The Road to Wellville (69 page)

They moved out into the corridor at a glacial pace, the men stiff as corpses, the women fluttering and cackling like the old hens they were. If Charlie hadn’t already felt uneasy, the fact that no one in the crowd seemed to be less than twenty years older than he didn’t help any. Still, he glad-handed this one and that, trying his level best to look as if he belonged, working the crowd as Bender might have done—you never knew. He didn’t give a damn for the Sanitarium or anything about it, but these people were all food cranks, every last one of them, and if that wasn’t a ready-made audience for Per-Fo (or whatever it was going to be called) he didn’t know what was. And they had money. Money to invest.

He found himself discussing breakfast food as he moved up the hallway and into the lobby with this suddenly congenial group, all his vague fears dissolved in the growing awareness of what the connection could mean to him. And then he understood: this was the reason Auntie Hookstratten had arranged this little luncheon for him, of course it was, and if she seemed a bit distracted it was because she was anxious to see him make a good impression. He felt a sudden surge of affection for her. Where was she? There, at the head of the crowd, with the countess she’d introduced him to earlier, showing her guests into the Palm Garden, where the luncheon was to be held under the glass ceiling. She was good to him, yes she was, and he resolved to make it up to her.

The crowd bunched up at the entrance to the garden room, most heading for the elevators to dine upstairs, a select few moving in amongst the ferns and creepers to sit at the long, linen-covered table he could make out through the doorway. Charlie lingered a moment, making his farewells to this former group and chatting amiably with the latter, no hurry, everything moving along at a sedate and leisurely pace. It was
while he was standing there pumping the suety hand of an elderly gentleman from Mississippi—”Cotton’s my game, son; what’s yours?”—that he spotted Eleanor Lightbody. She was standing at the foot of the grand staircase in a white muslin dress and a wide-brimmed straw hat decorated with artificial flowers. There was a woman at her side, similarly dressed, a picnic basket in her arms and a pair of binoculars dangling from her neck. They weren’t moving, but were poised there at the banister, eyes ranging over the crowd as if they were waiting for someone. Charlie excused himself and made his way toward them.

“Eleanor,” he said, coming up to her and taking her hand, all thought of sandwich boards and the humiliation of traipsing through the rain like an itinerant peddler banished in a stroke.

“Oh,” she gasped, dropping her eyes, and it was as if he’d interrupted her at some private moment, “hello.” She seemed confused, stripped for an instant of that self-possession that stirred and alienated him at the same time.

He felt awkward suddenly—was she going to snub him?—and he removed his hand from hers and hid it behind his back. “I was just here to see Mrs. Hookstratten—Auntie Amelia—and I thought I’d say hello….”

“Oh, yes, of course—your luncheon.”

He was surprised. “You know of it?”

Her eyes were cold, translucent, glass. “Of course—and I did so want to come, but I’m afraid I have a prior engagement. Virginia and I are going bird-watching…. Have you met Virginia?”

Eleanor’s companion—she looked to be about forty, with sallow skin, a disproportionate bosom and a pair of hips that cut like scythes at the seams of her dress—held out her hand. Charlie took it.

“Virginia Cranehill,” Eleanor said, “Charlie Ossining.”

“The Per-Fo man,” Virginia pronounced with a smirk, and Eleanor gave her a sharp look. “A pleasure.”

“Likewise,” Charlie said, and he wondered what was going on between them—and how did this woman know about him? Would Eleanor have told her? Mrs. Hookstratten? And what would they have said—judging from that smirk it wouldn’t have been all that flattering. After all these months, Eleanor Lightbody was still making a joke of him. He felt a
surge of resentment—and who was she to feel so superior? What had she ever accomplished—marrying a rich man? He would show her. He would show them all.

“Amelia tells me your new factory is really quite the thing,” Eleanor said, the old mockery dancing in her eyes, “very modern and efficient. You must be pleased to have come so far so quickly.”

There was no mistaking her tone and it chilled him suddenly. How much did she know? How much did any of them know? The uneasy feeling he’d had all morning tightened its grip on him. Something was wrong here, terribly wrong.

