Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel Read online

  “If I was you,”a newspaper vendor who had heard of Cabot Wright told him, “I would just begin walking around the streets and by-ways here in Brooklyn. Go up and down. After a few blocks, ask anybody… Look on mailboxes inside the doors of apartment buildings that don’t have doormen in front. Or where they do, ask the doormen. They’re a snotty lot, but they know everything. Remember the character you hunt has a notorious name, but also remember the public memory ain’t five inches long. They can’t even remember their last famous general. The last human of importance the American people have been able to keep in the working end of their brain is your own Chicago triggerman, Dillinger. After him they kind of lost hold on keeping who’s who straight. So don’t be surprised if they don’t remember who Cabot Wright is, or if they do. By all odds he’s forgotten, but you could run into one of these cute newspaper-headline memory men, nuts for keeping old information on their tongue’s tip. Such a wiseacre would remember, and then he might do one of two things, direct you right, or horn in your business. Don’t tell him. Best thing to do is keep walking. Brooklyn is large—76 square miles—but the part where he done his dirty work can be covered in a few afternoons of easy strolls, and you’ll come up with something. Glad you’re not a dick, though. People like to help a guy with an idea. So good luck and don’t sit down on the job.”

  OUT OF A city of over 8,000,000 people, how was he to find one man seriously in hiding? Cabot Wright had probably changed his name and appearance and would never be easy to verify from the only two available photographs. He may have undergone spectacular changes (grief and guilt damage the face and heart), and might vary chameleon-like daily as he strove to merge into the anonymous crowd.

  Looking out over the waters that compose the confluence of the Hudson and East Rivers, with Wall Street on the north and the Statue of Liberty on the south, Bernie was fevered again by his mania for belonging. That was why he had begun to steal as a boy, in the first place. He had wanted to be “inside”with the people whose houses he had to burglarize. Now in Brooklyn he felt left out of everything all over again. He didn’t like to seem unemployed even to the kind of people who lived in the Joralemon Street tenement. (He told a man on his floor that he worked on a night-shift so that he wouldn’t wonder when he saw Bernie around in the daytime.) Gradually Bernie realized that people in Brooklyn were even less interested in how he made out than they were in Chicago.

  At night, half-asleep, he would see himself back in the reformatory and relive those days in agonized boredom. He remembered the faces of all the men and boys who had been “in”at the same time as he; he could still hear their talk and laughter, and could see the guards watching him and them. He had been over this thousands of times in his own mind and with the prison psychiatrist, but now it all appeared to him as a movie he had seen four or five times and had not enjoyed at the first showing.

  He had begun burglarizing wealthy people’s houses—he repeated to himself—because he wanted to be at home inside the house he robbed. Now again, in Brooklyn, he found himself in front of something like a closed house. He was hunting a man his wife had commissioned him to find, an unknown whom he was writing a novel about, whose whereabouts and person filled him with anonymous feeble irritability coupled with a forced conscious lack of interest.

  “Do you really think I’ll ever run into this man?”Bernie asked Carrie during one of their interminable telephone conversations. “Take a look at the Brooklyn telephone directory, for example,”he told her, “and see the number of Wrights listed, blurry column after column of the same name. Anyway a convicted rapist who has served his sentence wouldn’t want his name in a directory in the first place. Or take a look at the number of red-heads in Brooklyn, since Cabot has red hair. Even among all the people who have Jewish, Italian, Negro, and Puerto Rican fathers, redheads are common, let alone the Wasp diehards.”

  “Wasps?”Carrie wanted to know what he meant.

  “It’s a word they use here. White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant.”

  Carrie admitted that the thorns and the difficulties were real but, she insisted, “They are not going to stump us!”and made kissing sounds of love, encouragement and goodbye over the long-distance connection.

  Hanging up the receiver in the airless telephone-booth of the tenement, Bernie wondered again whether she had played a huge joke on him. Was this Carrie’s method of ridding herself of him, by sending him away? He remembered Zoe Bickle, Curt’s wife, who once while drunk had told him that Carrie actually hated all men, and would like to exterminate the breed. Failing that, Zoe had said, Carrie always got rid of her husbands one by one, after draining them.

