Besides, he just loved the look on her face when she got back from her treatment.
Chapter 5
The
Per-Fo
Factory
There was nothing to do but lie.
The train was heaving into the station, the porters were jumping, the Push, Grano-Fruto and Vita-Malta boys jockeying for position with the people who’d come down to greet their friends and relations, and Mrs. Hookstratten—Auntie Amelia—was perched behind one of those shimmering windows, peering out on the town of vegetable legend with all the anticipation Charlie had felt on the night he’d arrived. How could he tell her that the whole thing was a bust, a dismal failure and worse? How could he explain that every last cent of her $6,500 investment in Per-Fo, along with the thousand dollars she’d laid out as start-up money, was gone, vanished down Bender’s insatiable gullet like a stone dropped in a well? How could he admit that there were no happy workers whistling over crisp mountains of golden cereal flakes; that there was no office appointed in mahogany, no conveyor belt, no factory, no product; how could he tell her that the only thing Per-Fo had produced was lawsuits and injunctions?
He couldn’t and he didn’t. Somehow, when he rose up off that bench and stepped into the surging crowd, he found the strength to fight down the fear and loathing that ran through his veins like an infection. In that moment he made himself over He felt the smile leap to his face, tasted the sweet syrup of the lies gathering on his tongue, saw the world come into focus as if for the first time. Nothing he’d experienced in his life could approach the cold-sweat tension of this moment, not the giddiest hustle, not the shakiest hand at cards or the luckiest kiss on the billiard table, not even the finessing of Will Lightbody—till now it had been easy. This was his baptism, this was his trial by fire.
In his jacket pocket, neatly folded in an oversized envelope, were the handsome blue-and-gold, and utterly worthless, Per-Fo stock certificates for Mrs. Hookstratten—the same issue he’d delivered to Will in exchange for his check—and in his right hand, tucked into the crook of his arm like a bouquet, was the last red-white-and-blue-striped sample box of the sham product itself. There was no going back now. There was no crying over Bender, no covering his flank—there was only this moment. Grinning, ecstatic, his eyes glowing and his back arched, he stood there on the platform like a suitor, and went forward to meet it.
Like Eleanor Lightbody before her, Mrs. Hookstratten descended from the train in a flurry of porters and baggage. She wore a traveling gown of some sheeny blue material, tightly corseted, a hat that shot feathers like sparks and a trailing fur stole. Brisk and small—she wasn’t much taller than a child, though she was as solid as a fireplug—she sank into the snarl of activity and Charlie lost sight of her. He shouldered his way past a man with a trunk the size of a coffin, neatly sidestepped a pair of nuns walking arm in arm, and with a twist of his hips sent a Vita-Malta boy sprawling into the knees of a man hawking Dr. Pettibone’s Health Tonic. “Auntie Amelia!” he cried, though the words stuck in his throat, and in the next moment he was embracing her.
“Charles, my Charles,” she cooed, patting his shoulders in an explosion of perfume and powder, her grip surprisingly firm and tenacious. “And let me have a look at you,” she demanded, standing back now at arm’s length. Her eyes, magnified by the thick polished lenses, darted like fish in an aquarium, and then she pronounced him looking fit but a little thin. “And that suit,” she added, clucking her tongue, “—it looks like you slept in it.”
“Yes, well,” he mumbled, at a loss suddenly, but holding his artificial smile (he had slept in it, three nights running), “business, you know. I hardly have time for anything but. And speaking of business”—with a flourish—“ this is for you,” and he handed her the last remaining box of Per-Fo in the world.
Her mouth dropped. Her eyes went soft. And as traveling salesmen, juvenile stock peddlers and grandparents from Ohio surged round her, she took the garish pasteboard container from him and pressed it to her bosom like rare treasure. Three porters, burdened with her baggage, looked on numbly, watching this ritual with the impassivity of Indian fakirs. “Charles,” she gasped, struggling to summon breath sufficient to express the precipitous emotion of the moment, “oh, Charles, I’m so proud of you.”
