The Road to Wellville (15 page)

The lobby was quiet at this hour—it was past ten now, and the last travelers would long since have settled in. Charlie sat there, fiddling with his buttons, consulting his watch, yawning despite himself in the luxurious enveloping warmth. The place was certainly plush, that was
for sure. Tapestries on the walls, oil paintings, chandeliers, that hushed air of elegance and ease hanging over the rooms as if they were suspended in time. It was what the rich craved, he supposed—the suspension of the whole temporal order of things, absolution from the cares and worries of plebeians like himself. That’s what money was for.

And C. W. Post understood it better than anyone. He’d come to town with nothing, nothing—not fifty cents to invest—and he’d realized all of this. Of course, he didn’t spend much time in Battle Creek anymore—he was all over the world, conquering one market after another, building a whole city in Texas, influencing votes and policies in Washington, making them eat Grape-Nuts and Elijah’s Manna in England and France and Germany—but when he was in town, he lived here, in the Post Tavern Hotel. Charlie had heard he had a whole floor to himself, a magnificent suite of rooms with every amenity … and the clerks must jump out of their skins when he walks in the door,
Yes, Mr. Post, sir, yes, sir, yes, yes, yes
….

Charlie must have dozed. He couldn’t seem to recall seeing the bellhop move across the room to lean solicitously over him and place two gloved fingers gently on his shoulder. “What?” he gasped, starting.

“Mr. Bender will see you now,” the bellhop returned, speaking in the whisper they all seemed to affect, as if using a normal tone of voice would somehow crack the pillars, shatter the chandeliers, bring the whole opulent edifice crashing to the ground. “Would you come with me, please, sir.?”

Charlie followed the bellhop across the lobby and down a hallway that apparently connected to the rear street-entrance of the hotel, all the while focusing wearily on the man’s pinched, squared-up shoulders and the pale depression at the nape of his neck. The bellhop stopped outside a long comfortable room fitted in Flemish oak, with a built-in buffet, stained-glass panels and an arrangement of heavy dark tables and chairs. A wrought-iron sign hung over the door: “The Wee Nippy,” it proclaimed.

As Charlie entered, he saw Bender rising from one of the tables with a group of prosperous-looking men, most of whom wore sheepish looks, as if they’d made a pact against their better judgment and already regretted it. The table was littered with empty beer schooners, whiskey
glasses, napkins, ashtrays,-a decimated platter of sandwiches—and two decks of well-thumbed cards. Smoke rose from the gentlemen’s cigars. There was a muted murmur of conversation. But if three or four of the men looked vaguely uneasy, Bender himself was the picture of rugged confidence, optimism, triumph, even. He had hold of one man’s hand in a firm politician’s grip, all the while gathering up a wad of greenbacks from the table with his free hand and raising his voice in a jocular, hail-fellow-well-met roar.
Poker.
All at once Charlie understood.
Bender had kept him waiting over a poker game.

In that moment, Bender spotted him, and his expression wavered ever so slightly, as if he’d been awakened in the middle of a dream, as if for an instant he didn’t recognize his partner, come all the way from New York with the wherewithal to make Per-Fo fly, but he covered himself admirably. “Charlie!” he boomed, sweeping across the room on his stupendous feet, a tottering, sweating, plum-faced tornado of a man, huge, ventricular, his fractured soapstone eyes leaping madly out of his head, arms spread wide for the crushing embrace. In the instant before they closed, Charlie noticed that he’d dyed his beard to contrast with the white fluff atop his head, and not only that, but he’d taken to parting it aristocratically in the middle of his chin, too. He looked like a general home from the wars, looked like a senator, a banker, a captain of industry.

As they embraced there in the glittering taproom, as Charlie felt the power in the older man’s arms and took in the rich intoxicating odor of lilac water, Cuban tobacco and fine Scotch whiskey that enveloped him like a succubus, he couldn’t help feeling relieved, proud even: this dynamo, this titan, this earthshaking figure of a man was his partner. He was in a daze as Bender introduced him round to the company (noses, mustaches, beards: he couldn’t catch a single name), but it didn’t seem to matter—the party was breaking up anyway. Bender bellowed his goodbyes, the others shrugged into jackets and overcoats, the smoke began to dissipate. And then, resplendent in checked trousers, sky-blue jacket with matching vest and yellow high-button shoes buffed till they threw back the light like twin dancing mirrors, Bender led him grandly through the corridors, out into the lobby and across the carpet to the elevator.

