Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (23 page)

“I’m gone!” he cried, and he knew it. Whatever had happened to him, he would never be back. Everybody, anyhow, was dead but him, he felt, and he was repopulating the earth, a bladder of erectile fruit, anodyned pain and seed.

Cabot Wright read now of himself as the Anonymous Coon, active in the Heights of Brooklyn, but sometimes for a change of diet wandering as far South as Red Hook and Cobble Hill. Cabot Wright, the press claimed, hid in garbage cans and/or bushes, jumped out, had his way. The tarry night hid his race, or the island from which he stemmed (Jamaica, Cuba, Tobago, Haiti), but the epithet
ANONYMOUS COON
stuck. Race hate is everywhere, kiddy, and the biggest haters are on the polyglot racial committees stamping it out.

“
ANONYMOUS COON STRIKES AGAIN.
” The Mayor in an extraordinary gesture, cut off two hours of his luncheon, and doubled the policemen on the beat, and anybody who looked odd at all was to be immediately apprehended and carted off. There was also an alert for blackface artists, as Negro groups claimed the Anonymous Coon was a white man with a charcoal make-up kit.

Reading of his night exploits, Cabot at times gave out what simulated a tee-hee, but was of course a giggle, for he looked just the same as ever, slightly-used Wall Street, impeccable collar, lovely he-man complexion, serious turn to his mouth, straight-ahead eye, erect bearing (dig that bulge), Ivy league, wife nuts (he scot-free), parents dead (he alive). He loved reading the headlines:

“DEMON ASSAULTER OVER THE HUNDRED MARK: MORE EXPECTED TONIGHT. CITY COUNCIL BELIEVES WEEKEND WILL SEE MOST CONCENTRATED NUMBER OF RAPES. PERCENTAGE SOARS.”

“
LOVELY RESIDENTIAL NEIGHBORHOODS TURNING INTO WILDERNESS AS MANIAC-DEVIATE ROVES AT WILL: FEAR MANY MORONS WEAR POLICE UNIFORM, EFFECT LEWD ACTS.
”

“
ARE POLICEMEN BY CHANCE RAPING OUR WOMENFOLK AND OUR WOMENFOLK NOT RAISING SUFFICIENT ALARM? QUERIES BY JEANETTE THOMAS MCKINLEY VAN BUREN HART, NOTED WOMAN COLUMNIST AND AUTHOR OF THE CHURCH-APPROVED BOOK
Where Are Our Bowling Mothers Tonight
?” (
Columnist
.)

“We must arrest and arrest until we find the culprit,” Miss McKinley Van Buren Hart, who is syndicated in 5,000,000 papers and magazines, urges. “She is willing herself to spend a night in jail to prove her own hands are clean.”

“
SHOULD POLICEMEN WEAR CHASTITY BELTS ON THEIR BEST SUITS IN VIEW OF SUSPICION ONE OR MORE OF THEIR NUMBER MAY BE THE ANONYMOUS COON-DEMON RAPIST? MISTER MAYOR, ANSWER THAT ONE OVER YOUR FIFTY DOLLAR PLATE LUNCH.
” (
Editorial
.)

“
ARE TOO MANY POLICEMEN ENGAGED IN CHASING DEVIATES MAKING GRAND OLD U.S.A. A POLICE STATE? ASKS A PINK-ORIENTED BRONX HOUSEWIFE WHO HUGS HER FM SET. ANSWER: LOOK WHO ASKED
!” (
Right-wing magazine
.)

“
DECORATED MARINE CONFESSES HE JOINED FORCE IN ORDER TO PERFORM PRETERNATURAL ACTS WITH OTHERS.
”

“
IS YOUR MOTHER A DEVIATE? YOUR PROOF.
”

“
DR. BUGLEFORD JUST APPOINTED BY MAYOR TO REGISTER, CHECK, INTERVIEW, FINGER-THUMB, CODE, SENTENCE AND IF NECESSARY EXECUTE ALL DEVIATES BY MORNING.
”

“
DRAGNET FALLS OVER ENTIRE RESIDENTIAL MEGALOPOLIS ALL NEW YORK ADVISED TO MARRY OR BE MENTALLY ILL: LOWER MARRIAGE AGE TO 13, SYNDICATED WOMEN COLUMNISTS URGE. MANDATORY HETEROSEXUALITY IN THE Y.M.C.A. BILL PROPOSED FOR FEDERAL LEGISLATION.
”

