Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (17 page)

“Negroes understand just about everything, especially concerning grief,” he assured her, going to work in earnest. She smiled, still hoping perhaps that grief explained what was happening.

“I’m old enough to be your grandmother!” she appealed to him when she saw how deep they were.

“Let Doctor decide,” Cabot told her.

“Mrs. Warburton, ma’am,” Brady’s cautious baritone came to them through the panelling. “Dessert’s on.”

When Mrs. Warburton did not respond, the servant called through the jamb of the door: “Peach Melba on the table, Mrs. Warburton, please.”

There was a long pause and then Brady’s drowsy voice again came to them: “No dessert course then today, ma’am?”

There were some smacking sounds from the room off the dining hall, the sound of a chair toppling, and then the phonograph began playing.

Brady exhaled heavily, took the last of the dishes away, then paused just before he began to go through the swinging doors that led into the kitchen.

A heavy crash in the room into which Mrs. Warburton and her guest had retired made him hesitate just a moment before he let the doors close on him and the two untouched Peach Melbas.

12

THE BEGINNING ROOM

D
id I mean to bang ’em and blow ’em and make ’em feel they were mine?” Cabot Wright had rephrased the question put to him by a row of medical experts and detectives. This was long afterwards in jail, after his capture and incarceration, when both his accent and diction at times resembled that of the great beating heart of inner Brooklyn.

“Well, did you, Cabot?” an elderly psychiatrist inquired with routine medical kindness.

“O.K. I’ll sit in for some vacationing best-selling crap-artist for you,” Cabot is said to have replied. “I’ll tell you, gentlemen and cops. The older the hen, the richer the gravy. But you always want to know why. Search me. I was sick—I can go this far—sick of the young marrieds, the professional brief-case smarties, the sun-bathers from the Hamptons comparing their browns, the baseball addicts, race and fight pros, sports-car nuts, TV glaucoma people, jeans-wearing faggots of forty, ginger-beer voices of the off-track betting baboons.”

Cabot thought some more under the Hiroshima bright lights:

“Murder may be an indoor crime, but rape needn’t have any backdrop and shouldn’t. It’s an everywhere sport. I raped everyone through boredom, so maybe then I chose the thing I felt would bore me the most, dumb dames. You are not as bored, gentlemen, listening to me as I am to myself, which disappoints me. I surrendered to boredom knowing there couldn’t be more to it than itself. Wasn’t boredom the only experience I could latch on to, considering what Wall Street had for me? Next to dying, boredom is the most. I knew only boredom was possible then, because there is no time for pleasure today, you can just allow yourself that second-and-a-half to hear the message, which is always an ad. I more than half-heard it, and I think that might have been Cynthia’s trouble too. She had been hearing and reading and then drawing for a living nothing but ads all her life. Feasting on them, poor little twat, by day and having them again by night in New York classic fiction,
The Shepherd in the Pie, Gooey and Girly,
and the Great Boy Writer’s Gentile successor,
Your Rarebit Is Running.

“We were digesting our own personalities which somebody else had given us in the first place, and it all backed out up on us before we could cry puke. The business of winning finally gave us one too many hellos. By Jesus, we were overstimulated and turning over too many new leaves at once, we went haywire.”

ALTHOUGH STILL A
member of the firm of Slider, Bergler, Gorem, Hill and Warburton, Cabot Wright, by reason of his becoming an heir, could no longer be listed merely as a General Partner. While a more suitable name was being found for his changed status, he sampled his new-found leisure. No longer going to the office so assiduously, he discovered around him, in the novelty of off-hours, a world whose existence he had neither known nor suspected, the army of persons who know no routine labor.

He had thought that businessmen and stenographers, career women and elevator operators were the entire population, and that those left behind were housewives and children or small groups too nondescript to consider. By being semi-retired at 26, he found a whole population which did not walk the Brooklyn Bridge or go by subway to midtown Manhattan, or commute to Long Island. Neither were they all over 65. There were the young and the very young among them. Some were, he supposed, heirs like himself, while others were the unemployed and unemployable—a monster statistic whose real numbers both press and government concealed under stock phrases.

