The Road to Wellville (44 page)

If Charlie was disappointed, he didn’t let it get him down. This was a minor setback, a hitch in their progress, and he never doubted that
Bender would work things out. Perhaps he didn’t have quite as much confidence in Bookbinder—the word was he’d been lured away from Post Foods by another concern, now bankrupt, and that he’d taken a real bundle out of it, but who could say?—yet it wasn’t the end of the world. If Bookbinder couldn’t get Per-Fo to shape up into something appealing—or even edible—well, they’d have to chalk up the loss to experience and get someone who could. It was a setback. A disappointment. But there was always a way.

At twenty-five, Charlie Ossining was essentially an optimist. And why wouldn’t he be? The Fates had smiled on him, and he’d walked in sunshine the better part of his life. Born Charles Peter McGahee in the town of Ossining-on-Hudson to Irish-immigrant parents who occupied themselves more strenuously with the uncorking of a whiskey bottle than with the means of obtaining such trifles as bread and meat and a roof over their heads, he might have been consigned to the dung heap and suffered through the usual grim and deprived childhood. But he wasn’t. The tutelary gods, in the form of his benefactress, Mrs. Amelia Dowst Hookstratten, prevailed. His father, Cullum, largely through glossal endurance and the strength of a fevered, overactive imagination, had persuaded the widow Hookstratten to take him on as gatekeeper, man-about-the-place and majordomo of her Tarrytown estate, in addition to engaging Charlie’s mother, Mary, as cook and parlormaid. Charlie was a boy of four at the time, precocious, winning, with the wide-open eyes and ready-made grin of the born confidence man (or pastor, tycoon or senator, for that matter).

From the start, Mrs. Hookstratten had taken a consuming interest in the boy, dressing him in the fine calfskin shoes and English tweed jackets her own son (then in his midtwenties and a power on the New York Stock Exchange) had worn in his youth. The boy delighted her. He made her feel necessary again, young at heart, essential; he lent credence to her mornings and regularity to her afternoons. Most of all, he helped her to fill the void left by the death of her husband.

She took Charlie’s schooling in hand, too—though she was as democratic as the next person, she couldn’t help feeling that the village school was the resort of the uncouth, the foreign and the ruffianly. Accordingly, Charlie spent his grammar-school years at Mrs. Partridge’s
School for Young Gentlemen in Briarcliff Manor, where he learned comportment, Latin and music, as well as the three Rs, and spent his later years at St. Basil’s, in Garrison. When Mrs. Hookstratten moved to a more commodious place just south of Peterskill, she did it in order to better display her plumage, of course, rising to her station on the strength of her late husband’s investments as managed by her pencil-sharp son, but also—though she’d admit it to no one, not even herself—to be closer to Charlie; that is, if he wanted to come home for the occasional weekend. And it was for Charlie, too, that she brought Cullum and Mary with her, though Charlie’s father was by this time so far gone in his drink that he couldn’t even be relied upon to open the gate when the occasion demanded it, and Charlie’s mother had developed a host of mysterious ailments, from a ringing in her ears to palpitations of the phalanges, that rendered her all but useless as cook, maid, pot scrubber or linen changer.

Yes, Charlie had had all the advantages, but as so often happens under such circumstances, he rejected them. Not outright, of course, but in the long run, in a growing repudiation of the expectations society had for him and a corresponding fascination with the life of those who live outside those expectations, who live by their wits, instincts, poise and balance. It was while he was at St. Basil’s that this new way of looking at things first dawned on him. He was fifteen at the time, expert with his fists, a good runner, an indifferent athlete, a mediocre scholar. Intellectual pursuits held no interest for him. The quizzes, the tests, the essays, the committing of facts to memory and words to paper were torture to him, forced labor, the work of the underclass and the imprisoned—it wasn’t even paid work, that’s what got him. Mrs. Hookstratten had to pay
them
—Dr. Van Osburgh and the rest—to torment him with names and dates and numbers, with plane geometry and ancient history. Charlie wanted out. He dreamed of running off and setting up on his own; of being a power in business, any business; of acquiring the tangible accoutrements—the house, the carriage, the billiard table—that would tell the world he was no mere gatekeeper’s son. And what did St. Basil’s Academy have to do with any of that?

