Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel

by Purdy, James

  “We’ve prepared you a little something, my fine General Partner,” Mr. Warburton spoke in a manner peculiar even for him, “and we hope you will want to accept it.” As if surprised at his own use of the word “we,” Mr. Warburton fell back on his habit of placing his fingers before his mouth in tepee-shape. He whistled mournfully through his fingers.

  “Now, Cabot,” Mr. Warburton studied the envelope Miss Watkins had brought. “I want you to take this in the spirit in which it is offered. And by the bye, both your parents have been informed of what I am doing.” He handed Cabot the envelope.

  Tearing it open, he saw of course that it was a check. “Christ, Mr. Warburton, two thousand five-hundred dollars!” The young General Partner next got out in a kind of ghastly whisper “Severance pay?”

  “Nothing of the kind, not by the remotest suggestion,” Mr. Warburton bellowed but Cabot’s phrase, it was easy to see, had touched a nerve.

  “You’re a valuable fellow around here,” Mr. W. intoned, “and, by God, I reward valuable fellows.” Wheeling about then in his chair, Mr. Warburton continued: “But the situation is, Cabot, and the fact is: you’re tired!”

  Cabot rose from his chair, about to cry, “Who told you?” but Warburton was going ahead:

  “Probably, Cabot, you’re one of those, as I hinted a moment ago, a modern American who sleeps too much. I don’t know your habits, of course, nor do I intend to pry into them like the goddam Government. But facts are facts. In my generation nobody was tired. God damn it. The word was unknown, not allowed in decent company. But that was then. This is now. Cabot, I want you to go away and rest, or do something you feel like doing, don’t rest, God damn it. Explode maybe. And your parents wish this too. By the way, do you walk the Brooklyn Bridge to work?”

  But on the word explode Cabot swallowed the weak coffee the wrong way down, and some of the liquid painfully went through his nose, simulating hemorrhage for a moment, which caused additional irritation and loss of time on the part of Mr. W.

  In dismay, Cabot let the check slip from his finger to the carpet, and Mr. Warburton picked it up at once with the professional proprietary grasp of the banker, and handed it back to his young executive.

  “You’ve gone stale in your work! I’ve already told your father!” Mr. Warburton thumped Cabot on the knee. “In my day nobody got stale, because, by Christ, we didn’t dare to. But I know times and periods change. I learn that lesson every hour. We live in a less vital world today, Cabot. But I’ve got my eyes on you and I feel you are one of the ones who may go on. It won’t be my world, of course, not by a damned long shot, I’m resigned to that, but I think, I believe, you are one of the ones who may go on up and onwards. Were you a football player in college by the way?” Mr. Warburton inquired suddenly, an expression of desire and hope in his expression.

  “The second team,” Cabot said, irritated that the swallowing of the coffee through his nose had imparted an unwonted lachrymose flavor to his tone, which he did not at all feel or desire.

  “I see,” Mr. Warburton replied, and assumed his habitual tepee pose with his fingers. “Well, that hasn’t got a good goddam to do with what we’re talking about. Let me close with this thought. I believe in you as I believe in no other man in this organization but, Cabot, by Jesus Christ, I’m waiting for results!”

  Mr. Warburton had gone white.

  “Mr. Warburton,” Cabot said, standing up, “I believe I am your man, sir.”

  Cabot wondered later how he had made this statement. He decided that he must have heard it on his Japanese portable radio, when it was advertising, while he was partially asleep.

  But the statement worked. It electrified old Mr. Warburton, brought the color back to his lips, and made him stand up and pump Cabot’s hand.

  “That’s the ticket now, laddie,” Mr. W. exploded, wreathed in smiles. “That’s my Cabot… Go away and have a hell of a time, laddie… One hell of a one… Do you hear, you good-looking son-of-a-bitch… And what is this talk you are worried about being a supposititious child? Don’t you know your father Cabot Wright Senior has implicit confidence in you? Implicit. As do I. Now go away and explode! Explode, my boy.”

  Mr. Warburton punched Cabot in the ribs and then in the solar plexus, which was the way, Cabot realized, these things are done.

