Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (22 page)

“‘Yes, I can call myself a philanthropist,’ I told Bertha. ‘I give away a lot,’ and then, Mrs. Bickle, I couldn’t stop giggling.

“‘Are you listed as a philanthropic society?’ Bertha McIntosh continued the interrogation.

“‘Don’t suppose I could list myself as such, as all I do is give out free rooms to whoever needs one, I don’t phone the Government I am doing it.’

“Bertha McIntosh was even more unfavorably impressed by my giggle than she had been by my grin. And I am sure, Mrs. Bickle, it was my giggle led to my arrest later on (the Puerto Rican girl with the pimples knew what that giggle meant, let me tell you).

“Miss McIntosh’s showing me her disfavor by a curled lip was her first mistake, you might say.

“‘I’m afraid I’ll have to report this entire matter to City Hall,’ Miss McIntosh beamed and got up to go. ‘Thanks for the coffee.’

“‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t do that if I were, or was, you,’ I said.

“‘What?’ she said, a kind of green ivory shade now.

“‘Wouldn’t tell anybody I’m not a society,’ I explained to her.

“‘Mr. Wright,’ Miss McIntosh said, ‘I’m afraid you’re asking me to disobey my superior. I’m doing my job, after all…’

“‘See that banister on the winding staircase?’ I pointed to this early twentieth-century work of art, copied from Federal interiors. She stared.

“‘Hop on it, and I’ll show you what we’re talking about.’

“‘Good morning, Mr. Wright!’

“But I had already picked her up and placed her on the banister.

“‘Get your little panties off and we’ll see who’s who,’ I encouraged her.”

As Mrs. Bickle made an eyeshade of her left hand, she learned that Miss McIntosh, like all the rest of them, didn’t do a thing. Cabot went on: “Bertha cried a little after a while, shucks, and the exertion had tired her too. Sitting together, we two, after it was all over, as she drank and drank more coffee with generous helpings of rum, I said: ‘Bertha, everybody is screwed in America to protect the innocent. America is sports is fun. Get American, kiddo. Get American.’ Then as I looked at her again, I said, ‘God, Bertha, do you look guilty!’

“I’m telling you all this, Mrs. Bickle,” Cabot Wright continued, “in order to lead up to a certain letter-confession which Bertha penned after she began to go straight again, and which I keep in my breast pocket… Her entire life had been as unpleasant as though she had been tied under the posterior regions of a huge mammoth, such as a rhinoceros. ‘I felt a monster crouching over me, and I was powerless even to show nausea, such a conformist had I become.’ Bertha McIntosh speaking, mind you. She has put on 10 pounds and is the picture of advertising, rosy, beaming, nice toothpaste grin, and an outgoing manner recommended by churches. She never speaks of me, but is grateful, and here’s what I’ve been leading up to, Mrs. Bickle, as I’ve sat here and heard with you most of the story of my life, except for my career as philanthropist and 300 odd additional rapes I can’t quite remember. Bertha McIntosh is grateful I showed her the way.

“Her name is now Mrs. Dirkey. Had I not approached Bertha that late fall evening, she would have continued to believe in her mission as a municipal agent, thought that her enforcing of the law was as important as the revolving of the celestial sphere, and would have died an old maid. After I had loosened her up with (quote) my philanthropy (the pain was just as terrible as an aunt of hers in Elkhart had told her, intolerable, inhuman, such pressure, and yet after it was all over,
memories
) Bertha, as I say, gave up her fine position in City Hall, quit reading intellectual magazines like
The New Yorker
and
Red Book
and went back to Staten Island, which had been chewed up a lot by bulldozers but was still home to her. She married Fred J. Dirkey, a retired housepainter and wheelbarrow repairman, and they planned a family. To tide things over a bit, she opened the frankfurter-stand and became adapted to and dynamically integrated in this way of life. I still send Bertha Hallmark greeting cards whenever I have time to pick a card up. She wrote me this letter of thanks, you see, explaining that had she not met me, had she not had this experience, painful though it was, she would never have found herself, never married, never found the happiness she seems to have achieved with Fred Dirkey. Unfortunately, Bertha has not been able to become a mother, which was always her most cherished ideal but Fred, retired, needs a great deal of attention, and she has found caring for him and his wants an answer to her unfulfilled maternal aspirations. Mrs. Dirkey has a beautiful disposition, and engages in the interesting recent hobbies of collecting butterfly nets and early post-Victorian paperweights. She will always, she says, be grateful to one Cabot Wright.”

