by T. C. Boyle
John Hampton Krinck, the reprobate, backslider and nihilist, waved his hands energetically, but the Doctor ignored him. What the occasion demanded was a little feminine pulchritude, the well-turned ankle and athletic bosom. And here he missed Ida Muntz, and felt, for just a hairs-breadth of a second, a stab of uncertainty—he’d never have admitted her if he’d suspected just how severe her condition was. Greensickness. It was nothing. And yet she’d been one of his most pronounced failures, the very worst sort of advertisement. At the funeral, her parents—odious people, for all their money—had almost seemed to blame him, as if he hadn’t done all he could to undo the years of carnivorous abuse they’d heaped upon her. And yet still he wondered: Had he given her too much of the radium? Not enough? Was the element all it was cracked up to be?
But there was no use in crying over spilt milk, and so he shrugged it off and chose Eleanor Lightbody—stunning woman, beautiful, really, but too thin: had she been starving herself?—and a young lady from Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, who had to supply him with her name—an annoyance: and what was it with names lately; was his mind going now?—and Vivian DeLorbe, the actress from Broadway. All three found the unmistakable evidence, the evil little worms coiled like snails in their shells, just waiting to spring forth and invade the unsuspecting body. Miss DeLorbe even emitted a number of very satisfactory and highly theatrical expressions of disgust.
It was a charming performance, but nothing compared to what came next. Once the stage had been cleared and the audience had had a moment to reflect on the quality of the meat served up by Battle Creek’s finest butcher and how that reflected on the quality of the meat served up elsewhere, the Doctor returned to the question of the pseudonymous W.B.J. and spoke at length of the tapeworm. He gave special attention to his description of the adult form and the hooks by which it attaches its scolex to the walls of the human intestine, and when he had sufficiently impressed his point on the audience, he asked Frank Linniman to circulate among them while cradling a jar in which a twenty-foot specimen had been preserved.
“I remember the patient well,” the Doctor began, reminiscing as the tapeworm made its rounds in Dr. Linniman’s capable hands. “He was a man of means, an attorney who’d risen to the top of his profession as a founding partner of one of New York’s great law firms—there are few in this room, I’m sure, who will not have heard of it. I was an intern at Bellevue at the time, and the man expired suddenly and without warning, of complications arising from acute autointoxication—he was, from all accounts, a great frequenter of tavern and chophouse. During the autopsy, which I had the dubious honor of supervising, this little specimen turned up, perfectly preserved and still very much alive.” There wasn’t a face in the room, not even Krinck’s, that hadn’t gone white. “I just thought I’d share that little story with you,” the Doctor went on, “in the event that any of you might be tempted at some point in your life to return to the carnivorous diet. Wiener, anyone? How about a nice rare pork chop?”
There was a flurry of questions, all delivered in hushed bloodless tones, concerning various preparations and types of meat—“Venison?” the Doctor cried at one point, “why, you might just as well swallow the tapeworm eggs themselves and have done with it!”—and an exhaustive comparison of individual symptoms to the effects of the organism at hand. At least a dozen questions began with the hypothetical “What if—?”
Dr. Kellogg was patient with them. After all, by exposing the shortcomings of Tuckerman’s select pork and showing them that hideous, faceless, hook-headed flatworm in the jar, he’d succeeded in his purpose—that is, to arouse and disgust them and harden their resolution to avoid meat and meat products forever. After half an hour or so, he took a few unrelated questions on heliotherapy, Naturkultur and nudism (he approved of it all, even nudism, so long as the sexes were rigidly segregated) and the physiological causes of yawning and the power of suggestion. Then, just when they were worn down emotionally, sapped, exhausted, fighting to maintain the proper physiologic posture in their orthopedic chairs, the Doctor brought on his showstopper.
The yawning question had given rise to an epidemic of that oral phenomenon, and Dr. Kellogg was just winding up his comments—“Bathing the face with cold water, drinking a glass of hot or cold water or some refreshing beverage will generally cause the disposition to yawn to disappear”—when Dr. Linniman, having disburdened himself of the pickled tapeworm, strolled casually into the room with Fauna, the timber wolf, on a leash.
