The Road to Wellville

by T. C. Boyle

  Bloese, his features ironed with concentration, sat beneath the lamp at the typewriter, polishing up the Doctor’s early dictation. The wind was still up and the Doctor, momentarily distracted, heard it come and crouch in the trees with the forlorn wail of a demon lover risen from the grave to take its own back again. He toyed with his pen. Pushed a pair of scissors up and down the length of the blotter. It was then that he thought of Florida. Miami Springs. The golden sun, the everlasting sun. Palms. Sea breezes. Sand. Miami Springs. And wouldn’t it be nice to—?

  There was a knock at the door.

  Bloese’s head snapped up like a guard dog’s.

  “I’m not in, Aloysius,” the Doctor said.

  Bloese rose and answered the door, holding the plane of oak rigidly to him and speaking through the crack. “The Doctor is not in,” he repeated. “He’s gone home for the day,” he said, and then stepped swiftly out into the hallway, slamming the door behind him—but not before Dr. Kellogg caught the drift of the commotion outside. A voice was raised, a voice that grated on him like a harrow dragged the length of his body: it was the voice of Lionel Badger. Badger! He’d forgotten all about him. But, yes, come to mention it, he did seem to recall something in his calendar about Badger’s coming to lecture and stay again—for God knew how long.

  “I know he’s in there,” came the hoarse nag of Badger’s voice.

  “I assure you, sir—” Bloese countered.

  The Doctor pictured Badger’s great swollen head fringed with a red fluff the consistency of pubic hair, the bulging eyes, the grim set of the jaw. The last time he’d visited he’d had the temerity to take the Doctor to task for wearing shoes of animal hide—leather, that is—while he, Badger, wore rope sandals, winter and summer. Lionel Badger—he was a fanatic of the worst stripe, the nearest thing to a flagellant the Vegetarian Movement could lay claim to. The Doctor shrank from the thought of confronting him, humoring him or whatever: Not now, he prayed, not tonight. The voices disputed in the hallway, the wind rattled the panes, and now, more strongly, in all its greens and cerulean immensity, the vision of Miami Springs arose before him again. Organized rest without ennui.

  It took him one minute. Sixty seconds, that was all. John Harvey Kellogg picked up the phone, asked for Nichols at the front desk. “Nichols?” he inquired, keeping his voice low lest Badger overhear—the man’s ears were keen as a rabbit’s.

  Properly unctuous, Nichols’s voice came back at him. “Yes, sir, Dr. Kellogg?”

  “Phone home, Nichols, and inform Mrs. Kellogg—and my sister, too—to pack their things, and a small bag for me.”

  “Sir?”

  He’d gone off in a reverie for a moment, the sound of the surf whispering in his ears. “Oh, yes—and make a reservation for three, private sleeping compartment…. Yes, on the Michigan Central Line…. We’ll be going through to Miami.”

  Chapter 8

  Groundhog Day

  The weather was indifferent. One minute a tepid pale rinsed-out sun would poke through the clouds to feebly illuminate the grounds of the San, and the next, clouds would close over it, big-bellied and truculent. It was anybody’s guess as to whether Dr. Kellogg’s groundhog would see his own shadow and thus be startled back into his burrow for another six weeks’ sleep, but after enduring nearly three months of gray cold changeless Battle Creek afternoons, Will Lightbody, for one, was praying that it would be overcast just this one last time. Not that he put much credence in such nonsense, but, then, who could say? The creatures of the wild did seem to have an uncanny way of predicting the weather—skunks and raccoons growing extra fur between their toes at the approach of a severe winter, swallows building their nests higher in advance of a rainy season, grubs and earthworms digging deeper before a drought and so on. The Farmers Almanac depended on them.

  Will watched from his window as the Doctor’s tame deer roved across the yard in little groups, the uncertain light now silvering their backs, now blotting them, until they seemed to flicker like images on a moving-picture screen. He thought back to the day he and Miss Muntz had lain side by side on the veranda, wrapped like Eskimos and watching these same deer at their hard work, pawing at the frozen ground for a tidbit here and there. Miss Muntz, poor girl, had found them charming, but Will saw them then as he saw them now, as instruments of the Doctor’s message, as propaganda. So, too, with the mangy chimp and the dispirited wolf the Doctor kept in a cage in the basement and fed exclusively on scraps of bread to illustrate the carnivore’s docility when deprived of the kill. Or the white rabbits that bounced from bush to bush, happy in their pacifistic pursuits, and the Christmas goose, which had somehow managed to survive the Doctor’s regimen and could be heard honking blissfully from a pool in the Palm Garden. And, of course, the celebrity of the day, the groundhog.

