The Road to Wellville (6 page)

To sleep—just for an hour. And to eat something, anything, and have it pass through him as it should, quietly, decently, unconsciously, instead of searing his insides with all these peristaltic rumblings and outpourings of gas. He’d looked at those oysters Charlie Ossining had been eating, at the chowder and the steak, and he’d felt something clench in his jaws and the juices begin to run—and what he wouldn’t give to be able to sit down to a meal like that. But no, it was toast, and even that was poison. Dr. Brillinger, his mother’s physician and a man as respected around Peterskill as Chauncey Depew himself, had told him it was just a stomach upset—indigestion—and prescribed ipecac, Hostetter’s Celebrated Stomach Bitters, Warner’s Safe Cure and Castoria. Like a fool, he tried them all, dousing himself with stomachics after every pickle and sausage till he couldn’t taste a thing but the alcohol that floated the stuff. Before he knew it, it was the alcohol he craved, and for a good long while—it was when Eleanor went away to the San the first time—he found himself spending more and more time at Mapes’ or Ben’s Elbow, taking beer with his whiskey and the occasional pickled egg to stave off the hunger pains. That was the beginning of the end.

When Eleanor came home, ten pounds heavier and preaching a new religion of vegetarianism and “scientific eating,” she found him bleary-eyed and besotted with drink. The dog barely knew him, the servants were terrified, he hadn’t changed his clothes in a week, and he had a bottle of Old Crow sequestered in every room of the house. She fed him pureed lima beans, nut butter on Graham bread and creamed parsnips, but it made no impact on him. She had his father come round to speak to him, arranged chance meetings with Reverend Tanner of
the Episcopal church and Willa Munson Craighead of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union—all to no avail. His gullet cried out for booze, and six nights a week Sam Lent brought him home sprawled out drunk in the back of his hackney cab.

That was when Eleanor, in her desperation, first noticed the advertisement in the Sears Roebuck catalogue.
SEARS’ WHITE STAR LIQUOR CURE
, the ad proclaimed in big block letters, and then, below it:
Housewives, are you tired of spending the night alone in an empty house while your spouse ruins his digestion and throws away good money at the local saloon? Try Sears’ White Star Liquor Cure—just 5 drops a night in your drinking husband’s coffee and he will roam no more.
All of a sudden Will began to find himself dropping off in the armchair each evening after his rice surprise, Granose biscuits and lichee nuts. Ten, twelve, sometimes thirteen or fourteen hours later, he would awaken in bed, all the rough edges of his mind buffed smooth.

He was working for his father then, keeping charge of the accounts at the Water Street factory and ostensibly learning enough of the business to one day take it over, but now he found himself so muddled he rarely got to the office before ten. His father’s reaction should have been a dead giveaway—normally the old man would chew his feathers off if he was anything other than a quarter of an hour
early
(Got to set an example for the men, Will), but he never said a word. And when Will woke each morning, so fuzzy he barely knew his own name, Eleanor always contrived to be there with as hearty a breakfast as the Kellogg regime would allow, and he was eating it, actually eating it, before he was fully conscious. And then he was dressed, and at the office, and before he knew it, it was six o’clock and he was home again, stealing a nip at the Old Crow and then sitting down to his lentil-and-tomato soup and grilled eggplant with soya sauce, and then he was in the armchair with his coffee and nodding off again.

It took him three months to discover the deception, and only then because he’d happened to thumb through the Sears catalogue one bleak rainy Sunday afternoon while his wife was holding a meeting of the Peterskill Ladies’ Biologic Living Society in the next room. The ad got him thinking. While Eleanor was preaching the virtues of pure food
and the simple life to a gaggle of her reform-minded friends, Mrs. Amelia Hookstratten among them, she was drugging her own husband. Sears’ White Star Liquor Cure, six bottles of which he discovered that afternoon in the back of a drawer in the kitchen, turned out to be nothing more than a tincture of opium.

Well, he was outraged. Outraged and disappointed. His own wife, his own father. Standing there in the kitchen, listening to Eleanor’s perky tones as she went on about the lazy colon and the evils of salt pork and kippers, he felt the rage steal over him and he almost—almost, but not quite—destroyed the little opaque coffee-colored bottles right then and there. Instead, he put the bottles back and waited for his supper and his evening coffee.