  2

  MRS. GLADHART HEARS MRS. BICKLE

  Carrie Moore had arrived at her “plan”for her husband only after enlisting the support and encouragement of another person, who had come wholeheartedly to her aid. She realized that without the help of a confederate she would never in a month of Sundays have got the strength to send Bernie to Brooklyn. She could not bring herself to tell him before he left that there was somebody else behind it all, though by his steady examination of her face in their long talks in the basement, she wondered whether he suspected. He might have hesitated more than he did, had he known somebody else stood behind her, for he could obey and follow only Carrie. To believe that the directive was not entirely hers would have filled him with a cankering doubt about her belief in him. For that reason Carrie was careful to say nothing of her accomplice.

  The friend who nudged Carrie into action was Curt’s wife, Zoe Bickle, a handsome woman of forty-five, whom Bernie hated, and with whom Carrie herself had kept up a running battle for years. As the wife of the novelist and on her own, Zoe Bickle knew some of the right people in New York publishing and enjoyed being involved in “the real literary current,”even though she seemed cynical about publishing, perhaps because of her first-hand experience of it. During the early years of her marriage to Curt, when they lived in New York, Zoe had worked as an editor in a venerable second-rate publishing firm. Her subsequent isolation in Chicago was due in a large part, one supposed, to the failure of her husband as a writer, but even now she held an editorial job with a Chicago encyclopedia, by which she supported Curt, and even did “free-lance”editorial jobs for her old employers occasionally.

  Living only a short block apart, the Bickles and the Gladharts saw one another every Saturday night, a custom they had kept up for over ten years, when either Zoe Bickle gave a party to which the Gladharts came, or the Gladharts gave a party to which the Bickles came. More or less the same guests usually attended each party. At the Gladharts there were jazz records or a well-known jazz pianist, and everybody brought his own liquor, owing to Bernie’s impecuniousness. At the Bickles, instead of music there was “discussion,”and liquor was available if not exactly plentiful. At the Gladharts, with the musical background, the emphasis was on relaxed behavior, and the evening usually ended in a perfunctory type of sexual encounter in which married couples switched partners and unattached persons found a room not in use. People drank heavily, there were often quarrels between the married couples themselves, and on occasion physical violence. Invariably furniture was broken, again in a perfunctory way. The to-dos were sordid rather than exciting, perhaps because nearly everybody was approaching middle age. Even when there was a sprinkling of young persons and even children, advanced for their age, who painted or wrote or underwent trances, they seemed to add no exuberant or gay note.

  One night at the Bickles the party was so solemn, with discussions of Buddhism, Unamuno and peyote, that Carrie, very drunk, took Zoe Bickle aside and confided her penchant and passion for the Cabot Wright case. For the first time in their acquaintanceship, Mrs. Bickle responded warmly to a topic that Carrie brought up. Zoe, it turned out, was a great follower of Cabot Wright, and said she would give anything to know how Cabot was faring now that he was out of prison.

  Bringing her chair close, Carrie spoke into Zoe’s ear:

  “Do yo
u think anybody could write his story?”

  And Mrs. Bickle without batting an eye replied:

  “Somebody has to.”

  “I mean as fiction, say,”Carrie explained.

  “As fiction,”Mrs. Bickle boomed agreement, absolute belief, surety.

  “You think Curt will want to write it?”Carrie felt her way, even though she had decided the writer must be her husband.

  “I think Bernie could write it sooner,”Zoe Bickle immediately replied.

  Zoe’s irony was wasted on Carrie. Whether she had uttered her remark as a witticism or a cry of bored impatience with Carrie or her own husband, the remark itself was seized on and carried off by her incredulous but triumphant auditor.

