The Road to Wellville

by T. C. Boyle

  Eleanor—if this was Eleanor—didn’t respond. “Eight—uh, uh, phaw!” grunted a feminine voice, and a cowl hid her face. She bent at the waist, flailed her arms. “Nine—uh, uh, phaw! Ten—uh, uh, phaw!”

  “Eleanor?”

  The hooded figure turned to him then and showed him a face that wasn’t his wife’s, a death mask of a face, horrific, immobilized, features clenched like a fist. He took a lively step backward, startled, and the hollows of the eyes, luminous against the dark vise-grip of the mask, seized him. “Will?” The lumpen figure spoke his name, mouth fallen open in a rictus of surprise. “What in God’s name—?”

  It was all right—the spell was broken. This wasn’t a messenger from beyond the grave, it wasn’t the Grim Reaper or an escaped lunatic—it was only Eleanor, his wife, his love, basted in Silesian mud and indulging in a little deep breathing on the frozen flagstones of the veranda two hours before breakfast and in the dead black of the night. Eleanor, it was only Eleanor. With recognition came confidence, and with confidence, ardor. He glided forward in his slippers and tried to take her in his arms, but the layers of blankets impeded him. Clutching at what he took to be an arm, he sputtered, “I-I came to see how you were—”

  “At five-thirty in the morning?”

  “I missed you. It is Christmas Eve, after all. Or the morning of Christmas Eve.”

  (This was a sore point between them. Will had wanted to go home for Christmas, home to the house on Parsonage Lane and their friends and family, but Eleanor refused. She couldn’t leave now, right in the middle of her treatment—nor could he. What was he thinking? But it would only be for a week, two weeks at most, he’d countered. No, she said, no. He could go if he wanted—though in his condition it was tantamount to throwing his life away—but she wasn’t budging. Did he think she was suicidal? He didn’t, of course he didn’t, and he’d mumbled something apologetic and gone off, chastened, to his room. And so they’d stayed, though the fall season at the San was over and the halls grew more deserted by the day, stayed to eat Nuttolene giblets and artificial goose among strangers in the bleak forbidding ice-shrouded wastes of south-central Michigan.)

  Eleanor didn’t respond. “Eleven—uh, uh, phaw!” she gasped. “Twelve—uh, uh, phaw!; Thirteen—”

  Will was freezing. A shiver racked his body so violently it was as if he’d been lifted by the nape of his neck and shaken, vertebra by vertebra, to the tip of his tailbone. “I just wanted to say I have a present for you, something nice, something you’re going to love—wait till you see it.”

  “—uh, uh, phaw!” She bent over now to adjust her padding and Will saw that an electric cord trailed away from her backside, looped round half a dozen vacant Adirondack chairs and found its way to an outlet just inside the door. “That’s sweet of you, Will,” she murmured, hot breath steaming from invisible nostrils, and she cracked her mask to give him a smile. “I have something for you, too.”

  “Your cord is tangled,” Will said, though it wasn’t, and he used the distraction as a pretext for moving into her and clinging ardently to her cocoon of blankets. He dropped his voice to a passionate whisper. “And I have a little something with me now, too, if you want to come back to my room and try it on for size….”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Will—we’ll exchange gifts tonight, as we’d agreed, at Frank’s party for Dr. Kellogg.”

  This rankled him—”Frank’s party for Dr. Kellogg”—but he ignored it and clung to her blankets all the more fervently. He was cold. His robe was nothing. A predawn wind whistled over the rooftops to sit in his ears. The tip of his nose was insensate. “No, no,” he whispered, and he couldn’t seem to stop his teeth from chattering, “th-that’s not what I mean—you-you-you said you wanted me-me to give you a d-daughter, don’t you remember? And I, I was—well, n-now I’m ready. Can’t you f-feel me? I’m ready to give her to you. Right now. This m-minute.” He gazed passionately into her mud-rimmed eyes. “C-come to my room.”

  “You can’t be serious?” She broke away from him, the cold morning air hissing through her nostrils. “Marital relations are strictly forbidden here, you know that.” And then she laughed and shook her head. “Will Lightbody, you’re impossible. Impossible. Talk of the most inappropriate time—and what are you doing out here in your robe and slippers anyway? Are you mad? You’ll catch your death.”

