Free Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel by James Purdy Page B

something connected with his hearing-aid and seemed then to expect her to say something again.
    He kneeled down and bandaged one of the injuries on her forearm.
    “Friend of a publisher or a writer?” he inquired of her.
    This query seemed somehow even more upsetting to her than her fall through the glass partition. It made her feel he had been expecting her. She had forgotten, she realized, that Princeton Keith had known Cabot Wright, but why had Princeton told him about her and not simply introduced them in the first place? “Because the only people who come here are writers or people sent by somebody,” Cabot explained.
    “Well, you’ll pull through, I judge,” he said at last, when he had tended to her cuts. Getting up from his kneeling posture, he pulled up a small footstool and sat there, a careful distance away from her.
    “People warned me after I got out of prison,” he began, “that writers would come. So I thought they would swarm.” He smiled. “Not too many have got here, matter of fact, but they keep coming, a constant flow. But they all leave empty-handed, even though I give them what they say they want.”
    At that moment Mrs. Bickle saw what she was up against, and the thought that many had come to him, had asked for his story, been talked to, and gone away empty-handed, was startling and discouraging. She felt there must be innumerable writers composing novels, plays, and even perhaps narrative poems about Cabot Wright.
    She allowed a sigh to escape from her, which he noticed, even if he did not hear it, for he said:
    “Need something?”
    “A glass of water,” she shouted. She had begun to feel a bit faint, and she realized that either her fall had disagreed with her more than she had first acknowledged or seeing Cabot Wright himself at last had been too much for her.
    He went into the next room, and returned almost immediately with an old-fashioned tin cup such as she had seen on farms as a small child. With some hesitation, she drank from it.
    “You’re disappointed,” he studied her.
    Looking up at him, Mrs. Bickle saw that he looked like the mythical clean-cut American youth out of Coca-Cola ads, church socials, picnics along the lake. Could he be—was it possible he was the real rapist? She compared him in her mind with Bernie, so much less attractive, the only other life-size criminal she actually knew. Yet the man who had brought her the tin cup looked—yes, impeccable.
    “I suppose you know what I’m doing here,” Mrs. Bickle began. “That I’m a writer or sent by somebody,” she quoted him, a little too low perhaps for him to hear, but at that moment her attention was attracted from the not overclean tin cup to an amazing spectacle in the next room which she had till then entirely missed. In this room from which Cabot Wright had first emerged she caught sight of a solid array of clocks on the wall, of all sizes and shapes, from large ones like those seen in public waiting-rooms, down to small alarm-clocks fastened by force to the wall. There were rather pretty old-fashioned ones, with large black hands, and finally the remains of an ormolu likewise nailed to the wall.
    He nodded to where she was looking. “A lot of those were here when I moved in,” he told her. “This was some sort of watch-repair place. But I’ve added a lot of them myself.”
    He sat down again on the stool and stared back into his clock room, almost wistfully.
    “The clocks have given me a funny new habit. Listening to them so long I began to take my own pulse every few minutes. I can’t break it.” He giggled, and she was surprised she had not noticed this mannerism in him before, as it was rather pronounced.
    “Before everything happened to me,” he explained, “I don’t think I thought about clocks or time. Now it’s almost the only thing—I won’t say I think of—but that holds me, the old heart’s tick-tock as it fills and empties itself of blood 75 times a minute!
    “My biggest