  In honor of this rodent, Dr. Kellogg had built an enclosure on the south lawn of the San and proclaimed it “Groundhog Glen,” a neat and unobtrusive hand-lettered sign identifying the place for the curious. It consisted of a four-foot-high fence of chicken wire, presumably sunk deep, a tumble of rock and a log or two for authenticity, and a concrete trough of drinking water, long frozen. The burrow itself had apparently been engineered by its occupant—a creature Will had never laid eyes upon, at that. When he’d arrived in November, the burrow was silent and unrevealing, cold dirt, black hole. As a boy he’d shot dozens of groundhogs at his grandfather’s country place in Connecticut and hadn’t thought much about it one way or the other. But this one had taken on a special, almost mystical significance, part and parcel, as it were, of the Doctor’s newly announced scheme of “Organized Rest Without Ennui” (every least holiday an occasion, as well as a reminder to abide by and respect the rights of the animal kingdom). Despite himself, Will couldn’t help feeling a real and compelling interest in seeing the deserted hole in the ground come to life. No matter what the trappings, it was a pledge of renewal, rebirth, the coming of the sun. And he was curious, too: how would the little white-clad impresario manage it? Was the ground electrically wired? Had he put an alarm clock in the hole? Or would one of the attendants simply dig the thing out?

  The deer moved on. The sun stabbed through the clouds. Will put his fingertips to the window and belched softly, tasting milk, always milk. He felt his stomach clench suddenly, and it clenched around an idea, an apprehension that had been with him for days, off and on, minute to minute. The fact was that neither he nor Dr. Kellogg would be present for the groundhog’s performance, scheduled, according to the San’s house organ, for twelve noon, amid the usual Sanitarium hoopla, with a formal out-of-doors luncheon and a “Groundhog Ball and Cotillion” to follow. No, they would be engaged in an intimate prognostic performance of their own—at twelve sharp, Will was scheduled to go under the knife.

  He’d been spared for better than a month now, a month during which he’d consulted endlessly with Linniman and the beard-pulling, lip-tugging, inappropriately grinning and evasive staff of the Colon Department. The tests had been repeated, and then repeated again. Milk came back into the diet, psyllium and seaweed departed. There were no grapes. And there was no Dr. Kellogg. He’d disappeared, called off on urgent medical business to some distant place, from which he’d only recently returned, brown as a walnut served up in the crisp white napkin of his worsted suit.

  During all that time—the entire month of January—Will’s condition remained static. He didn’t improve, he didn’t worsen. His routine was unwavering, all the usual treatments redoubled (with the exception of the sinusoidal bath—Will drew the line there). He didn’t take any sleigh rides, didn’t visit the jeweler’s, didn’t stop at the Red Onion (every time he stepped out the door to take a stroll round the grounds he was shadowed to make sure he didn’t fall prey to the temptation). His stomach was an acid pit, his stool nonexistent, the enemas ceaseless. All he wanted was to go home to Peterskill, to be away from the San and Dr. Kellogg and his fixation with the mouth and anus, but the whole institution rebelled at the thoug
ht. Doctors and nurses alike echoed Eleanor: it would be suicide. And as for Eleanor herself, she meant to stay another three months at least. Maybe longer.

  And so, the knife. And so, the stomach that would not work and the intestines that would not flow were to be invaded, prodded, examined in their bloody wet lair, hefted, weighed, pronounced upon—and, if the Doctor, the Almighty Doctor, saw fit, excised, snipped, cut, mutilated. That was what Will Lightbody had to look forward to on the windy uncertain afternoon of Groundhog Day.

  Earlier, at breakfast (Drs. Linniman and Kellogg insisted that Will take his meals in the dining hall, even if it was only to lift a glass of milk to his lips in the company of his fellow seekers after the physiologic ideal or, in this case, to take nothing at all in preparation for surgery), Eleanor had joined him at the table. Will was elated. Here was his wife, this elegant showpiece in high lace collar and jewels, this adornment and inspiration, abandoning the brilliant company of her own select group to show her concern for him, her husband, as he faced the liability of surgery. When she took Professor Stepanovich’s place (he was back in Russia, peering into his telescope, desperately attempting to restore the credibility of Saturn’s rings), Will felt his eyes go glassy with tears of gratitude. “Eleanor,” he said, flushing with pride, “what a surprise,” and he introduced her to his tablemates, though, as it turned out, she knew them all already, through her social activities and her directorship of the Sanitarium Deep-Breathing Club.

