The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  The man looked uneasy. He shifted in his seat, cleared his throat, produced a handkerchief and thoughtfully evacuated first one nostril, then the other.

  The Doctor regarded him with a steely gaze. “I’m very sorry, sir, but I must advise you that I haven’t more than sixty seconds to consult with you at this juncture—several minor emergencies have arisen. You say, sir, that my lecture affected you. Have you not perhaps guessed the identity of the couple to whom I was referring?”

  Lightbody gave him a blank look.

  “Come, come, man,” the Doctor exploded, “don’t play innocent with me. I happen to know for a fact that on the night of November sixteen, overcome with your sick lusts, you inflicted yourself on your invalid wife, thereby risking her life—her life, I say—just as surely as if you’d held a knife to her throat. And you. Look at you. Your vital fluids depleted, your digestion ruined, the rotten scrawl of death written all over you.”

  Ashen, the long bones of his legs chattering, Will Lightbody got unsteadily to his feet. “What are you saying?” he gasped. “I, I knew I was unwell, but I’m doing my best—it’s hardly fatal, is it, my condition?”

  The Doctor grudged him even this—it was time to crack the whip. “It can be—it most certainly will be—if you don’t stop this nonsense.”

  “Nonsense? But I haven’t—I deny it. I certainly did not ‘inflict’ myself on my wife, and I resent your tone and your implication….” He broke off in confusion, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his clothes hanging from him as if from a peg in the closet. “Or, well, maybe I did lose track of things there,” he admitted, his voice rattling in his throat, “you know how things are, between man and wife, that is—but there was no excitation of the nervous system, no consummation.” He faltered, tugged at his fingers, licked his lips. The cast in his eye gave him the look of a shying horse. When he spoke again, it was in a whisper. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

  The chimp was amuck, the goose dying, George being carted off to jail, the heating plant in chaos and yet another lawsuit pending, and still the Doctor stood there. He’d heard some shameful revelations in his time, seen men—and women—at their worst, and he braced himself. “Go on,” he said, softening his tone.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Lightbody murmured, hanging his head. “I was a slave to the baser appetites, I did come to Eleanor with marital, uh, relations in mind, I did turn a deaf ear on your warnings, and I hope you’ll forgive me and know that I’ll never, not until we’re … what I mean to say is, I failed.”

  The Doctor was disgusted. It was just as he’d suspected—and the fool had missed his milk feedings all that night, too. How in God’s name did they expect to get well if they couldn’t follow instructions—even when under direct supervision? “Failed?” he repeated.

  The great gangling sack of self-abuse and adolescent lusts that stood there before him flushed crimson even to the tips of his ears. He couldn’t look the Doctor in the eye. “I wasn’t a man,” he whispered.

  “You mean you were impotent?”

  Will Lightbody winced at the term. He nodded.

  Dr. Kellogg couldn’t restrain a snort of contempt. “I don’t doubt that you would be,” he cried suddenly, tugging at the brim of the eyeshade. “How could you hope for anything different? What would ever possess a man in your condition to put it to a test, anyway? Don’t you understand the gravity of this situation? Are you a child in a nursery, sir?”

  The patient had no response. A silent moment reverberated in eternity. Finally the Doctor spoke. “I’m happy for you, sir. Your own body revolted at what you were about to subject it to. If you were incapable of saving yourself—and sparing your wife—you should get down on your knees and thank the heavens that nature intervened. You say you’re impotent? I say congratulations.”

  Without another word, John Harvey Kellogg swept by the man, exited the room and hurried off down the hallway. If he’d been a bit hard on him, so much the worse—the patient had to be made to understand that the physician could take him only so far; after that, it was his own responsibility to control the animal urges that were digging him an early grave. The Doctor took a corridor to the right and then headed down the stairwell, taking the steps two at a time. He quickened his pace as he pictured the damage Lillian could do to the equipment, his gleaming pots, cookers and retorts, not to mention the food she would almost certainly foul. He’d been working with the macadamia nut, trying to come up with a nutritious nut butter, like his peanut concoction, that would give the right-thinking consumers of America yet another sandwich option to replace the beef and pork on which they glutted themselves like beasts in the Alaskan wild, and the last thing he needed was chimp dander in the mix.