By the time Charlie managed to recover himself, Bender was ushering him into his fourth-floor room—or, rather, suite of rooms. Bender had a sitting room, with electric lamps and a rolltop desk in the corner; a bedroom visible through an open door to the left and lit invitingly by a single amber-shaded Tiffany lamp; and a glittering tile-and-porcelain bathroom that was itself bigger than Charlie’s crawl space at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s. As Bender crossed the room to the sideboard and poured them each a snifter of brandy from a cut-glass decanter, Charlie eased himself down on the wine-colored sofa and saw with amazement that the amenities here even included a telephone.
Bender had his own telephone. In his sitting room.
The convenience of it, the luxury—it was a revelation. It stunned him. It was almost beyond his comprehension. Sure, Mrs. Hookstratten had a phone, in her eighteen-room mansion overlooking Lounsbury Pond. And he supposed the Lightbodys and people like that had them, also, but a telephone in your own room? It was too much.

“So, so, so, my friend,” Bender cried, whirling round on him and tottering across the room with the drinks, “and how was your trip? First-class all the way, eh? A little taste of the good life never hurt anybody—and it’s just the beginning, Charlie, just the beginning.”

Bender didn’t wait for a reply.

“I would have been there to meet you, of course I would, you know that, but these people you’ve just been introduced to—Bookbinder, Stellrecht and the rest—well, they’re the princes of this town, princes, and you’ve got to cultivate people like that, you’ve just got to. Know what I mean?” Bender had planted himself on the arm of the sofa, his wild smoke-colored eyes tugging at Charlie’s as if they were connected by invisible wires. He lifted the snifter to his nostrils and inhaled. “Good stuff, Charlie. The best. Otard Dupuy ‘78.”

Charlie had never been tireder in his life. He sipped the fiery liquor and watched Bender swell before his eyes. “Yes, very good,” he murmured, and attempted a smile.

“Yes, well,” Bender boomed, leaping to his feet and pacing up and down the length of the room, alternately sniffing at his drink and pulling at the ends of his beard, “I’m pleased that you like it. After all, your patron—or should I say patroness?—is paying for it, the whole kit and
caboodle … and by the way, you’ve got the check, I presume?” He paused now, caught in the midst of a gigantic stride, to give his full attention to the framing of the question—and to its answer. “And the cash?”

All of a sudden, Charlie came to life, fully alert for the first time since he’d left the train. He heard the faint whisper of a cart moving past the door, the gurgle of a distant toilet, a murmur of voices.
The check. The cash.
Bender didn’t care about him, didn’t care about Per-Fo, didn’t care about anyone or anything—all he cared about was Mrs. Hookstratten’s money. He’d already had the first thousand of it, a check Mrs. Hookstratten had written and signed over in her own parlor on a glorious sunstruck October afternoon not five weeks ago—and where was that money? Tied up in Otard Dupuy and Havana cigars? Charlie wanted to ask, to press the issue, but it was late, he was exhausted, and he didn’t know where to begin. “Listen, Goodloe—”

“‘Good,’ Charlie. Just call me ‘Good,’ for short. Let my enemies call me ‘Goodloe’—or ‘Mr. Bender.”’

“I, uh, just wondered—about the factory. And the paper for the cartons. You wrote that you were making progress…?”

“Well, we’ve had a problem there.” Bender was pacing again, shooting his cuffs, toying with the heavy signet ring he wore on his right index finger. “We had the old Malta-Vita plant all tied up, two big flight ovens included, good as new—”

“Malta-Vita? You mean they’re out of business?” Charlie felt a chill go through him.

“Pffffft.” Bender waved a hand in the air, as if shooing away a fly. “They’ve been gone nearly four years, Charlie. Undercapitalized, overpaid, and the product wasn’t worth a blue damn. Wheat flakes. Ha! The money’s in corn, Charlie, that’s where it is. Look at Kellogg—now
he
knows his cereal.”

“But—but I was offered stock in it just tonight. I barely got off the train and this gang of ragtag kids was all over me as if I was some kind of mark or something.”

