The Road to Wellville
Maybe, he thought, huddling under the onslaught of the pounding leathery fists and twisting his leg almost casually beneath the grip of the probing teeth, just maybe I’ve been wrong, maybe my entire life has been a sham. He saw the whole arena sweep before him then, the Elders and Sister White, the forty-two waifs, the countless faces of his countless patients and the open bleeding mouths of the wounds he’d made in them; he saw George, Charlie Ossining, the Lightbodys. Maybe I’ve been too single-minded, he thought, too sure of myself, too much my own guiding light and beacon, and that thought hurt him more than any fists or teeth or renegade son ever could. It hurt him so much he almost gave up. A voice rose up from within him and it said, And so it goes: let them tear my flesh, let them strangle the breath from my lungs, let me die.
But then, at the very nadir of that dark abandoned moment, that moment of despair and sickness unto death, he recalled a salient and telling point: he was no ordinary man. He was a man with a mission, a man with the strength of hundreds, thousands even—he was John Harvey Kellogg. The knowledge gave him new strength and he jerked his worried leg from the wolf’s grip, and the wolf, in the heat of the moment, closed its jaws on the chimp’s delicate, buffed-ebony toes. That was all it took. Lillian let out a screech of anathema and fell on the wolf as if she’d been set afire, one sinewy vinelike arm already jammed down its throat, the other locked across its eyes, and the two beasts rolled off down the corridor in a thrashing cataclysm of yips, shrieks, squeals and caterwaulings.
The Doctor shook himself and bounced promptly to his feet, the rags of his suit and undergarments stripped away to his waist and trailing behind him as if he were an enormous half-peeled banana, his right pant leg perforated and soaked with blood. He winced when he put his weight on the wolf-gnawed leg, and he found himself stiffly hobbling across the hallway to bend’ for the twin orbs of light that were his spectacles. Wiping them on one of the linen scraps that fringed his waist like a hula dancer’s skirt and then forcing the bent wire frame back into shape over his ears, he straightened himself up and surveyed the field of battle, more determined than ever to track down the agent of this anarchy and make him pay the price of it.
Overhead: shouts, cries, the thump and pulse of vigorous movement. Down the hall: the two beasts, still going at it, surging and flapping against the walls like a pair of animated hearth rugs. Behind him: the excremental reek of the ravaged lab and a tile floor streaked with the unreadable message of its violated specimens. And directly ahead? The door to the animal laboratory stood open wide—and George must be in there still, smashing aquaria, freeing experimental rats, toads and lizards, lost in some obscene childhood reverie of annihilating his playmates’ toys. Well, let him, the Doctor muttered under his breath, and he approached the doorway on silent feet.
Noiseless, canny, stalking his quarry with the fierce and utter concentration of the pygmy with his blowgun or the aborigine with his boomerang, Dr. Kellogg flattened himself to the wall and assayed a peek round the door frame. The lab stood unchanged. The lights were on, that was something, but otherwise all was as it should be. There was the faint odor of rodent urine—so faint that only the Doctor, with his hypersensitive nose, could detect it, and even in his extremity he made a mental note to have Murphy change the litter throughout—and the cages stood as usual on their shelves. He heard the muted scurry and shuffle of tiny feet and naked tails, and he was listening hard, listening for the untoward footfall, the squeal of hinges, the sound of glass shattering. And then all at once there was a hand in his face, George’s hand, tearing at his spectacles, gouging at his eyes, his lips, his nose, and George spun out into the hall before him. “Well, Pater,” he jeered, raising his voice to be heard over the unholy din of Fauna and Lillian, “and how do you like the physiologic life now? Stinks of shit, I’d say.”
Though his spectacles were askew and his leg was stiffening, the Doctor made a lunge for him, but George evaded him, skipping off easily out of reach with a maddening laugh. “Catch me if you can,” he taunted, and he fled the length of the hallway, past the ragged wolf and screeching chimpanzee, and disappeared into the Experimental Kitchens, as Lillian had done before him. The Doctor followed, slowed now by his leg—it didn’t seem to want to bend at the knee—but all the more grim and dogged for it. This was a battle to the finish.
And here, finally, the balance swung in his favor.
When he came through the door and into the darkened room, dragging his leg, he found George crumpled on the floor beneath the nut-butter vat. He was clutching his ankle and whimpering, the same hateful intransigent boy he’d discovered in the root cellar, the boy who wouldn’t hang his jacket on the peg, who tormented his siblings, set fires, refused to treat his adoptive parents with the respect—let alone gratitude—they deserved. The boy who couldn’t be touched. The boy who lived only to refute and debase everything John Harvey Kellogg stood for. He was hurt. Whimpering. Clutching his ankle.
