The Road to Wellville

by T. C. Boyle

  Charlie glanced round him. There was a codger with a cane at the base of the staircase, a pair of old ladies positioned like statues in the jungle room, no orderlies, no doctors, no Kellogg: this was easy. “Yeah, sure—would you do that?”

  The clerk picked up the telephone and asked for five-one-seven. He froze his smile on Charlie while the call went through the switchboard, and then he was asking for Mr. Lightbody in a stilted syrupy voice that seemed to drip out of him as if he’d sprung a leak. There was a pause for the reply and Charlie watched the man’s face change—the artificial smile fell away, the lip dropped, and he let out a low gasp of surprise. “No, you don’t mean it?” he said. “Really? For how long?” Another pause. Charlie could feel his heart going. Finally the man hung up the phone and turned to him. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’ve just spoken to Mr. Lightbody’s nurse and she says he’s indisposed—quite ill, actually. It seems he’s taken a sudden turn for the worse. Are you a … relative?”

  “Me? Oh, no. No, no. I’m a business associate—acquaintance, that is. Did the nurse happen to indicate how long it will be? Until he can see people, I mean?”

  The lapdog eyes came to rest on him with a melting, watery gaze. The clerk took a moment, working a ministerial gravity into his tone. “We can’t know that, I’m afraid. Until we get a diagnosis—well, we can’t even know if …” He broke off. “It seems it’s fairly critical. I’m sorry.”

  A tic started up under Charlie’s left eye, beating time with his racing pulse, one thousand dollars, one thousand dollars, Per-Fo stalled, the check a worthless scrap of paper. How could it be? Lightbody hadn’t looked so bad, had he? Or maybe he did look bad, terrible even, sallow, sunken, ready for the grave, but he acted fine. Ate everything in sight. Roared and hooted and drank like an Irishman at a funeral. Charlie didn’t know what to say. It was over, done, finis, time to give it up and trudge on back to the boarding house, but he couldn’t move. His hands gripped the edge of the desk as if it were made of tar, the check seemed to burn through his shirt and into his skin, his feet refused to move.

  “I’m sorry,” the clerk repeated. “Deeply sorry, sir. But there’s always hope—and remember, your friend couldn’t find himself in a holier temple of healing.”

  It was then that another voice intruded on Charlie’s consciousness, a bright sarcastic chirp of a voice that sang in his ear like a playground taunt: “Why if it isn’t Mr. Charles P. Ossining, the breakfast-food dynamo!”

  He spun round on Eleanor Lightbody, resplendent in green velvet, her hair swept up above a pair of crimson earrings and a necklace of bright gemstones clasped round her white, white throat. She was giving him that infuriating little purse-lipped smile, the one that seemed to invite the world to bend over and kiss her feet. Or her posterior.

  “And what brings you to our little citadel of health?”

  The check was in his pocket, her husband fading, Per-Fo still on the ground. But Charlie had self-possession—he was born with it—and he had charm and looks and a smile all his own. He took a deep breath. “Well, well, well, Eleanor—and how are you?” He showed her his teeth. “Just inquiring after a friend … but don’t you look the perfect vision of the season?”

  It was the right thing to say. “Oh, this?” she murmured, resting a hand on the front of her dress. “Yes, they do tell me I look festive in green.”

  “Brings out your eyes.” Charlie looked into those eyes as he spoke, glanced away as if he were suddenly interested in the dowager descending the staircase, and came back to them again. He dropped his smile. He was earnest suddenly, serious, a sponge of pity and sympathy. “I hear your husband took a turn for the worse.”

  Now her smile was gone, too, a stricken look settling in around her nose and upper lip. (He saw that her nostrils were faintly reddened—had she been crying?) He felt for Will in that moment—poor sap—and for himself and the worthless check, too, and he couldn’t help feeling for Eleanor, imagining her widowed, rich as a peacock in a nest of feathers and needing support, the support of a younger man, someone to brighten up her days, someone she could pamper and spoil and take to bed at night….

  Her voice was soft. “I’m afraid so,” she said.

  There was movement around them. The dowager turned the corner and disappeared in the foliage of the jungle, a nurse flickered by, the desk clerk turned his dripping eyes on a middle-aged man in tweeds who’d suddenly materialized at the desk. The telephone rang. Baggage arrived. An attendant wheeled a cart of covered dishes into the elevator. Even on Christmas day, the business of healing went on.

