The Road to Wellville (62 page)

The Cafe Nonpareil (“Nutritious Food Without Slaughter”) was a replica in miniature of the San dining hall, run by a zealous former patient who attributed her cure to the Doctor’s recipes and a quasi-religious revelation in which an anthropomorphic lamb had appeared to her with a butcher’s diagram stenciled on its hindquarters. The menu ran to things like Beet Tops Salade and Jerusalem Artichokes, Broiled Tender. Mrs. Hookstratten kept up an unrelenting stream of complaint throughout the meal, wondering how in heaven’s name her own boy, whom she’d seen through the finest schools and staked in business, could treat her so shabbily, delivering her up into the hands of strangers and all but deserting her. “Don’t tell me you can’t find time for me, Charles, don’t tell me,” she huffed, picking at a glutinous ball of unhulled rice.

Charlie pleaded, charmed, lied. He used all his skills as an apprentice confidence man and professional dissembler to propitiate her, giving way on every point, issuing promises like paper money and weaving a fabric of lies so tight it could have sustained the political platform of a national party. On Friday he took her out again, and she nagged him inexorably—Where had he been? Couldn’t he at least have phoned? Sent a note? She’d been here nearly a week now and he hadn’t even seen her room yet. Didn’t he care how she was doing or where they’d put her? Did her comfort mean nothing to him? Her health? Her nerves? Her itching? And what about the factory? She was beginning to believe it was built on air.

This time Charlie was ready for her. Finally. “How does Sunday sound, Auntie? It’s the only day the workers are off, and believe me, you wouldn’t want to set foot in the place with all the noise and confusion of the full-scale operation, not with your nerves—”

The light froze in her spectacles. She clutched the fork like a weapon and the diamond at her throat glared in its uncompromising purity. “What time?” she asked, her lips clamped round the question.

“Seven.”

“Seven? But isn’t that awfully early? I’ve got my Swedish Manual Movements to get through, you know—and morning services.”

Charlie smiled with his whole face, his whole head, smiled till he could feel the skin at the back of his neck tugged up like a window shade, “Seven in the evening,” he said.

Night fell deep and early that Sunday, accompanied by a steady sizzling rain that drove the earthworms up onto the sidewalks and obscured all the hard lines and recognizable features of Foodtown, U.S.A. To Charlie’s mind, the weather was perfect. Once they got into the cab out front of the San, Mrs. Hookstratten couldn’t have known whether they were traveling north, south, east or west, or if they’d risen up into the sky like one of the Wrights’ airplanes. She was visibly excited. And though she didn’t pause even for breath, her tone was less combative and he could feel her softening. Should he ask for five thousand? he wondered. Ten? He didn’t want to shock her with the figure, but, then, he didn’t want to underplay his hand, either.

They were met at the door by Delahoussaye’s cousin, a bald-headed man in a cheap but respectable-looking suit and an ingratiating smile. Twenty dollars was a lot of money, but it bought Charlie an exhaustive tour of the facilities, from the flour-milling room to the roasting room to the packing line and the folding and stitching room, where the cartons were constructed (the cartons themselves had, of course, been conveniently mislocated, so as not to cause Mrs. Hookstratten any undue perplexity). It also bought—or, rather, rented—an oracle who could answer even the most recondite question with a thoroughness that would have exhausted a team of engineers. In fact, the cousin was so good, he had Charlie half convinced that this grand and immaculate plant was his after all, and Charlie resolved to tip him a dollar when they left.

The problem came when they reached the offices. Charlie had arranged for Per-Fo letterhead and a nameplate for the desk, and he’d been careful to sanitize the place of all signs of its true affiliation. Telephone, typewriter and blotter were stationed on the desk, along with a homely spill of pens, pencils and gum erasers. “And here,
Auntie,” Charlie said, throwing open the door, “is my inner sanctum.”

Mrs. Hookstratten’s face fell. She bit her lip. Her eyes devoured the room and spat it out again.

“Auntie?” Charlie croaked, frantically scanning the place for the telltale trace of Push paraphernalia, the corpus delicti, the dead giveaway. “Is there something the matter? Don’t you like my office?”

The steely eyes, the unforgiving compress of the lips. Mrs. Hookstratten could be tough—tough enough to drive whole armies howling before her. “But this isn’t mahogany, Charles—even a child could see that.” She shot a wilting look at the cousin, as if he were somehow responsible for duping her boy in this most essential of equations.

“Cherrywood, ma’am,” the cousin said.

“Painted in a mahogany stain,” Charlie put in, waving his fingertips as if he’d burned them. “Isn’t that right, Garth?”

“That’s right, sir.”

But Mrs. Hookstratten wouldn’t be placated. “It’s criminal, is what it is,” she puffed, “using a cheap domestic wood that doesn’t have one-half—not one-half—the elegance and richness of mahogany, and here I’d been led to believe … but surely you were deceived, Charles? If it weren’t mahogany and you knew it, you would have been the first to tell me, wouldn’t you?”

