The Road to Wellville

by T. C. Boyle

  “Come on, mister,” the boy whined. “I’m freezing.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Charlie said, distracted. “But I thought the Post Tavern was in town. It’s out here, then? By the factory?”

  The boy was already moving. “Not goin’ to the Post Tavern,” he called over his shoulder. “Mr. Bender told me to take you to Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s.”

  “Where?”

  Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s rooming house was within sight of the White City itself, and it was clean, spartan and depressing. Charlie and the boy stood shivering in the coolish hallway, Charlie counting out another three dollars and a quarter from Mrs. Hookstratten’s hoard while the boy wiped his nose on his sleeve and half a dozen sallow, hopeless-looking men huddled round the faintest glimmer of a fire in the parlor. Mrs. Eyvindsdottir beamed at them. She was a square-shouldered woman with a faint blond mustache who always managed to look as if she’d just received an unexpected gift, and whose English was all but impenetrable—at least as far as Charlie was concerned. She went up and down the scale like a diva doing her warming-up exercises as Charlie counted out the money, and he could only give her a blank look until one of the other boarders—a bald-headed man in a red-checked muffler—got up from his chair by the fire and translated: “One week in advance, due and payable on Saturday, breakfast at seven, dinner at one, supper at six-thirty, late boarders to fend for themselves.” When the bargain was formalized and Mrs. Eyvindsdottir had deposited Mrs. Hookstratten’s three dollars and twenty-five cents in the folds of her apron, she heaved herself up a flight of protesting stairs to show Charlie to his room.

  The room wasn’t much. It called to mind the root cellar on the Hookstratten estate, though it was barely half the size. Cramped beneath the pitch of the roof, thoroughly refrigerated, gloomy, damp and deathly still, the room needed only a few heaps of potatoes and a basket of rutabagas to complete the picture. A much-scrubbed kerosene lamp provided light—and, apparently, all the heat he was likely to get. There was no radiator, no fireplace, no stove. The narrow bed was wedged into the corner beside a washstand and worn porcelain basin; three unvarnished pegs driven into the wall served as closet and wardrobe. The only decoration was a tiny turgid oil painting depicting the midnight sun hanging over the fjords of Norway.

  “No window?” Charlie wondered aloud, attempting to ease the trunk down on the bare floorboards with a minimum of damage.

  Mrs. Eyvindsdottir yodeled something in response as the boy edged warily into the room and set Charlie’s imitation-alligator-skin grip in the corner.

  “Beg pardon?” Charlie said, straightening up gingerly. The muscles of his lower back, long dormant, announced themselves: they were on fire, meat pounded raw and tossed into a vat of sizzling lard.

  “She says, ‘Mr. Bagwell’s got it,’” the bald man said, poking his head in the door and attempting a smile. He was amazing, really, totally hairless, like some fantastic creature in a sideshow—he didn’t even seem to have any eyebrows. “That’s me,” he added, by way of clarification. He pointed to the front wall of Charlie’s room, a cheap partition left open where the ceiling slanted up into the attic. “I’ve got the window in my room, and I’m sorry about that, but I had to wait two and a half years for Mr. Bjornson to pass on before I could get it.”

  All right, Charlie thought, all right. Bender’s economizing—so much the better. They’d need every penny to make Per-Fo fly—and fly it would, the cappers and the hucksters and the fast-talking boys at the depot notwithstanding. Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s was a far cry from a private compartment on the Twentieth Century Limited, with oysters and duck and even caviar available for the asking, but he was willing to tighten his belt for a while, no problem there—if C. W. Post could do it, so could he. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said, ushering Mrs. Eyvindsdottir out the door, along with her interpreter, “and you too, sir—I’m very much obliged.”

  When he’d shut the door and turned round, wondering what to do next, he found himself staring into the blunted eyes of Bender’s pathetic little messenger. “Well,” he said, and he couldn’t help it if his tone was a bit sharper than he’d intended, “and what do you want?”

  The boy hung his head. “I’m sorry, sir, but Mr. Bender says you’re to give me a dime … and he wanted me to take you to see him at the Post Tavern, no matter how late—”

  The Post Tavern: yes, of course. Charlie was going to live like Peary among the Eskimos in a barren back room at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s while Bender lived it up at the best hotel in town. Yes, sure. What else would he expect?

