Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (9 page)

At that moment Mrs. Bickle saw what she was up against, and the thought that many had come to him, had asked for his story, been talked to, and gone away empty-handed, was startling and discouraging. She felt there must be innumerable writers composing novels, plays, and even perhaps narrative poems about Cabot Wright.

She allowed a sigh to escape from her, which he noticed, even if he did not hear it, for he said:

“Need something?”

“A glass of water,” she shouted. She had begun to feel a bit faint, and she realized that either her fall had disagreed with her more than she had first acknowledged or seeing Cabot Wright himself at last had been too much for her.

He went into the next room, and returned almost immediately with an old-fashioned tin cup such as she had seen on farms as a small child. With some hesitation, she drank from it.

“You’re disappointed,” he studied her.

Looking up at him, Mrs. Bickle saw that he looked like the mythical clean-cut American youth out of Coca-Cola ads, church socials, picnics along the lake. Could he be—was it possible he was the real rapist? She compared him in her mind with Bernie, so much less attractive, the only other life-size criminal she actually knew. Yet the man who had brought her the tin cup looked—yes, impeccable.

“I suppose you know what I’m doing here,” Mrs. Bickle began. “That I’m a writer or sent by somebody,” she quoted him, a little too low perhaps for him to hear, but at that moment her attention was attracted from the not overclean tin cup to an amazing spectacle in the next room which she had till then entirely missed. In this room from which Cabot Wright had first emerged she caught sight of a solid array of clocks on the wall, of all sizes and shapes, from large ones like those seen in public waiting-rooms, down to small alarm-clocks fastened by force to the wall. There were rather pretty old-fashioned ones, with large black hands, and finally the remains of an ormolu likewise nailed to the wall.

He nodded to where she was looking. “A lot of those were here when I moved in,” he told her. “This was some sort of watch-repair place. But I’ve added a lot of them myself.”

He sat down again on the stool and stared back into his clock room, almost wistfully.

“The clocks have given me a funny new habit. Listening to them so long I began to take my own pulse every few minutes. I can’t break it.” He giggled, and she was surprised she had not noticed this mannerism in him before, as it was rather pronounced.

“Before everything happened to me,” he explained, “I don’t think I thought about clocks or time. Now it’s almost the only thing—I won’t say I think of—but that holds me, the old heart’s tick-tock as it fills and empties itself of blood 75 times a minute!

“My biggest trouble, though,” he continued, like one who had been expecting her to come and interview him, “well, it’s not deafness,” he touched the aid, “my biggest trouble for other people is I can’t remember.”

There was a look on Mrs. Bickle’s face like a heavy shadow blotting out eyes and mouth.

“Literally can’t remember,” he looked up into her face like one modestly telling of accomplishment and ability.

“Only thing I have to make me remember is some police tape-recordings. You’re welcome to hear them sometime.” He exchanged a look with the largest of the clocks in the adjoining room. “That’s why the ‘hunters’ soon tire of me. The tapes don’t give them enough of what they want. Well, that’s the way it goes. Where’s the keenest place you can hurt a man? Not in his eye or groin, but where he can’t remember.”

Mrs. Bickle sipped from the tin cup.

“You’re a different type of visitor,” he turned now to Mrs. Bickle’s case, “although I saw you regard my poor wallpaper with the same expression the others get when they look at it. I have, you see, four or five wallpapers, one under the other. They wear down gradually all of them to the original willow pattern over the calcimine itself, then robin redbreast, scenes at the forge, water lilies, peasants in ancient France. I’ve always wanted a room different from my adopted parents’. No carpets,” he looked down at the bare floors, “no chandeliers,” he nodded above where the plaster was coming through, “no dining-room sets or covered toilet seats.”

Mrs. Bickle cleared her throat. She was listening very intently to his accent and she was puzzled. Each sentence he spoke seemed to be from a different geographical section of the country. Though all his speech sounded native American, for Cabot Wright was an American criminal in anybody’s book, it was nonetheless, like his wallpaper, composite.

