Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (27 page)

She looked up as he came back into the room, and said: “You’ve picked up a lot of new ways of talking since you went to New York. You’re not you.”

“Carrie old girl,” he patted her quickly on the cheek.

“And you’re not sorry I’ve had my change of life. It’s not real to you on account of
I
never was real to you.”

“Sweetheart, I got to go to work. He’s got a job for me, Badge. Don’t you follow? It’s a miracle. He didn’t even know I’d been to New York. Do you know what he just said. Said I was the best car salesman he ever had in all his years here on the South Side. That put the refill in my pencil when he said that,” he mumbled joyously.

“Going to work,” she stared at him, disgust and surprise both in her voice.

He picked up his grips.

“I got to get this job, honey,” he was half-apologetic. “I been in the out and out. Brooklyn was a real duck in the pond. I felt I was in the asshole of the cosmos. It was nothing, sweetheart. They couldn’t even make a phony of me. I was an imaginary fart they couldn’t blow away.”

“You don’t need to talk dirty to make me feel at home. On account of I am at home,” she said. “So get out if you want out.”

“Bye, Carrie.”

“You won’t be back then?” she eyed him with concern. She drank some more of the tea hurriedly to snatch at some part of soberness.

“As you said yourself, kid, the Wedding Bower is closed,” he congratulated himself on having had the luck to think of this, as he was trying to get out of the place. “I figured I was through here, anyhow, after I found out about Joel Ullay, but I wanted to stop in and say hello.”

“You wanted to do the right thing,” she nodded jerkily like a figure in the Fun House. But then she put her hand on his forearm and pressed, saying: “But if you ever did find yourself with your ass out again and no place to park it, cold and hungry—just for the night, you understand, come back. Come back anytime.” She kissed him wetly on the mouth.

“Thanks, Carrie.”

“Thanks but no—is that what you mean?”

“Thanks,” he kissed her.

She followed him over to where he leaned against the street door, his back to her, holding the heavy grips.

She kissed him on the nape of the neck.

“It’s just as well, Bernie, I guess. Too much water under the bridge. Been through too much now to even know I’m lonely.”

“Please, Carrie,” he wept a little again.

“For Jesus sake don’t bawl any more,” she flared up. “Don’t bawl, you hear. Go sell cars, for Christ sake.”

“If you want me for anything, Carrie, call me, and I’ll come.” He still kept his back to her.

“Boy, does that cheer me,” she said. “My bad news evaporates when I hear your voice. Goodbye, Bernie. Get it out of here.”

When, from outside, he heard the sounds of her rage and bawling, he opened the door again to say: “Carrie, you call me up now, d’you hear?”

“I’m not afraid of bad news like some people,” she stared at him, as if confused about the passage of time. Perhaps she thought he was returning hours later.

“All right, Carrie,” he said. “I love you anyhow.”

“Big help,” she said. She dried her own tears now in the predilect manner of Bernie Gladhart, on the back of her hand. “You ain’t done bad for a prison graduate,” Carrie said drily. “You may as well keep going ahead, Bernie, now you’ve started.”

“Carrie,” he held tight to his grips now, “you call me.”

She closed the door hard this time.

Back in the room the TV set, perhaps owing to the slam she had given the door, came on thunderous. The “Cuba, You’ll Live Again” program was still in progress. A girls’ band of 40 played American patriotic numbers, the pertinacity of which was that each and every señorita instrumentalist was an exile from the red Caribbean dictator, and had expressly learned the United States national anthem only recently. A Sousa program then followed.

“The one with the saxophone in the second row is the cutest,” Carrie Moore said, and she poured herself some more bourbon for her cold tea.

20

“THE WAY I FEEL NOW”

Y
ou act,” Curt Bickle addressed his wife some weeks after her return from New York, “and you talk as though you were going to write the story of this youthful rapist yourself.”

“But you know perfectly well I won’t,” Zoe Bickle reassured him, and Curt smiled with relief.

“You’re a bright, brainy and even handsome woman today,” Curt wiped his spectacles free of blur and stared at her again with complacency.

It was true. Mrs. Bickle had put on weight so that she looked better than she ever had before, her complexion shone, her eyes were bright, and her laugh had lost its edge.

“Believe you me,” Mrs. Bickle said, “there was this temptation to write Cabot’s story, after Bernie’s failure, and with poor dear Princeton dead by his own hand. Well, what has stopped me from finishing the book,” she told her husband, “is our culprit himself. He has begun to write
me
. I didn’t tell you before because I hoped they would stop—Cabot Wright’s letters, I mean. Maybe they are going to stop, now that he’s left New York.”

She opened a little box Curt had seen but paid no attention to. She drew out a letter, enclosed in a post-office stationery envelope, and read:

After the roof of my mouth fell in, I saw how everything really was, Mrs. Bickle. That was before I could yet laugh—I’m now as you might guess a really professional laugher—yes, my giggling days are over. To think you—thank you—were the first person to listen to me all the way through.

Mrs. Bickle paused, and Curt looked away, embarrassed. He was ashamed, she knew, like all of us, of the human in his human nature.

“Where will a man like that end up?” Curt Bickle said, at last, in a kind of aside.

“A boy like Cabot?” She considered the question. “Perhaps his letter gives us a clue.” She continued to read:

Having sold all my property, including a row of brownstones—you will remember how rich I became when I inherited Warby’s empire—well, nearly all I inherited is gone. I’m cleaned out. Philanthropy by the mile, unwise investments, and so on. I wanted to get clear of it too. Gave away a lot.

