The Road to Wellville (77 page)

Battle Creek mourned his passing. Buildings were hung with black
crepe, shops and factories were closed, a thousand Postum employees formed a guard of honor as the cortege rolled through streets packed shoulder to shoulder with mourners. It was a sad day for Battle Creek, though the Kellogg brothers—Dr. Kellogg, in particular—couldn’t help feeling a private little frisson of triumph at the news. The health arena, so recently crowded, suddenly felt a whole lot roomier.

But if Dr. Kellogg shed no tears over the demise of his rival, Charlie Ossining did. The news reached him in Paris, where he was living in Saint-Germain-des-Prés with his Swiss-born wife, Marie-Thérèse, the ambassador’s daughter who spoke five languages, composed music and poetry, and wrote for many of the leading intellectual journals of the day. Charlie had a house in Zurich, as well, and a two-hundred-fifty-acre country estate in northern Westchester, where he spent six months of every year, seeing to the affairs of the Per-To Company and living under his given name, Charles Peter McGahee. Both houses were roomy and extensive, as was the flat in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and all three featured parlors devoted exclusively to billiards. In fact, Charlie was bent over the billiard table, engaged in a friendly small-stakes contest with the Baron Thierry de Villiers, when the telegram arrived from New York.

The news of C. W. Post’s death hit him hard. The Baron later reported that Charlie, on opening the telegram, had set down his flute of Pommery & Greno, carefully leaned the cue against the bookcase and broke down in tears. Along with Lydia Pinkham and the anonymous purveyor of the memory tablets, Charlie Post had been his inspiration and guiding light, and, more than any other, the man in whose image he had tried to make himself. He was upset and out of sorts for days. His first impulse was to book passage for New York and take the train from there to Battle Creek for the funeral, but both his wife and the Baron talked him out of it—the cereal king’s body would arrive from Santa Barbara in three days’ time at most and would be long in the ground by the time Charlie arrived. Reluctantly, he agreed with them. But many years later, when he himself was an old man, Charlie made a pilgrimage to Battle Creek, the town which had inspired and rejected him, and stood before the big marble mauseoleum in the Oak Hill Cemetery and paid his respects.

It was no idle homage, for Post had made Per-To possible, just as he’d made possible all the breakfast foods and cereal drinks that flooded the U.S. and Europe at the turn of the century. When Charlie had left Battle Creek, on the day after Decoration Day 1908, he had taken his hope and vision with him, not to mention the pair of steel bracelets the town constable had been good enough to donate, and the nine hundred dollars left over from Will Lightbody’s investment in Per-Fo (or, rather, access to the account at the Central National Bank in which it was secreted). He was to found the Perfect Tonic Company, Inc., of Battle Creek, Michigan, with offices and production facilities in New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Boston, with that initial stake, and watch it grow into an empire. He considered himself lucky on several counts, but especially lucky to have escaped Battle Creek in the early hours of that June morning when all the town would have been looking for him and only the iron cot and musty cell awaited him.

He’d watched for George through the course of the long, rocket-festooned night, drunk on his dreams and Lydia E. Pinkham’s potent brew, but George never showed up. An hour before sunrise he gave it up, and, tucking a pint of Vegetable Compound into his waistband for sustenance, he made his way along the darkened bed of the creek after which the town was named, traveling east and north until it was full light, when he settled down to sleep in the underbrush. Moving by night, sleeping by day, startling dogs on their chains and chickens in their coops, eating what he could scavenge and avoiding all human contact, he made a leisurely tour of the county’s backwaters and finally left the state without incident. Eventually he made his way to Indianapolis, where he got work in a distillery and found a discreet blacksmith, who, for a consideration, relieved him of his official jewelry. Closing his account at the Central National Bank by mail, he returned to New York in style, aboard the Twentieth Century Limited, eating oysters and fat rich dripping beefsteaks without a moment’s regret.

Per-To was an instant success. It had an attractive and eye-appealing label of shiny embossed silver-and-gold paper, it was celery-impregnated, it made active blood, sturdy legs and sound lungs, and it was a specific for pleurisy, heart ailments, diphtheria, the flu, general weakness, men’s troubles, women’s troubles and rectal itch. Charlie floated its active
ingredients—”Celeriac, Gentian, Black Cohosh, True & False Unicorn Life & Pleurisy Root”—in a forty-percent-alcohol’ solution (“Added Solely as a Solvent and Preservative”), and found that all he needed by way of a factory was a back room, a cast-iron kettle, some powdered roots and weeds, and a dependable source of white lightning. For the first three years, every nickel he made went into advertising.

