The Road to Wellville (35 page)

“Because Dr. Kellogg wouldn’t approve?” Will sat up abruptly, his blind feet seeking the carpet slippers on the cold germ-free glaze of the floor. “The man who sees all, hears all, knows all?”

“Because it’s not right. Because it’s against the rules.”

“The rules.”
Will was on his feet now, gaunt and towering, the robe hanging from him like a deflated sail flapping at the mast. “Whose rules? What rules? You don’t really believe all this bunkum, do you? This, this holier-than-thou dietary crap, the enema treatments, the mud packs, the sensory deprivation? What’s it going to get us—another six months of eating mush or grapes or psyllium seeds? Another year? We
die anyway, all of us, even the exalted Dr. Kellogg—isn’t that the truth?”

Irene looked as if she’d been slapped. Her face was hard, outraged, stung to a whiteness that alarmed him. But when she spoke, her voice was calm and controlled. “Yes,” she said, “I most certainly do believe it. Every word, every treatment, every principle. With all my heart—and my brain, too, thank you. You’re a sick man,” she added. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“I do,” Will insisted, but he was flagging. “I just don’t think your Dr. Kellogg is God, that’s all, and I don’t think he has the right to control your life—or anybody else’s.”

But the argument was already over. She was serene now, gazing up at him like an ecstatic, a crusader, a Mohammedan on the eve of the jihad. “There’s a God in heaven, Mr. Lightbody, and I believe in Him in a way I suspect you never will, a God who cares for our immortal essence, but there’s a god in every one of us, too, and the holy temple of that god is the human body, and if it takes a man like Dr. Kellogg to bring that truth home to us, then he’s a part of the godhead, too.” Her voice was airy, her eyes distant and unfocused. “When I think of what he’s done for mankind—for the alimentary canal alone—I have to say, yes, he is a god, my god, and he should be yours, too.” She turned to him with an accusatory look, her eyes burning with the fire of righteousness. “And after all he’s done for you, you should be ashamed of yourself, ashamed to the very core.”

Will was defeated. The brooch was nothing. He couldn’t even look at the box. Perhaps it was frustration, disappointment, despair, but what he did next shocked even him—he lurched forward and took her clumsily in his arms, Nurse Graves, Irene, took her in his arms like a lover and bent his lips to hers. He kissed her, held her, squeezed her to him until he felt something warm and wet on his chest and she was breaking away from him and the naked bulb of black wet rubber lay on the floor between them like some sort of ghastly birth.

“Mr. Lightbody—” The breath escaped her. She backed up a step. “This is … I don’t—”

“Will,” he said. She’d kissed him, kissed him back.

“Mr. Lightbody, I—”

“Will.”

“Will … Mr. Lightbody … I’m too confused, I’m sorry, I—I can’t do this. Not tonight.”

Not tonight? Can’t do it tonight? But that meant—? His heart whirled like a turbine. If not tonight, then some other night—yes—and he needed no grape diets or sinusoidal currents to arouse him now, he was ready, straining at the fabric, lifting the tent of his nightgown as if this were the moment and this the center ring.

But she was looking past him, staring down at the enema bag deflated on the floor. “I can’t,” she repeated, and she wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t look at the brooch on the night table, wouldn’t look at his feet, his hands, the stake driven into his groin, his sick hungry eyes. “Nurse Bloethal,” she whispered, and her voice had gone distant. “I’ll have to get Nurse Bloethal.”

And so it was Nurse Bloethal, she of the callous hands and iron grip, and his erection—his glorious, life-affirming, rejuvenant erection—came to naught. And if Irene believed in her gods and applied the syringe like a sacrament, Nurse Bloethal used it like the jackal of death.

In the morning, it was Nurse Bloethal again, and it was Nurse Bloethal before lunch and after. And where was Irene? She wasn’t feeling well. Nothing serious? he hoped. No, just a touch of indigestion.

