Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (20 page)

Calm after sending Wilson this ultimatum, Goldie considered that one day as sure as winter was followed by spring, her ideal American man would arrive. Kneeling before her satiny coverlet, Goldie did not pray for the ideal American husband—just yet. Her prayer was always very short, for she was very tired from being photographed, and she needed the long hours of dreamless sleep to keep her beauty and look 16, but each evening kneeling on the same identical place on the carpet, she could always manage to get out: “Please God, Hollywood. Please, dear God, Hollywood. I must go.” She knew it would come. Wilson had been sure it would come, too. She would be—in an era without stars—a star.

In bed, with her cucumber night cream carefully applied, Goldie was about to whisper faintly again, “Please, God,” when her mother, Zenda called her on their intercom phone:

“If you hear me talking with somebody below, dear, it’s a young man Gilda Warburton is sending over. Cabot Wright. She wants me to size him up. See if he has criminal tendencies. Ha!”

WHILE ZENDA STUYVESANT
sized up Cabot Wright, she regaled him with stories of her silent picture career way back before Cabot was thought of, her triumph as the author of the best-seller
Building Baby’s Wardrobe
under ghost supervision of Princeton Keith, and her final fabulous success as a real estate magnate, with acknowledgment to Warby’s tutelage and kind efforts.

Then she told Cabot Wright she would admit immediately to owning at least 50 brownstones in and around Fifth Avenue so that the two of them didn’t need to carve into the shank of the evening arguing about that! To her discomfort, Cabot did not laugh at this remark, which everybody else “new” always found so funny.

Desperately she attempted to entertain him while she plumbed his depths. At first she saw nothing in his appearance to suggest crime or offense. If anything, he was very Wall Street, boring despite the butter-milk sweat on his upper lip, a sure sign, she knew, of youth and vigorous physical health. It was his red hair, nearly fire-house in shade, and his mouth, too full for that of a broker, which raised phrenological danger signals.

Zenda then told an anecdote about her blind voyeur-lover. Seems while still a silent star, Miss Stuyvesant was greatly admired by the blind multi-millionaire cattle-rancher, O’Hara Morgan. Spent all her vacations in the late ’Twenties with him. He never touched a hair of her head. Only made one demand on her, and she was glad to comply as it did not deprive her of dignity. She did it as kindness, pure kindness, to O’Hara and all the world would agree with her if it knew the facts.

“What O’Hara loved for me to do,” Zenda said, “was bathe nude in his immense swimming pool at an hour specified by him. Then he would sit at a comfortable distance from where I was to go in, and have me describe to him in detail—for, be advised, though blind as a cave of bats he was not deaf, had ears like an owl—how I took off each stitch of clothing, bit by bit, this one, that one, the other, until he would say, ‘Are you completely bare, Zenda, love?’ when he would go crazier than a row of boys at a burlesque show, in the days, that is, when boys cared about girls and there were shows.” She sighed. “I used to come over to O’Hara sometimes still dripping wet and give him one innocent little kiss on his ear lobe. Dear, dear O’Hara. There’s nobody like that today. Because nobody likes anything today, that’s why. It’s a nation of frozen jellyfish…”

As Zenda later explained to Gilda Warburton, while the two girls wept and commiserated together, it was after she told the anecdote about O’Hara (what a damn fool she had been to tell that story) that she saw the peculiar look about the young broker’s passionate mouth on which the drops of butter-milk sweat were pouring, the suspicious bulge of his left-side trousers, and the words she heard with unbelieving ears: “About ready for your roll in the hay? I can keep my eyes shut too, old doll…”

“I have a young daughter upstairs,” Zenda had implored him, and then she had heard the statement that could come, of course, only from a psychopathic: “You’ll do, old pal. As I say, autumn honey is sometimes sweeter to the taste than that from the spring hive.”

“You wouldn’t!” Zenda now begged him.

She was already lying back on the factory-fresh Louis XV divan, as Cabot, to use his own phrase, pumped the origin of life into the old girl, while interrogating her about her daughter upstairs. Panting heavily, in spite of herself, her head hanging over the end of the divan, Zenda begged him not to go upstairs and “disturb” little Goldie.

