Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (12 page)

“Do you mean to say you’d know your story if somebody told it to you, but you couldn’t tell it to anybody yourself and be sure you were right?” she inquired.

He looked at her brightly. “How can you express it so well?” he wondered.

“If that’s the case,” she rose, “I’m afraid this is the time for me to go back to Chicago.”

“But why?” he was deeply disappointed.

“You certainly know why I’m here,” Mrs. Bickle was a bit indignant at his question. “I’m not on a vacation,” she surveyed the room, “and you’ve just told me I can’t get what I came for, which of course is your life.”

“Of course it’s true you’re not the first to try to write it,” he seemed to be studying a plan.

“But you’re quite good at knocking down all comers, aren’t you?” She sat down again and looked in her purse for a cigarette.

“That’s not exactly true,” he came over to her chair and looked down on the crown of her head. “No, sir. Besides,” Cabot Wright went on, “I’d rather like to tell you what happened to me, all in one piece, so to speak. If, that is, you could coax it out of me. Do you have that kind of time, Mrs. Zoe Bickle?”

She looked up then at something in his tone, and perhaps remembered he had been a rapist.

“If you could coax it, milk it out, say,” he told her.

“Sit over there,” she commanded him, and he obeyed.

He went on with his speech: “The others who came I didn’t knock down, like you claim; they didn’t have that kind of time. They were interested at first, but they couldn’t stay interested for weeks or months. Said they’d never stayed with anything that long. Days or hours were their kind of time, you see. They wanted me really in minutes, come to think of it. An hour is long to their kind.”

He stopped talking and she stared at him.

“Let me get this straight,” Mrs. Bickle said, puffing away on her smoke. “If I sit, and read to you or have you read, or we read together, say, what Bernie has written, and he’s written a lot, believe you me, you think you might remember enough
more
to get the whole thing out?”

“Exactly,” Cabot Wright said.

“But what will you get out of it?” she wondered. “After all, when we do get the truth, if it’s there, we’ll just turn it into fiction.”

“What will I get out of it?” he looked at her mouth. “Well, Mrs. Bickle, let’s say I might get my own story straight. Now with the other writers, they weren’t like you. You’re slow and disinterested, as I told you in front of Reverend Cross. I believe you can wait long enough to coax me. I believe so.”

“I can wait forever,” she told him. “I’ve waited all my life, and besides now I’m rich.” She laughed.

“Exactly,” he said. “That’s what I told Princeton Keith.”

“You told
him?
” she cried, a bit uneasy if not scared.

“Oh, don’t let that worry you. But I told him, and I told Bernie Gladhart, if I could see my whole story written out straight, I think I’d be cured.”

“What of?” she laughed.

“Cured of being what everybody made me, I guess I’d say, so I can go on and be somebody else.” He giggled, but in a less pronounced fashion. “Because I was never really the man I read about in the papers. That is, I suppose, I was never really Cabot Wright. I was a supposititious child and I fell into the part out of there being nothing better to do. But if I got down all that I did, when I was
him
,” he giggled, “maybe I could go on to be somebody, if not better, different. There. I’ve told you, I’ve told Princeton Keith, I’ve told Bernie Gladhart, Reverend Cross, and I’ve told myself. We can get started then.”

She stared at him for the longest time, and then he got up and handed her back the manuscript she had given him.

IN THE ENSUING
weeks Mrs. Bickle read Cabot’s own story aloud to him, while correcting, rewriting, and listening to him as in a play-back on tape. Then she read some more, erased, stopped and thought, as did Cabot himself, immured now in her sitting-room. Together they handed the sentences and paragraphs back and forth between them, while poor Bernie Gladhart, in the same building, in solitary misery, practiced drinking himself into the grave.

