The Road to Wellville

by T. C. Boyle

  Will writhed in the chair, consulted his pocket watch, studied the phrenological charts on the walls and the row of yellowed skulls that lined the upper shelf of the bookcase in grim testimony to the fate of those who turned their backs on the principles of biologic living. And where was Dr. Linniman? Lingering over his bran and Meltose, no doubt, dispensing advice, roaming the dining room to insinuate himself beside married women and coach them in the intimate details of salivation, mastication and the proper use of the throat muscles. And what was that smell? Will couldn’t pin it down, but the office seemed saturated with some musty essence, as if it were the repository of thousand-year-old eggs from China or mold scraped from the recesses of an Egyptian sarcophagus. He felt his stomach turn.

  “Ah! Mr. Lightbody!” Frank Linniman suddenly appeared from behind a paneled door at the rear of the office, exploding into the room as if he’d just burst through the wall. Two strides brought him up to where Will sat immobilized on the rack of the physiologic chair. Dr. Linniman hovered over the chair a moment, beaming, bright, rippling with vegetarian energy and the brawn of high animal spirits, and then he eased himself down familiarly on the corner of his desk and focused his rinsed-out eyes on his patient. “And how are we this morning? Slept well? Kept some food down?”

  Will heard the hollow boom of his own voice tolling in reply. He was very well, thank you. Or, no: what was he saying? He was unwell. Ill. Desperately ill. He’d slept, yes—for the first time in three weeks—and he’d eaten a bite of toast. It was his stomach, that was the problem.

  Dr. Linniman absorbed this information without comment. He shifted his left buttock on the edge of the desk and clasped his knee with two meaty hands, stretching himself like an animal in its cage. On the wall behind him, opposite the bookcase with its row of antique skulls, was an arrangement of photographs Will had somehow, to this moment, overlooked. Each of them featured Dr. Frank Linniman in an athletic pose: with tennis racket, putter, baseball bat and lacrosse stick; astride a horse, clinging to the end of a rope with his teeth.

  Frank. Eleanor had called him Frank.

  “Well, and so,” Linniman suddenly cried, bouncing down from his perch in a burst of motion that startled his patient, “this is the big day, eh? The day we turn your life around. Examination time.”

  For the next half-hour Will sat there on the unforgiving chair and allowed himself to be poked, prodded, pinched, pushed and tapped while Dr. Linniman scribbled in a notepad and put detailed questions to him regarding his bodily functions, history and genealogy. Will answered as patiently as he could, but he resented it. He hated physicals. They left him feeling inadequate, incompetent, violated. Or, worse yet, moribund. Dr. Brillinger had gone through the same routine, pushing and poking at him in his own bedroom in Peterskill, peering into his ears and down his throat, rapping his knees, lifting his arm and letting it drop again—only to confess himself stumped. He reminded Will that he was just a humble general practitioner and didn’t fully appreciate the ins and outs of the antitoxic diet, naturopathy, heliotherapy, the sinusoidal current and all the rest of the newest advances in medical science. What Will needed, he felt, and it was the merest coincidence that Eleanor concurred wholeheartedly with his prescription, was an extended stay at one of the great sanitoria. There he could be examined by the best and ablest men of the time. There he could get answers.

  Yes. And here he was, at the great, all-heralded and overpriced Battle Creek Sanitarium, and all he’d gotten so far was questions. How long? How often? What color? When? And how does this feel? This? Your father? Mother? Grandparents? Great-grandparents? Consumption? Smallpox? Yellow fever?

  Will did the best he could. For half an hour he sat there answering this objectionable man’s indelicate questions, his stomach burning, joints aching, eyeballs aflame, until he could take it no longer. He cut Frank Linniman off in the middle of a question concerning the color and texture of his last stool. “Enough questions,” Will barked. “What’s wrong with me?”