In the parlor that evening, a fire in the hearth, Dick the wirehaired terrier stretched out beside him, Will Lightbody made an effort and left his coffee untouched. It was no easy effort, because by now he’d become habituated to those five nightly drops of Sears’ White Star Liquor Cure and he had to fight off the sight and aroma of that coffee as if it were the devil’s own poison. But resist it he did, and when Eleanor breezed into the room half an hour later with her needlework, she actually started when she saw him sitting there conscious and staring into the fire.

“But Will,” she said, “aren’t you going to drink your coffee?”

This was the woman he loved, the woman he’d married the month he graduated Columbia with his baccalaureate, the woman whose every look and movement stirred him in a way he couldn’t describe (but had tried to, time and again, to his classmates, to the rare Barnard girl he asked to the theater or a concert, and to the tarts and working girls he discovered in the blind pigs and outside the vaudeville houses). This was the woman, and she’d tried to poison him.

“No coffee,” he said, rising from the chair. For the first time in months his brain was clear. He knew who he was, where he was, what he was doing and why. “I’m going down to Mapes’,” he said levelly, “for a good steak and a glass of whiskey. No, five glasses of whiskey—one for each drop of Sears’ White Star Liquor Cure.”

Then the tears came. And with the tears, the recriminations. He’d
never seen her so wrought up—even Dick, scratching his hindquarters in confusion and looking back dolefully over his shoulder, had to leave the room. “I never meant to harm you,” she sobbed, “but I was at the end of my rope, and, and you’d changed so—you were like a stranger, a drunk, a seedy drunk in our own house.” She straightened her shoulders and looked him in the eye. “It ran against all my principles,” she said, recovering herself a little, “and you know I don’t believe in drugs or foreign substances of any kind—Dr. Kellogg would throw the whole apothecary of this country right out the window, and I believe he’s right, I do, but—”

But she’d drugged him. For his own good. And with the complicity, as it turned out, of both his parents, the cook and Dr. Brillinger. Their reconciliation was fine and tumultuous. She’d been gone three months in Battle Creek, and he’d been gone in his alcoholic and narcotic haze for the next three, and they came together that night with what he liked to think was real hunger—he still believed fervently that that was the night she got pregnant.

Fine. But one small problem remained: he was desperate to get at those six little bottles of Sears’ White Star Liquor Cure. No: “desperate” wasn’t strong enough a word—he was compelled, obsessed, mad with the need and craving for it. And, of course, when he went straight from her arms to the kitchen drawer for it, it was gone, all six bottles of it. That night his fevers began. His skin swelled till he could feel whole armies marching beneath it, then it shrank again till he thought it would asphyxiate him; his stomach dwindled to the size of a walnut and then sprang open like an umbrella in his throat; his feet became blocks of ice, his hands curling irons. He fell to the floor in the midnight kitchen and crawled on his hands and knees, retching and gagging, through the dining room and out into the parlor, where he startled Dick, upset the coal scuttle and scratched the skin of his arms till it bled like a roast wrapped in butcher’s paper.

In the morning, on the table beside his empty bed (in which he somehow found himself), stood a little opaque blue bottle with a beautiful blue label emblazoned with that single all-encompassing, all-wonderful, redemptive and salvatory Sears’ White Star. He didn’t stop
to think: brown bottle, blue bottle—what difference did it make? In the next instant he had the cork out and the bottle to his lips… but what was this? It tasted … different somehow. Different, but not bad. Not by any means. He drained half the bottle before he paused to study the label:
SEARS’ WHITE STAR NARCOTIC CURE
, it read. And below it, in fine print:
Housewives, are you tired of spending the night all but alone while your spouse ruins his digestion and throws away good money in a narcotic-induced stupor in your own living room? Try Sears’ White Star Narcotic Cure—just 5 drops a night in your nodding husband’s coffee and he will be as bright and alert as a squirrel.
The irony wasn’t lost on him. But what did he care? His stomach was shot, his life a shambles, he had cravings he couldn’t control and a wife who grew more distant by the day. All right, he thought, all right, and he could already feel the narcotic cure working in his veins, and he drained the rest of the bottle.

Later that day, he had the druggist analyze the second bottle he found—he knew there’d be a second and a third and a fourth, ad infinitum—in the drawer of his wife’s vanity. The narcotic cure tested out at about eighty-four proof, or two percent less than the Old Crow. He went back to his Old Crow, which, after all, was more reliable and, ounce for ounce, about a tenth the cost. Still, all this had had a profound effect on him, and with Eleanor’s pregnancy, his life began to take on new meaning. He developed a renewed enthusiasm for his work, he spent less time at Mapes’ and Ben’s Elbow, and, after a while, he began to phase out the Old Crow and try his best to eat scientifically. And he might have made it, too, if his stomach hadn’t collapsed on him.

