Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (25 page)

“Now that I’m informed, Al,” I told him, “we’ll know where to look.”

“It’s too late to be smart about it now, Prince,” Guggelhaupt said. “Be as smart as you will, but get one thing straight: you’re through, Keith, and there’s no two ways about it. You are cashiered. Fired! Right? Right. I’ve no place in this organization for has-beens. You’re living in the past. You are less in step with the Zeitgeist than my piano-tuner or my hat-check girl. Goodbye, and get out!”

PRINCETON SAT THERE
with Zoe and Bernie who were fanning his fevered brow and comforting him as best they could. His eyes no longer focussed, and it was only a question of time till he would be sick, but during the interim they all felt close and together. They had tried, and they had failed. They were not just out-of-date people today, they had never really been in date, and never could be. And they were all leaving New York, but two of them, at least, were going home with recent money in their pants and the third, Princeton Keith, had pocketed so much in his big days that it would be his own fault if he had to go on poor relief back in Illinois.

That was the last Mrs. Bickle and Bernie Gladhart ever saw or directly heard from Princeton Keith, and it was hard for them to think of him spending the rest of his life sitting on a front porch in the great Mid-West. However, as Mrs. Bickle pointed out to Bernie, this has happened before to great New York literary figures. Having stomped, romped, barked and cried with gay lunatics and square Marxists in their youth, of a late evening you could now see them somewhere curled up in a hammock or wicker rocking-chair, reading Generals Grant and Sherman, a tear on their balding eyelid.

18

“I THOUGHT I’D DIE BUT I LIVED”

H
ad Cabot Wright understood even the minimum commands given him by Life, you can ask.

He had been born, of course, and toilet-trained, weaned at an average age. Was sent to the Sunday school of his peer’s choice. Saw portrait of Elijah, Jesus the Christ, and God in nightgowns talking with other long-haired gents dressed samely. Entered kindergarten under bad-breathed spinster name of Sadie F. Harkness. Early learned to slide down teeter-totter, noticed girls had different behinds than boys, squatted where boys remained erect. Noticed some people had different skin-textures and were hiding on the whole behind lilac bushes, was commanded to ignore same. Everybody however even then was riding in big cars. Woodrow F. Harding was dead, of course, and Theodore F. Truman called to the chair. China fell to land-hungry boll weevils. C.W. continued his mass-education learning following subjects: salute to the community, with pupil-community-laity participation program, sliding down escalators, wall-climbing and writing, doughnut-break, group training with both sexes, Democracy for little people period, hygiene, physical exercises, leap-frog, Y.M.C.A. salute night, Field Day with basket-lunch, camp during hot months relieves Mother. College of his choice dictated by friend of the family, Ivy Walls, graduated half
laude
, and entered military service where nothing he did was commented on. His majoring in art at Yale seen to be fiddle-faddle necessary in Eastern gentleman, and after service in khaki shorts entered the Wall Street. America expects every junior-executive general partner to marry & exercise his democratic tool. This Cabot, like all upstanding young blades, did, settling in Brooklyn across the water from his work, bought high-powered telescope to get a lay of the land, wife took ill, mother-father disappeared in pink Caribbean revolution. The rest, reader, you know.

Yet once the Chicago crew and the New York printing Czars dropped him, C. W.’s problem began all over again—learning to feel at last, after having been born anaesthetic from the womb. To recapitulate Cabot’s problem: Dr. Bigelow-Martin had taken away all his attention except in his erectile tissue, and the police hoses and night-sticks had removed his attention there. But was this not the problem of the whole USA? Under the different Generals, poker-players, country squires, haberdashers, grandsons of whiskey-barons for President, and while America is fucking the rest of the world or putting a yellow island down the incinerator in the name of freedom, wearing Jehovah’s whiskers and the tiara of the Queen of Heaven, the fact remains that the American people at home,
chez eux
, to quote Princeton Keith, outside of the aged and aging who are crying their heads off for free doctors and rectal TV, the rest of the USA citizenry, as a noted magazine calls them, from Maine’s retired millionaires to the shores of the gilded Yukon, the American people are all head-wise if not physic-wise anaesthetic. They hear, but they don’t get it. They see, but the image is blurry. The rain is falling on their TV screens.

