Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (26 page)

Pacing up and down, the preacher said, “You have set yourself up against God and man, and especially against yourself. My boy, you are in a state…”

“The ugly truth is,” Cabot shook his head, looking out the window at the incoming steamer from Cartagena, near Fort Jay, “religion hasn’t got anything on the ball. It’s all Daddy-rattling and pious alarm.”

“I will continue to pray for you, my son.”

NOW CABOT WAS
alone again with his non-self. Loneliness feels so good after the mythic contact with the social. Dreams become clear, and nightmares are no longer attention-getting. One sucks eight or nine aspirins and allows his calloused thumb to rest on a quilt. The trauma of birth, life and death pass as shadows on the moon. Mother Nature goes right on keeping house even though nobody is to home.

“Hello, Central Information Bureau?” Cabot spoke into a phone. “Weather woman? Are you now or have you ever been in the pay of a Cosmic Bugaboo? I’m not human now and never was, is my fuckworthy answer. Thank you for allowing us to enter your home in the legal frock of spies. We are screwing you, as you know, to protect the innocent. Thank you and good morning. Remove the bandage tomorrow. The stitches are absorbed by the blood stream. You will feel no pain. We repeat. You will feel no pain. Sold, American.”

Lying down on his side, Cabot relieved himself in laughter. His laughter was like a paroxysm, neither willing nor unwilling. His regions from the breast-bone down shook in helpless hapless hopeless waves of self-relief, which happily for him was one prolonged orgasm. After all, laughter is the greatest boon Nature has bestowed on miserable unjoyous man. The release, the only relief from the pain of being human, mortal, ugly, limited, in agony, watching Death cornhole you beginning with the first emergence from the winking slit above the mother’s fundament, pulled into existence from between piss and shit, sorrow and meaninglessness, drudgery and illusion, passion, pain, early loss of youth and vigor, of all that had made it worth while, with the eternity of the tomb, the final word over the hunger for God, the repletion of earth and slime, the shout of the ocean in the ears of death. Meaning is there is no meaning but the laughter of the moment made it almost worth while. That’s all it’s about. We was here, finally laughed.

“The roof of my mouth fell in. I laughed!” said Cabot.

He lay in the Brooklyn mud, guffawed weakly. He had laughed until he was in erection again for the first time since the policemen’s nightsticks, laughed some more until he was limp as an old man, laughed until he mewed and purled like a new-born babe. Then he lay back on his back silent, weeping a little from the pain of his laughter, a thread of drivel coming down from his mouth onto his pointed dimpled chin.

“I thought I’d die but I lived.”

That deadly monotony of the human continuity
,

The fog is a sea on earth
!

19

MAMA’S WELL IS DRY

T
he runaway is back!” Carrie Moore cried, in her TV nookery on Dorchester Avenue, when she saw Bernie Gladhart come in the door.

Entering Carrie’s basement again, Bernie Gladhart sniffed carefully and did not take on that “at home” expression around the mouth and eyes. He had the slouch of a transient.

Putting down his bags temporarily, Bernie tried to avoid studying the changes in the face of his former wife. Carrie had aged and when a woman ages, she goes faster than a man ever can, Bernie reflected. Seeing his look of shock, she blamed her face’s condition on TV principally. “It’s what they call
television glint
,” she explained, a nervous ailment common in the Greater Chicago area. Dressed as usual, only in her foundation, with her wired bra raising her nipples to the angle of a woman young enough to be her granddaughter, she had a special bit of crape to hang, as she explained, on Bernie’s lapel. “Might as well tell you the worst while you’re still fresh from your train ride.”

“Is a new fellow living with you?” Bernie inquired jerking his head in the direction of upstairs. He knew, of course, that Joel Ullay had departed long since.

“I’m kind of beyond new or old fellows,” she said. “I’ve got real trouble. I’ve got bad news, real bad news.”

He stared at her and saw that what she said was true.