  Will was already backing toward the door, his member flaccid and drawn up into his body against the cold, shoulders cradled in his quaking arms. “M-merry Christmas,” he said, and sneezed, “—Eleanor.”

  But she didn’t hear him. She was crouching, bending from the waist and straightening up again, over and over. He could hear her counting as he closed the heavy door to the hallway: “Fourteen—uh, uh, phaw! Fifteen—uh, uh, phaw!”

  The rest of the morning was consumed in routine. At seven, Nurse Bloethal welcomed him to the day with his morning enema and escorted him to the dining room for the first two feedings of his final seventeen hours on the milk diet. The word had come down from on high: all signs were favorable and Will was to proceed to grapes on Christmas Day. The news was thrilling, wonderful, a kind of earthly miracle. At the stroke of midnight, on the commencement of the day that commemorated the birth of his spiritual savior, Will’s corporeal savior would allow him the great boon of solid food. Grapes. Grapes bountiful, grapes delectable, grapes medicinal. As Will had come to understand it, the grape diet represented the third rung on the alimentary ladder to recovery, and it prescribed an unlimited quantity of those fleshy, spherical, sweet and sustaining fruits—the golden muscat, the royal Concord, the humble Thompsons and fat red Tokays—freighted in from some distant and still vernal corner of the world and peeled lovingly, one by one, by Mrs. Stover’s nimble-fingered dietary girls. Will was looking forward to it. Grapes had their limitations, and he’d never consumed more than a bunch or two in a good year, but anything was better than milk. At least you could chew them.

  After breakfast, Nurse Bloethal led him to the Men’s Gymnasium for his daily calisthenics under the hortatory direction of the big-armed Swede, after which he forced himself through a lackluster session of laughing exercises and settled into the tremulous oblivion of the Vibrotherapy Department. All this, over time, had become a monumental bore. Far from developing a positive outlook, Will found himself growing increasingly depressed as he twisted his grallatorial limbs and shook his nugatory buttocks with the rest of his fellow sufferers—it was the same thing, day in, day out, a purgatory of the unwise and the unwell. About the only things he had to look forward to were Nurse Graves (and she was indisposed today, frightened half to death by a simple little human gesture of affection) and his visit to the Electrical Department, which had become one of the few high points of his daily routine.

  He couldn’t say why, really. Perhaps it was the initial surprise of that first day, when he discovered that the sinusoidal bath didn’t involve public disrobing, public waters, body hair and the display of portions of the male anatomy that were best left under wraps. There was a neatness and civility to it that appealed to him. Roll up your cuffs and sleeves and feel the salutary prickle of electricity on your skin while remaining otherwise fully and decently dressed. Will had no idea whether the treatment did him a lick of good or not, but he found it relaxing and, if not actually enjoyable, then at least something less than an ongoing torture.

  On this particular day, he was paired again with Homer Praetz, the industrial magnate. Over the course of the past weeks, through their meals and sinusoidal fellowship, Will had come to know the man somewhat better. Tireless, driven, dynamic, fleshy, Homer Praetz seemed cut from the same mold as Will’s father, though Praetz was younger, much younger, one of those men who settles so thoroughly into his role, it’s impossible to guess his age—he could have been anywhere from thirty to fifty. He was king of the machine-tool industry in Cleveland, having managed in a few short years to increase his initial investment a hundredfold while simultaneously driving his comp
etitors to ruin; unfortunately, he’d defeated his stomach and undermined his heart in the process.

  Praetz had warmed to Will in the dining hall, shoveling up great glutinous masses of Rice à la Carolina and Indian trifle while Will stuck to his ascetic servings of milk, and in the absence of Mrs. Tindermarsh and Hart-Jones, both of whom had gone home for the holidays, had begun to make a species of higher conversation at the table. And as he warmed to Will, so the feeling became mutual, and Will had become more animated, joking with Professor Stepanovich over the collapsing rings of Saturn and flirting, as much as he dared, with Miss Muntz. What’s more, Praetz’s schedule had been changed, so that he now appeared in the Electrical Department before his steam bath rather than after, thus sparing Will the unsettling sight of his tumultuous nakedness. On the days when their schedules coincided, they would sit there side by side in their sinusoidal chairs, feet elevated, hands immersed, chatting away like a pair of bankers at the shoeshine parlor. It was a conceit Will could live with.