It was an afternoon in late spring, still crisp but infused with a hint of the warmth to come, and he left the plant early, stopped in at Offenbacher’s to pick up a bottle of Coca-Cola, two packs of Wrigley’s gum and Eleanor’s favorite—ginger ale, in the big green bottle—and started home early to surprise her. He walked up Division Street, the package tucked neatly under his arm, and turned in at the private lane that led to the grand three-story red-brick house his father had built for them. The dogwood was in bloom, pink and white, and the air was fragrant. He felt in that moment that all was right with the world, and
with Eleanor and him, and with his son and heir to come. Bounding up the stairs, he saw the house in a new light, the way a child might, a little boy in a Buster Brown outfit whose father took him to feed the ducks in the park and to watch the trains thunder into the station. “Eleanor?” he called. “Elea-nor!”

He found her in the bedroom, packing, the maid—a pinched-up girl of eighteen with all the animation of a block of stone—at her side. “What are you doing?” he demanded. “Planning a trip? In your condition?”

She was. And there was nothing to discuss. She was going back to Battle Creek, to the Sanitarium, and she was going to stay there till the baby was born.

“But why?” he blurted, and it was then that he felt the first hot intimation of it buried like a sword in his deepest gut, burning, burning. “Why not here? We have a new hospital and, and the finest—”

“Hygiene,” she said. “Scientific eating, biologic living—it’s a whole different atmosphere there. You wouldn’t know. You wouldn’t believe it. I want my baby—
our
baby—to have the best. Don’t you?”

He did. Of course he did.

The next day she was gone. So was his stomach. It hit him, full force, as he saw her off at Grand Central, a pain so hideous, so unbearable, so all-encompassing, it dropped him to his knees. How he made his way to the Hudson Line and got himself home he would never know; for the next week he lay in bed, and nothing, not Dr. Brillinger, not a hamburger sandwich from Mapes’, not the Old Crow or the Sears’ White Star Cure could help him.

He wrote her every day. And she wrote back—long enthusiastic letters full of terms like “autointoxication,” “dextrinized starch” and “sinusoidal current.” Four months dragged by and he was all but an invalid. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t drink, could barely raise himself from the bed. He lost twenty pounds, twenty-five; he stopped going in to work. Twice he thought to visit her, but she discouraged him. Both times. By wire. It would be too much on her nerves, she claimed. He knew she was suffering from neurasthenia, and if her nerves were in a jangle, what did he think that would do for the baby—the baby they’d already named Alfred, after his father? No, he was to be patient. She’d wire when the
time came, and then, then he should fly to the San, and plan on staying awhile.

The wire came on a sweltering day in early September:

He was on his way, actually standing at the Peterskill station, his bags piled round his feet, Battle Creek—till this moment as impossible a destination as Sarawak or Mongolia—awaiting him at the end of the line, when his father’s car pulled up on the cobblestones out front. Will’s father was a big man, thick where Will was thin, and he had the stoic fleshy face of a butcher or baker. As the driver held the door open for the old man, Will, hurrying across the platform, caught his first glimpse of that face—funereal, dead and buried in its ruts and creases—and he knew what was coming. Knew it even before his father embraced him stiffly and handed him the second telegram.

The baby girl was dead. In the night. No one knew how. Or why. Eleanor was recuperating. She would be home in two weeks.

Stop.

And so here he was, seven weeks later, the cold grip of winter lying heavy over the land, his stomach shot, Eleanor a wreck, his baby girl dead, hurtling down the rails for Battle Creek and the cure. He lay there through the night and into the sleepless morning, and he changed trains in Chicago and sat propped up with an unread book in his lap while Eleanor embroidered beside him. He saw hills, naked trees, the same stubble fields he’d seen in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois. Three weeks and a day without sleep. He laid his head back, closed his eyes and tried to doze … and then the brakes shrieked,
the train slowed as if tugged gently backward on an infinitely supple cord of India rubber, and they were there. Eleanor was chirping something at him. Will didn’t hear her. He was staring up into the blocky brownstone arches of the Battle Creek station and the sign that reared like prophecy against the sky above it: