The Road to Wellville (8 page)

He was mortified. This was a place of healing, of peace and tranquillity, where the halls echoed with the soothing strains of the Battle Creek Sanitarium String Quartet and no one spoke above a whisper. And here he was, shouting like an Italian in a tenement.

In the next instant, Dab was scurrying across the marble floor, and a pair of attendants, big men, sinewy, with rocklike chests and intransigent shoulders, were converging on the Doctor’s errant son. Distracted, the prophylactic smile frozen to his face, the Doctor bowed curtly to the Lightbodys—“Charity case,” he murmured, “nothing to be alarmed about”—and hustled off in the direction of the far corridor, waving a hand over his head to direct the attendants like an overwrought general deploying his troops.

In his office, settled behind the great mahogany barge of his desk, the bill of his eyeshade pulled down low, the Doctor was another man. He was in command again, in control, everything was in its place and all was right with the world. Except for George, that is. Not in the least contrite, he sat there across from his adoptive father, slumped in his
chair, the omnipresent sneer ironed into his face. Behind George, sandwiched between the framed portraits of Socrates and Elie Metchnikoff, Dab stood against the wall doing his best imitation of a henchman, arms folded, shoulders squared, chin thrust forward. The two attendants waited just outside the door.

The Doctor pushed himself back from the desk and, never fully at ease unless he was in motion, began to pace the carpet. For all his talk of biologic living and the simple life, he drove himself relentlessly, working from 4:00
A.M.
to midnight, seven days a week. Sleep? The Doctor disdained it—who had time for sleep? He traveled to Algeria, Italy and Mexico, to Paris, London and Lisbon, he addressed the Northern Nut Growers Association and the National Milk Congress, lectured his patients, dictated his books (
Plain Facts about Sexual Life, Man, the Masterpiece, The Crippled Colon
, and
The Itinerary of a Breakfast
, among others), oversaw the administration of the San, organized the Race Betterment Society and the Health Efficiency League of America, served as president of the American Medical Missionary College and half a dozen other organizations, and still managed to knock off as many as twenty-five gastrointestinal operations a day. If he couldn’t find all the time he’d like for Ella, who’d become deaf and increasingly feeble, or for his forty-two children, who could blame him?

“George,” he said, still pacing, his head down, “I’m disappointed in you. No, I may as well be frank: I’m disgusted by your behavior. Disgusted. I took you in. Rescued you. Why, your mother was nothing but a common, a common—”

“Go ahead and say it—a whore. She was a whore.”

“You know I don’t like to hear that language, George.”

George’s spine was bent like a strand of wire. He slipped lower and lower, until he seemed to be absorbed in the fabric of the chair. He made a pyramid of his grubby fingers and smiled a bemused smile. He said nothing.

The Doctor paced. Light glinted from the smoked celluloid of his eyeshade. The eyeshade was a fixture of the Doctor’s office attire—it masked the expression in his eyes, and he wore it when dictating, giving instructions to his staff, conducting distasteful interviews such as this one. Pacing, he allowed himself to heave a sigh fruity with disgust
. “You’ve become a thorn in my side, George, and I just don’t understand it. I educated you, gave you everything—”

George’s laugh, sharp as the slap of a wave against the bow of a freighter, cut him off. “And just what did you give me? Five minutes of your time? A pat on the back? The thrilling opportunity to be your unpaid house servant?” George was aroused now, his eyes engorged, his head bobbing like a pullet’s. “My life’s a shit pile, that’s all. A shit pile.”

John Harvey Kellogg swung round on him in that instant, his lips twisted beneath the shadow that fell over his face. “You ingrate,” he choked. “You, you guttersnipe with your filthy mouth. You meat eater. How can you dare—” But he couldn’t go on. It was bad for his heart, for his nerves, for his digestion. George was the biggest mistake he’d ever made in his life, no doubt about it. And though he didn’t like to admit it, he knew in his heart he had only himself to blame. Hubris, that’s what it was.

Thirteen years ago, after a lecture in Chicago, he’d sat down to a vegetarian supper with Drs. Johannes Schloh, Mortimer Carpenter and Ben Childress of the Good Samaritans’ Pediatric Hospital, and found himself embroiled in a debate over child rearing. Carpenter and his colleagues claimed it was all in the parentage—“A bad seed gives rise to a weed, John, to be short and sweet”—but Dr. Kellogg, with his messianic belief in the perfectibility of the human race, insisted otherwise. Conditions made the man, he asserted, wagging a finger for emphasis, and any child of the ghetto, any poor unfortunate from the stockyards or the shantytowns that stood awash in sewage behind them, would grow into as valuable and decent a young person as any if only he were given the opportunity. “Give me the worst case you can find,” he said, “the single most deprived child in all of Chicago, and I’ll take him in and raise him as my own son, just as I’ve raised the others, and I guarantee you he’ll turn out a model citizen. I know he will, gentlemen. I know it.”

Well, he was wrong.

They found George—he was known only as “Hildah’s boy” then, with neither Christian nor family name attached to him—sitting beside the corpse of his mother in an unheated shack out back of a South Side
slum. The police were unable to determine how long the mother had been dead—the cold weather had helped preserve her—but the marks at her throat and the contusions about her face suggested that her death was not the result of natural causes. No one knew how long the boy had been sitting there, nor what horrors he’d witnessed—he was six years old, wrapped against the cold in a scrap of old carpet, and he hadn’t yet learned to speak. All around him, scattered like bones, were the stubs of candles he’d chewed to fight down his hunger.

