Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (16 page)

Cynthia was my wife,” Cabot intoned. “Went out of her head last week in a new shiny supermarket. Good place for it, as Leah Goldberg more or less said outright. Worried too much, you know, Cynthia. Dress-designer. Tense and keyed up over everything. I blame it on our not having a car. But we couldn’t afford everything and live in a nice neighborhood like we did. Choice between an apartment and a car, and that did it.”

“Leah Goldberg is a friend, I take it,” Gilda considered this name, improbable though it was in her circle of acquaintance.

Then firmly, and with great assurance, she said, “I had no idea at all you were married, dear boy. Warby never mentioned it. Do you suppose he didn’t know it also?” She laughed. “Certainly he never even hinted at this second tragedy of yours, or your first one, whichever the order. He always speaks of you as one of his boys. And all the time you’ve had a wife, and now, as you say, she’s—well gone mad, to put it truly.”

A paroxysm of giggling overtook Cabot at that moment, and Gilda herself could not restrain a sudden burst of laughter on her part.

“Life is so terrible!” she announced, still laughing.

A tall Negro servant entered with a tray bearing two oversize cocktails.

“Brady, here,” Gilda commanded as she saw him begin to go first in the direction of Cabot. “This is Mr. Cabot Wright, Brady,” she coached. “A General Partner in my husband’s firm.”

The cocktails distributed, Brady was about to leave, when hearing a cautious whisper of his name, and a loud “Thank you,” he turned back, and then receiving Gilda’s permissive dismissal, exited.

“I’m still training Brady, as you must have observed,” Gilda pointed out when the servant had left the room. “As I said, I want to have a part in their future. My European days are over. I remember my own Alabama roots more and more, and I feel I’ve earned my Afro-American servants. It’s only fair for all of us.” She quickly sipped her drink.

“To Africa!” Cabot raised his glass.

Gilda thought for a moment before raising her own, and then amended Cabot’s toast to “Let’s drink prayerfully, if I may say so, Cabot, to your own uncertain future. Africa will wait.”

They drank on that, and it was this drink, actually the fifth pre-luncheon “taster” for Gilda, that seemed to reach her, for she swiftly became very flushed and from then on lost a good deal of the thread of conversation.

Brady entered, however, almost immediately with another tray of cocktails.

“It was good of Warby to think you would like luncheon with me, in any case,” Gilda said while muttering some reproof
sotto voce
to Brady, while taking her new glass and snatching up a watercress sandwich. “Warby has (that will do, Brady) an occasional good idea from time to time. I speak of the human world, mind you. I know nothing ’t all about his business genius, which I am told is on the breathtaking side. He makes piles of money and that impresses the outside public.

“Shall we tell Anna luncheon in five minutes?” Gilda called somewhere in the direction of the retiring Brady, her vision now not quite allowing her to spot him.

“Let me admit it. I adore Negroes.” Gilda asseverated, when the door had closed behind Brady. “Adored them, mark you, before they were in all the newspapers.”

“To Africa, Gilda,” Cabot tilted his glass at her.

She thought a moment, and then said, “If you insist, youthful Cabot, if you insist. To Africa! It’s a big toast, though.”

“You’re big, Gilda,” Cabot said sweetly, so that she accepted his remark, after a glance, without comment.

Studying him a bit more closely now, Gilda remarked, “Grief hasn’t spoiled your looks, my dear, I’m glad to report to you.”

As they tasted their drinks, Cabot made smacking sounds which she was not aware were echoing hers.

Gilda said, “I don’t know whether I’m big or not, come to think of it. Did you think Warby’s big?”

“Off hand, I’d say why ain’t he, Gilda,” Cabot replied.

“What about off-the-cuff?” Gilda wondered.

“On or off, I’d say he was big,” Cabot replied.

“Hmm,” she considered his remark. “What can I say to comfort you, though, charming boy? We’ve given Africa and Wall Street the benefit of our doubts. What about you? Where do you come in?”

“Maybe luncheon wasn’t the right idea,” she went on. “Maybe you should have gone to a Turkish bath. I hear they’re great for grief.”

