Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (14 page)

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.

Leah Goldberg explained that she had been there only by sheer accident. Irving having got the day off and driven her over to the supermarket to buy staples for the coming week-end, when they were expecting house guests. Leah had, of course, tried to comfort Cynthia, but the latter seemed hardly to recognize her.

“Cabot, you poor fellow!” Leah Goldberg cried, wishing to impart sympathy, but with accusation, reproach, indignation and blame on her sun-tanned face. She explained that she wished to pick up some of Cynthia’s clothes to take to the hospital.

“Help yourself, old girl,” Cabot walked in the direction of the liquor cabinet.

Peering around impishly at Leah, who was continuing to stare at him, he said, “That was the one thing that kid loved—duds!”

“Haven’t you had enough to drink already?” Leah cautioned him, as he poured himself a shot from a bottle he had taken from the cabinet.

“I’m never drunk,” Cabot said, which was near the truth.

Mistaking his wish to drink for deep grief, Leah had come up close to him in order to give comfort, and Cabot had absentmindedly taken her hand. He did not release it.

“Cynthia kept herself locked in there,” Cabot nodded toward his wife’s bedroom. “Couldn’t even get a look in at her through the keyhole.”

“You must be calm,” Leah told him, not daring to try to release her own hand from his grasp, seeing with unease that far from being upset he was perfectly calm.

“You understand, Cabot dear, what I’ve been telling you,” Leah Goldberg went on, her hand held stiff and trembling in its trap. “Cynthia had the complete thing, you understand, a real breakdown. She was shopping for
you
, at the time, poor dear—for food, that is,” she added nervously. Leah now got her hand free and dried her eyes with some of Cynthia’s own tissues.

In the guise of comforting her, Cabot patted her arm, and then energetically pressed his mouth to her hair. A somewhat strong odor, mixed with a kind of brilliantine whose perfume was unfamiliar to him, stimulated his nostrils. He pushed Leah securely against the back wall so that she now faced the Wall Street panorama across the river.

“Cabot!” she cried, feeling something in their combined posture that puzzled her.

But his face and expression, as it had in the case of the young woman in the branch library, began to work its effect on Leah Goldberg. Her mind became hazy, she muttered something about poor Cynthia again, then suddenly gave an incongruous titter, while at the same time, she seemed unconscious that he had opened her blouse and taken off her bra.

Leah was completely silent when he pressed himself gently but relentlessly into her, as standing they both pressed their combined weight against the wall. She had the helpless expression of a woman who has fallen under a slowly moving car, and watches studiously as the wheels go over her body. She felt Cabot’s panting and his intense joy of relief, and coming fulfillment, as he worked himself into her, with a kind of charitable and selfless exertion about him like one remedying some mental discomfort of her own. Her mouth fell against his thick soft hair, and her spittle, suddenly released as if from a well, flowed freely and ran down the front of his face to his own mouth.

Then collapsing under her confusion and her terror, Cabot, with the cry of relief still stuck in his throat, extricated himself slowly from her body, carried her methodically to an easy chair, and then gave her tumbler after tumbler of tap water.

As they sat together, his head over the general situation of her mons Veneris, with Leah weeping somewhat convulsively at first and then regularly and quietly, Cabot gently massaged her nipples.

CYNTHIA
’
S CONFINEMENT IN
a mental institution paved the way for Cabot’s successful return to Wall Street more than any other event could have. His playing the role of a youthful Orpheus around the office prevented anybody’s “reviewing” his future for a while.

“Warby,” as Cabot Wright recalled in one of his long police-tape interviews, “like nearly any American you could hit by spitting from a high building, was a congenital sentimentalist. The thought of Cynthia going mad made him all gooey and got him out of my hair for a while.”

The day before Cabot’s second tragedy, he and Mr. Warburton were seated in one of the old man’s favorite restaurants, on Fulton Street, an oaken-panelled place as big as four barns, with private rooms upstairs and downstairs. They were in one of the private rooms now, and Warburton was pouring Wild Turkey down his throat almost as fast as he could gulp it. “Cynthia will come out of it, she’s that kind of a girl,” he assured his General Partner. “Will fight her way back. Determined chin, if I ever saw one.

“Laddie,” Mr. Warburton now got down to business, “we’re going to put you in charge of Monthly Reports.”

Cabot’s face fell, to use one of Mr. Warburton’s own favorite ways of describing the reaction of his colleagues, and of course, it was a facial expression never to assume in the old broker’s presence. But when he remembered what Cabot had been through, he forgave his having allowed his face to fall.

“Wonderful training for a chap like you,” Mr. Warburton was in full and loud enthusiasm. At a look of uncertainty from Cabot, he elaborated: “Monthly Reports are a damned serious phase of our work. Be great to have you on them.”

A few months back, Cabot had told Warburton he would resign rather than be in charge of Monthly Reports. “It’s a stenographer’s work,” he had shouted then at the end of that interview. “Am I a frigging typist?” And though Mr. Warburton had cautioned him then about exploding in his presence, Cabot had been firm: “I’ll be goddamned if I do your Monthly Reports.”

And even now, with all his great fatherly interest in Cynthia’s going off her rocker, both Mr. Warburton and Cabot appeared to be hearing again their row of a few months past, as if on play-back tape, and at that moment they might have posed for an advertisement for dictation machines.