The Road to Wellville (14 page)

The boy shuffled along, head down, the bottom of the imitation-alligator-skin grip dragging along the crust of ice hardened into the slats of the wooden sidewalk. “It’s not far,” he called in his piteous bleat of a voice, the tatters of his breath streaming behind him.

Not far? Ten blocks later they were still trudging along, every nerve in Charlie’s body alive to the torturous pains shooting through his limbs and playing up and down his spine like Saint Elmo’s fire. His feet were dead things, blocks of ice, stone, glacial debris, his nose a memory, his fingers forever twisted into hooks. The lights of the city were behind them, the sidewalks had given way to furrows of frozen mud, and the houses had begun to trail off. “Goddamnit,” he muttered, dropping the trunk to the ground with a distant cold thud and fighting to arch his back against all sense and habit. “You, boy!” he roared into the night, “where the devil you taking me?”

The boy was like a mule on a treadmill, fixated, senseless, the sticks of his legs plodding on automatically in their torn stockings and disheveled knee pants. He swung his head round reluctantly, slowing but not yet stopping. “Just a little ways more,” he piped. “Up there, ahead—see them lights?”

It was a distance of some blocks, and the street ahead of them was dark on either side, but there was a powerful, pervasive glow of electric light ahead of them, as if they were coming into another town altogether. Had they walked all the way to Ypsilanti? It sure felt like it. “What’s that?” he asked, pulling the collar tight against his throat.

The boy had stopped now, ten paces ahead of him. “That’s the White City.”

The White City. Even Charlie, newly arrived, had heard of the White City, had dreamed of it, even. This was the home of Postum and Grape-Nuts, the hub of C. W. Post’s empire, a manufacturing enterprise and residential community so pristine and enlightened it had been named after the glorious “White City” of the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition. For a long moment, though he ached in every fiber and the hyperborean wind drove at him relentlessly, Charlie stood there in awe
of that distant electric glow. Here was an inspiration, and it made the petty annoyances of his journey seem like nothing. Was there an enterprising man or boy in America who didn’t know the story of C. W. Post’s rise from feeble health and poverty to the very first rank of American industrialists? Here was a man who’d come to Battle Creek in ruins, barely able to walk, who’d worked in the Sanitarium kitchens to pay for his treatment while his wife sewed suspenders by the piece in her unheated garret.
Yes: and six years later he was a millionaire.

“Come on, mister,” the boy whined. “I’m freezing.”

“Yeah, sure,” Charlie said, distracted. “But I thought the Post Tavern was in town. It’s out here, then? By the factory?”

The boy was already moving. “Not goin’ to the Post Tavern,” he called over his shoulder. “Mr. Bender told me to take you to Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s.”

“Where?”

Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s rooming house was within sight of the White City itself, and it was clean, spartan and depressing. Charlie and the boy stood shivering in the coolish hallway, Charlie counting out another three dollars and a quarter from Mrs. Hookstratten’s hoard while the boy wiped his nose on his sleeve and half a dozen sallow, hopeless-looking men huddled round the faintest glimmer of a fire in the parlor. Mrs. Eyvindsdottir beamed at them. She was a square-shouldered woman with a faint blond mustache who always managed to look as if she’d just received an unexpected gift, and whose English was all but impenetrable—at least as far as Charlie was concerned. She went up and down the scale like a diva doing her warming-up exercises as Charlie counted out the money, and he could only give her a blank look until one of the other boarders—a bald-headed man in a red-checked muffler—got up from his chair by the fire and translated: “One week in advance, due and payable on Saturday, breakfast at seven, dinner at one, supper at six-thirty, late boarders to fend for themselves.” When the bargain was formalized and Mrs. Eyvindsdottir had deposited Mrs. Hookstratten’s three dollars and twenty-five cents in the folds of her
apron, she heaved herself up a flight of protesting stairs to show Charlie to his room.

The room wasn’t much. It called to mind the root cellar on the Hookstratten estate, though it was barely half the size. Cramped beneath the pitch of the roof, thoroughly refrigerated, gloomy, damp and deathly still, the room needed only a few heaps of potatoes and a basket of rutabagas to complete the picture. A much-scrubbed kerosene lamp provided light—and, apparently, all the heat he was likely to get. There was no radiator, no fireplace, no stove. The narrow bed was wedged into the corner beside a washstand and worn porcelain basin; three unvarnished pegs driven into the wall served as closet and wardrobe. The only decoration was a tiny turgid oil painting depicting the midnight sun hanging over the fjords of Norway.

“No window?” Charlie wondered aloud, attempting to ease the trunk down on the bare floorboards with a minimum of damage.

Mrs. Eyvindsdottir yodeled something in response as the boy edged warily into the room and set Charlie’s imitation-alligator-skin grip in the corner.

“Beg pardon?” Charlie said, straightening up gingerly. The muscles of his lower back, long dormant, announced themselves: they were on fire, meat pounded raw and tossed into a vat of sizzling lard.

“She says, ‘Mr. Bagwell’s got it,’” the bald man said, poking his head in the door and attempting a smile. He was amazing, really, totally hairless, like some fantastic creature in a sideshow—he didn’t even seem to have any eyebrows. “That’s me,” he added, by way of clarification. He pointed to the front wall of Charlie’s room, a cheap partition left open where the ceiling slanted up into the attic. “I’ve got the window in my room, and I’m sorry about that, but I had to wait two and a half years for Mr. Bjornson to pass on before I could get it.”

