Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel

by Purdy, James

  “A beautiful potential screen star* whose name cannot be revealed until the house lights go on, not yet 20, will perform the entire operation of scientifically cleaning her anus with our new love-petal facial tissue on our private TV-for-ladies screen. Live. She will demonstrate that only with Love Bloom tissue can one’s fundament be scientifically cleansed but not stimulated or chafed. Learn true scientific daintiness know-how & be safe for that special date or business appointment, ladies. In our Wilma Thomson Memorial Auditorium. 8 star coupons honored in lieu of admission fee.”

  And thousands of paragraphs later, Cabot read the section of “Faggot-fever, or virility-fantasy: Common to many a Wall Street executive, many American men are now so unsure of their erectile tissue, their virility, they are afraid to be seen in public in the company of another man or even other men, unless a banquet is in progress. I call it faggot-dementia, a term of my own, as I long ago (ten minutes) planned to sever connection with that Bohemian mountebank on whom the Nazis have bestowed their own mentality, Dr. Bugleford. An executive now should be accompanied by a woman. Any pair of tits will do in a restaurant or lunch-counter. Makes a better impression with silk stockings in public. Fear of reality, America. No country ever put on such a false front over the human mask. And they say it is falling. Fell ages ago. Take this headline: The model agencies complain that the male and female models (faggots all) are still not thin enough, and Dr. Clancy Ridgeway O’Brien Fuchs has settled that, I have just learned, like this. He combs away with a newly invented surgical knife any suggestion of excess flesh on the face, and a little accident of his has spelled fortune for himself and his clients; the agency went mad over it. Fuchs uncovered a bone under the buccinator muscle so that the model was actually photographed showing a tiny bit of his and or her calcium there (this model later posed for all the men’s wear, she is duo-sexual ad-wise). A success everywhere. Most models now undergo this safe and painless surgical operation on their os zygomaticum. Their os nasale remains covered, I’m informed.”

  “Consider these United States,” Mr. Warburton wrote. “It’s the time when the country has less virility than ever before, when the men are more faggoty than all the frogs who ever lived, and the women dyed-in-the-wool irregular anaesthetic whores, and the whole communication media devoted to sex-unsex. All America talks of nothing but sex, my boy, and there isn’t a stiff pecker or a warm box in the house.

  “I feel like a man too weak to turn off the radio which goes on through all eternity advertising trading stamps, beer, and tasty fags to Jewish-Negro-hot-box music. Am I responsible for the stinking level of American life to any degree? I must answer, I am. I know what is coming, Wall Street in Moscow or the Congo, New York a Black Metropolis, with the Negroes speaking in an Irish-Jewish-Italian accent, and the few white men left, in the role of male nurses.

  “My book of Sermons perhaps may be found one day, and the truth told, but I fear not. There will be only the radio advertising purple & blue stamps, and cancer papers. Even garbage will beam radio messages.

  “I used to know the rich when the men were men and the women people. I can still see them. Can’t really focus on the freak parade that’s them today. And then everybody’s rich who can raise his right hand and screw somebody. Put on your glare-goggles and take a look at them today, see their Florida tan in the winter, their South-American ski-slide burn in the summer, their jewels, their fish-eye gaze, their big air of ‘Heard this before, Joe,’ their mountain sickness from going up to the Waldorf Towers.

  “Under all their diets, vitamins & makeup, their reducing-rooms and mental love courses, their 2,000 mile a day travel schedule, today’s rich, skinny as skull and cross bones, look fat and are. They’re fat and getting fatter and the Rich’s secret is to look like anybody today; their children gaunt undernourished, shabbily clad, their model a Harlem pusher. It’s all part of the Rich being bigger and greater, hoggier and nastier than the first Rockefeller, Carnegie or Ford ever dreamed. They want to be in to stay, even if in masquerade, and so they look fatter than ever, dirtier and blacker and more like nobody than nobody who ever lived.”

  At the end, Cabot read a baseball hero’s testimony that Warby had clipped from a newspaper: “I try to get my thinking straightened out before every World Series game and during the playing of the Star Spangled Banner, I close my eyes. My prayer is gratitude, gratitude I am a citizen of this wonderful U.S.A. and that God has given me the ability to do the thing I like most: Play ball. I don’t believe in asking for help to win.”

  “Play ball!” Cabot continued, and suddenly rising, he saluted an imaginary flag. “Peace to your ashes, you mixed up old mummy,” he intoned.