He glanced round him at the gilded trappings of the place, the men and women in their expensive clothes and polished accents, and suddenly he was angry. She was one of them and he was nothing to her, nothing more than a diversion, a toy. There was no romance in that Christmas dinner, no intimacy at all. She was rich and bored and her husband was incapacitated and half the society of the San had gone home for the holidays and so she’d fastened on him the way she might have picked up a lapdog or a penny dreadful. He was nothing, nothing at all.

“You’re looking thin,” he observed, throwing it back at her. “The dietary doesn’t agree with you?”

No trace of amusement in those arctic eyes. He shot a glance at the entrance of the Palm Garden—the crowd was thinning. “I’ve been fasting,” she said finally. “It’s the latest cure. But we’ll be eating today, won’t we, Virginia?”

Virginia patted the basket and emitted a tight little nasal laugh.

Charlie didn’t so much as glance at her. He held Eleanor with his gaze. “And your skin,” he said. “Have you been out in the sun?”

He seemed to have struck a chord. Eleanor put a hand to her throat, an instinctive gesture, and he saw that the hand contrasted sharply with the high white collar of the dress. She was dark, dark as a gypsy. “Yes, of course,” she said, and a crease of irritation had appeared between her eyes. “The sun’s rays are purely natural and health-giving and we should drink them up whenever we can—and wear white clothing, as Dr. Kellogg does, to allow those health-giving rays to penetrate to the innermost flesh, the flesh that’s never seen the light of day. It’s a basic
scientific truth, Mr. Ossining”—and now they were on a formal footing again, strangers—“one that I think even you should be aware of.”

He wanted to say something cutting, something about washerwomen and grape pressers and how much they enjoyed the sun, too, but he didn’t have the opportunity. At that moment, careening, brash and loud, Eleanor’s companion of that rainy April afternoon descended on them—he of the overlarge head and nagging, fitful voice. “Eleanor, Virginia,” the man rasped, taking them each by the hand in turn and completely ignoring Charlie, “are you ready?”

They were. They gathered themselves, tiny little steps in place, a twitch of the shoulders, a smoothing of the dress, a touch to the hat, women on the verge of movement. “You look charming,” the big-headed man growled, turning his back to Charlie and reaching out an arm to shepherd them along, “perfectly charming. Both of you.”

Charlie felt something go off inside of him. He wouldn’t be treated this way, he wouldn’t be ignored. He was President-in-Chief of the Per-Fo Company, whether it had flown or not, and he was on the brink of great things. “Nice to see you again,
Eleanor
,” he said, putting all the venom he could into it.

The little group halted, arrested, and turned back to him, the big-headed man—Badger, wasn’t that his name?—looking as if he’d just seen a clod of earth rise up before his eyes, shape itself into human form and speak. Virginia Cranehill ducked her chin defensively. Eleanor’s jaw went hard. She looked round the room once, and then, without warning, she leaned into Charlie, took his elbow in a raptor’s grip and swung him away from the others. “I know all about the thousand dollars,” she hissed, and her breath was hot in his face. “You took advantage of my husband at his weakest, a poor sick man struggling for his very life—”

“It was a legitimate investment.”

“In what?” Their faces were so close they might have been embracing. A man in Sanitarium white, arms folded across his chest, was quietly watching them from across the room. “An imaginary company? A sham, a fraud, an illusion? The Charles P. Ossining Pension Fund? Where’s that ‘investment’ now, huh?” She was trembling. Her eyes dug at him. She tightened her grip on his arm and then flung it away from her as
if it were something she’d picked up in the street. “There are laws, you know, for people like you.”

He wanted to explain, wanted to reason with her, lie, win her over—against all odds he wanted her to like him, admire him, he did—but it was too late, he could see that, and it frightened him. If she saw through him so clearly, what of the others, what of Mrs. Hookstratten?

There was a touch at his arm, and his benefactress was there, standing at attention, her feet pressed neatly together. “Charles,” she said, “Charles, dear,” and her voice seemed to quaver as she exchanged a look with Eleanor, “come on in—everyone’s waiting.”

He turned to go, but Eleanor wasn’t through, not quite yet. “And Charlie,” she called, tucking her arm into Badger’s and giving him a sour look over her shoulder, “if I don’t see you again, enjoy your lunch.”

