Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (11 page)

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 restaurants…”

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”

A
fter 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.”

He raised his right hand as if gesturing in sleep.

She was about to ask him how true Bernie’s fiction was, when he went on, as if to answer for her:

“Did I do all this?” he tapped the sheaf of manuscript. “Yes, I’d say so, but it still reads wrong. The facts, I mean, are put together, the beads are all strung along like they were mine, but there’s no necklace. The press and TV stories were also like that, you see—everything people said, then and later, describing everything about me to a T, including those things I didn’t really know about myself. For instance, this manuscript points out at the beginning that I was a supposititious child, which I didn’t really ever remember hearing as a term until I was out of prison and a magazine told me about it. Nor did I know my exact wrist measurements until a lady journalist, helped by a police captain who’d put the tape around me, said my body weight was ideal in line with the circumference of my wrist and height. My complexion was described with the exact artist’s color and shade, my excessive perspiration was counted in drops, together with a chemical description of odor and content, and there was of course my blood count and blood type. Who didn’t know these things who read the dailies?” He giggled hard now. “If you’ll excuse the detail, which I know you will because you’re a writer, the size of my glans penis was testified to in court and got into print, but the extenuating fact is that I never saw the Brooklyn housewife who described it, and certainly never assaulted her, even in the dark. I read somewhere, in school, that Louis XVI had his puce coat torn to shreds during or after being guillotined, and my silk Brooks Brothers suit was slashed and divided by female spectators the first day of my trial. Yet I’ve heard my own life so many times, I can say I’m a stranger to the story itself. If somebody told you the story of your own life, Mrs. Bickle, in New York news-paper English, wouldn’t you disremember yourself too?”