  “I’ll tell him you said so!”Carrie had risen at that moment, not wanting to lose what she had heard from Mrs. Bickle by any sudden modification or amendment. “I’ll tell Bernie,”she added for positive clarity, even though she had no intention of mentioning Zoe. All she had needed was this final psychological push, and Zoe had pushed her over the unknown brink.

  “Sweetheart,”Mrs. Bickle began, in slow realization she had made Carrie a present of something the latter dearly wanted. “Carrie!”she called, but her friend had already made her way into the throng, and that moment was the beginning of everything, for all of them.

  ONCE BERNIE HAD departed for Brooklyn and Carrie was alone, she panicked. The one person she could have spoken to, Zoe Bickle, she hesitated to call, for the very reason that it was Zoe who had given her the courage to send him away. Though Carrie realized that Zoe could not have meant everything that her sentence had conveyed at the moment she uttered it, it had now become the truth. Carrie even knew she had acted on it because she wanted it to be the truth.

  At last Carrie saw there was nobody else she could call except Zoe. They were old friends but not really close ones, yet out of everybody else in Chicago they were two women in a similar, almost identical, situation. In some ways Zoe’s situation was worse than hers, for Curt Bickle was one of those contemporary men more common than book and drama reviewers realize—a man not only willing to be supported by a woman, but incapable of turning a hand to support himself. Also Carrie and Zoe were married to husbands who wanted to be writers rather than men who were in fact the authors of anything.

  There were, of course, dissimilarities too: Zoe was positive for example, that her husband would never be a writer, at least in the public sense. In a way she now counted on his not being one, for she wanted to face as squarely as possible the truth of her situation: she had put everything on a losing horse. On the other hand, Carrie believed without proof or evidence that her fourth husband, Bernie, was a writer, that he would be known as one, just as she was equally sure that Zoe was right about Curt’s not ever going to succeed. Too, Carrie counted on Bernie’s being not just a writer but a successful one, and she clung to her almost irrational belief he could write the story of Cabot Wright.

  In the past, Zoe had expressed mild interest in Bernie’s literary ambitions but she had never before told Carrie to go ahead and let him try his wings in Brooklyn. Though they never discussed it, Carrie and Zoe had only one tacit agreement between them: Curt Bickle would now never make it. He might as well go on with what he was doing, studying and annotating the book of Isaiah, despite his Gentile origin and lack of Hebrew. True he had all the training needed for a writer, with his university background, controlled sensitivity, and flair for phrases (his thin-blooded prose appeared once every seven years in The New Yorker, cut a bit, with more commas than he had put in, but it was unmistakably his voice), while Bernie, untrained and without experience, as Carrie never tired of insisting, had the heart, the life experience, and the feeling.

  If you get lonesome enough, Carrie knew, you’ll even call the police. Zoe Bickle, in many ways, was for her a good deal more upsetting than a police lieutenant. She would ask Carrie more questions than a policeman, see through all her evasions and lies, and give her a hard time. Carrie finally realized she could delay her call no longer when she learned that Zoe was going on a trip.

  When Mrs. Bickle answered the phone, Carrie said: “Zoe, precious, you know who this is. I hear you’re going to New York in a day or so, but do you think you could do the impossible and come over? I know you’re afraid of the streets after dark.”Then Carrie briefly explained her situation and Bernie’s mission in Brooklyn.

  Hanging up, Mrs. Bickle was not quick enough to hide her astonishment, even shock, from her husband. He asked her what was wrong.

  “She’s sent Bernie to Brooklyn on the basis of something I said.”

  Curt Bickle’s grim look turned his mouth to a paper-thin line. (It was his thin mouth that had originally captivated her, she remembered, as she looked at him now without desire.) He forced a yawn, then looked quickly at his wristwatch, while Zoe explained why she thought she’d better run over to Carrie’s despite the hour.

  “She’s in a real fit, Curt.”

  “How could she send Bernie to Brooklyn on the strength of something you said?”He seemed hurt, and suspicious that what she had done might prove dangerous for both of them.

  “Maybe I’ll be able to answer your question when I come back.”

