The Road to Wellville (48 page)

And so, the knife. And so, the stomach that would not work and the intestines that would not flow were to be invaded, prodded, examined in their bloody wet lair, hefted, weighed, pronounced upon—and, if the Doctor, the Almighty Doctor, saw fit, excised, snipped, cut, mutilated. That was what Will Lightbody had to look forward to on the windy uncertain afternoon of Groundhog Day.

Earlier, at breakfast (Drs. Linniman and Kellogg insisted that Will take his meals in the dining hall, even if it was only to lift a glass of milk to his lips in the company of his fellow seekers after the physiologic ideal or, in this case, to take nothing at all in preparation for surgery), Eleanor had joined him at the table. Will was elated. Here was his wife, this elegant showpiece in high lace collar and jewels, this adornment and inspiration, abandoning the brilliant company of her own select group to show her concern for him, her husband, as he faced the liability of surgery. When she took Professor Stepanovich’s place (he was back in Russia, peering into his telescope, desperately attempting to restore the credibility of Saturn’s rings), Will felt his eyes go glassy with tears of gratitude. “Eleanor,” he said, flushing with pride, “what a surprise,” and he introduced her to his tablemates, though, as it turned out, she knew them all already, through her social activities and her directorship of the Sanitarium Deep-Breathing Club.

For all of thirty seconds Eleanor was solicitous and tender, asking how he felt, reassuring him, wondering if there was anything she could do for him, but then she ordered breakfast, looked up and threw herself into the general conversation. Five minutes later, Will found himself growing irritated: she was ignoring him. In fact, she was excluding nearly the whole table—the braying Hart-Jones, Mrs. Tindermarsh, the shrinking Miss Muntz—in favor of the newcomer to Will’s group, a big-headed loudmouth by the name of Badger. As he’d let them know, endlessly, Badger was President of the Vegetarian Society of America, and a Very Important and Influential Individual. It turned Will’s stomach to see Eleanor playing up to him (and his stomach certainly didn’t need any additional turning). This was just the sort of thing that was wrong with her—she had no sense of proportion.

They were discussing prominent vegetarians they knew in common, Badger holding forth, Eleanor name-dropping, Hart-Jones fluttering round the edges of the conversation with a stutter and whinny, hopelessly trying to pass for a wit. Will gazed out the window on the piercing sunshine and spongelike clouds of Groundhog Day, watching the treetops
tops go from light to dark and back again, until he could stand it no longer. He turned to Mrs. Tindermarsh, who sat mountainously to his left, her hands folded over a plate as barren as his own. “You’re not breakfasting this morning, Mrs. Tindermarsh?” he murmured, by way of saying something, anything, to distract himself from the inanities of the Eleanor-Badger dialogue.

Mrs. Tindermarsh stiffened. She unlocked her fingers, one by one, and spoke without lifting her head. “I’m having surgery today.”

A spurt of panic shot through Will’s veins—in his irritation with Eleanor he’d managed to forget for just a moment the terrible sentence that hung over his own head. “Me, too,” he said in an unnatural voice, a voice that sailed too high, a squeak of a voice.

The great solid frieze of Mrs. Tindermarsh’s head turned toward him and a kind of dim sympathetic interest lit her eyes. “Oh, really,” she said without animation, “what a coincidence. I’m due at eleven-thirty—for the kink. I’m nervous, of course. But I can’t help thinking it’s for the best, for my … well,” and she attempted a smile, “we can’t be going on like this, can we? It does so smack of symptomitis.”

Will nodded. Gave her a sick smile. “I’m at twelve,” he said. “Same kink. Or so the Doctor thinks. He won’t know, of course, until he’s in there….” His voice trailed off. He had a sudden image of the Doctor in his surgical mask poised over the incision—a hole, deep and black—and reaching in like a magician to pull out a groundhog by the ears. He shut his eyes and rubbed his temples, then reached for his water glass. Shakily.

