Inside, the place smelled incorrigibly of grease, stale beer, sweat, cheap cigars and the gut-clenching ambrosia of a good sixteen-ounce steak in the pan on a bed of onions. Bender was sitting alone at a table in back, a half-empty pitcher of beer at his elbow, the remains of a T-bone steak settling into the plate before him. “Bender,” Charlie barked, crossing the black-and-white tile floor in half a dozen strides, faces looking up in alarm from cutlets, chops, sausages, split chickens and wieners, and then, lowering his voice to a pained rumble, “where in hell were you?”
Bender rose from his seat with an answering roar, tumbling out of the chair like some great sea lion going into battle on the California beaches, crying “Charles, my boy,” over and over, as if he were glad to see him. “Have a seat, have a seat”—he was repeating himself, saying everything twice, and Charlie saw that beneath the bluff exterior, he was agitated. “Pull up a chair, pull up a chair, sit down, sit down, my boy, my fine—my very fine—boy and business partner.”
Charlie wouldn’t sit. Bender hadn’t answered him yet, and he was reluctant to surrender the high moral ground. “Where the hell were you?” he repeated. “We had an appointment, didn’t we? At eleven A.M.? Do you know I waited around that broken-down factory freezing my damn bones for over an hour and a half?”
“Sit down, Charlie, you’re making a scene,” Bender hissed, and he was in command again, his face serene, unperturbed, sunk back into the mask it customarily wore. They sat down together. Bender reached over to pour Charlie a glass of beer. “Have you eaten yet?” he asked. “Hungry?” And without waiting for a reply he turned portentously in his seat and hailed the waiter in the fruity rich commanding voice he used on the public like some old Shakespearean faker. When he turned back round he drew a cigar from his breast pocket, clipped the end and leaned forward to light it off the tallowy candle puddled in a dish in the center of the table.
“Well?” Charlie demanded. “I’m waiting for an explanation. Listen, Goodloe, if we’re going to be partners we’ve got to get a few things straight here, like—”
Bender cut him off. “Charlie, Charlie, Charlie,” he crooned, massive, paternal, dredging up all the authority of his years and his bulk and his legendary successes (I was a millionaire and busted flat two times over before I was thirty, he’d told Charlie any number of times). “I apologize, I do. To tell the truth, the whole thing slipped my mind.” And here he held up a hand to forestall any further protest. “The factory’s small potatoes, Charlie. Something’s come up. Something worth any twenty burned-out cereal factories.”
At that moment the waiter sidled up to them, obsequious, squirming, dog-whipped, a man reduced to his rump-kissing essence. “Yes, Mr. Bender?” he breathed, and everybody in town seemed to know Goodloe H. Bender, the once and future tycoon. “May I bring you anything else?”
Bender kept him waiting as he drew the cigar from the crevice of his bearded lips and exhaled a cloud of smoke redolent of cane, frangipani, the steaming rains of the tropics. “Yes, as a matter of fact. Bring this gentleman the Delmonico steak, rare, smothered in mushrooms and onions, and serve him up a plate of your best fried potatoes and some soup and half a roasted chicken, will you? Looks like he hasn’t eaten since he got off the train two days ago.”
The waiter vanished. Bender leaned back in his chair like a sultan, pleased with himself, the rich blue tobacco haze wreathing his head like a crown. Charlie felt his heart slip. How could he have doubted a man like this? Bender was born to inherit the earth, to eat off silver salvers and drink from golden goblets, there was no doubt about it. “So what is it? What’s come up?” Despite himself, he could barely contain his excitement.
The big smile, the self-congratulatory pause. “Nothing more than this: we’re going to get rich at a rate six times faster than we were yesterday, that’s all. Oh yeah—and we’re changing the name of the company.”
“Changing the name?” Charlie clutched involuntarily at the leather card-case in his breast pocket—how he loved those cards. “But why?”
“Just a minor change, Charlie, no big deal. We’re just going to add another name to the full appellation, that’s all.” Again the pause, lingering and dramatic. Worlds collided, ships went down in the time it took Bender to flick the ash from his cigar. “Are you ready? ‘Kellogg’s Per-Fo Company, Incorporated,’ that’s what we’re going to call it.”