Everywhere he saw those engaged in race-track betting, gambling and other related pursuits, professional dog- and cat-walkers, disappointed unpublished writers, longshoremen unhired or laid off for other reasons, plain clothesmen resting until their suspects turned up, photographers, reporters hoping to run into stories, worried businessmen out to think things through, senile Spaniards who still discussed Franco, young men in Bermuda shorts, the crippled, ministers of churches getting ideas, social workers out “in the field,” shoe clerks off for a smoke, nursemaids, homemakers, cooks, and children not at camp.

The boats screamed prior to departure from the Columbia pier, air-raid sirens occasionally rehearsed their cries, gulls flew sleepily overhead, and the Wall Street towers stared back at Cabot from the other side of the river.

Deciding to look like everyone else, Cabot put on summer slacks, a soft sport shirt, and sun glasses. Before he left his room, the desire for a whiff of present-day reality made him turn on his tiny Japanese radio. He heard the words of a song:

“
Everywhere in our free land
,
our only land
…”

sung by youthful male altos, followed by the rouse of the march song for Beer, the democratic get-to-gether drink.

A dialogue followed between a woman with a low contralto and a man identified as her husband concerning plans they had laid for a vacation in the Adirondacks, with Victor, their 8-year old son with an I. Q. of 180, this dialogue being succeeded instantaneously by Feminine Hygiene Ad, followed, while the last note of the preceding sounded, by Health-Larynx-Cigarettes. A chorus of Swiss yodellers then spoke of men’s body odors as contrasted with those of ladies. An expensive-dentured M. D. lectured for 30-seconds on baby’s heatrash, and the listener was then returned to the low contralto who read a funny joke in the presence of her husband (already identified) from a list of jokes known as “Buzzie S.’s At-Home Talks” (the genius child).

Then an eighty-piece band played, with background of mixed chorus of 14 middle-aged men who sang a religious number, after which came the religious quotation of the day, plus appeal to attend church, synagogue or tent of your radio sponsor’s choice, followed by a chorus of the sons of the middle-aged men singing
a capella
for Mooney Cement and King Bar Beer. A father whose voice had earlier spoken to the M. D. concerning his baby’s heatrash, then urged all to buy shares in freedom and appealed again to attend church of radio sponsor’s choice, but if as yet you had not chosen church, go at once to the free psychiatric clinic nearest you, where you would be given a telephone appointment.

Adjusting his trousers, Cabot went out, not taking the time to turn off the radio, and hearing again in the hall the contralto’s shared laughter (with identified husband), and the parting strains of the chorus of youthful middle-aged men singing

“
Keep it free, keep it free
…”

On the wall near his apartment building, he saw an old-fashioned obscene word misspelled, and although obviously a trap laid by the borough police, since the chalk lay in open view on the walk below, Cabot picked it up, fumbled for the extempore inspiration, and then wrote the word: JITTO.

There are no streetcars in Brooklyn, though there are the remains of the tracks that were once laid for them, and of course nearly everything of the old city was being abolished. “The bull-dozers are coming to you and to me,” Cabot thought. “They will flatten the old Federal homes, so dear to so few, the yards, the shrubs, the tea-rose bushes, tear down the fancy bird-houses, the immaculate greenswards, though leaving a few golf-courses founded by Italian candy kitchens, and a statue of a Scottish caddy who found the ten thousand dollars and returned it to the owner only to receive a dollar reward, on which he founded his chocolate biscuit factory and became a Flatbush millionaire.”

IT WASN
’
T LONG
before Gilda, in a drink coma, squealed on Cabot Wright. Later, sober, she denied her own story, leaving Mr. Warburton high and dry, but still obsessed.