A FEW DAYS
after Cabot Wright’s marathon hear-and-answer-back with Mrs. Bickle, in which he had to remind her four or five times that during his heroic career as rapist he had not been deaf, he summoned her out of bed to make a date for the following night. By his desperate tone and hard breathing, she took it to be a matter of some importance. He promised her a sheaf of documents he was getting from a Wall Street safety-deposit box, and said he would turn these over to her, Bernie Gladhart, Princeton Keith and company for making him immortal in a novel. The place of their rendezvous was downtown, at his old stamping-ground, Hanover Square.

They met in a little park near some dead trees, facing an old brown building called India House. Nearby were the Cotton Exchange and several other buildings looking like stage sets. “We can sit here, Mrs. Bickle,” Cabot said after her arrival, “and not be overheard.” He looked around him. “Damned odd note here tonight. There are rats all around. Two just scurried past my outstretched shoe.”

“Since I’m from Chicago, I’ll feel right at home.” Mrs. Bickle sat down on the bench over which he had spread some tabloids. “You’re right!” she looked around her. “What a stage set this is. I love India House.”

“How can I tell you what I want to?” Cabot Wright said.

“You violated some girl here, of course,” Mrs. Bickle prompted him.

He struck his thigh. “Matter of fact, yes. Want to hear about it?

“I was well known to the newspaper audience,” he went on, “when I did the girl over there… As a matter of fact, they were hot on my trail when I got her here at Hanover Square. No rats then, so far as I know. Imagine rats in Wall Street! Sat here many a night in those days wondering what I was up to. But I didn’t bring you here to tell you any more about my rapes! And the soft eyes of the ruminants are on us in the dark, Mrs. Bickle! You can put that in your book of memories.

“Yes,” he continued, “old Hanover Square near Wall Street. I heard, on this particular evening, an older lady warning a younger one, her daughter, about the dangers of being a single girl in New York, Wall Street no exception, spookier than uptown, and the dark is something you just have to put up with. A sexual instrument may be plunged into you at any moment from any quarter.
Officer, help! My daughter has fallen on the prong of a youthful degenerate who singles out the opposite sex. Give a hand here!
Little knowing that many an officer has sworn an oath to aid and abet the act.

“I had walked over to a restaurant noted for its seafood, and there spotted these two females again, mother and daughter, complaining this time about the dinner menu: ‘I don’t believe I’ll have the gray sole, my dear,’ mother said. ‘Name’s too depressing.’ ‘Try the red snapper, love,’ daughter said. ‘Can never go wrong on that.’ After a two-course dinner of snapper and biscuit tortoni, mother and daughter parted right outside India House over there.

“I stepped right up like a Jehovah’s Witness on Saturday night and engaged the girl: ‘May I trouble you for a direction, young woman?’ asked I. (Etiquette book warns never to say
Miss
, far from correct.
Lady
is suspect, and reserved for tramps and canned-heat addicts.
Young woman
rates hit-parade usage, and of course it was my choice.) ‘Patty, where are you going with that young man?’ mother called from a block away, having turned round in an intuitive sense of impending evil. But Patty had already without the shadow of a doubt taken a shine to me. That long fish-dinner with Mother! Ready for anything, Mrs. Bickle.

“We, she and I, vanished into one of the de Chirico alleys. I pulled her gently but with absolute never-let-you-go grasp into a hidden puddle beneath a watch-repair shop, dug hurriedly as you would hunting in warm wet soil for a diamond or opal dropped from a purse, found the ‘place,’ old familiar
belle chose
with my vivid hand, the veins dancing now under the only excitement that matters outside of war—grope, push away any dressmaking obstacles, there I have it in my hands, and just a question of a moment to unpop, and the mother of course screaming as though she did not at first blush know what was going on or what had to be done. First things first. There at last, girl too surprised to do a thing, and me pumping into her what life feels is never too good for anybody, right up to her lungs, you would think from her moans. ‘This is my only pleasure, lady,’ I called back to the mother, ‘so why be a kill-joy?’ Yes, my only pleasure. The only thing that ever made anything seem worth while. Call it a crime, that’s a good old girl, for the mother was calling a policeman on the emergency telephone: ‘Come quickly, officer! A dagger of meat has pierced my precious jewel. He is entering her basket of joy. She isn’t screaming, officer, so I’ll bet she’s bleeding. Oh, my dear little Patty. Can’t you get here in a helicopter, officer? Oh, God, it’s too late already! Officer, officer, he’s had his way with her! He’s buttoning and calling it a night. Stop, degenerate, moron, stop! God, Patty, speak to your little mother. She lies there like a broken kewpie doll. Pray speak to me, darling. Are you going to open your eyes again, do you think? Are you wounded, my angel? You’ll never be the same, it’s a fact, my dearest, but you’re going to get well, and we’ll go to Vancouver together and never come back, that’s right, dear, we’ll go away together, only do get well for mother.’