Bender drained his cognac and turned his back to pour another. “You’re thinking of Vita-Malta, Charlie, Vita-Malta. They just started up in the old Map-L Flakes factory out on the Marshall Road, oh, seven,
eight months ago.” He swung round, the snifter dwarfed in his big meaty hand, and pointed a rhetorical finger. “And they’re shipping six carloads a
day
out of here now, Charlie.
Six carloads a day.
”

Charlie’s mind floated away on the wonder of it: six carloads a day. That was good news. The best news he’d had since he dropped down off the train like a stone into the most hellish night of his life. If Vita-Malta could do it, so could Per-Fo. Charlie was grinning—he couldn’t help himself. “So what sort of problem did you run into? With the factory, I mean?”

Bender’s laugh shook the room. “Worried, Charlie? You look worried. You do. Trust me. Trust Goodloe H. Bender to steer you right—and your Mrs. Hookstratten, too. Don’t I know this business? Don’t I?” He perched himself on the arm of the sofa again, took a brief pull at the snifter. “It’s nothing,” he said. “The son of a bitch that’s got title to the place wants too much for it now he sees somebody’s interested, and I was running short and didn’t really have the spondulics to put down, if you know what I mean—”

“Running short?” The fear was back. Charlie saw the future open up before him like a black hole. Suddenly he was on his feet. “You can’t mean you’ve—?” He couldn’t get the words out; they choked him, stuck in his throat. “You mean you
spent
it all, the whole of our start-up money? Already?”

Bender’s face went rigid. “I don’t like your tone, Charlie. I don’t like it at all.” He jerked his chin truculently, lifting three stout fingers to his throat to adjust his bow tie. Charlie fixated on that bow tie—it was bright yellow, made of silk, and it clung to Bender’s collar like a mounted butterfly. “Are you questioning my integrity? If you are, you’re in trouble, my friend. Deep trouble. No man questions the integrity of Goodloe H. Bender. No man.”

Charlie looked away. He was tired, that was all. Tired.

“Listen, Charlie. You don’t just snap your fingers and start up a business like Per-Fo overnight.” Bender’s tone was softer now, each syllable a fluffed little feather pillow tucked under Charlie’s weary head. He was soothing, reassuring, the voice of reason and conciliation. “It takes capital, Charlie. Money to grease the wheels. You see those gentlemen down there tonight? Well, we played a friendly little game of
cards—that’s how they see it, anyway. But to my mind, it’s business. Stellrecht owns eight paper mills in this state—eight of them—and Bookbinder used to be C. W. Post’s chief engineer before Vim lured him away. Need I say more?

“And, yes, I know you’re feeling put upon because I wasn’t there to greet you and because I can’t show you through the brand-spanking-new Per-Fo factory with its scores of tidy workers and the wainscoted office for its President-in-Chief with the little brass nameplate on the door, and I know I’ve stuck you out there in a dreary boarding house while I’m curled up here in the lap of luxury, but you’ve got to have business sense.” He paused to put some gravel in his voice. “Who do you think in this town is going to give us the time of day if I don’t stay in the best hotel they’ve got and put on a show for them? You ever think of that?”

Charlie hadn’t thought of it. He fell back into the sofa and studied the carpet. He felt cheap, felt like a turncoat, a carper and a caviler, the weak cog, a negative thinker in a positive enterprise. He was ashamed of himself.

Bender leaned over him and wrapped an arm round his shoulder. “Now, Charlie, I asked you a question: You did bring the money, didn’t you?”

Later, much later—so late the streetcars had long since stopped running and the hack drivers and their nags were peacefully ruminating in bed and stable, respectively—Charlie Ossining staggered up the stairs at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s, fumbled into his room and threw himself on the bed. Woozy with Bender’s brandy, chilled to the marrow, stiff and aching in the long muscles of his legs from his cumulative hike of sixty blocks, he lay there facedown on the mattress, too exhausted even to remove his overcoat. For a moment he thought he was back on the train again, the bed swaying beneath him, the sound of the phantom rails ticking in his ears, and then he was home, in the gatehouse at Mrs. Hookstratten’s, surrounded by his boyhood things and the familiar polished maple posts of his bedroom furniture. Sleep came like an avalanche.