The Road to Wellville (38 page)

Charlie awoke to the gray void of an indeterminate hour, huddled in his bedclothes on his mattress stuffed with useless stock certificates. The muffled sounds of subdued gaiety drifted up to him from between the cracks in the floorboards, and he had a fuzzy vision of Mrs. Eyvindsdottir and her rinsed-out boarders celebrating the day with Norwegian mulled wine, or a fruitcake that might have been put to better use as roofing material. He emptied his bladder in the pot in the corner, noting with a clinical detachment that the liquid draining from him was exactly the color of that which he’d put in, and then he took his very tender head and tentative limbs over to the mirror for a cold shave. His brain was a bit clouded—he remembered taking Will to Bathrick’s for a drink, and then to a back-room place on Calhoun—but from the moment he’d opened his eyes he was aware of the check. Of the fact of it. Of its existence. Of its presence in the room with him, looming large, a Christmas offering for Per-Fo tucked away in the inside pocket of his jacket. He glanced up from the mirror to where the jacket dangled from its peg, and he began to whistle. A thousand dollars. Not bad for a single night’s work. Wait till he told Bender.

But wait: why tell Bender at all?. The check was made out to him, wasn’t it—to Charles Ossining? Who would be the wiser if he—but no, he couldn’t just take the poor fool’s money like that, could he? For one thing, it was illegal—false pretenses, fraud, theft even. And it was seed money, money that would grow a hundred times over—he knew that and knew he had to be patient. But he could hold it back from Bender, hold it in reserve, that is, squirrel it away for the moment the Per-Fo factory opened its doors and they needed a little extra for greasing the wheels, for advertising or paying off their suppliers or carton manufacturers or whatever—hell, for throwing a party. A thousand dollars. He could hardly believe it. It would take his father two years to earn that much at Mrs. Hookstratten’s, opening and closing the big wrought-iron gates every time the Oldsmobile went in or out….

He couldn’t help himself. He set down the razor and crossed the room to throw back the flap of his jacket and dig out the check—just to
admire it, gloat over it, stroke it in the way a red Indian might stroke a favorite scalp or a millionaire his bankbook. His fingers closed on it—and it was there, it was no dream—the feel of the crisp, single-folded sheet of paper like the feel of ready money, and then he was scanning the rich, spare, resonant command scrawled across the face of the thing:
Pay to the Order of Charles Ossining, One thousand dollars, The Old National and the Merchants Bank, Battle Creek, Michigan.
The elation rose in him, his heartbeat took off on a pair of flapping wings, and he was half a breath away from springing back from the wall and dancing round the room with Will Lightbody’s check for his sole partner when he noticed something odd: there was no signature at the bottom of the check. Nothing. Not a mark.

The wings plummeted. His stomach clenched.
The idiot had forgotten to sign it!
And he, Charlie Ossining, was twice an idiot for not examining the thing on the spot—what would it have taken to say casually, “Oh, Will, by the way, I’m afraid you’ve forgotten to sign it here—ha-ha—no problem, no problem at all—another drink?” But now—he slammed his fist into the wall and watched a vein sprout in the plaster, capillaries and all—now he’d have to go up there to the Sanitarium, with all those bloated ducks and bran munchers gawking at him, and broach the subject to Lightbody over a bowl of celery soup. And what if he didn’t want to sign? What if he didn’t remember or had changed his mind or excused himself because he was drunk and didn’t know what he was doing? What if the wife was there? Or old man Kellogg?

No matter: there was no time to waste. He stepped into the pants of his blue serge suit, slapping haphazardly at the eternal flecks of lint, dug a semidecent collar and a pair of cuffs from his suitcase, buttoned up his yellow shoes and hurried down the stairway, shrugging into his greatcoat on the fly. He caught a quick glimpse of Mrs. Eyvindsdottir, Bagwell and some of the others sitting round the table mournfully masticating goat’s cheese burned into rounds of toast and a “nice” haunch of muskrat or groundhog or whatever it was her intrepid inamorato had managed to pull out of his traps that week, and then he was out the door. Walking. Walking yet again. The interurban wasn’t running because of the holiday, and the hacks, if there were any, would have been clustered round the Post Tavern at the other end of town.

