The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  As he was crossing Champion, the air seemed suddenly to congeal and a single electrifying odor rose up out of nowhere to drive all else before it and stop him dead in his tracks. Apprehension was instantaneous: this was the natural pure unapologetic aroma of meat sizzling in the pan—a hamburger, to be specific—and it was emanating from the restaurant on the corner. The Red Onion, read the sign out front, and Will recognized the place as the iniquitous den in which the San’s gizzardites and yogurt gobblers took refuge when they could tolerate the Kellogg regime no longer. The Doctor had spies there, Will had heard, and it was said that he’d once dismissed a physician who’d been caught red-handed in the back room with a double order of short ribs in tomato sauce. Will couldn’t remember ever having smelled anything as keenly, even as a boy, and he stood there transfixed in the middle of the road, wondering at this dominance of the olfactory sense. Was it some sort of organic reaction to the deadening of his senses through those eternal mucousy feedings of milk?

  It was. It had to be. But oh, what a smell!

  And now his stomach asserted itself for the first time in a good long while, and he had a sudden epiphanic vision of himself at a comfortable table with a checked tablecloth, a bottle of beer at his elbow, the waiter setting down a plate of fried potatoes and a hamburger sandwich with a garnish of onion and a dill pickle fresh from the barrel. The vision was so palpable that he’d actually begun to reach for the plate when a man in a hack brought him back to reality. Will looked up into whiskers, teeth, heard the shriek of wheels and the thunder of hooves. “Get out of the street, you goddamned moron!” the man hollered, and then he was gone, the hack swaying indignantly up the road.

  Will crossed to the sidewalk, his eyes fixed on the window of the restaurant—he saw a man in side-whiskers lifting a fork to his mouth, movement, a waiter in mustaches, apron and suspenders—but he continued on past. No, he told himself, and he was a man of steel, no. He was making real progress—Drs. Linniman and Kellogg had promised a switch to the grape diet for Christmas if everything went well—and he couldn’t risk throwing it all away on a single impulse, no matter how enthralling. Was he insane? Lunatic? Mad? Was he willing to measure his life against a hamburger sandwich? The answer rattled around like a loose bearing inside his head: Almost, almost.

  He passed a buttermilk shop on West Michigan and didn’t look twice—he’d had enough dairy to last him six lifetimes—but the Christmas display of fruits, nuts and candies in the window of Whalen’s Grocery slowed him down, and Tuckerman’s Meat Market, with its rubbernecked geese and broad-beamed hams, brought him to a halt. A ham, he thought, and what a terrific gift that would make … but for whom? He no longer knew a soul in the world who’d want it. Except for his father or Ben Settember down at Ben’s Elbow—and they were so far away, through space, time and disposition, as to be on another planet in another galaxy. How far he’d come. And how far—how interminably, exhaustingly, impossibly far—he had yet to go.

  But enough of that. It was Christmas, and nothing could suppress his delight in the season. His pace was jaunty, the bowler winking low over one eye, the tails of his scarf flying behind him in the breeze. To the denizens of Battle Creek he was a remarkable sight, all prancing shank and flapping elbow, a great gangling mantis given human form and marching through the icebound streets like a parade of one. He tipped his hat to the ladies, called out Christmas greetings to men and boys alike, and despite himself, he allowed the notion of a gift for Irene to work its way to the very top of his list of charitable intentions.

  The jeweler’s—Casaubon’s, by all accounts the best in town—was right where Homer Praetz had said it would be, on McCamly, just across the street from the Post Tavern Hotel, another den of iniquity. Will paused a moment at the jeweler’s door, craning his neck to study the great looming brick-and-granite building behind him, where no doubt the backsliders and the blissfully ignorant were even then digging into legs of mutton, beefsteaks and pork loins, and washing all that delicate indigestible flesh down with schooners of beer and shots of good malt whiskey. With a sigh, he turned his back on it and entered the shop to the soothing mercantile tinkle of the bell over the door.

