The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  “Oh,” she gasped, dropping her eyes, and it was as if he’d interrupted her at some private moment, “hello.” She seemed confused, stripped for an instant of that self-possession that stirred and alienated him at the same time.

  He felt awkward suddenly—was she going to snub him?—and he removed his hand from hers and hid it behind his back. “I was just here to see Mrs. Hookstratten—Auntie Amelia—and I thought I’d say hello….”

  “Oh, yes, of course—your luncheon.”

  He was surprised. “You know of it?”

  Her eyes were cold, translucent, glass. “Of course—and I did so want to come, but I’m afraid I have a prior engagement. Virginia and I are going bird-watching…. Have you met Virginia?”

  Eleanor’s companion—she looked to be about forty, with sallow skin, a disproportionate bosom and a pair of hips that cut like scythes at the seams of her dress—held out her hand. Charlie took it.

  “Virginia Cranehill,” Eleanor said, “Charlie Ossining.”

  “The Per-Fo man,” Virginia pronounced with a smirk, and Eleanor gave her a sharp look. “A pleasure.”

  “Likewise,” Charlie said, and he wondered what was going on between them—and how did this woman know about him? Would Eleanor have told her? Mrs. Hookstratten? And what would they have said—judging from that smirk it wouldn’t have been all that flattering. After all these months, Eleanor Lightbody was still making a joke of him. He felt a surge of resentment—and who was she to feel so superior? What had she ever accomplished—marrying a rich man? He would show her. He would show them all.

  “Amelia tells me your new factory is really quite the thing,” Eleanor said, the old mockery dancing in her eyes, “very modern and efficient. You must be pleased to have come so far so quickly.”

  There was no mistaking her tone and it chilled him suddenly. How much did she know? How much did any of them know? The uneasy feeling he’d had all morning tightened its grip on him. Something was wrong here, terribly wrong.

  He glanced round him at the gilded trappings of the place, the men and women in their expensive clothes and polished accents, and suddenly he was angry. She was one of them and he was nothing to her, nothing more than a diversion, a toy. There was no romance in that Christmas dinner, no intimacy at all. She was rich and bored and her husband was incapacitated and half the society of the San had gone home for the holidays and so she’d fastened on him the way she might have picked up a lapdog or a penny dreadful. He was nothing, nothing at all.

  “You’re looking thin,” he observed, throwing it back at her. “The dietary doesn’t agree with you?”

  No trace of amusement in those arctic eyes. He shot a glance at the entrance of the Palm Garden—the crowd was thinning. “I’ve been fasting,” she said finally. “It’s the latest cure. But we’ll be eating today, won’t we, Virginia?”

  Virginia patted the basket and emitted a tight little nasal laugh.

  Charlie didn’t so much as glance at her. He held Eleanor with his gaze. “And your skin,” he said. “Have you been out in the sun?”

  He seemed to have struck a chord. Eleanor put a hand to her throat, an instinctive gesture, and he saw that the hand contrasted sharply with the high white collar of the dress. She was dark, dark as a gypsy. “Yes, of course,” she said, and a crease of irritation had appeared between her eyes. “The sun’s rays are purely natural and health-giving and we should drink them up whenever we can—and wear white clothing, as Dr. Kellogg does, to allow those health-giving rays to penetrate to the innermost flesh, the flesh that’s never seen the light of day. It’s a basic scientific truth, Mr. Ossining”—and now they were on a formal footing again, strangers—“one that I think even you should be aware of.”

  He wanted to say something cutting, something about washerwomen and grape pressers and how much they enjoyed the sun, too, but he didn’t have the opportunity. At that moment, careening, brash and loud, Eleanor’s companion of that rainy April afternoon descended on them—he of the overlarge head and nagging, fitful voice. “Eleanor, Virginia,” the man rasped, taking them each by the hand in turn and completely ignoring Charlie, “are you ready?”

  They were. They gathered themselves, tiny little steps in place, a twitch of the shoulders, a smoothing of the dress, a touch to the hat, women on the verge of movement. “You look charming,” the big-headed man growled, turning his back to Charlie and reaching out an arm to shepherd them along, “perfectly charming. Both of you.”

