The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  People were beginning to take notice of them now, staff members and patients alike, some self-consciously averting their gaze, others openly gaping at this freak, this avatar of filth and degeneracy sprung up like a toadstool between their Chief and his secretary. It was maddening. It was. For a long moment the Doctor stood frozen there in the middle of the wide gleaming terrazzo floor, the man of decision, crusader for the clean and the correct, brought to a grinding standstill. “George,” he said under his breath, and he spoke the name almost involuntarily, almost as if he couldn’t bear to individualize this lump of dejection before him.

  George said nothing. He merely slouched there, ragged and twisted, ugly as a turnip, and grinned to show off his yellowed teeth and rotten gums.

  It was too much. The boy was a walking, talking nightmare, the breathing refutation and antithesis of everything Dr. Kellogg and the Sanitarium stood for, an insult, a provocation, a slap in the face. Suddenly, before he knew what he was doing, the Doctor lashed out and snatched him by the arm, and in the next instant they were moving swiftly up the hallway toward the lobby, George hanging back sulkily, the Doctor’s grip like iron. “Come out of this, George, come out of this now,” the Doctor hissed.

  “I want money,” George spat, showing his teeth again, and the Doctor tugged at his arm as if at the leash of a willful dog.

  Through the lobby, the Doctor said to himself, and into my office in the far corridor, a hundred and twenty steps to safety. They’ll think he’s a charity case, that’s all, and then he’ll be gone, out the door and into the night. “Money,” he muttered, tossing it back at him out of the corner of his mouth. “You’ve had all the money you’ll ever get from me.”

  George was striding along beside him now, a full-grown man, longer of leg, and for all his lousy posture a good head taller than the Doctor. “We’ll see about that,” he sneered.

  They were just emerging from the corridor and entering the grand expanse of the lobby, with its careening bellhops, its benches and palms, the crush of luggage and new arrivals. Groups of patients lounged about, contentedly sipping milk and peach nectar from long-stemmed glasses; nurses bent over hypochondriacal matrons in wheelchairs; a murmur of voices whispered of the stock market, the theater, Caruso and Farrar, and the newest motorcars from Ford and Olds. There was Dr. Baculum with that Pittsburgh woman, wife of the steel magnate, what was her name?—Wallford? Walters? Walldorp?—and Admiral Nieblock at the telegraph cubicle with the Crouder woman, a blur of nurses, Meta Sinclair. Dr. Kellogg moved purposively through the room, nodding, waving, nothing in the world the matter, a bit of a hurry, that was all, some poor unfortunate at his elbow, and of course he knew they didn’t want to see this side of things, but the Sanitarium was a charitable institution, after all, and their Chief was a saint, they had to understand that, a veritable saint.

  Halfway across—fifty people at least crowding round the desk, the staircase, lining the benches and flowing in and out of the Palm Garden at the rear—George suddenly jerked his arm from the Doctor’s grasp and came to a halt. “One hundred dollars, Dad, Pater, Pa—one hundred dollars or I scream my lungs out right here and now.”

  Fifty pairs of eyes were on them, the Doctor all grins and smiles, throwing kisses, winking, waving, nodding, everything under control. One sharp glance at his son: “In my office. We’ll discuss it there.”

  Dab crowded them. George wouldn’t budge. “SHALL I,” he suddenly barked, his voice a ragged tear in the genteel fabric of the room before it dropped again to a whisper, “Shall I raise my voice?”

  No one got the better of John Harvey Kellogg, no one. He was master of all he surveyed, Chief, king, confessor and patriarch to his thousands of dyspeptic patients and the forty-two children he and Ella had adopted over the years. There were the Charlie Posts of the world, to be sure, there was his brother, Will, who’d bought the corn-flake concession out from under his nose, there were the Phelpses and the Macfaddens and all the rest of them, and maybe they won the skirmishes, yet John Harvey Kellogg won the wars. Always. But the situation was delicate, he understood that, and he fought down his anger. “March down that corridor and into my office this minute,” he said in a harsh whisper, “and it’s yours.”

  George stood there half a beat longer, whiskers bristling, malice dancing in his loamy eyes. Then he dropped his arms and collapsed his shoulders. “It’s a deal,” he said.