  “—because, he says, the banks are closed for the night and he thought … well, he says you ought to put the stockholders’ money in the safe there. For safekeeping. That’s what he says. That, and you’re to give me a dime.”

  Nine-thirty at night, the wind had shifted round demonically to blow in his face again, and Charlie Ossining was plodding back up the long dark street to town, retracing his steps. The boy kept half a pace ahead of him, as if it were a point of honor, and there was no sound but the crunch of their footsteps and the hoarse wind-shocked rasp of their breath. At one point, the interurban sailed on past them, lit like heaven, but the boy made no attempt to flag it down, and when Charlie angrily questioned him, the boy looked away and murmured, “Mr. Bender said to walk. Both ways.”

  By the time they reached the hotel, Charlie was seething. If someone had tossed an effigy of Bender in his path, he would have booted it on down the street and cheerfully set it ablaze. Here he’d had to haul his own trunk twenty blocks in an arctic wind and in the company of a skinny, snot-nosed, down-at-heels runt of a kid in tattered short pants and a jacket that looked as if it had been fetched out of the rubbish, and then tramp the twenty blocks back again for an audience with the almighty Bender—and Bender hadn’t even stuck his nose out the door in all that time. No, he couldn’t even have bothered to meet him at the station and say, Hello, Charlie, welcome to town, and by the way, I’ll be sticking you out in the middle of nowhere in a three-dollar-and-twenty-five-cent boarding house while I soak my feet and order up another plate of bluepoints from room service.

  The fact that the hotel was imposing—really first-class—didn’t help his mood any, either. Charlie could hardly believe it. Six stories high, a full block long, its banks of windows confidently glowing against the bleak Midwestern night, it was impressive, modern, very grand, the equal of anything he’d seen in New York—or anywhere else.

  He’d passed through the porte cochère and the doorman had stepped forward to swing open the door for him before he missed the boy. He stopped to glance round him, and the doorman gave him a look. But in that moment he spotted the boy—out on the street still, lurking in the shadows, his shoulders fallen in on themselves. “What’s the matter?” Charlie called, backtracking to where the boy stood hunched in the street.

  “Nothing.”

  “You’re not coming in?”

  The boy wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I go in the service entrance,” he murmured, “when Mr. Bender wants me. Anyway, I got school tomorrow.”

  School. Charlie felt a weight settle on him. Here he’d been bellyaching all night and this skinny-legged kid had waited out in the cold for him at the depot and then tramped all over creation just to see that he didn’t get lost. What was he—nine, ten years old? School. He had to go to school. Charlie realized he didn’t even know his name. “Listen,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the brightly lit entrance to the hotel, “I appreciate your help tonight, I really do … you know, I don’t even know your name—”

  “Ernest,” the kid said. “Ernest O’Reilly.”

  “An Irishman, huh? Well, listen, Ernest O’Reilly, thanks a lot. You come round again—maybe Mr. Bender and I’ll have some errands for you. We’re starting up a breakfast-food company and I’m sure we’re going to need a dependable errand boy.”

  Ernest O’Reilly said nothing to this. He stood there, hunched against the wind, a dogged expression on his fac
e. “Mr. Bender said you’d give me a dime,” he repeated.

  Charlie had forgotten—after all that, the kid probably thought he was going to stiff him. Embarrassed, Charlie dug out his change purse. “Here,” he said, feeling magnanimous suddenly, “here’s fifteen cents.”

  Snatching the money and jamming it into his pocket, Ernest O’Reilly gave him a look suspended midway between gratitude and contempt. “Big spender,” he piped, and then he was gone in a flash of spindly legs.

  The transaction left a sour taste in Charlie’s mouth—the little ingrate: what did he expect?—and as he inquired at the desk for Mr. Goodloe H. Bender, he could feel the indignation rising in his throat. “Mr. Bender?” the desk clerk repeated, as if Charlie had been speaking in a foreign language. The clerk looked him up and down a moment, the hollows of his cheeks drawn in cool appraisal, and then he turned away abruptly to conduct a brief hushed telephone conference. After a moment he set the earpiece back on its hook as if it were a precious jewel and shifted round to face Charlie. “Mr. Bender is occupied at the moment. Would you take a seat, please?”