In the cab on the way to the Sanitarium, while Charlie tortured his brain to come up with an even faintly credible explanation as to why he couldn’t help her in with her things, she elaborated. “I’m proud that you’ve chosen the field of health, Charles,” she breathed, her eyes shining with excitement as the dusk settled in around them. “I mean, dedicating yourself to the general good, while coincidentally making your way in the world. Why, it’s almost a crusade. Just think how many digestive systems Per-Fo will save from ruin…. I only wish your Morgans and your-Rockefellers had such humanitarian aims. I’m afraid the majority of our boosters and go-getters think of nothing but money. It’s a shame, really. A shame.”
Charlie nodded, forcing an inarticulate rumble of agreement from his larynx. He was thinking of money himself at the moment, wondering if he could somehow manage to hold off the stroke of doom long enough to get more of it out of her—love, gratitude and the Eighth Commandment notwithstanding. If Bender had taught him anything, it was this: never let mere scruples stand in your way. Bender had taken something soft in Charlie, something weak and yielding, something human, and held it over the torch of his cynicism till it blackened and shrank and grew hard as an ingot.
“And how is Mr. Bender?” Mrs. Hookstratten wondered, patting his hand and leaning forward to peer out the window, drinking in this new and glorious environment like a pilgrim come to the shrine. “Such a sincere man. And with such vision.”
Vision. Yes, he had vision, all right. Bender made the inventor of the memory tablets look like a blind man. Right from the beginning, from the moment Charlie had been introduced to him at the odd soirée at Mrs. Hookstratten’s, a friend of a friend of someone in Philadelphia society, Bender had seen the entire jerry-built framework of Per-Fo rise up before him on rotten timbers, had seen all the suckers lined up out the door and across the countryside all the way to Battle Creek—and Charlie first in line—and he’d seen the day when the take would be sweet enough to pull the whole thing down. What Charlie wouldn’t have given for a little of that vision.
“Charles?”
“Huh?”
She let out a laugh. “Has business got you that distracted? I was asking about your partner, Mr. Bender: How is he?”
“Fine,” Charlie blurted. “Thriving. Couldn’t be better. He’s out of town at the moment, though,” he added, feeling the ground slip out from under him. “In St. Louis—looking after our accounts.”
“What a pity,” Mrs. Hookstratten murmured as the carriage turned up Washington Avenue and the lights of the Sanitarium came into view, showy and audacious, a six-story electrical blaze that set the twilit night afire. “I’d so looked forward to seeing him again—but, then, I suppose he’ll be back soon?”
“Soon? Oh, yes, sure—of course he will, of course. In a few days or so. Or a week. What I mean is, who can tell how long a sales trip will take—got to drum up business, you know. But he’ll be back. He will.”
If he was hedging, Mrs. Hookstratten didn’t seem to notice. She’d spotted the San now and was emitting a low gurgle of appreciation and grasping blindly for Charlie’s arm. “That’s it, isn’t it?” she cried, but didn’t wait for an answer. “I’ve seen it so many times in pictures and on postcards. ‘A goodly temple upon the hill’—and it is a temple, isn’t it?” She was distracted in her excitement, thinking aloud about her glossitis, her shingles, her nervous itch (“I’ve scratched my arms and legs till I look like a skinned savage strapped to a totem pole or whatever you call those things”), and it gave Charlie a precious moment to work up an excuse for being unable to help her check in, find her room, arrange her things for her, stay to dinner, gossip, visit and tuck her in. The carriage
swayed. The horses clopped. The lights grew closer.
“—and Dr. Kellogg,” she was saying, “a saint on earth. I don’t know how you were fortunate enough to become associated with such an illustrious family—was it his son or his brother’s?”
She paused. The gap opened. Charlie fell into it. “His son,” he said miserably. “The Doctor’s.”
“Didn’t you say his name was George in one of your letters? George, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” Charlie affirmed, and his voice had sunk low.
They were swinging into the circular drive in front of the San now and Mrs. Hookstratten was cooing and exclaiming like a tourist: “How grand!” and “Is that Italian marble?” In the midst of it, craning her neck, peering, ejaculating, she turned back to him and said, “George, yes, how I do look forward to meeting him—and to seeing his father again. Did I tell you that I first met Dr. Kellogg three years ago in Manhattan? Or was it four? Well, anyway, he was lecturing on food drunks, I remember it as if it were yesterday, Meg Rutherford and—but goodness, here we are.”