  Suddenly the three of them were moving again, the audience from the Grand Parlor just now spilling into the lobby behind them, the Doctor firing looks right, left and over his shoulder, practically scampering on his truncated legs and driving George before him with a firm and unwavering hand. He was almost there, almost out of it, almost safe, when a peremptory female voice took hold of him like a grappling hook. “Dr. Kellogg!” the voice rang out, and he was caught. Feet faltering, a weary automatic smile pressed to his lips, he wheeled round to find an impeccably draped female form engulfed in a maelstrom of luggage. Beside her and two paces to the rear rose the towering sticklike wraith of a long-nosed young man with flat feet and posture so egregious he might just as well have had curvature of the spine. “Doctor,” she chirped, “Dr. Kellogg, what a pleasure to see you again,” and his hand vanished in the grip of her black kid glove.

  The party had halted in the middle of the room, Dab arrested in mid-waddle, George drooping like a frost-burned plant, the Doctor pulled up short. “Why,” he gasped, beaming, beaming, the genial host and courtly physician, “if it isn’t Mrs., Mrs.—?”

  “Lightbody,” she returned, “Eleanor. And this,” indicating the gaunt, broken-down figure beside her, “this is my husband, Will.”

  An awkward pause. Though George had faded back a step, the Doctor couldn’t get the smell of him out of his nostrils, a sick working stench of mold and fermentation, of grease, bodily functions and filth. He smelled like a garbage scow. Worse: a meat wagon. “Lightbody, of course,” the Doctor exclaimed. “And how is your, uh, condition? Neurasthenia, isn’t it? And autointoxication? Yes? Combating both, I trust. Winning the battle of biologic living, eh?”

  He made as if to withdraw his hand, but Eleanor held him fast. “I know we’re supposed to think positively, Doctor, and I know you’re going to do wonders for him, for both of us, but I’ll tell you—I must tell you,” and here Eleanor’s voice dropped as she leaned confidentially toward the Doctor, “my husband is a very sick man.”

  “Well, yes,” the Doctor said, “of course, of course he is,” and suddenly he was his old self, a magneto of energy, sparks flying from his fingertips, the grand leonine head wagging majestically on his shoulders. “You’ve come to the right place, young man,” he said, disengaging himself from the wife to pump Will Lightbody’s limp and skeletal hand.

  All around them the room glowed with a cairn eupeptic health. Life, promise and progress burgeoned in every corner, from the gaggle of milk-sipping millionaires lounging against the Corinthian columns to the tranquil uncorseted grandes dames, marchesas and housewives gliding in and out of the Palm Garden. The banana tree, in all its exotic glory, could be seen through the high arched portal, rising up from a thatch of palm, succulent and orchid in defiance of latitude and season alike, centerpiece of the Doctor’s own private jungle.

  Ignoring George—he could just cool his heels a minute—the Doctor turned to his secretary. “Mr. Dab, I want you to fetch a wheelchair for this gentleman and have Dr. Linniman see to him this evening. And the very best of your attendants—Murphy, find Murphy, will you? And Graves. I want Mr. Lightbody to have every comfort,” he went on, expansive, sagacious, the intrepid man of healing for whom no case was beyond hope, no colon too clogged, no stomach too sour, “and I’ll want to examine him personally first thing in the morning.”

  Eleanor fixed him with a look of surprise. The husband fidgeted. “Personally?” she echoed. A rare gift had been dropped in her lap, a boon from the gods. “But Doctor, that’s too kind of you … we know how very busy you are, and—�
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  “You’ve suffered a great loss,” the Doctor began hesitantly, almost in the way of a fortuneteller or swami, but then his memory—that ironclad infallible airtight faculty that had held him in good stead all these many years—began to coil round the facts of the case. Lightbody, Eleanor. Caucasian, female. Twenty … twenty-eight years of age. Peterskill, New York. Neurasthenia, autointoxication, loss of child. Yes, yes, that was it. “Nothing can rectify that, I know, and you have—and will always have—my deepest regret and sympathy, both of you. But you must go on, and scientific eating and rest and fresh air will restore you, just as surely as it’s restored hundreds upon hundreds before you. You’ll see.” He paused, gazing into the wife’s eyes, deciding something. “And I’ll be supervising your case personally, too, my dear, of course I will.”

