The Road to Wellville (17 page)

“Well,” she said, “are you ready?”

“Ready?”

Was that a giggle that escaped her? No, of course not. But she showed him her gums, smiling so tightly he was afraid she might begin to ooze something sticky and sweet. “Are you being facetious with me, Mr. Lightbody?”

“Oh, no,” Will insisted, “not at all.” He was grinning, too.

She cocked her head to one side, as if to get a better look at him, and she let out a sigh. “It’s time for your examination—or have you forgotten already?”

Ten minutes later, after exchanging banalities with the elevator man and taking advantage of the close confines of the compartment to inhale the heady, faintly antiseptic aroma of Nurse Graves’s pinned-up hair, Will found himself seated in a back-gouging physiologic chair in the temperature-controlled office of Dr. Frank Linniman. The office was located on the first floor, in the Neurological Department, and its windows gave onto the frozen lawn of the deer park Dr. Kellogg had provided for the edification of his patients. (The power of suggestion: What decent, rational man or woman could continue to crave meat in the face of these gentle, sleek, blameless creatures?) Will attempted to lean back in the chair, but it had been designed by Dr. Kellogg to discourage lounging—lounging was the first step on the road to deleterious posture and bankrupt health. The chair was a sort of torture device, actually, its hard oaken slats bellying out to push the sitter’s lower spine into his rib cage and force his shoulders back as if he were strapped to a barrel.

Will writhed in the chair, consulted his pocket watch, studied the phrenological charts on the walls and the row of yellowed skulls that lined the upper shelf of the bookcase in grim testimony to the fate of those who turned their backs on the principles of biologic living. And where was Dr. Linniman? Lingering over his bran and Meltose, no doubt,
dispensing advice, roaming the dining room to insinuate himself beside married women and coach them in the intimate details of salivation, mastication and the proper use of the throat muscles. And what was that smell? Will couldn’t pin it down, but the office seemed saturated with some musty essence, as if it were the repository of thousand-year-old eggs from China or mold scraped from the recesses of an Egyptian sarcophagus. He felt his stomach turn.

“Ah! Mr. Lightbody!” Frank Linniman suddenly appeared from behind a paneled door at the rear of the office, exploding into the room as if he’d just burst through the wall. Two strides brought him up to where Will sat immobilized on the rack of the physiologic chair. Dr. Linniman hovered over the chair a moment, beaming, bright, rippling with vegetarian energy and the brawn of high animal spirits, and then he eased himself down familiarly on the corner of his desk and focused his rinsed-out eyes on his patient. “And how are we this morning? Slept well? Kept some food down?”

Will heard the hollow boom of his own voice tolling in reply. He was very well, thank you. Or, no: what was he saying? He was unwell. Ill. Desperately ill. He’d slept, yes—for the first time in three weeks—and he’d eaten a bite of toast. It was his stomach, that was the problem.

Dr. Linniman absorbed this information without comment. He shifted his left buttock on the edge of the desk and clasped his knee with two meaty hands, stretching himself like an animal in its cage. On the wall behind him, opposite the bookcase with its row of antique skulls, was an arrangement of photographs Will had somehow, to this moment, overlooked. Each of them featured Dr. Frank Linniman in an athletic pose: with tennis racket, putter, baseball bat and lacrosse stick; astride a horse, clinging to the end of a rope with his teeth.

Frank. Eleanor had called him Frank.

“Well, and so,” Linniman suddenly cried, bouncing down from his perch in a burst of motion that startled his patient, “this is the big day, eh? The day we turn your life around. Examination time.”

For the next half-hour Will sat there on the unforgiving chair and allowed himself to be poked, prodded, pinched, pushed and tapped while Dr. Linniman scribbled in a notepad and put detailed questions to him
regarding his bodily functions, history and genealogy. Will answered as patiently as he could, but he resented it. He hated physicals. They left him feeling inadequate, incompetent, violated. Or, worse yet, moribund. Dr. Brillinger had gone through the same routine, pushing and poking at him in his own bedroom in Peterskill, peering into his ears and down his throat, rapping his knees, lifting his arm and letting it drop again—only to confess himself stumped. He reminded Will that he was just a humble general practitioner and didn’t fully appreciate the ins and outs of the antitoxic diet, naturopathy, heliotherapy, the sinusoidal current and all the rest of the newest advances in medical science. What Will needed, he felt, and it was the merest coincidence that Eleanor concurred wholeheartedly with his prescription, was an extended stay at one of the great sanitoria. There he could be examined by the best and ablest men of the time. There he could get answers.

Yes. And here he was, at the great, all-heralded and overpriced Battle Creek Sanitarium, and all he’d gotten so far was questions. How long? How often? What color? When? And how does this feel? This? Your father? Mother? Grandparents? Great-grandparents? Consumption? Smallpox? Yellow fever?

Will did the best he could. For half an hour he sat there answering this objectionable man’s indelicate questions, his stomach burning, joints aching, eyeballs aflame, until he could take it no longer. He cut Frank Linniman off in the middle of a question concerning the color and texture of his last stool. “Enough questions,” Will barked. “What’s wrong with me?”

Dr. Linniman looked offended. His eyebrows—so pale as to be almost invisible—lifted in surprise. “Mr. Lightbody,” he began, dropping his eyes to the notepad a moment before coming back at him with a professionally admonitory stare, “I’m in no position to make a diagnosis at this juncture. This is just the beginning. Why, we’ll need blood tests and count, urine and fecal analysis, you’ve got to go to the X-Ray Fluoroscopic Room, the Colon Department, we’ve got to have specialists examine your teeth, eyes, tonsils and tongue, we need to see how much acetone you’re exhaling and what your intestinal fluids look like. We won’t have the full picture until this evening, at the earliest.” He paused,
squared his jaw, tugged at his tie. “I could make an educated guess, of course, judging from the color of your skin, the condition of your tongue, your general puniness and malaise….”

