by T. C. Boyle
“‘Good,’ Charlie. Just call me ‘Good,’ for short. Let my enemies call me ‘Goodloe’—or ‘Mr. Bender.”’
“I, uh, just wondered—about the factory. And the paper for the cartons. You wrote that you were making progress…?”
“Well, we’ve had a problem there.” Bender was pacing again, shooting his cuffs, toying with the heavy signet ring he wore on his right index finger. “We had the old Malta-Vita plant all tied up, two big flight ovens included, good as new—”
“Malta-Vita? You mean they’re out of business?” Charlie felt a chill go through him.
“Pffffft.” Bender waved a hand in the air, as if shooing away a fly. “They’ve been gone nearly four years, Charlie. Undercapitalized, overpaid, and the product wasn’t worth a blue damn. Wheat flakes. Ha! The money’s in corn, Charlie, that’s where it is. Look at Kellogg—now he knows his cereal.”
“But—but I was offered stock in it just tonight. I barely got off the train and this gang of ragtag kids was all over me as if I was some kind of mark or something.”
Bender drained his cognac and turned his back to pour another. “You’re thinking of Vita-Malta, Charlie, Vita-Malta. They just started up in the old Map-L Flakes factory out on the Marshall Road, oh, seven, eight months ago.” He swung round, the snifter dwarfed in his big meaty hand, and pointed a rhetorical finger. “And they’re shipping six carloads a day out of here now, Charlie. Six carloads a day.”
Charlie’s mind floated away on the wonder of it: six carloads a day. That was good news. The best news he’d had since he dropped down off the train like a stone into the most hellish night of his life. If Vita-Malta could do it, so could Per-Fo. Charlie was grinning—he couldn’t help himself. “So what sort of problem did you run into? With the factory, I mean?”
Bender’s laugh shook the room. “Worried, Charlie? You look worried. You do. Trust me. Trust Goodloe H. Bender to steer you right—and your Mrs. Hookstratten, too. Don’t I know this business? Don’t I?” He perched himself on the arm of the sofa again, took a brief pull at the snifter. “It’s nothing,” he said. “The son of a bitch that’s got title to the place wants too much for it now he sees somebody’s interested, and I was running short and didn’t really have the spondulics to put down, if you know what I mean—”
“Running short?” The fear was back. Charlie saw the future open up before him like a black hole. Suddenly he was on his feet. “You can’t mean you’ve—?” He couldn’t get the words out; they choked him, stuck in his throat. “You mean you spent it all, the whole of our start-up money? Already?”
Bender’s face went rigid. “I don’t like your tone, Charlie. I don’t like it at all.” He jerked his chin truculently, lifting three stout fingers to his throat to adjust his bow tie. Charlie fixated on that bow tie—it was bright yellow, made of silk, and it clung to Bender’s collar like a mounted butterfly. “Are you questioning my integrity? If you are, you’re in trouble, my friend. Deep trouble. No man questions the integrity of Goodloe H. Bender. No man.”
Charlie looked away. He was tired, that was all. Tired.
“Listen, Charlie. You don’t just snap your fingers and start up a business like Per-Fo overnight.” Bender’s tone was softer now, each syllable a fluffed little feather pillow tucked under Charlie’s weary head. He was soothing, reassuring, the voice of reason and conciliation. “It takes capital, Charlie. Money to grease the wheels. You see those gentlemen down there tonight? Well, we played a friendly little game of cards—that’s how they see it, anyway. But to my mind, it’s business. Stellrecht owns eight paper mills in this state—eight of them—and Bookbinder used to be C. W. Post’s chief engineer before Vim lured him away. Need I say more?
“And, yes, I know you’re feeling put upon because I wasn’t there to greet you and because I can’t show you through the brand-spanking-new Per-Fo factory with its scores of tidy workers and the wainscoted office for its President-in-Chief with the little brass nameplate on the door, and I know I’ve stuck you out there in a dreary boarding house while I’m curled up here in the lap of luxury, but you’ve got to have business sense.” He paused to put some gravel in his voice. “Who do you think in this town is going to give us the time of day if I don’t stay in the best hotel they’ve got and put on a show for them? You ever think of that?”