  In an instant, Will was transported. Warmth embraced him. A murmur of voices whispered in sacerdotal tones of stones and settings, of Vever, Gaillard and Lalique. A pretty girl, trying on an opal ring at the near end of a long gleaming display case, glanced up at him and smiled. In a kind of reverie, Will felt the coat fall from his shoulders, discovered the luxury of a plush chair interposed between his lean buttocks and the nullity of intermediate space, opened his hands to receive a steaming redolent cup of the finest chocolat chaud from Paris, allowed the shop owner himself to present him with the full pageant of reigning jewels and their habiliments of gold and silver and champlevé enamel. He bought too much and he paid too much for what he bought. But it didn’t matter. Not a whit. Patrick Henry Casaubon was the soul of hospitality and his shop a pasha’s palace, and together they gave him a welcome respite from the antiseptic and the physiologically correct.

  Will sipped chocolate like a turncoat, an outlaw, and he nodded an imperial yes or no at this glittering object or that. And when he left, when he girded himself against the cold and started back up the cheerily lit streets for the San, he took with him an opulent necklace of Ceylon sapphires and rose diamonds for Eleanor, and a starburst brooch of seed pearls and one little unostentatious and absolutely forgivable diamond for Irene. Two small elegant velvet-lined packages. They were nestled in his breast pocket, palpable and satisfying, a barely discernible bulge against the rich fabric of his coat, as he strode up the hill to the San. He felt lighter than air all of a sudden, as if he’d shrugged off some heavy burden, and he couldn’t help himself, he couldn’t—though people looked at him as if he were drunk or mad or floating along behind a full sail of Sears’ White Star Liquor Cure, he burst into song:

  Now Christmas is come,

  Let us beat up the drum,

  And call all our neighbors together,

  And when they appear,

  Let us make them such cheer,

  As will keep out the wind and the weather.

  His voice rose up, hollow as the wind in a drainpipe, tuneless, flat, hopelessly unmelodic, but infectious for all that. First one dog took it up in a crazed stuttering high-pitched yowl that irrevocably shattered the compact of the night, and then another and another, until up and down the length of Washington Avenue, the whole neighborhood was singing with him.

  But the mood wouldn’t hold. How could it? How could that damnable purgatory of brick and stone and marble sustain any measure of joy that wasn’t connected directly to the bowels?

  She wouldn’t take the brooch. Nurse Graves, that is. Irene. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Lightbody,” she breathed, and Will’s room was still as a mortuary, no hint of sound from the radiator, the water pipes, the hallway or the room next door, “but we’re not permitted to accept gratuities from the patients. It’s strictly forbidden.”

  Will was stunned. “Forbidden? To accept a gift, a Christmas token given selflessly and in commemoration of the season?” He was outraged. “By whom? Forbidden by whom?”

  The light of the postulant shone in her eyes as she pronounced the name: “Dr. Kellogg.”

  “Dr. Kellogg,” Will repeated, and his emphasis was entirely different. “Dr. Kellogg. Is he governor? President? God? Does he have to dictate every last thing that goes on here, from our bowel movements to our emotions?” Will was stretched out on the bed, in robe and nightgown, his thin ankles crossed in front of him. He sat up now, his voice tight with anger. “And what about me? What about my right to express my, my affection and gratitude to my fellow man—and woman. To people, I mean, people I consider friends?”

  There it was, he’d said it: friends. The term lay there before them like the trunk of a toppled tree, the bigger, more complicated terms—gratitude, affection—tangled in its branches. Nurse Graves chose to ignore it. “When
we’re hired,” she said, reaching up to adjust a cap that was already set flawlessly in place, “we sign a pledge to the Sanitarium in which we vow to uphold its principles and to refrain from fraternizing with the patients outside the confines of our duties.”

  Fraternizing. Her tone infuriated him. Dry, cold, impersonal—she might have been quoting from a medical text. And here he’d just quaffed his final four ounces of milk for the day, without argument, just to please her; here he was, filled with gratitude and the pure unblemished spirit of giving, and she called it fraternizing. He watched her preparing his bedtime enema, making a show of heating the paraffin over a burner and filling the reservoir with painstaking precision so she wouldn’t have to contemplate the velvet-lined box on the nightstand with its bow of red ribbon and the personally inscribed card attached. “But that’s ridiculous,” he protested. “I’m the patient, you’re the nurse, sure—but we’re people, too, aren’t we?”

  No answer.

  “Aren’t we?”