It took him twenty minutes to reach the grounds of the San, and his ears were stinging and his toes dead by the time he entered the gleaming, cavernous lobby. There wasn’t much activity—nothing like his first visit, when he’d had to cool his heels outside the old man’s office with George and Bender. A whole parade of people had trooped by them that day, nurses, doctors, women in the kinds of dresses you’d see in the magazines, beautiful women and women not so beautiful, bodybuilders, lacto-ovo vegetarians, a squadron of millionaires in beards and bathrobes (Bender claimed to have recognized half a dozen of them—”It’s not the clothes that make the man, Charlie, it’s the way they carry themselves, fore and aft, remember that—fore and aft”). But today was Christmas day, and the place was pretty quiet. Just as well. Charlie didn’t relish the idea of running into the Doctor or one of the apes who’d hustled him out the door and into the street after his last, ill-fated visit.

He was concentrating on the man at the desk, trying to act casual, ignoring the inquisitive stares of the bellhops in green and the white flash of an orderly he spied out of the corner of his eye, striding purposefully, as if he were at home, as if he belonged here, and he came within a deuce of bowling over a little stick of a woman in a wheelchair with her plaster-bound leg stuck out in front of her like a battering ram. Profuse apologies, tip of the hat, bow to the waist, and a merry Christmas to you, too, ma’am, and all the while he was scanning the place for Kellogg, ready to shrink under the hand at his collar, the boot applied to his backside. He straightened himself up, stared down the nearest bellhop and crossed to the desk without incident.

The man behind the desk had the pinched face and bright fawning eyes of a lapdog. He stood there as if he’d been nailed to the floor, his back as stiff as an ironing board. “Merry Christmas,” he said, and his smile was saccharine, oozing, insipid, “welcome to the University of Health. And how may I be of assistance?”

Charlie asked for Will Lightbody.

“Lightbody, Lightbody,” the man murmured, scanning the register, “ah, here it is—room five-seventeen. Shall I ring him for you?”

Charlie glanced round him. There was a codger with a cane at the base of the staircase, a pair of old ladies positioned like statues in the
jungle room, no orderlies, no doctors, no Kellogg: this was easy. “Yeah, sure—would you do that?”

The clerk picked up the telephone and asked for five-one-seven. He froze his smile on Charlie while the call went through the switchboard, and then he was asking for Mr. Lightbody in a stilted syrupy voice that seemed to drip out of him as if he’d sprung a leak. There was a pause for the reply and Charlie watched the man’s face change—the artificial smile fell away, the lip dropped, and he let out a low gasp of surprise. “No, you don’t mean it?” he said. “Really? For how long?” Another pause. Charlie could feel his heart going. Finally the man hung up the phone and turned to him. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’ve just spoken to Mr. Lightbody’s nurse and she says he’s indisposed—quite ill, actually. It seems he’s taken a sudden turn for the worse. Are you a … relative?”

“Me? Oh, no. No, no. I’m a business associate—acquaintance, that is. Did the nurse happen to indicate how long it will be? Until he can see people, I mean?”

The lapdog eyes came to rest on him with a melting, watery gaze. The clerk took a moment, working a ministerial gravity into his tone. “We can’t know that, I’m afraid. Until we get a diagnosis—well, we can’t even know if …” He broke off. “It seems it’s fairly critical. I’m sorry.”

A tic started up under Charlie’s left eye, beating time with his racing pulse, one thousand dollars, one thousand dollars, Per-Fo stalled, the check a worthless scrap of paper. How could it be? Lightbody hadn’t looked so bad, had he? Or maybe he did look bad, terrible even, sallow, sunken, ready for the grave, but he acted fine. Ate everything in sight. Roared and hooted and drank like an Irishman at a funeral. Charlie didn’t know what to say. It was over, done, finis, time to give it up and trudge on back to the boarding house, but he couldn’t move. His hands gripped the edge of the desk as if it were made of tar, the check seemed to burn through his shirt and into his skin, his feet refused to move.

“I’m sorry,” the clerk repeated. “Deeply sorry, sir. But there’s always hope—and remember, your friend couldn’t find himself in a holier temple of healing.”

