Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel

by Purdy, James

  “Come in, please,”Keith motioned him to sit down on his own bed, for he had taken the only chair. “Be seated by all means.”

  He examined Bernie Gladhart’s face with interest. “You’re puzzled. You see a mystery where no mystery is. As is usually the case, there is no puzzle and no mystery. Mrs. Bickle told me,”he went on to explain. “Wife of a writer named Curt Bickle. But of course you know both of them. Curt never did very well himself at the writing game. On the other hand, Mrs. Bickle feels you have a chance… —She’s here,”Keith added, flinging a hand in the direction of New York City, but was then puzzled at a strange disconnected look which had come swiftly over Bernie Gladhart’s features.

  “Mrs. Bickle’s here to help you,”Keith brought out, consolingly.

  “Her! Help me?”Bernie exploded. “So this is why I’m here,”he understood the whole thing now. “Talk about put-up jobs, for Christ’s sake. So this has been a crummy hoax from the day Carrie read those newspaper stories till I landed in this cockroach palace. Oh, Carrie,”he apostrophized his wife, “when I see you again…”

  Ever delighted at discomfort in others, Keith regained his own composure and good humor. “Now save your steam for your book, my boy. Never waste energy. Prime rule of mine. Fool to let yourself go, young as you are. How young are you, by the bye?”

  Frowning, Bernie merely retorted: “So that middle-aged bitch is behind all of this.”He ignored Keith and jumped around the room upsetting ashtrays and empty cheese jars. “And my cheap double-crossing wife… So it was her idea, huh,”he menaced Mr. Keith. “As if she could have an idea that wasn’t bed…”

  “I don’t know what suddenly bit you, or where,”Keith continued, perfectly calm. “But I will tell you this. We’d like to publish the book. We want, that is, your idea… Only thing I’d kind of like would be for you to meet with the goddam culprit himself. The rapist. It’d be a great help to all of us.”Mr. Keith looked wistful.

  Bernie studied his face for traces of irony, sarcasm, tricks.

  “I’m not going to require the impossible of you,”Mr. Keith looked away from him. “I’m after all not hunting documentation but ideas.”

  The thoughts of both men at that moment were elsewhere. Bernie was thinking of the “secret”he had not even shared with Carrie. It was something he had only recently learned in Brooklyn, and he thought Princeton Keith might have got wind of it by reason of his peculiar statement about the “goddam culprit.”Princeton Keith’s thoughts were more portentous. Though he was considered the most brilliant editor in New York publishing, he faced a crisis in his career, one might even say Armageddon. He was not here reading a coffee-stained manuscript in a bed-bug palace by choice. He had not found a new book or new writer that had made money for his firm in several seasons. Other editors, obscure compared to him, had recently made several “finds”and fortunes, and though Princeton Keith had been the fair-haired boy of the Al Guggelhaupt publishing empire, there was a marked coolness now between editor and publisher, a strained, inhibited but crackling hostility.

  “Find me a new book, or a new writer soon, or face the eventuality of our early pension-plan,”Al Guggelhaupt as good as told Keith, always in veiled and indirect messages, as had Corinna, Al Guggelhaupt’s wife, in saccharine expressions of “concern”dropped from her lips at terrible cocktail parties.

  Reading the story of Cabot Wright that late afternoon in the Manor, while the sounds of Spanish caterwauled up the rotten stairwells, Keith’s face relaxed for the first time in years without the help of whiskey or tranquillizers.

  “I’ve got it for you, you old ball-less dynamo, Guggelhaupt,”Keith had actually cried out half-through the manuscript, and now as he faced Bernie similar words fell from his lips: “I’ve got you something this time you can’t put down, you cruddy old fourflusher!”

  Alarmed by this verbal attack from his intruder, Bernie seized Keith’s arm and intemperately shook him.

  “Of course you’ve got a book in you!”Keith exclaimed, coming to himself. “I’ve told you we want it. What more can I say?”

  Baffled at Keith’s odd incoherence, Bernie changed tack and said, “What would you say if I told you that in addition to writing all this about the culprit, I’ve met him besides?”

