The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Miss Muntz’s face seemed suddenly ecstatic, her eyes burning, a secret smile pressed to her lips, and she let out a sigh of cosmic contentment as she threw hack her head and let her gaze roam over the sky, the naked trees, the deer on the lawn below them. After a moment, during which a stiff breeze off the icy black waters of Lake Michigan shook the veranda and sent a scrap of paper rocketing over the wall, she murmured, “Aren’t they darling?”

  “The deer?”

  “Yes. So graceful, so much a part of the world of nature we insist on brutalizing with our guns and nets and fences, our roads and brick houses, so … so right.”

  Will agreed with her, wholeheartedly, though he couldn’t help seeing them as agents of the Chief’s propaganda, and the very thought of a venison steak, streaming juices and served up with a sprinkle of thyme and pan-broiled carrots and onions, started him salivating. “Darling, yes they are,” he heard himself answer, but now that they’d broken discursive ground, he couldn’t keep his thoughts from drifting toward the morbid: What was wrong with her? What was greensickness, exactly? Was it fatal? Catching? He knew they weren’t supposed to discuss symptoms—the Chief had strictures against it, negative thinking and all that—but his curiosity got the better of him. He cleared his throat and took a breath so bracing he could feel it all the way down to the tip of his tailbone. “Uh, Miss Muntz,” he began, “if you don’t mind my asking, just out of curiosity, I was wondering what a young girl like you would, uh, require from an institution like this—I mean, I hope I’m not being rude, but what’s ailing you, anyway?”

  There was a moment of silence. Miss Muntz turned to him finally, and he saw that the ecstasy had gone from her face, sopped up in her greenish pores like ink in a fountain pen. “We’re not supposed to discuss symptoms, you know, though I forgive you because you’re new. And because I like your eyes. And your nose.”

  This information gave him a little frisson: she liked his eyes and nose. He was a married man, of course, and, what’s more, a married man deeply in love with his wife, and no woman’s blandishments could really touch him … but still, there it was, a little thrill of pleasure.

  “Dr. Kellogg calls it ‘symptomitis.’ The last thing he wants is for his patients to sit around like a bunch of old hens, trading complaints.”

  “True enough. But because you like my eyes and nose, and because, Miss Muntz, though I’ve just got to know you, I have to confess I’m very concerned—without you at the table I’d be at the mercy of Mrs. Tindermarsh and that blathering Englishman—well, not to be too forward, but won’t you put my fears to rest? It’s not anything”—had he gone too far?—“not anything too grave, is it?” Will could feel the cold air numbing his gums as he gave her his best smile—suddenly it had become vitally important, crucial, that she tell him. They were two suffering confused put-upon souls trading confidences, that was all—and where was the harm in that? “It’s my stomach,” Will offered. “That’s why I’m here. I can’t eat, can’t sleep. It feels like there’s a hundred little coal miners in there having a torchlight parade.”

  A pretty viridescent hand had worked itself out of the cocoon of Miss Muntz’s blankets. She put it to her lips to suppress yet another giggle—was the simile so amusing? Or his suffering? Will reddened—he’d tried to be sincere with her, hadn’t he?

  “I have greensickness,” she announced suddenly, and looked away. “It’s an anemia. ‘Chlorosis’ is the official name for it. Dr. Kellogg says I’m a very severe case, but his prognosis is for full recovery—if I stay on the antitoxic diet, of course.”

  “God,” Will said, “don’t you hate that food? I mean, corn pulp and Protose fillets?”

  Miss Muntz gave a little sniff. “If it’s going to make me well again, I’ll eat anything. Besides, I’ve learned that it was meat that was poisoning me all these years. My mother is absolutely—well, with her it’s salt pork for breakfast, beefsteak for dinner and a chicken, kidneys, chops or the like for luncheon. Little wonder I’m anemic.”

  Will was considering this, the specter of a loving mother unwittingly poisoning her own flesh and blood, when Nurse Graves appeared to change his hot-water bag and see how he was doing. “Get your rest now,” she admonished in quick little puffs of breath as she slipped the hot rubber reservoir down under the blankets, “you’ve got your afternoon enema at two-thirty, and then it’s off to the Colon Department, the Shadowgram Room and the Anthropometric Department. And then”—she held back a moment, as if announcing a visit with the crowned heads of Europe—“the Chief will see you.”

