by T. C. Boyle
No: the trouble was with Mrs. Hookstratten. She was a woman who wasn’t used to being denied. From the time she was a girl and sole heiress to the Van der Pluijm brickworks fortune to her later years as wife to Adolphus “Dolph” Hookstratten, the lion of Wall Street, and her subsequent viduity, she had gotten exactly what she wanted when she wanted. But Charlie couldn’t gratify her for eight interminable days—it took that long to make his arrangements and wait through to the following Sunday, when the plant would be vacant. Push, like Post Foods and the Kellogg company, was running a twenty-four-hour-a-day operation, and the only time Charlie could manage his imposture was on the Lord’s Day, when the ovens were quiescent and the packing line deserted.
Mrs. Hookstratten didn’t understand. He telephoned her two or three times daily, ostensibly from his mahogany-lined office, but actually from the drugstore, or from the Chinese laundry, where the sound of the steam press lent an air of authenticity to the ruse. Why couldn’t she call him? she wondered. Something wrong with the lines, he countered, outgoing calls only, and that was hell on business, as she could imagine, and he had the phone company working on it even as they spoke. But why hadn’t any of the people at the San heard of Per-Fo and its benefits, and why wasn’t it on the shelves at Offenbacher’s, back in Peterskill? She’d looked and looked. That was why he was working so hard, he told her, static crackling in his ear, that was why, this week especially, he was having difficulty in getting away. But, she insisted, he had to get away, and there was no arguing with the tone of her voice. He had to squire her around town, soothe her nerves, help her acclimate herself to all that was strange and new—and, most particularly of all, he had to show her this factory she’d underwritten to the tune of a small fortune. “A small fortune, Charles,” she’d repeated for emphasis.
She’d arrived on a Friday, and he managed to put her off till Monday, when he persuaded her to dine with him at a new vegetarian restaurant that had just opened downtown, rather than at the San (anything but the San). In the interim, he began growing side-whiskers and a mustache, took to wearing dark spectacles and found himself a room, no board, for a dollar and a half a week. The room was on the south side of the city, halfway to Goguac Lake, on an overgrown back street that looked as if it were still in the process of being carved from the wilderness. It was remote and quiet and he felt safe there, all things being equal. He sent Ernest O’Reilly to fetch his things from Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s, instructing him to use the back staircase and take a devious route both ways. It was mad, hopeless, and he was living on the edge of the precipice, he knew it, but there was no other way. This was the life of the man of vision, the man who dared all, the genius, the tycoon: risk nothing, gain nothing.
The Cafe Nonpareil (“Nutritious Food Without Slaughter”) was a replica in miniature of the San dining hall, run by a zealous former patient who attributed her cure to the Doctor’s recipes and a quasi-religious revelation in which an anthropomorphic lamb had appeared to her with a butcher’s diagram stenciled on its hindquarters. The menu ran to things like Beet Tops Salade and Jerusalem Artichokes, Broiled Tender. Mrs. Hookstratten kept up an unrelenting stream of complaint throughout the meal, wondering how in heaven’s name her own boy, whom she’d seen through the finest schools and staked in business, could treat her so shabbily, delivering her up into the hands of strangers and all but deserting her. “Don’t tell me you can’t find time for me, Charles, don’t tell me,” she huffed, picking at a glutinous ball of unhulled rice.
Charlie pleaded, charmed, lied. He used all his skills as an apprentice confidence man and professional dissembler to propitiate her, giving way on every point, issuing promises like paper money and weaving a fabric of lies so tight it could have sustained the political platform of a national party. On Friday he took her out again, and she nagged him inexorably—Where had he been? Couldn’t he at least have phoned? Sent a note? She’d been here nearly a week now and he hadn’t even seen her room yet. Didn’t he care how she was doing or where they’d put her? Did her comfort mean nothing to him? Her health? Her nerves? Her itching? And what about the factory? She was beginning to believe it was built on air.
This time Charlie was ready for her. Finally. “How does Sunday sound, Auntie? It’s the only day the workers are off, and believe me, you wouldn’t want to set foot in the place with all the noise and confusion of the full-scale operation, not with your nerves—”
The light froze in her spectacles. She clutched the fork like a weapon and the diamond at her throat glared in its uncompromising purity. “What time?” she asked, her lips clamped round the question.
