The Road to Wellville (5 page)

Charlie glanced down at the three sorry bivalves remaining on his plate. “Urine?”

Her smile was widening. “Piss,” she said, “to use the vernacular. As in ‘making water’?”

Will was grinning at him again, too, his eyes swallowed up in a filigree of wrinkles and laugh lines; he looked like a gargoyle leering from its perch. “I wouldn’t want to eat a scavenger, would you?”

Charlie could feel his hackles rising. “Actually—” he began, but Eleanor cut him off.

“Dr. Kellogg took a sample from this very train, did you know that?” she said, wagging a gloved finger for emphasis. “Had it shipped on to Battle Creek from the terminus at Chicago and analyzed it in the laboratories at the San….” She paused for emphasis. “And he found the juice of each of those oysters to be almost identical to a teaspoon of, well,
human
urine.”

Charlie had been about to defend his oysters—urine or no, they were about as perfect a way to begin an evening, or end one, as he could imagine—but a new note had entered the conversation and he jumped on it. “Battle Creek? Did you say ‘Battle Creek’?”

Eleanor nodded. Will bobbed his head.

“But that’s my destination—Battle Creek. I’m on my way there now. Once we get to Chicago, I connect with the Michigan Central Line.” He loved the sound of that,
Michigan Central Line
—it made him feel worldly, well-traveled, an important man doing important things. Never mind that he’d never been west of the Jersey Palisades or ever before had anything to do with an overnight train other than to watch it roar out of the station, packed to the windows with its rich cargo.

He wanted to elaborate, the whole business of timetables and porters and connections wonderfully exotic to him, but he couldn’t go on. The Lightbodys had burst out in a simultaneous peal of laughter, Eleanor actually clapping her hands together like a girl at a party. “But that’s marvelous,” she gasped. “What a wonderful coincidence.”

“You too?” Charlie surmised.

“Yes,” Will said, and his grin faded a degree or two, “we’re on our way to the Sanitarium—for the cure.” He hesitated, and the bleakness returned to his face: he was hunted, he was starved, he was condemned before his time. “I’ve—I’ve never been,” he confessed, “but Eleanor—”

“This will be my third visit,” she announced, reaching up prettily to adjust her hat. “I’m afraid I’ve become one of those ‘Battle Freaks’ you read of in the papers.”

Charlie couldn’t help giving her a quick once-over: the slim arms and dainty hands, the white arch of her throat above the choke collar set with a studded pin, the swell of her chest. And what was wrong with her? She seemed fine—a bit drawn and pale, maybe, but nothing a week in the country wouldn’t cure. The husband was a man of sticks—he looked as if he could use all the help he could get—but the wife, the wife intrigued him. He was framing the question in his mind, wondering just how to put it, when the waiter materialized with two glasses of water and set them down with a flourish in front of the Lightbodys. “Is the gentleman finish?” the waiter murmured, making a feint toward the remaining oysters.

Charlie looked into Eleanor’s mocking eyes and then at Will, who gave him a doleful sidelong glance. He waved his hand and the oysters vanished.

“Tell me, Mr. Ossining,” Will said, “if I may inquire—what brings you to Battle Creek? Convalescence? Business? Pleasure?”

Charlie had been a bit off his mark since the Lightbodys had joined him—these people were odd, there was no doubt about it—but he understood only too well that oddness was the prerogative of the rich and that it was his job and mission to exploit it as best he could. He felt a sudden surge of the old confidence. “Business,” he announced. “The breakfast-food business. I’ve got a card right here”—and he was
digging in his vest pocket—“ah, here it is.” He handed the card to Will, who even as he took it was rooting around in his dinner jacket for a card of his own.

“Which one is it, Mr. Ossining?” Eleanor was leaning forward to peer at the card clutched in her husband’s hand. “Cero-Fruto? Tryabita? Force? Vim?”

Charlie obliged her with a second card—he was inordinately proud of his cards—which he laid out on the table before her:

“How impressive,” Eleanor murmured, and Charlie couldn’t tell if she meant it or not.

“Very,” Will agreed.

“I—and you’ll forgive my saying so, I hope—I wouldn’t have thought you’d be an advocate of scientific eating, Mr. Ossining,” Eleanor said. “And this phrase—’exonerates the bowels’—this is one of Dr. Kellogg’s obiter dicta. Though he uses it in the reflexive, insisting that the bowels must exonerate them
selves.
”

Charlie felt the blood in his face. He took a sip of wine to mask his agitation. “Yes,” he said finally, “or, actually, I don’t know. I read it in a magazine.”

But by now Eleanor’s cucumber salad had arrived, and Will’s toast—two slices of dry white bread, cut neatly on the diagonal and with the crust removed. Expertly rotating his tray, the waiter set Charlie’s second course before him—a covered white china dish exuding steam. With a with a waiterly flourish, he removed the lid to reveal the creamy hot liquid within: oyster stew
.

Will regarded his toast morosely. He seemed to have forgotten his own card, which he’d finally managed to fish out of his pocket and held now between thumb and forefinger as he gazed down at the crisp brown butterless toast on the plate before him. Suddenly his eyes lit and he glanced up quickly at Charlie. “And how long have you been in business, Mr. Ossining?”