Charlie exchanged a glance with the cousin. “Yes, Auntie, of course, but—”

“Well, then,” and she bounced the flat of her hand off the desk as if to dismiss it, “it’s a terrible, awful shame. If you can’t distinguish your woods, as any child can, then I don’t wonder you’re having difficulties getting that breakfast food into Offenbacher’s.”

There was an awkward moment, during which Charlie put on a face of mock righteousness, expressing his outrage with the furnishers and their cheap deceptions, and then he humbled himself and said a prayer aloud, wishing only that his Auntie Hookstratten had been there from the beginning to see that he wasn’t taken. And then he vowed, with the squarest set of his jaw, to have those furnishers back in to replace the whole business—wainscoting and all—with genuine Malay mahogany. She sniffed her approval, and the moment passed. After
bidding their farewells to the cousin, they gathered up their things and stepped out into the rain beneath the bright startling plane of the Per-Fo sign.

It was then, just as he was escaping unscathed, just as he was unfurling the umbrella and working up the courage to broach the subject of pressing needs and lagging investment, that a new and infinitely more dangerous threat arose. What would it have taken them to reach the cab without incident—twenty, thirty seconds? What if they’d lingered half a minute more to chat with Charlie’s presumptive foreman or spent another five minutes in the granary, absorbing the sweet farinaceous odor of the drying corn? But no, they had to leave just then, just on the crux of that nasty fatal moment.

“Charlie!” a voice bawled from the drenching dark, “Charlie Ossining!”

The rain fell, the puddles grew, Mrs. Hookstratten huddled beneath the umbrella and looked round her, startled. Charlie froze.

“It’s me, partner,” the voice cried, and then it began to solidify round a form staggering out of the gloom, a ragged form, oddly familiar, creature of the crushed hat and vomitous overcoat, poised to deliver the death-blow to all Charlie’s dwindling hopes. George Kellogg, in all his rancid glory, stood astride the walk before them.

“George,” Charlie said, and gave a curt nod of dismissal. He tightened his grip on Mrs. Hookstratten’s arm and tried to hurry her past the obstruction in the path, but George was too quick for him. Suddenly he was under the umbrella with them, his arm clapped round Charlie’s shoulder, a miasma of earthy and human stinks enveloping them like a shroud in their fetid little pocket of the night.

“Saw the sign,” George slurred. And then he stuck his face in Mrs. Hookstratten’s and breathed, “Nice evening, ma’am.”

“Look,” Charlie said, trying to fight his way out from under George’s arm while at the same time managing to keep a grip on the umbrella and Mrs. Hookstratten, “I haven’t got time for this foolishness now—”

“Who
is
this horrid man?” Mrs. Hookstratten demanded. The rain beat at the fabric of the umbrella; it drooled from the eaves of the factory in a maudlin hypnotic dirge.

“I said get away, George,” Charlie growled.

But George wouldn’t let go. “Get away? Foolishness? Horrid man?” he echoed, sober suddenly. “I’m insulted, Charlie. Deeply hurt. Is that any way to talk to your closest business associate, the man who’s lent his good and valuable name to all this, this”—he flapped his arm at the high-flung sign cut into the roof of the night behind them—“this enterprise?”

Mrs. Hookstratten hardened beside Charlie—he could feel her going rigid as the outrageousness of the situation grew on her. “What’s he saying?” she demanded. “Who is this man?”

Charlie never got a chance to answer. George let go then, his features hammered in light, and removed his hat with a mock bow. “George Kellogg, at your service, madam. You wouldn’t happen to have any spare change, would you?”

   
Chapter 6   

I
t was a night for sleeping, the wind gentle in the trees, rain counting time on the shingles, the house held in the soft fluttering grip of its tics and rustlings. But for John Harvey Kellogg, sleep would not come. He lay there in his bed, stiff as a corpse, scrubbed inside and out and enfolded in the crisp white sheets and freshly laundered blankets as if he’d been sealed in an envelope, and willed himself to relax. He forced his eyes shut, listened to the house settle around him. It was so still and the rain so soft, he could hear the occasional muted snore from Ella’s room across the hall, the faintest little slip of a sound that somehow filled him with sadness.

It was past two in the morning, and he needed sleep. Not in the way an ordinary man might, and not so much of it, either—but he needed it nonetheless. He routinely got by with four hours a night and had always regarded the whole notion of sleep with suspicion. It seemed wasteful, sinful, a squandering of precious resources, and he was always amazed to find that some people actually looked forward to it. But as a physician, he understood and appreciated the body’s need for respite from the trials of waking life, and he was willing to give in to it once a day, as part of his regimen. Just as he wouldn’t dream of going without his enemas or his Swedish Manual Movements or oat bran, so he wouldn’t go without sleep, either—it was a vital component of the
physiologic life. And usually, through force of will, he was able to get to sleep in an efficient and economical way. After a cup of Sanitas Koko or herbal tea and some quiet reading in the
Journal of the American Emunctory Society
or the
Hydrotherapy Newsletter
, he would slip into his white cambric pajamas with the silver J.H.K. monogram over the heart and drop off to sleep the moment he extinguished the light.