“Seven.”
“Seven? But isn’t that awfully early? I’ve got my Swedish Manual Movements to get through, you know—and morning services.”
Charlie smiled with his whole face, his whole head, smiled till he could feel the skin at the back of his neck tugged up like a window shade, “Seven in the evening,” he said.
Night fell deep and early that Sunday, accompanied by a steady sizzling rain that drove the earthworms up onto the sidewalks and obscured all the hard lines and recognizable features of Foodtown, U.S.A. To Charlie’s mind, the weather was perfect. Once they got into the cab out front of the San, Mrs. Hookstratten couldn’t have known whether they were traveling north, south, east or west, or if they’d risen up into the sky like one of the Wrights’ airplanes. She was visibly excited. And though she didn’t pause even for breath, her tone was less combative and he could feel her softening. Should he ask for five thousand? he wondered. Ten? He didn’t want to shock her with the figure, but, then, he didn’t want to underplay his hand, either.
They were met at the door by Delahoussaye’s cousin, a bald-headed man in a cheap but respectable-looking suit and an ingratiating smile. Twenty dollars was a lot of money, but it bought Charlie an exhaustive tour of the facilities, from the flour-milling room to the roasting room to the packing line and the folding and stitching room, where the cartons were constructed (the cartons themselves had, of course, been conveniently mislocated, so as not to cause Mrs. Hookstratten any undue perplexity). It also bought—or, rather, rented—an oracle who could answer even the most recondite question with a thoroughness that would have exhausted a team of engineers. In fact, the cousin was so good, he had Charlie half convinced that this grand and immaculate plant was his after all, and Charlie resolved to tip him a dollar when they left.
The problem came when they reached the offices. Charlie had arranged for Per-Fo letterhead and a nameplate for the desk, and he’d been careful to sanitize the place of all signs of its true affiliation. Telephone, typewriter and blotter were stationed on the desk, along with a homely spill of pens, pencils and gum erasers. “And here, Auntie,” Charlie said, throwing open the door, “is my inner sanctum.”
Mrs. Hookstratten’s face fell. She bit her lip. Her eyes devoured the room and spat it out again.
“Auntie?” Charlie croaked, frantically scanning the place for the telltale trace of Push paraphernalia, the corpus delicti, the dead giveaway. “Is there something the matter? Don’t you like my office?”
The steely eyes, the unforgiving compress of the lips. Mrs. Hookstratten could be tough—tough enough to drive whole armies howling before her. “But this isn’t mahogany, Charles—even a child could see that.” She shot a wilting look at the cousin, as if he were somehow responsible for duping her boy in this most essential of equations.
“Cherrywood, ma’am,” the cousin said.
“Painted in a mahogany stain,” Charlie put in, waving his fingertips as if he’d burned them. “Isn’t that right, Garth?”
“That’s right, sir.”
But Mrs. Hookstratten wouldn’t be placated. “It’s criminal, is what it is,” she puffed, “using a cheap domestic wood that doesn’t have one-half—not one-half—the elegance and richness of mahogany, and here I’d been led to believe … but surely you were deceived, Charles? If it weren’t mahogany and you knew it, you would have been the
first to tell me, wouldn’t you?”
Charlie exchanged a glance with the cousin. “Yes, Auntie, of course, but—”
“Well, then,” and she bounced the flat of her hand off the desk as if to dismiss it, “it’s a terrible, awful shame. If you can’t distinguish your woods, as any child can, then I don’t wonder you’re having difficulties getting that breakfast food into Offenbacher’s.”
There was an awkward moment, during which Charlie put on a face of mock righteousness, expressing his outrage with the furnishers and their cheap deceptions, and then he humbled himself and said a prayer aloud, wishing only that his Auntie Hookstratten had been there from the beginning to see that he wasn’t taken. And then he vowed, with the squarest set of his jaw, to have those furnishers back in to replace the whole business—wainscoting and all—with genuine Malay mahogany. She sniffed her approval, and the moment passed. After bidding their farewells to the cousin, they gathered up their things and stepped out into the rain beneath the bright startling plane of the Per-Fo sign.
