The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  There was a strange light in the health preceptor’s eyes, as if he were picturing her there leading the women’s group in a state of deshabille. “Yes?” he said. “And?”

  She looked away. “Well, we’ve been experimenting—just as I understand the men do routinely—with freeing ourselves of our garments—”

  “Yes!” he cried suddenly, clenching his fists and raising up his arms in a warrior’s gesture of triumph, “that’s it, that’s it exactly! Dress reform, Eleanor—it starts with liberating the body from its artificial constraints, and I’m not just talking about whalebone corsets now, though the things are about as appropriate on a modern woman as the bones the cannibals in New Guinea stick through their noses—no, Eleanor, and you’ve perceived it all along, it goes much deeper.” He held her eyes. “Do you know what I’m wearing underneath these shorts?”

  She hadn’t given it a thought, not in her wildest imaginings, but in that moment she knew.

  His smile was huge and toothy and it lingered over her just a moment too long. “Are you familiar with Freikorper Kultur, Professor Kuntz’s seminal work on the German Nudist Movement?”

  And why was her pulse racing suddenly? She felt like a girl waiting to be asked to dance. “Yes, of course.”

  If he’d looked interested a moment earlier, he was positively transfixed now. Behind him, no more than a hundred feet away, Frank and Professor Gunderson directed a pair of workmen with shovels and pickaxes, and Virginia Cranehill, fortyish and stout, sat primly on a blanket beside a hamper of sandwiches from the Sanitarium kitchens. “Really? And what do you think of it?”

  Still shielding her eyes, Eleanor pushed herself up on one elbow and plucked a stalk of grass to chew. “It’s quite revolutionary,” she said, without hesitation. “And logical. If one looks at mankind’s beginnings, well, then, to be naked to the sun is the most sensible thing in the world. It’s natural and pure. But society, unfortunately, has given us these odious costumes to wear—” and here, for emphasis, she plucked at the heavy folds of her skirt.

  “But it’s charming,” Lionel protested, easing to his knees now and leaning closer. “I’ve meant to tell you all morning how perfectly charming you look today—the whole ensemble suits you, flatters you, and that wide-brimmed hat just seems to make your eyes melt away like twin pats of butter….”

  What could she say? She thanked him for the compliment.

  “But I know what you mean,” he went on, “—clothing is confining, fashion-driven, wasteful, downright silly in weather such as this. And I can’t help imagining how equally charming you’d be without it—au naturel, as it were. Professor Kuntz would have you out of those clothes, bloomers and all, in half a minute.” He leaned back on his heels, spread his arms wide to take in the light, the soft breeze, the wild landscape that fell back to the horizon around him. “And on a day like this! Why, no glade in Bavaria, no Black Forest crag or tumbling cascade could hope to match this—don’t you agree?”

  “Yes,” Eleanor assented, nibbling at her stalk of grass, “but if we were practicing the local brand of Freikorper Kultur today, Lionel, I’d be deprived of your company—and Frank’s and Professor Gunderson’s—not to mention the edifying companionship of our two earth diggers over there. It would be just me and Virginia, and I can’t imagine a duller outing, even if all the sunshine in the world were available.”

  “But not so, not so, my darling Eleanor. Perhaps the rather hidebound and puritanical director of the San would have the sexes separated, as if there were something to be ashamed of in revealing the human body, as if it were some sort of dung heap instead of the temple he’s forever proclaiming it, but Gerhardt Kuntz, as you must know, mixes the sexes freely. And why not?”

  Eleanor couldn’t think of a single reason. She had read Kuntz’s descriptions of naked gambols with her heart in her mouth, picturing the men as hairy-legged satyrs plunging into icy torrents and basking afterward on thrones of granite, while the women, their bodies shy and soft, their breasts released to the caress of gravity, sat beside them and made witty, giddy conversation. She’d known no man but Will, and she loved him, she did, but there was something else in her, too, something beating strong and secret in her veins, struggling to get out. She looked Lionel in the eye. “Why not?” she agreed.