  “Is it—is it serious?” Charlie asked.

  “Everything is serious,” she said, arms akimbo, eyes boring into him, her dress lifting a fraction of an inch to show off a pair of bright red patent-leather shoes. “The world is serious. Life is serious. But listen, it’s Christmas day, my husband is”—her hand fell like the drop of a guillotine—”indisposed, and it’s rude of me to keep you standing here in the lobby as if you were some sort of notions peddler or door-to-door salesman or something, forgive me, please.” And here she arched her eyebrows and gave him the old familiar look of bemusement. “Have you eaten, Mr. Ossining?”

  He’d been wondering if he should broach the matter of the check, but in that moment he decided against it. Here they were, chatting like old friends, the queen come down off her pedestal, Charlie rising to his station like the magnate he was destined to become. The check would only sully things, put them back on their old footing. He showed her his teeth again. “Why, no. No, I haven’t.”

  “Will you join me for dinner, then?”

  Charlie was at a loss. The smile faltered. “You mean—here?”

  “Of course,” she laughed, and her laugh conspired with him, warm and chummy, the sort of laugh he’d hoped for when he ran across her on the steps of the Post Tavern. “Dining scientifically won’t kill you, Mr. Ossining—not if you try it just once. But I warn you, be careful—you never know what it might lead to.”

  The dining room was grandiose, dwarfing anything Bender’s Post Tavern had to offer, a big open columned room that might have been a Roman bath or the training quarters for the gladiators—bears, lions, bulls and all. Palms sprouted from the floor every ten paces, chandeliers glittered, a sea of elegantly set tables swept the buffed marble floors all the way to the great gray windows that looked out over the Biggest Little City in the U.S.A. The room was impressive—it was meant to be, in a showy, pompous way—but except for the odd table here or there, it was largely deserted; aside from Eleanor and Charlie, there were maybe fifty people in the place. “It’s the Christmas holiday,” Eleanor said, as a brisk little woman with a big front showed them to their table and pulled out chairs for them. “Most of the patients have gone home. Or they’re dining privately.”

  Charlie unfurled his napkin and laid it across his lap. “And what about you?”

  “Oh, I’m much too ill to travel. I’m the classic neurasthenic, I’m afraid—or so Dr. Linniman tells me. Too sensitive by half, too thin-skinned, too wrapped up in things, too involved in the evolutions of this sad old world. The slightest thing will set me off—rain on the windowpane, an old woman crossing the street, my own kitchen. It’s all dietary, of course.” She laughed. “And Will. He wanted to go home. To Peterskill. The dreariest town on earth. And look at him now.”

  Charlie wanted to pursue the issue—yes, let’s look at him; what was wrong with him anyway?—but a girl dressed in blue and white with a little white cap perched like a folded napkin atop her head was hovering over them. “Hello, Mrs. Lightbody. Good afternoon, sir. And a happy Christmas to you both. May I get you something to drink?” she asked, handing each of them a menu.

  “Water, thank you, Priscilla,” Eleanor said, and Charlie watched the earrings play against the swell of her jawbone as she dipped her head to the menu. He fought down an urge to lean over and take one of those earrings in his mouth.

  “And you, sir?”

 
“Whiskey and soda,” he murmured, before he realized what he was doing. Eleanor put a hand to her lips to suppress a giggle; her eyes took hold of him as they had that first night on the train, probing like needles, digging in, sizing him up in a quick shrewd glance.

  The waitress was scandalized. For a moment she was speechless. But then, her smile wavering, and pronouncing each word as if she were reading from a text, she treated him to a curt little lecture. “I’m very sorry, sir, very sorry indeed, but this is a temple of right living—and right thinking—arid we do not serve injurious spirits here. In fact, sir, we feel very strongly that such poisons must and will be banned and prohibited in any civilized society.”

  Charlie threw up his hands in mock surrender. “All right, mea culpa, I’m sorry, forgive me.” Eleanor laughed. The girl tried out her smile again but couldn’t hold it.

  “Let me help you,” Eleanor said, leaning over the table to lay a hand on his wrist and pull the face of the menu gently toward her. “Here,” she said, “down near the bottom: Beverages. The Doctor is offering Kaffir Tea, Health Koko, Kumyss, Hot Malted Nuts, Milk, of course, and a Christmas Special Eggnogg—with Orange-Cranberry Flake and Cinnamon Flavorings. I’d take the kumyss if I were you.”

