The Road to Wellville (70 page)

“Good afternoon, my friends,” the Doctor boomed, rubbing his hands together like a workman setting out his tools, and striding down the length of the table to the far end before pivoting and staring back up again. “I wish you all a very happy holiday and urge you to enjoy all the many festivities we’ve organized for the remainder of the day, including the sing-along and fireworks display this evening, and I want to thank you all for attending this little luncheon I’ve asked Mrs. Hookstratten to arrange, and hope you will find it instructive, as well as gratifying to the palate. And, oh yes, of course, I’d like to thank Mrs.
Hookstratten for her participation, which I know must have been difficult for her, in light of what will shortly be revealed….”

There was a spatter of applause for Mrs. Hookstratten, but she barely acknowledged it. She bit her lip and clasped her hands before her. She wouldn’t look at Charlie.

For his part, Charlie stared so hard at his plate he could have reproduced its every least line and fracture from memory. He didn’t move a muscle. Couldn’t. The smell of the place immobilized him, rank and tropical, the smell of decay, rot, fatality, of betrayal and the death of hope, and it clogged his nostrils till he could smell nothing else. He choked back a sob. He could barely breathe.

The Doctor whirled, pirouetted, danced on his toes—he was enjoying himself. He stopped opposite Charlie, framing the heavy shoulders and sagely nodding head of Philpott, the police chief from Baltimore, and made a pyramid of his fingers. “There is here among us,” he announced, “a fraud and criminal of the very worst stripe, a man so heinous and without conscience that I’ve taken time out from my crowded schedule to arrange this gathering both to ensnare and expose him and to warn you all against him and his ilk.”

He paused, never taking his eyes from Charlie. “This is a man who would violate every fundamental principle of human decency, who would defraud his own patron, the very woman—Mrs. Amelia Hookstratten—who took him up from poverty and low circumstances to dress and educate him and give him a start in life … a man who would think nothing of taking money under false pretenses from our own Mr. Lightbody, a model patient and as decent and trusting a fellow as there is, and this after weakening his resolve with alcoholic beverages smuggled into this institution in direct contravention of all we hold sacred … a man who, without a glimmer of moral awareness, would defraud a legion of poor honest hardworking grocers throughout the country, all but steal the staggering sum of thirty-five thousand dollars from the most steadfast citizens of this our decent little forward-looking town, our Battle Creek, and, worst of all, betray the public trust in our great and selfless mission to save the American stomach and ensure each and every one of us the full enjoyment of life and longevity to which we are entitled—and if that isn’t murder, I don’t know what is.”

The Doctor drew himself up, his head swinging on its axis with its freight of grief, anger, heartache and denunciation. “I say to you, ladies and gentlemen, this is cynicism at its most pernicious, this is nay-saying and criminality, this, without exaggeration, is the greatest danger facing America today.”

Charlie was dead, numb, all the receptors of sense and pain shut down to the threshold of endurance. He hung his head. He shrank. He prayed for it to end, longed for the clasp of the handcuffs, the clank of the iron door.

“Per-Fo,” the Doctor pronounced, and the once-cherished name, the name that had made Charlie proud, was the vilest curse on his accuser’s lips. “
Kellogg’s
Per-Fo. Have any of you heard of it? No? Well, it’s a good thing. A blessing. Would that Mrs. Hookstratten, Mr. Lightbody and our own Mr. Bartholomew Bookbinder could say the same. Would that
I
could. Yes, I, even I. For this vicious venal individual, and I’ll pronounce his name and be the first to point an accusing finger—Mr. Charles P. Ossining, sitting here before you in all his wretchedness—this man tried to enfold even me in his web of deception, shamelessly using the name of one of my unfortunate adoptive sons as a means of blackmailing me to ‘invest’ in his nonexistent breakfast-food company. I say it’s outrageous, ladies and gentlemen. I say it is sick, twisted, perverted.”

A murmur went up from the table, ugly and incriminating. Mrs. Hookstratten sobbed into her napkin. “Auntie,” Charlie whispered, appealing to her against all hope, “help me, please, I didn’t … I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—”

She lifted her face to him, and he barely recognized her. Her eyes were wet, nostrils pinched, her face a pit of age and misery, gone old in an instant. “The factory,” she choked, and the whole table was riveted on them now, “your letters … how could you do that to me? Tell me what I’ve done to deserve this? Tell me?”

Charlie looked wildly round the table. “It wasn’t me—it was Bender!” he cried. “Bender, Bender did it!”

The Doctor loomed over him now, suddenly interposed between him and Mrs. Hookstratten, as if to shield her with his body. “Your accomplice, sir, is now under custody in Detroit, or so Judge Behrens
informs me, and will get everything that is coming to him,” the Doctor observed dryly before raising his eyes to the company at large. The judge threw Charlie a malignant look, and his wife drew back her lip in a sneer.

“I am a humanitarian,” the Doctor announced after a moment’s reflection, and all the while he was patting Mrs. Hookstratten’s erupting shoulders with a plump and consolatory hand, “and I do believe in rehabilitation and the ultimate perfectibility of man, and yet”—the swipe at the brow, the thunderous breath—”some things disgust me to the very core of my being. This man—and I won’t waste much more of your valuable time on him, believe me—this man, Charles P. Ossining, is such a threat to all our good work, such a subverter and perverter of the dietary truths to which I have dedicated my life and all my energies, that I cannot find it in my heart to pity him—no, not for a second.”

