The Road to Wellville

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  Though he couldn’t quite follow the Doctor’s logic, Will was mortified all the same, as deeply and thoroughly mortified as ever he’d been. He wanted to bolt, fly off crazily across the lawn, trample the flower beds, throw himself in the river and be done with it. He stared numbly into the blaze of the Doctor’s spectacles.

  But the Healer, as if divining his thoughts, had hold of him again, and his grip was like iron. “I can’t do anything for her,” he said, his voice pitched low, dead earnest. “I’m not her husband, only her physician. But I tell you this, sir, and I say it with all my heart: look to your wife.”

  Eleanor wasn’t in her room. She wasn’t in the Palm Garden, the parlor or the Ladies’ Gymnasium. Will carried his loose joints up and down the stairs, rapped on the doors of a dozen rooms where she was known to visit with one or another of her lady friends, stalked Virginia Cranehill and Mrs. Zachary Cornish, the yellow-taffeta lady. No one had seen her. Heartsick and fuming, Will went up to dinner early, hoping to confront her there, and sat for two hours listening to Hart-Jones rhapsodize about the bird life of the Lake District, where, to the everlasting dismay of everyone within hearing distance, he’d been born and raised. Neither Badger nor Eleanor put in an appearance.

  At three, Will skipped a session of medicine-ball tossing under the direction of the big-armed Swede, and instead dropped in on a dress rehearsal of The Fatal Luncheon, the Deep-Breathing Club’s original drama. He took a seat in the cool afternoon shadows of the downstairs parlor, heart pounding in his ears, waiting for Eleanor to make her appearance. The play, co-authored by Eleanor and Mrs. Tindermarsh, seemed to be about a man with a ruined stomach struggling against the twin demons of alcohol and carnal abuse. Mrs. Tindermarsh, in overalls and greasepaint mustaches, portrayed the protagonist, stalking about the stage spouting lines like “O woe to this digestive tract and unquiet stomach that ever I saw chop or steak!” Eleanor was to play the female lead, the role of the long-suffering wife who contends against all hope to bring her deluded husband to see the redemptive light of physiologic living. Will’s stomach contracted at the thought of it—the play was just one more knot in a string of humiliations stretching all the way back to the night he’d arrived and Dr. Kellogg had inspected his tongue as if he were a horse going to stud. He shrank into the shadows.

  The play was difficult to follow and he was so wrought up in any case that even Wilde or Ibsen would have seemed a burden, but after half an hour or so he began to realize that Eleanor’s part had been taken by another woman. The woman had been onstage since the outset, playing opposite Mrs. Tindermarsh, but Will had assumed she was a domestic or a distant relative, and now he understood that he was wrong. Eleanor wasn’t here, either.

  He rose abruptly in the dark and made his way up front, where he attempted to inquire after her but was roundly shushed from all quarters. Sinking nervously into a seat just under the stage, he bided his time till the rehearsal was over and then approached Mrs. Tindermarsh.

  “Oh, Mr. Lightbody,” she crowed, “—and what do you think of us? Will we make a hit?”

  Faces had gathered round them, garish in their stage makeup. Will glanced up uneasily. “Oh, yes, of course,” he boomed, his voice setting up a shiver in the glass decanter perched beside the fictive husband’s armchair, “splendid, very moving—and true to life.”

  Eyes batted, mouths pursed. A squeal of voices started up behind the curtain, someone laughed at the rear of the stage. Will swiveled his neck and masked his eyes. “But where’s Eleanor? I thought she was playing the wife?”

  Mrs. Tindermarsh’s gaze fled to the far corners of the room. She stroked her mustaches and came away with blackened fingertips. “Didn’t she tell you?” she murmured, looking round for a towel. “She resigned two weeks ago—her treatments were just eating up all her time. Gloria Gephardt’s taken her role, but it’s a shame, it really is—your wife’s such a natural actress.”

  He finally cornered Eleanor in her room late that night—she hadn’t made a supper appearance, either, though Badger was there, the sot, blathering on about esculents and tubers and all the celebrated people he knew. She was in bed, reading, and when he surprised her—he didn’t bother to knock—she looked up guiltily and slipped the book beneath her pillow. “Oh, Will,” she murmured, her voice languid, artificial, fat with venality and deceit, “how are you?” She let out an abbreviated laugh. “We hardly get to see one another anymore, do we?”