  For all of thirty seconds Eleanor was solicitous and tender, asking how he felt, reassuring him, wondering if there was anything she could do for him, but then she ordered breakfast, looked up and threw herself into the general conversation. Five minutes later, Will found himself growing irritated: she was ignoring him. In fact, she was excluding nearly the whole table—the braying Hart-Jones, Mrs. Tindermarsh, the shrinking Miss Muntz—in favor of the newcomer to Will’s group, a big-headed loudmouth by the name of Badger. As he’d let them know, endlessly, Badger was President of the Vegetarian Society of America, and a Very Important and Influential Individual. It turned Will’s stomach to see Eleanor playing up to him (and his stomach certainly didn’t need any additional turning). This was just the sort of thing that was wrong with her—she had no sense of proportion.

  They were discussing prominent vegetarians they knew in common, Badger holding forth, Eleanor name-dropping, Hart-Jones fluttering round the edges of the conversation with a stutter and whinny, hopelessly trying to pass for a wit. Will gazed out the window on the piercing sunshine and spongelike clouds of Groundhog Day, watching the treetops tops go from light to dark and back again, until he could stand it no longer. He turned to Mrs. Tindermarsh, who sat mountainously to his left, her hands folded over a plate as barren as his own. “You’re not breakfasting this morning, Mrs. Tindermarsh?” he murmured, by way of saying something, anything, to distract himself from the inanities of the Eleanor-Badger dialogue.

  Mrs. Tindermarsh stiffened. She unlocked her fingers, one by one, and spoke without lifting her head. “I’m having surgery today.”

  A spurt of panic shot through Will’s veins—in his irritation with Eleanor he’d managed to forget for just a moment the terrible sentence that hung over his own head. “Me, too,” he said in an unnatural voice, a voice that sailed too high, a squeak of a voice.

  The great solid frieze of Mrs. Tindermarsh’s head turned toward him and a kind of dim sympathetic interest lit her eyes. “Oh, really,” she said without animation, “what a coincidence. I’m due at eleven-thirty—for the kink. I’m nervous, of course. But I can’t help thinking it’s for the best, for my … well,” and she attempted a smile, “we can’t be going on like this, can we? It does so smack of symptomitis.”

  Will nodded. Gave her a sick smile. “I’m at twelve,” he said. “Same kink. Or so the Doctor thinks. He won’t know, of course, until he’s in there….” His voice trailed off. He had a sudden image of the Doctor in his surgical mask poised over the incision—a hole, deep and black—and reaching in like a magician to pull out a groundhog by the ears. He shut his eyes and rubbed his temples, then reached for his water glass. Shakily.

  “—knew the Alcotts personally,” Badger was saying, “I was just a boy, of course, but I learned some invaluable lessons at Dove Cottage….”

  And Will knew he would go on to elucidate those lessons in excruciating detail, as he had at breakfast, lunch and dinner for the past month, finding virtue in tautology and inspiration in his own hoarse ragged bottomless nagging voice. The man wore rope sandals in winter and spurned wool, going about in a cotton shirt in freezing temperatures. And he conspicuously consumed nothing but coarse unleavened cottage bread made of Graham flour he’d brought with him, dried apples and pure unfiltered spring water imported from Concord, Massachusetts, where Bronson Alcott had made his home. The Kellogg diet, as he’d let them know innumerable times, didn’t go far enough. Molasses, milk, butter, potatoes! He scorned them all. For his part, Will wished him the peace and solace of the grave, hoping against hope that he’d choke to death on his cardboard crusts.

  Eleanor countered Badger’s speech with something equally stupid, and Will, trembling now with the effort to contain himself, turned his attention to Miss Muntz, who sat to the left of Mrs. Tindermarsh. “And Miss Muntz,” he said, making a stab at a smile, “may I ask how your drawings are progressing?”

  Will didn’t dare ask about her condition—or even how she was feeling. The tall and regal girl with the greenish complexion he’d known two months ago was now stooped and wrinkled, the skin fallen loose from her bones, hanging in pouches beneath her eyes, turning to scale at her ears. She was so pale she looked like a victim of one of Bram Stoker’s monsters, sucked dry of blood, even her viridian glow faded to a faint dullish crème de menthe. But worst of all, and most horrifying, was her hair. It had gone gray, gray as a crone’s, and had begun to fall out in clumps. He looked at her now and saw that her scalp shone under the lights of the chandelier like buffed leather.