The crowd immediately came to life. Fauna wasn’t perhaps the crowd pleaser that Lillian the chimp was, but her appearance signaled one of the Doctor’s stunts. Heads turned. The yawning ceased. A whisper of voices buzzed up and down the aisles. Dr. Kellogg beamed as Frank, with his fair hair and physiologic jaw, made his way up the aisle, the wolf padding docilely at his side. To the Doctor’s keen eye, the animal’s faults stood out in sharp relief—the uneven stride, the dysplastic hips, the dullness of the eyes and the discolored swath of hair along the underbelly where Murphy had neglected to powder her. The question of her diet had been the very devil from the beginning—the Doctor gave her peanuts and vegetable milk, Protose, cornmeal and wheat gluten, and he saw that her bowel was kept rigorously clean, but there was something lacking. On close inspection, the animal just didn’t look healthy. Still—and he released a small grunt of satisfaction—no one would notice. No: all they saw was a magnificent creature, a big white vegetarian wolf, rescued from the wild as a pup and fed up to adulthood on Sanitarium fare.
Frank brought her up to the platform and handed her leash to the Doctor. The wolf, who knew her part as well as Lillian knew hers and was a whole lot more tractable to boot, gazed out calmly on the audience, as pure and rugged a symbol of nature as anything Jack London had to offer. She licked the Doctor’s hand and then settled down on her haunches, as comfortable as a retriever sitting before the fire. The Doctor waited until Frank Linniman had descended from the stage and left the room, and then he began his commentary in an easy off-the-cuff manner.
“You all know Fauna,” he said, laying a hand on the broad white head. “You’ve all seen her at play on the Sanitarium lawns, watched as she gamboled and cavorted with our deer and the conies we released at Easter. But one thing you’ve never seen is this animal’s wolfish nature. For you forget, ladies and gentlemen, that Fauna is no lapdog, no collie or shepherd, but a wolf, of that ravening breed that has been a bane to humankind from time immemorial, a real live wild wolf recovered from the wastes of the Northwest, at the very remotest tip of Lake Superior. But would she harm a hair of my head? Of yours? Would she dream of falling on those placid and innocent does and rabbits?” He patted her, and again she licked his hand (he made a mental note to wash up the minute he left the podium). “No, my friends and fellow seekers after the biologic ideal, of course she wouldn’t. And you all know the reason why—because she has never experienced nature red in tooth and claw, never killed, never once tasted meat. She was as yet unweaned when she was brought to us, and she has been fed exclusively on the foods that you and I customarily consume, a champion and exemplar of the vegetarian diet.”
At that moment, the crowd at the entranceway parted and again Dr. Linniman entered the room. This time he was accompanied by a pair of husky attendants bearing a cage, from the depths of which issued a steady savage warning growl, a rumbling antiphon of rage and hate broken only by the odd snarling insuck of breath. There was danger in the room. The audience felt it, and it poked at their spines, got the ancestral juices flowing, elevated the short hairs at the napes of their necks. Fauna felt it, too. Her ears went erect and she let out a barely audible whimper, but the Doctor silenced her with a surreptitious kick.
When the cage was delivered to the platform, its occupant became visible to all: a second wolf, black as a dream in the deadest hour of the night, crouched against the bars, its eyes flaring yellow, knotted strings of saliva dangling from the white flash of its teeth. The Doctor had to raise his voice to
be heard above it. “Calm yourselves, ladies and gentlemen. Believe me, this is a demonstration only. No harm will come to any of you.” The audience was stirred up, not simply buzzing but distressed, exclamatory, cacophonous even. The Doctor had to clap his hands sharply to get their attention. “Ladies and gentlemen, calm yourselves,” he repeated.
Though they quieted then, the Doctor held off. He merely stood there, the white wolf lying placidly at his feet, its counterpart tearing at the bars of its cage, giving the audience the benefit of a good long look at the tableau he’d arranged for them. Finally he spoke. “You’ve all had an opportunity in these last few minutes to observe the radical disparity in temperament between these two beasts, beasts of the same species, though judging from appearances you might find it hard to believe. The second wolf—that’s a boy, yes, yes, growl for us now—as I say, the second wolf, until seven days ago, knew nothing but the reign of unholy terror that rules the forest day and night—and not just in some dimly imagined Western setting, but here in the fens and glades of Michigan. Yes, here. This specimen was brought to me by one Bjork Bjorksson, a local trapper, who caught him in a leg snare not twenty miles from where you now sit.” Master of the moment, Dr. Kellogg paused to let this information have its effect. “And do any of you doubt, on the evidence, that this wolf means you no harm? Or that this wolf would roll playfully across our lawns with the young of our deer herd?”