It was not long before Bernie Gladhart figured out what was going on. As Cabot and Zoe worked on the novel, the original idea-man of the rapist’s career stayed in his room drinking, or walked to and fro on the Brooklyn streets. Occasionally he would gaze up at Mrs. Bickle’s window, confused and wondering, and at the same time somewhat relieved and even unconcerned over what had happened. As long as Carrie’s small checks continued to come—and he knew they would come as long as she wanted to keep him away from Chicago—he felt he could hold on.

Mrs. Bickle, somewhat to her own amusement, saw herself turning into a novelist at a ripe age, while Cabot Wright’s life as fiction sprawled and grew under her hand, lumbering on in endless corrections and addenda as it reeled and retraced itself, was interrupted, continued, ran on over lapses of memory, lies, vague echoes, police-tapes, gossip-columns and eye-witness stories. It was a hopeless, finely-ground sediment of the improbable, vague, baffling, ruinous and irrelevant minutiae of a life. If she could not lay down her pen, however difficult her task, it must have her realization that all lives were like this, and indeed this was proof of life.

“Why did you rape?” she was always on the point of asking, as she wrote and annotated, listened and shook her head, but she usually withheld her own question because she knew Cabot wouldn’t know.

9

THE YOUNG EXECUTIVE

W
hen Cabot returned, after initiating his new career, from the branch library, not finding Cynthia at home, he sat down in his tropical-hut armchair without bothering to light the eye-saver lamp beside him. He snapped on his tiny portable Japanese radio. Ballroom music, so muted and blurred one could not distinguish the separate musical instruments in the orchestra, was in progress, song hits from two generations before that gave him a feeling of mild surfeited comfort, as he mopped himself with a face cloth under his open shirt.

At the height of his comfort he caught Cynthia’s unrhythmic spike-heeled tromp, similar to the sound of a circus pony. Then he heard her open the door, key-ring jangling.

“Do you
listen
to that cheap cascade of sound?” she stormed.

“It’s background, sweety,” he picked small particles of tobacco from his upper teeth. “Hey, I’m getting to like soft music,” he counterfeited elation. “Especially old soft. Your grandmother heard this stuff. Anyhow I’ve had my education in real music,” and he imitated modern cacophony.

“Pray don’t turn it off for my comfort!” Cynthia commanded, when she saw his finger beginning to touch the tuner. “Nonetheless,” she went on, “it’s a bit funny to come home and hear you listening to the same piped-in music they play at the supermarket. It’s my little surprise for the day,” she said, coming closer and looking at him more carefully than was her wont. “What’s wrong with you, by the way?”

“Can’t you tell?” he studied her almost contemptuously. “No conditioner in the library.”

She was almost taken in by his quip, but she quickly asked, “What do you go to the library for?”

“Loose ends, I guess.”

“Since the branches have no books,” she mused petulantly, “no book, that is, a civilized person could pick up, what did you read?”

“Something about wildlife,” he gazed at her, stony.

“I hope this new doctor is doing you some good,” Cynthia walked over to the stack of breakfast dishes. She touched a coffee cup.

Cabot lost track of her in the stream of ballroom music now. Then after an indeterminate period he heard her voice coming from the bedroom, whether scolding or commenting he was not sure, if indeed there was a difference.

He looked in on her. She was already in her twin-bed, dressed in her waltz gown, sleep-mask on, her hand turning off the light.

He began removing his clothing unmethodically, slowly, staring at her.

“What have you been reading, by the way?” Cabot inquired, with the thick tones to his voice she had come to know and dread.

“I don’t want you to make love to me tonight,” she boomed at him, and tore off her sleeping-mask to stare at him.

As he continued to approach her, she cried, “Good God, your eyelids are covered—they’re dripping with perspiration.”

Putting her sleeping-mask back on her face and slipping off her waltz gown, Cabot told her: “There’s nothing wrong that you can’t cure.”