“Kellogg’s? What are you talking about? We can’t just—”
But at that moment the front door swung open and in walked the man Bender had been waiting for. He was clean-shaven and he’d had a haircut and somebody had buried the vomit-stained overcoat and gotten him a new suit of clothes, but Charlie recognized him in an instant. He staggered a bit as he came up to the table, and Charlie, bewildered, took Bender’s lead and rose to greet him. “Ah, George,” Bender purred as he took the man’s hand in his fleshy embrace, “good of you to come. Capital.” And, turning to Charlie: “I’d like you to meet my associate, Mr. Charles P. Ossining, Esquire.”
The muddy eyes, the yellowed stumps of the teeth, and not the vaguest glimmer of recognition.
“And Charlie, dear old, good old, fine old Charlie,” Bender crowed, flush with geniality, an arm round each of them, “Charlie, I’d like you to meet George Kellogg.”
Chapter 10
A
Thankful
Bird
Two weeks before Thanksgiving, that holiday of universal glut, Will detected a subtle change in the atmosphere of the dining hall. It was during the morning meal—or, rather, during the period he occupied at table watching Mrs. Tindermarsh gobble her chopped-beet-and-split-rail salad while Hart-Jones roared like an ass over his soft-boiled eggs and Miss Muntz took neat little bites of her leg of Protose, or whatever it was. He wasn’t eating, himself. This was the second of his three days on the laxative diet, and he swallowed the rubbery psyllium seeds and cardboardlike hijiki as if he were taking so many pills; for beverage, he enjoyed a glass of water. At any rate, the ambience of the place seemed different somehow, almost festive, the buzz of conversation more animated, the titters and bursts of laughter more convivial and frequent. Something was afoot.
A bit sore from his prebreakfast bout with Nurse Bloethal and her irrigating machine, Will gave a stiff nod of welcome to his tablemates as he eased himself down and unfolded the napkin in his lap. There was no need to bother with the menu—he’d barely gotten the napkin settled when one of the dietary girls appeared with his plate of shriveled dark seaweed and bitter seeds, which had all the appeal of a bowl of wood shavings and lint. Professor Stepanovich gave him a shy look of commiseration, then went back to digging at his corn flakes; the others, even Homer Praetz, a man not given to levity, wore tight little smiles, as if they could barely contain themselves. “What is it?” Will demanded, and despite himself he could feel a silly grin tugging at the corners of his mouth. “Am I missing something?”
Miss Muntz, his lovely greenish friend who’d been swaddled beside him on the veranda for the past three afternoons now, let a little calliope toot of a laugh escape her. Homer Praetz put a hand to his mouth and harmonized in a reedy falsetto. “Haven’t you noticed—?” she began, and broke down in a trill of schoolgirlish giggles.
“What she means, Mr. Lightbody,” Mrs. Tindermarsh added, and she was in on it, too, “is that the hall seems a bit rustic today, wouldn’t you say?”
“The barnyard invades the healing pen!” Hart-Jones crowed, waving a spoon slick with egg yolk and showing his blunt yellow horse’s teeth.
Put on his mark, Will scanned the room. He saw the usual horde of feeding faces, the celebrated, the rich, the dyspeptic and nervous. Pillars rose to the ceiling; waitresses flowed though the aisles in an unrippled stream. He saw Eleanor’s table and noticed, with a little stab of alarm, that she wasn’t there—nor was Linniman. Maybe she’d eaten earlier—or overslept. Or maybe Dr. Kellogg had her on an early-morning enema-and-exercise regimen … but where was Linniman, the grin
ning one, that paragon of health and mesmerizer of married women, that breakfast eater? Will had learned that he was a bachelor, and the knowledge depressed him still further—no trim physiologic wife awaited the lusty doctor at home, no patter of running feet answered the rattle of his key in the door. All the more reason he should give free rein to his unbridled bacheloric libido and hunger after other men’s wives.