  Later, after they’d picnicked on Graham bread, peanut-butter-and-cucumber sandwiches and a bottle of Concord water that Lionel had brought along, they all sat in a circle on Virginia’s blanket—Lionel on one side of Eleanor, Frank on the other, Professor Gunderson beside him and finally Virginia to complete the arrangement—and talked of archaeology, health, phrenology and nudism to the clank of pick and spade. On the last of these subjects, Frank was wary (though he clove to the Kellogg party line vis-à-vis sunlight and the untrammeled body), Virginia was enthusiastic and Professor Gunderson noncommital. Lionel gave Eleanor a significant look as Frank waffled and the professor became suddenly occupied with his notes. Virginia went so far as to loosen the top button of her blouse, roll up her sleeves and fold back her skirt to expose the white-frosted hem of her bloomers (Eleanor remained fully and properly dressed—for her it would be all or nothing), and then it was on to archaeology and a sermon from the little professor about the mound-building tribe that had preceded the Potawatomi in these parts. Frank chimed in with his phrenological theories about Indians in general and these Indians specifically, and Eleanor couldn’t help feeling he was getting to be something of a bore lately, a one-note virtuoso. It wasn’t until later, when one of the workmen cried out in excitement and Frank and the professor bounded up to peer into the distant ginger-brown hole, that the conversation took a more interesting turn.

  “Speaking of the untrammeled body, Lionel,” Virginia breathed, edging in nearer to close the circle, “I want to thank you for sending me to Dr. Spitzvogel—I’ve never felt so good in all my life, though I don’t mean to derogate the San’s methods. They’ve done me a world of good, and I have no intention of leaving—but oh, Dr. Spitzvogel!” She rolled her eyes theatrically, a great cow of a woman, and then smiled at Eleanor.

  Eleanor had heard of the physician in question. The whole business was very hush-hush and the mention of his name among the ladies of the San always brought on a shock of titters, suggestive looks and faraway stares. “I’ve heard of him, of course,” Eleanor said, “but I didn’t know that you—”

  “For three weeks now,” Virginia broke in.

  Eleanor could feel Lionel’s eyes on her. He was rarely silent for more than an inhalation at a time, and she could feel his silence like a palpable weight, brooding on her. She hadn’t known he was involved, but she might have guessed. The treatment—it was called “Movement Therapy” and it was something especially attuned to women, that’s all she knew—wasn’t offered at the San. This Dr. Spitzvogel, an enigmatic figure whom no one seemed to admit knowing, had set up his offices in Battle Creek sometime in the fall. Eleanor searched Virginia’s bright pregnant eyes. “And is it—the treatment, that is—is it valuable?” She was hoping for some sort of description.

  “Very,” Lionel offered. “Particularly for the hypersensitive nature, for the neurasthenic, Eleanor. I’m not your doctor”—here he threw up his hands and gave her another of his looks—”but I will say I’ve sent several women to Siegfried now, and I haven’t heard a single complaint.”

  “I’ll second that,” Virginia said, ducking her head conspiratorially. “When I come out of that office I’m floating on the clouds, so relaxed that every pore of my body is just oozing—the last two times I was so in tune with my inner nature, the doctor himself had to help me into a cab. I was weak, Eleanor, practically melting.”

  Eleanor didn’t understand. Why would you want to be weakened—wasn’t the whole idea of physiologic living to strengthen oneself for the long life it guaranteed? “Weak?” she echoed.

  “Relaxed, dear.” Virginia exchanged a look with Lionel. It was a complicitous look, smug and chummy, and it irritated El
eanor.

  “Listen, Eleanor.” Lionel’s voice was soft, persuasive; in the distance, the men peering into the hole in the earth exclaimed over something. “Dr. Kellogg’s methods are first-rate, I won’t argue that, but you know he doesn’t take things far enough, doesn’t value extremes. I say extreme cures for extreme conditions. No, now listen to me. This is nothing to be afraid of—for you, of all people, who have gone boldly where others fear to tread, a Vegetarian and Progressive leader among women—for you it would be a simple extension of what you’ve been doing all along. But it happens to lie outside the parameters of what Dr. Kellogg sees fit to rigidly impose on his patients—he’s a great man, Eleanor, but he isn’t God.”

  “I’ll say,” Virginia put in. She was close now, so close Eleanor could smell the peanut butter on her breath; mingled with Lionel’s garlic, it was intoxicating.

  Eleanor smiled and let a little laugh escape her, though her blood was racing. “You make it sound like such an ominous thing—you don’t have to build it up so, Lionel, Virginia. You know I’m progressive.” She paused. “What exactly does the treatment consist of?”

