The Road to Wellville

by T. C. Boyle

  As for the Lightbodys, Will and Eleanor, they returned to Peterskill to find everything in order on Parsonage Lane, though Dick the wirehaired terrier never quite got over their having deserted him and spent the rest of his life taking out his displeasure on the Persian carpets every time they left the house for more than an hour or two. The roses were in full bloom on the trellis outside the kitchen window, the sunny little room at the head of the stairs stood ready to receive its future occupant, and the familiar umbrageous town, with its sharp inclines and vernal walks, its uplifting views of the Hudson and Dunderberg Mountain to the west and Anthony’s Nose to the north, seemed to cheer them both, and an air of normalcy and quiet fell over their lives. Admittedly, the question of their diet those first few weeks was a ticklish one, and Mrs. Dunphy, the cook, had to tread a fine line between the old physiologic order and the new one of moderation and laxness, but Eleanor ate an asparagus frittata, a poached shad or a veal chop without complaint, and Will found that the hard hot fist in his stomach had begun, ever so gradually, to unclench itself.

  Dr. Brillinger had passed on in the interim, and the new man in town, a Dr. Morris Frieberg of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, examined Will casually, diagnosed a duodenal ulcer that was well along the way to healing itself, and prescribed absolutely nothing other than sensible eating and drinking and perhaps a stroll down the avenue after dinner. As the weeks and months drifted by, Will found that a glass of beer before dinner seemed to help with his digestion, and a brandy or two afterward just set him aglow. He took vegetables with his meat, ate his whole grains and his cereals, enjoyed the occasional pickled egg and strip of jerky. He slept well and contentedly at night, Eleanor breathing softly beside him in the big four-poster bed, Dick the wirehaired terrier at his feet, and when he felt like it, after eighteen holes of golf with one of his old school chums or a loping hike into the Blue Mountain Reservation, he took a nap in the afternoon. By the fall of that year, he’d returned to the factory on Water Street, but only to tender his resignation, pleading his health. In actuality, he’d never felt better, and he planned to devote himself to his own pursuits—reading the complete works of Dickens, building ships under glass, raising wirehaired terriers and preparing himself for fatherhood.

  In February of the following year, Eleanor gave birth to their first child, a girl of seven pounds, two ounces, with eyes like twin specks of emerald glass, whom they named Elizabeth Cady and installed in the bassinet in the pink sunny room at the head of the stairs. She was followed two years later by Lucretia, and finally, after a hiatus of five years, by Julia Ward. The girls grew up to be leggy and lean, and they ate whatever they liked, within reason. Will was devoted to them.

  Eleanor softened in motherhood, and the nervous condition that had so dogged her younger days seemed to become less and less a factor as the years went on. But though she was softened, and in a way chastened by her Battle Creek experience, Eleanor never lost her cutting wit or her reforming zeal. Where before she’d thrown all her energies into diet, as though control of the appetite were the source and foundation of all human endeavor, she now broadened her perspective, throwing herself into local and national politics, into charity work, education and the movement for women’s suffrage, with the same fervor she’d once reserved for the Peterskill Ladies’ Biologic Living Society or the Battle Creek Sanitarium Deep-Breathing Club. It was a shift of emphasis, that was all, and never a recantation. Whereas before it was vegetables that would save the world, now it was basic human rights, it was education, it was a giving and a selfless devotion to the cause. She became president of the Peterskill chapter of the National American Woman Suffrage Association and in 1919 traveled throughout the country lobbying for passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. So involved was she, in fact, that it was often up to Will to look after their daughters, a responsibility he gladly and without prompting assumed. When she was home, and when they sat down to dinner, she accepted a slice of turkey or a choice cut of beef, and though she never did reconcile herself to meat, by the same token she didn’t seem to miss Nuttose, Baked Cornlet or kumyss, and she never, or almost never, mentioned Dr. Kellogg.

  By contrast, Will rarely traveled, rarely, in fact, went out, unless it was to take his constitutional, walk the girls to school or spend a quiet evening at Mapes’ or Ben’s Elbow (two drinks his limit—or, well, maybe three). When the girls were grown and the rumblings of the Second War making themselves heard, Eleanor pitched herself into the relief effort, and the house on Parsonage Lane gradually filled with refugees. There were Jews and Lithuanians, Czechs, Frenchmen and Poles, and they wrote, sculpted, played piano, gave speeches and argued politics, and they ate anything and everything that was put before them. It was a happy time for Will, the house full of talk and music, all three of his daughters (two now married) within walking distance, Eleanor shining like the polestar of that brilliant company, and as he slipped quietly into his sixty-seventh year, he felt at peace with himself, and if not exactly heroic, then a man who had risen to the occasion and taken charge of his life in that sunlit field by the Kalamazoo River so many years ago. He died in his sleep the night Hitler invaded Russia.