  * * *

  * Goldie Thomas

  15

  THE YOUNG PHILANTHROPIST

  After the death of Mr. Warburton, Mrs. Bickle heard from the rapist’s own lips, Cabot Wright became not only a well-known philanthropist donating rent-free flats to derelicts, but continued his own special philanthropy, raping his victims with disinterest and tender unconcern. The police kept a list of “possible” suspects. Cabot himself might as well have worn a different disguise for each criminal attack, so various were the forms and faces attributed to him by those whom he attacked—a Black Muslim, a Puerto Rican degenerate, a longshoreman amuck on canned heat, an Atlantic Avenue dope addict, an escapee from numerous penitentiaries, and a noted Jewish nightclub comic.

  Cabot’s prey always knew his touch, his presence, his tarry laugh, ending in whees and giggles.

  He was called the Anonymous Coon, the Kosher Jack, the Eternal Tar Baby, working with his weapon into the far hours of the night. Somebody’s disillusioned lover, husband, daddy, a pimp to the unknown of his own body, who patiently unsheathed his dagger in the night.

  Cries echoed cries as dark settled over Brooklyn.

  A woman falls behind a hedge and shouts “Mucker!”

  They are waiting by the river,

  They are waiting late tonight,

  For his tool is hard as cobalt,

  His dagger gleams like light.

  “Unsheathe your dagger!”

  Cries go up as hallelujahs tell everybody it’s happening again. Boats whistle, there is the rumble of the subway down in the guts of Brooklyn, a scavenger lets fall the lid of the garbage can, muggers drop their brass knuckles. “RAPIST IS OUT! ANONYMOUS COON STRIKES AGAIN.”

  “Many of my victims thanked me, however,” Cabot went on to remember, still talking to Mrs. Bickle. “Take Bertha McIntosh as an example. Bertha had been connected with the Department of Health for many years, and she was certain that too many people were living under my roof. On the death of Warby, I began filling up my brownstone, which I had purchased, with people, friends, or finally, strangers who needed free rent.

  “One early fall morning Bertha McIntosh rang my buzzer. By some odd chance, I had not yet gone to my Wall Street office. My arrest was in the air. I was paring my toenails after having had a really rough time trimming the nails of my right hand—the battle to appear decent in public! Had my Abercrombie and Fitch socks on, but had not adjusted the garters which rested on the cow-hide high shoes I affected, though to tell the truth I walked the Brooklyn Bridge better without them.

  “‘Wrong door,’ I told Bertha. She showed her inspector’s badge.

  “‘Cup of black?’ I offered her the pot and nodded to a cup and saucer.

  “‘Why, maybe I might,’ Bertha McIntosh said. Boldly she poured herself a cup, took it in her hands, ‘I merely wanted a confirmation or denial from you, Mr. Wright, if you were allowing more than three persons to occupy any of your rooms. You are the landlord, I am told.’

  “‘Who were you told by?’ I grinned. ‘I mean you make it sound so goddam passive.’ Bertha McIntosh began to feel uneasy when I grinned and giggled.

  “‘I don’t rent rooms, Miss McIntosh, sir. This is all church property, so to speak. The Islamic Federation come and go all hours. I don’t receive a penny intake from the
m or nobody. Hardly hear a word of English all day long and believe you me my English was going downhill the day I moved to Brooklyn. But seriously, unemployment in America has its biggest headquarters right here. I came into an inheritance not long ago. Warby’s suicide you’ve read about. Gilda not expected to live either. Well, take a look at an heir, Bertha, not a landlord.’

  “‘To get back to regulations,’ Miss McIntosh said, consulting a sheet of instructions which a superior had handed her that morning. ‘You say you’re on church property here,’ she wrote down the statement.

  “‘I’d say so,’ I nodded.

  “‘All right then,’ Miss McIntosh tried to smile, showing her bridge. She drank her hot black coffee. I grinned at her.

  “‘I could show you some of the church rooms,’ I told her.

  “‘You call yourself, I believe I am right in saying this, a philanthropist,’ Miss McIntosh went on. She waited awkwardly for my reply.

  “‘Someone has written down here,” she consulted her notes, ‘that you have so listed yourself.’

  “‘Where?’ I wondered.

  “‘On the telephone,’ Miss McIntosh said. ‘To my superior.’

  “‘Yes, I can call myself a philanthropist,’ I told Bertha. ‘I give away a lot,’ and then, Mrs. Bickle, I couldn’t stop giggling.

  “‘Are you listed as a philanthropic society?’ Bertha McIntosh continued the interrogation.

  “‘Don’t suppose I could list myself as such, as all I do is give out free rooms to whoever needs one, I don’t phone the Government I am doing it.’

