The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Yes, Charlie had had all the advantages, but as so often happens under such circumstances, he rejected them. Not outright, of course, but in the long run, in a growing repudiation of the expectations society had for him and a corresponding fascination with the life of those who live outside those expectations, who live by their wits, instincts, poise and balance. It was while he was at St. Basil’s that this new way of looking at things first dawned on him. He was fifteen at the time, expert with his fists, a good runner, an indifferent athlete, a mediocre scholar. Intellectual pursuits held no interest for him. The quizzes, the tests, the essays, the committing of facts to memory and words to paper were torture to him, forced labor, the work of the underclass and the imprisoned—it wasn’t even paid work, that’s what got him. Mrs. Hookstratten had to pay them—Dr. Van Osburgh and the rest—to torment him with names and dates and numbers, with plane geometry and ancient history. Charlie wanted out. He dreamed of running off and setting up on his own; of being a power in business, any business; of acquiring the tangible accoutrements—the house, the carriage, the billiard table—that would tell the world he was no mere gatekeeper’s son. And what did St. Basil’s Academy have to do with any of that?

  One night, thumbing through an issue of Scribner’s because he couldn’t stand the thought of memorizing the names and dates of all the regents of England from Edward of Wessex and Ethelred II to Victoria, he came across an advertisement that caught his eye:

  BE BRILLIANT AND EMINENT! Brainworkers. Everybody. The new physiological discovery—MEMORY RESTORATIVE TABLETS quickly and permanently increase the memory two to tenfold and greatly augment intellectual power; difficult studies, etc., easily mastered; truly marvelous, highly endorsed. Price, $1.00 post-paid. Send for circular. MEMORY TABLET CO., 114 Fifth Ave., New York.

  Here was an easy out. A miracle. Suddenly he saw his way to becoming the top scholar in the place, spoon-feeding Mrs. Hookstratten and graduating to his real life in business or finance or something—and all without a lick of effort. He snuck a look over his shoulder to see if his roommate, Wapner, was watching, tore the page from the magazine, folded it carefully and secreted it in his pocket.

  Charlie invested a dollar and sent for the tablets. He took one the day they arrived, but it didn’t seem to help much with his Latin paradigms, on which he received a grade of F. The following day he took two, thinking the increased dosage would fix the lines of Portia’s speech on the quality of mercy indelibly in his head, but when he got up to recite in class, all he could remember was the phrase “twice blessed.” It stuck there, like a broken tooth in a gearbox, until the class dissolved in laughter and the master told him to sit down. He tried three pills, four, five, took them on an empty stomach, after meals, before bed, first thing in the morning. He went through six dollars and three hundred tablets before he understood that he’d been taken. The pills were useless, worthless, no more effective than chewing bark from the trees or grass from the playing field.

  Here he was, sharpest of the sharp, looking for an easy way around the demands of St. Basil’s, looking for a way to circumvent the system, and he’d wound up throwing away his spending money for the term on a sham, a hoax, a confidence game even the dullest and weakest of the boys would never have fallen for. He’d been sucked in because he was vulnerable, because he had a need, a weakness, the gull’s hope. It was a lesson. A lesson more valuable than anything Mr. Petrussi or Dr. Van Osburgh ever taught him. And who was the man who’d dreamed up the idea of the memory tablets to begin with, who’d placed the ad and watched the money pour in from a legion of dupes and half-wits that stretched from coast to coast? Who was he? There was real genius. There was the man they should be studying.

  When Charlie left school in his junior year, Mrs. Hookstratten was disappointed. He didn’t return home, didn’t write or send word or explanation. He just packed his bag one night, caught a ride into Peterskill with the milk wagon and began the study of billiards in earnest. After a week he showed up hungry at the gatehouse. His father lamented in a red-eyed, sloppy-mouthed way; his mother groaned about her pains and conniptions; Mrs. Hookstratten pleaded with him. But to no avail. By the time he was seventeen he was living on his own, in a rented room over a dry-goods store in Tarrytown, earning an uncertain living at cards, dice and pool. He drank, but never in the way of his father, and he found women to comfort and amuse him but he made no attachments. It wasn’t until he’d matured a bit and began to grow impatient with his two-bit hustles, with the taverns and the fistfights and the women who thought that “youse” was the plural form of the pronoun, that he came back to the Hookstratten fold. And then it was only because he’d met Bender, and because he had a goal and a vision—because he had Per-Fo.