Cabot’s comeuppance came unexpectedly—at the hands of a pimply Puerto Rican girl, who had seen a vision of Our Lady in Flatbush. It is true she charged that Cabot had merely molested her, not raped her. So strong was religious feeling in the nation at the time, however, together with prosperity and indignant belief in racial equality, that Cabot, despite his social and business position, was arrested. At the police station he was beaten with the usual rubber hoses and night sticks. Then to the astonishment and debilitating pleasure of the police lieutenant who was grilling him, the culprit confessed to having committed over 300 rapes in Brooklyn and vicinity, U.S.A.

During the trial that followed, scores of women testified they recognized Cabot as their physical assailant. He never denied one of these accusations. He was very tired, more so than when he had first consulted Dr. Bigelow-Martin, very bored, and America did not interest him.

The prison sentence handed down by a court that was more puzzled than vindictive was mild, and would have been possibly milder, many brilliant journalists believe, had Cabot not queered much of his own defense by giggling.
Giggling
, mark you—not laughing. He couldn’t laugh.

16

ONE FLEW EAST, ONE FLEW WEST

B
ernie Gladhart was angry and dejected at the way Mrs. Bickle had spent the last few weeks in the company of Cabot Wright, ignoring him. He had gone out in a huff, looking for trouble, as in his old free days, and before his prisons. About to go past the Iron Kettle, a dull coffee house where washed-out denizens of Greenwich Village tried to start a new life, his attention was arrested by a striking colored man wearing an unusually white straw hat with a pink band unknown to this latitude. The expression of his face, his complexion itself, the pearl perfection of his teeth told Bernie at once that this could not be the Brooklyn uncertain status-mad American Negro. The man walked like a prince, and was obviously not impressed by anything except what was inside him.

Bernie, as he was to tell Carrie Moore via long-distance and as he also told Mrs. Bickle, saw an Ideal Man and, in his despairing and yet stubborn mood, decided to love him. Had he not appeared at that moment, Bernie often wondered later what would have happened to him in view of his having been himself sold into white slavery as the factitious author of a novel he had long since had no connection with. Would he have resumed his petty derelections and crimes, become a full-time alcoholic, sold himself to dope-pushers?

Bernie followed the man with the wide-brimmed foreign hat down leafy streets, past Federal mansions, over blue-stoned pavements, until they both came to the Promenade with its benches. His dark-skinned prey seated himself under a street-lamp and Bernie, more desperate by the moment, seated himself next to him, then almost immediately introduced himself.

His new friend accepted the introduction in the manner in which it was meant. They exchanged the necessary information about themselves, Bernie learning that his chance acquaintance was Winters Hart, from a town in the Congo. He had got a job in a phonograph company and was waiting for his wife and three children to come join him as soon as he had some money. Taking Winters Hart’s left hand in his, Bernie held his friend’s dark finger on which he wore a wedding-ring, and pressed the finger and the hand.

Far from being annoyed at this liberty, Winters Hart was, to tell the truth, relieved and pleased. Isolation in a racial democracy, as he was to tell Bernie later that night, as they lay in Bernie’s bed together, isolation, no thank you. As for these American colored people with their immediate ambitions and small souls, and washed-out posture, their timid arrogance and hunger for the White, again no thank you. “You can keep Black America, Bernie,” he returned his new friend’s pressure, “if it means working all day to turn white.”

“I hope this will be as deeply a felt relationship for you as it is for me,” Bernie told Winters. It was his Chicago affability, perhaps, as much as his own personality, that won the Congolese over.

“But why talk so much, Bern?” Winters Hart had said. “We’re doing good, right as we are, but don’t talk to let each of us know just how good we are doing. Americans always explain me how they’re doing a right thing. We’re just doing something, Bern, was in the cards, and so no explanations please. A little pressure here, a little pressure there lifts the weight of the world from the heart, but no need to celebrate it by way of explanation.”

Bernie smiled at these wise words. For the first time, in his friend’s arms, he felt some warmth in the cold sea-fog city of Brooklyn.

WHILE BERNIE SLEPT
peacefully, spoon fashion, next to the heart of his Congolese friend, Mrs. Bickle was thinking about the manuscript she had just turned in to Princeton Keith and company. Mrs. Bickle felt she could now relax a bit from her strained assumed passive disinterest in the presence of Cabot Wright.