  A geyser of excitement seemed to shoot through her. Her lips trembled and her cheeks flushed; for a moment, the Doctor was afraid she was going to drop to her knees. “Oh, Doctor, Doctor,” she cried, and it was a chant, a prayer, a hosanna of thanksgiving and joy.

  He waved his hand: it was nothing. And now he turned to the husband. “And I can see that you’re suffering, young man—I can see it in the sallowness of your skin, in the whites of your eyes, and, and—” Here he suddenly reached out, took hold of Will Lightbody by the lips and forced his fingers into his mouth like a horse trader. “Yes, yes, say ‘ah’… the coated tongue, I knew it! As severe a case of autointoxication as I’ve ever seen….”

  Will’s face sank. Eleanor looked stricken.

  “But it’s nothing we can’t deal with here, I assure you,” the Doctor. was quick to add. “Of course, I can’t say for certain till you’ve been properly and thoroughly examined, but I hold out every hope—” He broke off suddenly. Where was George? He gave Dab a sharp glance, made accidental eye contact with half a dozen patients—Hello, hello—and twisted round completely before he spotted him. Suddenly his jaw clenched. There was George, Hildah’s boy, ragged and stinking, a tramp, a bum in toe-sprung shoes, all the way across the room at the elbow of J. Henry Osborne, Jr., the bicycle king, cadging change. “George!” the Doctor cried out, and the whole room turned to him.

  He was mortified. This was a place of healing, of peace and tranquillity, where the halls echoed with the soothing strains of the Battle Creek Sanitarium String Quartet and no one spoke above a whisper. And here he was, shouting like an Italian in a tenement.

  In the next instant, Dab was scurrying across the marble floor, and a pair of attendants, big men, sinewy, with rocklike chests and intransigent shoulders, were converging on the Doctor’s errant son. Distracted, the prophylactic smile frozen to his face, the Doctor bowed curtly to the Lightbodys—“Charity case,” he murmured, “nothing to be alarmed about”—and hustled off in the direction of the far corridor, waving a hand over his head to direct the attendants like an overwrought general deploying his troops.

  In his office, settled behind the great mahogany barge of his desk, the bill of his eyeshade pulled down low, the Doctor was another man. He was in command again, in control, everything was in its place and all was right with the world. Except for George, that is. Not in the least contrite, he sat there across from his adoptive father, slumped in his chair, the omnipresent sneer ironed into his face. Behind George, sandwiched between the framed portraits of Socrates and Elie Metchnikoff, Dab stood against the wall doing his best imitation of a henchman, arms folded, shoulders squared, chin thrust forward. The two attendants waited just outside the door.

  The Doctor pushed himself back from the desk and, never fully at ease unless he was in motion, began to pace the carpet. For all his talk of biologic living and the simple life, he drove himself relentlessly, working from 4:00 A.M. to midnight, seven days a week. Sleep? The Doctor disdained it—who had time for sleep? He traveled to Algeria, Italy and Mexico, to Paris, London and Lisbon, he addressed the Northern Nut Growers Association and the National Milk Congress, lectured his patients, dictated his books (Plain Facts about Sexual Life, Man, the Masterpiece, The Crippled Colon, and The Itinerary of a Breakfast, among others), oversaw the administration of the San, organized the Race Betterment Society and the Health Efficiency League of America, served as president of the American Medical Missionary College and half a dozen other organizations, and still managed to knock off as many as twenty-five gastrointestinal operations a day. If he couldn’t find all the time he’d like for Ella, who’d become deaf and increasingly feeble, or for his forty-two children, who could blame him?

  “George,” he said, still pacing, his head down, “I’m disappointed in you. No, I may as well be frank: I’m disgusted by your behavior. Disgusted. I took you in. Rescued you. Why, your mother was nothing but a common, a common—”

  “Go ahead and say it—a whore. She was a whore.”

  “You know I don’t like to hear that language, George.”

  George’s spine was bent like a strand of wire. He slipped lower and lower, until he seemed to be absorbed in the fabric of the chair. He made a pyramid of his grubby fingers and smiled a bemused smile. He said nothing.

