Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel

by Purdy, James

  Cabot Wright was already nude except for his shorts.

  The doctor, bending over the day-bed where Cabot lay, suddenly with a remarkable show of strength picked him up bodily and put him over a kind of padded hook which had come out of the wall, and hung his patient on it, much as one would a side of beef.

  “Do not move,” Bigelow-Martin admonished. “No matter how much you may wish to change your position, resist it, simply give in to your fatigue, let go, let go, Cabot, let go.”

  Struggling on the immense mattress-padded hook which had come out of the wall, Cabot felt very much like a fish—caught but not pulled in. The blood rushed violently to his head. His shorts, which he had laundered many times, snapped, and fell down about his legs. Visions of gauchos riding on the pampas came to him, together with memories of bull-fights he had seen on TV. His forehead was swimming with sweat, he felt his intestines give, spittle flowed freely from his mouth, and his navel suddenly contracting violently seemed to explode and vanish, as will the top crust of a pie in the oven when the proper slits have not been made in it. Cabot felt he was saying adios from a boat rapidly advancing from the shore on which stood his adopted father and mother in their Florida clothes, and his recent bride, Mrs. Cabot Wright Junior in her Vogue pattern dress.

  When Cabot Wright regained consciousness, Dr. Bigelow-Martin was bathing his forehead with some drugstore witch hazel.

  “How did we do?” the doctor was saying.

  When Cabot did not reply, Bigelow-Martin waited a bit, then said: “I’ll tell you, sir. We did fine.”

  “Did I pass out, doctor?” Cabot wondered.

  “You went to sleep,” was the reply. “You relaxed. Probably for the first time in your life.”

  The vision of the gauchos came back to Cabot.

  “Can I tell people about this?” Cabot inquired.

  The doctor appeared to be studying his question.

  “At least I can tell my wife?” he appealed to Bigelow-Martin in an almost wistful voice.

  “Just as you wish,” the doctor was grudgingly acquiescent, and he turned away from his patient, humming a tune.

  There were certain obvious warnings in what the doctor did not say, and Cabot understood that secrecy and indirection were characteristic of the profession. Yet, as Cabot asked himself, who would want to tell on himself and reveal what he had undergone in Bigelow-Martin’s office? Who would believe it?

  “My God, you look different,” Cynthia said when he came into the apartment. “You look like you’d been to Florida.”

  But Cabot was already unbuttoning his wife’s blouse.

  “I HOPE HE’S not charging you too much,” Mrs. Cabot Wright Junior said in bed, next morning, speaking of the doctor of course. Cabot had brought her morning orange juice and coffee because he felt it was his fault neither of them had had a wink of sleep till dawn. Irritated he did not reply, Cynthia tossed away her black mask which she wore to protect herself against early morning light.

  “Old Bigelow-Martin.” Cabot now hummed the same tune the doctor had. “As a matter of fact,” he finally came to her question, “I haven’t asked the old bird how much he is going to charge.”

  Cynthia fished some seeds out of her juice.

  They had both spent money recklessly, and even with the Cabot Wright Seniors’ help, were badly in debt.

  “You don’t think his fee will be prohibitive, do you, sweetheart?” he stood by her bedside, briefcase in hand.

  “Aren’t all their fees that?” she snapped. “I remember that time I fell while riding—”

  “Well, I’ll just tell him he can’t soak me too much. I’m newly married, after all, just starting in business…”

  Furious he had interrupted her, she spat: “Anybody could put you on a padded hook without your clothes on and let you pass out!”

  As he stared at her, incredulous at the anger in her outburst, she went on: “How do you know he’s an accredited M.D.?”

  “You, Cynthia, sent me to him.”

  “Draped naked over a hook,” she went back to this. “What kind of therapy is that?”

  “You admitted yourself I looked like I’d been to Florida,” he began now to open the door while making his kissing sound of goodbye.

  “It could all be dangerous,” she muttered, ignoring his goodbye.

  “So is being tired,” he told her. “Bye, lamby.”