  She murmured a reluctant “yes” as she bustled across the floor to the bathroom and ran some water in the sink. He studied her through the open door, the swell of her shoulders, firm, compact, tendons leaping as she worked the faucets, her legs, the neat squared heels of her shoes. Then she was back, looking flushed but determined.

  “Well, won’t you even open it then? Won’t you have a look—even if you can’t accept it? I picked it out myself. For you. Thinking of you.”

  A mocking smile crossed her lips. “Given selflessly, eh?” she said. “And have you also selflessly chosen little tokens of gratitude for Nurse Bloethal and Mrs. Stover? For Ralph?… Mr. Lightbody, I think you’re deluding yourself—”

  “Can’t you call me ‘Will’?”

  The apparatus was in her hands, slick, hot, catharsis in an India-rubber bulb. She shifted it nervously from one hand to the other. A pin glinted in her hair. “No,” she said, “I can’t.”

  “Because Dr. Kellogg wouldn’t approve?” Will sat up abruptly, his blind feet seeking the carpet slippers on the cold germ-free glaze of the floor. “The man who sees all, hears all, knows all?”

  “Because it’s not right. Because it’s against the rules.”

  “The rules.” Will was on his feet now, gaunt and towering, the robe hanging from him like a deflated sail flapping at the mast. “Whose rules? What rules? You don’t really believe all this bunkum, do you? This, this holier-than-thou dietary crap, the enema treatments, the mud packs, the sensory deprivation? What’s it going to get us—another six months of eating mush or grapes or psyllium seeds? Another year? We die anyway, all of us, even the exalted Dr. Kellogg—isn’t that the truth?”

  Irene looked as if she’d been slapped. Her face was hard, outraged, stung to a whiteness that alarmed him. But when she spoke, her voice was calm and controlled. “Yes,” she said, “I most certainly do believe it. Every word, every treatment, every principle. With all my heart—and my brain, too, thank you. You’re a sick man,” she added. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “I do,” Will insisted, but he was flagging. “I just don’t think your Dr. Kellogg is God, that’s all, and I don’t think he has the right to control your life—or anybody else’s.”

  But the argument was already over. She was serene now, gazing up at him like an ecstatic, a crusader, a Mohammedan on the eve of the jihad. “There’s a God in heaven, Mr. Lightbody, and I believe in Him in a way I suspect you never will, a God who cares for our immortal essence, but there’s a god in every one of us, too, and the holy temple of that god is the human body, and if it takes a man like Dr. Kellogg to bring that truth home to us, then he’s a part of the godhead, too.” Her voice was airy, her eyes distant and unfocused. “When I think of what he’s done for mankind—for the alimentary canal alone—I have to say, yes, he is a god, my god, and he should be yours, too.” She turned to him with an accusatory look, her eyes burning with the fire of righteousness. “And after all he’s done for you, you should be ashamed of yourself, ashamed to the very core.”

  Will was defeated. The brooch was nothing. He couldn’t even look at the box. Perhaps it was frustration, disappointment, despair, but what he did next shocked even him—he lurched forward and took her clumsily in his arms, Nurse Graves, Irene, took her in his arms like a lover and bent his lips to hers. He kissed her, held her, squeezed her to him until he felt something warm and wet on his chest and she was breaking away from him and the naked bulb of black wet rubber lay on the floor between them like some sort of ghastly birth.

  “Mr. Lightbody—” The breath escaped her. She backed up a step. “This is … I don’t—”

  “Will,” he said. She’d kissed him, kissed him back.

  “Mr. Lightbody, I—”

  “Will.”

  “Will … Mr. Lightbody … I’m too confused, I’m sorry, I—I can’t do this. Not tonight.”

  Not tonight? Can’t do it tonight? But that meant—? His heart whirled like a turbine. If not tonight, then some other night—yes—and he needed no grape diets or sinusoidal currents to arouse him now, he was ready, straining at the fabric, lifting the tent of his nightgown as if this were the moment and this the center ring.

  But she was looking past him, staring down at the enema bag deflated on the floor. “I can’t,” she repeated, and she wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t look at the brooch on the night table, wouldn’t look at his feet, his hands, the stake driven into his groin, his sick hungry eyes. “Nurse Bloethal,” she whispered, and her voice had gone distant. “I’ll have to get Nurse Bloethal.”