As if on cue, the caged wolf raised the level of its growl a decibel or two. The Doctor’s point was taken.
“And what is the difference between the two—the one fed on bloody chunks of raw meat torn piecemeal from its prey, the other on vegetable things? Would any man or woman amongst you care to experience the emotions of the beast in that cage? Yes? I don’t hear you.” Silence, but for the steady crosscut growl. “Well, just feed yourselves up on meat, then, on caffeine, bourbon whiskey and tobacco, and you’ll know the rage in that heart. But let’s have a demonstration, shall we? Frank? Frank, where are you?”
Frank Linniman, efficient and obliging as ever, was there to assist him, rising from a chair at the foot of the platform as if the Doctor were working him with levers. “Yes, Doctor?”
Perfect. Couldn’t have been smoother if they’d rehearsed it. “May we have the other package from Tuckerman’s Meat Market, please?”
And here, Frank mounted the platform, bent to the icebox and retrieved a second package wrapped in butcher’s paper: inside was a prime beefsteak, marbled with fat and oozing blood, a steak not dissimilar to the Post Tavern issue of November’s demonstration. But how many of them remembered back that far? The San had turned over at least half or more of its clientele since then—and if some few of them had been present, what did it matter? The more he impressed upon his audience the perils of meat eating, the more the Doctor was doing to save their lives—and the lives of their children and their children’s children. Slipping on his gloves—this was the danger, this red and dripping time bomb, not the animal in the cage—the Doctor lifted the steak from its paper nest and laid it on the floor at Fauna’s feet.
The wolf sniffed, sniffed again. Then she looked up helplessly at the shining Doctor, whimpered, and backed away as far as the leash would take her. “You see?” the Doctor cried, and he couldn’t begin to count the number of solemnly nodding heads. “She will not eat this obscene and unnatural food, not by choice or preference—or even, at the risk of inflaming the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, by compulsion.” (What he didn’t mention was that she had been trained, through negative reinforcement, to view meat as the prelude to a beating—just touch her tongue to it and she was whipped—or that her vegetarian diet had so weakened her, she wouldn’t have had the strength to chew it in any case.)
Making a face, the Doctor bent to retrieve his lump of flesh, and after handing Fauna’s leash to Frank Linniman, he crossed the stage and gingerly dangled the steak over the cage. As he’d approached, the growling rose in volume, but now suddenly it choked off entirely and for the first time since the caged wolf had entered the door, the room was silent. The silence held a second longer, and then the wolf lunged at the meat with a snarl and bolted it as if it hadn’t eaten in a week. (“Which it hadn’t.) But was it thankful? Not a bit of it. The moment the beast’s throat was clear it started in again, and, if anything, it was louder now, more ferocious and hateful. The Doctor made a feint for the cage and the animal threw itself at the bars, gagging on its rage. “Is that gratitude for you?” he asked, and one or two members of the audience gave an uneasy chuckle, but then he was bowing like an orchestra leader and with a nod and smile recognizing his co-performers, the white wolf and the black, and the applause rose up to engulf him: the show was over. Or so they thought. But the impresario of health, the preceptor of the stage and resuscitator of the race had one more surprise in store for them.
“I thank you all, ladies and gentlemen, for your attention tonight. The Question Box lecture has now come to an end, but I’ll be back next week, same time and place, with my trusty assistant, Dr. Frank Linniman”—a spatter of applause—”to answer your health questions. And now, before you hurry off to tonight’s reception in the Palm Garden, I’d like to leave you with this, a thought for the evening, as it were….” He cleared his throat, adjusted his spectacles. “It’s a poem I’ve written for the occasion of this lecture and demonstration…. I call it ‘Methuselah’:
No fish was he fed,
No blood did he shed.
And he knew when he had eaten enough.
And so it is plain
He’d had no cause to complain
Of steaks that were measly or tough.
Or bearded beef grimy,
Green, moldy and slimy,
Of cold-storage turkeys and putrid beefsteaks,
With millions of colon germs,
Hams full of trichina worms,
And sausages writhing with rheumatiz-aches.
