The Road to Wellville (42 page)

“Yes,” Will agreed. “Of course, of course.” He was in a daze. How that whiskey worked its magic, hot in his stomach and cold in his brain—and why couldn’t Kellogg put some of that on the table?

“You forgot to sign it.”

“What?” Will took the check from him and examined it under the lamplight. Sure enough, he’d forgotten his John Hancock. He was embarrassed suddenly. What must Charlie think of him? He gave a little laugh and his voice went hollow again. “Don’t think I’m in my dotage yet, Charlie—forgive me, will you? It’s just this damned place”—he waved a hand to take in everything, from the enema bag lying on the counter in the corner to the wheelchair behind the door and the four floors beneath and the one above. “Of course,” he added with a conspiratorial chuckle, “I was in my cups, too, you know. Remember?”

Charlie’s laugh was high and sharp. He slapped his knee, then leaned forward and refilled the glass. Will fumbled through the drawer of the night table, came up with his Waterman and signed the check with a flourish.

Charlie thanked him and Will said it was nothing. They sat there in the afterglow of the moment, both satisfied, their troubles behind them. After a while Will ventured to ask how much he’d invested—with a
laugh he admitted that he hadn’t thought to look at the amount. “Oh,” Charlie said, and he returned Will’s laugh with a deep chuckle of his own, “it may not seem like a lot to you, but to us at Per-Fo, just starting up as we are, it’s really generous, and I thank you from the bottom of my heart, and my partners thank you, too.” A pause. Shrug of the shoulders. The voice drops. “A thousand.”

A thousand. The tiniest coil of doubt gripped Will in his innermost gut, but he lifted the glass to his lips and quieted it. “I’m pleased,” he said, but his lips caught on the
p
and sounded a
b
in its place. Charlie didn’t seem to mind. He was beaming at Will, rocking back on the legs of the chair and giving him a look of pure gratitude and unadulterated joy.

“Well,” Charlie said, rising from the chair, “it’s getting late, Will; and I’ve got to be going—I really do—and I wish you could join me down at the Onion, but listen, keep the rest of the bottle and take a judicious sip now and again to wash down all those bean sprouts, all right?” He was standing in the middle of of the room, just where Eleanor had stood, his smile locked in place. “All right?” he repeated.

And it would have been all right—everything would have been all right, from the glow in Will’s stomach to the laxness of his limbs and the fine feeling that existed between them—if Dr. Kellogg, the little white dynamo himself, hadn’t chosen that moment to blast through the door like some hurling, whirling meteorological event, words of caution, praise, hope and command on his lips. “—sticks to the dietary regimen,” he was saying, his secretary at his heels, “rest and a good regular cleansing, hourly now, hourly, up to the point of the procedure—” and then he stopped short. For the second time since Will had known him, the saint of health was at a loss for words. “What?” he said, glancing from Will to Charlie and back again. “Who—?”

“Good night, Will,” Charlie said quickly, “I hope you feel better,” and he made a move for the door.

“You!” the Doctor suddenly cried, flinging the door shut behind him and pressing himself up against it to bar Charlie’s exit. “I know you, sir, I know you now—the cheapest kind of scoundrel!”

“Now wait a minute—” Will began, but the Doctor cut him off.

“Not a word from you, sir,” the little man fumed, pointing an admonitory
finger. “Dab”—and his eyes fastened on Charlie’s—“telephone for Rice and Burleigh. I want them here this instant.”

It was a tableau vivant: Will in his bed, Charlie backed up against the wall, the Doctor at the door and Dab beside him. Then the secretary broke the spell by lumbering across the room to the telephone and calling for the orderlies. There was a silence while Dab’s voice rose in agitation, and then the Doctor uttered a single word, harsh with astonishment: “Whiskey!”

The bottle of Old Overholt stood there on the night table, incontrovertible, the half-filled glass beside it. Will exchanged a glance with Charlie, and in the next moment the Doctor was in action, catlike in his quickness, springing across the room to seize glass and bottle and smash them over the edge of the table so that the floor exploded with jewels of glass and the jagged neck of the bottle, gripped tight, blossomed in the bulb of his fist. “Here,” he said, his voice pitched high, fighting for control as he sliced at the air inches from Will’s shrinking face, “cut your own throat with it—or would you prefer a surgeon’s touch?”

No one moved. Dab looked as if he were about to faint. Charlie’s eyes were lit with excitement, a rough insouciant look settling into his features. Will’s head felt as if it were floating free of his body.

The sequel was brief. The orderlies arrived and escorted Charlie from the San; he took with him the Doctor’s warning not to set foot on the grounds again under penalty of criminal prosecution. A nurse swept up the glass. The Doctor paced back and forth. Will hung his head. Finally, when the nurse had left and the Doctor had had time to compose himself, he ordered Dab out of the room, shut the door quietly, pulled the chair up to the bed and perched himself on the edge of it. “Mr. Lightbody,” he began, and Will could feel the tension in the air as the Doctor struggled to maintain his composure, “as long as you are under my care—and leaving it at this juncture would be purely suicidal, though you don’t seem to give two hoots about your own life—you do want to live, don’t you, sir?”

Will nodded.

“As I say, so long as you are under my care, you will not leave this institution for any purpose and you will not be allowed any visitation privileges whatever, save for the visits of a select group of your fellow
patients—should your condition allow it. For the time being, however, I am limiting you to this room, the dining hall, the gymnasium and the baths.’ You remain on the laxative diet and you recommence your full exercise regimen the first thing tomorrow morning. Is that clear?”

It was. Will had been caught red-handed and the fight was gone from him.