  Eleanor outlived her husband by some twenty years, and as she got on into her seventies and the causes dropped away from her, she began, once again, and all those years later, to think of food. At seventy-eight, she was fitter, stronger, more mentally acute and physically active than women twenty years younger. She saw them in Woolworth’s, feeding their great greasy globular faces with pork rinds and extra-buttered popcorn, watched them bend their heads to their chicken-fried-steak sandwiches and swell beneath their pedal pushers with appendages no human was meant to carry. She saw them, and she thought about it, and the more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that Dr. Kellogg had been right (maybe not Spitzvogel or Lionel Badger, dead of a stroke at forty-nine, and the thought of them and what had happened between them still made her blush and got her pulse racing all those many years later—not them, maybe, but Dr. Kellogg).

  She felt like an apostate in the face of it, and she gave up what little meat she’d fallen into eating over the years, hardened her will, dug out her old pamphlets, her yeast powder and the crumbling pages of Dr. Kellogg’s “Nuts May Save the Race.” In 1958, at the age of seventy-nine, she got together with her youngest daughter, Julia, and opened Peterskill’s first health-food store, stocking its shelves with fish-oil capsules, vitamin supplements, tahini, wonton wrappers and great open bins of sesame seeds, cracked-wheat flour, unhulled rice and dried soy-beans. A juicer stood on the front counter, and local bodybuilders, Transcendentalists, Unitarians and chiropractors would stop by for a lecithin-yogurt shake or a glass of carrot juice. She died in 1967, at the age of eighty-eight, and no one knows why.

  But Dr. Kellogg—Dr. Kellogg, that amazing high-wire act of a sprightly, proselytizing, tightfisted, food-altering, revolutionary great-grandfather, author and presiding genius of the whole alimentary business, what of him? He throve and he faltered, like anyone else, but he never let his guard down and he never missed a photo opportunity. We see him today, his portrait hung in that celebrated gallery alongside Sylvester Graham, Bronson Alcott, Thomas Edison and Old Parr, eternally smiling with a mouth full of physiologic teeth, his white cockatoo perched on his white shoulder. Or on his bicycle, at seventy, cutting figure eights in a pair of shorts for the camera, tossing Indian clubs and lifting barbells, doing a triple gainer from the high dive of the Miami-Battle Creek Sanitarium pool in Miami Springs, Florida, in 1933, aged eighty-one.

  He fought his wars, and he had his triumphs. But on the evening of May 31, 1908, while rockets shot into the air and all the crowd of his inmates, his associates, his patients, devotees and familiars oohed and aahed and strained their eyes toward the heavens, he had some dirty work to do, some lies to tell, some dirt to sweep under the carpet. He appeared before an astonished Murphy, Linniman and some two dozen others who had sprung into the teeth of the fire an
d were even then driving it down to nothing, limping up the ground-floor hallway in his rags and tatters. There was a sheen of blood and perspiration on his face, a glistening coat of macadamia oil pasted to the hard proud swollen knot of his bare belly, and he carried a reek of intestinal secrets with him that made two of the men, full-grown and eudaemonically sound, turn away and gag. “It was George,” he cried, his voice trembling, face ashen, “he did it all. He attacked me, set the place afire, let the animals loose.” He hesitated, overcome. They moved toward him, but he gestured them away. “I tried to save him,” he choked, and then he said no more.

  Those were the good years, the years of the San’s heyday, the years when all the world came to him, John Harvey Kellogg, the one man, the unimpeachable, the authority, the king. The teens gave way to the twenties, the war years rose up and fell away like some sick red tide, women traded in their dresses and feathered hats for short skirts and cloches, ragtime segued into jazz, and the Battle Creek Sanitarium rode higher and higher on the current, unsinkable. John Harvey Kellogg’s nimble fingers and razor-honed scalpel probed a thousand abdomens, ten thousand, and his enema machine irrigated the most celebrated bowels in the country, yea, the world. Johnny Weissmuller stopped by to have his plumbing inspected; Byrd, Amundsen, Grenfell and Halliburton paid their homage; J. C. Penney, Amelia Earhart, Battling Bob La Follette, Henry Ford. In 1928 the Doctor added a fifteen-story addition, sumptuous with marble, crystal, tapestries and murals, and sat back to watch its two hundred sixty-five new rooms fill with the physiologically wanting.

  It never happened. The Crash came, the dyspeptic set took to dosing themselves with milk of magnesia, diet was whatever you could get. The San crashed under the burden of its debt, the glorious building that had witnessed the conversion of so many oceans of intestinal flora and the slow mastication of so many hundreds of tons of grits and granola, the Goodly Temple on a Hill, was sold at auction to the federal government and rechristened the Percy Jones General Hospital, and Dr. Kellogg retreated to Florida while his enemies—and they were legion—lifted up their parched old heads and sniffed something new in the air.

  In the end, though he received and administered more enemas than any man in history, though he ate more vegetables, smoked less, drank less, slept less and exercised more than practically any man of his time, even Dr. Kellogg couldn’t live forever. On December 14, 1943, like his nemesis, C. W. Post, before him, John Harvey Kellogg passed on into eternity.

  He did die, yes. But could anyone ask for more?

  In fourteen smart, funny, and richly crafted works, T. C. Boyle strips away the veneer of respectability draped across the American psyche, and exposes the comical truths beneath.