  Her hand lingered on his wrist. He could smell her perfume. He felt dizzy suddenly and recalled that he hadn’t eaten since the night before—and at that only a hamburger sandwich that was like a wave-tossed raft in a typhoon of booze. His head ached. He felt queasy. “Kumyss?”

  Eleanor let go of him, arched her back against the chair. “You’ll love it. Believe me.”

  The waitress left them and Charlie found that he was staring into Eleanor’s eyes. He’d read somewhere that green eyes were the sign of a passionate nature—or was it brown eyes? No matter: he’d been living like a eunuch at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s, and Eleanor’s presence excited him. “Yes, well,” he said, “I’m sure you wouldn’t steer me wrong. But we were talking about your husband, about Will—what happened? What’s the matter with him?”

  Her mouth tightened. She toyed with her silverware. After a moment, she asked, “Have you seen him lately?”

  “No,” Charlie lied.

  She sighed. “He was improving—immeasurably. Everybody said so. He was to go on the grape diet today.”

  Charlie lifted his eyebrows.

  “His first solid food. Doctor Kellogg had him on a bulk dietary at first, to flush his system—don’t smirk, Mr. Ossining, and don’t presume to make light of a sphere of human knowledge of which you are entirely ignorant, and you a breakfast-food man…. Well, at any rate, he’d been on the milk dietary ever since, in an effort to revitalize his intestinal flora and improve his digestion, and today he was to graduate to grapes.”

  At that moment, a spindle-thin, hook-nosed man dressed in the bells and motley of an elf or jester burst through the doors at the far end of the room, strumming a mandolin. He was playing a Sousa melody—“Bonnie Annie Laurie”—and, as one, the diners clapped their hands and laughed. Eleanor turned her head and smiled, and her smile was pure and uncomplicated. Charlie smiled too. He couldn’t help himself—he felt giddy just to be in her presence, let alone dining with her intimately, like husband and wife. She was three or four years older than he, and a married woman to boot. But she was class, pure class. When Per-Fo flew, when he was a tycoon and a force to be reckoned with, with his own car and tailored suits and his billiard table, this was the sort of woman he envisioned at his side. Just this. Exactly. “Yes?” he prompted. “And what happened?”

  She furrowed her brow, all trace of amusement gone. “Will had a lapse. Last night. Something terrible happened—in the sinusoidal baths—some sort of accident. I’m still not clear on the details, but it set him off. You see”—leaning forward, lowering her voice in confidence—“my husband has an addictive nature.”

  The jester swept round the room, playing carols now and singing in a high, pinched, nasal whine that brought tears to the eyes of the old lady at the next table over. A handful of people began to clap out the rhythm and sing along.

  Eleanor was still there, still leaning toward him. “First it was meat, then liquor, and finally, though I don’t like to think about it, opium. It’s ruined him, it has. This is his last chance, I really believe that, Mr. Ossining.” She looked up at him for sympathy, confirmation, hope.

  Charlie gave her all that and more, putting on his best I-understand-I-appreciate-and-I-sympathize-to-the-depths-of-my-soul look, but he was elated. So that was it—Lightbody was hung over. Hung over. Charlie was hung over himself and none the worse for it, beyond the usual headache and a little sinking in the stomach. God, these bran munchers were a bunch of self-dramatizing idiots. Hung over. You’d have thought he’d been stabbed in the guts or worked over by a couple of stevedores, you’d have thought he had stomach cancer or paralysis. What horseshit. He was thinking he’d come back in a couple of days with the check and maybe a pint of Old Overholt, loosen the guy up, when the waitress appeared with a glass of water for Eleanor and the kumyss—a frothy, whitish-looking concoction—and set them on the table. “Are you ready to order?” she asked.

  “Yes, of course,” Eleanor murmured. “If you don’t mind, Mr. Ossining, may I order for us both—since I’m familiar with the Anti-Toxic Diet?”

  A grunt and a nod of the head from Charlie. Sure, why not? He could always pick up something at the Red Onion on the way home.

