Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (2 page)

After Carrie’s brainstorm about his writing a book, they spent more and more of their evenings discussing how to do the story of Cabot Wright. Sometimes, as in the nature of a reprieve, 9:15 p.m. would nearly slip by without her stepping upstairs for the encounter. She never tired of telling him what a great book he had “in him,”and though he shuddered a bit, she emphasized that it must not be a short book, for length was a necessary ingredient of great fiction.

The more Carrie in her enthusiasm talked on, the more Bernie stared at her, immobile and drawn. Was Brooklyn, he wondered in such moments, her Siberia for him? He was, after all, her fourth husband; perhaps this was her method of ridding herself of him—by a mental plan.

On and on she went, in her flat mid-Western prairie drone, while he brooded and tried not to listen.

“Just a few days after publication,”he heard a sentence here and there, “we’ll see who’s buying our book in the stores, eh, Bernie? With that subject,”she laughed her satisfied late-evening laugh, “the young good-looking rapist from the right side of the tracks… who could fail with it?”

Not only was Bernie averse to leaving Carrie’s house because of his “at home”feeling, a more practical consideration made him regard his departure as ill-advised. It was on Carrie’s basement telephone that he conducted all of his car deals, his “little business,”and whatever she may have thought of car-selling, it brought him a living. He was, besides, nearly as attached to his boss, Wurtheim Badger, as to “home”; selling cars was about the only job a paroled convict could get at that time in Chicago, but Wurtheim had been more than the man who gave Bernie his chance—he liked Bernie personally to the point of ribbing him unmercifully, teasing and making jokes at his expense, for he felt his little prison graduate was a natural salesman, and could sell anything. The first winter as car-salesman Bernie had worked so hard that, as he pointed out to his boss and Carrie, “his ass had got as bony as an Arkansas mule’s.”

Now in Brooklyn, sitting day and night at his typewriter, Bernie nostalgically recalled Wurtheim’s ferocious kidding of him, his belittling of Bernie’s occupational “disease,”his mock concern over any responsibility for an employee’s physical disability. In connection with Bernie’s dwindling posterior, Badger liked to tell an interminable anecdote about a Brooklyn cabbie who “went on this rigid diet because his stomach was so big he couldn’t enjoy his wife in the usual textbook position, but instead of losing his fat where he should have, he lost it on his ass where he couldn’t spare it!”Bernie recalled the story in full, hearing again the cadence of his boss’s voice, his crawling narrative, unfunny the first time he heard it but now, in this strange place, not only unamusing but chilling like a postcard, falling out of a file, from a dead man.

Having been translated from Chicago to Brooklyn, almost without knowing why or how, changing professions from car-selling to full-time novelist, Bernie took up his new place of business in an antique sprawling tenement palace off Joralemon Street. It was called the
See-River Manor
, and it was a monster hive buzzing with Puerto Ricans, ruined Cubans, native whites and mulattoes ending their days on relief checks and handouts from friends and relatives. He didn’t go to a nice residential hotel, as Carrie had advised him, for the simple reason that his source of money now was Carrie, not car-selling, and while generous with her body, Carrie had never been so with money. She had half-starved her own daughter in infancy, according to the friend of the family, Mrs. Curt Bickle.

If Carrie was stingy with spending-money—Bernie found himself living on the peanut butter sandwiches and fresh oranges that a fellow-convict years before had told him was a perfect diet—she was generous about paying long-distance phone calls at her end of the wire. Had Bernie been able to live on long-distance calls, he would have been well fed, because he called Chicago twice a day, early afternoon, when it was yet expensive, and late evening, when the rates were in effect, reversing the charges every time he called.

Maybe Carrie was approaching menopause, he mused, and had gone crazy and thought up this book for him. That was what was wrong with her, she had gone nuts and sent him to Brooklyn. All they talked about on the phone now was the novel, she never mentioned the wedding bower. Cabot Wright seemed to be some kind of change-of-life baby, so far as she was concerned. Even if he ever wrote the book, it would be hers, rather than his, it went without saying.