“But remember I’m not grieving,” he assured her.

“Ah, you’re going to have the delayed kind,” she considered this. “That will be awful. Perhaps luncheon again at that time, what say?” She caressed him with her eyes and her tone. “I hope you’ll like what we’re having to eat. So few of my friends think highly of my menus. They’ve spoiled their taste buds beyond the power of satisfaction. At least you’re a man. Hunger does a lot. Anna always has something palatable because she’s on to hunger. I love Anna. She’s black as midnight, but I’m not sorry I changed from the European plan. After all, I’m Alabama myself…”

“Tuxedo Park was unaware of any problem, I guess,” said Cabot.

“You must think of it in this way,” Gilda puckered her lips, and Cabot noticed her mouth was still beautiful. “See where we are, I mean, my lad. We are sailing in troubled waters, all of us, high and low, white, black, brown, speckled, or mottled. God bless all colors, say I, since we’re together and can’t do anything about weeding things out now if we tried. We’re afloat in rotten climate and lunatic weather besides.”

Cabot put down his glass slowly.

“I’m afraid,” Gilda said. “Aren’t you?”

He was still wondering at her fear when Brady announced luncheon.

Cabot and Gilda went into the dinning-room arm in arm, but Gilda insisted that Brady seat her so that he wouldn’t lose his lesson.

“I’ve got to train him, and I’ve got to exercise my responsibility,” Gilda said, when Brady had gone out of the room again. “I’ve got to give them their chance. He’s got to have a real beginning somewhere, and this is where I’m giving it to him. Of course there’s wax in his ears and he sniffles, and there’s a kind of smell at times—why pretend. But I’ve got to give them their chance.”

Staring at her soup, she asked, “Cabot, are you afraid?”

Cabot said he was sometimes, but didn’t think about it.

“Don’t you like turtle soup?” she inquired as she noticed he was not touching his bowl.

He took a mouthful then and said “Ahem.”

“You do feel a little consolation here, I hope. Of course you’ve lost everybody you had in the world, haven’t you?” she suddenly narrowed her eyes as she sensed the enormity of it. “That you can sit up at all is wonderful,” she praised him. “Cabot, you’re wonderful,” she applauded him. “And grief doesn’t mottle your complexion either. It turns mine to coffee and grime. You have auburn hair, too. So few auburn-haired people in my life now, except for wigs.”

She pushed back her plate. “I know Warby must be hell to work for…”

“Oh it’s all me frankly,” Cabot volunteered.

“I doubt that. He’s not human at all, you know. This quality has kept us together, I suppose, nonetheless. But he’s just a troll, a mammoth mummy with a motor, but no soul.”

“Don’t you see him sometimes as a shoebill?” Cabot inquired,
thinking aloud as her mention of animals carried him back to his reading at the branch library.

“Shoebill?” she considered the word if she could not visualize the thing. “I’m afraid you’ve got me there,” she wiped her chin slowly with her napkin, and studied her guest narrowly. “However,” she proceeded, “the only relationship one can have with Warby is working for him. Not with him, please note. Yes, that’s the way the boat rocks.” She threw her head back in the attitude of one about to vocalize.

“And now here’s the sesame fried chicken,” Gilda greeted Brady as he entered. She touched a drumstick with her index finger. “Sometimes I run Down Town for luncheon with Warby,” Gilda went on. “Feel such a blamed prisoner in this house, and my servants are so good to me during the day. Sometimes I could almost scream. Ever get tired of being treated so
nice?
” Gilda put the matter to Cabot.

He stopped chewing a moment in an effort to think it over. “My life is largely paper work,” Cabot confided.

“How would one describe my life, do you suppose?” his hostess looked at her forkful of dark meat. “Dressing up and getting there takes the day,” she said. “I don’t write letters any more, though in my day I was a minor Mme. De Sévigné. Phone calls finished me. Dial just anywhere at present, call up California or London or Nice and say, ‘I hadn’t a minute to pick up the inkwell. How are you?’ Half-listen to this and that, and goodbye again. So miraculous and yet so unsatisfying, so spooky-unreal to hear people’s live voices when you know you’ll never see them alive again if you both live to be 200. It’s already like talking to the River Styx. Writing letters to people was better, but who has the time or will power any more? Do you know, Doctor told me when I cry I double my metabolic rate? But, Doctor, I said, when I write a letter it must quadruple it. I was always so emotional. Warby, I know, hasn’t heard anything I’ve said since 1930.”