But no, Will was probably just imagining things. So what if Linniman was cordial—exceptionally cordial—to his wife? That was his job, wasn’t it? And besides, Will felt secure in Eleanor—she might poison him, but she’d never forsake him, never even think about it, never. Would she? They’d made up their differences—it was nothing, really, they agreed; it was just that they were both ill and under a good deal of strain, what with the change of scene and regimen and the long enervating journey. She’d come to his room the previous evening, sweet in a simple white shirtwaist and black skirt, to see how he was. She wound up staying for over an hour, sitting at his bedside and reading to him from Helen Keller’s The Story of My Life, and when she got up to leave she bent over him, took his face in her hands and gave him a prolonged and very promising kiss.
“Oh, Mr. Lightbody, really,” Miss Muntz laughed from the other end of the table, “don’t tell me you haven’t noticed it yet?” And then she was up out of her seat and sweeping round the table with a rustle of skirts to hover over him and point out this marvel, this wonder, this new cynosure of the dining hall.
Will saw it then, caught up in the aura of her perfume and tingling with the awareness of her proximity, and he couldn’t help himself: he burst out with a laugh. How could he have missed it? There it was, the talk of the room, right there in front of his eyes, thrumming to itself in a wood-slat cage set up on a table in the corner. A turkey. A fat, wattled, feathery, preening bird staring out at the diners from the thicket of its glittery dull eyes. Above it, another of the Doctor’s didactic banners:
A THANKFUL BIRD
And why was it thankful? Because two weeks hence the full complement of nearly a thousand San guests would be dining on Nuttolene steaks, thank you, with mock giblets and gluten-soya gravy to go with their turnips, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. Will had to hand it to Kellogg: he never missed a trick.
“Isn’t it hilarious?” Miss Muntz breathed in his ear, her face radiant in its greenish glow.
It was as if a weight had been lifted from Will’s shoulders: it was hilarious, yes, it was. And more, much more. Here was this noble bird, this avatar of winged flight and oven-browned skin, this provider of drumstick and wing, white meat and dark, their fellow creature who had every right to his life, liberty and pursuit of wattled happiness, here it was strutting about its pen and eating the same nuts and grains they were, spared forever the butcher’s block and the fatal drop of the cleaver. This was what it was all about, the vegetarian ethos, a new kind of spirituality and moral bonding, and Will saw it pecking there before him, felt it deep in the pit of his stomach. At least he believed he felt it. Of course—and even in his moment of rapture the thought occurred to him—it might only have been a psyllium seed, expanding in its secret nook.
After breakfast, Nurse Graves escorted Will to the Men’s Gymnasium for a session of Swedish Manual Movements and laughing exercises, followed by Vibrotherapy and a half-hour immersion in the sinusoidal bath. The Swedish Manual Movements, as developed a hundred years earlier by Ling, of Sweden, after reading an ancient Chinese text in French translation, consisted primarily of jumping and clapping in various contorted and unnatural attitudes, so far as Will could see. A hundred men of all ages and conditions took part en masse, while the chief therapist—a Swede with a prominent forehead and huge lumpish bread-loaf muscles—exhorted them. For the laughing exercises, designed not only to improve the patient’s mood but to allow him to breathe more deeply and naturally, the same group reconvened in the same gymnasium to watch a pair of mimes in blackface take pratfalls while the stocky tenor, Tiepolo Cappucini, led them all in a tortured session of operatic laughter. Purged, half-starved and disoriented, his limbs numb from the Swedish movements and his gut leaden with seaweed, Will didn’t find it all that funny. But he pranced and jogged up and down and shook his lean buttocks along with his fellow sufferers, with the old men in suspenders, the obese and the emaciated, the outwardly healthy and the visibly decrepit, and before he knew it he was laughing uncontrollably, desperately, without reason or cause, laughing like a lunatic rattling the bars of his cage.
Vibrotherapy came almost as a relief. This, the attendant explained to Will and a splinter group of half a dozen men similarly exhausted by the effort of laughing, was a passive exercise. The idea was to sit on a chair or stool or lie on a table fitted out with an electrical motor that caused the entire apparatus to quake, shiver and lurch like a buggy with broken springs hurtling down a washboard road. Will heard a brief lecture on each of the three forms of vibration—percutient, lateral and centrifugal—and learned how Vigoroux, Granville, Schiff and Boudet had found them effective in either increasing or diminishing nervous sensibility, according to the case at hand, after which he was strapped into a chair bolted to an iron plate and shaken like a Christmas eggnog for the next three-quarters of an hour. And that wouldn’t have been so bad, really, but for the man in the chair bolted directly behind his, a grunter and tooth grinder of the first magnitude who kept butting the back of his head against the headrest of Will’s chair. Or the man to his left, who blathered incessantly in a high clonic squeal about the vicissitudes of the stock market. Once that was over, Will was introduced to the special vibrators for the hands, arms and feet, as well as the vibrating stool, the vibrating table and the vibrating cot. By the time he left the Vibrotherapy Department, the walls, curtains and lamps had begun to vibrate, too, and it took him a good five minutes of pacing up and down the corridor with Nurse Graves before the world stopped trembling beneath his feet.