It was then, just as he was escaping unscathed, just as he was unfurling the umbrella and working up the courage to broach the subject of pressing needs and lagging investment, that a new and infinitely more dangerous threat arose. What would it have taken them to reach the cab without incident—twenty, thirty seconds? What if they’d lingered half a minute more to chat with Charlie’s presumptive foreman or spent another five minutes in the granary, absorbing the sweet farinaceous odor of the drying corn? But no, they had to leave just then, just on the crux of that nasty fatal moment.
“Charlie!” a voice bawled from the drenching dark, “Charlie Ossining!”
The rain fell, the puddles grew, Mrs. Hookstratten huddled beneath the umbrella and looked round her, startled. Charlie froze.
“It’s me, partner,” the voice cried, and then it began to solidify round a form staggering out of the gloom, a ragged form, oddly familiar, creature of the crushed hat and vomitous overcoat, poised to deliver the death-blow to all Charlie’s dwindling hopes. George Kellogg, in all his rancid glory, stood astride the walk before them.
“George,” Charlie said, and gave a curt nod of dismissal. He tightened his grip on Mrs. Hookstratten’s arm and tried to hurry her past the obstruction in the path, but George was too quick for him. Suddenly he was under the umbrella with them, his arm clapped round Charlie’s shoulder, a miasma of earthy and human stinks enveloping them like a shroud in their fetid little pocket of the night.
“Saw the sign,” George slurred. And then he stuck his face in Mrs. Hookstratten’s and breathed, “Nice evening, ma’am.”
“Look,” Charlie said, trying to fight his way out from under George’s arm while at the same time managing to keep a grip on the umbrella and Mrs. Hookstratten, “I haven’t got time for this foolishness now—”
“Who is this horrid man?” Mrs. Hookstratten demanded. The rain beat at the fabric of the umbrella; it drooled from the eaves of the factory in a maudlin hypnotic dirge.
“I said get away, George,” Charlie growled.
But George wouldn’t let go. “Get away? Foolishness? Horrid man?” he echoed, sober suddenly. “I’m insulted, Charlie. Deeply hurt. Is that any way to talk to your closest business associate, the man who’s lent his good and valuable name to all this, this”—he flapped his arm at the high-flung sign cut into the roof of the night behind them—“this enterprise?”
Mrs. Hookstratten hardened beside Charlie—he could feel her going rigid as the outrageousness of the situation grew on her. “What’s he saying?” she demanded. “Who is this man?”
Charlie never got a chance to answer. George let go then, his features hammered in light, and removed his hat with a mock bow. “George Kellogg, at your service, madam. You wouldn’t happen to have any spare change, would you?”
Chapter 6
A
Sword of
Fire
It was a night for sleeping, the wind gentle in the trees, rain counting time on the shingles, the house held in the soft fluttering grip of its tics and rustlings. But for John Harvey Kellogg, sleep would not come. He lay there in his bed, stiff as a corpse, scrubbed inside and out and enfolded in the crisp white sheets and freshly laundered blankets as if he’d been sealed in an envelope, and willed himself to relax. He forced his eyes shut, listened to the house settle around him. It was so still and the rain so soft, he could hear the occasional muted snore from Ella’s room across the hall, the faintest little slip of a sound that somehow filled him with sadness.
It was past two in the morning, and he needed sleep. Not in the way an ordinary man might, and not so much of it, either—but he needed it nonetheless. He routinely got by with four hours a night and had always regarded the whole notion of sleep with suspicion. It seemed wasteful, sinful, a squandering of precious resources, and he was always amazed to find that some people actually looked forward to it. But as a physician, he understood and appreciated the body’s need for respite from the trials of waking life, and he was willing to give in to it once a day, as part of his regimen. Just as he wouldn’t dream of going without his enemas or his Swedish Manual Movements or oat bran, so he wouldn’t go without sleep, either—it was a vital component of the physiologic life. And usually, through force of will, he was able to get to sleep in an efficient and economical way. After a cup of Sanitas Koko or herbal tea and some quiet reading in the Journal of the American Emunctory Society or the Hydrotherapy Newsletter, he would slip into his white cambric pajamas with the silver J.H.K. monogram over the heart and drop off to sleep the moment he extinguished the light.