There they were. The hack stopped and the driver was climbing down. The doorman from the San and a matching pair of bellhops descended on them like jackals. “Listen, Auntie, I have to tell you something—” Charlie began, tugging at his words as if they were stuck to his teeth.
“Oh, look! That’s that perfectly adorable Mrs. Cormier I met on the train coming in from Chicago”—her head out the window now—“yoo-hoo, Winifred!”
“I, uh, I’ve got to go. I mean, I can’t come in. I’d love to, I would, but I’ve got to get back. To the factory, the books—”
No one moved. The doorman, the bellhops, the cabbie—they might have been hewn of stone. Outside, the crickets seemed to choke off in unison and Winifred Cormier, a woman with a convex figure in a plain dress, halted at the door of the cab ahead of them, perplexed. Mrs. Hookstratten was staring at him in astonishment, the corners of her mouth working. “Can’t come in?” she repeated. “But what do you mean?”
Charlie’s smile was foolish, swollen, a bravura smile that didn’t begin to cover his panic. “Work,” he said lamely.
“Work? At this hour?”
Nouns dropped from his lips like succulent little fruits—“duty,” “competition,” “nose,” “grindstone”—but they had no effect. Mrs. Hookstratten cut him off in the middle of a convoluted apology. “Do you mean to tell me that after I’ve come all this way and after all I’ve done for you since you were practically an infant in diapers—and for your parents, too, don’t forget about them—that you don’t want to see me? Can that be possible? Am I losing my hearing?”
“Auntie, I—”
“Don’t ‘Auntie’ me. I want an answer, yes or no: are you coming in or not?”
“Please don’t be upset, but I’ve got a business to run—you’ve been after me for years to get involved in something, find my way in life, and now I have—”
“Can you for just one minute imagine how utterly depleted I am, Charles? Can you? A woman in my condition, whole days and nights on the train, shoddy service, food that would choke a hog—”
Charlie hunched his shoulders. He looked up into the faces of the Sanitarium doorman and the bellboys in the kelly-green uniforms with the fig leaves embroidered over their hearts, and he took a gamble. “Yes. All right,” he said, uncoiling himself from the seat to step down and offer his hand, “but just for a minute.”
Luck had been with him that night. The vast roiling life of the Sanitarium lobby, with its comings and goings, its glissade of wheelchairs, the dinner-jacket socializing and clubby chitchat round the milk bar or beneath the palm fronds, swept obliviously past him. No one so much as looked twice at him, and for his part, he saw no muscle-bound orderlies, no imperious little doctors and no Lightbodys, male or female. Better yet, Mrs. Hookstratten was distracted by the swirl of attention—they had her in a wheelchair, her baggage was already on the way to her room, and would she care for a lacto-ovo vegetarian snack?—and she let him off easy. For the moment. But just as he was leaving, the hat jerked down over his brow, the blood settling back into his veins, she snatched at his sleeve. “Tomorrow, Charles,” she said, pulling his face down to hers. She was mollified, he could see that, but her eyes were like needles, pricking and probing at him. “Tomorrow—and I don’t care how exhausted I am or how busy you are—I want you to myself. All to myself.” She grazed his cheek with her own and made a kissing noise. “And the very first thing I want to do is see this marvel of a factory.”
From the Sanitarium, Charlie went directly to the Red Onion, where he slammed through the door, hurled himself at the bar and had to throw back two whiskies with beer chasers just to clear his head. Tomorrow. What was he going to do? The options were narrowing fast. Of course, he could go to the bank in the morning, withdraw Will Lightbody’s thousand dollars and vanish like Bender—close the whole business like a book and be gone and out of it. There’d be no one to answer to then, no games to play, no lawyers to forestall or Auntie Hookstrattens to placate … but then he’d be back where he started, condemned to the life of the small hustle and smaller expectation. A thousand dollars richer, sure, but that wouldn’t last long—and he’d always be looking over his shoulder.
No. What he needed was capital, more capital. Per-Fo was dead—raped and murdered by that son of a bitch Bender—but that didn’t mean Charlie had to lie down and die, too. He knew the breakfast-food business now, he did—all he needed was a new start, a new name. Christ, he could think of a hundred of them—Zip, Flash, Fruto-Fruto, Flakies, Crunches, Chewies…. Yes, sure—and Albatross, the Breakfast Food You Hang Round Your Neck. He sighed. Ordered another whiskey. There had to be a way.
