Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (15 page)

“Agreed then, my boy!” the old broker vociferated over his Ramon Allones cigar.

Cabot said nothing, and did not even go pale. Later he wondered what would have happened if he had repeated his earlier tantrum, and refused to write Monthly Reports. This time, drinking his French cognac, sinking into the rich leather of his chair, with the soothing ubiquitous oak-panelling behind him, he could only say yes of course to Monthly Reports.

Mr. Warburton had immediately slapped him on the back, spilling a long ash, and crying, “That’s the ticket, boy!”

Cabot had smiled faintly and Mr. Warburton, wanting to say something assuring, had then stumbled for words, the sure sign of an even more unfavorable attitude toward Cabot than before his General Partner had taken the enforced vacation.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Cabot had helped the old man. “You’re thinking, ‘The son of a bitch still looks tired.’”

Mr. Warburton had turned purple with laughter, then stroking the back of his head, said gravely, “Well, who wouldn’t, laddie, in your shoes? Good God, with your better-half in a mental home!”

A FEW DAYS
later, summoned unexpectedly to Mr. Warburton’s presence, Cabot fully expected to be fired once and for all. Instead Mr. Warburton had some black crepe on his arm. Cabot was already rehearsing his “speech of relief” at hearing the news of his dismissal, though he thought the touch of mourning was a bit much even for Warby.

Warburton began: “It is my melancholy duty to inform you that the first great tragedy of manhood has happened to you, my boy.”

Cabot heard the sentence and thought it applied to his dismissal. Sitting in a swivel chair, looking out the window over glass buildings and old brown church steeples, sweat again began to seep through his cotton undershirt, and though his body suffered, he knew he couldn’t care less. In fact at that moment he believed he would have been indifferent if he had been told the thermonuclear bomb was being counted down to go off. There had been so many threats, warnings, auguries, coming catastrophes, ends and beginnings of ends, cataclysms and Armageddons. What could you do but not care?

At that moment Mr. W. put his hand on Cabot’s shoulder, and the latter of course jumped slightly. “Now, now,” Mr. Warburton was patting him. “It’s your parents,” he almost whispered. “Your Mom and Dad, Cabby…” He removed his hands from Cabot’s shoulders to wipe his glasses, for tears were coming from his creased eyelids. “You couldn’t have picked a finer pair of people, let me tell you, to grow up with.”

“What’s their problem?” Cabot finally said from behind a linen handkerchief with which he was drying his neck.

Mr. Warburton did not appear to take in Cabot’s inquiry, for he was continuing with his announcement:

“While pleasure-cruising in the troubled waters of the Caribbean, my boy, an incendiary bomb fell on their yacht, setting it afire immediately and sinking it. Your parents, Cabot, perished instantly. There is no doubt on that score. Hope is idle. However, they did not suffer. I can reassure you on that…” He brought out a crumpled telegram from his vest pocket, and prompted himself. “Now, as your father’s solicitor and also the executor of both your parents’ estates…”

“My foster parents, Mr. Warburton,” Cabot said in a loud voice.

When Mr. Warburton merely popped his eyes at him, Cabot went on: “You knew I was supposititious. Think we discussed it once.”

“I’m aware of your origins, sir,” Mr. Warburton cried with passion, for he felt that any interruption at a moment like this, and with regard to an announcement such as he was making, was not only inexcusable but in appalling bad taste.

“Who my real parents were,” Cabot was going blithely on, “well, as they say in the funny papers, you search me.” He laughed quickly and then tightened his mouth.

“In the funny papers,” Mr. Warburton repeated, and then studied Cabot with serious scrutiny for, as he knew, great grief sometimes masks itself in incoherent remarks just before the bereaved one collapses. He therefore placed his arm again on Cabot’s shoulder.

Shifting under Mr. Warburton’s pressure which was meant to comfort, Cabot placed his hand now under his undershirt, working to stop a twin rivulet of sweat which had begun to race unevenly over his pectorals, one stream of which was racing down toward his abdomen.

Mr. Warburton on observing this behavior immediately rang his buzzer, and Sue of Short Hills responded.