  Charlie felt something go off inside of him. He wouldn’t be treated this way, he wouldn’t be ignored. He was President-in-Chief of the Per-Fo Company, whether it had flown or not, and he was on the brink of great things. “Nice to see you again, Eleanor,” he said, putting all the venom he could into it.

  The little group halted, arrested, and turned back to him, the big-headed man—Badger, wasn’t that his name?—looking as if he’d just seen a clod of earth rise up before his eyes, shape itself into human form and speak. Virginia Cranehill ducked her chin defensively. Eleanor’s jaw went hard. She looked round the room once, and then, without warning, she leaned into Charlie, took his elbow in a raptor’s grip and swung him away from the others. “I know all about the thousand dollars,” she hissed, and her breath was hot in his face. “You took advantage of my husband at his weakest, a poor sick man struggling for his very life—”

  “It was a legitimate investment.”

  “In what?” Their faces were so close they might have been embracing. A man in Sanitarium white, arms folded across his chest, was quietly watching them from across the room. “An imaginary company? A sham, a fraud, an illusion? The Charles P. Ossining Pension Fund? Where’s that ‘investment’ now, huh?” She was trembling. Her eyes dug at him. She tightened her grip on his arm and then flung it away from her as if it were something she’d picked up in the street. “There are laws, you know, for people like you.”

  He wanted to explain, wanted to reason with her, lie, win her over—against all odds he wanted her to like him, admire him, he did—but it was too late, he could see that, and it frightened him. If she saw through him so clearly, what of the others, what of Mrs. Hookstratten?

  There was a touch at his arm, and his benefactress was there, standing at attention, her feet pressed neatly together. “Charles,” she said, “Charles, dear,” and her voice seemed to quaver as she exchanged a look with Eleanor, “come on in—everyone’s waiting.”

  He turned to go, but Eleanor wasn’t through, not quite yet. “And Charlie,” she called, tucking her arm into Badger’s and giving him a sour look over her shoulder, “if I don’t see you again, enjoy your lunch.”

  There were twenty guests in all, a glittering collection of brushed whiskers, brilliantined hair, hats, silks, diamond earrings and gold watch fobs, and they were already seated, setting up a muted buzz of polite conversation and having a go at the celery, crackerbread and bran cakes on the table before them. As Mrs. Hookstratten led Charlie into the room, they looked up as one from their butter knives and celery sticks, a feast of sharp penetrating eyes. Charlie shot a quick glance up and down the table, muttered an apology, and sank into the chair on Mrs. Hookstratten’s right, the place of honor. A pair of Sanitarium girls in blue caps and starched skirts moved up and down the length of the table, pouring fruit juices and water from the Sanitarium springs. There were ferns everywhere, creepers, flowers, fronds, the jungle itself come to life in Michigan. Charlie gave the man across from him a nervous smile and self-consciously brushed at the lint clinging to the lapels of his cheap but serviceable blue serge suit.

  And then there were the introductions. The man to Charlie’s right was a judge from Detroit, and beside him was the thespian lady, Mrs. Tindermarsh, now relieved of her greasepaint and stage powder. Directly across from him was a Mr. Philpott, police chief from Baltimore, and Mrs. Philpott, a wizened little nugget of a woman with skin like old newsprint and a rubbery, exaggerated smile. To her left was a hulking red-faced man with pinn
ed-back ears and a name Charlie didn’t catch—he was with the Michigan Association of Correctional Institutions—and beyond him, which was about as far down as polite introductions would allow, was the diminutive Countess, blanketed in jewels and holding forth on the subject of bowel movements.

  Charlie gave each of them a forthright smile and replied, to the inevitable question, that he was in the breakfast-food business—but what was that glimmer in their eyes as they asked, and why the preponderance of people associated with the law? Was it chance? Or was there something else going on here, something grim, nasty, final? But no. He was wound up tight, that was all. These were just decent, ordinary food cranks with jittery stomachs and clogged-up intestines who happened coincidentally to be in the field of law enforcement—he’d just have to avoid soliciting investments from them. In fact, he made a mental note of it.