One night, thumbing through an issue of
Scribner’s
because he couldn’t stand the thought of memorizing the names and dates of all the regents
of England from Edward of Wessex and Ethelred II to Victoria, he came across an advertisement that caught his eye:

Here was an easy out. A miracle. Suddenly he saw his way to becoming the top scholar in the place, spoon-feeding Mrs. Hookstratten and graduating to his real life in business or finance or something—and all without a lick of effort. He snuck a look over his shoulder to see if his roommate, Wapner, was watching, tore the page from the magazine, folded it carefully and secreted it in his pocket.

Charlie invested a dollar and sent for the tablets. He took one the day they arrived, but it didn’t seem to help much with his Latin paradigms, on which he received a grade of F. The following day he took two, thinking the increased dosage would fix the lines of Portia’s speech on the quality of mercy indelibly in his head, but when he got up to recite in class, all he could remember was the phrase “twice blessed.” It stuck there, like a broken tooth in a gearbox, until the class dissolved in laughter and the master told him to sit down. He tried three pills, four, five, took them on an empty stomach, after meals, before bed, first thing in the morning. He went through six dollars and three hundred tablets before he understood that he’d been taken. The pills were useless, worthless, no more effective than chewing bark from the trees or grass from the playing field.

Here he was, sharpest of the sharp, looking for an easy way around the demands of St. Basil’s, looking for a way to circumvent the system, and he’d wound up throwing away his spending money for the term on a sham, a hoax, a confidence game even the dullest and weakest of the boys would never have fallen for. He’d been sucked in because he was vulnerable, because he had a need, a weakness, the gull’s hope. It was
a lesson. A lesson more valuable than anything Mr. Petrussi or Dr. Van Osburgh ever taught him. And who was the man who’d dreamed up the idea of the memory tablets to begin with, who’d placed the ad and watched the money pour in from a legion of dupes and half-wits that stretched from coast to coast? Who was he? There was real genius. There was the man they should be studying.

When Charlie left school in his junior year, Mrs. Hookstratten was disappointed. He didn’t return home, didn’t write or send word or explanation. He just packed his bag one night, caught a ride into Peterskill with the milk wagon and began the study of billiards in earnest. After a week he showed up hungry at the gatehouse. His father lamented in a red-eyed, sloppy-mouthed way; his mother groaned about her pains and conniptions; Mrs. Hookstratten pleaded with him. But to no avail. By the time he was seventeen he was living on his own, in a rented room over a dry-goods store in Tarrytown, earning an uncertain living at cards, dice and pool. He drank, but never in the way of his father, and he found women to comfort and amuse him but he made no attachments. It wasn’t until he’d matured a bit and began to grow impatient with his two-bit hustles, with the taverns and the fistfights and the women who thought that “youse” was the plural form of the pronoun, that he came back to the Hookstratten fold. And then it was only because he’d met Bender, and because he had a goal and a vision—because he had Per-Fo.

A week after the dismal failure of their efforts in the Bookbinder basement, Bender sent Ernest O’Reilly to Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s to fetch Charlie to the Post Tavern Hotel. Charlie went in the service entrance and up the back stairs, as he customarily did now to avoid the doorman and bell captain (though he hadn’t forgotten he owed them a little debt, which he intended to pay back, with interest, someday). Bender was lordly in a red silk dressing gown and his nose was flushed from any number of medicinal doses of Otard Dupuy. Single-minded and devoted to his goal, Charlie had long since ceased to concern himself over the disparity between his and his partner’s living styles. Bender was Bender,
and that was all there was to it. There would be plenty of luxury to spare when Per-Fo flew.