  “Well, well, well, Lightbody,” Praetz chuckled as he sat heavily and began removing his shoes and socks, “and a happy Christmas to you—I understand you’ll be eating solid food like the rest of us come tomorrow, hey?”

  Alfred Woodbine, the impeccably dressed attendant, with his crisp bow tie, immaculate collar and pomaded hair, was helping Will into the chair beside Praetz’s. Will smiled. He looked from Homer to Alfred and back again. “You know, it’s been so long, I think I’ve forgotten what teeth are for.”

  “Don’t I know it, Will,” Praetz sighed, dropping his shoes to the floor and massaging his massive feet as tenderly as if he were caressing the cheek of a lover. “Dr. Kellogg likes to humble you, take you right back to the beginning till you’re nothing more than a squalling little red-faced baby clawing for the teat … I suppose it’s some sort of psychological effect he’s after, he ought to know, God bless him, what with all the lives he’s saved—isn’t that right, Alfred?” But before Alfred had a chance to agree, Praetz let out a hoot of laughter.

  Will was grinning. “What? What is it?”

  “Oh, I was just thinking….” Praetz was leaning forward now, his face swollen with hilarity. “I mean, now that you’re teething, what’s on the menu? Mush? Corn pulp? Or is it grapes?” His smile was sly, his eyes bursting in their sockets. “It’s grapes, isn’t it? Am I right?”

  Will didn’t mind the ribbing. It was a rite of passage, a Battle Creek tradition, and he was secretly pleased to be matriculating to the next phase of treatment. “Yes,” he admitted, “grapes. But I can’t help wishing it was lobster.” This was funny, very funny, and the tile walls reverberated with his whoop of laughter.

  “Don’t you listen now, Alfred—you didn’t hear that, did you?” Praetz worked his mouth as if there were something caught between his teeth, trying unsuccessfully to suppress the laugh that rushed through his nostrils in a high-pitched whinny.

  The attendant shook his head and compressed his lips, but his eyes gave him away. He was feeling it, too, the zaniness, the hilarity, the holiday spirit that lifted them all free of their shackles and made them as giddy as children rushing the tree at first light. Will whooped.

  Homer Praetz eased himself back in the sinusoidal chair and slapped his knee. “Next thing you know, Will, the Chief’ll graduate you to Protose fillets and you’ll be hot as a farm boy on his first date.”

  The breath caught in Will’s throat. He glanced up at Alfred, who was bending over him to fold his sleeves back, and blushed.

  “Don’t blush, Lightbody,” Homer crowed, plunking his feet into the big white galvanized buckets before him, “come on now, you fox, I’ve seen the way you work Miss Muntz at the table—ah-ah, don’t deny it—and I wouldn’t say a word but that I’ve been through it myself. Good Christ, when they brought me in here back in October I could barely find the strength to get up out of the chair, and as for women, well, my wife was the loneliest woman on earth”—here he leaned forward and winked—“if you know what I mean.”

  Will knew. He knew all too well. Closing his eyes, he thought of Eleanor, Irene, Ida Muntz, the anonymous woman in the waiting room, and let out a sigh. He really didn’t feel comfortable discussing private matters, particularly in the hearing of Alfred, who for all he knew could be one of the Doctor’s spies, but what Homer was saying spoke directly to him: he’d been through it, too. The knowledge made him feel better—it was all part and parcel of the Battle Creek way, and he appreciated the confidence, he did. Cracking his eyes lazily to see if Alfred had flicked on the current—his hand was on the switch—Will gave a grunt of assent. “I know, Homer,” he said, and his voice was drowsy, “I know what you mean.” He let his eyes fall shut again.

  He heard Homer’s voice come back at him, thin as hammered wire—”She’s lonely no more”—and waited for the familiar pinch and nibble of the current as it took his limbs in its delicate little rows of teeth and then released them again. There was a faint vibration, a sort of rattle, as of spoon and cup, and his mind settled into its groove. It took him a moment before he realized that nothing was happening.