As Cabot buttoned up and mopped his neck of sweat, on bended knee Zenda said: “If you touch that child you’ll ruin her career, which has just begun. She’s got to stay looking 16 for her model job, mind you, and one thing of this kind—You’re from a profession! Think of hers, if you won’t of her or me!”

Then Cabot suggested that her daughter Goldie could, after he had finished with her, perhaps pose for middle-aged women’s ads, and make even more money. “Take it from me,” he said, “middle-aged women are in and besides run the nation.”

Cabot went upstairs.

Painlessly gagged and tied, Zenda waited below while Goldie, upstairs, was brought to terms with reality or, in the young broker’s abominable phrase, having her hymen separated from her vulva by an expert. As the mother lay in her thongs, though her cheeks blushed as her mind told her they should, she realized she was not entirely unhappy about what was happening to Goldie. Her daughter had always been such a snot—Zenda was thinking this even as she heard the peculiar light and heavy sounds above indicating speeded activity by a sex criminal—and maybe she would find out what life was about, poor dear. But her daughter’s career, Zenda feared, was over.

IT WAS GOLDIE
who untied her mother after Cabot Wright had left by the fire-escape.

“My precious lamb,” Zenda began to comfort her daughter. “It hasn’t aged you a bit, love. You still look sweet sixteen.”

Goldie had already looked in the mirror and knew her mother was lying, as usual.

“I’m not hurt, precious, if you aren’t,” Zenda feared the look of calm rage on Goldie’s face. “Shall I summon Doc?” she asked her daughter while she rubbed her arms frantically, trying at least to restore circulation there.

“A lawyer,” Goldie commanded.

“Why a lawyer, dear heart?”

“This happened in your house,” she told her mother.

“Darling!”

“I was attacked in your building. By a friend of your friends.”

“Goldie, child! Please.”

“I was raped. My career’s over. You know that, and by God, you’ll do something about it!” She walked over to her mother and slapped her smartly over the mouth. “I’ll sue you! You incapable old pouch. I’ll have it out of your bank account. This happened in your house, and you’ll foot the bill for your negligence.”

Zenda now struck her daughter full in the face.

“I’ll put more than wrinkles in that snotty face of yours, you spoiled little tramp. As that young broker said while he was doing me, maybe you’ll earn more with a middle-aged mug than as the empty-faced little snip you were when you still had your cherry!”

As Zenda struck her again smartly, Goldie spat in her mother’s face. Zenda put up her fists then, and let her daughter have it. Goldie fell at her feet, conscious but no longer struggling or talking. All she could get out was: “I wouldn’t put it past an old has-been like you to have planned this!”

MR. WARBURTON
’
S SUICIDE
took place exactly twelve hours after a delegation consisting of Zenda Stuyvesant, Goldie Thomas, and Gilda, the widow-to-be, paid a call to his Wall Street office, convincing him, they claimed, beyond a shadow of doubt, that Cabot Wright was a sexual monster who had performed the deeds ascribed to him on the persons of his wife, Zenda, and Zenda’s child, Goldie, and how many other innocent victims, beyond conjecture or documentation.

Miss Watkins (“Sue of Short Hills”) was reluctant to report to the board making the investigation of Mr. W.’s death that after the women had left, she heard the old financier laughing heartily, alone, for an unusually long period of time. (This was explained by a friend of the family as undoubtedly rising from hysteria and temporary depression-reaction.) Warby had subsequently called in a notary and altered his will, and this was ascribed by some, in view of Miss Watkins’s report of his “laughter,” as evidence of insanity.

Although planning to retain a battery of lawyers to obtain Cabot’s conviction and sentencing, Mesdames Stuyvesant, Warburton, and Thomas suddenly made no further moves when they learned the contents of Mr. Warburton’s will. Warby, it became known to the world, had appointed Cabot his business successor and the sole executor of his estate, and referred to him as “my adopted son in point of fact.”

“To all intents and purposes,” to use a phrase dear to that great literary critic of the pink 1930’s—Cornell Dicks, now a successful investor in his own right—Cabot Wright was now head of Warby’s firm and, if you will, empire.

“From General Partner to God, how’s that!” Gilda had cried, when mulling over the provisions of the will. Between sniffles, she mumbled, “Hypnotism! Diabolic sleight-of-hand!”