“—knew the Alcotts personally,” Badger was saying, “I was just a boy, of course, but I learned some invaluable lessons at Dove Cottage….”

And Will knew he would go on to elucidate those lessons in excruciating detail, as he had at breakfast, lunch and dinner for the past month, finding virtue in tautology and inspiration in his own hoarse ragged bottomless nagging voice. The man wore rope sandals in winter and spurned wool, going about in a cotton shirt in freezing temperatures. And he conspicuously consumed nothing but coarse unleavened cottage bread made of Graham flour he’d brought with him, dried apples and pure unfiltered spring water imported from Concord, Massachusetts,
where Bronson Alcott had made his home. The Kellogg diet, as he’d let them know innumerable times, didn’t go far enough. Molasses, milk, butter, potatoes! He scorned them all. For his part, Will wished him the peace and solace of the grave, hoping against hope that he’d choke to death on his cardboard crusts.

Eleanor countered Badger’s speech with something equally stupid, and Will, trembling now with the effort to contain himself, turned his attention to Miss Muntz, who sat to the left of Mrs. Tindermarsh. “And Miss Muntz,” he said, making a stab at a smile, “may I ask how your drawings are progressing?”

Will didn’t dare ask about her condition—or even how she was feeling. The tall and regal girl with the greenish complexion he’d known two months ago was now stooped and wrinkled, the skin fallen loose from her bones, hanging in pouches beneath her eyes, turning to scale at her ears. She was so pale she looked like a victim of one of Bram Stoker’s monsters, sucked dry of blood, even her viridian glow faded to a faint dullish crème de menthe. But worst of all, and most horrifying, was her hair. It had gone gray, gray as a crone’s, and had begun to fall out in clumps. He looked at her now and saw that her scalp shone under the lights of the chandelier like buffed leather.

She smiled. “Lovely, I think. Grand. I’ve done portraits of Dr. Kellogg and Mr. Hart-Jones. I’d love to do one of you—just a charcoal sketch, nothing elaborate. Will you sit for me one day?”

Sit for her? Of course he would. Of course. Will felt flattered and he unconsciously sat up a little straighter and forgot for another precious second the weight of the doom hanging over him.

Badger’s voice, a natural irritant, caustic to the ears, suddenly intruded on them. “And I’m ashamed to see you wearing leather, Mrs. Lightbody,” he rasped. “Ashamed and disappointed. Rarely have I met a woman so well informed about our cause, so devoted and dynamic. Really, though, you must come to terms with
every
aspect of the Vegetarian Ethos, neglecting nothing. Only then can you achieve a complete physiological harmony.”

Will tuned him out. “I’d be delighted,” he said to Miss Muntz. “After, well …” He hesitated. Would he be able to sit? Would he be drawing breath and occupying space? He had a vision of Miss Muntz leaning
over him like the hag of death, pressing her cold fingers to the lifeless mask of his face. “I’m going in for surgery today.”

“Oh, you, too?” she exclaimed. She seemed strangely excited. “You and Mrs. Tindermarsh on the same day. Well”—drawing a deep breath—“congratulations.”

Will gave her a look of bewilderment.

“You’ll get well soon, that’s what I mean. Isn’t that marvelous?” She clapped her hands girlishly, folded her fingers and nibbled thoughtfully at her pale green knuckles. In her decline, she’d taken to progressively more radical cures in a kind of desperate leap at health, and perhaps her values had become distorted. She was even then undergoing one of Dr. Kellogg’s newest and—if you believed his self-puffery—most efficacious cures for chlorosis and a host of other conditions, from erysipelas and obesity to ingrown toenails: inhaling radium emanations. Radium, as Will understood it, was some sort of stone that gave off healing rays or vibrations. The Curies had discovered it, along with polonium, and won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics in acknowledgment of their achievement in isolating this miraculous substance. Dr. Kellogg had picked right up on it. A stone. A healing stone. It almost sounded pagan.