“If you don’t want me, Carrie,” he began, “I’ll leave of course. Your calls didn’t indicate whether you really wanted me or not. But I just didn’t have any other place to go, sweet-heart, not right away today, I didn’t. I’m sorry your book idea for me didn’t pan out, though I’ve got some money for it, of course. Princeton Keith, well, he was really queer for the Cabot Wright story. Dreamed it would crown his career and all…”

“He’s dead, you know,” Carrie remarked.

“What?” Bernie gasped. “Who?”

“The name you mentioned, Princeton Keith. Heard it on the early morning show. Shot himself in his rocking chair, with a big old .45. Think of using one of them!”

She yawned convulsively.

“Is that your bad news?” he inquired.

“Bernie, you bug me,” she said. “Of course not.”

He noticed how out-of-date Carrie’s slang sounded. Her slang, which he used to think was current, he now saw as belonging to the earliest lingo of the Flat Foot School of writers, the old bop men who had all retired from the scene, but he knew of course the passion Carrie had always to speak the latest language, in order for her to feel she was here at all. But her speech was hoary; she was an old jazz-record in an age when jazz is more classical than fun.

“
My
bad news,” Carrie cried a little, “is bad news on a paramount scale, and it’s baddest of all on account of it’s largely all just for me and nobody else is going to feel it.”

She cried hard now.

Bernie, who had risen now, and with his head resting on his elbow, against the wall, was sobbing quite hard himself, so that Carrie left off her own weeping to bark:

“What are
you
bawling for, can I ask?”

“Guess it’s the shock of his death,” he replied.

“Whose?” she wondered. “Oh, that editor guy, Keith…”

Bernie wiped his eyes on the back of his hand.

“Well, I’m sorry the Keith man died since it strikes you home this way,” she scolded.

“He gave me quite a lot nobody ever had before. But I guess in the end he didn’t think I was a writer either,” Bernie mumbled.

“Well, then it’s unanimous at last,” she said.

“You thought I was a writer once, Carrie,” he came back to this.

“Ahem,” she said. “But that’s so long ago, baby heart. So long ago. Mama was well in those days.”

“Ain’t you well, Carrie?”

“Well, let’s say like this, honey. If for example you decide to go on living under my roof, you won’t be living in the jet age.”

“I won’t stop here if you don’t want me to,” he appealed now to her. She stared at him, her eyes slightly out of focus. “I’ll leave whenever you give the word,” he bowed his head.

“That’s cute to hear,” Carrie helped herself to the bourbon bottle. “Matter of fact, I hadn’t given your leaving or staying a bit of thought. I did think about your appetite, your belly that is, on account of you eat a lot. When I found out your train was arriving I called up the Chinese Chop Suey Parlor on Fifty-fifth street, Wong Duck Fu or whatever the mothy place calls itself now—changes hands once a month at least—and they’re sending us over our supper. I hope they’ve heated it this time. We have some skillets out back though if they goofed. And they’re sending a gallon of tea.”

“What’s your bad news, Carrie?” Bernie returned to this.

“Let me raise the bucket myself, dolly,” she admonished him. “Say you don’t look so good either, speaking of bad news.”

Bernie pointed out to Carrie that he thought he heard the doorbell through the sound of the television set. He walked to the door just in time to catch the delivery boy before he returned to Wong Duck Chop Suey Parlor with their order.

A few minutes later, having dished out from paper cartons the cold rice and chop suey, he poured her tea from paper containers.

“You don’t have to eat that grub if it don’t suit you, by the bye,” she pointed with her paper fork.

“Why don’t you tell me your bad news, Carrie?”

“Won’t spoil your appetite?” she wondered. She had hardly touched her food. She drank dispiritedly from her paper carton of tea.

Bernie began speaking: “I don’t believe anything could happen to me now that would really throw me. I’m throwed, and good. Maybe,” he spoke too low to be heard even by her perhaps, “maybe there’s always something that can get a guy further down yet, but how?”

“What guy?” she said.

“Where’s Joel Ullay?” Bernie inquired.