His final stop that morning, prior to being bundled up like a newborn infant and deposited by Nurse Graves on the frozen flagstones of the veranda, was the Electrical Department. Here, patients were subjected to varying degrees of electrical shock as a way of either stimulating or depressing groups of nerves and muscles—each according to his symptoms and needs, of course. Will was scheduled for the hot glove, followed by half an hour in the sinusoidal bath. He wasn’t looking forward to either. For one thing, he was feeling cranky and tired, having been subjected to enough abuse for one day. For another, he didn’t like the sound of the first treatment—the hot glove—and he’d always had an aversion to public baths and swimming pools, all that exposed flesh; apelike men with hairy shoulders and fur growing in clumps on their thighs, calves, between their toes; women like squashed melons in their lumpy bathing costumes. During their courtship and the first few years of their marriage, Will and Eleanor had bathed in the Hudson on those blistering, eternally blue days of July and August, but they’d always managed to find a spot to themselves—on the Brinckerhoff estate or his father’s place or some such private enclave. At school, of course, there had been no escaping the public bath, and Will had been one among a throng of naked boys during his eight years at the Crowley Preparatory School for Boys in New Milford, Connecticut. But he hadn’t liked it. And he wasn’t in school anymore. And he resented having to remove his clothing in the presence of strangers—or for that matter, having to endure the sight of strangers removing their clothing in his presence, or appearing in public in any state of dress short of what would be considered good and proper attire for an evening at Sherry’s or Delmonico’s.
But the Electrical Department surprised him. There was no sign of the mob of bearded, hirsute characters in loincloths of which he’d had one brief horrifying glance when Ralph had taken him on a tour of the place and pushed open the doors to the men’s swimming pool. Nor were there any strangers, male or female, lounging about in deshabille. The attendant, dressed in a suit, shirt, collar and tie like anyone else, took him into a p
rivate booth, bade him remove his shirt and directed him to lie prone on a padded table beneath a crisp white sheet. The hot glove, which was supposed to excite the muscles of his lower back (and, when he turned over, his much-abused abdomen), actually felt good. The shocks it administered were minimal, and the warmth was soothing. Afterward, he was instructed to dress himself but for his jacket, and roll up his sleeves and trousers so that he could immerse his forearms and lower legs in the elevated buckets of water that comprised the sinusoidal bath.
He complied passively. And the whole thing would have been at least tolerable if it hadn’t been for the presence of a second patient, not exactly a stranger, but a man to whom Will had said so little he might just as well have been: Homer Praetz. They were seated side by side, Will and the industrial giant, in identical chairs that had been tricked out with four white galvanized buckets and the electrical wires that provided the healing charge. Homer Praetz had evidently just come from the pool or one of the more vulgar baths, as his hair was wet and he was wearing an enormous blue cotton bathrobe. “Lightbody, isn’t it?” he’d cried, taking Will’s hand in a moist and flabby grip. “Getting a bit of the old sinusoidal, eh?” And then he’d lowered his voice: “Can’t say that I like this part of it, myself. Feels like ants crawling up and down my legs. And my privates, that’s what kills me. Hurts a bit, too—nothing much, but enough to make you wince from time to time.”
He heaved a sigh and threw off his robe to reveal a tumultuous puckered belly hung with twisted black hairs, and then he stalked round the room in his loincloth two or three times as if to show it off properly before easing himself into the chair beside Will. Casually, as if he were dipping a shirt in a washtub, he lifted first one blocky pale dead-looking foot into its receptacle, and then the other. “Anything for a cure, eh?” he whispered, giving Will a wink.
The Road to Wellville Page 17