There were twenty guests in all, a glittering collection of brushed whiskers, brilliantined hair, hats, silks, diamond earrings and gold watch fobs, and they were already seated, setting up a muted buzz of polite conversation and having a go at the celery, crackerbread and bran cakes on the table before them. As Mrs. Hookstratten led Charlie into the room, they looked up as one from their butter knives and celery sticks, a feast of sharp penetrating eyes. Charlie shot a quick glance up and down the table, muttered an apology, and sank into the chair on Mrs. Hookstratten’s right, the place of honor. A pair of Sanitarium girls in blue caps and starched skirts moved up and down the length of the table, pouring fruit juices and water from the Sanitarium springs. There were ferns everywhere, creepers, flowers, fronds, the jungle itself come to life in Michigan. Charlie gave the man across from him a nervous smile and self-consciously brushed at the lint clinging to the lapels of his cheap but serviceable blue serge suit.

And then there were the introductions. The man to Charlie’s right was a judge from Detroit, and beside him was the thespian lady, Mrs. Tindermarsh, now relieved of her greasepaint and stage powder. Directly
across from him was a Mr. Philpott, police chief from Baltimore, and Mrs. Philpott, a wizened little nugget of a woman with skin like old newsprint and a rubbery, exaggerated smile. To her left was a hulking red-faced man with pinned-back ears and a name Charlie didn’t catch—he was with the Michigan Association of Correctional Institutions—and beyond him, which was about as far down as polite introductions would allow, was the diminutive Countess, blanketed in jewels and holding forth on the subject of bowel movements.

Charlie gave each of them a forthright smile and replied, to the inevitable question, that he was in the breakfast-food business—but what was that glimmer in their eyes as they asked, and why the preponderance of people associated with the law? Was it chance? Or was there something else going on here, something grim, nasty, final? But no. He was wound up tight, that was all. These were just decent, ordinary food cranks with jittery stomachs and clogged-up intestines who happened coincidentally to be in the field of law enforcement—he’d just have to avoid soliciting investments from them. In fact, he made a mental note of it.

The girls were bringing in the soup course and Charlie was engaged in a conversation with the Philpotts over the relative merits of the various breakfast foods, when he happened to glance down the table and catch the eye of a very familiar looking individual, a gangling, overdressed, ever-so-slightly cross-eyed individual with an untamed shock of hair fallen across his brow: none other than Will Lightbody himself. It was a jolt to see him there after the encounter with his wife—but how could Charlie have missed him? Charlie gave him an agitated wink—was he going to demand his investment back now, on top of everything else?—but Will gave no sign that he recognized him. He looked preoccupied, somber, a whole continent away. Charlie’s first thought was to avoid him when the party broke up, but there was no sense in that—Mrs. Hookstratten would have invited him expressly because of the Peterskill connection. He would just have to put the best face on it he could.

They were well into the entrée—the usual boiled pasteboard and soggy greens—when Charlie had a second surprise. A shock, actually, of the first magnitude. Across from Will Lightbody, at the far end of
the table and blocked from view till this moment by the grazing heads and busy hands of the intervening guests, was the erect and unmistakable figure of Bartholomew Bookbinder.
Bookbinder
. And what in God’s name was he doing here? The answer, too horrible to phrase, rang like a tocsin through his veins and he turned to Mrs. Hookstratten in fear and bewilderment—“Auntie,” he pleaded, “Auntie”—but she looked away from him and he saw her lip tremble. He had to get out of here, had to get out now—

It was too late.

At that moment, just as the guests were sucking thoughtfully at the last morsels of whatever it was they’d been served and the girls in the blue caps had begun to exchange the dinner settings for dessert plates, the little white general himself, the impresario, the Chief, the lord of the manor, strode through the door from the lobby accompanied by six of his white-clad lieutenants and a ferrety slope-shouldered man with a badge pinned to his shirt and a baton dangling casually from his right hand—and there was no doubting who he was. Charlie froze. There were two other exits—one leading to the Men’s Gymnasium, the other to the Women’s—and the orderlies quickly fanned out to cover both of them. Paralyzed, staring down at the table for fear of lifting his eyes, Charlie sat there hunched inside himself like a man being beaten with a stick. In that moment he saw himself stepping off the train, full of his pathetic naive hopes and dreams, saw himself in Bookbinder’s basement, tramping the streets in his sandwich board, lifting a glass of Otard Dupuy with Bender in his high-flown suite of rooms at the Post Tavern Hotel.
And so it all comes down to this
, he thought.
It all comes down to this
.