  “Cabot!” she called, but he had already closed the hall door behind him. “All right,” she began to sob a bit, “hang on your goddam hook.” Then she cried in earnest, because she knew nothing was going to be right between them.

  ZOE BICKLE LOOKED up from the manuscript and gazed across the room. She was astounded by what she had read. Was this the real truth about Cabot Wright’s beginnings? Had Bernie Gladhart written these pages, even with Carrie’s help and guidance? Nervously, she stood up and went to the window. In the light of the street-lamp, she saw a policeman going by across the street, twirling his nightstick. She counted the five gold buttons he wore on each side of his jacket. Looking behind him, she saw the words, High Pressure Fire Service, Main Pumping Station, painted on the wall of the deserted building, with some words scrawled in chalk in big letters below: COOL FOOL YOU WILL NEVER EXECUTE THE MAD SPADES. She thought back to Chicago and Curt, and reviewed her unhappy marriage and life, thought of old age and death. She had called Curt a few times in Chicago, but he sounded more languid than ever, obviously deep in Isaiah, begrudging the time away from his work, much as if she had come into his room on returning home from the office. In recollection of another of Cabot’s eccentric habits, she found herself counting her own pulse. Some of Cabot Wright’s odd statements came back to her now, such as his “Mrs. Bickle would like to be interested, Reverend Cross,” which she now felt contained either a great truth or a great prophecy. She sat down in her chair again, and took up the manuscript where she had left off.]

  WHILE CYNTHIA DID her shopping in the supermarket or finished her weekly drawings for her fashion editor, Cabot would saunter into the office of Dr. Bigelow-Martin for his afternoon treatment on the hook.

  “How did we do today?” was the invariable question put to him by Bigelow-Martin, as the signal that the treatment had come to an end. Once sufficiently conscious, Cabot would reply from the hook in a voice described by the doctor’s eavesdropping secretary as “strained honey” :

  “Fine, doctor.”

  The doctor was already taking his pulse.

  “You’re one of my more intelligent patients,” Bigelow-Martin said. Then looking at his patient closer, he added: “At least one of my more cooperative. You follow instructions to the letter, and you don’t talk me to death. You’ll get well, Cabot…”

  Whether Bigelow-Martin had foreseen the ramifications of his cure or not, some strange and potent élan was released in Cabot shortly after the second treatment. At the time of the trial and investigation of Cabot Wright on criminal charges, Bigelow-Martin himself had disappeared, and with him any possible clue to his methods. But under the doctor’s ministrations, Cabot Wright came, so to speak, into full manhood. He bloomed, as so few men do, and the very sight of him made women stare, or hurry on, or stop.

  Some say that he now gave off a kind of sweetish rich animal-vegetable odor, such as one associates with the tropics and natives before they were spoiled by missionaries, constricting clothing, V.D., bottled drinks, and candies.

  At first Cabot Wright was not aware of his own metamorphosis. Cynthia, plunged into the difficulties of a dress-designer, did not pay too close attention to him, insofar as to note the daily changes in his makeup, and spent most of her time, actually, rejecting his renewed sexual attentions to her. “We’re living in the most civilized city in the world,” she remarked, “and we’re not going to do this every hour on the half-hour, and that’s final. What do you think you’re trying to prove? You look so pink and flushed, too, lately. Perhaps you’re eating too much red meat in those masculine Wall Street restauran
ts…”

  Cabot had required ten to eleven hours sleep before his treatments with Bigelow-Martin. He now slept only four or five hours a night. He slept stark naked. Often, in the middle of the night, his wife would wake up and see him with his eyes open contemplating his form. The fact was, as she finally came to understand, he was so relaxed that, even with eyes open, he was not conscious. She would call to him, nonetheless, urging him to close his eyes so that he would do his best work next day, and usually he would obey her.

  THE CHECK FROM Cabot Wright’s father was not always forthcoming, especially now that Cabot Junior had his Wall Street post, and Cabot and Cynthia’s expenses were increasing by geometric proportion. Cynthia found that she must work even more than when she was single if they were to keep their four-hundred-a-month apartment overlooking the water and the Statue of Liberty.

