The Road to Wellville (61 page)

“—and Dr. Kellogg,” she was saying, “a saint on earth. I don’t know how you were fortunate enough to become associated with such an illustrious family—was it
his
son or his brother’s?”

She paused. The gap opened. Charlie fell into it. “
His
son,” he said miserably. “The Doctor’s.”

“Didn’t you say his name was George in one of your letters? George, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Charlie affirmed, and his voice had sunk low.

They were swinging into the circular drive in front of the San now and Mrs. Hookstratten was cooing and exclaiming like a tourist: “How grand!” and “Is that Italian marble?” In the midst of it, craning her neck, peering, ejaculating, she turned back to him and said, “George, yes, how I do look forward to meeting him—and to seeing his father again. Did I tell you that I first met Dr. Kellogg three years ago in Manhattan? Or was it four? Well, anyway, he was lecturing on food drunks, I remember it as if it were yesterday, Meg Rutherford and—but goodness, here we are.”

There they were. The hack stopped and the driver was climbing down. The doorman from the San and a matching pair of bellhops descended on them like jackals. “Listen, Auntie, I have to tell you something—” Charlie began, tugging at his words as if they were stuck to his teeth.

“Oh, look! That’s that perfectly adorable Mrs. Cormier I met on the train coming in from Chicago”—her head out the window now—“yoo-hoo, Winifred!”

“I, uh, I’ve got to go. I mean, I can’t come in. I’d love to, I would, but I’ve got to get back. To the factory, the books—”

No one moved. The doorman, the bellhops, the cabbie—they might have been hewn of stone. Outside, the crickets seemed to choke off in unison and Winifred Cormier, a woman with a convex figure in a plain dress, halted at the door of the cab ahead of them, perplexed. Mrs. Hookstratten was staring at him in astonishment, the corners of her mouth working. “Can’t come in?” she repeated. “But what do you mean?”

Charlie’s smile was foolish, swollen, a bravura smile that didn’t begin to cover his panic. “Work,” he said lamely.

“Work? At this hour?”

Nouns dropped from his lips like succulent little fruits—“duty,” “competition,” “nose,” “grindstone”—but they had no effect. Mrs. Hookstratten cut him off in the middle of a convoluted apology. “Do you mean to tell me that after I’ve come all this way and after all I’ve done for you since you were practically an infant in diapers—and for your parents, too, don’t forget about them—that you don’t want to see me? Can that be possible? Am I losing my hearing?”

“Auntie, I—”

“Don’t ‘Auntie’ me. I want an answer, yes or no: are you coming in or not?”

“Please don’t be upset, but I’ve got a business to run—you’ve been after me for years to get involved in something, find my way in life, and now I have—”

“Can you for just one minute imagine how utterly depleted I am, Charles? Can you? A woman in my condition, whole days and nights on the train, shoddy service, food that would choke a hog—”

Charlie hunched his shoulders. He looked up into the faces of the Sanitarium doorman and the bellboys in the kelly-green uniforms with the fig leaves embroidered over their hearts, and he took a gamble. “Yes. All right,” he said, uncoiling himself from the seat to step down and offer his hand, “but just for a minute.”

Luck had been with him that night. The vast roiling life of the Sanitarium lobby, with its comings and goings, its glissade of wheelchairs, the dinner-jacket socializing and clubby chitchat round the milk bar or beneath the palm fronds, swept obliviously past him. No one so much as looked twice at him, and for his part, he saw no muscle-bound orderlies, no imperious little doctors and no Lightbodys, male or female. Better yet, Mrs. Hookstratten was distracted by the swirl of attention—they had her in a wheelchair, her baggage was already on the way to her room, and would she care for a lacto-ovo vegetarian snack?—and she let him off easy. For the moment. But just as he was leaving, the hat jerked down over his brow, the blood settling back into his veins, she snatched at his sleeve. “Tomorrow, Charles,” she said, pulling his
face down to hers. She was mollified, he could see that, but her eyes were like needles, pricking and probing at him. “Tomorrow—and I don’t care how exhausted I am or how busy you are—I want you to myself. All to myself.” She grazed his cheek with her own and made a kissing noise. “And the very first thing I want to do is see this marvel of a factory.”