  Virginia’s eyes shot to Lionel’s; Lionel turned to Eleanor. “It’s very simple, really. The doctor gives you a loose-fitting garment, a shift really, and lays you on a padded table—”

  “—in a very cozy room,” Virginia added.

  “Yes, of course. The atmosphere is one of perfect compose—it really has to be, that’s the idea.”

  “And Dr. Spitzvogel has the warmest hands of any living being, warmer than the hot glove at the San, it’s as if he radiates his own energy—”

  Yes, Eleanor said to herself, but what does he do?

  “Eleanor.” Lionel flattened his voice. “I’ll be frank with you—why shouldn’t I? We’re good friends, aren’t we? And what’s to be ashamed of where the human body is concerned?”

  There was a shout from Frank in the distance. “Yes?” Eleanor said. “Go on.”

  “In German it’s called ‘Die Handhabung Therapeutik.”’

  “Manipulation Therapy,” Virginia breathed.

  “Well,” Lionel said. “The doctor manipulates the womb—”

  “And the breasts,” Virginia put in, lingering over the sibilance of the word as if she couldn’t let go of it.

  “Yes,” Lionel puffed, warming to the subject, “because this is the seat of the hysterical passions in the female anatomy and the key, many feel, to neurasthenic disorders. By manipulating the womb—”

  “And the breasts,” Virginia softly hissed.

  “—and the breasts, the doctor is able to stimulate blood flow to these regions and release the negative humors that build up there, just as ptomaines and other poisons build up in the intestines in cases of autointoxication. It’s the newest treatment—utterly safe—and all the rage on the Continent.” Lionel gave her the full benefit of his caramel eyes. “Again, it’s only because Dr. Kellogg—not to criticize, he’s done me good and his ideas are on the right track—is so puritanical that he hasn’t offered Siegfried Spitzvogel a place on the Sanitarium staff as yet. But it’s not a problem: I can offer you an introduction.”

  They were watching her now, breathing shallowly, the perspiration standing out on both their faces. The sun was warm and Eleanor felt uncomfortable suddenly and saw that the backs of her hands had turned pink. She was about to say yes, of course she would try Dr. Spitzvogel’s therapy—if this cow of a Virginia Cranehill could experience positive results, well, then, she could derive any measure of benefit from it herself—but Frank Linniman interrupted them.

  He was standing over them, a smudge of soil on his white duck trousers and another on his cheek. “Look,” he cried, “look what we’ve found!” Eleanor was vaguely aware of Professor Gunderson hunched behind him like a gargoyle, grinning till his face seemed split in half. Frank seemed to be offering them something, white stone shrouded in loam, but then she saw that it wasn’t a stone at all.

  “Four hundred years old, at least,” Frank said, and his voice rode up and down its currents of emotion. “A female, we think. And look at this”—pointing with a blackened fingernail to the crevice where an ear might once have been, where a lover’s fingers might have lingered in a long-ago caress—“do you see this? This organ behind the mastoid here at the base of the skull?”

  Eleanor saw bleached bone, honeycombed with age, saw the vacant drop of the jaw, the punctured eyes, death compressed in a living hand. “Yes,” she said, “yes, Frank: what is it?”

  “Amativeness,” he said. “This is her organ for amativeness. Do you see how developed it is compared to this for calculation? Or this for order? Or look here—see how small this plate is? This is spirituality.” His finger roamed the naked globe of the skull, jabbing here and there like a lecturer’s pointer.

  “What does it mean?” Lionel asked, shifting his weight on the corner of the blanket.

  Frank took his time, reveling in the moment. Behind him, butterflies fell through the air like scraps of colored paper and the two workmen, satisfied, leaned on their shovels. “It means lust,” he said. “It means she held nothing back. It means she was a sink of sensuality.” He shook his head. “These Indians,” he said finally, “no wonder they never amounted to anything.”

  There was rain at the end of the week, on Friday, a warm seasonal rain that puckered on the pavement and dropped musically down the gutters. Eleanor had finished her daily regimen by four that afternoon and was dressing to go out when Will stopped by her room. “Hello, darling,” he said, hesitating in the doorway, “I just dropped by to see how you were doing—you’re not going out, are you? In this weather?”