  “Where does the money go?” came so frequently from her mouth that Cabot pinned the words, cut from an advertisement, on the wall above their dinette.

  Stingy at heart, Cabot, refusing to plunk down what they were asking for movies and plays, began browsing in a branch of the Brooklyn public library, a pastime which carved up his evening until Cynthia’s return from her fashion shows. He developed a sudden interest in books about plants and animal-life, especially such exotic forms as the fish in Asiatic waters.

  Rummaging around the shelves for books about his newfound subject, he soon realized that because this was a branch library, there was very little available except for those books forgotten or discarded in the receding tide of popular taste. He picked up one large red book on popular science, long out of date, and read:

  SWIMMERS AND DRIFTERS

  The animals of the open sea are conveniently divided into the active swimmers (nekton) and the more passive drifters (Plankton). The swimmers include whales… The drifters, jellyfishes.

  His eye ran on at random, as his hand lifted page after page:

  Sometimes when a plant is grown in a foreign country, artificial pollination must be resorted to: the marrows and peaches in our gardens and hot-houses are commonly pollinated by hand. The red clover never set seed in New Zealand till the bumble-bee, to which it is adapted, was introduced.

  He read about the Cuckoo-Pint which attracts flies by a carrion stench and by the lurid purple of the club of its flowering axis, and went on to the case of the Red-Clover, in Darwin, and the ripe flower-head of the Goat’s Beard, whose petals close before midday causing the flower itself to be sometimes called Jack-go-to-bed-at-Noon.

  Cabot yawned widely, and touched his heavy lids with his hand.

  At that moment a young woman in a soft blue sweater sat down at the same reading table with him, exactly as if she had come out of one of Cynthia’s fashion magazines.

  Yawning now almost helplessly, he found at the same time he could not quit staring at the sweater girl.

  His hour of reading about tropical plants and seeds, together with the warm air of the library, had caused him to break out in a sweat such as he had never experienced since he had had to do hard manual labor in the Army. Rivulets of water poured down his temples, and from his arm pits. He took out a large silk handkerchief, a graduation gift from his mother, and wiped his forehead. The cloth came away soaking.

  His eyes, smarting with the unaccustomed bath of perspiration, tried to focus on the text:

  The flowers are hidden in a large green hood or spathe, in the mouth of which can be seen the club-like end of the floral axis. This club attracts flies by its lurid color and its foetid smell.

  Feeling the girl’s eyes on him, Cabot Wright loosened his collar slightly, then tied his Italian all-silk necktie, with severe stringency.

  “Warm,” he heard his own word addressed to the girl in the sweater.

  She smiled at him with the calm of one who knew him.

  “No ventilation,” he whispered, took out a pack of English cigarettes and laid them down between them. His eyes continued:

  In wind-pollinated plants the adaptations run on different lines. The pollen is dust-like and is produced in enormous quantities, for the chances of a grain borne in the air reaching the stigma of a flower of its own species are remote. The grains are small and light; in the pine they are provided with two little bladders, the better to float in the air. Conspicuous corollas are useless; they would even be a hindrance, catching the flying pollen and preventing it reaching the stigma. The corolla has almost entirely disappeared, the wind flower is small and inconspicuous. The stamens hang far out of the flower on slender filaments, dangling in the air, shaken by every gust. The stigmas, too, protrude—the crimson filaments of the hazel, the feather of the plantain, the brushes which hang from the grass ear—winnowing the air for drifting pollen.

  He closed the book with a bang which molested several readers. He grasped the package of cigarettes.

  Again he heard his own voice: “Any chance your joining me in a cigarette?”

  Her lips formed the word No mutely, but after a wait, she got up to follow him.

  They walked out into the hallway. The building was undergoing extensive alterations, according to a sign in the hall. A huge hole in the wall exposed another empty darkened room adjoining where they now stood.

  His fingers trembled so badly as he tried to light her cigarette that she had to hold his hand briefly, the hairs of which were weighted with drops of perspiration. They smiled at one another.

  “Overhead lights add to the heat,” he said.

