The Road to Wellville (30 page)

On the day before Christmas, after counseling with a score of patients and seeing to final arrangements for the San holiday, the Doctor managed to slip away to the church for the latter portion of the children’s program. He joined Ella, who was already dozing, in the first pew, settling down between her and his sister Clara just as Nathaniel Himes rose to recite “Jes’ Before Christmas I’m As Good As I Can Be.” Nathaniel acquitted himself well, the audience chuckling appreciatively at the contrast between the boy’s sober vow and his urchin’s expression, and the Doctor flushed with pride. He breathed deeply of the scents of pine and red Life Buoy soap, and looked round him with satisfaction. The children, about half of whom were the Doctor’s wards, were fresh-scrubbed and glowing, the church was cozy and pleasantly decorated, and outside a fine feathery snow drifted gently down to enfold the streets in the silence of the ages. All was right with the world. The Doctor relaxed.

Jonella McGimpsie, fifteen and already developing into an almost embarrassingly well-endowed young woman, rose to recite “Annie and Willie’s Prayer.” Dr. Kellogg leaned forward in anticipation. He was a sentimentalist at heart, and he wasn’t afraid to admit it—in its proper place, of course—and he’d always found the poem deeply affecting. As Jonella’s adolescent voice rose and fell, the familiar story began to cast its spell over him: Annie and Willie’s father, wrapped up in his own problems, was a man blind to the spirit of the season, and on hearing his children talk of Father Christmas and the gifts they hoped to receive, he scolded them and sent them to bed. Later, passing by their room, he heard them praying for him and was so touched he rushed out to the shops just before they closed and bought everything he could lay his hands on. Jonella was in fine form, never hesitating, charging the homely stanzas with drama and pathos, and when she reached the part where the children discover their gifts, the Doctor found himself filled right up to the back of the throat with emotion.

It was then that the interruption began. A rude noise—the passing of intestinal gas, or its counterfeit—began to punctuate each of the poor girl’s lines. The audience hushed. She stumbled, went on bravely, but the noise persisted.

Dr. Kellogg was incensed. He sat bolt upright on the hard wooden bench, scanning the faces of the participants—some forty-three children in all—to detect the source of this outrageous and profane display. Adolfo Rodriguez’s gaze darted angrily amongst his brothers and sisters and classmates; Lucy DuPlage looked as if she might burst into tears; Rory McAuliffe was white as a corpse. Only George—the smallest child on the stage but for Rebecca Biehn and one of the four-year-olds—was unaffected. He stared straight ahead, as if in a trance, unmoving, unblinking. Jonella had come to the final stanza, and still the rude noise tore at her composure. It was George, it had to be. Was he rubbing his palms together? Working his biceps against the damp places under his arms? Was it a trick of ventriloquism? To sit there and endure it was almost more than the Doctor could bear—it was all he could do to keep from crying out in his rage.

“‘Blind father,”’ Jonella declaimed, her voice quavering, “‘who
caused thy stern heart to relent”’ (
brrrupt! brrrupt!
)/ “‘And the hasty words spoken so soon to repent?/’Twas the Being who bade thee steal softly upstairs”’ (
brrrupt! brrrupt!
)/ “‘And made thee His agent to answer their prayers.”’ (
Brrrupt!
)

Never in his life had the Doctor been so humiliated. His stomach was wrung like a rag in the wash, his heart rapping at his rib cage—to think of the embarrassment, his own children, and in public yet! He couldn’t hear the hymns and carols that followed, couldn’t see the streets for the yellow slush, snapped at Ella and ordered Clara out of the sled as if she were a servant. At home, he lined up the children, all twenty of them, and began an inquisition that would have made Torquemada blanch. There would be no Christmas, he roared, no presents, no special dinner, no privileges for any of them for a month, unless the guilty party stepped forward. And he knew who it was. He knew already—and there was no use trying to blame it on their brothers or sisters or the townschildren—and that person should quail not only before the Doctor and poor Jonella, but before the God that had fashioned him and whose holy house he had defiled. Well?

The children were mute. No one stepped forward.

“Arms outstretched!” the Doctor roared. Forty arms rushed up in a wave, held shoulder-high and parallel to the floor. “You will stand here, all of your arms held in just this posture, until the malefactor steps forward—and I don’t care if it takes all night, till New Year’s, Easter, Decoration Day! Do you understand me?”