“Charlie, Charlie, my boy, my boy,” Bender cried, doubling up his words and crossing the room to crush Charlie in his volcanic tycoon’s embrace. He fell back, redolent of cognac, and indicated a chair with a princely sweep of his arm. “Sit down,” he said, “there’s something I want to discuss with you.”

Charlie sat. Did he want a cognac? Sure. Cigar? No thanks.

Charlie revolved the snifter in his hands. “Well, okay,” he said, and he’d been cooling his heels at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s for seven days now, reading dime novels and trying not to think about what his thrifty landlady might be stewing up in the big iron pot on the stove, going quietly crazy, “so what is it?”

Bender pulled his big feet up under the chair opposite and sank into its plush depths. “It’s just this, Charlie,” he said, scratching at the side of his nose and bringing his fractured gray eyes to rest on Charlie’s. “It’s obvious that we’re encountering a bit of a problem with the formula for Per-Fo—I mean, I appreciate everybody’s effort, I’m not saying that, but I just don’t think we’re going to be able to get it right out there in that old lady’s basement.”

Charlie started to protest, but Bender held up his hand.

“Look, Charlie, I know what you’re going to say, we’ve laid out a considerable expense here, what with the dent corn, Bart’s fee, the oven—but it’s chicken feed, really, when you think of the millions we’ll be taking in by this time next year. And we can reuse the oven and some of the tubs and whatnot, that’s not a problem, and the whole thing, despite appearances to the contrary, was not a wasted effort.” He paused, sniffed at his brandy. “At least we learned something.”

“What? What did we learn?” Charlie was irritated. He’d broken his back to make that hog slop, and he’d put his heart into it, too. Sure, conditions weren’t what he wanted, but it had been Bender who’d convinced him to go along with it in the first place—and at least he’d had the feeling that they were accomplishing something. After eight weeks of frustration, at least they were moving forward, at least they were
doing
something … and now Bender was telling him it was a
waste of time, effort and money, but that they’d learned something.
Learned something.
Big deal.

“We learned I was wrong, Charlie. You were right. You were against that basement from the beginning. I thought we’d at least get the ball rolling there, settle on a formula and fill up our sample boxes—that’s all we need, just those thousand boxes and it’s off to the races. But it didn’t work. We were too ambitious. We jumped in before we had factory space, equipment, proper ovens and retorts and mixing tubs. Peach baskets, for Christ’s sake. No wonder it didn’t turn out.” He paused to let a little taste of brandy trickle down his throat. “No, Charlie, I was wrong.”

Charlie wanted to remonstrate, wanted to go back to Bookbinder’s and give it another try, but he’d never heard Bender admit that he was wrong before, even after Kellogg had summarily booted them off the Sanitarium grounds, and he held his peace to see what was coming.

“I guess you’re wondering what the next step is, aren’t you?” Bender said in a mellow, ruminative voice, a voice of assurance and quiet confidence, the voice of a man with an ace in the hole. Bender always had an ace in the hole. He sat back and stretched, the smoke from his cigar wafting lazily round him. Outside, beyond the elegant curtains and double-hung windows, it was another gray and relentless Michigan day. “Well, I’ll tell you. I’ve got a plan, Charlie, and I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before … it would have saved us—
you
—a whole lot of expense and confusion. Anyway, everything’s on track again, don’t you worry.”

There was a pause. Why didn’t he get to the point?

“Listen, to get to the point, I want you, George and this fellow Hayes down at the loading dock of the Grand Trunk Railroad—you know it, on the east end of town?—at twelve midnight tonight.”

“Midnight?”

Bender nodded. “Fourteen carloads of Will K.’s finest, crispest, genuine and guaranteed toasted corn flakes are going out of there first thing in the morning—and I’ve already fixed it with a man I know down at the train yard, so don’t worry about a thing—”