  She smiled. “Lovely, I think. Grand. I’ve done portraits of Dr. Kellogg and Mr. Hart-Jones. I’d love to do one of you—just a charcoal sketch, nothing elaborate. Will you sit for me one day?”

  Sit for her? Of course he would. Of course. Will felt flattered and he unconsciously sat up a little straighter and forgot for another precious second the weight of the doom hanging over him.

  Badger’s voice, a natural irritant, caustic to the ears, suddenly intruded on them. “And I’m ashamed to see you wearing leather, Mrs. Lightbody,” he rasped. “Ashamed and disappointed. Rarely have I met a woman so well informed about our cause, so devoted and dynamic. Really, though, you must come to terms with every aspect of the Vegetarian Ethos, neglecting nothing. Only then can you achieve a complete physiological harmony.”

  Will tuned him out. “I’d be delighted,” he said to Miss Muntz. “After, well …” He hesitated. Would he be able to sit? Would he be drawing breath and occupying space? He had a vision of Miss Muntz leaning over him like the hag of death, pressing her cold fingers to the lifeless mask of his face. “I’m going in for surgery today.”

  “Oh, you, too?” she exclaimed. She seemed strangely excited. “You and Mrs. Tindermarsh on the same day. Well”—drawing a deep breath—“congratulations.”

  Will gave her a look of bewilderment.

  “You’ll get well soon, that’s what I mean. Isn’t that marvelous?” She clapped her hands girlishly, folded her fingers and nibbled thoughtfully at her pale green knuckles. In her decline, she’d taken to progressively more radical cures in a kind of desperate leap at health, and perhaps her values had become distorted. She was even then undergoing one of Dr. Kellogg’s newest and—if you believed his self-puffery—most efficacious cures for chlorosis and a host of other conditions, from erysipelas and obesity to ingrown toenails: inhaling radium emanations. Radium, as Will understood it, was some sort of stone that gave off healing rays or vibrations. The Curies had discovered it, along with
polonium, and won the 1903 Nobel Prize in Physics in acknowledgment of their achievement in isolating this miraculous substance. Dr. Kellogg had picked right up on it. A stone. A healing stone. It almost sounded pagan.

  “Yes,” Will agreed, uneasy with the conditions of Miss Muntz’s radiant, liver-lipped smile. He was going under the knife, but he put a brave face on it and gave her back her smile. “That will be marvelous. Mrs. Tindermarsh and I will have to kick up our heels and lead the Cotillion…. But not this afternoon, I’m afraid. For Lincoln’s Birthday—will that satisfy you, Miss Muntz?”

  Miss Muntz smiled serenely, the vision of the square-shouldered Tindermarsh in Will’s embrace briefly illuminating her ghastly yellow eyes. She was sick. Desperately sick. Will stood abruptly. “Eleanor,” he announced, interrupting his wife in the middle of an anecdote about the time she’d arranged a speaking engagement for Lucy Page Gaston, the anti-tobacco crusader, at the Peterskill station, “we need to go now.” He leveled a look of annoyance on Badger. “I undergo surgery in less than three hours.”

  Badger snorted, made some disparaging remark about Dr. Kellogg and his surgical skills, waved his hand in dismissal. Eleanor rose dutifully to join her husband. “It’s been a pleasure talking with you, Lionel,” she said, “and very enlightening, too.”

  “Likewise,” growled the vegetarian prince, and he bit down hard on his cottage bread.

  When the time came, it was Nurse Graves who prepared Will for surgery, and he thanked the Fates that it was she and not Nurse Bloethal, who, as it turned out, was busy irrigating yet another costive bowel with the aid of the Doctor’s enema machine. Irene was brisk and beautiful, and though she tried to be as matter-of-fact and businesslike as possible, Will could see that she was concerned for him. Deeply concerned. Concerned above and beyond the call of duty and the normal limitations of the nurse-patient relationship. It was the way she moved and spoke, a certain breathlessness to her voice and an exaggeration of her small movements that betrayed her. She cared for him. She did. And though she hadn’t accepted the brooch and though she’d been upset and angry with his lapses, they’d come to a rapprochement in the past weeks and seemed to be on their old footing again. It was an exhilarating thing to be back in her good graces, to see her smile, to joke with her, to participate with her in the team effort that bound them so intimately together—the struggle to salvage the broken heap of his body and soul.