Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (7 page)

“When you’re stronger and I’ve had my beauty sleep, you can tell me what happened,” she assured him. “I suspect, however,” she added, “it’s the place as much as anything,” and she surveyed the filth and the mouldering walls and ceiling.

“The place, hell! Carrie’s gone and married a nigger,” Bernie exploded.

A few days later when he was well enough to be sitting in a chair, dressed in a monk’s cloth bathrobe, he explained it all to Mrs. Bickle.

“I suppose it’s my fault, too,” she said, “since I’m supposed to have sent you to Brooklyn in the first place.”

“You don’t seem too surprised at my news either, come to think of it,” Bernie studied her face.

“How did you find out he was colored?” Mrs. Bickle asked in reply. She did seem unsurprised. “I mean,” she said, “after all you were only on the telephone.”

“Oh,” he sneered. “Well, that’s easy. She shouted his name.” He laughed three times. “When she was in culmination, she called out, ‘Joel!Joel Ullay!’ and I remembered that was the name of the dinge dancer she knew.”

“I’m already in on the whole thing, Bernie. I may as well tell you.”

“You mean you heard it on the phone too?” he was nearly credulous.

“Curt phoned me about it,” she said. “News travels fast in that neighborhood.”

“Well, then you can tell me,” he snorted and leaned back in his chair. “Go ahead.” He lit a cheroot, and began examining the ends of his fingers.

“I’m sorry, Bernie, about it.”

“Skip the shit and let me have the facts,” he told her.

“Somebody talks like he was going to live after all,” Zoe couldn’t refrain from a sigh of relief.

“Go ahead and tell me, Zoe, and then I can decide by myself if I’m going to die or live.”

“Well, of course you’re right, Bernie. It is Joel Ullay. He’s moving in.”

“
Moving?
He was clear in the other night.”

Consuming his cheroot in enormous drags, he went on with: “Say, Zoe, did you ever hear of a guy that lost everything as quick as I did: my home, wife, job, my town. I ain’t got a thing left, if you think it over.”

She did seem to be thinking it over, and he turned away from her face with irritation and impatience.

“Go ahead and give it to me,” he told her.

“If you can wait a minute, I’ll give you Curt’s version of it,” she fumbled in her purse for a cigarette.

“Oh don’t give me nothing. I hate people who got versions from out of somewhere, and horse around with pauses and commas and expression on words, and that jazz. Give me the news.”

“All right, the gory facts then.” She stared at the long ash on his cheroot and lighted her own smoke.

“Seems Carrie and Joel had a mock wedding at her house,” she began.

“Well,” he was impatient again at her pauses.

“They claimed they didn’t want to go to the trouble and expense of a divorce this time, and in any case Joel’s present girl friend would not cooperate at any level, it seems, though later she may be agreeable to a settlement… Everybody who has ever half-known either Joel or Carrie was there. Mostly South Side folks, of course. And it was a costume affair.” Mrs. Bickle turned down the corners of her mouth to show what she thought of that. Bernie’s face was stony, but he managed to inquire:

“You don’t know who the bride came as, by chance?”

“Curt didn’t mention how any of them came,” Zoe replied. “But they were all pretty seedy costumes, and a good many only made a stab at dressing like anybody. There was a pillow fight early in the evening, and a good many of Carrie’s American antiques and objets d’art got busted, and Harold Winternitz’s Oriental carpet burned badly. The usual great jazz pianists, that U.S. Senator Carrie always keeps in tow, an old opera star or two, the university people, the young fry and children and finally the ceremony, with ring, ‘preacher,’wedding march, and the rest.After that it was just like it always is at your house on Saturday nights.” Zoe stopped. “Don’t look like that,” she couldn’t help saying to him.

“How?”

“All ashes and thorns,” she told him. “It had to end, Bernie,” she went on as consoler. “Be glad, really, that it ended here for you instead of there. It would have been terrible for you had it occurred while you were in Chicago, believe me. You really would have been hurt. It’s terrible here, too, I realize, but distance dissolves some of the nastiness, not the main part, granted, but some.”