But not tonight. There were too many things on his mind. Though it was a Sunday, generally the most tranquil day of the week for him, what with the time he spent in reflection at church and the musical half-hour he enjoyed at the piano with one or another of the children, he was far from tranquil at the moment. Among other things, he was wrought up over the following evening’s Question Box lecture. Not over the substance of it, that was never a problem: white sugar had been on his mind lately, a commodity as pernicious and enervating as bleached flour, and he would speak to that. No, the worry—the fear, actually—was over George. It had been two weeks since he’d made his criminal assault on the reception following the tapeworm lecture, and though he hadn’t attempted anything in the interval, the Doctor was sure he was planning some new hatefulness. And what better time for the odious little ingrate to strike than when he was at the podium? That was how George’s sinkhole of a mind worked.
They hadn’t caught him that night—and woe to George if they had. If they’d caught him—and the Doctor’s eyes snapped wide open at the thought—he didn’t know if he would have been able to restrain himself, didn’t know but that it would have been a repeat of that terrible night on the stairwell when George had first come to them. The boy had made a fool of him, set the curtains ablaze and scared the daylights out of a hundred patients whose nerves were in no condition to be tampered with. He’d very nearly ignited Mrs. Cornish’s taffeta gown in the process, and in fact had given her a nasty second-degree burn on the left breast when one of the missiles had lodged in her cleavage. How he’d managed to escape was a mystery. After stampeding the patients with his pyromaniacal display, he was somehow able to elude the Doctor, Frank Linniman and half a dozen attendants, no doubt slipping out one of the rear exits at the height of the confusion. He knew the building well—the Doctor had to give him credit for that.
But it was damnable. An outrage. This wasn’t merely an embarrassment, this wasn’t cadging change or shouting obscenities in the street; this was criminal assault, arson, attempted murder. Chief Farrington and his force of twelve deputies had been combing the streets for him ever since, poking through the tramp “jungle” under the South Jefferson Street bridge and roving as far afield as Kalamazoo, Olivet and Albion. George was going to prison this time, and no mercy was to be extended him, no mitigating circumstances taken into account. “Bill,” the Doctor h
ad told the constable, “I made a mistake with that boy, a grievous mistake, and I’m sorry to have to admit it. There’s a taint in his blood, a sign of the degeneracy that’s already overtaking the race, and I want him put away behind bars where he’s not liable to hurt anybody else. You catch him, Bill,” he added, and his voice was steady and cold, “and you do it quietly and quickly, and while you’re at it, you just give a moment’s reflection as to how much my support and goodwill have meant to you and the mayor over the years.”
Farrington was no fool. He’d gotten the message, all right, no doubt about that, but it would be two weeks tomorrow night and George was still unaccounted for. And that was no small thing. The boy had made his intentions perfectly clear—it was all-out war on John Harvey Kellogg, the man whose only crimes were compassion, generosity and hope, the man who’d given him the clothes on his back, the roof over his head, the food in his mouth, an education, a name, a place in the world that was his for the taking. It was beyond fathoming, beyond human understanding. But at this point, the Doctor’s patience was exhausted—all that mattered now was that the boy be stopped. He was a self-declared enemy, for whatever reason—or lack of reason—and the Doctor knew how to deal with enemies. George would never see the light of day again.
Yet what frightened him as he lay there rigid in his bed, what kept the sound of the rain from lulling him and the pillow from loosening the knotted muscles at the base of his skull, what kept his eyes stuck on the shifting, ghostly, half-visible pattern of the wallpaper, was the way the boy had delivered his message, the balls of newsprint flaring through the air like rockets, like the bright semaphore of doom. It paralyzed the Doctor even to think of it. Fire was his bête noire, the thing he feared above all else, the one thing he couldn’t control. And George knew it. How old had he been—thirteen? fourteen?—when the fire had swept the San? Whatever his age, the lesson of it hadn’t been lost on him. This was the way to strike out at the world, this was the way to humble his betters and twist the knife in his adoptive father’s heart, this secret spark, this flame in the darkness, this.