The Doctor took him in, named him after Ella’s uncle and gave him his own surname to go along with it. There were eighteen other children in the house at the time, including four Mexican boys the doctor had found abandoned during his trip to Guadalajara and Mexico City, three girls orphaned when their mother died at the San and a mulatto boy who’d been found wandering the streets of Grand Rapids with second-degree burns on his chest, his thighs and the soles of his feet. The Doctor’s house, or the Residence, as it was called, had been built the year before, and it had been designed to accommodate a crowd. There were twenty rooms in all, including separate quarters for Dr. Kellogg and his wife (no matter how forbearing he might have been, there were times when he simply needed to escape that cacophony of piping voices), an office, a library, several bathrooms, a stenographer’s room (he never knew when the urge to dictate a book would strike him), a small laboratory and a gymnasium for the children.

The children slept in dormitories according to their ages and sexes, they were attended to and educated by San nurses and staffers, and they were provided with all the plain unvarnished accoutrements of La Vie Simple, from calisthenics in the morning to beet soufflé, okra soup and three-ounce portions of baked Cornlet in the evening. They were expected to work, of course—John Harvey Kellogg was a firm believer in the twin principles that work is a great character builder and that no one gets anything for nothing. The younger children were assigned chores in the household, the yard and the garden, while the elder were encouraged to work at the San after school hours.

And they throve. All of them. Two of the Mexican children—the Rodriguez boys—became doctors in their own right, and half a dozen of the girls became nurses. They spoke well, kept their quarters neat
and always looked presentable. The Doctor was proud of them—they were as much his achievement, his creation, as the corn flake and the electric blanket, and they were a credit to Battle Creek, to the Sanitarium and to the great progressive democratic country that gave rise to them. All of them, that was, except George.

From the beginning, he’d been sullen and withdrawn, the sort of boy who would as soon bite off the tip of his finger as crack a smile. He wouldn’t—or couldn’t—speak; he tore pages from his books, defaced his desk in the schoolroom, dismantled the gymnasium equipment and fought grimly and incessantly with the other children. Undersized, always dirty despite the vigilance with which the Doctor pursued personal sanitation, his eyes clouded with hurt and anger, he was a small tornado of disorder and grief.

Dr. Kellogg decided on a course of what in later years would become known as behavior modification. He began with the problem of George’s slovenliness. Each day the boy would come in from outdoors and drop his jacket on the floor in the back hallway, while all the other children, even little Rebecca Biehn, aged four, would hang theirs on the hooks provided for that purpose in their rooms. A small thing. But one, the Doctor felt, that lay at the foundation of all the rest.

When George came in from school the following afternoon—it was a month to the day since the Doctor had taken him in—John Harvey Kellogg was, waiting for him. Never mind that the Doctor had pressing business at the Sanitarium, never mind that he’d rescheduled a slate of operations and a staff meeting and put off answering his voluminous correspondence: the boy’s education—
this
boy’s education—was about to commence. Two of the San’s girls led the younger children through the back hallway and up the stairs to their quarters, and the children followed docilely—and responsibly—behind. There was no shoving; no elevation of voices; no skipping, scampering, trotting, leaping or running. And no jackets were removed until the children Were upstairs and the hooks to receive them in reach—that was the rule. George, as usual, brought up the rear.

If the children were surprised to see the Doctor seated there on a bench in the corner at such an unwonted hour of the day, they didn’t show it. A few of the younger ones—little Rebecca, in particular—
gave him a shy glance, but they knew better than to be too demonstrative in the presence of their patriarch and provider. The Doctor didn’t like noise. They all understood that.

George had his head down. He always had his head down, as if the ground itself were more fascinating than the great wide world about him, and this disturbed the Doctor, not only because it was a reflection of the boy’s attitude but because it made for such unacceptable posture. Head down, George didn’t see his adoptive parent sitting there in the shadows, and, sure enough, as carelessly as if he were a dressed-up ape in the forest, he shrugged out of his jacket and let it fall to the floor behind him.

“George,” the Doctor called out in a voice of authority. “George Kellogg.”

The boy had his foot on the bottom stair. The other children, under the guidance of their nurses, with whom Dr. Kellogg had conferred earlier, went straight up the stairs and into their rooms. George paused, contemplated his elevated foot for a long moment and then slowly tilted his head and lifted his eyes to the Doctor’s.

“That’s it,” the Doctor said, trying to soften his expression. The boy
was
responding to the English language, after all, and what’s more, the Doctor reminded himself, he’d been through God knew what manner of filth and depravity. Gesturing with both hands, the Doctor beckoned the boy to him. “Come over here, George,” he coaxed, “come on. I won’t bite you.”

The boy’s eyes fell again to the floor. He hung his head, shuffled his feet, slouched like a whipped dog—all of that, yes, but he did come, and he did seem to understand.

The Doctor wasn’t very demonstrative physically—a quirk of his, one he didn’t even recognize. It was just that deep down he didn’t really see the need for much physical contact between human beings, beyond the business handshake or the husbandly peck at the wifely cheek, of course. Contact was unavoidable, he knew that, but it was also the means by which disease was spread. The upshot was that when George had crossed the room and stood there before him, the Doctor was reluctant to take him in his arms and explain to him his transgression. Instead, he rose from his seat, fussed with his hands a moment and
looked down at the crown of the small boy’s head. “George,” he began, “I do wish you would speak to me, to Mrs. Kellogg, to your nurses and your brothers and sisters. I know you understand the spoken language, and you’ll learn to write it as well, and I know that you appreciate—or will come to appreciate—the rules of this household.” Pause. “Now, you’ve been told countless times about your jacket.”

George made no move to agree with this proposition. He stood there, staring at his feet, as motionless, and for all the world as insentient, as a post.

“I’m not going to punish you, George,” the Doctor went on. “I know you’re new here and I know too that you’ve gone through a great deal, but I am going to give you an exercise—let’s call it an exercise in recalling one’s duties and responsibilities.”

George was lifeless, mute, unattached to the world and its currents of animation.