  As he came round the corner to the kitchen, the little group of staffers and dietary girls that had been standing timorously at the door opened up to admit him. Someone had jammed a wedge under the door from the outside in order to prevent Lillian’s escape, and the Doctor bent briskly to remove it before cracking the door and peering in.

  “She’s been hooting to herself in there, Chief,” someone murmured at his back.

  “Yessir, and making one hellacious godawful racket with the pots and pans and kitchen things.” This from Abraham Lincoln Washington, the man the Doctor employed to sweep the kitchen floors. “Dr. Distaso, he try to stop her but she went and torn his pants right off him—I’d be careful, Doctor. She’s in a mood.”

  Dr. Kellogg ignored them. This was the moment he’d been born for, the time to take charge, to put on the mantle of the Chief and act when others could only stand round and wring their hands. He thrust back the door boldly and stepped into the room.

  Nothing. Not a sound. The keen blue eyes took in the damage at a glance—smashed lights, overturned counters, a faucet wrenched from its receptacle and spewing water—and the unflagging abacus of the Doctor’s thrifty mind translated it into dollars and cents. “Lillian!” he called, his voice clamping round the silence like an iron collar. “Lillian, come here this instant! Bad girl. Bad.” It was then that the stench rose to his nostrils, a dark foul primitive odor that spoke of Africa at its darkest: she’d loosed her bowels. Everywhere. Her scat fouled the counters, the floors, even the walls, a pure expression of the uncivilized bowel at its most uninhibited. He moved forward, wary, sly, glancing right and left, above and behind, his feet reverting to the slow silent shuffle of the hunter. He heard something then, the whisper of a movement, and glanced up sharply to his left: nothing. “Lillian?”

  Catlike, the Doctor tiptoed across the floor to the great cast-iron vat of macadamia butter—he had nearly a hundred pounds of the stuff, beaten smooth and thickened with cornstarch, and he’d planned to try it out on some of the patients at breakfast. At first glance it looked all right, and he felt a flood of relief—the nuts had come all the way from the Sandwich Islands, and at a price that made him shudder to contemplate. But then he looked again and saw the stain; his nose told him what it was.

  At that moment, as if proud of her handiwork, Lillian appeared, slowly separating herself from the shadows cast by the mixing vats. She was no more than fifteen feet away. The Doctor froze, impaled on the bitter spear of defeat that had pricked at him all the day long. She was grinning, black rubber lips folded back from long sepia teeth, and in that moment she looked just like George.

  Chapter 3

  Cold

  in the

  Middle

  A thick wet snow was falling as Will Lightbody left the San and made his way briskly down Washington Avenue. It had rained the day before and then frozen during the night, and now, at the end of a long gray December afternoon, it had begun to snow. Of course, none of this affected the inmates of the San, basking as they were in seventy-two-degree temperatures amid hibiscus and palm or wrapped in half a ton of blankets on the veranda for a preprandial snooze, but for Will it was an adventure. Stooped, thin as a bent wire, his throat wrapped in a woolen scarf and his hands
thrust deep in his pockets, he kicked through the slush in his galoshes like a boy let out of school early.

  To this point, he’d left the grounds of the Sanitarium exactly twice in the six weeks of his residency—to walk into town with Eleanor one bright cold afternoon so she could pick up some items at the stationer’s, and to participate in an open sleigh ride arranged by Nurse Graves as a Christmas amenity for three of her select patients. The walk into town was one of the few good things he’d experienced since he’d arrived. It was a simple joy, a revelation, the aroma of wood smoke on the air, children playing at tag, the sky leaping back to its farthest ethereal reaches—life as it was meant to be lived, a real life, not some dreary limbo of laughing exercises and sinusoidal current. Unfortunately, Eleanor couldn’t linger—she had to be back within the hour for her salt-mush rub and colon massage—and the outing was all too short. But just to have left those pristine corridors with their neutral smell and eternal lights, just to have escaped the scrutiny of all those correct and sanctimonious biologic livers, if even for an hour, had made Will feel like a man reborn.