Then a funny thing happened. Though Carrie’s maniacal interest in Cabot had left him rather cold in Chicago, it began to communicate itself to him in Brooklyn over the long-distance wires. Bernie began to feel not only that he was close to Cabot in some inexplicable but really connected way, he also felt at the same time that his meeting with his “main character,”similar to the sudden appearance of a historical personage come to life temporarily, would be not merely unwelcome but maybe impossible to endure.

Bernie’s new business day therefore settled around the telephone, much as it had in his car-salesman days, reporting progress to Carrie instead of Wurtheim Badger. In his in-between hours, to satisfy her later questions, he went hunting Cabot. He was already writing his novel—it was almost one-third finished—but Carrie insisted he must meet his subject before completing the script so that the story would be “authentic.”Bernie simply went out and talked to people, to anybody who would listen. No one was ever able to direct him to Cabot, but it helped him to report to Carrie that he was doing something all day long besides writing.

As the weeks went by, Bernie became more and more certain of one unwelcome consequence: Cabot
would
appear. He was unsure of all the rest—that he would finish the novel, that it would be published, that he would ever see Chicago again, that he would resume his role as leading-man in the wedding-bower—all these things were improbable and dubious. But he was now sure that Cabot Wright would appear.

To convince Carrie that he was really hunting, he continued to ask around concerning the rapist. Newspaper vendors and men with shined shoes who stood around looking informed, cops, messenger boys, soap salesmen, the drivers of the Post Office trucks, sanitation men—all expressed mild interest when he questioned them and they noted his Chicago accent. Was he a detective? A writer. They nodded respectfully and seemed relieved he was not a detective. A few tried to be helpful.

“If I was you,”a newspaper vendor who had heard of Cabot Wright told him, “I would just begin walking around the streets and by-ways here in Brooklyn. Go up and down. After a few blocks, ask anybody… Look on mailboxes inside the doors of apartment buildings that don’t have doormen in front. Or where they do, ask the doormen. They’re a snotty lot, but they know everything. Remember the character you hunt has a notorious name, but also remember the public memory ain’t five inches long. They can’t even remember their last famous general. The last human of importance the American people have been able to keep in the working end of their brain is your own Chicago triggerman, Dillinger. After him they kind of lost hold on keeping who’s who straight. So don’t be surprised if they don’t remember who Cabot Wright is, or if they do. By all odds he’s forgotten, but you could run into one of these cute newspaper-headline memory men, nuts for keeping old information on their tongue’s tip. Such a wiseacre would remember, and then he might do one of two things, direct you right, or horn in your business. Don’t tell him. Best thing to do is keep walking. Brooklyn is large—76 square miles—but the part where he done his dirty work can be covered in a few afternoons of easy strolls, and you’ll come up with something. Glad you’re not a dick, though. People like to help a guy with an idea. So good luck and don’t sit down on the job.”

OUT OF A
city of over 8,000,000 people, how was he to find one man seriously in hiding? Cabot Wright had probably changed his name and appearance and would never be easy to verify from the only two available photographs. He may have undergone spectacular changes (grief and guilt damage the face and heart), and might vary chameleon-like daily as he strove to merge into the anonymous crowd.

Looking out over the waters that compose the confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers, with Wall Street on the north and the Statue of Liberty on the south, Bernie was fevered again by his mania for belonging. That was why he had begun to steal as a boy, in the first place. He had wanted to be “inside”with the people whose houses he had to burglarize. Now in Brooklyn he felt left out of everything all over again. He didn’t like to seem unemployed even to the kind of people who lived in the Joralemon Street tenement. (He told a man on his floor that he worked on a night-shift so that he wouldn’t wonder when he saw Bernie around in the daytime.) Gradually Bernie realized that people in Brooklyn were even less interested in how he made out than they were in Chicago.

At night, half-asleep, he would see himself back in the reformatory and relive those days in agonized boredom. He remembered the faces of all the men and boys who had been “in”at the same time as he; he could still hear their talk and laughter, and could see the guards watching him and them. He had been over this thousands of times in his own mind and with the prison psychiatrist, but now it all appeared to him as a movie he had seen four or five times and had not enjoyed at the first showing.