“Jesus, you have philosophy,” Bernie said.

“Bernie,” Mrs.Bickle proposed, “supposing I invited you out to a nice big restaurant with carpets and chandeliers and tall drinks and food. Wouldn’t that make you feel more like living? I’ve got a message for you from Princeton Keith.”

“Don’t have the clothes or the appetite,” he replied.

“You will,” she said in a soft if sarcastic voice.

Looking at her studiously, Bernie brightened and went on: “Would you mind stepping over here and doing a little something for me in the line of a favor?”

She nodded.

“Bend down now,” he said when she had approached him, “bend down and cover my face with nice warm cool kisses. I know you won’t feel it when you give them to me, but fasten a few on just the same.”

“Well, poor little hard-up you,” Mrs. Bickle bent down and pecked him a couple of times. He took her hand in his.

“Did big old Keith tell you about
him?
” he moved his head in the direction of Cabot Wright’s room, below.

She thought a moment before she said, “Is it really him, then?”

“No question about that,” Bernie mumbled. “The rapist is down there all alright… Go take a peek, why don’t you. It’s in the clothes closet, and you just lift up the loose board on the floor.”

“I take your word for it.”

“If I get to feeling better, I’ve got to show him to you,” Bernie spoke now almost too low to be heard. “You know you look good here, Zoe,” he still held her hand. “You look almost gorgeous.” He kissed her fingers.

“You
are
homesick as well as light-headed,” she sighed, but she bent down again to kiss him, and he held his mouth to hers.

Freeing herself, she heard him comment: “Just to think when I accomplished my mission at last and found my rapist, the lady who thought it up in the first place had just given the whole thing up for love.”

“Life is full of incidents,” she spoke as he pulled her down to him again.

“Don’t do this because you think you have to or because we’re both away from home,” she cautioned him. “And for God’s sake no little games of spite on poor old Carrie, please.”

“You look good to me. I told you that,” and he put his mouth to hers again.

After a night in Bernie’s arms, Mrs. Bickle found that if she had not yielded to him as ardently as Carrie always testified she did, she had warmed him up from total despair, and on returning to her Gramercy Park apartment, taking off her high heels as she sat with a drink on her divan, she realized that she had replaced Carrie more completely than Joel Ullay had Bernie. She would probably never be Bernie’s lover in any full sense of the term, though nobody can be sure what is coming so far as love is concerned. In any event she had better take over Bernie’s book about Cabot Wright, or Princeton Keith would make her life a hell.

ON HER FIRST
day in New York, Keith and Zoe had met for their talk at a fashionable hotel, in a huge court of potted palms, in an alcove protected by an awning, exclusively reserved for the publisher by the management at certain hours each day of the week. (A gentleman from a rival publishing house had once inadvertently approached Keith’s reserved space a bit ahead of the editor; Keith had commanded him to be off; when the other refused, they had come to blows; worsted, the interloper had left with a bruised cheek and eye, cursing his assailant roundly.)

Studying Keith closely now, Mrs. Bickle discovered he was happy over two things, one that Bernie had a book about the rapist and the actual rapist in tow, and two that Zoe was here, on the spot.

“It’s a little bit too wonderful for me to believe,” he told her. “And I need a book like this, believe you me, Zoe, dear. My publisher, Al Guggelhaupt, needs it too, God knows. We’ve got to find something
good
. We’re dying from best-sellers. All money and no bite.”

Mrs. Bickle looked away.

“And to think,” Princeton went on to exaggerate a bit, “that it would be an old girlhood sweetheart who would bring this all about!”

Zoe Bickle smiled, and even flushed faintly, trying to remember what Princeton had been like as a boy in the small Illinois town where they had grown up. He could have been nobody’s sweetheart, she was sure.

