The Road to Wellville (11 page)

He heard the rattle of a tray, the whisper of the chair’s wheels. Nurse Graves—Irene—was going to put him to sleep. He wished her luck. He did. He hadn’t slept in twenty-two days—had barely eaten or moved his bowels or even drawn breath, for that matter. It was Eleanor, of course. As soon as she’d announced that they were going to the San, both of them, for an indefinite stay, he began to lie awake through the eternal nights, his stomach churning with fear. Fear of what? He didn’t know. But the Sanitarium was a club from which he’d been excluded, a club that had taken his wife, his baby girl and his stomach, and it loomed nightmarishly through the dark hours of the night. He longed for the oblivion of the Sears’ White Star Liquor Cure, opium dreams edged in red and pink and opening on nothingness.
Then
he would sleep, oh yes indeed. But he fought the urge, fought it like a man on the brink of extinction—which is exactly what he was. And so he hadn’t slept. Not at all. Not a wink. Every time he closed his eyes he was immediately swept down his own esophagus and into his stomach, where he lodged like an undigested lump of food—chops, fried potatoes, tumblers of whiskey and oysters with human faces gamboling and cavorting
round him as he churned in his own juices. He wished her well, Nurse Graves, but how could she hope to accomplish what Sears and Eleanor and the Old Crow could barely manage?

There was the sound of water being drawn in the bath, and then Ralph’s hands were on him again, unbuttoning his long johns. “There, now,” Ralph murmured, “just lift your arm up.” Will flashed open his eyes. Nurse Graves, her back turned, seemed preoccupied with a tray of instruments. “Right leg, that’s a boy, now your left,” Ralph coached, peeling the garment from Will’s ankles and feet, and suddenly Will was naked, fully naked, in the presence of strangers. The stirring in his groin died stillborn. He was mortified. And what if she should turn round? What then?

Ralph, white-smocked, sure-handed, square-jawed Ralph, produced a swath of linen, a flap of white cloth the size of a dinner napkin and supported by a thin band at the waist. Nothing more than a diaper, really. Will took the garment from Ralph’s outstretched hand, slipped his feet through the leg holes and hurriedly pulled the thing up over his loins.

“All set?” Nurse Graves chirped, swinging round on them in that instant as if she were clairvoyant. Will gazed up at her in helplessness and surrender. “Good,” she puffed, rubbing her hands together. “We’ll have you fast asleep in no time at all. Ralph, would you help Mr. Lightbody into the bathroom?”

Will gave her a startled look.

“Neutral bath and colon wash,” she said, her voice as light as the air itself.

“Colon wash?” Will could only gasp out the words as he staggered to his feet and Ralph took hold of him and assisted his plodding steps across the floor.

“An enema,” Nurse Graves said. “Hot paraffin, soap and tepid water. You haven’t been thoroughly examined yet—we’ll put you through a series of tests tomorrow—but the Chief and Dr. Linniman have both diagnosed you as suffering from autointoxication, among other things. In effect, Mr. Lightbody, you’ve been poisoning your own system. We find it’s very common among meat eaters.”

They were in the bathroom now, and Will was perched on the edge
of the toilet in his pristine diaper. Ralph nodded his head and ducked out the door. “But I don’t eat meat—or not anymore,” Will protested. My wife won’t let me. It’s been nothing but Graham gems, parsnips and tomato toast for the last six months.”

Nurse Graves was watching him closely. The apparatus—a sort of syringe, with a big distended ball of India rubber at its base—lay cradled in her arms like a sacred object. “That’s very admirable, Mr. Lightbody; it’s a very good start. But you must realize that all those years of abuse have severely taxed your system. I’m not a doctor, and I know you haven’t been thoroughly examined yet, but if you’re like the thousands of patients who come here from all over the world, I’d say your intestines are absolutely putrid with disease and germs—
un
friendly germs.”

It was seventy-two degrees in that bathroom, a temperature Dr. Kellogg maintained throughout the San, winter and summer, seventy-two degrees, and yet Will felt a chill go through him. “Unfriendly?”

Her hand was on his back, hot as a little nugget against his bare skin. “Bend forward now, Mr. Lightbody, yes, just a touch, that’s right.” He felt her probing at the diaper, felt it slip down round his hips; “Yes,” she breathed cheerfully, “there are so many types of bacteria—people don’t realize that—and so many of them are a natural and necessary part of the human organism—particularly in the alimentary canal.” She paused, probing, probing. “We need to rout the bad ones so that the beneficial can … flourish….”

Her hands. The warm bulb of the apparatus. What was he doing? What was going on? “Eleanor,” he blurted. “My wife. Where’s Eleanor?”

“Hush,” Irene whispered. “She’s fine. She’s on the second floor, room two-twelve, no doubt undergoing this very same procedure … to flush her system, relax her.”

Will was stunned. “Then she, she won’t be staying here, with me?”

The nurse’s voice caressed his ear, soothing, soft, as much a part of him as the secret voice that spoke inside his head. “Oh, no. The Chief keeps couples separate here. For therapeutic reasons, of course. Our patients need quiet, rest—any sort of sexual stimulation could be fatal.”