  “And for the sake of God and these goddamned United States, don’t come back with that sleepy look. Give up sleep for the good of the nation, Cabot!” And Mr. Warburton roared with laughter as Cabot left.

  Downstairs, in the Alexander Hamilton bar, Cabot ordered a double brandy and fingered the check from Mr. Warburton. He was almost sorry that the old bastard had not fired him at once because he knew the two thousand five-hundred dollars, yes, those little embossed figures, were the first step down, if not out. He could see Cynthia already halting in her application of her Princess Gray cold cream when he told her they were “required” to take a vacation. Cynthia hated vacations, never liked to leave New York and never went away unless the trip could be combined with some “connection” with her career, business with pleasure.

  Having been potlatched by Mr. Warburton, Cabot Wright remained on in the Alexander Hamilton bar until he was too drunk to walk the Brooklyn Bridge back to his apartment, and took the subway at the Bowling Green stop. Later that day at home, looking out over the confluent waters of the Hudson and East Rivers, he gazed at the Wall Street towers, and had the distinct impression he had flown in over the water and the Bridge.

  Mixing three kinds of vermouth, all bitter, with an immense shot of rum, he began thinking of Mr. Warburton’s icy wrath of the preceding weeks:

  “See here, Cabot,” the old man had said at that time, “I’ve put up with your goddam nonsense about long enough. We are here to get things done. Right? as the New York Hebrews say. All right then, we won’t worry about our feelings and our personalities, our motivations or our own little aspirations. Work, Cabot, that’s the ticket, work, and get on the winning team. The team, Cabot, goddam it, the winning team. What does the geography of Down Town stand for, my boy? I told you the day your Dad and Mother sent you fresh in here. The winning team will decide, goddam it, and you’re a member of it.”

  “The winning team is you, you old white-haired crud,” Cabot mixed himself a second pitcher of rum-vermouth, and then sat down at Cynthia’s typewriter, and began writing a letter to Mr. Warburton. Not knowing the touch system, the typewriter under his fingers sounded like an old-fashioned sewing machine making a false hem. Cabot was scarcely aware what he was saying in his letter of resignation, and after signing it in swooping letters, he put it on a table nearby.

  As dusk fell over the edge of the Wall Street towers, Cabot’s day-long depression warmed itself into a kindling triumphant sense of victory. He imagined having wrung from Mr. Warburton both a speech of apology, and a testimonial in praise of Cabot’s “performance,” together with a statement in which the old man said he would resign for the good of the firm, that is, the team. At the last moment, however, Cabot had insisted old Warby stay on, but with fewer responsibilities, no decision-making powers, no authority to hire or dismiss personnel, a considerable reduction in salary, and a diminutive office facing the powder rooms and the freight elevator shaft.

  “What are you looking at out the window this time of day?” Cynthia quavered, coming unexpectedly into the room. She touched her hair-bow gingerly.

  “The job and man I left behind, lover,” he replied, and he raised his face and his glass to her.

  “Have you been home all day drinking?” she leaned over him, but on whiffing the air did not kiss him. “Bloodshot as a St. Bernard,” she examined him. “Well, give me a taste,” she took his drink, and sipped a bit.

  “What kind of a concoction do you call that?” she wondered, still tasting.

  “Mr. Warburton gave us two thousand five-hundred dollars to go away on,” Cabot said loudly, holding one hand over his eye as he gazed in the direction of Down Town.

 
“Let’s not have any of your sick jokes today,” Cynthia cautioned. She began folding the fresh linens she had picked up from the laundry on her way home. “And please don’t joke about money tonight. I’ve had a day.”

  “Here’s the check, dear girl,” he extended it to her.

  She peered at it.

  “You’ve been fired,” she said. “Dear God, that’s all I needed.”

  “Oh, this is only the first step to my getting the sack,” he informed her. “They’re firing me when I go back.” He bristled, and looked brave, as perhaps he might have looked had he been on the first football team.

  Just then as she closed one of the drawers the letter Cabot had written to Mr. Warburton fell directly at her feet. Stooping to pick it up, her eyes were riveted to the irregularly margined triple-spaced words, giving the effect of having been branded on the paper by an iron.