Two weeks passed while the publishing empire of Guggelhaupt was assembling the novel, assisted by checkers, ghosts, stenogs, under-editors, whole staffs working till late at night. During this period, Mrs. Bickle heard not a peep from the man whose life was being prepared for the millions. She felt the need, with a suddenness that disturbed her, to hear more from Cabot. A hundred questions filled her mind about his career. Now that the truth had been told as fiction, and was to be sold as such, now that she and Bernie were “rich” by former standards, she wanted to find out, if possible, the truth as truth.

“He was so obviously
not
a rapist!” she kept repeating to herself. Yet more and more she realized that what he had said to her, and listened to in her presence, must have occurred: he
had
raped and raped and raped, apparently without interest. He had to complete his mission. Had he completed it?

Cabot’s final last “look” at her puzzled her now more than when it happened. She decided to talk to him. Going down to his room, she knocked weakly on his door. She waited. No sound of any kind.

Her heart slowed its beat, for she already felt she knew what had happened. She saw that “look” of his again. At the same time she knew she must find out more. This need came over her furiously like the burning necessity for water in fever.

Entering Cabot Wright’s room, she saw an envelope standing upright on his desk. She picked it up and then looked apprehensively about her. There was no writing on the envelope itself, though it was sealed for somebody, obviously her.

She looked about the room, examining quickly. There were the same ticking clocks, thirty or more, the atrociously heavy encyclopedias, medical dictionaries, books on anatomy, pathology, the big dictionaries of foreign languages. His clothes were gone. And there was a flat non-human smell in the room, meaning he had been gone some days. She opened the envelope. Inside, the letter was addressed to her, as follows:

Mrs. Bickle—

It is too bad you were beginning to show interest. My story is not yours, after all. Neither am I, though that was coming too, so far as you are concerned. I am nobody’s now but mine own, so my disinterest in you remains the same. However, I found you an ideal ear, and tongue. What is more, everything else you may have been, for instance, a woman, was missing, because you have stood by others so long. You were just right for me at the precise time I needed a rarity like you. Maybe you were never a woman, maybe once you were. Still I gather you feel you should act like one a bit. You do have a mind, but your ear and your presence are you. Hats off, I suppose, for that!

You are and always were, Mrs. Bickle, a mature American matron. I am writing this to you because your disinterest in me, which was decaying rapidly, may return. I may drop you a line, as they say in prison, when you get back to Chicago. I may as well tell you that you are going back without any doubt to the gem of the prairies. Princeton Keith is
not
going to publish that fucking novel the ghosts have been writing about my life. They haven’t even thought up a name for me. You’ll hear about it. Them not doing the novel, that is. Well, so long, Mrs. Bickle, and don’t feel grateful just because I do to you. You listened and you told me. I saw me all in one piece together like in a movie, and as a result I’m free. I’m grateful, but I don’t want to pay you back my gratitude. You’re not my type.

Cabot Wright

P.S. I am going to take up disguises for a while, I think harmless ones. Think I may be a preacher further South or maybe some kind of a quack healer. Just white-face disguise, though, as I never swam with the current. Hear from me, old girl.

Mrs. Bickle’s mind, recovered from the shock of the letter, raced over a number of topics and ideas, the peculiar style in which he had written, the thought that rubber-hoses, night-sticks and ex-boxers’ fists during his third-degree police nights and days must have taken a lot out of his former self. Then she admitted her own strange muted growing, call it love or fascination for the man who said he violated—but that would be another novel for another editor.

The truth is, without her being in on the secret, that when the police began their so-called brutality on him, and prison finished what they had started, not only his
membrum virile
went from “At-ten-tion!” to “Pa-rade rest!” to “At ease!” but the bite which had been on so long, the huge false-teeth which Business America fastened at his jugular was
off
.

BERNIE GLADHART ENTERED
her room at the very moment that Mrs. Bickle had broken down, crying softly. The letter was in her hand, and Bernie had immediately read it at an angle, while sitting beside her and comforting her.

“You got out of it easy,” Bernie petted her. “Think of it in that way.”

“He believes Chicago is as remote as Peking,” she cried. “A real Easterner, over and above all the other things that are amiss in him.” She dried her eyes.