Cabot Wright Begins: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

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.”
    Carrie let Zoe have all the time she needed.
    “I do know people who count in publishing,”Mrs. Bickle let Carrie in on something Carrie already knew. Looking at her friend gravely, she added: “You’ve heard of Princeton Keith.”
    “Afraid not, Zoe, dear.”
    “It’s a big name for nobody, which is all big names in our period are,”Zoe smiled.
    A deep depression had settled over Carrie. Mrs. Bickle held out her glass. “You know, darling Carrie, I can’t drink this beer. When a drink’s flatter than cistern water—”
    Carrie made a