  The girls were bringing in the soup course and Charlie was engaged in a conversation with the Philpotts over the relative merits of the various breakfast foods, when he happened to glance down the table and catch the eye of a very familiar looking individual, a gangling, overdressed, ever-so-slightly cross-eyed individual with an untamed shock of hair fallen across his brow: none other than Will Lightbody himself. It was a jolt to see him there after the encounter with his wife—but how could Charlie have missed him? Charlie gave him an agitated wink—was he going to demand his investment back now, on top of everything else?—but Will gave no sign that he recognized him. He looked preoccupied, somber, a whole continent away. Charlie’s first thought was to avoid him when the party broke up, but there was no sense in that—Mrs. Hookstratten would have invited him expressly because of the Peterskill connection. He would just have to put the best face on it he could.

  They were well into the entrée—the usual boiled pasteboard and soggy greens—when Charlie had a second surprise. A shock, actually, of the first magnitude. Across from Will Lightbody, at the far end of the table and blocked from view till this moment by the grazing heads and busy hands of the intervening guests, was the erect and unmistakable figure of Bartholomew Bookbinder. Bookbinder. And what in God’s name was he doing here? The answer, too horrible to phrase, rang like a tocsin through his veins and he turned to Mrs. Hookstratten in fear and bewilderment—“Auntie,” he pleaded, “Auntie”—but she looked away from him and he saw her lip tremble. He had to get out of here, had to get out now—

  It was too late.

  At that moment, just as the guests were sucking thoughtfully at the last morsels of whatever it was they’d been served and the girls in the blue caps had begun to exchange the dinner settings for dessert plates, the little white general himself, the impresario, the Chief, the lord of the manor, strode through the door from the lobby accompanied by six of his white-clad lieutenants and a ferrety slope-shouldered man with a badge pinned to his shirt and a baton dangling casually from his right hand—and there was no doubting who he was. Charlie froze. There were two other exits—one leading to the Men’s Gymnasium, the other to the Women’s—and the orderlies quickly fanned out to cover both of them. Paralyzed, staring down at the table for fear of lifting his eyes, Charlie sat there hunched inside himself like a man being beaten with a stick. In that moment he saw himself stepping off the train, full of his pathetic naive hopes and dreams, saw himself in Bookbinder’s basement, tramping the streets in his sandwich board, lifting a glass of Otard Dupuy with Bender in his high-flown suite of rooms at the Post Tavern Hotel. And so it all comes down to this, he thought. It all comes down to this.

  “Good afternoon, my friends,” the Doctor boomed, rubbing his hands together like a workman setting out his tools, and striding down the length of the table to the far end before pivoting and staring back up again. “I wish you all a very happy holiday and urge you to enjoy all the many festivities we’ve organized for the remainder of the day, including the sing-along and fireworks display this evening, and I want to thank you all for attending this little luncheon I’ve asked Mrs. Hookstratten to arrange, and hope you will find it instructive, as well as gratifying to the palate. And, oh yes, of course, I’d like to thank Mrs. Hookstratten for her participation, which I know must have been difficult for her, in light of what will shortly be revealed….”

  There was a spatter of applause for Mrs. Hookstratten, but she barely acknowledged it. She bit her lip and clasped her hands before her. She wouldn’t look at Charlie.

  For his part, Charlie stared so hard at his plate he could have reproduced its every least line and fracture from memory. He didn’t move a muscle. Couldn’t. The smell of the place immobilized him, rank and tropical, the smell of decay, rot, fatality, of betrayal and the death of hope, and it clogged his nostrils till he could smell nothing else. He choked back a sob. He could barely breathe.

  The Doctor whirled, pirouetted, danced on his toes—he was enjoying himself. He stopped opposite Charlie, framing the heavy shoulders and sagely nodding head of Philpott, the police chief from Baltimore, and made a pyramid of his fingers. “There is here among us,” he announced, “a fraud and criminal of the very worst stripe, a man so heinous and without conscience that I’ve taken time out from my crowded schedule to arrange this gathering both to ensnare and expose him and to warn you all against him and his ilk.”

  He paused, never taking his eyes from Charlie. “This is a man who would violate every fundamental principle of human decency, who would defraud his own patron, the very woman—Mrs. Amelia Hookstratten—who took him up from poverty and low circumstances to dress and educate him and give him a start in life … a man who would think nothing of taking money under false pretenses from our own Mr. Lightbody, a model patient and as decent and trusting a fellow as there is, and this after weakening his resolve with alcoholic beverages smuggled into this institution in direct contravention of all we hold sacred … a man who, without a glimmer of moral awareness, would defraud a legion of poor honest hardworking grocers throughout the country, all but steal the staggering sum of thirty-five thousand dollars from the most steadfast citizens of this our decent little forward-looking town, our Battle Creek, and, worst of all, betray the public trust in our great and selfless mission to save the American stomach and ensure each and every one of us the full enjoyment of life and longevity to which we are entitled—and if that isn’t murder, I don’t know what is.”