  Eleanor ordered, the names of the dishes falling from her lips as if she’d invented them on the spur of the moment in a mad culinary improvisation, and then the waitress was gone, and Eleanor was asking him about Per-Fo. “I’m curious,” she said. “Have you begun actual production yet? I mean, it must be difficult with so many competitors—”

  Charlie gave her the usual spiel in response, careful not to linger over the terminology she’d caught him up on before. He talked about the rush of new investors to the company—a pure fabrication—and about his partner’s determination to build a new factory for a new product instead of their contenting themselves with taking over the facilities of one of the concerns that had wound up in bankruptcy court.

  “And how do you propose to avoid a similar fate?” she asked, coy with him still, still mocking, but somehow sincere, too. He felt that their relationship had changed, that she’d given ground. She was content to be there with him in that moment, the mandolinist yodeling out his inanities and the artificial goose stewing in its own artificial juices, the room shrunk to the size of a single table, to him and her. Her precious doctor was nowhere to be seen, her husband huddled over a bedpan: she was glad for the company.

  “By offering a superior product,” he said, “and advertising it. Advertising is the key. It’s the modern way.” He was gesturing broadly, warming to the subject, regurgitating Bender’s lessons. “You’ve got to create a demand—no matter how good the product is, no matter what its merits and deserts, it’ll die stillborn if the public isn’t educated to it. Did you know that C. W. Post spent a million dollars on advertising alone in the past year? A million dollars!”

  Eleanor’s hands were folded on the table before her, the wedding ring prominent in the nest of her fingers. She was perfectly motionless, watching him as a naturalist might watch some exotic species at work in the wild, that faint mocking smile on her lips.

  “What?” he said. “What is it?”

  A pause. “You haven’t touched your kumyss.”

  He hadn’t. He’d forgotten all about it. There it was, frosting the glass with a mucus-colored foam that reminded him of the tide line along the Hudson. He picked up the glass and took a swallow.

  The taste was rank, and he damn near brought it up again. The stuff was rotten, literally, whatever it was. It smelled like a wet dog and tasted of rancid butter, cider mold, dirt. “What—?” He choked it back. “What is this stuff, anyway?”

  Her eyes were bright. “Fermented mare’s milk originally. But the Chief uses the bovine variety here.”
>
  Charlie just looked at her.

  “Cow’s milk. Fermented. To produce the lactobacillus culture your poor abused alimentary system needs to repair the damage you’ve done to it. If it isn’t already too late. Oysters,” she said scornfully. “Beefsteak. Pommery and Greno. You’ve been poisoning yourself all your life, Mr. Ossining, just as surely as if you’d taken a drop of arsenic in your coffee every morning—and that’s not to mention the poison of the coffee itself.

  “Go ahead,” she urged. “Finish it. It won’t kill you.”

  And so, for the sake of Eleanor Lightbody, for the sake of her husband, the check in his pocket, and the future of Per-Fo, Charlie Ossining tipped back his head and let the foul glutinous liquid fill his throat till it nearly choked him. And then came the meal itself: Protose goose stuffed with hijiki-hazelnut dressing, soya-gluten gravy, Nuttolene-and-apple salad, Cranberry Surprise, and vegetable-oyster fritters. Eleanor ate lightly. Charlie forced himself. When he was full up to the ears with it, whatever it was, when he felt that the next bite would be like an ice pick thrust into his solar plexus, the waitress materialized with the dessert menu. He protested; Eleanor insisted. The waitress brought them two servings of kumyss cake, with a generous garnish of kumyss ice cream.

  It was over the kumyss cake that Eleanor told him how unhappy she was. How depressed. How low and defeated. Dr. Linniman, the golden boy he’d seen her with on the street, was gone, off attending a conference in New York and not expected back for two weeks. And Will was a wreck. He’d missed Frank’s (Linniman’s, that is) Christmas-farewell party the night before, off on the carouse she’d mentioned earlier. How could she be happy with a man like that? A man who preferred cheap drink and vulgar companions to his own wife? A man who couldn’t resist a hamburger sandwich though it would kill him? She’d tried so hard, she had. And now she just felt hopeless.

  Charlie murmured the usual blandishments through the course of this pathetic recitation, clucking his tongue over the specter of the vulgar companions, commiserating over the horrors of meat. He was embarrassed. He didn’t know what to say. But he relished the moment, relished every quiver of the lip and dab at the eye.