  Dr. Linniman looked offended. His eyebrows—so pale as to be almost invisible—lifted in surprise. “Mr. Lightbody,” he began, dropping his eyes to the notepad a moment before coming back at him with a professionally admonitory stare, “I’m in no position to make a diagnosis at this juncture. This is just the beginning. Why, we’ll need blood tests and count, urine and fecal analysis, you’ve got to go to the X-Ray Fluoroscopic Room, the Colon Department, we’ve got to have specialists examine your teeth, eyes, tonsils and tongue, we need to see how much acetone you’re exhaling and what your intestinal fluids look like. We won’t have the full picture until this evening, at the earliest.” He paused, squared his jaw, tugged at his tie. “I could make an educated guess, of course, judging from the color of your skin, the condition of your tongue, your general puniness and malaise….”

  That sinking, doomed feeling came over Will again, but he fought it. Puniness? Malaise? Who was this self-serving, conceited, pompous, lantern-jawed hyena to be pronouncing judgment on him?

  “Actually,” Linniman went on, lecturing now, “we see any number of cases like yours—but I wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions. Nervous exhaustion. Coffee Neuralgia. Hyperhydrochloria. Autointoxication, certainly. But the Chief has already made that diagnosis.” He nodded his blond head sagely, smacked his lips, gently closed the notebook. “We’ll do the tests. You never know what might turn up.”

  Will was going under, drowning, spinning down the drain of a vast sink of doom. “What about my wife?” he snarled, coming up out of the chair suddenly, fighting it with everything he had in him. “What about Eleanor?”

  Nurse Graves was waiting for him in the hallway. The tile dully gleamed, patients drifted by in wheelchairs, a throng of nurses and attendants shouldered their way along the corridor. Coffee Neuralgia. Hyperhydrochloria. Autointoxication. It was medical jargon, voodoo, all but meaningless, and he wouldn’t let it affect him. So what if he drank three or four cups of coffee a day—was it hemlock? Strychnine? Still, as Nurse Graves smiled and chattered and led him up the hallway to the X-Ray Fluoroscopic Room, Will couldn’t seem to shake the spell of Frank Linniman’s pronouncements: the tests were barely under way and already there was a name—there were names—for what was wrong with him.

  His stomach had begun to groan and he couldn’t seem to stop his legs from jittering as Nurse Graves ushered him into a sedate waiting room with framed landscapes on the walls and Turkish carpets underfoot. He stood there awkwardly in the center of the room as Nurse Graves handed his charts to a brisk little doctor with an Oriental slant to his eyes, center-parted hair and a monocle, and he couldn’t help feeling a small stab of disappointment when she left him with a whispered promise to return in twenty-five minutes. What did he expect? Will asked himself as he chose a seat in the corner beneath one of the ubiquitous palms—she had better things to do than sit and hold his hand all day. She must have other patients, certainly; a family; time off for breakfast, dinner, good behavior; she must have a life of her own outside these healing walls.

  Four men and two women shared the waiting room with him, each of them, like him, seated in one of the Chief’s torturous chairs. They were surprisingly young—thirties and forties, anyway—and they looked as healthy as anyone you’d see on the street. Outwardly, that is. Who knew what miseries racked their insides or what pernicious shadows would show up on the fluorescent screen in the back room? After a brief struggle, Will gave up any pretense of making himself comfortable—anything would have been better than that chair: stretching out supine on the floor, dangling from the ceiling in a sling, being keelhauled by picaroons off the Barbary Coast—and he hunched awkwardly over his knees, skimming the Battle Creek Morning Enquirer for news of calvings and farm accidents.

  Ten minutes faded from his life before he exchanged the Enquirer for a copy of Dr. Kellogg’s house organ, The Battle Creek Idea. There on the front page, sandwiched between an article extolling the virtues of the San by a grizzled robber baron fro
m San Francisco and a chatty piece on the Contessa Spalancare’s Florentine villa, was a box listing the new arrivals. His and Eleanor’s names leapt out at him from the page, given form and moment in printer’s ink: Mr. and Mrs. William Fitzroy Lightbody, of Peterskill, New York. He crossed his legs, grunted. They might have been in separate rooms on separate floors, but at least they were still linked here, in black and white, in the great Doctor’s newsletter.