  Will wasn’t about to be distracted by small talk. “I spoke with Dr. Kellogg,” he said. He loomed over the bed, practically tottering, arms clenched rigidly at his sides.

  “Oh? And what did he have to say?” Her nonchalance was infuriating. She was toying with him, pretending, putting on an act. “Come, give me a kiss.”

  Will stood rigid. “I don’t want a kiss. I want to talk about Dr. Spitzvogel.”

  The name flashed across her face like a whiplash, but she never gave herself away. “Yes? And what about him?”

  How could she be so brazen? The man was manipulating her womb and everyone knew it. “I’ve seen his house.” It was all he could think to say.

  “Will,” and she was crooning now, her eyes fluid and rich, his own wife, “what’s this all about? Is something troubling you? You’re not jealous of my doctor, are you?” She laughed again, a little trill of private amusement. “Look at you—you’ve become the Battle Freak. Here I go to an outside physician and you act as if it’s the end of the world. Really, Will,” she said, and her laugh followed it up.

  “Outside physician!” He threw it back at her. “He’s no more a physician than I am.”

  Her eyes sharpened suddenly, and the familiar furrow appeared between her eyebrows. “How would you know?”

  “Because Dr. Kellogg told me. Your Dr. Kellogg. The great and only. And he told me what this Spitzvogel is doing to you, too, in the name of ‘treatment,’ and it’s shocking, Eleanor, and I, I think you owe me an explanation—no, I demand an explanation, and right now, right this minute. No more excuses, no more hiding behind this ‘biologic living’ nonsense—the man’s manipulating your womb, isn’t he? Well, isn’t he?”

  She’d gone pale beneath her tan. She was guilty, she’d been found out, but she never flinched and she never took her eyes from his. “Yes, he is. And what does that have to do with anything? It’s a perfectly respectable and effective treatment for a condition like mine, and that’s not all he does, not by a long shot—”

  “Yes? And what else does he manipulate? Your breasts? Your bottom?”

  The suddenness with which she sprang from the bed surprised him, and he stumbled back confusedly to avoid her. She was in her nightgown, a new one he’d never seen before, loose at the collar and provocative, but he didn’t have a chance to admire it—she hit him across the face with the flat of her hand, twice, three times, till he took her wrists and held them. “Let me go, you son of a—let me go!” she shrieked, rocking in his arms, and he felt her elbow like a knife in his side, and then she was free. “Get out!” she cried, and he could hear movement in the hall.

  “I won’t,” he panted, the rage building in him, pushing him beyond reason and control. He wanted to slap her back, pin her down, hurt her. “And I won’t allow you to go on like this. No more quacks, no more Kelloggs or Spitzvogels or Badgers or any of them—I’m taking you home.”

  Her face was fierce, alive with flashing eyes and snapping teeth. “Ha!” she cried, and her voice twisted toward hysteria. “You think you own me? You think you’re my lord and master? You think this is feudal times?”

  She wasn’t beautiful in that moment, wasn’t tender, wasn’t his wife. Eyes bulging, crouched like a wrestler, circling him in her rage, she was murderous and hateful. He felt the love go dead in him. “We’ll let the law decide that,” he said.

  “The law?” she screamed, and there was a knock at the door now, a voice from the hallway—Mrs. Lightbody, are you in there? Is everything all right? “Threaten me with the law,
will you, you weakling…. Get out!” she shrieked. “Get out or I’ll call the orderlies—”

  “No, I won’t. Not unless you come with me. Now. Tonight.”

  The banging at the door. “Mrs. Lightbody?”

  She looked at him evenly a moment, and then let herself go, her voice splitting a new register, gathering itself into a face of screaming. “Help!” she cried. “Help, help, help!”

  Under the circumstances, who could blame a man for seeking consolation elsewhere?

  Will accepted Nurse Graves’s invitation to go boating on the afternoon before Decoration Day, and he didn’t think twice about it. He was through with enemas and nut butter; through with cranks and quacks and the tyranny of fork, knife and spoon; through with Eleanor. She could have every private flap and wrinkle of her anatomy manipulated by the entire medical establishment of Germany for all he cared. And to prove it to himself he’d gone down to the Michigan Central depot and purchased a ticket to New York—a single ticket, for one passenger, one way only.