CABOT
’
S BOSS, MR. WARBURTON,
who dated from the Great Days of Wall Street, was continuously depressed at the way things were going downhill. Like so many men whose main interest in life is making a fortune and then doubling it, he had more than a routine interest in the Civil War. Now he had become less enthusiastic about the subject in the wake of its excessive popularity, and devoted himself instead to his book of “sermons” whose subject was the decline of business civilization in the United States. The word “sermons” was chosen by him with some reluctance, since he was lukewarm to religion, though he had been an elder in the Presbyterian church some years back. But, on the other hand, as he said so often to Cabot, he would not have given two cents for a city without a generous sprinkling of churches and synagogues.

Mr. Warburton had recently tried to break himself of the habit of using the phrase “good business” which, like the Civil War, was now in the mouth of every pauper and tin-horn in the land. The last time he had used the phrase was a few weeks ago when he told Cabot: “It may be good business to hire cripples and copulate with Negroes, but by God, Cabot laddie, you and I know better.”

Cabot nodded and swallowed.

“I’ve always been satisfied with basing my life on making a fortune and centering myself around the System,” Mr. Warburton went on, “but today I’m surrounded by men
and
women whom
nothing
can satisfy one way or another. Present company excepted.”

Although Cabot was unusually tired from his previous evening’s encounter in the branch library, listening to Mr. Warburton was one of his principal duties and he simulated attention as Mr. W. (“Warby”) touched on the subject of women in business.

“They are the very hell over here,” he heard the old man say, meaning women in Wall Street. “Talked with this Crozier dame the other day who controls or claims to control most of the beer they drink out West. Do you know what the fool is really interested in? Artificial hand-painted eggs—all she cares about. Hasn’t been a wife to her husband for twenty years, they tell me. Hand-painted eggs. Can you beat it? Has thousands of them in her insured collection, and claims the best ones come from the Iron Curtain countries. Has no use for her own native land anyway. Abroad most of the time. But, as I say, controls all the beer out there in the West.”

Mr. Warburton continued this morning’s sermon with his favorite bitter remark of the day that He (God and sometimes Uncle Sam) was dead and knew it, but they (the fools who were taking over) were buried already and did not know it. Cabot and Mr. Warburton laughed together at this sally.

Once during his morning listening period, Cabot had nodded and swallowed hard as usual, but then added in a voice he felt was too low for Warby to hear. “O.K., everybody knows this, Dad,” Mr. Warburton, who was the soul of formality and rigorous etiquette, had paused in shocked silence and then, repeating Cabot’s remark in unbelief, had finally broken into uproarious guffaws, in which Cabot insipidly joined. “O.K., everybody knows this, Dad,” Mr. W. had repeated, tears of laughter in his eyes. It was from that time on that Cabot had been “in” at Slider, Bergler, Gorem, Hill and Warburton.

This morning, as if to show suddenly that all this amiability and manly horseplay belonged now to the past, Mr. Warburton cleared his throat, shifted his knees, then spread his legs majestically as if, Cabot thought contemptuously, there was still anything between them the years had not shrivelled. Then a peremptory nod from Mr. W. brought Cabot half to his feet. He supposed that the morning listening period was at an end.

Today, however, as happened every so often, Mr. Warburton had planned an added ceremony to follow the Sermon: coffee with, one supposed, more jokes.

“Sue of Short Hills will do the honors,” Mr. W. referred to his aged secretary Miss Watkins, and he rang the bell for her.

Miss Watkins entered with shorthand pad and pencil, but Mr. W. indicated by a special movement of the skin of his forehead that the coffee urn was to be tended to and that it would be refreshments, not dictation.

“Yes, that’s the ticket,” Mr. Warburton mumbled from time to time, addressing nobody, while Miss Watkins poured coffee and cream at last for the two executives.

“I thought we needed a little caffeine, Sue of Short Hills,” Mr. Warburton quipped, “because our young General Partner here, Mr. Wright, looks like he’d lost a good deal of sleep yesterday night.”

Cabot flushed and touched his eyelids briefly.

“Didn’t you now?” Mr. Warburton was sure he spoke roguishly and he winked at Miss Watkins.

Cabot made a motion with his head which resembled putting his neck in a noose more than it did a bow or nod.