  Chapter 8

  Changing

  the

  Flora

  It was late in the afternoon, the windows gone opaque with the dark glue of night, a reflective calm settling over the corridors of the San as patients and attendants alike made preparations for the evening meal—the hour when, in another, happier venue, people would be gathering for cocktails. Will sat alone on a bench in the Palm Garden, breathing in the oppressive humidity and tropical funk of the place and listening to the Battle Creek Sanitarium String Quartet (four stiff-backed gentlemen sporting symmetrically pointed beards) dutifully sawing its way through something by Schumann. Or at least he thought it was Schumann. There was that fluid sadness, that precise Teutonic rush of joy. Schumann. Sure. He looked round him and yawned. He was exhausted, weak and profoundly bored, sitting there amongst the old ladies in their wheelchairs like the invalid he’d become, checking his watch, suppressing a ripple of gas as the three bites of Rice à la Carolina came back to haunt him. Where was she? What was keeping her?

  Just when he’d given up, when he’d closed his eyes on the Adagio and let his thoughts drift over the cobbled hilly sunstruck streets of Peterskill to a distant Fourth of July parade, Eleanor on his arm, lunch in a hamper, the band striking up a foot-thumping Sousa march, he felt a touch at his elbow. It was Nurse Graves, she of the soft brown eyes and artful hands, come to fetch him off into the great Doctor’s presence, where he would learn his fate, once and for all.

  “You poor thing,” she puffed, helping him to his feet, “you must be exhausted. It seems such a shame to interrupt your little catnap—”

  “I wasn’t napping,” Will protested, giving her a loose-lipped grin. “I was just thinking, that’s all. Meditating.”

  “Yes, of course,” she breathed as they passed through the archway and into the lobby, her normally brisk pace attuned to the slow tread of his invalid’s shuffle, “I always do my best thinking while snoring, too. And don’t try to deny it—you were snoring in there. You see: one day in the San, one step in the direction of living the physiologic life, and already you’re nodding off like a baby—you, who hadn’t slept in over three weeks.”

  They were passing down the corridor to the right, now, the lights all ablaze, the odd patient returning from a last-minute blood count or colon check while physicians closed up their offices and headed home in full physiologic stride. Will couldn’t help admitting the truth of what she was saying—he had slept, at least there was that. Maybe there was something to the Sanitarium system, after all—maybe, just maybe, he would begin to recover his health, with or without Eleanor at his side. The thought of that—of being able to stand up straight again, to walk in the woods, take an interest in life, drink a cocktail, smoke a cigarette, stuff himself like anyone else and relax on the toilet afterward—gave him a rush of hope. “Leave any man in front of that orchestra and he’ll be unconscious inside of thirty seconds,” Will boomed, bantering now, almost gleeful, on his way to see the healer with this angel of mercy at his arm. “If I’d only known, I would have hired them to serenade me in my parlor every night around eleven, a warm glass of milk in one hand, a bad novel in the other.”

  Nurse Graves’s pure, cleansing laugh rang out in the hallway, infectious, bringing smiles to the faces of passing nurses and physicians and thrilling Will till he felt like the wittiest man alive, and she was still laughing as she knocked on the heavy polished oak
door of Dr. Kellogg’s office. Will recognized the harried overweight man who answered the door as Dr. Kellogg’s amanuensis, and beyond him he saw an expansive, high-ceilinged office so brightly lit and sterile it might have been an operating theater. The only relief, aside from the radiator pipes, was provided by the unbroken band of portraits that lined the three visible walls just above the wainscoting. The effect was unsettling. Greek philosophers, celebrated vegetarians, medical heroes and captains of industry alike fixed the poor squirming patient with a stony and unforgiving gaze. These good and famous men—Lord Byron, Isaac Newton, Ben Franklin, Abe Lincoln, Plato, Joseph Lister, Sylvester Graham—all of them seemed to be staring down at him in accusation, crying out to him to give up his sinful carnivorous ways and follow the path of vegetarian righteousness.

  “Mr. Lightbody?” the secretary inquired. He dabbed at his brow with a damp handkerchief as if he were staggering around in the middle of the Arabian Desert, though the temperature outside was fifteen above and the interior climate held at a steady seventy-two degrees Fahrenheit, just as the Chief ordained.