Charlie hadn’t thought of it. He fell back into the sofa and studied the carpet. He felt cheap, felt like a turncoat, a carper and a caviler, the weak cog, a negative thinker in a positive enterprise. He was ashamed of himself.
Bender leaned over him and wrapped an arm round his shoulder. “Now, Charlie, I asked you a question: You did bring the money, didn’t you?”
Later, much later—so late the streetcars had long since stopped running and the hack drivers and their nags were peacefully ruminating in bed and stable, respectively—Charlie Ossining staggered up the stairs at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s, fumbled into his room and threw himself on the bed. Woozy with Bender’s brandy, chilled to the marrow, stiff and aching in the long muscles of his legs from his cumulative hike of sixty blocks, he lay there facedown on the mattress, too exhausted even to remove his overcoat. For a moment he thought he was back on the train again, the bed swaying beneath him, the sound of the phantom rails ticking in his ears, and then he was home, in the gatehouse at Mrs. Hookstratten’s, surrounded by his boyhood things and the familiar polished maple posts of his bedroom furniture. Sleep came like an avalanche.
At some point in the night—ten minutes later, an hour, two?—he woke in the chill darkness to the fruity rasping sound of a cough, hack, hack, hack, and for a moment he didn’t know where he was. Instinctively, he clutched at his wallet: Mrs. Hookstratten’s money. But then he remembered. He was at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s rooming house in Battle Creek, in the middle of the first night of his new life, the life that would make him a millionaire and the equal of anybody, and that was Mr. Bagwell coughing his guts out on the other side of the partition, and it was so cold that the water in his washbasin was no longer water but a solid brick of ice. The money was safe. Three thousand eight hundred forty-three dollars and fifteen cents, minus the five dollars Bender had given him for living expenses, was finally beyond the reach of accident, theft or loss, nestled in the two-ton safe at the Post Tavern Hotel. It was a relief to be rid of it, and a relief finally to be here, at the very start of something, something big.
But the cold spoke to him—he might just as well have been laid out in his tomb for all the heat of the place—and he shrugged out of his clothes and under the bedcovers, pulling the comforter up over his head to take advantage of the sole heat source: his own breath. As he lay there shivering, shifting about in the bed and alive to every nuance of Bagwell’s terminally irritating cough, he couldn’t seem to get comfortable. Even after he’d warmed up enough to stop shivering for minutes at a time and Bagwell’s coughs had turned to ragged intermittent snores, Charlie couldn’t seem to get back to sleep. It was the mattress. It seemed to be filled with corncobs—or, no, some sort of paper stuffing, newsprint or ticker tape. He tried his left side, his right, his back, his stomach, tried the fetal position, the crouch, the spread-eagle. Nothing worked. He lay there in the dark, exasperated, as tired as any man could be. Finally, annoyed out of all patience, he lurched up in bed, fumbled for a match and lit the wick of the kerosene lamp.
The room bloomed with light. Shadows lurked in the corners. There were cracks in the plaster and the wallpaper was faded. Bagwell ripped through logs on the other side of the wall. With a curse, Charlie sprang from the bed and began a vigorous rearrangement of the mattress, lifting it off the frame and working the ticking till it undulated like waves at sea. But still the stuffing wouldn’t settle—it kept bunching up like a sack of mail. Puzzled, furious, confounded—not to mention half inebriated still—he took his penknife to the seam at the base of the mattress, loosening the threads with the idea of inserting an arm and rearranging the stuffing.
Ah, yes: it was paper
, all right. Paper. He seized a fistful of it in disgust and pulled it through the rent in the ticking.
A nasty little surprise awaited him, the last in a string that stretched back to the moment he’d stepped down off the train. This wasn’t merely paper. No, it was very high quality paper, almost as supple as a banknote and embossed with the rich blue-green figure of a sheaf of wheat. Across the nexus of the bound stalks, printed in bold black characters, was this legend:
ONE SHARE, PREFERRED STOCK
THE MALTA-VITA BREAKFAST FOOD CO., LTD.