“We have all been here before!” the USA cries as it turns over another page on its TV roller. “Ouch, my bleeding piles.”

“We can’t tell the difference,” the child, the dowager, the millionaire kid from the Chicago department store all say, “we can’t tell the difference between General Roosevelt and Captain Truman or Professor Eisenhower from Grover Kennedy Johnson. They all look like boys in charge of a scouting party who don’t hear the cry, ‘timber!’ as the big investors screw away in the jungles, in the sugar islands, the pampas and waters of Lake Titicaca, the dynamite beds under the Prado, Habana, Bolivian tin-mines and Katanga. The boys all look alike to me, the viewers cry, except each succeeding President does promise a little more to the arthritic old and the darker niggers.…Hark! Now I hear it! Dong, dong, dong.”

“You shall have dong, niggers and outfielders, as long as there is health in my General’s body! I will give you dong. I am the President.”

“We’ve all been here before!” the USA is crying in front of the little screen.

But they’re so tired.

AFTER LEAVING MRS. BICKLE
, Cabot Wright, still partially without his memory, was in a semi-dazed condition which plausibly might have grown out of his having been emotionally anaesthetic since emerging from the tut-tut of his mother’s surprised birth pains. He went on of course to become a supposititious child. “
PA-RAD-E RRRRESST. AT EASE, M E N.
”

In the absence of Mrs. Bickle, Cabot paused on 42nd and Sixth Avenue when he heard Sister Sadie X: “If I could only make
one
of you feel anything.” The evangelist always opened her meeting, feebly but repeatedly waving her Bible and flag.

“If only one man or woman stopped here and showed his eye was not glassy with meaninglessness, I would stoop down here on this dirty curb and say, ‘Blessed Jesus, I do thank thee.’ But I don’t see anything but glassy eyes, and I don’t refer to your expensive optical equipment. No, dear lost sheep, I refer to something no optician can correct. You are living in the wickedest city which ever existed, making storied Babylon child’s play, for at least the Babylonians felt and relished their sins. You sin not even knowing the stab of your wickedness, not even, oh flock, gaining pleasure from your transgressing as did that ancient city on the Euphrates. You sin not through appetite for it, but through sheer spiritual emptiness and bodily numbness.

“If I could only make you feel anything, citizens of the greatest country in the history of the cosmos, but you’ve had too much from every point of the compass: they’ve made of every orifice in your body a cornucopia, and you’ve been stuffed and stuffed and stuffed till you can’t budge. You cry More! More! but you can’t feel a thing.”

As Cabot walked away further West, losing himself in street after same-looking street, he saw the whole of the Continent, as turned into a highway known as Piker. Trees are rubber tires and condoms. Dirt is cigarette butts propped on spark-plugs. The birds, gophers, rats, field mice, wood pussies and summer rattlers are old-fashioned jacks, air pumps, fan-belt, 1928 inner tubes. Everywhere ads tell you what you are about to do & did. The sentiment of moneycups is catching, and all America loves a moneycup. Not a man, woman or child alive today in this beautiful country who does not love a flower called moneycup, whose eyes grow a little moist at the very mention of the modest bloom, whose hands shake ever so little at the thought that somewhere in this great land a field of pure untouched moneycups is blowing in the soft spring zephyrs. Oh for the afternoons of childhood, youth, and of course full maturity. The aged not excepted either. The aged can look out from their mortgaged shingles and see moneycups. America is moneycups, as a great Yankee poet once said while working in the White House for General Woodrow Roosevelt. He had just received an $18,000,000 dividend check from a mail-order house which sells faulty teddy-bears, and leaky bathroom conduits. “America,” he wrote, “you are moneycups,” and all Americans waved their hankies at him.