  Standing there at the ticket window, he closed his eyes and pictured the old familiar house on Parsonage Lane, its rooms and halls and furniture, the horsehide sofa in the back parlor that was perfectly contoured to the mold of his back, the four-poster in the master bedroom with its curtains drawn to shut out the world, his bookshelves and reading lamp and the way the front hall took the morning sun and held it like a gift, and he didn’t see Eleanor anywhere in the picture. He saw Dick the wirehaired terrier and Mrs. Dunphy, the housekeeper, he saw the gardener and the delivery boy from Offenbacher’s … and who else? Who else did he see there? Nurse Graves, that’s who he saw. Irene. In the kitchen, gazing out on the roses, in the pantry, the parlor, the bath—oh, the bath—and a plan came to him then, born of the moment and fully formed. He would get a divorce, that’s what he would do, and Irene would climb with him into that high-vaulted connubial bed, soft where Eleanor Was hard, sweet where she was bitter, and he would reach out to her and take her in his arms, and no belt, no diet, no theory or rationale would have a thing to do with what came next….

  It was a vision that stayed with him, that haunted and inspired him, and he walked around in a dream for the rest of the week. He saw Eleanor only at meals, and she didn’t move him, not at all. Which was just as well, because she refused even to glance in his direction, let alone speak to him. She was coming off her fast and taking peach, apple and pear pulp, a spoon or two of pabulum and egg pastina, cautiously working her way up to breads and puddings and the rough-edged but cleansing bulk of the aspiring vegetables. Will watched her eat with the detachment of a scientist, and found that he didn’t care one way or the other, didn’t care whether she ate or starved, and he listened to her dialogue with Badger, Hart-Jones and the others as he might have listened to a language he couldn’t place. On the third day after their falling out, Eleanor moved back to her old table, and she took Badger with her.

  But Eleanor wasn’t the issue, Eleanor wasn’t what concerned him—it was Irene. Irene of the caressing voice and soothing hands, the farm girl, the nurse, the angel: Irene. She couldn’t accept a gift—no, that was against the regulations—but flowers were different. They were like little bits and pieces of the sun, she cooed, and they were the gift of God—she could never refuse flowers. And so each morning that week Will walked all the way out to a poultry farm at the end of Washington Avenue, battling hay fever and gnats and the stink of chickens and the sun that bit into the back of his neck, just to purchase a bouquet for her. Lilies and gold alexanders, phlox and cinquefoil, he let the farmer’s wife choose them, something new each day, and when Irene came in to take him to his eleven-o’clock vibrotherapy session, the flowers were there for her, in a vase on the night table. He didn’t say anything about the ticket in his wallet or how he was leaving Eleanor and needed a nurse, a friend, a companion, a lover and soul mate to accompany him to New York and stay there with him and be his wife, not a word, not yet. He smiled and flattered her and told her she was prettier than any bouquet, and she looked at her hands and blushed. No, he would save the speeches for Sunday, in the boat, as they drifted out over the bosom of Goguac Lake, vernal breezes wafting off the shore, swans bobbing beside them like accomplices, and there would be no place to go, no appointments to keep or regimen to follow, no doctors or orderlies, no prying eyes.

  Of course, as luck would have it, he discovered on Thursday that both the Countess Tetranova and Mrs. Solomon Teitelbaum were coming along, as per the Christmas expedition to the Graves homestead, and that took the wind out of his sails—or, rather, the oars out of his hands. The news—Irene let it drop casually as she was changing his bed—depressed him. Utterly. There was nothing special here, nothing romantic in the least—it was all in his head. For Irene it was merely charity work, a duty, just another therapeutic outing for a pitiful bunch of shut-ins and autointoxicatees, nothing more. Hurt, stricken, insulted to the core, Will brooded over his disappointment through the course of a long afternoon, his plans in ruins. Didn’t she realize how he felt about her after all this time? Was she blind? Coy? Or was it shyness?