“In Hanover Square,” Cabot concluded, “the policeman got a good look at me, saw my race, religion, build, sedentary character of spine, tilt of hat, F. R. Tripler necktie. I was typed. My arrest was only a matter of days.”

Mrs. Bickle looked down on the inscrutable flagstones.

“Homesick for Chicago?” Cabot Wright inquired.

He put the sheaf of notes, manuscripts, jottings and documents which told all of his story into her hands. “Here,” he said, “now immortalize me.”

“I’m afraid it may not be possible,” she said to him. Mrs. Bickle was strangely moody. Then suddenly she saw them! She grabbed Cabot’s hand. Screaming as loud as any of the women he had raped, she buried her head in Cabot’s breast. A procession of rats was hurrying past them, in the direction of the water, one of the last ruminants stopping a second and exchanging a look of indifferent malignancy with Mrs. Bickle.

When the procession had vanished, Mrs. Bickle began crying, and he patted her nonchalantly, correctly, as a father will a daughter he has loved but married off and grown indifferent to.

“I thought old Chicago had trained you better,” he spoke in nursery-tones to her. He yawned.

“Rats,” she gagged. “I can’t stand the sight!”

“Do you suppose Manhattan is sinking that the rats should all be leaving in a body like that?” he wondered. Then beating on his forehead he said, “God damn it.”

“What is it?” Mrs. Bickle looked more worried than ever.

“Where’s my brains?” he inquired. “I can’t remember!”

“Remember what?”

“The other thing I wanted to tell you, Mrs. Bickle. You don’t think I brought you to Hanover Square just to tell you about the lady who wouldn’t eat gray sole and give you the rest of my dossier. No, there was something else.”

“Well, try to recall,” she said, but there was no interest in her face or her expression.

“Oh, I’m cured of raping people, if that bothers you,” he snapped at her. “And I’m entirely cured, except for bad memory and the fact that I can’t laugh. Still can only giggle…”

She nodded.

“But I did have something to tell you, and it’s slipped clean out. Maybe in a month or so it’ll come to me.”

“I’m afraid that’ll be too late to tell me,” she said.

“Why is that?”

“We’ll be back in Chicago by then, I imagine. My assignment seems to be done.”

“And they won’t publish the novel?” he inquired.

She shrugged in reply, then looked apprehensively about her as if she feared to see more rats. As she left Hanover Square, she turned back and saw Cabot looking at her intently. She had the oddest feeling she might never see him again.

LIKE THE GREATEST
pugilists, baseball stars, football giants, Cabot during his period of philanthropy was continuously sore. His exertions—he lost 20 quarts of perspiration on more active days—spared no section of his anatomy. His bones sometimes ached like those of an old man. His veins and arteries, subjected to the supreme tension of ancient battles in times of Hannibal, Caesar, Napoleon, General Grant, throbbed deliriously.

He ate cut-rate bottles of aspirin by the handful. Yet his strength always returned after exertion—a freshet, a throbbing vigorous spring river of seed, turbulence, overmastering desire tore at his scrotum, sent his
membrum virile
bouncing thrashing flailing against his abdomen astrain to reach his umbilical scar. The flesh in its exertion to rise seemed to tear the rest of his body, he was devoured by himself like Scylla by her own canine appendages. He was covered with sweat from head to foot, flowing with smegma, and lying back in his chair fanned himself unrhythmically with pieces of cardboard from his laundered shirts. Like a metamorphosed creature half-emergent from his life in water, he could smell only the organs of reproduction. His mouth itself seemed to be full of seed. His ears heard only the grinding pumping of coitus in all nature’s sounds and voices. He heard flesh tear as he extended his feet to walk. The whole earth contracted, tumesced, stiffened, pumped, exploded, dissolved into thick viscous fountains. In the country, speeding in his rented Peugeot, the sight of the Milky Way made him whimper, saliva fell from his open mouth, he became incoherently excited, moaning and whining, nearly barking.