  A week after the dismal failure of their efforts in the Bookbinder basement, Bender sent Ernest O’Reilly to Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s to fetch Charlie to the Post Tavern Hotel. Charlie went in the service entrance and up the back stairs, as he customarily did now to avoid the doorman and bell captain (though he hadn’t forgotten he owed them a little debt, which he intended to pay back, with interest, someday). Bender was lordly in a red silk dressing gown and his nose was flushed from any number of medicinal doses of Otard Dupuy. Single-minded and devoted to his goal, Charlie had long since ceased to concern himself over the disparity between his and his partner’s living styles. Bender was Bender, and that was all there was to it. There would be plenty of luxury to spare when Per-Fo flew.

  “Charlie, Charlie, my boy, my boy,” Bender cried, doubling up his words and crossing the room to crush Charlie in his volcanic tycoon’s embrace. He fell back, redolent of cognac, and indicated a chair with a princely sweep of his arm. “Sit down,” he said, “there’s something I want to discuss with you.”

  Charlie sat. Did he want a cognac? Sure. Cigar? No thanks.

  Charlie revolved the snifter in his hands. “Well, okay,” he said, and he’d been cooling his heels at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s for seven days now, reading dime novels and trying not to think about what his thrifty landlady might be stewing up in the big iron pot on the stove, going quietly crazy, “so what is it?”

  Bender pulled his big feet up under the chair opposite and sank into its plush depths. “It’s just this, Charlie,” he said, scratching at the side of his nose and bringing his fractured gray eyes to rest on Charlie’s. “It’s obvious that we’re encountering a bit of a problem with the formula for Per-Fo—I mean, I appreciate everybody’s effort, I’m not saying that, but I just don’t think we’re going to be able to get it right out there in that old lady’s basement.”

  Charlie started to protest, but Bender held up his hand.

  “Look, Charlie, I know what you’re going to say, we’ve laid out a considerable expense here, what with the dent corn, Bart’s fee, the oven—but it’s chicken feed, really, when you think of the millions we’ll be taking in by this time next year. And we can reuse the oven and some of the tubs and whatnot, that’s not a problem, and the whole thing, despite appearances to the contrary, was not a wasted effort.” He paused, sniffed at his brandy. “At least we learned something.”

  “What? What did we learn?” Charlie was irritated. He’d broken his back to make that hog slop, and he’d put his heart into it, too. Sure, conditions weren’t what he wanted, but it had been Bender who’d convinced him to go along with it in the first place—and at least he’d had the feeling that they were accomplishing something. After eight weeks of frustration, at least they were moving forward, at least they were doing something … and now Bender was telling him it was a waste of time, effort and money, but that they’d learned something. Learned something. Big deal.

  “We learned I was wrong, Charlie. You were right. You were against that basement from the beginning. I thought we’d at least get the ball rolling there, settle on a formula and fill up our sample boxes—that’s all we need, just those thousand boxes and it’s off to the races. But it didn’t work. We were too ambitious. We jumped in before we h
ad factory space, equipment, proper ovens and retorts and mixing tubs. Peach baskets, for Christ’s sake. No wonder it didn’t turn out.” He paused to let a little taste of brandy trickle down his throat. “No, Charlie, I was wrong.”

  Charlie wanted to remonstrate, wanted to go back to Bookbinder’s and give it another try, but he’d never heard Bender admit that he was wrong before, even after Kellogg had summarily booted them off the Sanitarium grounds, and he held his peace to see what was coming.

  “I guess you’re wondering what the next step is, aren’t you?” Bender said in a mellow, ruminative voice, a voice of assurance and quiet confidence, the voice of a man with an ace in the hole. Bender always had an ace in the hole. He sat back and stretched, the smoke from his cigar wafting lazily round him. Outside, beyond the elegant curtains and double-hung windows, it was another gray and relentless Michigan day. “Well, I’ll tell you. I’ve got a plan, Charlie, and I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before … it would have saved us—you—a whole lot of expense and confusion. Anyway, everything’s on track again, don’t you worry.”