Indigestion. And wasn’t that ironic? Will’s own stomach was acting up again, too. He’d achieved a kind of truce there for a while, the seaweed and psyllium having done their work as advertised, the steady analgesic flow of milk inundating that hypersensitive organ until it was dead to all sensation. Despite himself, he’d begun to feel guardedly optimistic. But now, suddenly, on the eve of his graduation to the grape diet, Will’s stomach was a cauldron of acid all over again. He could taste it in the back of his throat, on his palate, his lips, his tongue: the acid of rejection, the acid of anger and despair. He’d awakened with an erection, dreaming of Irene’s lips, her body pressed to his, the wonder of her soft untrammeled breasts, and his first thought was of Eleanor. It was an unclean thought, a selfish and lustful thought, but there it was.

The clock on the bureau read 5:05; the night-light glowed softly. Will pushed back the hood of his outdoor respirator, shivered into his robe and slippers, and crept out into the sterile reaches of the San’s halls. If he’d been furtive on the night of the turkey, now he positively slunk along the silent corridors, guilty on a host of counts, not the least of which was his present intention of forcing himself on his ailing wife.
Give me a daughter, Will
, she’d whispered. Well, now he was ready, and all frailty, all suffering, all notions of restraint and appeals to reason were as nothing in the face of that momentous fact.

Down three flights and into a corridor identical to the one he’d just left. Bright lights. Cold floors. Room 212. Knocking—just a tap—eyes right, eyes left, no one, not even a nurse in sight. “Eleanor? Are you in there?” Hand on the doorknob, belching back an attack of gas, twist of the wrist, the room gently aglow. “Eleanor? It’s me, Will.”

Nothing. Not a whisper. He slipped into the room like a thief, pulling the door softly closed behind him. Eleanor was not in her bed. Ten past five in the morning, and his wife was not in her bed. His first wild thought came like an arrow, whoosh, and it bored into his brain:
Linniman.
But no. The bed had been slept in, pillow rumpled, bedclothes in a heap. Ten past five in the morning: where on earth could she be? The bathroom gave him no clue: toothbrush, face powder, rouge, a damp towel and a silk dressing gown he recognized from happier days. Back into the room again, poking through the bureau drawers: underthings—they electrified him—scarves, gloves, hatpins. On the nightstand, two books, bound in leather and with gilt titles:
Nature’s Own Book
, by Mrs. Asenath Nicholson, which seemed mostly to be about carrots and parsnips, and
Freikorper Kultur
, by one Gerhardt Kuntz, which espoused sunbathing in the nude. Will lingered over this latter, paging through endless disquisitions on light, air and the health-giving properties of meadows and beaches to find a single riveting description of a group of heliophiles of both sexes romping round a spring in the Black Forest. It was five-thirty when he looked up from the book, and he was more inflamed than ever.

The whole affair would have ended there if he hadn’t accidentally dislodged a typewritten sheet of paper from the night table on setting
the book back down. It was a “Rehabilitative Schedule” for Mrs. Eleanor Lightbody, and it began at 5:00
A.M.
with a colon wash, sitz bath and massage in the women’s baths, followed by calisthenics and Indian-club toss in the gymnasium. At 5:30 she was to have a “Silesian mud pack,” whatever that was, and take twenty minutes of deep-breathing exercise on the upper veranda.

The upper veranda.
Will was out the door and down the hall before the schedule hit the table.

Unfortunately, the veranda was deserted but for an unrecognizable figure wrapped like an Eskimo against the lingering night. The figure hovered near the far railing, high above the sleeping rooftops of Battle Creek, and it seemed to be grunting or crying out in agony, its burdened arms flapping helplessly, legs leaden beneath a bulky wrap of blankets. Will was about to turn away, disappointed, when something in the tenor of those grunts spoke to him. “Eleanor?” he whispered, drawing his robe tight at the collar.

Eleanor—if this was Eleanor—didn’t respond. “Eight—uh, uh,
phaw!
” grunted a feminine voice, and a cowl hid her face. She bent at the waist, flailed her arms. “Nine—uh, uh,
phaw!
Ten—uh, uh,
phaw!”

“Eleanor?”

The hooded figure turned to him then and showed him a face that wasn’t his wife’s, a death mask of a face, horrific, immobilized, features clenched like a fist. He took a lively step backward, startled, and the hollows of the eyes, luminous against the dark vise-grip of the mask, seized him. “Will?” The lumpen figure spoke his name, mouth fallen open in a rictus of surprise. “What in God’s name—?”