That sinking, doomed feeling came over Will again, but he fought it. Puniness? Malaise? Who was this self-serving, conceited, pompous, lantern-jawed hyena to be pronouncing judgment on him?

“Actually,” Linniman went on, lecturing now, “we see any number of cases like yours—but I wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions. Nervous exhaustion. Coffee Neuralgia. Hyperhydrochloria. Autointoxication, certainly. But the Chief has already made that diagnosis.” He nodded his blond head sagely, smacked his lips, gently closed the notebook. “We’ll do the tests. You never know what might turn up.”

Will was going under, drowning, spinning down the drain of a vast sink of doom. “What about my wife?” he snarled, coming up out of the chair suddenly, fighting it with everything he had in him. “What about Eleanor?”

Nurse Graves was waiting for him in the hallway. The tile dully gleamed, patients drifted by in wheelchairs, a throng of nurses and attendants shouldered their way along the corridor.
Coffee Neuralgia. Hyperhydrochloria. Autointoxication.
It was medical jargon, voodoo, all but meaningless, and he wouldn’t let it affect him. So what if he drank three or four cups of coffee a day—was it hemlock? Strychnine? Still, as Nurse Graves smiled and chattered and led him up the hallway to the X-Ray Fluoroscopic Room, Will couldn’t seem to shake the spell of Frank Linniman’s pronouncements: the tests were barely under way and already there was a name—there were
names
—for what was wrong with him.

His stomach had begun to groan and he couldn’t seem to stop his legs from jittering as Nurse Graves ushered him into a sedate waiting room with framed landscapes on the walls and Turkish carpets underfoot. He stood there awkwardly in the center of the room as Nurse Graves handed his charts to a brisk little doctor with an Oriental slant to his eyes, center-parted hair and a monocle, and he couldn’t help feeling a small stab of disappointment when she left him with a whispered promise
to return in twenty-five minutes. What did he expect? Will asked himself as he chose a seat in the corner beneath one of the ubiquitous palms—she had better things to do than sit and hold his hand all day. She must have other patients, certainly; a family; time off for breakfast, dinner, good behavior; she must have a life of her own outside these healing walls.

Four men and two women shared the waiting room with him, each of them, like him, seated in one of the Chief’s torturous chairs. They were surprisingly young—thirties and forties, anyway—and they looked as healthy as anyone you’d see on the street. Outwardly, that is. Who knew what miseries racked their insides or what pernicious shadows would show up on the fluorescent screen in the back room? After a brief struggle, Will gave up any pretense of making himself comfortable—anything would have been better than that chair: stretching out supine on the floor, dangling from the ceiling in a sling, being keelhauled by picaroons off the Barbary Coast—and he hunched awkwardly over his knees, skimming the Battle Creek
Morning Enquirer
for news of calvings and farm accidents.

Ten minutes faded from his life before he exchanged the
Enquirer
for a copy of Dr. Kellogg’s house organ,
The Battle Creek Idea.
There on the front page, sandwiched between an article extolling the virtues of the San by a grizzled robber baron from San Francisco and a chatty piece on the Contessa Spalancare’s Florentine villa, was a box listing the new arrivals. His and Eleanor’s names leapt out at him from the page, given form and moment in printer’s ink:
Mr. and Mrs. William Fitzroy Lightbody, of Peterskill, New York.
He crossed his legs, grunted. They might have been in separate rooms on separate floors, but at least they were still linked here, in black and white, in the great Doctor’s newsletter.

An attendant came to the door of the inner sanctum and called out a name—“Mrs. Pratt?”—and one of the women rose nimbly from her seat and crossed the room. Will. watched her furtively. She couldn’t have been more than thirty, well dressed, no sign of a limp, humpback, bloated joints, pockmarks or ulcers, and she’d already mastered the Battle Creek carriage, so far as he could see—her squared shoulders and concave spine could have been used as a mold for the physiologic chair. And what was wrong with her? Something internal, he supposed, something
hidden beneath the folds of her clothing … and the thought of that, her clothing and what lay beneath it, stirred him till he felt his penis stiffen.

God, he was randy. And how could that be, a man in his condition? First it was Miss Muntz, then Nurse Graves, and now this total stranger, this poor afflicted woman, and here he was having licentious thoughts about her, here he was sitting in the waiting room of the X-Ray Fluoroscopic Room of the Battle Creek Sanitarium with an erection. He thought of the weeds the gardener cut every summer at the Peterskill house—severed, desiccated, their vital juices gone and the best of them culled, used up, discarded, so much trash to be burned, and still they managed to burst into seed, white fluff floating on the breeze till it looked like an August snowstorm. Maybe that’s what it was. Maybe he was dying and his body was desperately trying to disperse its seed, the organism mad to procreate and pass on its lineaments before it was too late, without a thought for the bonds of matrimony or the appropriateness of the receptacle. It was downright Darwinian. Deny him his daughter and the hoary voices of his ancestors cry out in priapic urgency; threaten him with extinction, with a childless grave, and he goes stiff in his pants at the mere sight of a woman…. He realized in that moment he was staring, and he dropped his eyes to the newsletter.
Mr. and Mrs. William Fitzroy Lightbody:
where was Eleanor when he needed her?