BATTLE CREEK, MICHIGAN
Chapter 7
Symptomitis
After the ceiling came toppling down and the floor fell out from under him, Will Lightbody found himself back out in the corridor under the watchful and distinctly disapproving gaze of Mrs. Stover. Eleanor had ducked his embrace in the middle of that quietly seething dining room—and rightly so: what had he been thinking?—and then escorted him all the way up the central aisle, beneath the hortatory banner and through the Grecian portals of the pompous, overblown entrance. She stood before him now, her lips drawn so tight they seemed to be segmented, each little pursed line a division in itself. She was angry. As angry as he’d ever seen her.
“I just won’t have this, Will,” she said, biting off each word cleanly and then spitting it out again. Her pupils were shrunk to pinpricks and a petulant little furrow was drawn neatly between her eyebrows.
A moment ago, in the dining room, overcome by gastric distress and emotional confusion, he’d seemed to be on the verge of blacking out. It never occurred to him that a diet of unbuttered toast and artesian water might not exactly meet the full range of his nutritional needs, or that he was three-quarters starved and fully emaciated and the lightheadedness and peristaltic agony he experienced might be linked to inanition, pure and simple. No: it had to be more complicated than that. This was the Progressive Era, after all, and “reform” was the catchword of the day. Will was sick because his way of life was sick. He would become well when he reformed his eating habits and submitted himself to the regimen prescribed by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and the high muckamucks of health. Or so they told him.
At any rate, Eleanor did not fall into his arms, a familiar wooziness stole over him, and he felt his eyes rush up into the cover of his upper lids. Somehow, Mrs. Stover was there, short but strong of shoulder and capacious of bosom, and then one of her equally buxom nutritional girls—a strapping girl, corn-flake-fed and yogurt-toned—and finally, a male attendant. The scene was abbreviated, and Will, tenderly supported in the arms of strangers and shepherded by his wife, escaped the dining room. Now, in the relative privacy of the corridor, Eleanor wanted an apology. She wanted contrition, promises, protestations and expostulations; she wanted to drive the first post of the fence that would keep them apart.
The words were on his lips—I’m sorry—but he couldn’t say them. The more he thought about it, and the more he looked into the furious shrinking hard green nuggets of her eyes, the more he felt his own innocence. All he’d wanted was a little reassurance. An embrace from his own wife. He was a sick man and he was new to all of this and it overwhelmed him. Perhaps he’d chosen the wrong place, perhaps such an embrace was a thing to be indulged behind closed doors and not in the midst of a dutifully masticating assembly, but still, shouldn’t she be the least bit aware of his frame of mind, of his needs? “I don’t like this place, Eleanor,” he said finally. “I haven’t been here a full day yet and I’ve been subjected to all kinds of indignities, from your Dr. Kellogg sticking his fingers in my mouth to a Nurse Bloethal plying the other end of me with her tubes and bottles and I don’t know what-all—” He stopped there, short of mentioning Nurse Graves. Nurse Graves, and what had happened between them in the privacy of his own bathroom, was something he knew instinctively he should keep to himself.
Eleanor held her ground. Mrs. Stover, just out of earshot, seemed poised to rush to her aid. “Don’t you spoil it for me, Will Lightbody,” she warned, her voice dropping to a fiery whisper. “Don’t you start in with your self-pitying sermons and your, your—” She seemed stricken all of a sudden. Her eyes had dilated, opened up like morning flowers, and there were tears in them. Tears.
Will felt ashamed of himself. He felt like a barbarian, an apostate—and yet he couldn’t help deriving a small shred of satisfaction from the stance he was taking, though he couldn’t have said why.
Eleanor’s handkerchief had appeared. She dabbed at her eyes as a pair of white-clad attendants hurried down the hall and the fattest woman Will had ever seen staggered past them and into the dining room. He’d seen a woman nearly as fat once—at the Ringling Bros. Circus—and he was thinking about that, lost in a fantasy of bearded women, roaring cats and dancing pachyderms, when Eleanor, her voice soft and hesitant, spoke again. “I don’t know how to make you understand. It’s just that this is the only place where I think I’m truly happy anymore … and after the baby… I just don’t know, Will. If I ever have a hope of getting well again, it’ll be here, among my friends and mentors. This is where I’ve learned to live the right way, Will, the only way.” She paused, holding him with her eyes. “And look at yourself. This is the place for you, too, Will, the only place I know of.”
