Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel

by Purdy, James

  ALTHOUGH STILL A member of the firm of Slider, Bergler, Gorem, Hill and Warburton, Cabot Wright, by reason of his becoming an heir, could no longer be listed merely as a General Partner. While a more suitable name was being found for his changed status, he sampled his new-found leisure. No longer going to the office so assiduously, he discovered around him, in the novelty of off-hours, a world whose existence he had neither known nor suspected, the army of persons who know no routine labor.

  He had thought that businessmen and stenographers, career women and elevator operators were the entire population, and that those left behind were housewives and children or small groups too nondescript to consider. By being semi-retired at 26, he found a whole population which did not walk the Brooklyn Bridge or go by subway to midtown Manhattan, or commute to Long Island. Neither were they all over 65. There were the young and the very young among them. Some were, he supposed, heirs like himself, while others were the unemployed and unemployable—a monster statistic whose real numbers both press and government concealed under stock phrases.

  Everywhere he saw those engaged in race-track betting, gambling and other related pursuits, professional dog- and cat-walkers, disappointed unpublished writers, longshoremen unhired or laid off for other reasons, plain clothesmen resting until their suspects turned up, photographers, reporters hoping to run into stories, worried businessmen out to think things through, senile Spaniards who still discussed Franco, young men in Bermuda shorts, the crippled, ministers of churches getting ideas, social workers out “in the field,” shoe clerks off for a smoke, nursemaids, homemakers, cooks, and children not at camp.

  The boats screamed prior to departure from the Columbia pier, air-raid sirens occasionally rehearsed their cries, gulls flew sleepily overhead, and the Wall Street towers stared back at Cabot from the other side of the river.

  Deciding to look like everyone else, Cabot put on summer slacks, a soft sport shirt, and sun glasses. Before he left his room, the desire for a whiff of present-day reality made him turn on his tiny Japanese radio. He heard the words of a song:

  “Everywhere in our free land,

  our only land…”

  sung by youthful male altos, followed by the rouse of the march song for Beer, the democratic get-to-gether drink.

  A dialogue followed between a woman with a low contralto and a man identified as her husband concerning plans they had laid for a vacation in the Adirondacks, with Victor, their 8-year old son with an I. Q. of 180, this dialogue being succeeded instantaneously by Feminine Hygiene Ad, followed, while the last note of the preceding sounded, by Health-Larynx-Cigarettes. A chorus of Swiss yodellers then spoke of men’s body odors as contrasted with those of ladies. An expensive-dentured M. D. lectured for 30-seconds on baby’s heatrash, and the listener was then returned to the low contralto who read a funny joke in the presence of her husband (already identified) from a list of jokes known as “Buzzie S.’s At-Home Talks” (the genius child).

  Then an eighty-piece band played, with background of mixed chorus of 14 middle-aged men who sang a religious number, after which came the religious quotation of the day, plus appeal to attend church, synagogue or tent of your radio sponsor’s choice, followed by a chorus of the sons of the middle-aged men singing a capella for Mooney Cement and King Bar Beer. A father whose voice had earlier spoken to the M. D. concerning his baby’s heatrash, then urged all to buy shares in freedom and appealed again to attend church of radio sponsor’s choice, but if as yet you had not chosen church, go at once to the free psychiatric clinic nearest you, where you would be given a telephone appointment.

  Adjusting his trousers, Cabot went out, not taking the time to turn off the radio, and hearing again in the hall the contralto’s shared laughter (with identified husband), and the parting strains of the chorus of youthful middle-aged men singing

  “Keep it free, keep it free…”

  On the wall near his apartment building, he saw an old-fashioned obscene word misspelled, and although obviously a trap laid by the borough police, since the chalk lay in open view on the walk below, Cabot picked it up, fumbled for the extempore inspiration, and then wrote the word: JITTO.

  There are no streetcars in Brooklyn, though there are the remains of the tracks that were once laid for them, and of course nearly everything of the old city was being abolished. “The bull-dozers are coming to you and to me,” Cabot thought. “They will flatten the old Federal homes, so dear to so few, the yards, the shrubs, the tea-rose bushes, tear down the fancy bird-houses, the immaculate greenswards, though leaving a few golf-courses founded by Italian candy kitchens, and a statue of a Scottish caddy who found the ten thousand dollars and returned it to the owner only to receive a dollar reward, on which he founded his chocolate biscuit factory and became a Flatbush millionaire.”