  Keith looked at Bernie deprecatingly, and astonished him by his reply:

  “I’d simply tell you that it isn’t at all necessary. When I suggested awhile back that it would be good to know the rapist, I was merely speaking from an ideal viewpoint. What matters is here,”he struck the pages of typescript again, “and you wrote this without meeting him!”

  Exasperated, Bernie was about to shout, when Keith, who had good lungs, beat him to the punch:

  “And what would you say, Bernie, if I told you that not only have I met Cabot Wright, but that I used to know him and his family.”

  Obviously taken aback at this intelligence, Bernie sat down again on his bed.

  Keith smiled at the writer’s token of receptiveness, and went on immediately:

  “Not only, Bernie, did I know Cabot, I know all about him.”

  “Except where he is now!”Bernie shot, in great anger.

  Unruffled, Keith persevered: “Big fellow with flaming red hair, toothpaste smile, innocent gray eyes, stuffy background, Yale—but,”and here the editor chuckled, “his Achilles heel, Bernie—he was a supposititious child. Rotten heredity, one can only suppose.”

  Rising from the novelist’s typing chair now, Princeton Keith took the younger man’s hand in his, clasped it firmly, and said:

  “Change the poor bastard’s name, a few facts, names of victims, etcetera, we’ve got a book. Nice meeting you, Bernie.”

  The editor snapped his fingers in a northerly direction as in the face of an invisible eye: “We’ll make you eat shit and call it filet mignon, Guggelhaupt old boy. And Corinna will smack her white lead lips for more.”

  “Mr. Keith,”Bernie caught the editor by his jacket, “would it interest you at all to know, if I can get the word in somehow while you have your mouth shut, that I’ve also met the Achilles heel you refer to?”

  “The expression Achill—.”

  “Shut up,”Bernie said. “And sit down.”

  He shoved Mr. Keith back into the chair.

  “Who do you have reference to?”the editor asked with alarm.

  Despite being forced into a sitting posture, however, Keith drew himself up, was again the serious distinguished New York editor, guest columnist in New York newspapers, nationwide lecturer, member of TV panels, a face invariably present at great cocktail hours.

  “Who do I have reference to? Who but him,”Bernie informed his visitor.

  “You can’t mean it, Bernie, by God!”the editor leaned forward eagerly. “It can’t be true.”

  “Why would I tell you if it wasn’t,”Bernie gave it back to him. “After all it’s me who’s got to produce…”Then looking both mysterious and powerful, he added: “He’s right here too,”and pointed at the floor.

  “You mean Cabot, of course,”Keith wanted this point made clear positively, and Bernie nodded.

  “As I said,”the writer told Keith, “he lives here.”

  “And you’ve talked!”Keith could not help shouting. “You’ve said lots to him!”

  “Almost nothing,”Bernie replied, somewhat depressed by the smallness of his “secret.”

  Keith stood up again, now holding Bernie’s typescript tightly against his three-button suit.

  “Give that back here,”Bernie snatched at the manuscript.

  Making Keith sit down was much easier than taking a manuscript away from him, when he wanted it.

  “I’ll have five copies of it made!”he calmed Bernie. “I’ve never lost a manuscript, not in twenty years. We’ll have a contract made up for you. We want the book,”he said.

  Then pausing as he thought over something, Keith added:

  “Don’t tell our culprit we know each other, Bernie, or he’ll be on to the fact m
aybe you’re writing something.”

  Keith studied absentmindedly a heavy silver ring on his hand.

  “To think he’s stopping in a place like this,”he suddenly exclaimed. Catching himself, he looked up and away from Bernie, like a man come out of sleep. Out of the corner of his eyes, nonetheless, Bernie could see the editor examining critically his cheap Chicago clothes and the stained wall-paper with its morning-glory design.

  “Of course a lot has happened to Cabot since I knew him,”Keith sighed, still as if to himself. “Coincidence of this sort,”he went on, “you two chaps in this same establishment, well, I mean, coincidence which is so common, so abundant in real life, dear fellow, isn’t tolerated by many publishing people. Be glad I’m an exception. You’d have hurt your cause had you told most publishing people he was here. They like the workable story. I’m different,”he sniggered.