“Did he touch the little woman?”
he kept mumbling aloud Down Town. Finally, after soul-searching and rereading many of his own Sermons, he confronted Cabot. He blurted out his accusation suddenly and unexpectedly, but the look of calm innocence on young Wright’s face immediately convinced him of the impossibility of the charge. He realized the young man had never insulted his wife, that she was not well, and so to forgive him, forgive her, forgive everything.

Warby knew that a boy who had just lost his parents, and seen his wife break down in mental illness, certainly wouldn’t have insult and rape on the brain. Impossible. And again that fine wholesome look to Cabot. Open any newspaper to the photographs of captured rapists, and see their faces. Blood will tell. No, Gilda was just not well, after all the fortunes they had spent on specialists, rest cures, and Wisconsin vacations. Just goes to show you no amount of cash can buy health. Most precious thing in the world. Nothing equal to it. Old John D. knew that with his stomach ulcers. Without health, damned little to be grateful for. All the money in the world can’t equal it.

Despite Cabot Wright’s convincing disavowal, Mr. War-burton then and thenceforth seemed to lose his appetite for information. He ceased perusing the
Wall Street Journal
(he had given up the
Times
twenty years before), hardly touched his food, and in many ways looked more ill than Cynthia Adams prior to her celebrated breakdown at the supermarket.

EACH MORNING, IN
order to comfort the not-to-be-comforted, Cabot walked the Brooklyn Bridge as in his obscure days, and stepping into the old broker’s office reassured him each day that the charges were absolutely false. On those very days on which he was denying Gilda’s charges against him, young Cabot was raping women and girls at the rate of about 1½ per diem, by that meaning, in weekly statistics he raped about 2 an evening or afternoon, and fewer for some reason over the weekends, perhaps because women are more apt to be accompanied by sons, husbands, or other loved male companions in the cessation of work periods. Such was his incessant ability at rape or, as he testified to an attentive police-interrogation squad, his uncanny power to “have his way with them.”

EATEN BY A
hidden malaise, Mr. Warburton grew weaker and weaker by the day, and finally was advised by a young business colleague to consult a new physician, who had recently put up his shingle in Wall Street, and who was having sensational results with both older executives, and younger partners who were below par. Name of Dr. Bugleford.

Then another event transpired in Mr. Warburton’s domestic life which made Cabot’s real or fancied overtures to Gilda of secondary importance. To explain fully its impact on Mr. Warburton, one should know that although he had been born and raised in the East, all of his ancestors, like those of Gilda, were from the South, and he was proud of his heritage. That is, he was proud of being from the East and the South, and his loyalties were sometimes strained, though his principles were always clear.

Going to Gilda’s room “to have it out with her” a final time as to whether Cabot had molested her or not, he had heard a scene of such intimacy between Gilda and her butler, Brady, that the Cabot Wright episode was, he now believed, a ruse on Gilda’s part. At first he could not believe, quite naturally, what he was hearing outside Gilda’s door, but living as he was, at the end of a civilization, nothing was surprising, he supposed. It was nightmarish enough, when he went back the following evening to Gilda’s room and heard the entire scene between her and her Negro servant repeated.

“So it was Big Smoke then and not Cabot Wright!” he could only mutter. It was then he told his secretary to telephone Dr. Bugleford. “Troy has fallen,” he said of himself. All his life he had scorned doctors and therapy, believing that medicine must be employed only in such mechanical matters as a broken limb, or to staunch the flow of blood.

The reader, in this case the listener (Cabot Wright eavesdropping on his own story as novelized by Bernie Gladhart and revised by Zoe Bickle) has already met Dr. Bugleford, when he was Dr. Bigelow-Martin. Having had to leave the leaf-shaded blue-stoned pavements of Brooklyn Heights in order to escape a possible charge of malpractice, Bigelow-Martin changed his name effortlessly to another and set up practice on Lower Broadway where superstition, in a district so close to national pulse and strain, has always been rampant, especially in moments of crisis and naturally induces a flourishing patronage of herb-doctoring, health cures, astrology, fortune-telling, bone, muscle, and nerve realignment, not to mention new-thought parlors.