Little Rebecca Biehn began to snuffle. Her tiny arms, plump with baby fat, were already trembling. George, just behind her, was expressionless. “Hannah Martin!” the Doctor cried, and the children’s nurse appeared, eyes downcast. “You will supervise.” Then John Harvey Kellogg turned his back on the children and sequestered himself in his private quarters.

Twenty minutes later there came a tentative knock at the door of his study, where he’d retired with a sheaf of Sanitarium documents and a cup of negus (alcohol-free, of course). It was Hannah Martin. Beside her, unable to hold the Doctor’s gaze, stood Adolfo Rodriguez, then fourteen years old. “Yes?” the Doctor said.

Hannah Martin ducked her head in extenuation, swallowed hard and whispered so softly that the Doctor, even with his keen auditory powers, could barely hear her. “Adolfo has confessed.”

Dr. Kellogg was thunderstruck. It took him a moment, but then he understood: Adolfo, brave boy, stalwart boy, principled, noble and sacrificial boy, was taking the onus on himself. “I am sorry, sir,” the boy said, “but I must confess.”

“Come here,” the Doctor commanded.

Adolfo, his back ramrod straight, crossed the room like a little soldier. He halted five feet from the Doctor’s desk. “Closer,” the Doctor said.

Adolfo obeyed, edging up to within a foot of the gleaming, polished surface.

“All right,” Dr. Kellogg said, “I know perfectly well what you’re about, Adolfo, and I’m proud of you. But you would never under any circumstances lie to me, would you? A falsehood from you would hurt me more than a hundred vile little performances like the one this afternoon—do you understand me?”

The boy hung his head.

“You are not the guilty party, are you, son?”

The response was barely audible. “No.”

“Just as I thought.” The Doctor was on his feet now, hardly able to contain himself. He picked up a protractor and set it down again. “And who was it, then? And remember, you are not to try to protect anyone, no matter whom, if it will lead you to obscure the truth. This is the lesson of the moment, and a lesson for life. Now—who was it? And speak up like a man.”

The burden was lifted. Adolfo raised his tan Aztecan eyes to the Doctor’s and tried to contain the faintest tic of a smile. “George,” he said. “It was George, sir.”

Without another word the Doctor stalked past the boy, across the vestibule and into the children’s hall. The children were still at attention, their arms held out tentatively before them. “George,” the Doctor roared, “George Kellogg, step forward this instant!”

But George wasn’t there. “Where is he?” the Doctor thundered, beside himself with rage—and a fine Christmas Eve this was turning out to
be—but the others didn’t know. They hadn’t noticed him slip away. Genuinely. Truly. They hadn’t.

He instructed them to drop their arms, which they did with a groan of relief, and then he informed them that he wanted George standing before him within five minutes. “Search him out,” he cried. “And then we’ll have our Christmas. I won’t let one malingering, malicious, ill-behaved child ruin it for the rest of us. Now search him out!”

With a shout, the children disbanded and tore across the floor like a pack of hounds. They searched the pantry, under the beds, in the recesses of the closets and the basement, looked in chests and wardrobes, searched the carriage house, the barn—even, with their patriarch’s permission, the Doctor’s private quarters. No George. It was five in the evening, dark, the children wanting their dinner and the joy of the season, the whole world awaiting the coming of its Savior, and George was nowhere to be found. Reluctantly, the Doctor telephoned the police chief, Dab and half a dozen of his most trustworthy aides. The boy must be out in the storm somewhere, and though a voice told him it was just as well to let him go, he couldn’t—there would be a scandal, he’d look like a fool. Bill Farrington and the others were instructed to keep things quiet, but to mount a search: the boy hadn’t taken his jacket, and he could freeze before morning found him.

The night wore on. There were songs before the fire, punch and bran cakes for the children. The Doctor sat at the piano and went through his repertoire of Christmas carols for the older children, and Ella and Clara sang a duet of some of Schumann’s settings of poems by Heine and Eichendorff. Spirits were high, the little ones went off to bed dazzled, the snow mounted at the windows—and yet still, in everyone’s mind, there was the image of George, stunted, rail-thin, big-headed and angry, alone with the elements. Chief Farrington telephoned at eleven to say that they’d found no trace of him and were calling off the search. At twelve, his stomach in knots—damn the boy, anyway—Dr. Kellogg climbed wearily into bed.