  Charlie was weary, bone weary. It seemed as if he’d been traveling forever. But still, in that moment, he could barely restrain himself from reaching out and seizing the man by the collar. You chicken-necked little twit, he was thinking, in six months’ time I’ll buy and sell the likes of you a hundred times over. He held the clerk’s eyes till the man looked away, then stalked across the lobby and threw himself down on a red velvet settee in the corner. A long shiver ran through him, and he hugged his shoulders and stamped his feet on the carpet. After a moment, he began working at the buttons of his coat with stiff and aching fingers.

  The lobby was quiet at this hour—it was past ten now, and the last travelers would long since have settled in. Charlie sat there, fiddling with his buttons, consulting his watch, yawning despite himself in the luxurious enveloping warmth. The place was certainly plush, that was for sure. Tapestries on the walls, oil paintings, chandeliers, that hushed air of elegance and ease hanging over the rooms as if they were suspended in time. It was what the rich craved, he supposed—the suspension of the whole temporal order of things, absolution from the cares and worries of plebeians like himself. That’s what money was for.

  And C. W. Post understood it better than anyone. He’d come to town with nothing, nothing—not fifty cents to invest—and he’d realized all of this. Of course, he didn’t spend much time in Battle Creek anymore—he was all over the world, conquering one market after another, building a whole city in Texas, influencing votes and policies in Washington, making them eat Grape-Nuts and Elijah’s Manna in England and France and Germany—but when he was in town, he lived here, in the Post Tavern Hotel. Charlie had heard he had a whole floor to himself, a magnificent suite of rooms with every amenity … and the clerks must jump out of their skins when he walks in the door, Yes, Mr. Post, sir, yes, sir, yes, yes, yes….

  Charlie must have dozed. He couldn’t seem to recall seeing the bellhop move across the room to lean solicitously over him and place two gloved fingers gently on his shoulder. “What?” he gasped, starting.

  “Mr. Bender will see you now,” the bellhop returned, speaking in the whisper they all seemed to affect, as if using a normal tone of voice would somehow crack the pillars, shatter the chandeliers, bring the whole opulent edifice crashing to the ground. “Would you come with me, please, sir.?”

  Charlie followed the bellhop across the lobby and down a hallway that apparently connected to the rear street-entrance of the hotel, all the while focusing wearily on the man’s pinched, squared-up shoulders and the pale depression at the nape of his neck. The bellhop stopped outside a long comfortable room fitted in Flemish oak, with a built-in buffet, stained-glass panels and an arrangement of heavy dark tables and chairs. A wrought-iron sign hung over the door: “The Wee Nippy,” it proclaimed.

  As Charlie entered, he saw Bender rising from one of the tables with a group of prosperous-looking men, most of whom wore sheepish looks, as if they’d made a pact against their better judgment and already regretted it. The table was littered with empty beer schooners, whiskey glasses, napkins, ashtrays,-a decimated platter of sandwiches—and two decks of well-thumbed cards. Smoke rose from the gentlemen’s cigars. There was a muted murmur of conversation. But if three or four of the men looked vaguely uneasy, Bender himself was the picture of rugged confidence, optimism, triumph, even. He had hold of one man’s hand in a firm politician’s grip, all the while gathering up a wad of greenbacks from the table with his free hand and raising his voice in a jocular, hail-fellow-well-met roar. Poker. All at once Charlie understood. Bender had kept him waiting over a poker game.

  In that moment, Bender spotted him, and his expression wavered ever so slightly, as if he’d been awakened in the middle of a dream, as if for an instant he didn’t recognize his partner, come all the way from New York with the wherewithal to make Per-Fo fly, but he covered himself admirably. “Charlie!” he boomed, sweeping across the room on his stupendous feet, a tottering, sweating, plum-faced tornado of a man, huge, ventricular, his fractured soapstone eyes leaping madly out of his head, arms spread wide for the crushing embrace. In the instant before they closed, Charlie noticed that he’d dyed his beard to contrast with the white fluff atop his head, and not only that, but he’d taken to parting it aristocratically in the middle of his chin, too. He looked like a general home from the wars, looked like a senator, a banker, a captain of industry.