He had begun burglarizing wealthy people’s houses—he repeated to himself—because he wanted to be at home inside the house he robbed. Now again, in Brooklyn, he found himself in front of something like a closed house. He was hunting a man his wife had commissioned him to find, an unknown whom he was writing a novel about, whose whereabouts and person filled him with anonymous feeble irritability coupled with a forced conscious lack of interest.

“Do you really think I’ll ever run into this man?”Bernie asked Carrie during one of their interminable telephone conversations. “Take a look at the Brooklyn telephone directory, for example,”he told her, “and see the number of Wrights listed, blurry column after column of the same name. Anyway a convicted rapist who has served his sentence wouldn’t want his name in a directory in the first place. Or take a look at the number of red-heads in Brooklyn, since Cabot has red hair. Even among all the people who have Jewish, Italian, Negro, and Puerto Rican fathers, redheads are common, let alone the Wasp diehards.”

“Wasps?”Carrie wanted to know what he meant.

“It’s a word they use here. White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant.”

Carrie admitted that the thorns and the difficulties were real but, she insisted, “They are not going to stump us!”and made kissing sounds of love, encouragement and goodbye over the long-distance connection.

Hanging up the receiver in the airless telephone-booth of the tenement, Bernie wondered again whether she had played a huge joke on him. Was this Carrie’s method of ridding herself of him, by sending him away? He remembered Zoe Bickle, Curt’s wife, who once while drunk had told him that Carrie actually hated all men, and would like to exterminate the breed. Failing that, Zoe had said, Carrie always got rid of her husbands one by one, after draining them.

2

MRS. GLADHART HEARS MRS. BICKLE

C
arrie Moore had arrived at her “plan”for her husband only after enlisting the support and encouragement of another person, who had come wholeheartedly to her aid. She realized that without the help of a confederate she would never in a month of Sundays have got the strength to send Bernie to Brooklyn. She could not bring herself to tell him before he left that there was somebody else behind it all, though by his steady examination of her face in their long talks in the basement, she wondered whether he suspected. He might have hesitated more than he did, had he known somebody else stood behind her, for he could obey and follow only Carrie. To believe that the directive was not entirely hers would have filled him with a cankering doubt about her belief in him. For that reason Carrie was careful to say nothing of her accomplice.

The friend who nudged Carrie into action was Curt’s wife, Zoe Bickle, a handsome woman of forty-five, whom Bernie hated, and with whom Carrie herself had kept up a running battle for years. As the wife of the novelist and on her own, Zoe Bickle knew some of the right people in New York publishing and enjoyed being involved in “the real literary current,”even though she seemed cynical about publishing, perhaps because of her first-hand experience of it. During the early years of her marriage to Curt, when they lived in New York, Zoe had worked as an editor in a venerable second-rate publishing firm. Her subsequent isolation in Chicago was due in a large part, one supposed, to the failure of her husband as a writer, but even now she held an editorial job with a Chicago encyclopedia, by which she supported Curt, and even did “free-lance”editorial jobs for her old employers occasionally.

Living only a short block apart, the Bickles and the Gladharts saw one another every Saturday night, a custom they had kept up for over ten years, when either Zoe Bickle gave a party to which the Gladharts came, or the Gladharts gave a party to which the Bickles came. More or less the same guests usually attended each party. At the Gladharts there were jazz records or a well-known jazz pianist, and everybody brought his own liquor, owing to Bernie’s impecuniousness. At the Bickles, instead of music there was “discussion,”and liquor was available if not exactly plentiful. At the Gladharts, with the musical background, the emphasis was on relaxed behavior, and the evening usually ended in a perfunctory type of sexual encounter in which married couples switched partners and unattached persons found a room not in use. People drank heavily, there were often quarrels between the married couples themselves, and on occasion physical violence. Invariably furniture was broken, again in a perfunctory way. The to-dos were sordid rather than exciting, perhaps because nearly everybody was approaching middle age. Even when there was a sprinkling of young persons and even children, advanced for their age, who painted or wrote or underwent trances, they seemed to add no exuberant or gay note.