It was all right—the spell was broken. This wasn’t a messenger from beyond the grave, it wasn’t the Grim Reaper or an escaped lunatic—it was only Eleanor, his wife, his love, basted in Silesian mud and indulging in a little deep breathing on the frozen flagstones of the veranda two hours before breakfast and in the dead black of the night. Eleanor, it was only Eleanor. With recognition came confidence, and with confidence, ardor. He glided forward in his slippers and tried to take her in his arms, but the layers of blankets impeded him. Clutching at what he took to be an arm, he sputtered, “I-I came to see how you were—”

“At five-thirty in the morning?”

“I missed you. It
is
Christmas Eve, after all. Or the morning of Christmas Eve.”

(This was a sore point between them. Will had wanted to go home for Christmas, home to the house on Parsonage Lane and their friends and family, but Eleanor refused. She couldn’t leave now, right in the middle of her treatment—nor could he. What was he thinking? But it would only be for a week, two weeks at most, he’d countered. No, she said, no. He could go if he wanted—though in his condition it was tantamount to throwing his life away—but she wasn’t budging. Did he think she was suicidal? He didn’t, of course he didn’t, and he’d mumbled something apologetic and gone off, chastened, to his room. And so they’d stayed, though the fall season at the San was over and the halls grew more deserted by the day, stayed to eat Nuttolene giblets and artificial goose among strangers in the bleak forbidding ice-shrouded wastes of south-central Michigan.)

Eleanor didn’t respond. “Eleven—uh, uh,
phaw
!” she gasped. “Twelve—uh, uh,
phaw
!; Thirteen—”

Will was freezing. A shiver racked his body so violently it was as if he’d been lifted by the nape of his neck and shaken, vertebra by vertebra, to the tip of his tailbone. “I just wanted to say I have a present for you, something nice, something you’re going to love—wait till you see it.”

“—uh, uh,
phaw
!” She bent over now to adjust her padding and Will saw that an electric cord trailed away from her backside, looped round half a dozen vacant Adirondack chairs and found its way to an outlet just inside the door. “That’s sweet of you, Will,” she murmured, hot breath steaming from invisible nostrils, and she cracked her mask to give him a smile. “I have something for you, too.”

“Your cord is tangled,” Will said, though it wasn’t, and he used the distraction as a pretext for moving into her and clinging ardently to her cocoon of blankets. He dropped his voice to a passionate whisper. “And I have a little something with me now, too, if you want to come back to my room and try it on for size….”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Will—we’ll exchange gifts tonight, as we’d agreed, at Frank’s party for Dr. Kellogg.”

This rankled him—”Frank’s party for Dr. Kellogg”—but he ignored
it and clung to her blankets all the more fervently. He was cold. His robe was nothing. A predawn wind whistled over the rooftops to sit in his ears. The tip of his nose was insensate. “No, no,” he whispered, and he couldn’t seem to stop his teeth from chattering, “th-that’s not what I mean—you-you-you said you wanted me-me to give you a d-daughter, don’t you remember? And I, I was—well, n-now I’m ready. Can’t you f-feel me? I’m ready to give her to you. Right now. This m-minute.” He gazed passionately into her mud-rimmed eyes. “C-come to my room.”

“You can’t be serious?” She broke away from him, the cold morning air hissing through her nostrils. “Marital relations are strictly forbidden here, you know that.” And then she laughed and shook her head. “Will Lightbody, you’re impossible. Impossible. Talk of the most inappropriate time—and what are you doing out here in your robe and slippers anyway? Are you mad? You’ll catch your death.”

Will was already backing toward the door, his member flaccid and drawn up into his body against the cold, shoulders cradled in his quaking arms. “M-merry Christmas,” he said, and sneezed, “—Eleanor.”

But she didn’t hear him. She was crouching, bending from the waist and straightening up again, over and over. He could hear her counting as he closed the heavy door to the hallway: “Fourteen—uh, uh,
phaw
! Fifteen—uh, uh,
phaw
!”