  IT WASN’T LONG before Gilda, in a drink coma, squealed on Cabot Wright. Later, sober, she denied her own story, leaving Mr. Warburton high and dry, but still obsessed.

  “Did he touch the little woman?” he kept mumbling aloud Down Town. Finally, after soul-searching and rereading many of his own Sermons, he confronted Cabot. He blurted out his accusation suddenly and unexpectedly, but the look of calm innocence on young Wright’s face immediately convinced him of the impossibility of the charge. He realized the young man had never insulted his wife, that she was not well, and so to forgive him, forgive her, forgive everything.

  Warby knew that a boy who had just lost his parents, and seen his wife break down in mental illness, certainly wouldn’t have insult and rape on the brain. Impossible. And again that fine wholesome look to Cabot. Open any newspaper to the photographs of captured rapists, and see their faces. Blood will tell. No, Gilda was just not well, after all the fortunes they had spent on specialists, rest cures, and Wisconsin vacations. Just goes to show you no amount of cash can buy health. Most precious thing in the world. Nothing equal to it. Old John D. knew that with his stomach ulcers. Without health, damned little to be grateful for. All the money in the world can’t equal it.

  Despite Cabot Wright’s convincing disavowal, Mr. War-burton then and thenceforth seemed to lose his appetite for information. He ceased perusing the Wall Street Journal (he had given up the Times twenty years before), hardly touched his food, and in many ways looked more ill than Cynthia Adams prior to her celebrated breakdown at the supermarket.

  EACH MORNING, IN order to comfort the not-to-be-comforted, Cabot walked the Brooklyn Bridge as in his obscure days, and stepping into the old broker’s office reassured him each day that the charges were absolutely false. On those very days on which he was denying Gilda’s charges against him, young Cabot was raping women and girls at the rate of about 1½ per diem, by that meaning, in weekly statistics he raped about 2 an evening or afternoon, and fewer for some reason over the weekends, perhaps because women are more apt to be accompanied by sons, husbands, or other loved male companions in the cessation of work periods. Such was his incessant ability at rape or, as he testified to an attentive police-interrogation squad, his uncanny power to “have his way with them.”

  EATEN BY A hidden malaise, Mr. Warburton grew weaker and weaker by the day, and finally was advised by a young business colleague to consult a new physician, who had recently put up his shingle in Wall Street, and who was having sensational results with both older executives, and younger partners who were below par. Name of Dr. Bugleford.

  Then another event transpired in Mr. Warburton’s domestic life which made Cabot’s real or fancied overtures to Gilda of secondary importance. To explain fully its impact on Mr. Warburton, one should know that although he had been born and raised in the East, all of his ancestors, like those of Gilda, were from the South, and he was proud of his heritage. That is, he was proud of being from the East and the South, and his loyalties were sometimes strained, though his principles were always clear.

  Going to Gilda’s room “to have it out with her” a final time as to whether Cabot had molested her or not, he had heard a scene o
f such intimacy between Gilda and her butler, Brady, that the Cabot Wright episode was, he now believed, a ruse on Gilda’s part. At first he could not believe, quite naturally, what he was hearing outside Gilda’s door, but living as he was, at the end of a civilization, nothing was surprising, he supposed. It was nightmarish enough, when he went back the following evening to Gilda’s room and heard the entire scene between her and her Negro servant repeated.

  “So it was Big Smoke then and not Cabot Wright!” he could only mutter. It was then he told his secretary to telephone Dr. Bugleford. “Troy has fallen,” he said of himself. All his life he had scorned doctors and therapy, believing that medicine must be employed only in such mechanical matters as a broken limb, or to staunch the flow of blood.

