The Trouble with Tom by Paul Collins

The Trouble with Tom by Paul Collins

Author:Paul Collins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2010-06-27T16:00:00+00:00


Comfort for the Ruptured

"YEAH? " HE SAYS.

It's bitter cold out on Twenty-eighth Street, and the Chinese truck driver stops and looks warily at his overloaded produce truck, and then at me next to it; I am leaning against the No Parking sign and jotting into my little notebook. He is trying to decide if I'm some sort of plainclothes meter maid.

I smile as blandly as I can and move on. I need a better look into this building anyway. The windows of 120 Lexington Avenue are pretty well obscured by signs—paper and neon alike—shiiing for the warren of different businesses wedged into the premises. There is a 110/220 volt appliance store, a dry cleaners, a newly opened restaurant bearing the puzzling name Chinese Mirch, and atop all this an Indian video store. The latter features a dotted damsel's come-hither poster advertising The Return of the Kaanta Mix—a title which, at first glance, I mistook for the appetizer of the day at Chinese Mirch.

It was an afternoon in 1879—cold and shivery, much like this one—when a scrawny young man stood here as well, and ventured into the 120 Lexington entranceway. There was only one business for him to call upon back then, one outspoken man whose prosperity had made this address the byword of innumerable books, flyers, and newspaper ads across the country. He was here, the nervous visitor told the doorboy, to see the famed physician and author Dr. Edward B. Foote.

The visitor—he had identified himself as J. Peters, of Newark—was shown into the doctor's office, where a stenographer and a secretary both sat at the ready for dictation from the Great Man. Working from his elegant offices, E. B. Foote ran a business that was a marvel of vertical integration: he was the author and publisher of his medical theories, the doctor who prescribed his own remedies, and the manufacturer and mail-order distributor of those very same medicines. One floor of his headquarters was largely occupied by secretarial staff answering bags of mail from beseeching elderly invalids, young married couples, and book agents in London and Berlin. On another floor his botanical laboratories hummed along, fed by a hydraulic freight elevator that ferried herbs up and elixirs back down; toiling inside rooms fireproofed by six inches of concrete, medical assistants churned out priceless miracle cures to be shipped around the country and around the world.

But where was the doctor himself? The fidgeting visitor had to be kept waiting for a while. Foote was nowhere to be found within his offices: he was upstairs, in his own tastefully appointed quarters. Rather than dictating his newest medical guide for the masses, the fiftyyear-old physician was dutifully reading to his aged mother. But at length a hale, mustachioed man came down the stairs, and seeing that there was little privacy in the office with his staff amanuenses hurrying about, he led his new patient into a back office. Foote pulled a sliding door closed on the private consultation room, settled down and motioned his patient to take a seat.



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