  Dear Gray Forks,

  I have decided that rather than accept your crummy two thousand five hundred dollars which all men on or off the team know how you came by, you can take same and apply as poultice to your piles. How about giving some to your alum-pussed wife so she can go out & hang one on for a change? I take it, Gray Forks, you won the goddam money at either poker or recent market swindle. It will be one hell of a relief not seeing you or the frog-throated eunuchs of either sex. Am having a hand-carved marble stool with cherry colored throw of General Ike and Dick the Nix to replace the wooden seat where you park your old sagging white cheeks so many hours of the winning day. Am also forwarding to your home 80 foot mural of General Mac conquering Asia with his hat on.

  Cabot W.

  “Did you send this?” Cynthia kept staring at the paper.

  “Why don’t you take your clothes off, silly,” Cabot replied. “It’s nearly dark out.”

  Turning, she slapped him smartly over the mouth.

  Rising very much like a star half-back, Cabot picked her up and carried her writhing vigorously into their bedroom in order, as he told her, to make her distinguish between a paid vacation and severance check.

  10

  TWO CATASTROPHES

  Cabot Wright, in addition to that long hard nineinch sword he wore from then on all the time at the left side of his shorts (“Wounded by my own blade again! Condition brand new, never misses a volt!”) until he was restored to equilibrium by police brutality and his prison stretch, now underwent two tragic events that, together with his state of permanent erection, made his coming return to Wall Street a mere anticlimax.

  The first catastrophe was Cynthia, of course. Her growing fear of and contempt for his physical presence finally made coitus or, as she preferred to call it, sexual commerce, impossible for her. She had always feared, as she wrote in that final letter to her mother, the thought of a life growing in her body. To her pregnancy was now synonymous with death. She therefore barricaded herself.

  If Cabot had remembered the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, he might have applied its lessons to the last days of his married life. Locking herself in her own room, Cynthia forced Cabot to communicate with her entirely through the keyhole. Putting his mouth to this aperture, her husband would call out, begging her to be reasonable. Weeping, Cynthia would reply she would never come out again.

  “Sweety, do you realize what this means in law?” Cabot inquired, keeping his pupil to the keyhole. He had to repeat his question several times before she understood. He then recalled for her a conversation his father had had with a young working-man in a similar difficulty: if the wife continued “not to yield,” divorce would be permitted and, in some states, the marriage would be annulled.

  “I’ve yielded, God in heaven knows,” she responded, “more than the laws of nations could require.” Her voice was coming from behind a fashion magazine, and was muffled though intelligible.

  Then he heard her weeping into some kleenex.

  “You’ve changed, you’re the one who is not himself! Ever since the night you came home from that branch library!” Her voice was going through a metamorphosis, and she sounded more and more like a child in the first grade.

  “The branch library!” He recalled this event now, as if for the first time, and closed his eyes. “All right, Cynth, pour it on!”

  “You don’t need to act like a doped-up animal,” he heard her little girl voice, and he could visualize the hair-bow she now incessantly wore. “Yet that’s how you’ve been ever since the day you saw Bigelow-Martin. I think you’ve just decided to act out a part, not caring how I feel or what happens to our marriage. I don’t see how we can raise a family, in any case, on what we earn. And I’m sick and tired of your parents’ attitude.”

  “My foster parents, if you please.”

  “I’m not thinking of divorce, mind you,” Cynthia said, a bit worried, to judge by her strange breathing. “When you come to your senses, we can settle down to living together again. But I just don’t know why you have to pretend all of a sudden you’re an animal, sweating and panting and rushing. You’re not yourself, and if I had any respect for, or trust in, your Mom and Dad, I’d tell them how you are now,” she cried. “But I’ve never been close to your mother. Your father never stops long enough to listen, one can’t say a thing to him, and they wouldn’t believe what I told them in any case because I can’t believe it myself.” She dissolved again in tears.

  “Do you want me to quit seeing the Doc?” Cabot inquired, moving his eye back and forth over the keyhole. He had never been very adept at looking through keyholes. As a college boy, at Yale, he had often followed his classmates to a particular keyhole and while they had seen so much, they claimed, all he ever saw was a fuzzy portion of wallpaper. As he peered into Cynthia’s room, all he could get his vision focused on was some part of a windowshade, or a dress hung over a chair.