  So, too, the excursion with Nurse Graves.

  Will was pleased, truly pleased, to have been included, considering the way Irene had treated him since the night she’d traced him to Eleanor’s room, a night Will would just as soon forget on all counts. From the way she acted, you would have thought he was a child molester or a bigamist or something. Cold, rigid, mechanical, she went about her duties in silence, and as the days marched on Will seemed to see more and more of Nurse Bloethal and less and less of Irene—and there was nothing he could do or say to sway her. One evening, during his eight-o’clock feeding, he took the glass from her hands, and instead of draining it at once, set it down deliberately on the night table. Irene was agitated. He could see it in the way she set her mouth and narrowed her eyes in rebuke—first the business with his wife and now this, putting the milk aside as if to toy with her and make a mockery of his Doctor’s orders. “Nurse Graves—Irene—what’s the matter?” he pleaded, and because he knew the answer, because he knew how much it meant to her and how all the evidence was stacked against him, he couldn’t help reddening.

  She turned away, made some unnecessary adjustment to the ventilation hood at the window. She wouldn’t answer him. He watched her a moment as she moved about the room, her back to him, the dress clinging to her hips and buttocks in a way that stirred him miraculously despite his ruined stomach, his failure with Eleanor and the milk that saturated his pores and soaked his brain till he could hardly think. Her elbows flew as she tidied up and he admired them, admired the plumpness of her upper arms and the quiet strength of her shoulders. “Irene,” he choked, fumbling for his words, “listen to me … appearances can be deceiving—nothing happened between Eleanor and me, nothing at all. I swear it.”

  She swung round then, and the look she gave him was like the flat edge of a sword. “If a patient under my care doesn’t want to get well,” she began, and her voice trembled with the effort to control it, “then there’s nothing I can do. Nothing. And yet when all is said and done, the failure devolves on me. I don’t want your, your decline on my conscience….” She looked away. Will could hear a gurney creaking by in the hallway, India-rubber wheels on the hard Italian floor. “I … I care too much for you,” she said finally, her voice reduced to a thin hesitant whisper, and then she was gone, and he was left for the first time to drink his milk in solitude, unobserved.

  She’d softened gradually—to hold a grudge, even in matters of therapeusis and medical principle, just wasn’t in her nature—and by the time she came for him and bundled him into the sleigh out front of the San amidst a burst of flurries and a medley of carols from the Sanitarium Glee Club, they were on their old footing again. The day was blustery and cold and the wind burned his lungs and chafed his nose and ears, but he was fully alive to the world around him. The smell of the horses (had he ever smelled anything so life-affirming, so potent?), the sight of the sparrows huddled like pensioners in the wind-whipped branches of elm and oak, the music of the sleigh bells and the exhilaration of the icy air crashing about his ears—it was a feast for the senses. And, too, he had to admit he was relieved to discover that the other two specially favored patients were women—a Countess Masha Tetranova, who, though she hailed from Petersburg, claimed never to have heard of Professor Stepanovich, and Mrs. Solomon Teitelbaum, the young wife of a lard manufacturer from Brooklyn. He was relieved because he’d been expecting men, men for whom Nurse Graves would presumably have performed the same intimate therapeutic rituals she’d performed for him, and he’d expected to be annoyed by having to share her attention. Was he jealous? He was. And what did that mean? He didn’t want to ask.

  At any rate, they spent a good part of the afternoon dashing through the countryside, the sleigh bells beating rhythm to the muted clop of the horses’ hooves, a fine frosting of snow escaping the runners and settling over blankets, mittens, scarves, fur collars and hats. Their destination—a surprise—was the farm of Nurse Graves’s parents, some six miles to the east of town. They left the Marshall Road, crossed a one-lane bridge made of split logs and discovered a neat fieldstone house with a snow-dusted roof of blue-gray slate set amidst a grid of stone fences and ancient-looking outbuildings. An avenue of pine and fir skirted a fair-sized pond—glassy with ice at this season—and brought them up to the doorstep, where a pair of Border collies awaited them with rich liquid eyes. The Countess remarked that the place was “perfectly charming,” but her tone said otherwise; as for Mrs. Teitelbaum, she’d never before been outside the city—any city—and her features were pinched with uncertainty.