Though eventually he became one of northern Westchester’s leading citizens, widely recognized as a philanthropist and patron of the arts, he remained, at least in part, an expatriate, and he was never reconciled with Mrs. Hookstratten. When he was at home, he and Marie-Thérèse entertained lavishly, and many of the leading lights of the Peterskill circle enjoyed his hospitality, but Mrs. Hookstratten was conspicuously absent. He never invited the Lightbodys, either, though on Christmas Eve, 1911, four years to the day of making his investment in Per-Fo, Will received a check in the amount of five thousand dollars from a Charles Peter McGahee of the Per-To Company, thanking him for his generosity and hoping that his outlay had been sufficiently rewarded. Unfortunately, Charlie grew rather fat in his later years, glutted on the rich pâtés, chateaubriands and buttery sauces with which Marie-Thérèse plied him, and he died in 1945, sixty-three years old, of an overstuffed heart.

In all those years, Charlie had never heard news of Bender, except by rumor, though it was said that the man they’d detained in Detroit was a confederate—or, rather, a dupe—whom Bender had paid to assume his name and lord it about the finest hotel in town, presumably as a way of throwing the authorities off his track. With a man like Bender, the not inconsiderable sum he’d taken out of the Per-Fo scheme wouldn’t have lasted long, and legend had it that he’d lost the better part of it in a Nevada silver mine. He surfaced years later in Montana, a man well into his eighties, his beard still parted and dyed, under the name Soapy Smith, and he earned his living, with a pair of shills, at the soap game. In a tavern or out front of the general store in any one of a thousand nameless rustic towns across the West, he would attract a crowd by conspicuously wrapping bars of soap in crisp new bills ranging in value from one dollar to a hundred, flashing a great many more of
the latter than the former, and then he would wrap the bundles in plain paper and fill a basket with them. For a five-dollar fee, he would invite any of the onlookers to fish through the barrel and keep the bar of soap—and its precious wrapping—that they came up with. Somehow, though, the only contestants who ever managed to come up with the one-hundred-dollar bars were a pair of shifty-looking mustachioed men no one could remember having seen around town before. Bender did well with the soap scheme, as he always did and always had with his countless other schemes, a man blessed with flawless timing and a deep and resolute knowledge of his quarry. During the fall of his eighty-fifth year, so the story goes, he was shot three times in the face by a disgruntled soap dipper and was buried in his underclothes just outside Dawson, in the Yukon Territory.

As for the Lightbodys, Will and Eleanor, they returned to Peterskill to find everything in order on Parsonage Lane, though Dick the wirehaired terrier never quite got over their having deserted him and spent the rest of his life taking out his displeasure on the Persian carpets every time they left the house for more than an hour or two. The roses were in full bloom on the trellis outside the kitchen window, the sunny little room at the head of the stairs stood ready to receive its future occupant, and the familiar umbrageous town, with its sharp inclines and vernal walks, its uplifting views of the Hudson and Dunderberg Mountain to the west and Anthony’s Nose to the north, seemed to cheer them both, and an air of normalcy and quiet fell over their lives. Admittedly, the question of their diet those first few weeks was a ticklish one, and Mrs. Dunphy, the cook, had to tread a fine line between the old physiologic order and the new one of moderation and laxness, but Eleanor ate an asparagus frittata, a poached shad or a veal chop without complaint, and Will found that the hard hot fist in his stomach had begun, ever so gradually, to unclench itself.

Dr. Brillinger had passed on in the interim, and the new man in town, a Dr. Morris Frieberg of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, examined Will casually, diagnosed a duodenal ulcer that was well along the way to healing itself, and prescribed absolutely nothing other than sensible eating and drinking and perhaps a stroll down the avenue after
dinner. As the weeks and months drifted by, Will found that a glass of beer before dinner seemed to help with his digestion, and a brandy or two afterward just set him aglow. He took vegetables with his meat, ate his whole grains and his cereals, enjoyed the occasional pickled egg and strip of jerky. He slept well and contentedly at night, Eleanor breathing softly beside him in the big four-poster bed, Dick the wirehaired terrier at his feet, and when he felt like it, after eighteen holes of golf with one of his old school chums or a loping hike into the Blue Mountain Reservation, he took a nap in the afternoon. By the fall of that year, he’d returned to the factory on Water Street, but only to tender his resignation, pleading his health. In actuality, he’d never felt better, and he planned to devote himself to his own pursuits—reading the complete works of Dickens, building ships under glass, raising wirehaired terriers and preparing himself for fatherhood.