Cabot finished his chicken and pimento potatoes.

“Speaking of writing,” Gilda went on, “I used to be on speaking terms with this retired novelist Princeton Keith, now turned big-time publisher. He was the rage for a year or so as a writer, and do you know what from? Framing me in a novel of the epoch—oh, before you were born or thought of! I always have the feeling, too, he’s waiting to frame me all over again…”

Gilda looked thoughtful, and then very sad. “The whole world was his prey, Cabot. Since you mentioned animals—what was it, the Bluebill? —well, do you know what Keith has on his wall, along with the heads of wild beasts. Well, on his wall is the head of an animal that is the friend of man. There on the wall with wild boars, tigers, and snow leopards.”

She began to cry.

“Is it a horse?” Cabot began to guess.

Gilda shook her head.

“A collie?”

“No, no,” she seemed to scold him, drying her tears. “It’s a camel, dear friend.”

She cried a little more, and rang the bell for Brady.

“Keith didn’t shoot camels too, did he?” Cabot hadn’t bothered to tell Gilda he knew the game-hunter in question.

“He couldn’t shoot,” Gilda looked at him with tender condescension. “Princeton put me in a book once,” she reminisced, looking at the design on her china. “
Clarissa, Mistress of Sam
was the title, best-seller, book-of-the-week selection, you know—they go in for dirt, you see, if the prose is a bit refined. I was a prostitute in it, with just a
soupçon
of the lesbian. Can you imagine it now? I was, you see, Clarissa. Warby was going to sue Princeton, when he realized… But you’re not concentrating!” Gilda cried, staring at Cabot.

Her guest sputtered something.

“But why should you concentrate, you dear thing, with all your grief? How do you do it, Cabot? You’re of heroic mould. I know I’m boring you, but it’s better to bore you than have you sitting alone overlooking the Statue of Liberty and all that water flowing out to sea. I’ve tried to be amusing. And I gave the luncheon, so forgive me, for Christ’s sake…”

Sobbing, Gilda rushed out into a side room and closed the door behind her.

Cabot Wright sprang up with alacrity after her, and pounded on the closed door. “Gilda, come out at once. I must see you!”

Brady entered at the moment with the dessert plates and doilies, and exited after a hooded glance of wonder and surprise.

Cabot managed to open the door of Gilda’s retreat and went in. She was sitting in a large fat chair, in what was a small den-like chamber, blowing her nose. Her wig was a bit crooked.

“Gilda, dear lady,” Cabot said, “forgive me if I seemed inattentive or offended you in any way.”

“Offended? You couldn’t do that, dear child. It’s too late for anybody even to try to offend me. No, it has nothing to do with you. I’m an old recluse, that’s all. I know I’ve bored you, and besides I can’t remember in a prolonged conversation what topic’s been covered and what hasn’t. Luncheons are a workout! People are a workout! And I’m not very well,” she cried hard now remembering her metabolism.

Her diamond necklace flashed in the subdued light just as she finished talking.

“You look so absent-minded when you perspire as you are doing now,” Gilda remarked. “Shall we go back to the table for our dessert, like soldiers?” A worried look passed over her eyes and brow.

“I think dessert is out of the question,” Cabot told her.

“How gaily you put it,” Gilda smiled again. “I suppose you think I’m plump enough besides.”

“I hadn’t thought so, Gilda,” Cabot sat down beside her.

He put his hand on her white arm.

“Shan’t we return to the dining room just the same?” she wondered, wistful.

“Just to give Brady his lesson? I think not.”

“Dear Cabot,” she tried to remind him of his loss.

“It’s deadly,” he said the word. The sting of his kiss warned her too late.

“I have servants!” she cried. “Am expecting callers!”

He had already begun to remove her clothing.