  “Yes,” Nurse Graves answered for him. “Mr. Lightbody is here for his five-forty-five appointment with Dr. Kellogg.”

  “Won’t you come in, please, and have a seat?” the secretary returned, wiping his glasses now, as if his own internal climate had left them dripping with moisture. “Dr. Kellogg is expecting you.”

  But Will couldn’t move. He stood there on the threshold, uncertain, his heart hammering at his ribs (now, now he would find out everything, for better or worse, and the thought paralyzed him), gaping at the big mahogany desk in the center of the room as if it were a sacrificial altar. The gleaming surface of the desk held three objects only: a lamp on one side, an inkwell on the other and, in the center, a single file, thick with lab reports. Strangely, though, Dr. Kellogg himself was nowhere to be seen—if he was in the room, he must have been hiding under the desk.

  “Go ahead, Mr. Lightbody,” Nurse Graves was saying, as the secretary urged him forward with a peculiar rolling motion of his pudgy hands, murmuring some excuse about the Doctor’s previous appointment, when a quick excitable voice cried out at his back, “Ah! It’s Mr. Lightbody, isn’t it, if I’m not mistaken?”

  Dr. Kellogg, all in white, bustled through the door, ducking round Will like a child in a game of tag, a basket of fruit slung under one arm, a stack of books in the other. In a single brisk motion, he dropped the books into his secretary’s nervous arms and swung round on Will and his nurse with the basket of fruit. “Nurse Graves, a piece of fruit? Mr. Lightbody? Dab?”

  The basket was of woven straw, like something out of Mother Goose, and it was filled with apples, pears, out-of-season oranges, bananas, kumquats, tangerines and a single glowing cherry-red pomegranate. Nurse Graves selected a tangerine, neat in its ball of loose waxy orange skin, and Dab chose a banana, struggling to reach a hand forward without losing his grip on the Doctor’s tomes. Will, still framed in the doorway, reached awkwardly for the pomegranate, thinking not so much of eating it as simply holding it, fondling it, anything to mollify the bustling imperious little man before him.

  “But Doctor,” Dab began hesitantly, “do you think … in light of—?”

  “Of course—what am I thinking?” the Doctor cried, snatching back the basket as if the fruit were poisoned, as if he’d been offering toadstools and nightshade, as if the mere touch of it would kill. In the next moment he was at the desk, still on his feet, the basket of fruit perched out of reach on the bookcase behind him, Will’s file in hand. He glanced up sharply, a quick-blooded clear-eyed little bird alert to the faintest stirring in the grass. “Forgive me, Mr. Lightbody—don’t stand there as if you’re afraid of me; I won’t bite; come in, come in—but I’ve been making the rounds of the place, handing out fruit to my patients (best snack the Good Lord ever provided, antitoxic, antiscorbutic, full of roughage, the pomegranate in particular, miraculous fruit, that), and I lost my head for a minute there. No fruit for you, sir. Not yet. No, no, no, not at all. That will never do.”

  Will took a seat facing the desk, that curious lightness tugging at his head as if it were filled with helium, his stomach curdling in apprehension. Dab turned to fuss with the Doctor’s books, inserting each into the gap reserved for it on the bookcase. Nurse Graves stood at the door, the tangerine cradled like an offering in her clasped hands, awaiting further instructions. The Doctor was pacing, munching on a glossy green-skinned apple and paging through Will’s file—or what Will took to be his file. He saw that a smoked-celluloid eyeshade had appeared, as if magically, over the Doctor’s brow, muting the reflective sheen of his lenses.

  “Nurse Graves,” the Doctor said, still pacing, head down, his voice starting up like the accelerating rumble of an automobile at the first catch of the crank, “that will be all, thank you. I’ve arranged for Nurse Bloethal to take over here for the rest of the evening.”

  Nurse Graves closed the door behind her with a soft deferential click and was gone, physiologic carriage, pretty ears, nurturing hands and all. Will felt lost suddenly, as he had when he was a boy on a shopping trip to New York and he lost hold of his mother’s hand in the pitching, jostling crowd.

