Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel (3 page)

One night at the Bickles the party was so solemn, with discussions of Buddhism, Unamuno and peyote, that Carrie, very drunk, took Zoe Bickle aside and confided her penchant and passion for the Cabot Wright case. For the first time in their acquaintanceship, Mrs. Bickle responded warmly to a topic that Carrie brought up. Zoe, it turned out, was a great follower of Cabot Wright, and said she would give anything to know how Cabot was faring now that he was out of prison.

Bringing her chair close, Carrie spoke into Zoe’s ear:

“Do you think anybody could write his story?”

And Mrs. Bickle without batting an eye replied:

“Somebody has to.”

“I mean as fiction, say,”Carrie explained.

“As fiction,”Mrs. Bickle boomed agreement, absolute belief, surety.

“You think Curt will want to write it?”Carrie felt her way, even though she had decided the writer must be her husband.

“I think Bernie could write it sooner,”Zoe Bickle immediately replied.

Zoe’s irony was wasted on Carrie. Whether she had uttered her remark as a witticism or a cry of bored impatience with Carrie or her own husband, the remark itself was seized on and carried off by her incredulous but triumphant auditor.

“I’ll tell him you said so!”Carrie had risen at that moment, not wanting to lose what she had heard from Mrs. Bickle by any sudden modification or amendment. “I’ll tell Bernie,”she added for positive clarity, even though she had no intention of mentioning Zoe. All she had needed was this final psychological push, and Zoe had pushed her over the unknown brink.

“Sweetheart,”Mrs. Bickle began, in slow realization she had made Carrie a present of something the latter dearly wanted. “Carrie!”she called, but her friend had already made her way into the throng, and that moment was the beginning of everything, for all of them.

ONCE BERNIE HAD
departed for Brooklyn and Carrie was alone, she panicked. The one person she could have spoken to, Zoe Bickle, she hesitated to call, for the very reason that it was Zoe who had given her the courage to send him away. Though Carrie realized that Zoe could not have meant everything that her sentence had conveyed at the moment she uttered it, it had now become the truth. Carrie even knew she had acted on it because she wanted it to be the truth.

At last Carrie saw there was nobody else she could call except Zoe. They were old friends but not really close ones, yet out of everybody else in Chicago they were two women in a similar, almost identical, situation. In some ways Zoe’s situation was worse than hers, for Curt Bickle was one of those contemporary men more common than book and drama reviewers realize—a man not only willing to be supported by a woman, but incapable of turning a hand to support himself. Also Carrie and Zoe were married to husbands who wanted to be writers rather than men who were in fact the authors of anything.

There were, of course, dissimilarities too: Zoe was positive for example, that her husband would never be a writer, at least in the public sense. In a way she now counted on his not being one, for she wanted to face as squarely as possible the truth of her situation: she had put everything on a losing horse. On the other hand, Carrie believed without proof or evidence that her fourth husband, Bernie, was a writer, that he would be known as one, just as she was equally sure that Zoe was right about Curt’s not ever going to succeed. Too, Carrie counted on Bernie’s being not just a writer but a successful one, and she clung to her almost irrational belief he could write the story of Cabot Wright.

In the past, Zoe had expressed mild interest in Bernie’s literary ambitions but she had never before told Carrie to go ahead and let him try his wings in Brooklyn. Though they never discussed it, Carrie and Zoe had only one tacit agreement between them: Curt Bickle would now never make it. He might as well go on with what he was doing, studying and annotating the book of
Isaiah
, despite his Gentile origin and lack of Hebrew. True he had all the training needed for a writer, with his university background, controlled sensitivity, and flair for phrases (his thin-blooded prose appeared once every seven years in
The New Yorker
, cut a bit, with more commas than he had put in, but it was unmistakably his voice), while Bernie, untrained and without experience, as Carrie never tired of insisting, had the heart, the life experience, and the feeling.

If you get lonesome enough, Carrie knew, you’ll even call the police. Zoe Bickle, in many ways, was for her a good deal more upsetting than a police lieutenant. She would ask Carrie more questions than a policeman, see through all her evasions and lies, and give her a hard time. Carrie finally realized she could delay her call no longer when she learned that Zoe was going on a trip.