  And so it was Nurse Bloethal, she of the callous hands and iron grip, and his erection—his glorious, life-affirming, rejuvenant erection—came to naught. And if Irene believed in her gods and applied the syringe like a sacrament, Nurse Bloethal used it like the jackal of death.

  In the morning, it was Nurse Bloethal again, and it was Nurse Bloethal before lunch and after. And where was Irene? She wasn’t feeling well. Nothing serious? he hoped. No, just a touch of indigestion.

  Indigestion. And wasn’t that ironic? Will’s own stomach was acting up again, too. He’d achieved a kind of truce there for a while, the seaweed and psyllium having done their work as advertised, the steady analgesic flow of milk inundating that hypersensitive organ until it was dead to all sensation. Despite himself, he’d begun to feel guardedly optimistic. But now, suddenly, on the eve of his graduation to the grape diet, Will’s stomach was a cauldron of acid all over again. He could taste it in the back of his throat, on his palate, his lips, his tongue: the acid of rejection, the acid of anger and despair. He’d awakened with an erection, dreaming of Irene’s lips, her body pressed to his, the wonder of her soft untrammeled breasts, and his first thought was of Eleanor. It was an unclean thought, a selfish and lustful thought, but there it was.

  The clock on the bureau read 5:05; the night-light glowed softly. Will pushed back the hood of his outdoor respirator, shivered into his robe and slippers, and crept out into the sterile reaches of the San’s halls. If he’d been furtive on the night of the turkey, now he positively slunk along the silent corridors, guilty on a host of counts, not the least of which was his present intention of forcing himself on his ailing wife. Give me a daughter, Will, she’d whispered. Well, now he was ready, and all frailty, all suffering, all notions of restraint and appeals to reason were as nothing in the face of that momentous fact.

  Down three flights and into a corridor identical to the one he’d just left. Bright lights. Cold floors. Room 212. Knocking—just a tap—eyes right, eyes left, no one, not even a nurse in sight. “Eleanor? Are you in there?” Hand on the doorknob, belching back an attack of gas, twist of the wrist, the room gently aglow. “Eleanor? It’s me, Will.”

  Nothing. Not a whisper. He slipped into the room like a thief, pulling the door softly closed behind him. Eleanor was not in her bed. Ten past five in the morning, and his wife was not in her bed. His first wild thought came like an arrow, whoosh, and it bo
red into his brain: Linniman. But no. The bed had been slept in, pillow rumpled, bedclothes in a heap. Ten past five in the morning: where on earth could she be? The bathroom gave him no clue: toothbrush, face powder, rouge, a damp towel and a silk dressing gown he recognized from happier days. Back into the room again, poking through the bureau drawers: underthings—they electrified him—scarves, gloves, hatpins. On the nightstand, two books, bound in leather and with gilt titles: Nature’s Own Book, by Mrs. Asenath Nicholson, which seemed mostly to be about carrots and parsnips, and Freikorper Kultur, by one Gerhardt Kuntz, which espoused sunbathing in the nude. Will lingered over this latter, paging through endless disquisitions on light, air and the health-giving properties of meadows and beaches to find a single riveting description of a group of heliophiles of both sexes romping round a spring in the Black Forest. It was five-thirty when he looked up from the book, and he was more inflamed than ever.

  The whole affair would have ended there if he hadn’t accidentally dislodged a typewritten sheet of paper from the night table on setting the book back down. It was a “Rehabilitative Schedule” for Mrs. Eleanor Lightbody, and it began at 5:00 A.M. with a colon wash, sitz bath and massage in the women’s baths, followed by calisthenics and Indian-club toss in the gymnasium. At 5:30 she was to have a “Silesian mud pack,” whatever that was, and take twenty minutes of deep-breathing exercise on the upper veranda.

  The upper veranda. Will was out the door and down the hall before the schedule hit the table.

  Unfortunately, the veranda was deserted but for an unrecognizable figure wrapped like an Eskimo against the lingering night. The figure hovered near the far railing, high above the sleeping rooftops of Battle Creek, and it seemed to be grunting or crying out in agony, its burdened arms flapping helplessly, legs leaden beneath a bulky wrap of blankets. Will was about to turn away, disappointed, when something in the tenor of those grunts spoke to him. “Eleanor?” he whispered, drawing his robe tight at the collar.