When he looked up again, Harry Delahoussaye was standing beside him, one foot propped on the brass rail, an elbow cocked on the bar. Delahoussaye was watching him, a slow grin settling into his face. He was as casually stylish as ever, in a new suit of some imported material and a checked silk tie. Charlie looked at him and saw himself, a little man trading on his charm and wit and going nowhere farther than the next oyster bar—for every C. W. Post or Will Kellogg there were a million Delahoussayes. “What do you hear, Charlie?” Delahoussaye said. “How’s the breakfast-food business?”
Was it his imagination or was Delahoussaye shouting? “Shhh,” Charlie warned, taking him by the arm. He scanned the room nervously for off-duty hotel employees, lawyers, disgruntled investors. No one looked up. Conversation careened round them. The barman said something about a horse to the man on Charlie’s left and turned to draw a beer.
“Not so good, huh?” Delahoussaye said, and his grin got wider, as if the whole thing were funny, as if it were a joke. “Come on, let me buy you a drink. What are you having?”
Charlie was having whiskey. Delahoussaye ordered; the barman wiped the gleaming surface of the bar, set down two shots and absently watched the men lift the glasses to their lips before shuffling off to attend to another customer. “I’ve had a few problems,” Charlie admitted, setting down the empty glass, and now he was grinning, too, a show of bravado, “nothing I can’t handle. How about you?”
Delahoussaye looked down at the bar, feigning modesty. “The train was grand tonight, really grand,” he murmured, stroking his nose thoughtfully. “Didn’t I see you down there, by the way?”
Charlie nodded.
“Sold seventy-five of Push and twenty-something of the Vita-Malta, though even the dead ones fresh off the train know it’s sinking through the floor.”
“What? Vita-Malta? But didn’t they just open the factory last September?”
“They come and go, Charlie—you ought to know that as well as anybody.” Charlie wondered what he’d heard, but Delahoussaye gave no sign one way or the other, just dropped his shoulders and lifted his eyebrows. “Lousy management—and the stuff tastes like the box it comes in.”
“And Push? What about that? I hear they’re selling it as fast as they can make it.”
Delahoussaye paused to light a cigarette, regarding Charlie with a hooded look as he shook out the match and exhaled. “Yeah, sure—they’re thriving. Smart, that’s why. My cousin Garth’s out there, you know—assistant to the foreman—and I’ll tell you, they keep that place as spotless as your mother’s kitchen. They’ve got a new plant now, too, and that helps. You know it? Out on South Union, across the tracks from Post?”
Charlie knew it—a brick building painted in green and red, the Push colors, that took up the better part of a block all by itself. He couldn’t count the times he’d admired it—it was just what he’d envisioned for Per-Fo, something substantial, something to be proud of, the kind of building that said, Here I am, come take me on. But just then, the image of the Push plant glowing in his mind like a living photograph, something came over him. It was an idea, an inspiration, a scheme, and it struck him like a hard physical blow, like a slap to the head—he had to take a gulp of air and spread both hands out on the bar to steady himself. He turned to Delahoussaye, hoping the look in his eyes wouldn’t give him away, and said, as casually as he could, “Your cousin, huh?”
The hardest part was stalling Mrs. Hookstratten. The rest of it was no stroll in the park, but at least it was straightforward, a matter of distributing Will Lightbody’s money in the right places and in the right proportions. It took less than one hundred dollars of the Lightbody trust, doled out to Delahoussaye, his cousin, the night watchman and a select few others, to convert the Push plant into the Per-Fo factory for two furtive and illusory hours. The biggest share went to the sign painter, a hand-wringing artiste who couldn’t bear to prostitute his talents on so ephemeral a work. In the end, he did manage to produce a reasonable facsimile, though he never stopped grumbling about it. KELLOGG’S PER-FO, the banner read in four-foot-high letters evenly spaced across an expanse of bedsheets sewed together end to end, and though it hadn’t come cheap, Charlie couldn’t complain: when tacked down tightly over the soaring Push billboard, it looked like the genuine article. Especially at night.
The Road to Wellville Page 42