  The Doctor paced. Light glinted from the smoked celluloid of his eyeshade. The eyeshade was a fixture of the Doctor’s office attire—it masked the expression in his eyes, and he wore it when dictating, giving instructions to his staff, conducting distasteful interviews such as this one. Pacing, he allowed himself to heave a sigh fruity with disgust. “You’ve become a thorn in my side, George, and I just don’t understand it. I educated you, gave you everything—”

  George’s laugh, sharp as the slap of a wave against the bow of a freighter, cut him off. “And just what did you give me? Five minutes of your time? A pat on the back? The thrilling opportunity to be your unpaid house servant?” George was aroused now, his eyes engorged, his head bobbing like a pullet’s. “My life’s a shit pile, that’s all. A shit pile.”

  John Harvey Kellogg swung round on him in that instant, his lips twisted beneath the shadow that fell over his face. “You ingrate,” he choked. “You, you guttersnipe with your filthy mouth. You meat eater. How can you dare—” But he couldn’t go on. It was bad for his heart, for his nerves, for his digestion. George was the biggest mistake he’d ever made in his life, no doubt about it. And though he didn’t like to admit it, he knew in his heart he had only himself to blame. Hubris, that’s what it was.

  Thirteen years ago, after a lecture in Chicago, he’d sat down to a vegetarian supper with Drs. Johannes Schloh, Mortimer Carpenter and Ben Childress of the Good Samaritans’ Pediatric Hospital, and found himself embroiled in a debate over child rearing. Carpenter and his colleagues claimed it was all in the parentage—“A bad seed gives rise to a weed, John, to be short and sweet”—but Dr. Kellogg, with his messianic belief in the perfectibility of the human race, insisted otherwise. Conditions made the man, he asserted, wagging a finger for emphasis, and any child of the ghetto, any poor unfortunate from the stockyards or the shantytowns that stood awash in sewage behind them, would grow into as valuable and decent a young person as any if only he were given the opportunity. “Give me the worst case you can find,” he said, “the single most deprived child in all of Chicago, and I’ll take him in and raise him as my own son, just as I’ve raised the others, and I guarantee you he’ll turn out a model citizen. I know he will, gentlemen. I know it.”

  Well, he was wrong.

  They found George—he was known only as “Hildah’s boy” then, with neither Christian nor family name attached to him—sitting beside the corpse of his mother in an unheated shack out back of a South Side slum. The police were unable to determine how long the mother had been dead—the cold weather had helped preserve her—but the marks at her throat and the contusions about her face suggested that her death was not the result of natural causes. No one knew how long the boy had been sitting there, nor what horrors he’d witnessed—he was six years old, wrapped against the cold in a scrap of old carpet, and he hadn’t yet learned to speak. All around him, s
cattered like bones, were the stubs of candles he’d chewed to fight down his hunger.

  The Doctor took him in, named him after Ella’s uncle and gave him his own surname to go along with it. There were eighteen other children in the house at the time, including four Mexican boys the doctor had found abandoned during his trip to Guadalajara and Mexico City, three girls orphaned when their mother died at the San and a mulatto boy who’d been found wandering the streets of Grand Rapids with second-degree burns on his chest, his thighs and the soles of his feet. The Doctor’s house, or the Residence, as it was called, had been built the year before, and it had been designed to accommodate a crowd. There were twenty rooms in all, including separate quarters for Dr. Kellogg and his wife (no matter how forbearing he might have been, there were times when he simply needed to escape that cacophony of piping voices), an office, a library, several bathrooms, a stenographer’s room (he never knew when the urge to dictate a book would strike him), a small laboratory and a gymnasium for the children.

  The children slept in dormitories according to their ages and sexes, they were attended to and educated by San nurses and staffers, and they were provided with all the plain unvarnished accoutrements of La Vie Simple, from calisthenics in the morning to beet soufflé, okra soup and three-ounce portions of baked Cornlet in the evening. They were expected to work, of course—John Harvey Kellogg was a firm believer in the twin principles that work is a great character builder and that no one gets anything for nothing. The younger children were assigned chores in the household, the yard and the garden, while the elder were encouraged to work at the San after school hours.

  And they throve. All of them. Two of the Mexican children—the Rodriguez boys—became doctors in their own right, and half a dozen of the girls became nurses. They spoke well, kept their quarters neat and always looked presentable. The Doctor was proud of them—they were as much his achievement, his creation, as the corn flake and the electric blanket, and they were a credit to Battle Creek, to the Sanitarium and to the great progressive democratic country that gave rise to them. All of them, that was, except George.