  “What has seeing a doctor got to do with you turning into a sweating panting beast?” she countered. “Go to the doctor or don’t go. It’s immaterial. No M.D. is going to change you, if you ask me.”

  “All right, Cynth, old girl, if that’s your last word,” he got up from his squatting position in front of the door. “I’ve tried to be reasonable. I guess you’d just rather draw fashions than be a woman…”

  “Yes, you can say all right!” he heard her smothered voice growing more faint and more like her own mother’s until he almost thought the old girl herself might be in there with Cynthia. But of course Cynthia’s mother was safe away in Oakland, California.

  On the whole, Cynthia’s outward behavior remained unremarkable until, toward the end of her self-imposed confinement, she began mouthing garbled imitations of the headline announcements that came over the radio. She would cry out, from time to time, things like:

  “EAGLE SCOUT CONFESSES TO OFF-COLOR DEED.

  “WALL STREET BROKER SLAYS WIFE, MISTRESS, AND THIRD WIFE’S LOVER.

  “CRIMES OF PASSION INCREASE, CRIMES WITHOUT NAME ALSO UP.

  “F.B.I. OFFICAL DEMANDS MORE SUNDAY SCHOOLS STAY OPEN.

  “RACE RELATIONS DELEGATE BLAMES MOST NEGRO CRIMES ON BLACKFACE ARTISTS.

  “MOTHER OF TEN MAKES INDECENT ADVANCES TO Y.M.C.A. LEADER.

  Cabot, after his key hole interview with Cynthia, went on the prowl for several days. He slept in Central Park and emerged alive, rode the subways, inhabited the Automat, strolled down 42nd Street, and went to see Hell’s Kitchen. As Princeton Keith later pointed out to magazine editors, an entire book could be written concerning these hours in Cabot Wright’s life. Descriptions of the places he passed alone could fill countless pages of major American prose, with flash-backs to his Army career, long meaty paragraphs concerning the women whose breasts he had studied off-limits, the glances of guilt, hesitation and fear which he exchanged with passers-by, and finally his leaning against a lamppost or railing to get his breath. There would be long poetic descriptions of his reveries, with phrases or entire sentences in French, for the satiny weekly New York magazines to sandwich between their vermouth and plumbing ads.

  Returning to
his and Cynthia’s apartment one early afternoon (the clock on the mantel said 12:03), he was surprised to see their friend, Leah Goldberg, seated in the big arm chair looking him square in the face. Immediately she rose, and putting out her hand, her face warm and troubled, she was ready to tell him at length about Catastrophe No. 1.

  Only this morning Cynthia had gone to the supermarket to shop, shortly after it had opened its doors, so she could have her pick of the freshest fruits and vegetables, before the crush. She had walked up and down the aisles with her cart all morning, taking nothing down from the shelves and ignoring customers and clerks.

  Then toward the middle of the morning, she had begun to act “disturbed.” She began throwing cans on the floor, but so haphazardly and gradually that the clerks thought for a while the cans were falling by accident. After too many repetitions of this sort of thing the manager, Harry F. Cowan, had rung a bell by which he summoned extra help. While he was conferring with the assistants, Cynthia methodically began flinging cans and frozen goods to the floor. The ice-cream hostess, Miss Glenna De Loomis, attempted to salvage as many of their Dairy Maid frozen products as possible, but Cynthia then began to throw the articles at the fluorescent lighting fixtures. Just before the police and rescue squad came, she had moved back to fresh fruit and vegetables and had managed to throw in the air nearly all the pomegranates, persimmons, apples, peaches, and Jerusalem artichokes she could get her hands on. Then in a rush toward the front of the store, she had overturned three entire shelves of detergents and cleansing fluids.

  When she was seized, her beautiful frock was spattered with the leaves of vegetables, the juice of mashed fruits, and spilled ice cream and detergents, but the police were most gentle with her and led her rather easily out to a waiting ambulance, where she was strapped down to a litter and given an injection by a young internist. She immediately went to sleep.