He heard the conciliation in her tone, heard the plea, but he couldn’t help himself. “Outside the pages of the Sears Roebuck catalogue, you mean. And who was that at breakfast you were so concerned about? Dr. Linniman, wasn’t it? Frank? And do the physicians dine with their patients now—is that part of the program?”
“I won’t discuss this with you. I won’t.” Her eyes were sharp again, metallic, the flashing iridescent green of a pair of hovering dragonflies. “Dr. Frank Linniman happens to be one of this country’s great healers, schooled at the elbow of Dr. Kellogg himself, and he’s done more good for me than anyone in this world … since Mother died, anyway. If it wasn’t for him, I don’t think I’d have the strength to get out of bed in the morning.” She looked off down the corridor. “He was here for me when I lost my daughter, the only one.”
“The only one?” Will couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I was in Peterskill, eating my stomach up with worry and waiting for your telegram. What did you expect me to do—appear at your bedside like the Ghost of Christmas Past? It was you who told me to stay away.”
“No, no, no,” she said, her voice rising in inflection as she put her hands up to cover her ears. Mrs. Stover made a feint toward them but Will leveled a murderous look on her and she checked herself. “I won’t argue, Will, I can’t—I’m a sick woman.”
“I’m a sick man.”
“I’m sicker.”
“Than me? You’ve got to be joking.”
“I am sicker. Far sicker. You know that.”
“I don’t know it. It’s always ‘me, me, me’—how do you think I feel?”
But Will didn’t get his answer. Eleanor turned her back on him. Just swung around and stalked up the hallway, his question—his pathetic, self-justifying cri de coeur of a question—hanging unanswered in the air. He watched her shoulders retreating from him, watched her angry stride and the purposeful rise and fall of her feet, watched her until she rounded the corner and disappeared.
“Mr. Lightbody?”
A voice spoke at his shoulder, a familiar voice, mellifluous, breathy and sweet. The voice of Nurse Graves. Will turned to her in a daze.
She looked good, fresh-spanked with health and color, the glow of an uncomplicated morning settling into her eyes and the parabola of her smiling lips. This wasn’t the Battle Creek Sanitarium smile; this was genuine, artless, sincere; this was the smile of resurrection and salvation. Nurse Bloethal vanished from his mind. Dr. Linniman evaporated. Even Eleanor receded into the background. Will felt his own big-toothed smile blazing back at her and he fought to control the sudden tic in his left cheek. “Nurse Graves,” he said, dipping his head, “good morning to you.”
“Good morning,” she returned, hol
ding her smile and looking him candidly in the eye. It was a look that surprised him, made him feel naked.
Sick as he was, Will couldn’t help wondering what that look was all about. It expressed a whole lot more than a cool, detached, nursely concern, didn’t it? Or was he fooling himself? He remembered the touch of her as she put him to bed, the heat of her skin against his, and he stole a glance at her little feet in their white official shoes, saw how the thin cotton skirt clung to her hips and flat young abdomen. Oysters. What was wrong with oysters?
“Well,” she said, “are you ready?”
“Ready?”
Was that a giggle that escaped her? No, of course not. But she showed him her gums, smiling so tightly he was afraid she might begin to ooze something sticky and sweet. “Are you being facetious with me, Mr. Lightbody?”
“Oh, no,” Will insisted, “not at all.” He was grinning, too.
She cocked her head to one side, as if to get a better look at him, and she let out a sigh. “It’s time for your examination—or have you forgotten already?”
Ten minutes later, after exchanging banalities with the elevator man and taking advantage of the close confines of the compartment to inhale the heady, faintly antiseptic aroma of Nurse Graves’s pinned-up hair, Will found himself seated in a back-gouging physiologic chair in the temperature-controlled office of Dr. Frank Linniman. The office was located on the first floor, in the Neurological Department, and its windows gave onto the frozen lawn of the deer park Dr. Kellogg had provided for the edification of his patients. (The power of suggestion: What decent, rational man or woman could continue to crave meat in the face of these gentle, sleek, blameless creatures?) Will attempted to lean back in the chair, but it had been designed by Dr. Kellogg to discourage lounging—lounging was the first step on the road to deleterious posture and bankrupt health. The chair was a sort of torture device, actually, its hard oaken slats bellying out to push the sitter’s lower spine into his rib cage and force his shoulders back as if he were strapped to a barrel.