There was a silence—the Doctor was finished. Mrs. Hookstratten, the betrayer, melted into his healing embrace, her every breath torn with the ferocity of her sobs. Overhead, palm fronds knifed at the light and alien creepers dangled their nooses and coils. The guests sat motionless in their chairs. Charlie looked desperately from one face to another—it was Bender, couldn’t they see that?—but there was nothing there but loathing and contempt.

“Bill,” the Doctor called sternly into the silence, and the man with the badge stepped forward and Charlie felt himself lifted from the chair, felt the distant cold kiss of steel at his wrists and heard the snap of the handcuffs as if from some immeasurable distance, as if someone else were being shackled, someone else drubbed, humiliated and crushed in full public view. Dr. Kellogg stood at attention, his lips compressed in triumph. “Take charge of your prisoner,” he said, “and see that he is prosecuted to the very fullest extent of the law.”

   
Chapter 9   

W
ill was depressed. Yet another holiday, and here he was, still at the San, still alientated from his wife, still aching, still alone. Eleanor had gone off bird-watching—that was a new one:
bird-watching
—with that cow of a woman, and no doubt Badger as well. The three of them were practically inseparable, though he couldn’t begin to fathom what the attraction was. Badger was like a sliver driven under your nails and Virginia Cranehill was just plain coarse, that was all.
Bird-watching
. He wouldn’t be surprised if they’d taken their doctor along, too, the womb manipulator. The man needed a day off just like anyone else—his fingers must have been exhausted, worn down to the nubs. Yes: ha-ha-ha. Jokes, pathetic jokes. That’s what he’d been reduced to.

He lay there on his physiologic bed in his physiologic room on the fifth floor of the Sanitarium and stared at the physiologic ceiling. Somewhere beyond the windows, bands were playing, children cheering, women wrapping sandwiches and men gathering to chat, throw horseshoes, drink a beer in commemoration of the Union dead and the casualties of the Spanish war. There were flowers, butterflies, frisking dogs, the scent of sausages and quartered chickens and cherrystone clams grilling over open fires, the sound of the birds, the crickets, the feel of
sun-warmed grass and the cold curve of the horseshoe in your hand. Here there were enemas and watercress sandwiches.

God, he was depressed. Nurse Graves—he wouldn’t call her Irene anymore: what was the use?—was gone, off somewhere with her bump-kin fiancé, boating, bicycling, picnicking, lying on a blanket in a meadow. It was a form of torture to think about it, but he couldn’t help himself. He pictured them holding each other in the dappled shadows, thinking up names for their children, counting chickens, cows, furrows plowed and furrows seeded, kissing, touching, whispering secret desires over the gentle pulsating hum of the insects. All that. He’d done it, too, more or less, when he and Eleanor had been in love, in a time before chewing lessons, Graham gems and lost daughters. Nurse Graves was living in that time now, savoring life, the caress of the sun and the slow sweet unfolding of the day, while he’d had to go alone to that deadening melodrama replete with the backsliding husband he recognized all too readily and then the horrific luncheon that followed hard on its heels.

And that was part of the weight on him, too—the luncheon had been hard to stomach, gripping and potent in a way that insipid play could never have hoped to be. He didn’t like to see any man humiliated like that, no matter how much he might have deserved it. Kellogg had really made poor Charlie squirm, really seemed to enjoy letting the sanctimonious boom drop while the police chief waited in the wings with his truncheon and his handcuffs. And that was depressing, too. Charlie was a thief, a crook, a confidence man, and Will was a thousand dollars poorer. But it wasn’t so much the loss of the money that stung him—it was the thought that Charlie had seen him as a mark all along, right from the beginning, from the moment he and Eleanor had sat down across the table from him on the train. That hurt. Really hurt. He’d liked Charlie, liked the easy way he laughed and the confidence he had in what he was doing, liked the fact that he was a normal average regular meat-eating beer-drinking cigarette-smoking human being and not some Sanitarium monk. Aside from Homer Praetz and Miss Muntz, whose current condition he’d almost begun to envy, Charlie was about the only friend he’d had. Or thought he’d had.

He was chewing over these sour reflections when Nurse Bloethal
appeared at the door, grimly efficient, the makings of his postprandial enema in hand. “Resting up for the evening’s festivities, I see,” she observed, big and brisk in her cork-soled shoes. She passed over the bed like a dark cloud, already in the bathroom opening the tap. “Half the others’re out there on the lawn watching the Tozer Twins and waiting for the band to start up, but you’re the wise one—no sense in risking everything for a few minutes’ pleasure, hey?”

He wasn’t listening. He was thinking about the chain of events that had brought him to this moment with this woman in this room, about how he’d become a party to it, how he’d lost his volition, his spine, his basic human right to control his own body and its functions. He felt like a whore, a concubine of the Sanitarium, Dr. Kellogg’s plaything. This nurse—look at her—she was a nattering fool, idiotic, rough and uncouth and beneath him in every way and he hated her and all she stood for, and here he was, for the thousandth time, about to roll over and submit while she performed a filthy and degrading act on his most intimate person. What was he? What had become of him?