In the morning, after exchanging gifts over breakfast with his wife and sister and her husband, the Doctor and his party strolled across the house to the children’s wing to watch the children dig into their stockings
and open their presents. There’d been a message earlier from Chief Farrington—no sign of George; could the Doctor provide an article of the boy’s clothing for Michael Doyle’s bloodhounds?—but the Doctor had filed it away in one of the back drawers of his mind, determined that nothing should spoil the holiday and his pleasure in the children. All things considered, he was feeling buoyant—chipper, even—as he stepped into the children’s parlor, with its glittering tree and the mantel festooned with stockings.

Dressed for church, their faces shining in anticipation of their gifts and treats, the children were a vision. The Doctor greeted them individually, wished them a merry Christmas, and bade them look to their stockings. As one, they started for the mantel, orderly, hushed, never forgetting their posture or the Doctor’s respect for peace and quiet, and they tugged down their stockings with subdued squeals of joy. The Doctor was smiling. Ella was smiling. Hannah Martin, Clara and her husband, Hiland, were smiling. It was a special moment, shot through with an emotion as tangible and warm as a hot-water bag slipped between the sheets on a frigid night. But oddly, as the children examined their stockings, the little chirps of joy and surprise turned leaden—there was a murmur of disbelief, and their faces fell, older and younger children alike.

What was it? The Doctor moved forward, puzzled, nineteen pale oval faces fixed on his, and he saw little Rebecca Biehn burst into tears as she clutched the hijiki bar in one hand and turned her stocking inside out with the other: it was empty. They were all empty—no nuts, no apples, no oranges. Only the hijiki had been left behind.

George.
The name burned like acid in the Doctor’s brain. He stood there immobilized, his face gone hard, all the joy washed from the day like soil in the gutter. And to think he’d been worried, to think he’d lost sleep over the boy’s welfare, over the night, the cold, the storm, and all the while George had been holed up someplace in the house like a bloated little rat. “Find him” was all he could say.

“Who?” Ella replied, her voice plunging into a well of silence broken only by the bitter sniffling of Rebecca and her little brothers and sisters. His wife’s face was transformed by the look of confusion that would, in a few short years, settle permanently there. “Find who?”

The Doctor’s impulse was to root out the little ingrate in that instant, tear up the floorboards, break through the walls, anything, but he caught himself. The children must have their Christmas—he would be playing into the boy’s hands otherwise. He sent out to the San for a supply of nuts, oranges, apples and bran cakes, supervised the opening of the gifts and accepted his own present from the children—a monogrammed fountain pen—with grace and composure. But all the while he kept seeing George’s pinched little face before him, the keen black pits of his degenerate eyes, the mocking curve of the lip, and he determined to take the house apart brick by brick if necessary until he uncovered him.

It wasn’t necessary.

Cramden, the stableman, was waiting for him as he stepped out into the snow for the ride to church. “The boy youse’re all looking for, Dr. Kellogg, sir—he’s in the root cellar, back in the far corner behind the taters and rutabagers. I seen him there myself, not ten minutes ago, when I was down to fetch a couple dried apples for Bosco and Maisie—and I hope you won’t mind, but I thought the poor horses deserve their holiday, too.”

The Doctor made no response. All he said was “Hold the sled,” and then, dressed in his finest suit of clothes, in his gloves and overcoat and buffed black patent-leather boots, he made his way along the narrow path the kitchen help had trodden to the root cellar, pulled back the half-sized door and stuck his head in. “George,” he called. “George Kellogg—are you in there?”

The root cellar was a cramped and incommodious plank-roofed cave dug out of the ground and sloping sharply downward, home to spider, mealybug and daddy longlegs. It smelled of the earth and its dry cold secrets, and it never failed to remind Dr. Kellogg of his preference for the aspiring vegetables, which absorb the healthful rays of the sun, over the gouty, unsanitary relics that lay round him here in dusty heaps. Straightening up, he knocked his head against the door frame, and his hat—brand-new, made of silk, and a good grand seven and a half inches tall—tumbled forward into the dirt. “George!” he roared, snatching the hat up out of the filth and beating it against his thigh. “Answer me!”

Blinded by the dazzle of the snow, he could see nothing at first. But there was a movement in the far corner, the rustle of a pilfering stinking
little human rodent that should have been left to starve in the slums of Chicago. Hunching his shoulders, the Doctor edged forward. “George?”