From almost the moment of her entry, Zoe Bickle in her head had begun to write her own book about him—the book, that is, she would have written had she not been under assignment. But now another thought gave her pause, for whatever she might one day hand in to Princeton Keith for
his
book, she saw with great clarity that her “subject” had neither the biography nor the personality that could possibly be fitted into the publishing list of the Guggelhaupt empire.

Her cogitations were interrupted by the door’s opening. A young man in clerical garb stood on the threshold, removed his hat when he saw Mrs. Bickle, and for a moment looked puzzled and upset, then nodded slowly and put his hat over his breast.

“Reverend Cross,” Cabot Wright identified him, “come in, sir. And what did you say your name was?” he turned to Mrs. Bickle, and, when she told him: “Let me introduce you to my preacher,” which brought no change of expression in the young man who had just entered.

“Mrs. Bickle would like to be interested, Reverend Cross,” Cabot Wright said in a stentor’s voice. “She fell in, you might say,” he went on, in a sweeping summary and explanation of her presence here. He pointed to the plates of glass lying near the sofa.

Mrs. Bickle, feeling somewhat that she too was being affixed to the wall along with Cabot’s clocks, began bowing her way out, not only convinced there was no story here, but incredulous she could have spent this quarter of an hour in the presence of a convicted rapist.

“Ready for another session?” she heard her host say to the Reverend Cross, as she walked to the door. But Cabot Wright was already opening the door for her, and said, this time in what seemed to Mrs. Bickle an imitation of the West Virginia accent of Reverend Cross:

“You come back now, Mrs. Bickle, if you need any help.”

With this obscure message echoing in her ears, she went back to her own room to think everything over. When she got there, out of sheer nervousness she began to read the manuscript in her room.

7

CABOT WRIGHT BEGINS

T
he popularity of Cabot Wright as a criminal may have stemmed from two facts [she read]. He was employed in Wall Street in a well-known brokerage, and he was no respecter of age, raping girls, young ladies, middle-aged matrons, and even elderly women. Anyone who was a woman could be next.

This had kept the suspense high during the two years of his operations. Women waited in the humid fall twilights, in the blistering heat of July, on cold winter foggy evenings when the boat whistles cried all night. Weather never kept him inside. He didn’t kill, he didn’t bruise, he didn’t cuff or buffet. He used, everybody insisted afterwards, some form of hypnotism. He raped easily and well.

Women who thought of screaming did not. Those who began to run stopped short in their tracks. They knew his step, his pressure. There was never any evidence of struggle after he had left. Many called the police, but more to share their experience than to register a complaint.

Marriages were broken up by him, husbands, sons, lovers went out of the lives of the women in question. Nothing was ever the same after Cabot Wright left. During his two years of activity, women could be said to be waiting.

A window would be shattered.

“It’s time, Mrs. Van Buren,” Cabot Wright would say, stepping into a neat parlor, and unbuttoning his fly. “I haven’t but a moment.”

“I know,” Mrs. Van Buren would answer stoically.

“Then remove your clothing, sweetheart. You can leave on the light.”

EVERY GOOD MORNING
Cabot Wright walked across Brooklyn Bridge to his Wall Street office and, if weather allowed, walked back again to his four-room apartment on Columbia Heights, which he shared with his wife, Cynthia Abigail Adams, a dress-designer.

Cabot had majored in art at Yale, but on graduation, returning to his home at Tuxedo Park, his father had called him in and asked him how he expected to rise in the world as an art instructor (the only career his studies had prepared him for). Seeing the look of indecision on his son’s face, Wright senior had picked up the phone and in a short five minutes secured a position for the boy with Mr. Warburton in the Wall Street brokerage firm of Slider, Bergler, Gorem, Hill and Warburton.

At the time of his graduation, Cabot was going with Cynthia Adams, whom he had met at some art lectures at the Frick Gallery. Since he was through school, they both felt they should marry and did so a few weeks after Cabot got settled in his Wall Street post, then moved into a four-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment in the Heights, which Mr. Cabot Wright senior helped them pay for until the “young people get on their feet.”

