, see what you yourself do to yourself. You have been tense and tired, tired and tense, puffing and straining, expending far too much energy and getting oh so little back in return. Your case is not exceptional, Mr. Cabot Wright. Indeed it’s not. Put it out of your mind that you are different. Your case is, in fact, my young man, the rule. Americans are tired. America is tired. What is the root? We do not know. Is it world-wide? Perhaps, perhaps. Lie down, please,” and the doctor suppressed a yawn.

Cabot Wright was already nude except for his shorts.

The doctor, bending over the day-bed where Cabot lay, suddenly with a remarkable show of strength picked him up bodily and put him over a kind of padded hook which had come out of the wall, and hung his patient on it, much as one would a side of beef.

“Do not move,” Bigelow-Martin admonished. “No matter how much you may wish to change your position, resist it, simply give in to your fatigue, let go, let go, Cabot, let go.”

Struggling on the immense mattress-padded hook which had come out of the wall, Cabot felt very much like a fish—caught but not pulled in. The blood rushed violently to his head. His shorts, which he had laundered many times, snapped, and fell down about his legs. Visions of gauchos riding on the pampas came to him, together with memories of bull-fights he had seen on TV. His forehead was swimming with sweat, he felt his intestines give, spittle flowed freely from his mouth, and his navel suddenly contracting violently seemed to explode and vanish, as will the top crust of a pie in the oven when the proper slits have not been made in it. Cabot felt he was saying
adios
from a boat rapidly advancing from the shore on which stood his adopted father and mother in their Florida clothes, and his recent bride, Mrs. Cabot Wright Junior in her Vogue pattern dress.

When Cabot Wright regained consciousness, Dr. Bigelow-Martin was bathing his forehead with some drugstore witch hazel.

“How did we do?” the doctor was saying.

When Cabot did not reply, Bigelow-Martin waited a bit, then said: “I’ll tell you, sir. We did fine.”

“Did I pass out, doctor?” Cabot wondered.

“You went to sleep,” was the reply. “You relaxed. Probably for the first time in your life.”

The vision of the gauchos came back to Cabot.

“Can I tell people about this?” Cabot inquired.

The doctor appeared to be studying his question.

“At least I can tell my wife?” he appealed to Bigelow-Martin in an almost wistful voice.

“Just as you wish,” the doctor was grudgingly acquiescent, and he turned away from his patient, humming a tune.

There were certain obvious warnings in what the doctor did not say, and Cabot understood that secrecy and indirection were characteristic of the profession. Yet, as Cabot asked himself, who would want to tell on himself and reveal what he had undergone in Bigelow-Martin’s office? Who would believe it?

“My God, you look different,” Cynthia said when he came into the apartment. “You look like
you’d
been to Florida.”

But Cabot was already unbuttoning his wife’s blouse.

“
I HOPE HE
’
S
not charging you too much,” Mrs. Cabot Wright Junior said in bed, next morning, speaking of the doctor of course. Cabot had brought her morning orange juice and coffee because he felt it was his fault neither of them had had a wink of sleep till dawn. Irritated he did not reply, Cynthia tossed away her black mask which she wore to protect herself against early morning light.

“Old Bigelow-Martin.” Cabot now hummed the same tune the doctor had. “As a matter of fact,” he finally came to her question, “I haven’t asked the old bird how much he is going to charge.”

Cynthia fished some seeds out of her juice.

They had both spent money recklessly, and even with the Cabot Wright Seniors’ help, were badly in debt.

“You don’t think his fee will be prohibitive, do you, sweetheart?” he stood by her bedside, briefcase in hand.

“Aren’t all their fees that?” she snapped. “I remember that time I fell while riding—”

“Well, I’ll just tell him he can’t soak me too much. I’m newly married, after all, just starting in business…”

Furious he had interrupted her, she spat: “
Anybody
could put you on a padded hook without your clothes on and let you pass out!”

As he stared at her, incredulous at the anger in her outburst, she went on: “How do you know he’s an accredited M.D.?”

“You, Cynthia, sent me to him.”

“Draped naked over a hook,” she went back to this. “What kind of therapy is that?”

“You admitted yourself I looked like I’d been to Florida,” he began now to open the door while making his kissing sound of goodbye.

“It could all be dangerous,” she muttered, ignoring his goodbye.

“So is being tired,” he told her. “Bye, lamby.”

“Cabot!” she called, but he had already closed the hall door behind him. “All right,” she began to sob a bit, “hang on your goddam hook.” Then she cried in earnest, because she knew nothing was going to be right between them.

ZOE BICKLE LOOKED
up from the manuscript and gazed across the room. She was astounded by what she had read. Was this the real truth about Cabot Wright’s beginnings? Had Bernie Gladhart written these pages, even with Carrie’s help and guidance? Nervously, she stood up and went to the window. In the light of the street-lamp, she saw a policeman going by across the street, twirling his nightstick. She counted the five gold buttons he wore on each side of his jacket. Looking behind him, she saw the words,
High Pressure Fire Service, Main Pumping Station
, painted on the wall of the deserted building, with some words scrawled in chalk in big letters below:
COOL FOOL YOU WILL NEVER EXECUTE THE MAD SPADES
. She thought back to Chicago and Curt, and reviewed her unhappy marriage and life, thought of old age and death. She had called Curt a few times in Chicago, but he sounded more languid than ever, obviously deep in
Isaiah,
begrudging the time away from his work, much as if she had come into his room on returning home from the office. In recollection of another of Cabot’s eccentric habits, she found herself counting her own pulse. Some of Cabot Wright’s odd statements came back to her now, such as his
“Mrs. Bickle would like to be interested, Reverend Cross,”
which she now felt contained either a great truth or a great prophecy. She sat down in her chair again, and took up the manuscript where she had left off.]

WHILE CYNTHIA DID
her shopping in the supermarket or finished her weekly drawings for her fashion editor, Cabot would saunter into the office of Dr. Bigelow-Martin for his afternoon treatment on the hook.

“How did we do today?” was the invariable question put to him by Bigelow-Martin, as the signal that the treatment had come to an end. Once sufficiently conscious, Cabot would reply from the hook in a voice described by the doctor’s eavesdropping secretary as “strained honey” :

“Fine, doctor.”