  She’d made up her face and was buttoning the cape of her cashmere mackintosh and making a final adjustment of her blue velvet toque in the mirror. Will’s question, ingenuous as it seemed, contained a hint of criticism—was she blind? couldn’t she see that it was raining?—and it irritated her. Especially now, especially today. Her nerves were in a flutter, and she felt light-headed, odd, almost as if her feet weren’t touching the floor. For though she’d dressed in one of her smartest suits (the latest English cut, double-breasted, royal blue, with an exaggerated collar appliquéd in taffeta silk for contrast) and one of her best French satin blouses, she wore nothing beneath her slip and nothing to contain her breasts. The sensation was freakish and liberating at the same time, her nipples coming into random contact with the polished fabric, a coolness between her legs, but she felt it necessary to the experience—at four-fifteen she was meeting Lionel, who was escorting her to Dr. Spitzvogel’s for her inaugural treatment, and she didn’t want to be thought unprogressive. “Oh, I’m just going for a stroll,” she said, watching Will’s face in the mirror.

  “A stroll? But it’s raining out there, dear.”

  She turned round on him now, crossed the room and let him hold her elbows while she pecked a kiss at his cheek. “But you know how I love to walk in the rain—it’s my artistic nature. I let my soul soar like the lark ascending.”

  Suddenly Will was beaming. “I know,” he cried, “I’ll go with you! I could use the exercise. But listen to me—I’d make Dr. Kellogg proud, wouldn’t I?”

  “No, Will,” she said, suddenly flustered. “Or, yes, you would make Dr. Kellogg proud and I’m pleased to see you taking a more positive attitude toward physiologic living, but I mean I think I’d rather walk by myself—and please don’t take that the wrong way. I just need to be alone with my inner self, that’s all.”

  Will looked hurt., “You mean I can’t even take a stroll with you anymore? Eleanor, what’s happened to you? I’ve done everything you’ve asked—eaten grapes till they came out my ears, jumped up and down laughing with a bunch of overweight tycoons in the gymnasium, had the kink in my intestine snipped out like a wart. God, let’s go home, can’t we, El? just go home?”

  “We will,” she murmured, drawing away from him, “all in good time.”

  “Oh, don’t give me that, El—
that’s what you always say.”

  The fact was, she couldn’t bear the idea of going back to Peterskill after the excitement of the San. What could she do there—play bridge, do church work, watch the grapevine snake its way through the trellis? She couldn’t stay at the San forever. She knew that in some way she was prolonging the inevitable, forestalling her real life and avoiding her mother’s grave and her father’s desolation and the pink room with the bassinet at the top of the stairs that was meant for her daughter. But she was sick still, a very sick woman, and she couldn’t leave yet. Not yet. “I mean it, Will,” she said, “I promise you.”

  His face was like a big bruise. He looked as if he might break down and cry. When she reached out to comfort him, alarmed, he flung her hands away. “Don’t,” he said, harsh, bitter, put upon, “I don’t need it. Go walk in the rain,” he said, “let your soul soar.” And then he turned and was gone.

  She met Lionel in the lobby and went wordlessly into the cab waiting at the curb. It was stuffy and close inside and she was acutely conscious of his knee pressed against hers as he tried to arrange his legs in the tight compartment. “You’re doing the right thing,” he told her. “You’ll thank me a thousand times over for this.”

  She wanted to be witty and gay, wanted to command the situation, but it just wasn’t in her. She listened to the clatter of the horses’ hooves on the wet pavement, watched the trees come at them over the driver’s shoulders, smoothed a wrinkle in her glove. “I’m sure I will,” she murmured.

  Dr. Spitzvogel’s offices were in his residence, a perfectly respectable-looking Tudor on the fashionable West Side, not far from Dr. Kellogg’s own residence. Eleanor gave a glancing thought to her Chief and mentor—what would he think of what she was doing?—and felt like a traitor. But the look of Dr. Spitzvogel’s home reassured her, as did Lionel’s presence at her side—the President of the Vegetarian Society of America wouldn’t very well lead her astray, would he? Besides, though Dr. Kellogg prided himself on keeping up with every medical advance in the world, from the doings at the Pasteur Institute to the Royal College of Surgeons, even he couldn’t be expected to know everything. And so many other women at the San found Dr. Spitzvogel’s innovations effective—and gratifying. What did she have to lose? Eleanor stepped out of the hack with an open mind, determined to give herself up wholly to the Spitzvogel regime, come what may, and make her judgments without prejudice, as befitted a forward-looking and progressive spirit.