  As they embraced there in the glittering taproom, as Charlie felt the power in the older man’s arms and took in the rich intoxicating odor of lilac water, Cuban tobacco and fine Scotch whiskey that enveloped him like a succubus, he couldn’t help feeling relieved, proud even: this dynamo, this titan, this earthshaking figure of a man was his partner. He was in a daze as Bender introduced him round to the company (noses, mustaches, beards: he couldn’t catch a single name), but it didn’t seem to matter—the party was breaking up anyway. Bender bellowed his goodbyes, the others shrugged into jackets and overcoats, the smoke began to dissipate. And then, resplendent in checked trousers, sky-blue jacket with matching vest and yellow high-button shoes buffed till they threw back the light like twin dancing mirrors, Bender led him grandly through the corridors, out into the lobby and across the carpet to the elevator.

  By the time Charlie managed to recover himself, Bender was ushering him into his fourth-floor room—or, rather, suite of rooms. Bender had a sitting room, with electric lamps and a rolltop desk in the corner; a bedroom visible through an open door to the left and lit invitingly by a single amber-shaded Tiffany lamp; and a glittering tile-and-porcelain bathroom that was itself bigger than Charlie’s crawl space at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s. As Bender crossed the room to the sideboard and poured them each a snifter of brandy from a cut-glass decanter, Charlie eased himself down on the wine-colored sofa and saw with amazement that the amenities here even included a telephone. Bender had his own telephone. In his sitting room. The convenience of it, the luxury—it was a revelation. It stunned him. It was almost beyond his comprehension. Sure, Mrs. Hookstratten had a phone, in her eighteen-room mansion overlooking Lounsbury Pond. And he supposed the Lightbodys and people like that had them, also, but a telephone in your own room? It was too much.

  “So, so, so, my friend,” Bender cried, whirling round on him and tottering across the room with the drinks, “and how was your trip? First-class all the way, eh? A little taste of the good life never hurt anybody—and it’s just the beginning, Charlie, just the beginning.”

  Bender didn’t wait for a reply.

  “I would have been there to meet you, of course I would, you know that, but these people you’ve just been introduced to—Bookbinder, Stellrecht and the rest—well, they’re the princes of this town, princes, and you’ve got to cultivate people like that, you’ve just got to. Know what I mean?” Bender had planted himself on the arm of the sofa, his wild smoke-colored eyes tugging at Charlie’s as if they were co
nnected by invisible wires. He lifted the snifter to his nostrils and inhaled. “Good stuff, Charlie. The best. Otard Dupuy ‘78.”

  Charlie had never been tireder in his life. He sipped the fiery liquor and watched Bender swell before his eyes. “Yes, very good,” he murmured, and attempted a smile.

  “Yes, well,” Bender boomed, leaping to his feet and pacing up and down the length of the room, alternately sniffing at his drink and pulling at the ends of his beard, “I’m pleased that you like it. After all, your patron—or should I say patroness?—is paying for it, the whole kit and caboodle … and by the way, you’ve got the check, I presume?” He paused now, caught in the midst of a gigantic stride, to give his full attention to the framing of the question—and to its answer. “And the cash?”

  All of a sudden, Charlie came to life, fully alert for the first time since he’d left the train. He heard the faint whisper of a cart moving past the door, the gurgle of a distant toilet, a murmur of voices. The check. The cash. Bender didn’t care about him, didn’t care about Per-Fo, didn’t care about anyone or anything—all he cared about was Mrs. Hookstratten’s money. He’d already had the first thousand of it, a check Mrs. Hookstratten had written and signed over in her own parlor on a glorious sunstruck October afternoon not five weeks ago—and where was that money? Tied up in Otard Dupuy and Havana cigars? Charlie wanted to ask, to press the issue, but it was late, he was exhausted, and he didn’t know where to begin. “Listen, Goodloe—”