Curt yawned because it was eleven o’clock, but Zoe Bickle went on reading:

My face has broken out in boils and I don’t have time to see the doctor. Besides New York is closed for the Jewish holidays, there’s a mean southerly wind at 10 knots an hour, and the television set they have in this room is busted so that I don’t have any of the big serious faces that make me see America, baseball heroes, disk jockies, immortal crooners, generals in hats, and living Presidents’ wives.

“Oh, how adolescent,” Curt said.

As my preacher, Reverend Cross, used to say to me, in every breath we breathe, life and death jockey for position. There have been 77 billion people who have preceded us on this planet, but the big news is that with the increase today population-wise, 1/10 of all the people who have ever lived are alive today. That’s the good thought I want to give you, Mrs. Bickle, before I give you some of the bad news, the necrology, as the better newspapers call it. You really do have to know, if you are going to write the truth about my life as fiction.

NEWS EVENTS & RELEASES:

Goldie Thomas’s beauty was nearly completely destroyed when, riding in her bubble car, she ran into a fishing lodge in order to avoid a moose which would not get out of the way in Maine, near a place called Deer Isle, where she was of course vacationing. Gilda Warburton died by her own hand, of gastric upset, in Manhattan, subsequent to drinking liquid cosmetic, which she had mistaken for Campari. This is being hushed up as she had pilfered it from her new colored butler, the boy who replaced Brady, who by the way joined the Merchant Marine. I don’t remember whether I told you or not, but my first wife and my only, Cynthia Adams, died of double pneumonia in the loony bin, after never finding out again who she was (some people have luck).

If this letter seems disconnected, it’s partly because I can hear from a neighboring apartment, where they are
not
celebrating the holidays, Terry on the vibes playing “
I Love You, Stranger, in Fact I Do
.”

Well, before I come to the real drama of necrology, I can say what my Preacher says will always bear repeating, “My own heart was broken before I heard the Coach say ‘Go!’” Yes, Princeton Keith is no more. I thought that would smash you, as you were childhood chums. A lot he will need to care about automation. Tell you about a guy like Princeton. He spent 25 years of his life thinking he was permanently land-marked in New York, even though he was from Illinois somewhere, in fact he thought Al Guggelhaupt was only the Moon and he was the Sun. What really killed him wasn’t just the quiet of a small town in mid-America, but the shock to his internal system of not having those $50.00 a cloth luncheons, with the seven different beverages. I mean that is a bomb to anybody’s insides. Bladder backs up, great colon nonplussed, liver no longer tawny, prostate down in the dumps, great sphincter utterly collapsed…

“Oh, for Pete’s sake!” Curt cried. Mrs. Bickle went right on.

If you do ever write anything about me, I would half-like to read it, but am afraid I am more disinterested in my own life, such as it was, than even you were when you showed your disinterest at its height. God, did I admire your non-committed glance, Mrs. Bickle. (I’ll never call you Zoe, ’cause you’re the old Ear to me, just drinking in what you didn’t even always get. Thank you for that.)

I suppose even Chicago seems a little Lilliputian with the jet world all connected up, and the oral contraceptive ads going to the tune of “The Old Rugged Cross.” Another friend of mine named Vance Goldanski, who was writing an article on me for a movie magazine, dropped dead on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, very young man, had been a French horn player for 10 years, before he got to be a candidate for the World Thought Congress. He felt it was time to give up playing for helping out the world community in trouble, and the day he signed up he fell over.

But what was always on my mind, Mrs. Bickle, as you know from all those hours in the cockroach palace on Joralemon Street, Brooklyn, and that night in Hanover Square, lower Manhattan—and you remember all those clocks that I had when I hid away in the
See River Manor
—the thought always on my mind was “
Do You think there’s a Chance for Me if I ever Find out who I is
?” That’s why I’ve come home to my brownstones in Brooklyn Heights (falling fast), have sold same, and am on my way to extended flight, but this time with myself, and in search of same.

The thought occurs to me that this may be the last time we play our little game of hearing and not listening, Mrs. Bickle. Here I am running out on America, if not myself. That’s the funny thing to remember—in case I don’t send you more news.

No, what I am getting at is that when I had to have all those clocks going, and you remember how many times I took my own pulse, as though I never expected to hear the Coach say “Go” again, well I’ve got that one problem solved if no other, on account of I don’t have to ask those hard questions that nobody now or any of the other 77 billions ever found the answer to, what makes me tick? I don’t care about that now, Mrs. Bickle, but I do know,
hear
it any way you want, I am ticking as of this letter, anyhow, and I’ll write the symbol for the way I feel now, which is HA!

“Well,” Mrs. Bickle said, “I guess that will be the last of any letters I ever get from dear Cabot Wright.”

“Speaking of paramount issues,” Curt Bickle opened his mouth after the briefest of pauses, “you do look around the mouth and eyes as if you might write his story after all.”

“Believe you me,” Mrs. Bickle intoned, “it’s almost a temptation.”

Curt waited a little.

“But I won’t, pet,” she said in a low voice to herself and him. “I won’t be a writer in a place and time like the present.”

COPYRIGHT

Copyright © 1964 by James Purdy. Copyright renewed 1992 by James Purdy.

First published as a Liveright paperback 2013

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Purdy, James, 1914–2009.