From the Sanitarium, Charlie went directly to the Red Onion, where he slammed through the door, hurled himself at the bar and had to throw back two whiskies with beer chasers just to clear his head.
Tomorrow
. What was he going to do? The options were narrowing fast. Of course, he could go to the bank in the morning, withdraw Will Lightbody’s thousand dollars and vanish like Bender—close the whole business like a book and be gone and out of it. There’d be no one to answer to then, no games to play, no lawyers to forestall or Auntie Hookstrattens to placate … but then he’d be back where he started, condemned to the life of the small hustle and smaller expectation. A thousand dollars richer, sure, but that wouldn’t last long—and he’d always be looking over his shoulder.

No. What he needed was capital, more capital. Per-Fo was dead—raped and murdered by that son of a bitch Bender—but that didn’t mean Charlie had to lie down and die, too. He knew the breakfast-food business now, he did—all he needed was a new start, a new name. Christ, he could think of a hundred of them—
Zip, Flash, Fruto-Fruto, Flakies, Crunches, Chewies
…. Yes, sure—and
Albatross, the Breakfast Food You Hang Round Your Neck
. He sighed. Ordered another whiskey. There had to be a way.

When he looked up again, Harry Delahoussaye was standing beside him, one foot propped on the brass rail, an elbow cocked on the bar. Delahoussaye was watching him, a slow grin settling into his face. He was as casually stylish as ever, in a new suit of some imported material and a checked silk tie. Charlie looked at him and saw himself, a little man trading on his charm and wit and going nowhere farther than the next oyster bar—for every C. W. Post or Will Kellogg there were a million Delahoussayes. “What do you hear, Charlie?” Delahoussaye said. “How’s the breakfast-food business?”

Was it his imagination or was Delahoussaye shouting? “Shhh,” Charlie
warned, taking him by the arm. He scanned the room nervously for off-duty hotel employees, lawyers, disgruntled investors. No one looked up. Conversation careened round them. The barman said something about a horse to the man on Charlie’s left and turned to draw a beer.

“Not so good, huh?” Delahoussaye said, and his grin got wider, as if the whole thing were funny, as if it were a joke. “Come on, let me buy you a drink. What are you having?”

Charlie was having whiskey. Delahoussaye ordered; the barman wiped the gleaming surface of the bar, set down two shots and absently watched the men lift the glasses to their lips before shuffling off to attend to another customer. “I’ve had a few problems,” Charlie admitted, setting down the empty glass, and now he was grinning, too, a show of bravado, “nothing I can’t handle. How about you?”

Delahoussaye looked down at the bar, feigning modesty. “The train was grand tonight, really grand,” he murmured, stroking his nose thoughtfully. “Didn’t I see you down there, by the way?”

Charlie nodded.

“Sold seventy-five of Push and twenty-something of the Vita-Malta, though even the dead ones fresh off the train know it’s sinking through the floor.”

“What? Vita-Malta? But didn’t they just open the factory last September?”

“They come and go, Charlie—you ought to know that as well as anybody.” Charlie wondered what he’d heard, but Delahoussaye gave no sign one way or the other, just dropped his shoulders and lifted his eyebrows. “Lousy management—and the stuff tastes like the box it comes in.”

“And Push? What about that? I hear they’re selling it as fast as they can make it.”

Delahoussaye paused to light a cigarette, regarding Charlie with a hooded look as he shook out the match and exhaled. “Yeah, sure—they’re thriving. Smart, that’s why. My cousin Garth’s out there, you know—assistant to the foreman—and I’ll tell you, they keep that place as spotless as your mother’s kitchen. They’ve got a new plant now, too, and that helps. You know it? Out on South Union, across the tracks from Post?”