Her uneasiness about Princeton was not prompted by his inadequate memory of their childhood, but by the offer she knew he was about to make, which he had already referred to as something concrete and substantial.

When he realized what was wrong—her obvious distrust of him—for he was nothing if not sharp, he began to work on her, hard.

“There you’ve been for years,” she heard his voice as she sipped the incredibly frondescent mint julep he had insisted on selecting as her drink, “hiding your light under a bushel, nursemaid to a ne’er-do-well hypochondriac writer, a wet nurse, if the truth were told, when you could be one of the best editors in publishing. But now I’ve got you here, I’m not going to let you go. You know I have this offer to make to you, or you wouldn’t be sitting before me. We’ll forget the other little job you came here to do. A ghost can do that… Let me put it this way, Zoe dear, you can send Curt money, enough to let him study Hebrew the rest of his life, if you’ll see the light of reason here in New York.”

Without waiting for Mrs. Bickle to say no, he named the sum of money he would give her.

As it was an incredible amount of money, she expressed her surprise by total lack of expression. Princeton repeated his offer.

She could only sit there, perhaps stunned, but looking bored and dull.

“I’m offering Gladhart half as much,” he was clearly puzzled by her poker face.

“Just enough to put him on easy street,” she quipped, to his relief.

As he rattled on with his plans, he was careful to watch the look of temptation come and go on her face. She had been not only poor a long time, he knew, she had not been praised or complimented by anybody for even longer. He was positive Curt never paid her the slightest flattery. As a matter of fact Curt seldom kissed her, and sexual matters, Keith decided, must be nearly forgotten between man and wife back there. But in New York, he saw, Mrs. Bickle was blooming, and looked ten years younger than her age; she looked certainly fine in the court of palms, and her good appearance would help him when it came to promote their idea, possibly even more than Bernie’s having the perfect book, and the actual rapist under surveillance. It was all too goddam wonderful.

“Of course,” Keith went on, in reply to a comment from Zoe that was both cynical and indifferent, “I mean to make you work for your money and I mean to pick your brains. My own career is—I’ll be open with you—always in the balance.”

She looked up quickly on hearing his last remark, but finding it, as she thought then, merely rhetorical, went on with her apologies for turning down his offer: “I’m afraid you want things I don’t have,” she explained to him. As soon as she had said this, she realized it was obvious she wanted to back out only because she had felt the temptation of his offer, and because the sum he had named was so huge.

“If you want more money,” he said coolly, “that can be arranged.”

“Now you’ve frightened me even more,” she was truthful. “The fact is, Prince, I couldn’t write a novel if I tried, and I know next to nothing about prison, rapists, or indeed Bernie.”

“Perfect. You don’t need to know a thing about any of them,” he informed her. “I want somebody who can write…” He pulled from a battered briefcase Bernie’s manuscript. “The book is nearly all here,” he thumped on the soiled stack of paper. “We need more facts, details, and less of Bernie’s kind of mentality, which he calls imagination. We’ll need to know more from the rapist,” he paused suddenly and looked far away, out into Central Park, “and by the way, speaking of that,” he spoke in hushed legal tones, “I’ve checked and doublechecked. The man below Bernie
is
the rapist. It’s Cabot Wright,” he explained, “living in the room beneath our Chicago car-salesman.”

Now she was really surprised.

“We need you, dear Zoe, for the English language and for brains. Nobody else can give us those but you. I don’t want to call in any ghost.”

“You’ll have to let me go on taking in the facts,” Mrs. Bickle had then replied to his peremptory command that she decided at once about his proposal.

“I’m afraid I don’t have time for the luxury of procrastination,” Princeton Keith said swiftly. He looked both menacing and bilious. She was taken aback by his look of gritty cold determination, so that she flushed again, which he noted.

“If you don’t say yes to this offer, Zoe, you’re a bigger idiot than anybody who ever lived. One would even doubt you really love your husband, for I don’t see how you’ll be able to provide for his old age, which I imagine will be a costly one, on the salary you’re earning now.”