  There was a pause. Why didn’t he get to the point?

  “Listen, to get to the point, I want you, George and this fellow Hayes down at the loading dock of the Grand Trunk Railroad—you know it, on the east end of town?—at twelve midnight tonight.”

  “Midnight?”

  Bender nodded. “Fourteen carloads of Will K.’s finest, crispest, genuine and guaranteed toasted corn flakes are going out of there first thing in the morning—and I’ve already fixed it with a man I know down at the train yard, so don’t worry about a thing—”

  “Don’t worry? What are we going to do, steal them?”

  Bender simply smiled. A rich paternal smile, the sort of smile a teacher might bestow on his prize student when the grades are handed out.

  Charlie was incredulous. “You can’t be serious?” he cried. What in Christ’s name were they going to do with fourteen carloads of Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes? Fourteen carloads. Where would they hide them? How would they transport them? They’d need a hundred men, wagons, horses, lights, uniformed cops to direct traffic, for shitsake…. But as he watched Bender’s face, the sly thick-lipped grin, the signal flare of a nose, the cracked gray eyes narrowing in amusement, he began to understand: they didn’t need fourteen carloads of corn flakes, no, not at all … all they needed was one thousand boxes.

  Chapter 7

  Organized Rest

  Without

  Ennui

  It was a brisk morning in early January, winds gusting at twenty-five miles an hour, the thermometer sluggish at minus eight degrees Fahrenheit, a black mass of cloud spreading across the sky like a stain in water. The hands of the big walnut clock in the parlor of the Res showed a quarter to seven, and the Doctor, already arrayed in his white worsted suit, sat in his armchair, white-shod feet neatly crossed on the ottoman before him, going over his schedule for the day and finishing up his remarks on the lazy colon for the forthcoming issue of Good Health, of which he was editor-in-chief. He’d been working since five, having begun the day half an hour prior to that with his morning enema, a cold bath and twenty minutes of deep knee bends and jumping jacks in his private gymnasium. Some of the older children were up and at their chores by now, and one of them—he’d been so absorbed in the tragedy of the lethargic colon he hadn’t looked up to see which—had brought him his breakfast. This morning it was bran cakes saturated in pure golden butter from his buffed and vacuumed cows and honey from the San’s hives, pea patties with fruit compote, one apple, one orange, one banana and a steaming hot mug of Sanitas Koko.

  He ate with good appetite, as he always did, even when aggravated—and he’d been plenty aggravated lately, what with one thing and another, the circle ever tightening, the whole world waiting for him to stick his head in the noose so they could string him up and rifle his pockets. There was the business with George, a constant source of irritation—and that young scamp he was in league with, Charlie some-thing-or-other, damnable, perfidious man. Liquor on the San’s premises. It was outrageous. Well, he’d called Chief Farrington about that one, and if Mr. Charlie ever had the temerity to show his face around the San again, he would be sorry, good and sorry—John Harvey Kellogg and the statutes of Calhoun County and the great state of Michigan would see to that. But just thinking about that human garbage made his stomach broil over his bran cakes and honey. Yes. And then there was the Staff at the San—they wanted a raise. A raise! As if it wasn’t enough that they were medical missionaries, dietary messiahs, young men and women privileged to work at the very apex of their profession and acquire—gratis, and more power to them—the tools they would need to take that mission out into the world. And they wanted money on top of it—mere money! He shook his head over the irony of it, paging through his itinerary to see when he was scheduled to meet with them—ah, there: two o’clock—and his eyes happened to fall across his surgical schedule at the same time. Eight patients scheduled. All for repair of balky sphincters, or, as he would determine once he got in there, removal of what he’d already begun to think of as the “Kellogg’s Kink” in the intestine. But what was this?

  Lightbody, William F.