Charlie had been probing the chowder with a spoon, hoping to disguise the rippled anatomy of the scavengers of the deep as they poked here and there through the creamy chop of potato, onion and carrot. (All right—so what if he liked oysters? Was that a crime? How was he to know that eating an oyster was like drinking a teaspoon of his own urine?) Eleanor was busy with her salad, studiously inundating it with flakes of something or other she’d produced from a brown paper bag. “Oh,” Charlie said, surprised by the question, “well, uh, in fact, I mean, the fact is, we’ve just founded the company.”

Will raised his eyebrows.

“That is”—poking at the oysters as if they were his sworn enemies—“we
are
founding it, uh, tomorrow afternoon.”

“I see,” Will said. His lips were pinched, two stingy flaps of flesh in a fleshless face. “You say ‘we’—you have partners in this enterprise?”

The image of Goodloe Bender, in his flashy suit and buffed shoes, rose briefly before Charlie’s eyes. Bender would be waiting for him in Battle Creek, the equipment purchased, work force hired, orders taken. In six months they’d be millionaires. “Yes.” He smiled.

Eleanor fork-cut a morsel of cucumber and looked up. “Have you been fully capitalized as yet, if I may ask?”

“Yes, oh yes. Of course.” At that moment, Charlie couldn’t have been any more conscious of the billfold lying flat against his breast if it had swollen to the size of a suitcase. In it was eight hundred forty-nine dollars cash—more than he’d ever seen at one time before in his life—and a check drawn on the account of Mrs. Amelia Hookstratten, of Peterskill, New York, in the amount of three thousand dollars. “Our biggest investor is a very prominent socialite from Westchester County—”

“Westchester?” Again Will’s voice leapt out at him and the transmogrifying grin illuminated his face. “But that’s where we’re from—certainly you know Peterskill?”

And now it was Charlie’s turn. “Now this is a coincidence. It is. It really is. Our investor—I mean, our principal investor—is a Peterskillian herself. Do you know a Mrs. Hookstratten?”

The heavens opened; trumpets blew; cries of wonder and astonishment silenced the dialogue at the next table over, and half the others in the car as well. “Amelia Hookstratten?” Will exclaimed. “Do we know her?” He exchanged a complicitous look with his wife, who’d paused over her salad, her eyes suddenly bright.

Charlie grinned crazily. The elderly man with the mustaches stared unabashedly at them. The rails clicked faintly below.

“Why,” Will boomed in his hollow voice, “she’s my parents’ closest—my mother’s very best friend in all the world. Do we know her?” And his laugh turned to a high choking whinny.

Charlie was feeling good all of a sudden, very good, capital. On the other side of his card, the side the Lightbodys had yet to examine, was a modest announcement and a post-box address in Manhattan: “A small block of stock can be had by the right sort of investor.” It wasn’t a thing to pursue just then, but, of course, the start-up costs of Per-Fo were going to be substantial—or so Bender kept insisting—and they needed all the investors they could get.

He finished the bottle of wine, all the while smiling on his new acquaintances, these wonderful and wealthy people—he could smell the money on them the way a weasel smells out a hen, oh yes indeed—these wonderful people, the Lightbodys, of Peterskill, New York. Peterskill. The place was a gold mine—maybe they should start a cereal factory there. There was one in Buffalo, wasn’t there? He was about to toast their health—the dregs of his champagne against their plain abstemious water—when the waiter approached again, tray balanced nimbly over one shoulder, and set down the first of Charlie’s meat dishes as if it were a gift from the Sultan of Morocco: porterhouse steak, medium rare and awash in a sea of its own rich and bloody juices.

   
Chapter 3   

L
ate that night, long after the last dish had been washed and the ovens shut down, long after the club car had been cleared and the last weary porter fallen off into oblivion, Will Lightbody lay in his berth in the darkened compartment and watched the stubble fields of eastern Ohio drift past the window. Eleanor, at her own insistence, had taken a separate compartment, though it adjoined his. They slept together at home still—that is, they slept in the same bed, an ancient four-poster Will’s great-grandmother had brought with her from Bournemouth, a big dark fortress of a bed that could sleep six abreast with room to spare for a dog or two. But since Eleanor had lost the baby and his stomach had gone into receivership, there wasn’t much physical contact between them. He’d protested at first, but she pleaded her delicate condition—and his.
Besides
, she’d added,
once we get to the San there’ll be no time—and no reason—for any of that sort of business.
Dr. Kellogg, it seemed, didn’t approve of sex either.

Will closed his eyes. He’d hoped that the gentle rocking of the train would put him to sleep, an infant rocked in his cradle, but it was no use. He’d lain awake for hours now, so exhausted that even falling asleep seemed like too much of an effort. It was his stomach, of course. The pain was fiery and intense, painting the edges of his insomnia with a
molten brush. And at the root of it, deep down there somewhere, was the toast. Innocuous, dry, twice-toasted and bland. But there it was, searing away at his insides till he thought he’d swallowed a beaker of acid, pushing itself up his throat to ignite his tonsils even as it drove down deep to assault the other end, too. No wonder Eleanor wouldn’t sleep with him, the air filled with pestilential odors, his body racked with convulsions, the bedclothes twisted up like a hangman’s noose…. God in heaven, what he wouldn’t give for a few moments’ peace….