“Brandy,” Mr. Warburton said to her.

“I’m not surprised the news has unhinged you, my lad,” Mr. Warburton now spoke in quiet and uneasy tones to his General Partner. “After all, it’s your second blow in a very short period of time. And your most acute. We can always marry again in this country, but where are we going to find parents once we lose them? Grieve openly, my boy, don’t hold it in. Grieve.” He patted Cabot’s shoulder briefly again.

Going back to his desk, however, Mr. Warburton repeated aloud to himself: “In the funny papers! By God, what do you make of that for a remark.”

Addressing Cabot, then, in a loud business-like voice, he went on: “My boy, you realize now that you are a wealthy man in your own right. Easy street and that kind of thing.” He cleared his throat.

Sue of Short Hills reentered with the decanter of brandy, which Mr. Warburton took pontifically, waving her out of the room.

He poured Cabot a drink, got ice from a nearby container, and handed him the brandy on the rocks. He made no offer to help himself, as he had had a snort a short time before.

Cabot drank thirstily, while getting out the words: “Just the same, Mr. Warburton, I’d like to have a chance with those Monthly Reports…”

The old man looked at him appraisingly, cautiously.

“I mean, what would I do without work?” Cabot proceeded. “I can’t just walk the Brooklyn Bridge and back, with no excuse for doing so, can I?”

Mr. Warburton showed his involuntary respect for the newly crested millionaire by changing his mind and pouring himself a brandy.

“My wife in the nut-hatch, my parents killed in the revolutionary Caribbean,” Cabot faced him threateningly. “By God, you owe me those Monthly Reports!” He was close enough now to see the older man’s dentures. “How about it, Warby?”

Mr. Warburton winced when he heard so young a man call him by nickname, but he overlooked this also in light of what had happened. He smirked, however, perhaps under the sting of the lack of reverence, squared his shoulders and advanced to the window in General MacArthur strides.

“Holocaust as it is,” the old tycoon orated, “almost Biblical in its conclusiveness—” He could not go on, and wheeling around from the window to face Cabot, he blurted out, “But you’re rich as Croesus!”

He studied Cabot’s face, but evidently saw nothing on it which informed him of anything.

“Tell you what I’d like to suggest,” Mr. Warburton approached the bereaved man again, putting his arm around him. “I’d like you to take the day off, and I’d like you to have luncheon tomorrow with my wife Gilda. You’ve heard things about Gilda, of course you have. Discount them. She’s frail in health. You know, she doesn’t see many people. Kind of a hermit of late. But take the day off. A woman’s sympathy and kindness are what you need as of now. I won’t accompany you tomorrow. But I think Gilda’s the ticket. Just step out of my office a moment, will you, while I phone her and have the arrangements made certain. Will you please, laddie?” Cabot was amazed at this suggestion of Mr. Warburton. Only the very top brass were allowed to meet his wife. Cabot knew he was really “in.”

Before he was able to do much in the way of drying his chest and arms of the bath of perspiration he had inflicted upon himself, Mr. Warburton himself popped into the lavatory and informed Cabot that Gilda would be more than delighted to have luncheon next day. Then as Cabot adjusted his clothing, Mr. Warburton put his arm around him again and patted him with mechanical rapidity on the ass. “Keep the old spinal column straight,” he told the bereaved. There were no longer tears in the old man’s eyes, and the hard vague look of the hyena was back.

“And if you feel so disposed, God damn it,” he finished, “call me Warby from now on.”

“Thank you, Mr. Warburton, I will,” Cabot replied.

11

LUNCHING WITH GILDA

T
he succession of incredible, though (to Cabot) uninteresting events, that made him all at once orphan, widower, newly re-employed, rich, respectable and criminal, did not overwhelm him in the least. They made him want to go on doing as he pleased.

He sat in his four-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment and peeped out the windows with a pair of Army surplus binoculars at the historical panorama anchored in the waters of the rivers Hudson and East. He could still smell the perfume from Cynthia’s clothes. Just before she had lost her reason, she had gone clever and begun using men’s colognes, which had been the style in her day. He giggled as he savored that last phrase,
in her day
.