It was now clear to the girls, that if they brought charges against Cabot—as Zenda Stuyvesant, with her real estate, business, and Hollywood background, pointed out to Gilda—the newspaper publicity alone, in view of what it had already been in the past, would blacken them forever. All burden of proof would rest on them, the girls, and would any of them get off scot-free? Zenda answered her own query in the negative.

14

CABOT READS TO MRS. BICKLE

P
rinceton Keith remained avid for the manuscript of the full story of Cabot Wright. He was dying to enter the lion’s den of Al Guggelhaupt and show him the most fantastic novel his firm had ever published, the most current, the dreadfullest, the most “in.”

Mrs. Bickle had to tell him the sad facts. So far as the novel they had all been writing was concerned, Cabot had covered only the main biographical rapes—Cynthia, the Sweater Girl, Leah Goldberg, Gilda Warburton, the Stuyvesant ménage, mother and daughter. Beyond these were 360 more rapes, according to testimony in court, and newspaper files. Who were these women? Where did the crimes occur?

Cabot Wright literally did not remember. He recalled only the parts of his own story that Mrs. Bickle put down and read to him. While she read, he could corroborate a bit, add a detail here and there, a comment, a nod, a giggle, no more. But when she stopped, he had nothing.

The gap which they especially needed to bridge was the period of his life after he rose from General Partner to God—in Gilda Warburton’s words. This was his rise from a young broker to an heir and inheritor of Mr. Warburton’s empire, in which Cabot not only had lost most of his money by foolish investments and wild spending, but committed the major part of his rapes and won for himself his claim to the name of criminal.

No matter how much the Chicagoans talked to him, he could only smile or giggle again, and tell them nothing more occurred to him.

“Get it out of him!”
Princeton Keith commanded both Bernie and Mrs. Bickle.

While Cabot walked up and down in Mrs. Bickle’s apartment, thinking, trying to recapture a bit of his memory, she suggested as a change of pace that they do something with Mr. Warburton’s
Sermons
, which had had such a marked influence on Cabot in prison and were, as he admitted, one of the sources of Cabot’s “cure.”

As Mrs. Bickle listened to Cabot read the
Sermons
, they were, she thought, too “plain” and even perhaps too “pointed,” in an old-fashioned sense, of course.

The mausoleum of wrath, indignation, hatred, loathing, distaste, weariness, ennui, nausea, surfeit, and animadversion that had been the real Mr. Warburton lay buried and flowering in these diatribes against all and everybody, including himself. He had hated everything except baseball, football, and boxing, and finally he hated them as well, especially boxing, for he saw these noble sports as the pawn of criminal minorities who had come over in cattleboats and risen to offices of power.

“If I had my way and the strength to do so,” Mr. Warburton’s voice seemed to be filling the room again, “I would open a permanent window on Wall Street and continuously vomit through it for the next 25 years. However, nothing will clear the air.
PLAY BALL
!”

Cabot felt, Mrs. Bickle realized, that with Warby for the first time in his life he was actually talking with another human being about something. When Yale and the Army and his supposititious parents had been Cabot’s façade of reality, everyone talked
around
everything. Warby considered Cabot a failure and Warby had been, Cabot was sure, more than half-right. The old broker had railed a good deal, of course, against the new Wall Street and the new America, and he had hinted at the total failure of human nature, history, government, the cosmos, and god. But as he had perused the
Sermons,
Cabot had had the shattering feeling of entering into some kind of reality.

“America, which began as a society of men with plans, confidence, and good blood in its veins,” Warburton wrote, “has ended in a shambles of scrofulous obscenity and barking half-breeds in which nothing worth selling or connecting is hawked, barked and exposed in its inadequate meretricious shine to a nation of uninterested buyers. Young and old have suffered and are suffering a series of consumer hemorrhages from a non-attendant civilization that has only noise, confusion, pumped-up virility and pornography. It is a nation of salesmen, imbeciles, retired faggots, strip-tease sluts with nothing above or below the navel any more (the pathetic attempt of America to simulate sexual vigor is as unconvincing as her fame as a great hive of business organization). America’s single role at present is to militate confusion, dirt, hollowness, race transvestism so that she can pass as quickly as possible into the cosmic scrap-hole of non-existence.”