  The reader, in this case the listener (Cabot Wright eavesdropping on his own story as novelized by Bernie Gladhart and revised by Zoe Bickle) has already met Dr. Bugleford, when he was Dr. Bigelow-Martin. Having had to leave the leaf-shaded blue-stoned pavements of Brooklyn Heights in order to escape a possible charge of malpractice, Bigelow-Martin changed his name effortlessly to another and set up practice on Lower Broadway where superstition, in a district so close to national pulse and strain, has always been rampant, especially in moments of crisis and naturally induces a flourishing patronage of herb-doctoring, health cures, astrology, fortune-telling, bone, muscle, and nerve realignment, not to mention new-thought parlors.

  The doctor received the distinguished Wall Street personality in an unusually beautiful consulting room, on the floor of which rested a carpet, snowy as a llama’s belly. Because of Mr. Warburton’s age and an old football injury, Dr. Bugleford waived regulations and agreed that he would not require him to take off all his clothes for the present, though this was his usual method, to see the entire human radish stripped of subterfuge and disguise. In the case of Mr. W. the doctor would work up gradually to nudity.

  While Mr. Warburton consulted his gold pocket watch, Dr. Bugleford gave his beginning lecture on civilization’s woe, the demented neuroskeletal tension we are all living in, or rather, expiring under.

  “Let’s get down to facts and figures,” Mr. Warburton advised him. “For my part I’ll leave what kind of a world we’re living in to the preachers and the women.” Rising from the relaxation couch, Mr. Warburton explained that he was due back at his office in one half hour, that he had given up his usual luncheon at Whyte’s, and hoped the Doctor would be through with his examination in fifteen short minutes.

  “The initial examination is over,” Dr. Bugleford smiled pityingly (and his expression of condescension was not lost on Mr. Warburton.) “Your disease is America’s. Hurry-tension. Knotted arteries and veins. Clogged network of nerves and muscles. Tight brain tissue. It’s in every atom of our atmosphere. And when one thinks, Mr. Broker, we’re 6 billion muscle fibers encased in 639 muscles all of which have got steel tight with tenseness, isn’t it natural, then, we feel bad bad bad? Well, that’s my worry, not yours: I’ll hunt for the tight spots in your 6 billion muscle fibers…”

  Usually quick at a rejoinder, Mr. Warburton was struck dumb.

  “Ready, Mr. Warmington?”

  “Warburton, Warburton, if you please,” he corrected the Doctor.

  “You are as ready, now, Mr. Warburton, thank you for correcting, as you’ll ever be. As in religion, we must, in my science, obey or perish. Do you want to change your life, Mr. Warbleton, or not?”

  “Warburton!”

  “You needn’t raise your voice. I hear perfectly well, and stand corrected, Mr. Warburton.”

  Mr. W. flushed angrily.

  “You are very very tense, my dear broker,” the doctor moved into diagnosis. “Your disease is America’s. America is your disease. Your jaw,” he seized this portion of Mr. Warburton’s facial structure, “your lower jaw could easily be a steel trap.”

  Suddenly he slapped Mr. Warburton’s chin smartly.

  “Release that jaw!” he commanded, slapping the mandible again.

  The doctor then rose, a smile bringing into play the myriad wrinkles of his countenance, and said: “We shall begin our treatment then?”

  “Now see here, doctor,” Mr. Warburton began, but an imperious gesture from the doctor snapped this train of thought in the elderly investor, and he finished with the querulous appeal: “Got to call my office to tell them I won’t be coming back right away then.”

  Mr. Warburton touched his jaw gingerly as if he had suffered an extraction.

  “Nonsense, Mr. Warmington,” Dr. Bugleford reassured him, “they’ll see you when they see you, and they’ll see a changed man, let me tell you when they do.”

  The doctor then placed his index and middle fingers in the corners of the broker’s eyes and pressed calmly.

  “You’ll be going back to Wall Street, granted, a little late, but you’ll certainly be going back: be grateful for that. But if you go on the way you are, with that steel-trap jaw, those pounding arteries and tight nerves and muscles, you’re headed, without the shadow of a doubt, for an infraterrestrial site.”

  He ushered his patient into a huge room.

  “Ordinary doctors would call this the operating room,” he told Mr. Warburton. “I call it the beginning room.”