He decided to phone the institution where Cynthia was safely immured, and inquire about her. “Condition satisfactory,” a voice, obviously recorded, informed him. He then asked the voice what condition satisfactory meant, and the voice repeated the single word, satisfactory. No visitors was still the watchword. It reminded him that in his own office when his secretary was said to be not at her desk, one knew she was in the pee-parlor making up or something. His wife Cynthia was crazy as a bat in hell but her condition was going to be satisfactory, he would be told, until she died of old age.

Cabot listened to the phone ring every so often. Sometimes he answered it in a disguised voice, again he did not. After all, in his new character of orphan-widower, rich-office clerk, arrived-criminal, he didn’t exactly see the point of answering. What could anybody tell him now, after all?

GILDA WARBURTON HAD
been drinking, Cabot realized, immediately she had opened the door of Mr. Warburton’s house on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park.

Looking at his hostess, under the chandelier of the hallway, he remembered having seen her at a charity ball with Cynthia earlier that year, a woman of indeterminate age, much younger than her spouse, with a popular wig of the hour, a breast alight with jewels, flashing in cadence with bracelets of gold and platinum, and a stale dank gin breath.

“The wife of the great broker!” Cabot wanted to exclaim as she ushered him to a chair. “Where are your servants?” he was about to inquire, surprised by the lonesome silence of the mansion.

She had already anticipated his question, and was giving her popular lecture on how, in the current of the present, she had got rid of her European servants (though they were loves) and had engaged colored personnel. The latter had brought her deep satisfaction and peace, had given her, as an American, and through their character as Americans, a closer touch with the realities of the present. Furthermore, this new relationship between employer and servant had revived for her her wonderful Alabama childhood, when she had known oh so many marvelous marvelous Negroes. She shaded her eyes with her palm.

“I feel deeply close to this wonderful new awakening nation within us,” Gilda continued. “Our sterling colored friends,” she looked away at the flicker in Cabot’s eye, “noble people with a grand tomorrow… Brady and Anna (she named her personnel) are slow, but they’re gold.”

Gilda finished her speech as she gave the signal for Cabot to march with her into a huge anteroom. Still leading the way, she ushered him into a cavernous parlor, where he slouched into a creamy gold divan.

“But here while I talk about new nations and tomorrow, dear young Cabot,” Gilda raised her voice, “your own loss, poor boy! What can tomorrow mean in the face of such a terrible sorrow?”

She placed her index and middle finger over her frown marks, perhaps in prayer.

“You knew there were two, I gather,” Cabot remarked, moistening his upper lip.

Gilda turned her head briefly in his direction. “Two?” she said. “Ah, yes, two parents,” she seemed to echo, for her left ear, if not turned just right, often missed a crucial word or so.

“Two losses,” he corrected. “Cynthia went off her rocker last week, as I informed Warby,” Cabot remarked in a voice adjusted for deafness, while he looked about to see if there might be drinks cached away nearby. “She went just a short time before the explosion took off Mom and Dad.”

“Cynthia?” Gilda pondered, thinking perhaps Cabot had reference here to a servant of his own, for servants were a permanent source of attention for Gilda Warburton.

“Our cocktails are on the way,” she thought best to change the subject, for she understood the nervous motions of her youthful guest’s hands as arising without a doubt from the discomfort of thirst that she too suffered. “Any second now,” she reassured him, and glanced inquiringly at her white nail polish.

Then reconciled to the slowness of her new servants, she went on with a short speech: “I feel it’s an imposition for me even to ask you here,” she spoke now in soaring tones, “but Warby thought you should see somebody. Staying in the office is out of the question, as of course is being alone.”

“Oh I intend to go back to the office, unless I get word to the contrary.”

“Oh I didn’t mean that,” Gilda cried, much too emphatically. “Warby would
never
allow you to leave him! Not in a year of Sundays!” Though her voice was shrill, her lack of conviction was paramount. She therefore escaped on to: “But who is Cynthia, dear fellow, if you’ll pardon an old woman’s paucity of information.”