  Will had no sympathy for them. He was charmed, purely and ingenuously. He stroked the dogs’ ears, admired the wreath of holly on the door, went faint at the first ambrosial whiff of Mrs. Graves’s pfeffernüsse cookies (but alas, no cookies for him—he was still on the milk diet, and Irene had brought along sixteen neat little four-ounce bottles, each sealed with wax, to take him through the afternoon). There were sisters and brothers, eight of them in all, ranging in age from less than a year to seventeen, and Will gave each of them a coin and looked into their faces like an anthropologist, wondering at the marvelous repetition of the features that had been given such glorious expression in their eldest sister. There was a characteristic set to the jaw among the Graves tribe, a look of quiet determination, gumption even, that hearkened back to their Potawatomi-fighting ancestors, but it was tempered by an ever-so-faint upturning at the corners of the mouth that gave them all the air of just having heard a good joke. Their ears were perfect, like Irene’s; their eyes fathomless and uniformly brown; their hair its own indeterminate color, neither blond nor brunette. Will studied the parents, too, and saw that Nurse Graves had borrowed her slice of a nose from her father, and her arms, shoulders, lips, teeth and smile from her mother (not to mention a whole lot more still discernible in the ruins of Mrs. Graves’s generous figure).

  The afternoon progressed. The fire leapt at the fender; there were songs; the Countess Tetranova accepted a glass of cider as if it were strained offal; Leila Teitelbaum shrank into the corner until Irene’s mother drew her out on the subject of molten lard; the smell of roasting chestnuts basted the air; Will sang, sledded and bobbed for apples with the children; and the dogs, cats, a pet raccoon and the pulsing current of brothers and sisters kept up a continuous but joyful din through the shank of the afternoon. Will enjoyed himself thoroughly. So thoroughly, in fact, that for minutes at a time he forgot he was an invalid (though Nurse Graves reminded him, every quarter of an hour, by uncapping yet another four-ounce bottle of milk, while his bladder sent him out the kitchen door to the outhouse in a periodic scurry). But it was amazing. His stomach was quiescent; his prurigo, eczema and boils had dried up; his heart was nonpalpitant and his tongue uncoated. He felt better than he had in months, in years. He felt human, felt youthful, felt like a man who had never known the despair of a ruined gut, a limp organ or
a turkey laid low by the hand of fate.

  As darkness fell, Tetranova and Teitelbaum made their way precipitately to the sled, but Will could barely tear himself away. The dogs licked his hands, the children kissed him, Mrs. Graves wrapped up a dozen cookies against the day of his recovery. And on the way home, slicing through the night that wedded earth and sky so completely he couldn’t tell if the runners had left the ground or not, Will settled himself luxuriously beneath the rugs and furs and heavy blankets, and though he knew it was improper, though she was his nurse and he a married man, he slipped his arm round Irene’s shoulder and held it there till the lights of the Sanitarium rose up out of the cold streets to engulf them.

  And now he was out again. In the air. On his own. Heading down Washington Avenue with his billfold clutched tight, the snow brushing his cheeks and lashes with soft wings, every scent of the earth as new as if he’d just uncorked the bottle that contained them. There were two days to Christmas, and he was on his way to the local jeweler’s to see if he might not find something there to please Eleanor. That was his conscious purpose. But deep in the exfoliate layers of his mind, there lay a second thought, a thought he couldn’t approach too directly for fear of chasing it out into the open: he was thinking of getting something for Irene, too. Nothing too significant, of course, nothing she might tend to take in the wrong way—no rings or lockets or anything like that. A brooch maybe, or a pendant. Something for her hair, a necklace, a bracelet. Just a token, that was all. A little thing that would say Thank you for the care. The service, that is. The personal attention. He didn’t see anything wrong in that. He always gave a little something to the postman, the maids, the delivery boy from Offenbacher’s—Christmas was the season of giving, wasn’t it?