This great mid-continental poet felt that General Woodrow Roosevelt should have waged war earlier as he and his wife (now confirmed Easterners) were quite put out that they had not been able to visit England and France (second land of citizenship for them) to spend their mail-order dividends there on Anglo-French culture. (Enumerate, if you would be so kind: antiques ormolu clocks cheese wine wine wine French perfume not-to-be-duplicated spirits Chambertin champagne British preserves—can’t be beat, the English never learned to cook, but they’re queens and kings with gooseberry preserve and/or damson spread—British china British Chippendale wax-work dummies selected butlers and don’t forget tweeds & stout.) When the laureated great mid-west poet’s poem,
America Is Moneycups
, hit the newsstands in the big picture magazine called beautiful usa, the crush all over the continent was tremendous. To procure copies taxi drivers were seized and carried to the parapets of bridges and tossed over, mothers with baby-carriages were stopped and slapped for getting in the road of the newsstands, pregnant women were warned not to attempt the streets but go back to their kitchen units and make pudding in event of an emergency, truck-drivers with unusually developed deltoid-bicep-trapezius muscles were warned not to attempt approaching the newsstands to get copies of
America Is Moneycups
and finally the President of this country the President of the Grand Old USA had to speak from his sickbed and say, “Both my wife and I promise you that if you will all go home and quit creating a disturbance, which it is your constitutional right nonetheless so to create, we personally, she and I, will send each Democrat under 70 a copy of
America Is Moneycups
with a portrait of us coming down the chimney on the Fourth of July. Amen and God guide you to the polls. This is your personal Jehovah going off the air.”

SUDDENLY CABOT WRIGHT
could laugh. It was the first real laugh he had ever been able to bring off. The early part of his life, real and supposititious, had been devoted to giggles, and though he knew he would never be at attention fully anywhere again in his body, now suddenly he could laugh. First Ha then Ho, then Ha Ha HAR, HAAAAAA!

Laughter!

And Reverend Cross had come to see him. He had held his young ward’s hand as the laughter trickled, flowed, cascaded, came in torrents.

Cabot had told Mrs. Bickle nearly everything or had hinted at what he had left out. He had told his whole story, and she would never use it. Maybe she believed it and maybe she did not, which was better. Now he could forget his own story and himself.

Every day Reverend Cross from the Church of His Choice had visited him, though only for a few minutes, but today holding the culprit’s hand against his paroxysm of laughter, the preacher said:

“Cabot, my boy, you’re better.”

A young man in appearance, Reverend Cross suffered from several spiritual diseases of his own, as witness circles under his eyes, rapid pulse, dry mouth, looking at boys’ crotches, talking to himself. But he had renounced life for Christ and this was getting him through the world without being beaten and reduced to a pulp.

“Confession, Cabot, is good for the soul,” he patted Cabot’s knee.

“Told you everything, already, Reverend.”

“But you’re not sorry, Cab. You’re not.”

“I’m not tired any more, either, Reverend. Not tired at all. And I told Mrs. Bickle just about everything—after I heard it in that book.”

“Pray with me, Cabot,” Reverend Cross said. “It won’t hurt you even if you don’t believe in it. Pray some with me.”

“I was a supposititious child,” Cabot said dreamily. “God, does that reach your guts when you think about it. But I don’t.”

“Come pray.”

“My scrotum is blue with varicocele, Rev.”

“Pray anyhow.”

“Hold my pulse then while you mutter, Rev.”

He heard in sleep-like underwater thunderings the young preacher’s prayer.

“All suffer the deadwood, my boy, having rejected our divine inheritance. Remember those flowers which you so adored as a boy, Cabot? The hunts in the woods for snow-apples, jack-in-the-pulpit, heartsease…”

“When I left prison,” Cabot confided, “my warden said, ‘Cab, maybe this time you better stick to the company of your own sex.’”

“We must all do what is right,” Reverend Cross said, and his long black lashes were smashed to his cheek by tears.

“What’s right?” Cabot inquired, and when he said that the Reverend Cross looked like his name.

“My mother said that,” Cabot reminded the Reverend. “Did she know what was right? All she knew was life-insurance would save her when her mainstay kicked the goosepot. But was she bugged. Both mothers were bugged. They both died. The hand of no-return carried them off without their collecting on their forty years of fleshpot bleeding. Where was my real parents, Rev.? we should all do what is right. Excuse me while I use my new laugh. Let me tell you something, Reverend Cross. You bug me.”