Charlie knew it—a brick building painted in green and red, the Push colors, that took up the better part of a block all by itself. He couldn’t count the times he’d admired it—it was just what he’d envisioned for Per-Fo, something substantial, something to be proud of, the kind of building that said,
Here I am, come take me on
. But just then, the image of the Push plant glowing in his mind like a living photograph, something came over him. It was an idea, an inspiration, a scheme, and it struck him like a hard physical blow, like a slap to the head—he had to take a gulp of air and spread both hands out on the bar to steady himself. He turned to Delahoussaye, hoping the look in his eyes wouldn’t give him away, and said, as casually as he could, “Your cousin, huh?”

The hardest part was stalling Mrs. Hookstratten. The rest of it was no stroll in the park, but at least it was straightforward, a matter of distributing Will Lightbody’s money in the right places and in the right proportions. It took less than one hundred dollars of the Lightbody trust, doled out to Delahoussaye, his cousin, the night watchman and a select few others, to convert the Push plant into the Per-Fo factory for two furtive and illusory hours. The biggest share went to the sign painter, a hand-wringing artiste who couldn’t bear to prostitute his talents on so ephemeral a work. In the end, he did manage to produce a reasonable facsimile, though he never stopped grumbling about it.
KELLOGG’S PER-FO
, the banner read in four-foot-high letters evenly spaced across an expanse of bedsheets sewed together end to end, and though it hadn’t come cheap, Charlie couldn’t complain: when tacked down tightly over the soaring Push billboard, it looked like the genuine article. Especially at night.

No: the trouble was with Mrs. Hookstratten. She was a woman who wasn’t used to being denied. From the time she was a girl and sole heiress to the Van der Pluijm brickworks fortune to her later years as wife to Adolphus “Dolph” Hookstratten, the lion of Wall Street, and her subsequent viduity, she had gotten exactly what she wanted when she wanted. But Charlie couldn’t gratify her for eight interminable days—it took that long to make his arrangements and wait through to the
following Sunday, when the plant would be vacant. Push, like Post Foods and the Kellogg company, was running a twenty-four-hour-a-day operation, and the only time Charlie could manage his imposture was on the Lord’s Day, when the ovens were quiescent and the packing line deserted.

Mrs. Hookstratten didn’t understand. He telephoned her two or three times daily, ostensibly from his mahogany-lined office, but actually from the drugstore, or from the Chinese laundry, where the sound of the steam press lent an air of authenticity to the ruse. Why couldn’t she call him? she wondered. Something wrong with the lines, he countered, outgoing calls only, and that was hell on business, as she could imagine, and he had the phone company working on it even as they spoke. But why hadn’t any of the people at the San heard of Per-Fo and its benefits, and why wasn’t it on the shelves at Offenbacher’s, back in Peterskill? She’d looked and looked. That was why he was working so hard, he told her, static crackling in his ear, that was why, this week especially, he was having difficulty in getting away. But, she insisted, he
had
to get away, and there was no arguing with the tone of her voice. He had to squire her around town, soothe her nerves, help her acclimate herself to all that was strange and new—and, most particularly of all, he had to show her this factory she’d underwritten to the tune of a small fortune. “A small fortune, Charles,” she’d repeated for emphasis.

She’d arrived on a Friday, and he managed to put her off till Monday, when he persuaded her to dine with him at a new vegetarian restaurant that had just opened downtown, rather than at the San (anything but the San). In the interim, he began growing side-whiskers and a mustache, took to wearing dark spectacles and found himself a room, no board, for a dollar and a half a week. The room was on the south side of the city, halfway to Goguac Lake, on an overgrown back street that looked as if it were still in the process of being carved from the wilderness. It was remote and quiet and he felt safe there, all things being equal. He sent Ernest O’Reilly to fetch his things from Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s, instructing him to use the back staircase and take a devious route both ways. It was mad, hopeless, and he was living on the edge of the precipice, he knew it, but there was no other way. This was the life of
the man of vision, the man who dared all, the genius, the tycoon: risk nothing, gain nothing.