When Mrs. Bickle answered the phone, Carrie said: “Zoe, precious, you know who this is. I hear you’re going to New York in a day or so, but do you think you could do the impossible and come over? I know you’re afraid of the streets after dark.”Then Carrie briefly explained her situation and Bernie’s mission in Brooklyn.

Hanging up, Mrs. Bickle was not quick enough to hide her astonishment, even shock, from her husband. He asked her what was wrong.

“She’s sent Bernie to Brooklyn on the basis of something I said.”

Curt Bickle’s grim look turned his mouth to a paper-thin line. (It was his thin mouth that had originally captivated her, she remembered, as she looked at him now without desire.) He forced a yawn, then looked quickly at his wristwatch, while Zoe explained why she thought she’d better run over to Carrie’s despite the hour.

“She’s in a real fit, Curt.”

“How could she send Bernie to Brooklyn on the strength of something you said?”He seemed hurt, and suspicious that what she had done might prove dangerous for both of them.

“Maybe I’ll be able to answer your question when I come back.”

She went out and walked quickly, looking about carefully. The danger of the streets (four or five women had been mugged in the neighborhood during the last month) worried her until she reached Carrie’s and rang the bell.

She had hardly freed herself from Carrie’s embrace and dry quick kiss when she began with the hardest question itself:

“You mean then that you sent Bernie on my say-so.”

A bit startled by such suddenness, Carrie was nonetheless relieved it had come so soon and so sure.

“I’m afraid so.”Carrie felt she might as well allow Zoe full responsibility.

“Do you have a cushion anywhere for this chair?”Mrs. Bickle half stood up to show how uncomfortable a seat she had found.

Carrie produced a fat nondescript sofa cushion.

“You’ll have something to drink,”Carrie mumbled. Thinking over her own invitation she said, “All I have tonight is some beer and a bottle of wine that’s been opened some time, I’m afraid.”

“Not a thing just now.”Mrs. Bickle had adjusted herself to the cushion and lay her head back. “Perhaps I’ll have the beer later. I’ll see.”

“Got a headache?”Carrie peered at her friend.

Zoe shook her head. “Today was Tuesday,”she was barely audible. “That’s my long day at the office. Tonight I cooked Curt’s dinner for him.”

“I thought he was the cook.”Carrie’s voice was gray as slate.

“It was his evening not to feel up to it,”Zoe said.

“Curt’s still wrapped up in the Old Testament?”

“
Isaiah
,” Zoe nodded.

“What do you think he’ll ever do with it? When he gets done with it, I mean,”Carrie wondered.

Zoe had to laugh at the solemn manner Carrie always assumed when she touched on the subject of Curt Bickle, or indeed writing.

“I think maybe you worry more about Curt than I do,”Zoe commented, and it was not the first time she had made this observation.

“Oh well now, Zoe.”

“What do you hear from Bernie since his trek east?”

“He called just a few hours ago,”Carrie brightened a bit. “We’re keeping in touch by phone. Twice a day, as a matter of fact.

“Look,”Carrie went over to Zoe’s chair and stood like a pupil who has brought a paper to be corrected. “I mean, Zoe, have I been a maniac, do you think, in sending him to Brooklyn?”

“You do manage to make me feel totally responsible, if not exactly guilty, darling.”

“You wouldn’t of course remember a sentence you spoke. Oh, it was at your house, and I guess neither of us was bright and shining sober.”

“I’m sure of course I must have given you a sentence or two then,”Zoe’s voice was hard, if not precisely unpleasant. “I hope you’re not going to collect sentences I say when I’m in my Saturday cups.”

Carrie waited a moment before she said: “I wouldn’t have done it, if you hadn’t said what you did. Mind you, I’m not blaming you.”

Whipping out her compact, Zoe looked in it at her mouth which she had opened wide. As she closed it and the compact, she demanded:

“What was my goddam sentence?”