  She nodded in her eviscerated debrained cool sweater-ad grace: “I’m a bit used to them. Actress,” she pointed to herself. “Catching up on the theater files. Am here nearly every day lately.”

  “You’re researching,” he giggled, taking Cynthia’s phrase.

  A rivulet of sweat slipped from his cheek to his soft gabardine lapel, and the Italian silk tie gave and the top button of his shirt was exposed.

  In his absorption at feeling the droplets of perspiration descending from his face, he missed something she said to him. He was about to make some reference to Cynthia’s profession, when the girl looked in the direction of the darkened room next to them, and pointed out gleefully that it had an electric fan going.

  They entered the room to observe the phenomenon.

  He saw her lips move in surprise, and then he adjusted his own mouth quickly and solidly to hers. She pushed him with mechanical violence. He hit her lips again, and holding her against the wall, he had, with a routine instantaneity, unzipped his fly. A kind of barking cry of relief came from his throat, while he muttered into her hair: “Get deadly.”

  A dangling thread of saliva, or perhaps sweat, extending between both their mouths, helped impose silence.

  Afterwards, drying himself on mouth and neck with sheet after sheet of paper towel, he decided that she had not cried out for fear of attracting visitors.

  “Get deadly,” he quoted his own unpremediated phrase initial to his new career.

  8

  “YOU COULD COAX IT OUT OF ME”

  After reading these pages on the early career of Cabot Wright, Mrs. Bickle did what a few weeks earlier she would have considered daring. Nor would she have done it now, if she realized what time it was—two in the morning. She went to Cabot Wright’s room, carrying the novel in manuscript.

  She knocked twice and the door was opened for her by Cabot Wright. He was not surprised she had come, and seemed to know for what purpose she was here, for he put his hand out tentatively for the manuscript. She handed it to him without a word.

  Before she could say more, he had closed the door upon her. Though she stood there for what seemed some time, there was nothing for her to do but return to her own room. It was then she looked at her gold watch and saw the hour.

  HAVING REGAINED HER room, Mrs. Bickle sat down in her easy chair, and perhaps as much worn out by the events of the past weeks as by the lateness of the hour, she went to sleep. She was awakened from an uneasy doze by the sound of reveille coming from Governors
Island. Then she was startled, if not terrified, to see someone sitting across from her. It was Cabot Wright, of course, dressed in what must once have been an expensive dressing-gown, stained by breakfast and with one sleeve badly in need of sewing. She recalled that he had had this article of clothing on when she had knocked at his door some hours earlier.

  He nodded and, giggling as usual, said: “I’m returning your call.”

  Her own action with regard to him had deprived her of any grounds for indignation, criticism or indeed appeal. He knew obviously what she was in Brooklyn for, and that she must be a person who would stop at nothing—she saw that her “falling” through the glass sky-light into his room must be construed by him as a form of reckless intrepidity, the hardened ruse of a dyed-in-the-wool newspaper woman and adventuress.

  In the feeble dawn, she questioned her own motives in having gone to him and handing him the manuscript of Bernie’s novel. Her action seemed now to her an abject appeal for help on her part. She realized she did want to write the novel herself, just as Princeton Keith had suggested. Some stifled cry of authorship buried by her marriage to Curt must be asserting itself in terrible Brooklyn.

  Instead of saying anything to the point, she suppressed a groan, and said in her old Chicago manner: “Since you’ve lost your memory, Mr. Wright, I don’t suppose you can tell me if what you’ve read is authentic or not. That is, if you did read Bernie Gladhart’s book?” and she looked at his hands which held the typescript pages of the novel.

  “This manuscript?” He giggled briefly again, and took off his glasses. “I read it… no, I’ve not lost my memory for consecutive events,” he began. “I remember the separate details when once they’re put together for me. You see for nearly a year I read nothing but stories about myself. In newspapers, magazines, foreign and domestic—me, me, me. All the time I was in prison it was my story that was being told and retold. I read so many versions of what I did, I can safely affirm that I couldn’t remember what I did and what I didn’t.”