  Bernie considered Keith’s ill-concealed judgment that if the See-River Manor was too seedy a place for Cabot Wright, it was, all in all, just about adequate for a writer such as himself.

  “But you’re sure it’s really him now?”Keith inquired with concern just short of hysteria, going up close to Bernie, his eyes still worried by something in the cut or the cloth of the suit the writer wore. It was this final scrutiny of his clothes by Keith that made Bernie decide he would loathe him from that moment on.

  “It’s him all right,”Bernie nodded.

  “Well, fiddle,”the editor reassured him now. “Here or not here, we won’t need old Cabot in any case. And after all if we do want to check a detail or two, or there’s some color lacking in our palette, we can always use the old imagination. Expenses aside, too many cooks spoil the broth.”

  Keith patted the typescript again. “Bernie, don’t forget, we’re in business, old man. And this is a book. Don’t ever let anybody say it’s not. Thank God, Zoe Bickle’s in town. We’ll use her, Bernie.”He flashed his smile. “We’ll use you most,”he whispered. “And we’ll use him if necessary,”he employed Bernie’s gesture pointing downstairs. “We’ve found what I’ve been looking for, and I hope you feel the same. Just great to see you, Gladhart.”

  He had gone then, taking the precious thing that the fire engines and police cars had kept Bernie awake over, night after night. But Princeton Keith left behind a greater sense of security and hope, coupled with some inexplicable hurt and shame, than Bernie had ever known.

  He went out into the hallway to make a phone call to Chicago. When he got to the booth, however, his hand refused to take the receiver off the hook.

  4

  FIRST ENCOUNTER

  I’ve seen somebody I don’t know who down there, and it can’t be nobody; it’s got to be him—Cabot.

  Bernie had indited these words in the typescript Keith carried away with him. It was Bernie’s only record of his first Brooklyn discovery, and this was the secret he could not as yet share with Carrie on the telephone.

  When he told Princeton Keith he had “met” Cabot Wright, he had not told quite all, for he had not really encountered Cabot in the social sense the editor assumed he meant. Rather he and Cabot had looked at each other in common surprise, as we catch a glimpse unexpectedly of our own worried face in a store window and do not immediately recognize who is staring back at us.

  It had occurred in the following way.

  Like all New York tenements, the See-River Manor allowed you to hear all sounds individually and collectively under its roof, resembling in this regard a huge listening-booth in a music, or record, center. Soon after his arrival, Bernie had discovered that when he stepped into his tiny clothes closet to hang his coat (it contained nothing else), he could hear a stream of sound—music and talk—percolating from below. Another week or two passed before he noticed the loose board on the closet floor. He picked it up cautiously, found it covered an empty space originally occupied by a hot-air register,and looked down. There, one floor below, was a kind of student’s room, with huge dictionaries and reference books, a forlorn yellowed habitation in which somebody must spend his time morosely. As far as Bernie could tell, the room was empty.

  Just a day or two before his meeting with Keith, hearing the sounds again, this time the monotonous speaking of a young man, Bernie quietly removed the board. He recognized the occupant as a man he had seen on the street, several times on the long promenade, always at night. In daylight now he could see that his hair was red. Was it Cabot? Later that evening, looking down into the room once more, he had been caught in his observance by the occupant himself who had shouted: “You up there! DON’T YOU BEGIN!”

  Bernie had been taken too much unawares to put back the board at once. They confronted one another between ceiling and floor, interminably. The young man, when interrupted, had been examining his face in a small hand-mirror affixed to the wall by a nail. Strangely enough, after shouting at Bernie, he lost interest in his observer, and after feeling his way about the room by touching objects of furniture, like a blind man, sat down in a dilapidated easy chair minus a cushion, and seemed indifferent to the fact that Bernie still gazed at him from above.