  “You going to turn it on, Alfred?” he murmured, and in that instant he understood that something was amiss, that the rattling he’d been vaguely aware of for the past ten seconds was growing louder, steadier, the insistent chatter of a pair of drumsticks, a windup toy gone berserk. His eyes flashed open. Time seemed to have frozen. There was Alfred, impeccable still and still at the switch. But he was moving, jerking his limbs and shuffling his feet as if he’d suddenly been transported to a hoedown at the county fair, and his hand was flapping, fishlike, at the wall panel, which in turn was rattling and trembling so, the palm in the corner had begun to wave its fronds in sympathetic response. Bewildered, Will turned to Praetz. But Homer was in on it, too, his features seized up, eyes riveted, limbs kicking out as if the chair were a bucking bronco and he a Wild West cowboy, and that was odd and unexpected, yes, but what was that red froth on his lips and, and that substance, that pink and wet thing clinging to his collar like a second tie?

  His tongue, Witt, his tongue.

  That was it. Comprehension seized him like a pair of hot tongs and he was up and out of the chair in a bound, water sloshing, Alfred dancing, Homer Praetz’s eyes like hard-boiled eggs, the shelf rattling, the current sizzling. Don’t touch that switch! Panic put the flame to his heart. Run! screamed a voice in his head, but he fought it down. No. No. No. And then he was moving, no time to think, feet grabbing for purchase on the slick floor, shoulder down: he hit Alfred in the chest, just under his flailing arms, and broke the connection.

  In the next moment they were on the floor in a tangle of limbs, a fugitive smell of urine emanating from Alfred’s impeccable trousers, and Alfred was breathing, gagging, bringing something up … and then, behind them, a sudden violent crash, the wet heavy slap of water, the tumbling tubs: Homer Praetz took the sinusoidal chair down with him, down into the bear hug of outraged gravity. Will saw him there, sprawled horribly in the ruins, the big white slabs of his feet still jerking, and knew that no amount of restraint, no degree of physiologic living or rigor of scientific eating could bring him back again.

  One P.M. on the day before Christmas, the sky like an untended grave, and Will Lightbody, hastily dressed and still trembling, was heading down Washington Avenue for the second time that week. He wasn’t humming Christmas ditties and he wasn’t thinking of gifts. Eleanor was off somewhere at a skating party—or so he’d been told—and Irene was indisposed. He watched his feet and thought nothing, nothing at all.

  When he got to the corner of Washington and Champion he stepped out into the street without turning his head and made straight for the Red Onion. Tired of Bran & Sprouts? the sign out front asked. He was. Mortally tired. The door swung open as if greased, the waiter dipped his bald gleaming head, the smells hit him like a memory of Paradise before the Fall. He was shown to a table by the window, checked cloth, guttering candle. The waiter hovered at
his elbow. “Whiskey,” Will said, and his voice sounded strange in his own ears. “Make it a double. And a beer chaser.”

  “Yes, sir,” the waiter said. “Double whiskey and a beer. Any preference as to brand?”

  Will shook his head.

  “Yes, sir. All right. And will you be wanting anything to eat?”

  “Eat?” Will repeated, as if he’d never heard the term before. He gazed round him at the shadowy interior, the fire leaping over its coals, the mistletoe and pine and the beery joyous faces gathered along the bar. “A hamburger sandwich,” he said finally.

  “Hamburger sandwich,” the waiter tolled, scribbling the order in his notepad. “And how do you want that?”

  “I’m sorry?” Will said.

  “How do you want it cooked?”

  Will took a moment, the waiter poised over him with his mustaches, his gleaming brow, the fixed, faintly inebriate stare of his eyes. “Oh, I don’t know,” Will said vaguely, waving a hand in the air, “rare, I guess. Or, no, not just rare—cold in the middle.”

  Chapter 4

  The

  Advertising

  Game

  It was getting dark by the time Charlie Ossining drifted into the Red Onion. He’d spent the past two hours drinking hot rum punch at the party Bender had hosted for Stellrecht the paper manufacturer and a smattering of grocers, buyers, grain suppliers and newspapermen, along with the odd representative of the local carriage aristocracy (“Potential investors, Charlie, potential investors,” Bender reminded him), and he was feeling good. Feeling warm and optimistic and aglow with the spirit of the season. Bender had opened the bar at the Wee Nippy and draped banners proclaiming “Kellogg’s Per-Fo—The Perfect Food!” and “The Newest Health Food From Kellogg!” round the room, which seemed a bit reckless—subversive, even—in the Post Tavern, but a whole host of people showed up to gobble little meatballs on a stick and pickled herring on soda crackers. Charlie had shaken hands and quaffed punch and talked up Per-Fo till he began to believe in it all over again.