  An attendant came to the door of the inner sanctum and called out a name—“Mrs. Pratt?”—and one of the women rose nimbly from her seat and crossed the room. Will. watched her furtively. She couldn’t have been more than thirty, well dressed, no sign of a limp, humpback, bloated joints, pockmarks or ulcers, and she’d already mastered the Battle Creek carriage, so far as he could see—her squared shoulders and concave spine could have been used as a mold for the physiologic chair. And what was wrong with her? Something internal, he supposed, something hidden beneath the folds of her clothing … and the thought of that, her clothing and what lay beneath it, stirred him till he felt his penis stiffen.

  God, he was randy. And how could that be, a man in his condition? First it was Miss Muntz, then Nurse Graves, and now this total stranger, this poor afflicted woman, and here he was having licentious thoughts about her, here he was sitting in the waiting room of the X-Ray Fluoroscopic Room of the Battle Creek Sanitarium with an erection. He thought of the weeds the gardener cut every summer at the Peterskill house—severed, desiccated, their vital juices gone and the best of them culled, used up, discarded, so much trash to be burned, and still they managed to burst into seed, white fluff floating on the breeze till it looked like an August snowstorm. Maybe that’s what it was. Maybe he was dying and his body was desperately trying to disperse its seed, the organism mad to procreate and pass on its lineaments before it was too late, without a thought for the bonds of matrimony or the appropriateness of the receptacle. It was downright Darwinian. Deny him his daughter and the hoary voices of his ancestors cry out in priapic urgency; threaten him with extinction, with a childless grave, and he goes stiff in his pants at the mere sight of a woman…. He realized in that moment he was staring, and he dropped his eyes to the newsletter. Mr. and Mrs. William Fitzroy Lightbody: where was Eleanor when he needed her?

  “Mr. Lightbody?” The attendant stood at the door, a little man, balding, sallow, no healthier-looking than anyone else in the room, but with the Battle Creek Sanitarium smile stamped on his face as surely as if he’d come off an assembly line. “Will you step this way, please?”

  The remainder of the morning gave testimony to the advanced estate of the diagnostic sciences. Will stood before the X-ray machine and breathed in and out for the Oriental doctor—a Dr. Tomoda, the first Japanese Will had ever seen in the flesh—and his sallow, shrunken assistant. “You are not breathe too deep much,” Dr. Tomoda informed him, squinting severely behind the glittering disc of his monocle. “Must fill lung.” To demonstrate, he had the attendant stand before the machine and huff and puff mightily so that Will could watch the glowing bones of his rib cage swell and shrink on the fluoroscopic screen as his lungs took on their burden of air and expelled it again. It was amazing, really, like a magic trick, as if tiny rods of light had been inserted in the man’s skeleton. “This,” Dr. Tomoda solemnly intoned, “is the way how you must seize the air with your lung.” The attendant, looking enervated—no doubt from the stress of having his bones illuminated for the edification of every shallow-breathing patient who came along—smiled weakly.

  Will’s next stop was the Ear, Nose and Throat Department, where a doctor with a bristling, linty beard carefully peered into Will’s cranial cavities while delivering a running monologue reprising each stroke of each hole of golf he’d played the previous summer. Will drifted off in reverie to a description of a particularly knotty par three with a dogleg to the right, thinking back to his boyhood, when examinations were as clear-cut as right and wrong, when he was as healthy and lively as a cricket and the answer was a sum, a verb tense, a date or a place. But this exam was different. The answers were recondite, beyond his apprehension or control; they were coursing through his veins, hidden in his bones, his organs, seething in his gut. There was no right or wrong—only good news or bad.

  After twenty minutes or so, the ear, nose and throat man put down his instruments. Will learned, for the third time since he’d reached the San, that his tongue was coated (though with what and how it affected his health remained a mystery), and as the doctor showed him to the door the man advised him to eat right and take up some form of outdoor exercise—a sport, perhaps, one that might involve some walking and perhaps the swinging of clubs and irons.

  Nurse Graves led him next to the Dynamometer Room, where he waited his turn on one of several devices meant to gauge muscular capacity. A pair of cheerful, bulging young men in tights instructed Will to tug on various levers, bend over, stand on one leg, fasten leather straps to his brow, elbow, abdomen and knee, and generally fight against the resistance provided by the steely immovable apparatus. His efforts were measured on a dial set in a glass housing, and though Will was assured that the device had been created by the almighty Chief for precise and vital diagnostic purposes, the whole operation bore a suspicious resemblance to the sledge hammer and gong at the county fair.