  AFTER THE PLAGUE

  These sixteen stories display an astonishing range, as Boyle zeroes in on everything from air rage to abortion doctors to the story of a 1920s Sicilian immigrant who constructs an amazing underground mansion in an effort to woo his sweetheart. By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, these new stories find “one of the most inventive and verbally exuberant writers” (The New York Times) at the top of his form.

  ISBN 0-14-200141-4

  BUDDING PROSPECTS

  All Felix and his friends have to do is harvest a crop of Cannabis Saliva and half a million tax-free dollars will be theirs. But as their beloved buds wither under assault from ravenous scavengers, human caprice, and a drug-busting state trooper named Jerpbak, their dreams of easy money go up in smoke. “Consistently, effortlessly, intelligently funny.”—The New York Times

  ISBN 0-14-029996-3

  DESCENT OF MAN

  A primate-center researcher becomes romantically involved with a chimp. A Norse poet overcomes bard-block. These and other strange occurrences come together in Boyle’s collection of satirical stories that brilliantly express just what the “evolution” of mankind has wrought. “Madness that hits you where you live.”—Houston Chronicle

  ISBN 0-14-029994-7

  EAST IS EAST

  Young Japanese seaman Hiro Tanaka jumps ship off the coast of Georgia and swims into a net of rabid rednecks, genteel ladies, descendants of slaves, and the denizens of an artists’ colony. The New York Times called this sexy, hilarious tragicomedy a “pastoral version of The Bonfire of the Vanities.”

  ISBN 0-14-013167-1

  GREASY LAKE AND OTHER STORIES

  Mythic and realistic, these masterful stories are, according to The New York Times, “satirical fables of contemporary life, so funny and acutely observed that they might have been written by Evelyn Waugh as sketches for … Saturday Night Live.”

  ISBN 0-14-007781-2

  IF THE RIVER WAS WHISKEY

  Boyle, winner of the 1999 PEN/Malamud award for short fiction, tears through the walls of contemporary society to reveal a world at once comic and tragic, droll and horrific, in these sixteen magical and provocative stories. “Writing at its very, very best.”—USA Today

  ISBN 0-14-011950-7

  RIVEN ROCK

  With his seventh novel to date, T. C. Boyle pens a heartbreaking love story taken from between the lines of history. Millionaire Stanley McCormick, diagnosed as a schizophrenic and sexual maniac shortly after his marriage, is forbidden the sight of women, but his strong-willed, virginal wife Katherine Dexter is determined to cure him. “As romantic as it is informative, as colorful as it is convincing. Boyle combines his gift for historical re-creation with his dazzling powers as a storyteller.”—The Boston Globe

  ISBN 0-14-027166-X

  THE ROAD TO WELLVILLE

  Centering on John Harvey Kellogg and his turn-of-the-century Battle Creek Spa, this wickedly comic novel brims with a Dickensian cast of characters and is laced with wildly wonderful plot twists. “A marvel, enjoyable from the beginning to end.”—Jane Smiley, The New York Times Book Review

  ISBN 0-14-016718-8

  T. C. BOYLE STORIES

  “Boyle has the tale-teller’s gift in abundance,” writes the Chicago Tribune. And nowhere is that more evident than in this collection of sixty-eight short stories—all of the work from his four previous collections, as well as seven tales that have never before appeared in book form—that comprise a virtual feast of the short story. “Seven hundred flashy, inventive pages of stylistic and moral acrobatics.”—The New York Times Book Review

  ISBN 0-14-028091-X

  THE TORTILLA CURTAIN

  Winner of France’s Prix Medicis Etranger for best foreign-language novel, The Tortilla Curtain illuminates the many potholes along the road to the elusive American Dream. Illegal immigrants Candido and America cling to life at the bottom of Topanga Canyon, dreaming of a privileged existence of the sort endured by L.A. liberals Delaney and Kyra, When a freak accident brings these two couples together, darkly comic events leave them wondering what the world is coming to.

  ISBN 0-14-023828-X

  WATER MUSIC

  Funny, bawdy, and full of imaginative and stylistic fancy, Water Music follows the wild adventures of Ned Rise, thief and whoremaster, and Mungo Park, explorer, from London to Africa.” Water Music does for fiction what Raiders of the Lost Ark did for film … Boyle is an adept plotter, a crazed humorist, and a fierce describer.”—The Boston Globe

  ISBN 0-14-006550-4

  WITHOUT A HERO

  With fierce, comic wit and uncanny accuracy, Boyle zooms in on an astonishingly wide range of American phenomena in this critically-applauded collection of stories. “Gloriously comic … vintage Boyle … [these] stories are more than funny, better than wicked. They make you cringe with their clarity.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

  ISBN 0-14-017839-2

  WORLD’S END

  Walter Van Brunt is about to have a collision with history that will lead him to search for his long-lost father. This fascinating novel, for which Boyle won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for American Fiction, showcases the author’s “ability to work all sorts of magical variations of literature and history” (The New York T
imes).

  ISBN 0-14-029993-9