  The Doctor drew himself up, his head swinging on its axis with its freight of grief, anger, heartache and denunciation. “I say to you, ladies and gentlemen, this is cynicism at its most pernicious, this is nay-saying and criminality, this, without exaggeration, is the greatest danger facing America today.”

  Charlie was dead, numb, all the receptors of sense and pain shut down to the threshold of endurance. He hung his head. He shrank. He prayed for it to end, longed for the clasp of the handcuffs, the clank of the iron door.

  “Per-Fo,” the Doctor pronounced, and the once-cherished name, the name that had made Charlie proud, was the vilest curse on his accuser’s lips. “Kellogg’s Per-Fo. Have any of you heard of it? No? Well, it’s a good thing. A blessing. Would that Mrs. Hookstratten, Mr. Lightbody and our own Mr. Bartholomew Bookbinder could say the same. Would that I could. Yes, I, even I. For this vicious venal individual, and I’ll pronounce his name and be the first to point an accusing finger—Mr. Charles P. Ossining, sitting here before you in all his wretchedness—this man tried to enfold even me in his web of deception, shamelessly using the name of one of my unfortunate adoptive sons as a means of blackmailing me to ‘invest’ in his nonexistent breakfast-food company. I say it’s outrageous, ladies and gentlemen. I say it is sick, twisted, perverted.”

  A murmur went up from the table, ugly and incriminating. Mrs. Hookstratten sobbed into her napkin. “Auntie,” Charlie whispered, appealing to her against all hope, “help me, please, I didn’t … I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—”

  She lifted her face to him, and he barely recognized her. Her eyes were wet, nostrils pinched, her face a pit of age and misery, gone old i
n an instant. “The factory,” she choked, and the whole table was riveted on them now, “your letters … how could you do that to me? Tell me what I’ve done to deserve this? Tell me?”

  Charlie looked wildly round the table. “It wasn’t me—it was Bender!” he cried. “Bender, Bender did it!”

  The Doctor loomed over him now, suddenly interposed between him and Mrs. Hookstratten, as if to shield her with his body. “Your accomplice, sir, is now under custody in Detroit, or so Judge Behrens informs me, and will get everything that is coming to him,” the Doctor observed dryly before raising his eyes to the company at large. The judge threw Charlie a malignant look, and his wife drew back her lip in a sneer.

  “I am a humanitarian,” the Doctor announced after a moment’s reflection, and all the while he was patting Mrs. Hookstratten’s erupting shoulders with a plump and consolatory hand, “and I do believe in rehabilitation and the ultimate perfectibility of man, and yet”—the swipe at the brow, the thunderous breath—”some things disgust me to the very core of my being. This man—and I won’t waste much more of your valuable time on him, believe me—this man, Charles P. Ossining, is such a threat to all our good work, such a subverter and perverter of the dietary truths to which I have dedicated my life and all my energies, that I cannot find it in my heart to pity him—no, not for a second.”

  There was a silence—the Doctor was finished. Mrs. Hookstratten, the betrayer, melted into his healing embrace, her every breath torn with the ferocity of her sobs. Overhead, palm fronds knifed at the light and alien creepers dangled their nooses and coils. The guests sat motionless in their chairs. Charlie looked desperately from one face to another—it was Bender, couldn’t they see that?—but there was nothing there but loathing and contempt.

  “Bill,” the Doctor called sternly into the silence, and the man with the badge stepped forward and Charlie felt himself lifted from the chair, felt the distant cold kiss of steel at his wrists and heard the snap of the handcuffs as if from some immeasurable distance, as if someone else were being shackled, someone else drubbed, humiliated and crushed in full public view. Dr. Kellogg stood at attention, his lips compressed in triumph. “Take charge of your prisoner,” he said, “and see that he is prosecuted to the very fullest extent of the law.”