Mrs. Cabot Wright senior—Daisy—did not know if generosity like this would be appreciated, especially by her daughter-in-law, but she said no more about the young couple coming to live at home in Tuxedo Park, as she had originally planned for them.

Cabot’s mother did, however, have a discussion almost immediately with her husband about what she saw as a new problem, their son’s walking the Brooklyn Bridge each morning to his Wall Street job. Mrs. Wright did not approve of this at all. For one thing, as she pointed out to her husband, his son could easily be murdered, second, think of the shoe leather, and finally, it gave the impression he was not successful.

“I say it’s simply not right for Cabot to walk the bridge.” Mrs. Wright remained unyielding to her husband’s arguments that some of the top-drawer executives in Wall Street walked to work. “I’ll have to speak to Cabot the next time they come over,” she warned.

“If you ever took any advice of mine,” her husband told her with unusual emphasis for him, “don’t do it.”

“What do you mean, don’t do it?” she flared.

“We’ve got to let him make up his own mind how he wants to get to work!”

Daisy was reduced to silence by her husband’s emphasis. He continued: “It’s not important if he walks the bridge or doesn’t… Besides, he’s married. He’s begun a new life. Forget your old role and relax so we can enjoy our trip to Florida.”

“Relax so we can enjoy our trip to Florida,” Mrs. Cabot Wright repeated. “My dear Kirby.” She put her hand on his lapel. “Dear old Kirby, how little you understand a mother’s heart or her responsibilities.”

“And we should also remember once in a while that Cabot is only an adopted son!”

“Kirby!” Daisy warned him. “Stop right there.”

“By Christ, I think he’s forgotten it himself!”

Daisy wept now, daubing her eyes, and said in a low voice, “I’m afraid he hasn’t.” But she didn’t respond to Kirby’s astonished cry of “What?” and his appealing look for explanation.

“Well, Daisy,” he said after he had let her cry for a bit, “we’ve got to remember he’s made his decision. We both would feel badly if he had
not
got married. Let’s be glad he did, glad he has his post—“

“His
Wall Street
post, Kirby,” she shook her head.

“Very well, you wished him to become an artist, but he saw the handwriting on the wall!”

“Oh that eternal handwriting on that—”

“—eternal wall,” Kirby finished her statement, and laughed. “And remember, Daisy,” he went on, “Cabot is technically not an adopted son, but a supposititious one…”

“Kirby, you didn’t tell Cabot that!” Daisy cried.

“Yes, I told him the day he was graduated,” Mr. Wright said.

She looked still more crestfallen, but astonished too, and the tears now flowed in her eyes.

“Let’s go to Florida now, Daisy,” he kissed his wife.

“You used that word supposititious,” she studied the meaning of what he had told her. “You told the poor boy.”

“You’ll cheer up in Florida, Daisy,” he coaxed her.

AS CABOT WRIGHT
walked the Brooklyn Bridge each morning, he felt the weight of his adopted parents and the weight of his new wife dissipate. It provided, he was to learn afresh each morning, the one free hour of his day. He felt “prepared,” though he did not have anything waiting for him to feel prepared for. The bridge meant so much. He seldom looked about him when he was on it. Though the roar of traffic was unpleasant, and in the distance Governor’s Island and Staten Island no longer invited attention, and the Statue of Liberty was often hidden in mist, yet he was up here and not down there, and that was enough to make him feel, like one of the ships below, in port.

If only he could feel less tired. He had never felt tired when he was painting or hiking or on vacations by himself. But now suddenly he felt completely,
finally
tired.

He discussed his tiredness with Mrs. Cabot Wright Junior, who was sympathetically inattentive.

“It’s all in the mind, sweety,” she tapped her rather high forehead. “Concentrate on being non-tired, concentrate on being tinglingly alive: give, give, dear, to life. What can suffering teach? Nothing. It’s coming alive that tells.”