It was then that another voice intruded on Charlie’s consciousness,
a bright sarcastic chirp of a voice that sang in his ear like a playground taunt: “Why if it isn’t Mr. Charles P. Ossining, the breakfast-food dynamo!”

He spun round on Eleanor Lightbody, resplendent in green velvet, her hair swept up above a pair of crimson earrings and a necklace of bright gemstones clasped round her white, white throat. She was giving him that infuriating little purse-lipped smile, the one that seemed to invite the world to bend over and kiss her feet. Or her posterior.

“And what brings you to our little citadel of health?”

The check was in his pocket, her husband fading, Per-Fo still on the ground. But Charlie had self-possession—he was born with it—and he had charm and looks and a smile all his own. He took a deep breath. “Well, well, well, Eleanor—and how are you?” He showed her his teeth. “Just inquiring after a friend … but don’t you look the perfect vision of the season?”

It was the right thing to say. “Oh, this?” she murmured, resting a hand on the front of her dress. “Yes, they do tell me I look festive in green.”

“Brings out your eyes.” Charlie looked into those eyes as he spoke, glanced away as if he were suddenly interested in the dowager descending the staircase, and came back to them again. He dropped his smile. He was earnest suddenly, serious, a sponge of pity and sympathy. “I hear your husband took a turn for the worse.”

Now her smile was gone, too, a stricken look settling in around her nose and upper lip. (He saw that her nostrils were faintly reddened—had she been crying?) He felt for Will in that moment—poor sap—and for himself and the worthless check, too, and he couldn’t help feeling for Eleanor, imagining her widowed, rich as a peacock in a nest of feathers and needing support, the support of a younger man, someone to brighten up her days, someone she could pamper and spoil and take to bed at night….

Her voice was soft. “I’m afraid so,” she said.

There was movement around them. The dowager turned the corner and disappeared in the foliage of the jungle, a nurse flickered by, the desk clerk turned his dripping eyes on a middle-aged man in tweeds who’d suddenly materialized at the desk. The telephone rang. Baggage
arrived. An attendant wheeled a cart of covered dishes into the elevator. Even on Christmas day, the business of healing went on.

“Is it—is it serious?” Charlie asked.

“Everything is serious,” she said, arms akimbo, eyes boring into him, her dress lifting a fraction of an inch to show off a pair of bright red patent-leather shoes. “The world is serious. Life is serious. But listen, it’s Christmas day, my husband is”—her hand fell like the drop of a guillotine—”indisposed, and it’s rude of me to keep you standing here in the lobby as if you were some sort of notions peddler or door-to-door salesman or something, forgive me, please.” And here she arched her eyebrows and gave him the old familiar look of bemusement. “Have you eaten, Mr. Ossining?”

He’d been wondering if he should broach the matter of the check, but in that moment he decided against it. Here they were, chatting like old friends, the queen come down off her pedestal, Charlie rising to his station like the magnate he was destined to become. The check would only sully things, put them back on their old footing. He showed her his teeth again. “Why, no. No, I haven’t.”

“Will you join me for dinner, then?”

Charlie was at a loss. The smile faltered. “You mean—here?”

“Of course,” she laughed, and her laugh conspired with him, warm and chummy, the sort of laugh he’d hoped for when he ran across her on the steps of the Post Tavern. “Dining scientifically won’t kill you, Mr. Ossining—not if you try it just once. But I warn you, be careful—you never know what it might lead to.”

The dining room was grandiose, dwarfing anything Bender’s Post Tavern had to offer, a big open columned room that might have been a Roman bath or the training quarters for the gladiators—bears, lions, bulls and all. Palms sprouted from the floor every ten paces, chandeliers glittered, a sea of elegantly set tables swept the buffed marble floors all the way to the great gray windows that looked out over the Biggest Little City in the U.S.A. The room was impressive—it was meant to be, in a showy, pompous way—but except for the odd table here or there, it
was largely deserted; aside from Eleanor and Charlie, there were maybe fifty people in the place. “It’s the Christmas holiday,” Eleanor said, as a brisk little woman with a big front showed them to their table and pulled out chairs for them. “Most of the patients have gone home. Or they’re dining privately.”