  “Bertha McIntosh was even more unfavorably impressed by my giggle than she had been by my grin. And I am sure, Mrs. Bickle, it was my giggle led to my arrest later on (the Puerto Rican girl with the pimples knew what that giggle meant, let me tell you).

  “Miss McIntosh’s showing me her disfavor by a curled lip was her first mistake, you might say.

  “‘I’m afraid I’ll have to report this entire matter to City Hall,’ Miss McIntosh beamed and got up to go. ‘Thanks for the coffee.’

  “‘I’m afraid I wouldn’t do that if I were, or was, you,’ I said.

  “‘What?’ she said, a kind of green ivory shade now.

  “‘Wouldn’t tell anybody I’m not a society,’ I explained to her.

  “‘Mr. Wright,’ Miss McIntosh said, ‘I’m afraid you’re asking me to disobey my superior. I’m doing my job, after all…’

  “‘See that banister on the winding staircase?’ I pointed to this early twentieth-century work of art, copied from Federal interiors. She stared.

  “‘Hop on it, and I’ll show you what we’re talking about.’

  “‘Good morning, Mr. Wright!’

  “But I had already picked her up and placed her on the banister.

  “‘Get your little panties off and we’ll see who’s who,’ I encouraged her.”

  As Mrs. Bickle made an eyeshade of her left hand, she learned that Miss McIntosh, like all the rest of them, didn’t do a thing. Cabot went on: “Bertha cried a little after a while, shucks, and the exertion had tired her too. Sitting together, we two, after it was all over, as she drank and drank more coffee with generous helpings of rum, I said: ‘Bertha, everybody is screwed in America to protect the innocent. America is sports is fun. Get American, kiddo. Get American.’ Then as I looked at her again, I said, ‘God, Bertha, do you look guilty!’

  “I’m telling you all this, Mrs. Bickle,” Cabot Wright continued, “in order to lead up to a certain letter-confession which Bertha penned after she began to go straight again, and which I keep in my breast pocket… Her entire life had been as unpleasant as though she had been tied under the posterior regions of a huge mammoth, such as a rhinoceros. ‘I felt a monster crouching over me, and I was powerless even to show nausea, such a conformist had I become.’ Bertha McIntosh speaking, mind you. She has put on 10 pounds and is the picture of advertising, rosy, beaming, nice toothpaste grin, and an outgoing manner recommended by churches. She never speaks of me, but is grateful, and here’s what I’ve been leading up to, Mrs. Bickle, as I’ve sat here and heard with you most of the story of my life, except for my career as philanthropist and 300 odd additional rapes I can’t quite remember. Bertha McIntosh is grateful I showed her the way.

  “Her name is now Mrs. Dirkey. Had I not approached Bertha that late fall evening, she would have continued to believe in her mission as a municipal agent, thought that her enforcing of the law was as important as the revolving of the celestial sphere, and would have died an old maid. After I had loosened her up with (quote) my philanthropy (the pain was just as terrible as an aunt of hers in Elkhart had told her, intolerable, inhuman, such pressure, and yet after it was all over, memories) Bertha, as I say, gave up her fine position in City Hall, quit reading intellectual magazines like The New Yorker and Red Book and went back to Staten Island, which had been chewed up a lot by bulldozers but was still home to her. She married Fred J. Dirkey, a retired housepainter and wheelbarrow repairman, and they planned a family. To tide things over a bit, she opened the frankfurter-stand and became adapted to and dynamically integrated in this way of life. I still send Bertha Hallmark greeting cards whenever I have time to pick a card up. She wrote me this letter of thanks, you see, explaining that had she not met me, had she not had this experience, painful though it was, she would never have found herself, never married, never found the happiness she seems to have achieved with Fred Dirkey. Unfortunately, Bertha has not been able to become a mother, which was always her most cherished ideal but Fred, retired, needs a great deal of attention, and she has found caring for him and his wants an answer to her unfulfilled maternal aspirations. Mrs. Dirkey has a beautiful disposition, and engages in the interesting recent hobbies of collecting butterfly nets and early post-Victorian paperweights. She will always, she says, be grateful to one Cabot Wright.”

  A FEW DAYS after Cabot Wright’s marathon hear-and-answer-back with Mrs. Bickle, in which he had to remind her four or five times that during his heroic career as rapist he had not been deaf, he summoned her out of bed to make a date for the following night. By his desperate tone and hard breathing, she took it to be a matter of some importance. He promised her a sheaf of documents he was getting from a Wall Street safety-deposit box, and said he would turn these over to her, Bernie Gladhart, Princeton Keith and company for making him immortal in a novel. The place of their rendezvous was downtown, at his old stamping-ground, Hanover Square.