All right, Charlie thought, all right. Bender’s economizing—so much the better. They’d need every penny to make Per-Fo fly—and fly it would, the cappers and the hucksters and the fast-talking boys at the depot notwithstanding. Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s was a far cry from a private compartment on the Twentieth Century Limited, with oysters and duck and even caviar available for the asking, but he was willing to tighten his belt for a while, no problem there—if C. W. Post could do it, so
could he. “Thank you, ma’am,” he said, ushering Mrs. Eyvindsdottir out the door, along with her interpreter, “and you too, sir—I’m very much obliged.”

When he’d shut the door and turned round, wondering what to do next, he found himself staring into the blunted eyes of Bender’s pathetic little messenger. “Well,” he said, and he couldn’t help it if his tone was a bit sharper than he’d intended, “and what do you want?”

The boy hung his head. “I’m sorry, sir, but Mr. Bender says you’re to give me a dime … and he wanted me to take you to see him at the Post Tavern, no matter how late—”

The Post Tavern: yes, of course. Charlie was going to live like Peary among the Eskimos in a barren back room at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s while Bender lived it up at the best hotel in town. Yes, sure. What else would he expect?

“—because, he says, the banks are closed for the night and he thought … well, he says you ought to put the stockholders’ money in the safe there. For safekeeping. That’s what he says. That, and you’re to give me a dime.”

Nine-thirty at night, the wind had shifted round demonically to blow in his face again, and Charlie Ossining was plodding back up the long dark street to town, retracing his steps. The boy kept half a pace ahead of him, as if it were a point of honor, and there was no sound but the crunch of their footsteps and the hoarse wind-shocked rasp of their breath. At one point, the interurban sailed on past them, lit like heaven, but the boy made no attempt to flag it down, and when Charlie angrily questioned him, the boy looked away and murmured, “Mr. Bender said to walk. Both ways.”

By the time they reached the hotel, Charlie was seething. If someone had tossed an effigy of Bender in his path, he would have booted it on down the street and cheerfully set it ablaze. Here he’d had to haul his own trunk twenty blocks in an arctic wind and in the company of a skinny, snot-nosed, down-at-heels runt of a kid in tattered short pants
and a jacket that looked as if it had been fetched out of the rubbish, and then tramp the twenty blocks back again for an audience with the almighty Bender—and Bender hadn’t even stuck his nose out the door in all that time. No, he couldn’t even have bothered to meet him at the station and say,
Hello, Charlie, welcome to town, and by the way, I’ll be sticking you out in the middle of nowhere in a three-dollar-and-twenty-five-cent boarding house while I soak my feet and order up another plate of bluepoints from room service.

The fact that the hotel was imposing—really first-class—didn’t help his mood any, either. Charlie could hardly believe it. Six stories high, a full block long, its banks of windows confidently glowing against the bleak Midwestern night, it was impressive, modern, very grand, the equal of anything he’d seen in New York—or anywhere else.

He’d passed through the porte cochère and the doorman had stepped forward to swing open the door for him before he missed the boy. He stopped to glance round him, and the doorman gave him a look. But in that moment he spotted the boy—out on the street still, lurking in the shadows, his shoulders fallen in on themselves. “What’s the matter?” Charlie called, backtracking to where the boy stood hunched in the street.

“Nothing.”

“You’re not coming in?”

The boy wiped his nose on his sleeve. “I go in the service entrance,” he murmured, “when Mr. Bender wants me. Anyway, I got school tomorrow.”

School.
Charlie felt a weight settle on him. Here he’d been bellyaching all night and this skinny-legged kid had waited out in the cold for him at the depot and then tramped all over creation just to see that he didn’t get lost. What was he—nine, ten years old?
School. He had to go to school.
Charlie realized he didn’t even know his name. “Listen,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at the brightly lit entrance to the hotel, “I appreciate your help tonight, I really do … you know, I don’t even know your name—”

“Ernest,” the kid said. “Ernest O’Reilly.”

“An Irishman, huh? Well, listen, Ernest O’Reilly, thanks a lot. You
come round again—maybe Mr. Bender and I’ll have some errands for you. We’re starting up a breakfast-food company and I’m sure we’re going to need a dependable errand boy.”

Ernest O’Reilly said nothing to this. He stood there, hunched against the wind, a dogged expression on his face. “Mr. Bender said you’d give me a dime,” he repeated.

Charlie had forgotten—after all that, the kid probably thought he was going to stiff him. Embarrassed, Charlie dug out his change purse. “Here,” he said, feeling magnanimous suddenly, “here’s fifteen cents.”

Snatching the money and jamming it into his pocket, Ernest O’Reilly gave him a look suspended midway between gratitude and contempt. “Big spender,” he piped, and then he was gone in a flash of spindly legs.

The transaction left a sour taste in Charlie’s mouth—the little ingrate: what did he expect?—and as he inquired at the desk for Mr. Goodloe H. Bender, he could feel the indignation rising in his throat. “Mr. Bender?” the desk clerk repeated, as if Charlie had been speaking in a foreign language. The clerk looked him up and down a moment, the hollows of his cheeks drawn in cool appraisal, and then he turned away abruptly to conduct a brief hushed telephone conference. After a moment he set the earpiece back on its hook as if it were a precious jewel and shifted round to face Charlie. “Mr. Bender is occupied at the moment. Would you take a seat, please?”

Charlie was weary, bone weary. It seemed as if he’d been traveling forever. But still, in that moment, he could barely restrain himself from reaching out and seizing the man by the collar.
You chicken-necked little twit
, he was thinking,
in six months’ time I’ll buy and sell the likes of you a hundred times over.
He held the clerk’s eyes till the man looked away, then stalked across the lobby and threw himself down on a red velvet settee in the corner. A long shiver ran through him, and he hugged his shoulders and stamped his feet on the carpet. After a moment, he began working at the buttons of his coat with stiff and aching fingers.