  Lying down on a huge green couch, Mr. Warburton became aware of the doctor’s warm wintergreen breath bending over his right (the good) ear, saying:

  “Now my dear sir, I think you must realize that it is the way you act, the way you do, your way of raising your hand or your leg or your salad oil or the fork with the piece of sirloin attached to it, the pitch of your voice, the rapidity with which you lick an envelope, swallow your Jack Daniels, or make love to your wife or whoever—”

  “Meaning what?” Mr. Warburton raised his head and roared.

  “Lie back, sir,” Dr. Bugleford was forbearing.

  “You are as you behave, Mr. Warleyton, and how do you behave? I know how you behave, but do you? Can you catch yourself in the act of behaving as you? That is what we must find out today.”

  “Smacks of theosophy, by Christ,” Mr. Warburton exclaimed.

  “Smacks of what you do,” the doctor shook his head. “What you do you are.”

  “Clear as mud.”

  “Examine now all over again your chin. You have closed it as an iron trap might close over a grizzly’s hind leg. Examine your jaw for one hour, noting the extreme severity of its posture, and then having realized the hardness of your jaw, let it break, dissolve, flow, vanish, turn to flowing limpid water, flowing flowing flowing. Lie back, my good broker, lie back. You are flowing away, out to sea, out to the deep…”

  Mr. Warburton had been on the verge of roaring again with rage, both at the doctor’s theosophy as well as his incessant miscalling of his name, when suddenly he found himself doing just as he was bid. Lying on the couch without a pillow, Mr. Warburton had visions of Gilda betraying him first with Cabot Wright, and then turning to the caresses of the Big Smoke, Brady the butler. He saw the truth during that hour concerning Gilda, but he did not somehow care, there was such a pleasant perfume everywhere, and his mouth seemed to lie open on a bed of drifting water lotus.

  WAKING UP AFTER an hour in the doctor’s “operating room,” terrified by the lateness, by the missed appointments back at his office, Mr. Warburton was still not able to be as angry as usual. He tried to vent his rage on Dr. Bugleford. In vain. Relaxation had already begun, and his personality was changing. He already saw the handwriting on the wall: once he was deprived of tenseness and anger, his business empire would crumble—he would be calm and happy and penniless.

  Nonetheless, shaking hands with Dr. Bugleford, beaming, he made arrangements for a return visit and, rare for him, paid the atrocious fee quietly and without quibbling, on the spot.

  NO MATTER HOW much he grilled Cabot Wright in his office, or Gilda in her drawing room, Mr. Warburton could make no sense out of the affair. Cabot Wright denied the whole thing from beginning to end; Gilda wept when confronte
d with the question; Brady looked innocent and uninvolved. What Mr. Warburton did not understand was that his wife was more puzzled by what had happened to her than he was, that is she was not sure what had happened.

  His darker suspicions were to be confirmed in large part that very evening when, after dinner, he purposely pretended to doze in his easy chair, while Gilda was resting her eyes with a slumber-mask, prior to viewing television. Nearly a city block away from his wife in their cathedral-size living room, Mr. Warburton heard Brady enter with his leopard stealth and grace. Through one half-opened lid he saw Gilda take the butler’s hand.

  “Shall I serve you coffee here, Mrs. Warburton, or upstairs?” Brady bowed to know her pleasure.

  With her free hand, Gilda removed her eye-pads (she had taken hold of his hand “blind” from habit) and nodding, said, “Here, quite naturally.” As he set the demitasse down, with a tiny plate on which rested two mocha wafers, Mrs. Warburton covered his hand with inaudible kisses. Brady remained calm, though he noted the slow accumulation of lip rouge on his epidermis much in the same way, Mr. Warburton observed, that a zoo guard will permit a lioness to lick the fingers with which he is accustomed to feed her.

  “Beautiful veins on that hand, I wonder what they’re called,” Mr. Warburton heard his wife speak in a tone he had never remembered coming from her before. “I admire any sign or indication of strength,” she informed the butler. “And if I remember my anatomy—I was an art student, Brady dear, long before your mother thought of love,” and she held his hand now at a distance as one will appraise a ruby, “I believe the vein I am studying comes out of the dorsal venous network. Indeed I am sure of it.” She kissed the hand again, though less thoroughly now.