All in an instant, the Doctor saw that it was over. George had hurtled into the room, bent on destruction, but weak, essentially and in the deepest corrupt fiber of him, weak, weak, weak—and drunk, too, addled with drink—and he’d tripped over the three-foot lever that projected from the bottom of the vat, the lever that set the big mixing blades in motion and broke down the unyielding nuggets till they gave up their essence. From the way George was holding his ankle, from the angle at which the foot seemed to skew away from the tibia, the Doctor could see that it was broken, badly broken. George was breathing in quick shallow gasps and the pain clouded his eyes. He shrank into the shadows at the base of the vat.
Dr. Kellogg never hesitated—it had gone too far, and there was no coming back, not now. Sweeping across the floor in a single violent motion, he bent and snatched the boy to his feet, ignoring his shout of agony as he fell away from the broken ankle and staggered on his one good leg into the immovable wall of the vat. The Doctor slapped him, again and again, the pinched arrogant face shrunk to nothing, the flat head rolling loose on the shoulders, and he never thought back to the night in the hallway, never doubted himself for a second. Slamming the boy’s spine into the sharp unforgiving lip of the tub, he sought to hurt him, only that, to give as good as he’d gotten, and he beat at him till his hands went numb and the rancid gutter stink of the boy gave way to the rich rising effluvia of macadamia butter.
A thousand pounds of it, half a ton, smooth and nutritious and replete, enough to restore three-quarters of the stomachs in Battle Creek and awaiting only the jars to contain it. A sea of pure golden oil floated atop it, richly glinting in the half-light cast through the doorway, trembling and dipping with the oceanic shock of the towering little Doctor’s rage as he slammed into George again and again. And then a curious thing happened. In twisting away from the Doctor’s blows, George, bent double at the waist and savage with the pain of his ankle and the imperative of staying off it, lost his footing and pitched forward into the vat. At first only his right arm plunged in, and he flailed back out of it, his hand, wrist and forearm glistening with oil, his shirt greased to the shoulder, but the Doctor was inspired now, and never vacillating, he forced the boy back down into the fragrant sloshing unguent froth, baptizing him, purifying him, and he held the boy’s face there and fought it down with every ounce of outraged physiologic strength he could summon even as it lashed to the surface shrieking for air and fell back again into the oleaginous grip of the stuff.
The Doctor held George there until he stopped struggling. And in the end, his grasp became almost tender, and he imagined himself washing the boy in the big gleaming porcelain bathtub when he’d first come to them, digging deep with soap and washcloth, fighting down the dirt, laving and anointing the son George could never be. There was an infinite sadness at the core of it, infinite. But George was an experiment that hadn’t worked, and there was no shame in that, not to a man of science. When an experiment went bad, you had to move on to the next one and the one after that, on and on into the shimmering un
iverse of discovery and revelation that stretched out shining all the way to the very feet of God. George was weak. An aberration. He should never have been born, never have drawn breath, never have been allowed to add to the sum total of human misery and depravity that was dragging the race stubbornly down.
Dr. Kellogg drew himself up. Gently, with intimate touch and the most exquisite physiologic grace, he pressed the boy’s limp and inanimate flesh to his own and lifted first one leg over the lip of the tub, and then the other. And then he let him go, let him drift away, face down, aglow with precious oil. It was a hard thing to do, as hard a thing as he’d ever done in his life. But even as he stood there, bleeding quietly into the tatters of his clothes, even as George bobbed gently away from him, he knew he would draw strength from it. For he was no weakling, he was no George. He was John Harvey Kellogg, and he would live forever.
C. W. Post, the man who brought Postum, Grape-Nuts and meretricious advertising to the world, was the first of the high apostles of health to succumb to the inevitable. He’d never really got over the stomach troubles that had brought him to Dr. Kellogg’s doorstep in 1891, though positive thinking and the accumulation of a personal fortune that ranked him among the nation’s wealthiest individuals helped keep them in check for a time. Tall, dynamic, the most photogenic and opportunistic of Battle Creek’s breakfast-food barons, he fought his constitutional weakness with pamphlets and slogans (Grape Nuts: There’s a Reason; Postum: It Makes Red Blood), and rejuvenated himself in 1904 by divorcing his suspender-sewing wife and marrying his typist, an ingénue thirty years his junior. When his appendix gave out in 1914, he was rushed by special train from his home in Santa Barbara to Rochester, Minnesota, where the Mayo brothers performed an emergency appendectomy while half the world held its breath. The operation was a success, but it was just the tip of the iceberg. Charlie Post was sick, sick at heart, sick at stomach. On May 9 of that year, in the bedroom of his home overlooking the bright snapping banner of the Pacific, he put a rifle to his solar plexus and ended it all. He was fifty-nine.
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 confeder
ate—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.