The Doctor gazed at him as if he were a speck of something curious under the microscope. There was a silence. “You know of Sir Arbuthnot Lane?” he said finally. “No? I didn’t expect that you would.” He studied his nails a moment, then glanced up sharply. “Well, sir, he happens to be one of the most eminent physicians in the world, attached now to the Royal College of Surgeons, London, and he has perfected a surgical technique to improve motility and correct the often fatal consequences of autointoxication. To amateurs, the operation—an abdominal section to remove a portion of the lower intestine where stasis routinely occurs—is known as the ‘Lane’s Kink’ surgery. Surely you’ve heard of it?”

Will could only blink at him. He was drunk still, drunk as a loon, but all the elation had gone out of him. He didn’t like the turn the conversation was taking. He was frightened suddenly, and the fiery fist in his stomach took hold of him with a jerk.

“No matter,” the Doctor said, and he held up his hands to admire the nails again. The nails were smooth, perfect, the fingers lithe and expressive: a surgeon’s fingers. “I’ve located my own ‘kink,’ as it were,” he said musingly, “though no one has taken to calling it ‘Kellogg’s Kink’ yet, to my knowledge, but they will, they will … and my technique has relieved scores of severely autointoxicated and even moribund patients from the symptoms that afflict you. What I’m saying, sir,” and the Doctor got to his feet and leveled a long, keen-eyed, almost loving gaze on him, “is that I’ve scheduled you for surgery just after the New Year.”

He leaned over then and reached for the lamp, a serene self-satisfied smile on his lips, and pulled the switch. “Sleep tight,” he said.

   
Chapter 6   

I
t was a basement. Fieldstone and mortar, earthen floor, a smell like the cork in a bottle of wine gone bad on the shelf. There was a clutter of the usual junk—a sagging perambulator, rusted garden tools, a coal scuttle with a broken handle. The dirt was pulverized, grainy, ancient—dust—and the mummified corpse of a mouse lay in a drift of it in the center of the room, a pathetic wrinkle of naked hands and feet. Charlie had to duck his head and compress his shoulders like a hunchback to avoid knocking himself unconscious on the low-hanging beams. He kicked the dead mouse aside in disgust and looked up to where Bender and Bookbinder stood at the top of the steps, framed against a bleak January sky.

“It’s a basement,” Charlie said.

“It’s cheap.” Bender huddled in his greatcoat against the wind, his top hat glued to his head, silk scarf wrapped tight round his throat. George crouched on the bottom step, half in, half out of the cellar, a dazed and drunken look on his face. There was a swollen yellowish contusion over his left eye from when he’d fallen—or been pushed—in the street.

Charlie struck a match and lit one of the candles they’d brought with them. He set it atop a stack of split wood in the far corner and made a slow ambling inspection of the place. It was big, he’d say that for it,
but the ceiling couldn’t have been any higher than five feet eight inches, and the place was cold, filthy, a sink of neglect. He heard footsteps overhead, a shuffle and thump, repeated over and over, as if someone were dragging sacks of potatoes across the floor. “Who lives upstairs?” he asked, and he could see his breath hanging in the dank close air.

“Bart’s mother,” Bender returned, indicating Bookbinder with a nod. “It’s her place.”

She’s afflicted, poor woman,” Bookbinder put in. “The last stroke took the use of her left side and we’ve had to go and hire a Swede to look after her.”

But Charlie wasn’t listening. He was thinking of Mrs. Hookstratten—his “Auntie Amelia”—and the faith she reposed in him. Not to mention its tangible expression in cash and check. At Bender’s urging, he’d written her a series of letters describing the immaculate new Per-Fo factory headquarters and he’d enumerated an entirely fictitious list of prominent investors. He’d waxed eloquent about the clean and thrifty Midwestern work force, men and women alike, and the newly designed Per-Fo boxes, and the real and enduring mission of Per-Fo itself, which was, of course, to provide the good people of America with a predigested, peptonized, celery-impregnated miracle of a ready-to-eat vegetarian breakfast food—in short, to save the American stomach. His letters ran to twenty and thirty pages, and he found, at least for the hour or so in which he was engaged in their composition, that the fiction grew actual in his mind so that he saw the factory floor in its idealized version, saw the desk in his office behind the smoked-glass door, knew and admired and encouraged the workers—particularly the girls, who wore tight skirts and deferred to him as he inspected the line, murmuring “Good afternoon, Mr. Ossining,” one after another, and one after another turning away with a blush.

The letters had been effective. They’d got an additional twenty-five hundred dollars from the Hookstratten treasury. Twenty-five hundred dollars that Bender had turned toward the production of one thousand dummy cartons, and which had brought them, with a wagonload of used retorts, mixing tubs and rollers and a big new Sears wood-fired oven-range, to this dungeon on the outskirts of the Biggest Little City in the U.S.A. The cartons, designed by Bender himself, were quite the thing,
actually—he had to hand it to Bender there. Red, white and blue, with a representation of two cherubic children and their prim and yet somehow randy-looking mother sitting round a kitchen table in the absence of the breadwinner of the house, it bore the title
KELLOGG’S PER-FO, THE PERFECT FOOD
across the top. There was a line beneath it about the celery and the rest of it, then the illustration, centered, and at the bottom of the box, in red block letters, a legend paraphrased from no less an authority than C. W. Post himself:
MAKES ACTIVE BLOOD.
(It was Postum that made red blood, and they couldn’t trespass there, though Bender loved the ring of it.) The whole business was repeated on the reverse, but the picture was smaller and a paragraph of health-conscious gibberish had been added to appeal to the Eleanor Lightbodys and Amelia Hookstrattens of the world.