  She went out and walked quickly, looking about carefully. The danger of the streets (four or five women had been mugged in the neighborhood during the last month) worried her until she reached Carrie’s and rang the bell.

  She had hardly freed herself from Carrie’s embrace and dry quick kiss when she began with the hardest question itself:

  “You mean then that you sent Bernie on my say-so.”

  A bit startled by such suddenness, Carrie was nonetheless relieved it had come so soon and so sure.

  “I’m afraid so.”Carrie felt she might as well allow Zoe full responsibility.

  “Do you have a cushion anywhere for this chair?”Mrs. Bickle half stood up to show how uncomfortable a seat she had found.

  Carrie produced a fat nondescript sofa cushion.

  “You’ll have something to drink,”Carrie mumbled. Thinking over her own invitation she said, “All I have tonight is some beer and a bottle of wine that’s been opened some time, I’m afraid.”

  “Not a thing just now.”Mrs. Bickle had adjusted herself to the cushion and lay her head back. “Perhaps I’ll have the beer later. I’ll see.”

  “Got a headache?”Carrie peered at her friend.

  Zoe shook her head. “Today was Tuesday,”she was barely audible. “That’s my long day at the office. Tonight I cooked Curt’s dinner for him.”

  “I thought he was the cook.”Carrie’s voice was gray as slate.

  “It was his evening not to feel up to it,”Zoe said.

  “Curt’s still wrapped up in the Old Testament?”

  “Isaiah,” Zoe nodded.

  “What do you think he’ll ever do with it? When he gets done with it, I mean,”Carrie wondered.

  Zoe had to laugh at the solemn manner Carrie always assumed when she touched on the subject of Curt Bickle, or indeed writing.

  “I think maybe you worry more about Curt than I do,”Zoe commented, and it was not the first time she had made this observation.

  “Oh well now, Zoe.”

  “What do you hear from Bernie since his trek east?”

  “He called just a few hours ago,”Carrie brightened a bit. “We’re keeping in touch by phone. Twice a day, as a matter of fact.

  “Look,”Carrie went over to Zoe’s chair and stood like a pupil who has brought a paper to be corrected. “I mean, Zoe, have I been a maniac, do you think, in sending him to Brooklyn?”

  “You do manage to make me feel totally responsible, if not exactly guilty, darling.”

  “You wouldn’t of course remember a sentence you spoke. Oh, it was at your house, and I guess neither of us was bright and shining sober.”

  “I’m sure of course I must have given you a sentence or two then,”Zoe’s voice was hard, if not precisely unpleasant. “I hope
you’re not going to collect sentences I say when I’m in my Saturday cups.”

  Carrie waited a moment before she said: “I wouldn’t have done it, if you hadn’t said what you did. Mind you, I’m not blaming you.”

  Whipping out her compact, Zoe looked in it at her mouth which she had opened wide. As she closed it and the compact, she demanded:

  “What was my goddam sentence?”

  Carrie walked over to the mantel where one of her own miniature oil paintings had been placed. She did not reply.

  “All right! I’m beginning to see what you want to lay at my door,”Zoe said. She studied Carrie in the silence that followed, and wanted to shake her for not keeping up her personal appearance better than she did. Carrie obviously never went to a hair-dresser, she was at least twenty pounds overweight, and her complexion seemed never to know soap, let alone creams or bases. Yet sex was the only thing that had ever held Carrie’s interest over the years, and one would have thought, well——.

  “You thought then,”Zoe fairly assailed her, “you thought of course that I thought Bernie could write the novel about Cabot Wright!”

  Zoe had then exploded in laughter, but the sight of Carrie’s pale intent face stifled her merriment. “Of course I said it, Carrie,”she watched her from the corner of her eye. “I won’t back away from any part in it.”

  Carrie nodded now. “But you didn’t mean what you said,”Carrie struggled to subdue her own threatening arms, held forward suddenly toward Zoe.

  “I must have meant all of it,”Mrs. Bickle weighed everything, and struggled with the attempt to understand her own confusion.

  “But you’re not sure!”Carrie shot at her.