  Whatever it was, Will wasn’t about to give up so easily. By dinnertime, he’d already managed to speak with Mrs. Teitelbaum. He found her in the Palm Garden, pale as a peeled egg, reading a novel and struggling to relax in the clutch of an orthopedic chair. He allowed himself approximately one hundred and twenty seconds of small talk, then launched into a discussion of the insect life of the Goguac Lake region. They’d been talking about Mrs. Tindermarsh and her virile stage presence as the husband in The Fatal Luncheon, when Will shifted the subject. “She was bitten during rehearsal, you know,” he said.

  “Bitten?” Mrs. Teitelbaum looked confused.

  “Oh, yes,” Will assured her, shaking his head. “Just under the ear—it’s so swollen they’re afraid she might not be able to go on. One of those nasty biting flies from Goguac Lake—greenheads, I believe they call them. I hear they’re positively swarming out there this time of year, clouds of them so thick you can barely see the water.”

  With the Countess, he chose the direct approach. “I want to be alone with her,” he said.

  They were in the corridor just outside the ladies’ sudatorium, the odd patient moving languidly past them, the faint hiss of steam in the background. The Countess lifted an eyebrow. Will could see the pellet of gossip ricocheting in her eyes—the whole Sanitarium would know by Sunday. But, then, what did he care? He was already gone, and he’d never look back. Never.

  “With your nurse?”

  He really didn’t want to go into it, and so he gave her what he hoped was a rakish look. “A man has his urges,” he said.

  She peered up at him from her little porcelain doll’s face. “Especially when his wife is so ill, am I right? But then you must have made a remarkable recovery … Will,” she purred, laying a tiny hand on his arm.

  His instinct was to pull away, but he fought it. He was a lover, a Lothario, a man of the world. He gave her a lewd grin.

  “Yes, I see,” she said finally, giving his arm a squeeze. “You know, I’ve just remembered—I promised Amelia Hookstratten I’d help her plan for her luncheon. I really must do something about this memory of mine…. Mustn’t I, Will?”

  The day was perfect, high-crowned and glorious, no clouds to filter the sun, warm but not overpowering. There was a breeze—Will’s straw boater sailed off his head and across the lawn the minute he stepped out the door to climb into the car Irene had arranged for them—and that was potentially worrisome, but, then, you couldn’t have everything, could you? One of the San’s bellhops fetched the hat back and Will kept it firmly in place with one hand as he helped Irene into the automobile—an Italian Zust donated by one of the San’s patrons—which was, unfortunately, open to the elements. It was a struggle. Will never let go of his hat the whole way out to the lake, and the anxiety of it prevented him from enjoying himself or engaging in the witty banter and romantic innuendo he’d been looking for
ward to. In contrast, Irene, in a great wide-brimmed panama decorated with artificial flowers and silk butterflies, seemed perfectly at ease—never once did she touch her hand to her hat, no matter how stern the gust. The mysteries of the feminine, Will thought, his arm aching from holding his hat so long in one position. Or maybe it was just hatpins.

  The sight of the lake cheered him. They wound through the trees and out to a public beach, where scores of people sat around on blankets picnicking, and children ran about raising a healthy din. The lake gave back the sunlight in rolling flashes and sudden incendiary sparks, pushing at the shore as if testing its limits, and there were a number of boats out on the surface despite the wind. Will saw sculls, rowboats and half a dozen sails, and way in the distance one of the steamboats that brought people to Picnic Island and Jennings’ Landing. He was encouraged. Excited. Nothing could have kept him from those oars.

  Unfortunately, the wind had combed through the fields all morning, explosive with its load of pollen, and that slowed him down a bit. His eyelids itched, he couldn’t seem to stop sneezing and there was a spot over the bridge of his nose, just between the eyes, that throbbed as if it had been struck with a mallet. He was having a little difficulty breathing, too—a certain constriction of the windpipe—but these were the familiar symptoms that had dogged him, spring and fall, since boyhood. So what if he had flat feet, hay fever and a ruined stomach? Would it have stopped Roosevelt, Peary, Harry K. Thaw? This was his best chance and he wasn’t about to let it get away from him on account of a ninny nose and itchy eyes. Of course, there was the matter of the rowboat, too—he’d lain awake half the night trying to recall just exactly where one sat while rowing. Was it with the back facing forward or the front facing backward?