“I told you all about that yellow bastard…Where’s your Congolese boy-friend?”

“All I can think about is Princeton Keith,” Bernie said, after a long wait. He shook his head.

“Don’t change the subject,” Carrie said. “I asked you about your Congolese boy-friend. I told you Ullay lit out and why.”

“O.K., old doll,” Bernie sighed. He took from his wallet a tiny snap of Winters Hart.

“Did you love him?” Carrie looked at the photo.

“Oh almost, that one night,” he pushed his plate of food away.

“But not enough to marry him,” she went on looking at the snapshot. “Say, that’s a weak chin and mouth for a Congolese. Nice hair though and lots of it.” She handed him back the photo, and said, “Well, pick and choose, that was always my motto.” She threw her plate of nearly untasted chop suey into the open grate nearby.

“Now about my bad news, kiddy,” she began. “It’s simple like a funeral. Mama’s through.”

“No guessing games, Carrie. I’m too goddam tired to guess.”

“You’re too old, baby, you mean. But O.K., you don’t have to guess on account I’ve already told you if you think back. Dig?” she laughed when he did not reply.

He was crying again and that sobered her a little.

“Bernie,” she said, “you don’t have what it takes.”

He cried quite a lot then, and said, in a squeaking voice, “I know it, by Christ, I know it.” He broke down then.

Everything that had ever hurt him, everything that had cut and bruised and knifed and festered the flesh, the disappeared and forgotten blows, together with pus and lymph and canker seemed to burst and come out, as from a huge broken sluice. His breakdown froze her.

“What’s it from?” she whispered. She put her hand down on his, but he shook her off roughly.

“I got to get out of here!” He started up.

“Don’t want to hear my bad news?” she cried. “Hear it anyhow!” she cried, as she slipped and fell by his side. “Hear Mama’s bad news! Got to hear it.”

He paused, gazing at her, at the same time drying his eyes in the manner of a small child.

“I’m dead, Bernie,” she held on to his hand to rise from her sprawling at his feet. “That’s my bad news. Change of life, honey. I’ve gone through the cemetery gates, and the hearse is parked till the burial.”

“Change of life,” he nodded, still rubbing his eyes.

“Last week it happened for sure. Doctor says it’s premature but for permanent. Mama won’t ever be herself again. I don’t know why it’s hit me the way it has. Was on the wagon most of the time you were away, but knowing you were coming back, I began again.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Carrie,” he groaned, but in her scrutiny of him she saw he was only sorry about himself and well, how could she blame him.

“You don’t have to send me a telegram to show how busted up over it you are,” she remarked at last. “I’ve closed the Wedding Bower by the way. Closed it after that lily-white snob of a Ullay cleared out, after sticking me for his bills. I’ve turned it into my store room for paint and turpentine. I mean the Wedding Bower.”

“The Wedding Bower!” he cried with something of his old look and old voice. “Why that seems a trillion years ago, Carrie.”

“That’s the telephone,” she informed him. “I got good ears even with this disease I picked up from TV. Go answer it, it might be Jesus.” She poured herself some more cold tea while he was at the phone, looked at the bourbon bottle a long time, then didn’t reach for it.

“Who is it?” she scolded when she saw him talking longer than hello-goodbye, and with a pleased grin on his face.

Looking at her video screen, suddenly she raised an arm, threw a heavy ash tray at the set, screaming:

“Take off that wig, you two-headed cunt!”

“Carrie,” Bernie called to her, “would you mind, please. It’s Wurtheim Badger of all people.”

“Who?” she vociferated.

“Badger. The guy that owns the used car lots and all. Remember when I sold for him? He’s talking business to me.”

Bernie turned back to the phone and said, “Imagine you calling me on just a hunch, Badge.”

“Well how about that,” Carrie said. “Employment in the offing.”

Her head fell down now on the table by Bernie’s nearly untasted dinner of chop suey.

“I will, Badge, for Christ’s sake, yes. Take care of yourself. I’ll be fine,” his voice drifted over to her.