  As the morning wore on, Will gave blood, endured an unpleasant introduction to both the gastroscope and rectoscope, breathed into a vial of clear liquid to determine the amount of acetone in his breath and walked a treadmill like a blinded horse while a fussy little doctor with a huge watch auscultated his chest and scribbled notations on a printed form bearing the imprimatur of John Harvey Kellogg. At one o’clock, Nurse Graves left him in the care of a frigidly smiling Mrs. Stover at the entrance to the dining room, and Will sat again with Hart-Jones, Miss Muntz et al., mournfully spooning up a bite or two of the Rice à la Carolina the nutritional girls forced on him, and nibbling at a slice of Graham bread, toasted. If Eleanor was present, he didn’t see her, though after his bout with the Universal Dynamometer, he really didn’t have the strength to turn his head and look.

  But the good Dr. Kellogg, in his wisdom and benevolence, saw the need for rest, and had already prescribed, on this day of relentless examination, an hour’s nap. That sounded fine to Will—but there was a catch. The nap was to be conducted outside, on the veranda, in the bracing atmosphere of a sunless and hellishly cold November afternoon. And why? Because Dr. Kellogg believed in the curative powers of nature and couldn’t overemphasize the necessity of breathing the air of the great outdoors, summer and winter alike. Nurse Graves provided Will with a hot-water bag, and then, with the help of a male attendant—was that Ralph?—swaddled him so tightly and in so many layers of woolen blankets he thought the weight would crush him, placed a nightcap on his head and wheeled him out onto the veranda, where he was lifted into an Adirondack chair and positioned so that he was facing the sun—or, rather, the spot in the firmament the sun might have occupied if it hadn’t gone south for the winter.

  Will gazed up at the leaden sky. A dull gray bird hurled itself across the horizon. The arctic air stiffened the little hairs lining Will’s thoroughly examined nostrils, shocked his lungs, brought a distant but palpable ache to the thin layer of flesh that clung to his cheekbones. On either side of him, as far as he could see, stretched a phalanx of similarly cocooned patients, as alike as infants in swaddling clothes. He wondered if they felt as ridiculous as he did, a grown man, a rational adult, lying out on a flagstone veranda in a Michigan winter as if he were on a beach in the south of France. Below him, on the yellowed, rock-hard lawn, a pair of the Doctor’s deer nosed at a bale of hay. Despite himself, Will began to feel drowsy.

  It was then that he became aware of a small disembodied voice speaking to him from out of the gray void. “Hello,” the voice piped, “lovely afternoon, isn’t it?”

  It wasn’t easy, bound up in those blankets, but with an effort Will managed to wrench his neck
round and focus on the figure to his right. He discovered a nightcap identical to his own, a protruding, deeply rutted nose and a pair of purplish eyelids, unfurled. “Over here,” the voice called, appending a giggle, “to your left.”

  Will brought his head round again, a sudden glacial blast attacking his exposed chin and sending icy jets down his collar, and found himself staring into the yellowish broth of Miss Muntz’s eyes. At least he presumed that those eyes belonged to Miss Muntz—he’d never experienced eyes of quite that color before, like chicken soup after it’s thickened on the stove overnight, and they were, after all, framing a decidedly greenish nose. “Miss Muntz?” he ventured.

  She responded with a second, more prolonged giggle. “Don’t you find this cozy?” she asked, after a pause, her voice thin, the breath streaming from her bruised-looking lips and chartreuse nostrils.

  Cozy? His idea of cozy was a seat in the inglenook of a tavern, a plate of meat and potatoes and a glass of ale before him, and the stomach to digest it with. But he didn’t want to be uncivil, and he remembered the shape and bearing of Miss Muntz, for all her greenish cast, and the look she’d given him in the corridor the night before. Her room is only two doors down, he thought, and that sexual tingle raced through him again. “Yes,” he said finally, regretting the fact that Mrs. Stover had twice now seated him at the far end of the table from Miss Muntz and that Hart-Jones, the braying ass, had so dominated the prandial conversation that Will hadn’t been able to speak two words to her.