  They met in a little park near some dead trees, facing an old brown building called India House. Nearby were the Cotton Exchange and several other buildings looking like stage sets. “We can sit here, Mrs. Bickle,” Cabot said after her arrival, “and not be overheard.” He looked around him. “Damned odd note here tonight. There are rats all around. Two just scurried past my outstretched shoe.”

  “Since I’m from Chicago, I’ll feel right at home.” Mrs. Bickle sat down on the bench over which he had spread some tabloids. “You’re right!” she looked around her. “What a stage set this is. I love India House.”

  “How can I tell you what I want to?” Cabot Wright said.

  “You violated some girl here, of course,” Mrs. Bickle prompted him.

  He struck his thigh. “Matter of fact, yes. Want to hear about it?

  “I was well known to the newspaper audience,” he went on, “when I did the girl over there… As a matter of fact, they were hot on my trail when I got her here at Hanover Square. No rats then, so far as I know. Imagine rats in Wall Street! Sat here many a night in those days wondering what I was up to. But I didn’t bring you here to tell you any more about my rapes! And the soft eyes of the ruminants are on us in the dark, Mrs. Bickle! You can put that in your book of memories.

  “Yes,” he continued, “old Hanover Square near Wall Street. I heard, on this particular evening, an older lady warning a younger one, her daughter, about the dangers of being a single girl in New York, Wall Street no exception, spookier than uptown, and
the dark is something you just have to put up with. A sexual instrument may be plunged into you at any moment from any quarter. Officer, help! My daughter has fallen on the prong of a youthful degenerate who singles out the opposite sex. Give a hand here! Little knowing that many an officer has sworn an oath to aid and abet the act.

  “I had walked over to a restaurant noted for its seafood, and there spotted these two females again, mother and daughter, complaining this time about the dinner menu: ‘I don’t believe I’ll have the gray sole, my dear,’ mother said. ‘Name’s too depressing.’ ‘Try the red snapper, love,’ daughter said. ‘Can never go wrong on that.’ After a two-course dinner of snapper and biscuit tortoni, mother and daughter parted right outside India House over there.

  “I stepped right up like a Jehovah’s Witness on Saturday night and engaged the girl: ‘May I trouble you for a direction, young woman?’ asked I. (Etiquette book warns never to say Miss, far from correct. Lady is suspect, and reserved for tramps and canned-heat addicts. Young woman rates hit-parade usage, and of course it was my choice.) ‘Patty, where are you going with that young man?’ mother called from a block away, having turned round in an intuitive sense of impending evil. But Patty had already without the shadow of a doubt taken a shine to me. That long fish-dinner with Mother! Ready for anything, Mrs. Bickle.

  “We, she and I, vanished into one of the de Chirico alleys. I pulled her gently but with absolute never-let-you-go grasp into a hidden puddle beneath a watch-repair shop, dug hurriedly as you would hunting in warm wet soil for a diamond or opal dropped from a purse, found the ‘place,’ old familiar belle chose with my vivid hand, the veins dancing now under the only excitement that matters outside of war—grope, push away any dressmaking obstacles, there I have it in my hands, and just a question of a moment to unpop, and the mother of course screaming as though she did not at first blush know what was going on or what had to be done. First things first. There at last, girl too surprised to do a thing, and me pumping into her what life feels is never too good for anybody, right up to her lungs, you would think from her moans. ‘This is my only pleasure, lady,’ I called back to the mother, ‘so why be a kill-joy?’ Yes, my only pleasure. The only thing that ever made anything seem worth while. Call it a crime, that’s a good old girl, for the mother was calling a policeman on the emergency telephone: ‘Come quickly, officer! A dagger of meat has pierced my precious jewel. He is entering her basket of joy. She isn’t screaming, officer, so I’ll bet she’s bleeding. Oh, my dear little Patty. Can’t you get here in a helicopter, officer? Oh, God, it’s too late already! Officer, officer, he’s had his way with her! He’s buttoning and calling it a night. Stop, degenerate, moron, stop! God, Patty, speak to your little mother. She lies there like a broken kewpie doll. Pray speak to me, darling. Are you going to open your eyes again, do you think? Are you wounded, my angel? You’ll never be the same, it’s a fact, my dearest, but you’re going to get well, and we’ll go to Vancouver together and never come back, that’s right, dear, we’ll go away together, only do get well for mother.’