Carrie walked over to the mantel where one of her own miniature oil paintings had been placed. She did not reply.

“All right! I’m beginning to see what you want to lay at my door,”Zoe said. She studied Carrie in the silence that followed, and wanted to shake her for not keeping up her personal appearance better than she did. Carrie obviously never went to a hair-dresser, she was at least twenty pounds overweight, and her complexion seemed never to know soap, let alone creams or bases. Yet sex was the only thing that had ever held Carrie’s interest over the years, and one would have thought, well——.

“You thought then,”Zoe fairly assailed her, “you thought
of course
that I thought Bernie could write the novel about Cabot Wright!”

Zoe had then exploded in laughter, but the sight of Carrie’s pale intent face stifled her merriment. “Of course I said it, Carrie,”she watched her from the corner of her eye. “I won’t back away from any part in it.”

Carrie nodded now. “But you didn’t mean what you said,”Carrie struggled to subdue her own threatening arms, held forward suddenly toward Zoe.

“I must have meant all of it,”Mrs. Bickle weighed everything, and struggled with the attempt to understand her own confusion.

“But you’re not sure!”Carrie shot at her.

“Well, sweetheart, sincerity is not quite so simple or convertible as everybody always makes out. As a matter of fact I think Bernie could write a book. Don’t ask me to explain. Curt and I have argued over it. It’s a feeling
I
have.”

“But you feel I’ve been a horse’s ass in sending him to Brooklyn.”

“That’s a risk we all run when we decide to do almost anything.”Zoe had regained some of her more ordinary composure. “I mean you did right!”she now went on in a loud voice to Carrie. “But you can’t expect me, poor lamb, to be quite so devout about your husband’s prospects as you are. I’m not devout about Curt’s, as you must sometime have observed!”

“I’m not going to blame you, and I didn’t call you here to do so!”Carrie paced up and down.

“Well, it was a fateful utterance—mine, that evening,”Zoe laughed.

“I had followed the case so long—the Cabot Wright one,”Carrie began again.

Mrs. Bickle nodded for her to go on.

“And you see, I knew I was losing Bernie after all!”

Zoe Bickle could not suppress her look of surprise.

“Something fairly desperate had to be done,”Carrie told her.

“I believe I’ll have that beer now,”Zoe loosened her feet from her high-heels and lay back in the chair now.

Carrie gazed at her for a moment as if inquiring about her health, then went out into the kitchen.

She came back with a stein of beer and a paper napkin, almost pushing them into Zoe’s face.

Zoe drank eagerly from the stein, made a grimace of displeasure, then drank some more.

“You send a husband away to Brooklyn on a wild goose chase of writing a novel about a certain criminal I’m frankly taken with,”Zoe began now in earnest. “Then it would be nice, you decide, if it was me who had thought the whole thing up in the first place because, I suppose, I happen to have kept a writer all my married life who won’t write a line…

“I’ll tell you everything I think then, Carrie.”Zoe went on. “Curt, my husband, is a writer, and he’ll never write again. That’s our funeral, as they say down south. Now in your case, my pet, you’re married to a phenomenon of our own special epoch, a man who couldn’t in a thousand years be a writer in the only meaning of the term, but who can and probably will write a book. Put that down to a feeling I also have. And then tell yourself this before bedtime: I, Zoe Bickle, did give you that sentence the night you were at my place and the fact I’d had a lot to drink is not to the point. Furthermore, I think you were right to act on it, whether you’re losing Bernie or not—that’s beside the point too. You took a gamble, but you know that. Why should you expect everything to work out successful? You’re old enough to know better. Furthermore, it may be nearly time for a new husband. If we look back on your old marriage charts, you’re ready, sweety, you are.”

“Since you say you sent Bernie to Brooklyn,”Carrie took her turn now to laugh, “let me ask you another: will he write the book?”

“It might have been easier if somebody had hit me over the head tonight in the street.”Zoe put down her stein of beer. “As a matter of fact,”she went on to Carrie, “I’m going to New York on some publishing business of my own, next week.”