  A line had been drawn through the name. Were they canceling on him this morning? The Doctor hadn’t been apprised. He lifted his eyebrows in annoyance. The man was a special case—as recalcitrant and backsliding a patient as he’d ever seen—and one of the very sickest. Most definitely. But it was probably just a quirk in the scheduling—he couldn’t operate on them all at once, after all. He’d get to him tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. It didn’t really matter. Still, he made a mental note to consult Dab about it.

  As he munched the apple and went back to his text, reworking a phrase here and there—changing “putrefying” to “putrid, foul and moribund”—he couldn’t quite shrug off the button of irritation he’d pushed in his brain. George. Charlie whoever. The old goat of a confidence man with the dyed beard who’d put them up to it. McMickens, the orderly who’d been stirring up the staff with nonsense about wages and unionizing. Lightbody. The lectures. The papers. The petty details of running the San on a day-to-day basis—good God, they couldn’t even see to the chimpanzee without him. Sometimes it all seemed to weigh him down, harass him till he felt his nerves had been rubbed as raw as a coffee fiend’s.

  Revolving the apple in his hand and sinking his strong white teeth into its perfect flesh, he couldn’t help wistfully reflecting on his younger days at Bellevue—life had been so much less complicated then, and just as stimulating, maybe more so. Those were the days. No Georges, no sour employees or rampant chimps. No. It was just the medical texts then, just the cadavers, the lectures, the grateful healing patients. He’d lived frugally, too, and it hadn’t hurt him. Not one iota. Over the course of two years he’d gained nearly seventeen pounds on a diet of oatmeal, apples, Graham bread and pure spring water—and at a cost of sixteen cents a day. Yes, he thought, finishing the apple with a sigh, those were the days. Still, there was no sense in reliving your yesterdays when there was so much to be done today. He’d been a private then in the great campaign to save the alimentary canal, to improve the race and spare the eternal herds from slaughter, and he was a general now—four stars’ worth and aiming for five—and there was no one to stop him but himself. John Harvey Kellogg rose from the chair, stretched mightily, and called to one of the children to fetch his bicycle from the carriage house.

  Dab arrived promptly at seven, accompanied by the new fellow, A. F. Bloese, a saturnine rigid little man with a boyish face (or a boy with a mannish face) who happened to be a master stenographer, typewriter and codifier of the lithe symbology of shorthand. A real find. Yes, sir. Dab provided contrast, bloated and puffing, wrapped like an Egyptian mummy in his scarves, overcoats, mittens, sweaters and cummerbunds. He was a shambles of a man, an embarrassment. The Doctor stood there in the vestibule of the Res, regarding him with a cold eye: the m
an had to be forced into the physiologic regime. For his own sake, and the sake of appearance, too. Here was the Doctor, avatar of the strenuous life, and he was shadowed everywhere he went by this sweating fleshpot, this, this—but enough of that. Time was wasting. “Morning, Poult,” the Doctor said as he pulled on a pair of white gloves and slung the white scarf jauntily round his neck—no arctic claptrap and dragging coattails and the rest of it for him. Not unless the temperature dropped another twenty degrees and the wall of ice that had gouged out Lake Michigan came back again.

  “Morning, Chief,” Dab returned, already beginning to sweat.

  “Bloese.” The Doctor acknowledged the understudy with a curt nod.

  “Sir,” Bloese said. His carriage, the Doctor noted with satisfaction, was impeccable. His teeth, too. Bone structure. Even his hair, parted in the middle and neatly clipped round the ears.

  “All right, men!” the Doctor cried, and they were out the door and into the blast of the electrifying wind. “To work, hey?” One of the children—little Calvin Smoke, wasn’t it, the boy who’d been found living among the Nez Percé in a filthy tepee and subsisting on a diet of squirrel jerky and black-footed ferret?—stood patiently in the driveway, holding the bike. Yes, it was Calvin—of course it was. And what was wrong with his brain these days? He couldn’t even recognize his own children now? It was frightening, deeply disturbing, but he brushed it off. “Thank you, son,” the Doctor crooned, mounting the bicycle and hurtling off down the ice-crusted drive, Dab and Bloese quickstepping behind him.