“Yes,” Will agreed, uneasy with the conditions of Miss Muntz’s radiant, liver-lipped smile. He was going under the knife, but he put a brave face on it and gave her back her smile. “That will be marvelous. Mrs. Tindermarsh and I will have to kick up our heels and lead the Cotillion…. But not this afternoon, I’m afraid. For Lincoln’s Birthday—will that satisfy you, Miss Muntz?”

Miss Muntz smiled serenely, the vision of the square-shouldered Tindermarsh in Will’s embrace briefly illuminating her ghastly yellow eyes. She was sick. Desperately sick. Will stood abruptly. “Eleanor,” he announced, interrupting his wife in the middle of an anecdote about the time she’d arranged a speaking engagement for Lucy Page Gaston, the anti-tobacco crusader, at the Peterskill station, “we need to go now.” He leveled a look of annoyance on Badger. “I undergo surgery in less than three hours.”

Badger snorted, made some disparaging remark about Dr. Kellogg and his surgical skills, waved his hand in dismissal. Eleanor rose dutifully to
join her husband. “It’s been a pleasure talking with you, Lionel,” she said, “and very enlightening, too.”

“Likewise,” growled the vegetarian prince, and he bit down hard on his cottage bread.

When the time came, it was Nurse Graves who prepared Will for surgery, and he thanked the Fates that it was she and not Nurse Bloethal, who, as it turned out, was busy irrigating yet another costive bowel with the aid of the Doctor’s enema machine. Irene was brisk and beautiful, and though she tried to be as matter-of-fact and businesslike as possible, Will could see that she was concerned for him. Deeply concerned. Concerned above and beyond the call of duty and the normal limitations of the nurse-patient relationship. It was the way she moved and spoke, a certain breathlessness to her voice and an exaggeration of her small movements that betrayed her. She cared for him. She did. And though she hadn’t accepted the brooch and though she’d been upset and angry with his lapses, they’d come to a rapprochement in the past weeks and seemed to be on their old footing again. It was an exhilarating thing to be back in her good graces, to see her smile, to joke with her, to participate with her in the team effort that bound them so intimately together—the struggle to salvage the broken heap of his body and soul.

She came for him at eleven o’clock and found him brooding at the window. They made small talk about the groundhog and whether he’d make the event, and then she took his temperature, auscultated him, attached the sphygmomanometer and noted the result on her chart. She gave him a potion to relax him—it felt curiously like the Sears’ White Star Liquor Cure, a warmth that spread from his belly to his limbs, his fingers, the tip of his tongue—and then she helped him onto a gurney and Ralph, brawny dependable Ralph, wheeled him to the elevator and thence to surgery.

At a quarter to twelve he was lying in a private anteroom to the surgery, Nurse Graves at his side, waiting for Eleanor. Eleanor had her own morning routine to attend to, so she couldn’t be with him through his long wait, but she’d promised to duck out early from her posture
therapy session to be with him in his final moments. Irene’s voice, soft as a breeze warmed by the sun, floated over him; she held his hand and caught him up on the doings of her brothers and sisters as a way of distracting him—little Philo had fallen through the ice on the pond and the hair froze to his head; Evangeline had blackened two nails on the butter churn; the dogs had trapped a fox in the barn. Will felt lazy, disembodied. Odd moments of his life drifted in and out of his head, and he saw himself as a whiplash of a boy, sound in mind and body, gorging himself on fried chicken on Decoration Day, bicycling through a grove of white birch, fishing under the bridge, stepping out the door on a morning transformed by snow. But then his stomach clenched again. He was going under the knife: that was the reality. The knife. He pictured Mrs. Tindermarsh, that monument of flesh, the sagging belly and drooping breasts, exposed and naked beneath Dr. Kellogg’s probing scalpel, the scalpel that sliced, cut, burrowed. “Take me out of here,” he croaked, and his own voice startled him. “Irene, take me back to my room, take me away—I don’t—I can’t—”