In February of the following year, Eleanor gave birth to their first child, a girl of seven pounds, two ounces, with eyes like twin specks of emerald glass, whom they named Elizabeth Cady and installed in the bassinet in the pink sunny room at the head of the stairs. She was followed two years later by Lucretia, and finally, after a hiatus of five years, by Julia Ward. The girls grew up to be leggy and lean, and they ate whatever they liked, within reason. Will was devoted to them.

Eleanor softened in motherhood, and the nervous condition that had so dogged her younger days seemed to become less and less a factor as the years went on. But though she was softened, and in a way chastened by her Battle Creek experience, Eleanor never lost her cutting wit or her reforming zeal. Where before she’d thrown all her energies into diet, as though control of the appetite were the source and foundation of all human endeavor, she now broadened her perspective, throwing herself into local and national politics, into charity work, education and the movement for women’s suffrage, with the same fervor she’d once reserved for the Peterskill Ladies’ Biologic Living Society or the Battle Creek Sanitarium Deep-Breathing Club. It was a shift of emphasis, that was all, and never a recantation. Whereas before it was vegetables that would save the world, now it was basic human rights, it was education, it was a giving and a selfless devotion to the cause. She became president of the Peterskill chapter of the National American Woman Suffrage
Association and in 1919 traveled throughout the country lobbying for passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. So involved was she, in fact, that it was often up to Will to look after their daughters, a responsibility he gladly and without prompting assumed. When she was home, and when they sat down to dinner, she accepted a slice of turkey or a choice cut of beef, and though she never did reconcile herself to meat, by the same token she didn’t seem to miss Nuttose, Baked Cornlet or kumyss, and she never, or almost never, mentioned Dr. Kellogg.

By contrast, Will rarely traveled, rarely, in fact, went out, unless it was to take his constitutional, walk the girls to school or spend a quiet evening at Mapes’ or Ben’s Elbow (two drinks his limit—or, well, maybe three). When the girls were grown and the rumblings of the Second War making themselves heard, Eleanor pitched herself into the relief effort, and the house on Parsonage Lane gradually filled with refugees. There were Jews and Lithuanians, Czechs, Frenchmen and Poles, and they wrote, sculpted, played piano, gave speeches and argued politics, and they ate anything and everything that was put before them. It was a happy time for Will, the house full of talk and music, all three of his daughters (two now married) within walking distance, Eleanor shining like the polestar of that brilliant company, and as he slipped quietly into his sixty-seventh year, he felt at peace with himself, and if not exactly heroic, then a man who had risen to the occasion and taken charge of his life in that sunlit field by the Kalamazoo River so many years ago. He died in his sleep the night Hitler invaded Russia.

Eleanor outlived her husband by some twenty years, and as she got on into her seventies and the causes dropped away from her, she began, once again, and all those years later, to think of food. At seventy-eight, she was fitter, stronger, more mentally acute and physically active than women twenty years younger. She saw them in Woolworth’s, feeding their great greasy globular faces with pork rinds and extra-buttered popcorn, watched them bend their heads to their chicken-fried-steak sandwiches and swell beneath their pedal pushers with appendages no human was meant to carry. She saw them, and she thought about it, and the more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that Dr. Kellogg had been right (maybe not Spitzvogel or Lionel Badger, dead of a stroke at forty-nine, and the thought of them and what had happened
between them still made her blush and got her pulse racing all those many years later—not them, maybe, but Dr. Kellogg).

She felt like an apostate in the face of it, and she gave up what little meat she’d fallen into eating over the years, hardened her will, dug out her old pamphlets, her yeast powder and the crumbling pages of Dr. Kellogg’s “Nuts May Save the Race.” In 1958, at the age of seventy-nine, she got together with her youngest daughter, Julia, and opened Peterskill’s first health-food store, stocking its shelves with fish-oil capsules, vitamin supplements, tahini, wonton wrappers and great open bins of sesame seeds, cracked-wheat flour, unhulled rice and dried soy-beans. A juicer stood on the front counter, and local bodybuilders, Transcendentalists, Unitarians and chiropractors would stop by for a lecithin-yogurt shake or a glass of carrot juice. She died in 1967, at the age of eighty-eight, and no one knows why.