  “All right, Mr. Lightbody,” the Doctor said suddenly, fanning the file on the edge of the desk for emphasis, “I’ll be frank with you: you’re a very sick man. Your tests verify all the symptoms described by Dr. Combe in his masterly study of intestinal autointoxication, just as I suspected. The drawn features, sad expression, dry hair”—here Will reached reflexively for his scalp—”sunken eyes, coated tongue, emaciated chest, brittle nails …” The frenetic little man paused to snatch up Will’s hand, inspect the nails briefly and drop it again, before continuing. “Not to mention palpitations of the heart, neurasthenic dislocation, low blood pressure, formless stools, prurigo, eczema and boils. You haven’t experienced any memory loss, have you? Especially for proper names?”

  Will was stunned. Boils? Neurasthenic dislocation? “Well, I—”

  “Casual acquaintances, that sort of thing? Place-names, cities, states, rivers? Quick, tell me now, what’s the capital of Paraguay?”

  “Paraguay? Uh, that would be, uh—it’s not Buenos Aires, is it?”

  “Delaware? Sweden? Louisiana? What major river system divides Brazil?”

  The Doctor was leaning over his desk now, a smug knowing look on his face, all his suspicions confirmed. Dab, the sweating secretary, had finished with the books and was taking notes in a leather-bound notepad, alternately writing and swiping at his forehead with his handkerchief, which had begun to bloom with ink stains. The banana the Doctor had given him was tucked carelessly in his breast pocket, bright as a boutonniere against the blackish blue of his suit. “The Amazon,” Will said. “And the capital of Louisiana is, uh, New Orleans—am I right? And what else did you ask me?”

  “Your wife is a wonderful woman,” the Doctor said suddenly, apropos of nothing. “You’re a very lucky man.”

  Will fidgeted in his chair, palpitations of the heart, sunken eyes, brittle nails, not knowing quite how to respond. Somehow, he sensed, this was not the time to bring up the question of their separate rooms and the seating arrangements in the dining hall.

  “She’s ill, too, I’m sorry to say, her nervous system entirely exhausted … but she’s been pursuing biologic living with all her heart, and I’m confident she’s well along the path to recovery—this is, after all, her third stay with us here. But her neurasthenia—and yours, too—is merely a symptom, an outward sign, of the deeper problem, and that is, of course, the poisoning of your own system with putrefactive, anaerobic bacteria. That’s at the root of it all.”

  “But Doctor, how can I be suffering from neurasthenia?” Will protested. Did he have everything, every disease in the book? What about brain cancer? Cholera? Beriberi? “I thought—I mean, it was my impression that this was a woman’s problem—”

  Dr. Kellogg held up a healthy puckered white palm.
“Tut, tut, Mr. Lightbody, I’m surprised at you. I am. As Begany and Grünweiss have shown, this pernicious malady strikes across the board, regardless of age or sex. Our own president suffered from it as a youth.”

  The image of T.R., with his stiff mustache and stern spectacles, standing over the carcass of a two-thousand-pound bison on the plains of the Wild West, leapt into Will’s head. Teddy Roosevelt? The fire breather of San Juan Hill? The square-jawed, the vigorous, the manly? Trust buster and big-game hunter? Teddy, neurasthenic?

  “There’s no shame attached to it,” the Doctor observed. “Some people are just higher keyed than others, too sensitive and thoughtful for their own good, too intellectual, poetical, too urbane and aesthetically minded—if it weren’t for my own rigorous physiologic routine and the lessons of the simple life, I don’t doubt that I myself would be a fellow sufferer. But enough of that.” Dr. Kellogg leaned forward on the desk now, his arms rigid, the high arching moral brow of Abraham Lincoln looming behind him on the wall. “I bring up Mrs. Lightbody—Eleanor—for a reason.”

  Will was reeling. His throat was dry—it felt as if someone had taken a bottle brush to it and then packed it with hot sand—and the imp that dwelled in his gut poked a burning finger into the lining of his stomach. What next?

  The stern little white-clad healer held Will with a stare that would have done a schoolmaster proud. “Again, to be perfectly frank with you, I must say that I bring up the subject of your wife’s health because I need to emphasize how much restraint you’re going to have to show with regard to your natural urges. Any connubial relations would, in my opinion, do irreparable harm to her, to you both.”