  After putting back the board, like a sleepwalker, fearful, trembling as when one hesitates to open a telegram bearing a message that may change one’s life forever, Bernie had gone down to the vestibule in which all the mailboxes were lined up.In all the days of going in and out of the building and looking automatically at his own mailbox (the only mail he expected to see were his rent and light bills—what reason had Carrie to write him, when they spoke on the phone twice a day?), he had never before noticed the names of his fellow tenants. For the first time now he looked at each name, going from box to box and finally coming to the number of the room beneath his own. In black lettering on gold he read the seven letters: c. WRIGHT. Several days later Keith Princeton called on him.

  AFTER BERNIE HAD recovered from the shock of Keith’s visit enough for his hand to obey him, he managed to take the receiver off the hook joylessly and telephoned Carrie in Chicago. He wanted to scream at her that he knew all about Mrs. Bickle and the book being her idea, but he was in control of himself now and instead dutifully began telling Carrie his “secret.” As he quietly explained that at last he had discovered Cabot Wright’s whereabouts right in the See-River Manor, he realized that Carrie was not really interested or surprised and, to his incredulous certain horror, he was certain somebody was with her in their—in her—bedroom. After a very brief conversation, she made her goodbye kissing sound, but he could not bring his hand to hang up the phone. Then hearing voices and someone laughing, he realized that Carrie inadvertently had not put her own receiver back on the hook. They were still connected and he was about to shout and warn her, when what he heard silenced him…

  What Bernie heard in the wedding-bower as he listened with frozen attention in Joralemon Street, was the product not only of Carrie’s own nature,but of Mrs. Bickle’s visit to her house.

  Zoe’s visit had struck terror into the painter’s inmost being,and only after her neighbor’s departure did she realize how shattered she was. Carrie had not been so “down” since Harold Winternitz had told her she represented every second-rate Bohemian claptrap of a dead era. Looking in the mirror, she saw that she was certainly old in the face, and if anything older in the body. Her peculiar logic might have told her that she was through; instead it told her she required someone young and disengaged of the opposite sex, and at once.

  Carrie had grown up in an age which practiced promiscuous coitus as an injunction, if not a duty. Marriage, she and her contemporaries felt, was easier and more sensible than the single state, though not laudable or noticeably rewarding in itself—a gray faute de mieux.The best thing about marriage was the increased opportunities it afforded to meet a number of men sexually in relaxed homelike surroundings.Being single to her would be as awkward as appearing in the street bald of pate or deprived of makeup.

  Even more than her craving for “success” and “recognition” in her husbands was her incura
ble need for “romance.” She wanted to be married to a writer,but she also needed a permanent man in the wedding-bower. Carrie saw now, of course, after Zoe’s call, that she had not quite understood her own motives in sending Bernie to Brooklyn.Zoe’s remarks made it clear to her that she had acted rashly and that her lonesomeness, as a result of her rashness, would be an awesome problem for her.

  For days after Bernie’s departure she did nothing but sit in her wicker rocker, with her hi-fi set playing for interminable hours, opening up new boxes of cleansing tissue, blowing her nose, wiping her eyes, and cursing Zoe and her first three husbands intermittently with the popular bad words of her girlhood.

  Bernie’s daily long-distance telephone calls, satisfying though they were at first, since she realized she was “inspiring” him, were finally too spiritual. They did not assuage or comfort her need for romance in any palpable way.

  She finally decided that perhaps the best thing to do was follow Zoe’s suggestion, and again let out her rooms to rent. Roomers in the past, often between husbands, had somehow kept up her spirits and her interest in life; when depressed, she could invite one of the boarders downstairs for a drink and a chat. Shaking off her lethargy and blues, Carrie walked over to the five and dime store just before it closed one evening, and purchased a neon-bright red sign that said BEAUTIFUL ROOMS TO LET.

  The sign had been up only a few minutes when she felt it was “working.” Early the next morning the bell rang and on hastening to the door, Carrie had been pleased, if not thrilled, to see looking in through the frosted glass not the romantic stranger she hoped for, but something a good deal more promising, the familiar face of a friend who was a young handsome bachelor to boot.

  Something snapped that evening in Carrie’s brain, she later explained to herself. The moment she opened the frosted door, all she could think of was, “He is the answer to my prayers.” Brooklyn and Bernie seemed as distant as Burma when she laid eyes on Joel Carmichael Ullay.