Old Methuselah dined
On ambrosia and wined
On crystal-pure water from heaven-filled springs.
Flesh foods he eschewed,
Because, being shrewd,
He chose Paradise fare and not packing-house things.
The balding head shot up again and an antic smile played across the Doctor’s face. “And how long did he live, my friends?”
Will Lightbody stood beneath the banana tree in the Palm Garden, a cup of Kaffir tea in one hand, a bran-nut health cookie in the other. The tea smelled and tasted like something you might use on the woodshed to discourage dry rot, and the cookie, though vaguely sweet, had the consistency of animal fodder. Still, Will was glad to be admitting this liquid and this food to his body—any liquid or any food, for that matter, so long as it didn’t look, feel, smell or taste like milk or grapes, or contain, in even trace amounts, any milk or grape products. Actually, milk was a fading memory, though his throat still seized up at the thought of it—at the moment, it was the grape that was uppermost in his mind. He’d been on the grape diet until eight days ago, taking in nothing but grapes, grapes in all their varieties and guises, from Concord jelly on muscadine halves to Tokay pudding, black-currant stew and tall unending glasses of faintly cloudy thrice-strained Sanitarium-blessed grape juice. But no wine, of course. Not a drop of the only form in which grapes would ever again be acceptable to him, even if he should live to be twice as old as Methuselah.
Grapes. The very thought of them, of the way they popped individually between the teeth to release their pulpy, mucousy load, to the bitterness of their seeds, to the blatant bulbous sight of them, gathered to the vine like little cannonballs, dollops of lead, mucilage, poison, was enough to send him gagging for the toilet. Whenever he spotted some poor deluded soul picking away at a plate of peeled Perlettes in a forlorn corner of the dining room, he had to turn his head. He couldn’t help himself. Toward the end he would awaken in the night, certain that he was in the grip of a thick ropy vine, leaves sprouting behind his ears, tendrils creep
ing down his throat to strangle him, and he’d find himself heaving up off the bed, gasping for breath. In the morning, he would sneak off to the toilet before Nurse Bloethal could catch him, and deposit whole strings of perfect little royal-purple spheres in the white porcelain basin.
But now he was drinking Kaffir tea and eating cookies. He hadn’t gained any weight—had lost a good fifteen pounds, in fact—and he stood there in his dinner clothes like an animated coat rack. Beneath the starched white shirtfront, which was fastened with onyx studs and secured by his black satin cummerbund, he wore a summer undershirt, and beneath the undershirt, he wore a neat and tidy six-inch scar, a single railway spur running up the slope of his abdomen. This was Dr. Kellogg’s handiwork. He’d done the cutting, the delving, the poking and removing, and he’d done the sewing, too. It was said among the patients that in idle moments, while traveling or dictating, the Doctor often practiced his sewing on articles of the children’s clothing, keeping. his eye sharp, his fingers nimble and his stitches tight. Will couldn’t speak to that, but he couldn’t complain, either: the wound had healed beautifully. Of course, as far as he could tell, the operation hadn’t accomplished a thing. Oh, perhaps the fire in his gut had been damped a notch or two, like the flame under a kettle set on a gas range, but it was there still, burning, burning.
He had questions about that, of course, questions he’d like to bring up during one of the Chief’s absurd lectures—really, the wolf in the cage had been too much, though he had to admit it was high entertainment—but he hadn’t quite got up the nerve. And in private, consulting with Linniman or the bearded little saint himself, Will had learned not to complain, learned to fake recovery, in fact. It was either that or drown in milk and die of grapes. His father had told him to go ahead and stay for as long as it took—he’d long since found a replacement for him at the Water Street plant, and Will’s position there had never been more than ceremonial in any case—and Eleanor, after six solid months, still showed no inclination to leave. And so here he was, in Battle Creek, at the Sanitarium, paying a monthly stipend to the Kellogg coffers that would have bankrupted any number of South American dependencies, and improving at a glacial rate. He figured that if he stayed on into the 1920s the flame might almost be extinguished (until he lit it again with booze, cigars, coffee and porterhouse steak—and there was no sense in living at all if you had to abjure those things forever), but he’d weigh less than he had at birth. It was a real conundrum, and he was brooding over it and working his tongue up behind his molars to dislodge a stubborn fragment of bran-nut cookie, when Eleanor entered the room in the company of Dr. Frank Linniman.