Sexual stimulation.
Why did those two words suddenly sound so momentous?

“Relax,” she whispered, and all at once Will felt the hot fluid surprise
of it, his insides flooding as if a dam had burst, as if all the tropical rivers of the world were suddenly flowing through him, irrigating him, flushing, cleansing, churning away at his deepest nooks and recesses in a tumultuous cathartic rush. It was the most mortifying and exquisite moment of his life.

That night he slept like a baby.

In the morning, after his wake-up enema, a sitz bath and a dry-friction massage administered by a mannish-looking nurse who was as mechanical as Irene Graves had been tender, Will, under his own power, hobbled down the corridor and took the elevator to the dining room for breakfast. When this second nurse—Nurse Bloethal—had produced the colonic apparatus, Will had protested. It had been disturbing enough to have the lovely and delicate Nurse Graves administer the treatment, but this woman—well, he felt it would be impossible. “But I just had one last night,” he said, a hint of nasality creeping into his voice as he took a defensive posture on the bed and self-consciously adjusted his cotton robe. Nurse Bloethal, fortyish, arms like hams, hams like sacks of grain, with a squarish face and a smile full of crooked teeth, burst out with a laugh. “You’ll forgive my saying so, Mr. Lightbody, but you’ve got a lot to learn.”

She was referring, as Will would discover, to the Chief’s obsession with interior as well as exterior cleanliness. Dr. Kellogg, tidy son of a broom maker, not only believed in a diet rich in bulk and roughage to encourage the bowels to exonerate themselves, but he was a strict adherent to the five-enema-a-day regimen as well. The inspiration for this mode of treatment had struck him some years earlier during a visit to Africa. He’d had the leisure there to study a troop of apes living in a tumble of blanched rock and sere trees at an oasis outside of Oran. The doctor studied them for a week, sometimes up to sixteen hours a day, hoping to gain some insight into the hominoid diet from these gregarious and frugivorous primates. What he discovered, so obvious, really, and yet till this point so easily overlooked, was that the apes moved their
bowels almost continuously. Practically every mouthful they took was accompanied by a complementary evacuation.

Simple. Natural. The way it was meant to be. None of that tribe suffered from constipation, autointoxication, obesity, neurosis, hypo-hydrochloria or hysteria. But man did. Because man had civilized his bowel, house-trained it, as it were. Man could not, in the course of daily life, go about eliminating his wastes at will—society simply wouldn’t be able to function, and the mess … well, the Doctor felt, better not to think about the mess. At any rate, through his observation of the Oran apes, Dr. Kellogg hit upon one of his greatest discoveries: the need, the necessity, the imperative of assisting the bowel mechanically to undo the damage wrought upon it by civilization. Hence, five enemas a day, minimum. Hence, Will on the toilet and Nurse Bloethal with the already familiar apparatus.

Will was met at the dining-room door by a motherly little woman with an enormous bosom and tiny recessed eyes so blue they looked artificial. She wore a prim white cap perched atop an explosion of hair the color of cornstarch. “Mr …?” she inquired, the Battle Creek Sanitarium smile frozen into her features.

Tall, self-conscious, smarting from his recent encounter in the bathroom and broiling in the depths of his gut, Will gave her a curt glance. “Lightbody,” he said in his hollow booming tones. A few of the diners in the vast room before him looked up from their plates.

“Yes, of course,” the woman returned, “I’ve got you right here on my list. ‘Lightbody, William Fitzroy.”’ She paused to squint up at him for reinforcement. Will nodded. “It says here that until your examination is completed, you’re to be put on a low-protein, laxative, nontoxic diet. But, oh, do forgive me”—and here she held out her hand—”I’m Mrs. Stover, the head dietician. I’ll be overseeing your diet during your stay with us, under the direction of your physician, of course. Now, if you’ll look out into the dining room a moment, you’ll see a number of girls in white caps like mine. Do you see them? There, there’s a girl, Marcella Johnson, she’s one of mine. If you need any help or advice in choosing your dishes scientifically, please just flag one of us down, won’t you?”

Will took her hand, released it, and promised that he would. He
made as if to move on, but Mrs. Stover lingered there in the entranceway, blocking Will’s path to the comestibles as other patients sauntered casually by her and were seated in that grand and quietly seething room. Will didn’t care much about eating—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d experienced hunger or when he’d last eaten anything that didn’t set his digestive tract aflame—but he wasn’t particularly keen on standing there all morning like an idiot while several hundred cud-chewing diners studied him surreptitiously. “Yes?” he asked. “Is there anything more?”

“One thing only.” Mrs. Stover stoked up her smile a degree. So much cheer, Will thought bitterly. And for what? They were all of them hurtling toward their graves, scientific living or no. “Where would you care to sit? We do try to accommodate our guests as to seating arrangements, though not everyone gets an opportunity to sit next to a Horace Fletcher or an Admiral Nieblock, of course.”

Will shrugged. “With my wife, I guess.”

Mrs. Stover’s smile contracted till it was just the template of a smile pressed into her dry and faintly reproachful lips. She looked hurt, offended. “Oh, no,” she crooned, “you wouldn’t want to do that, would you? Don’t you think you might prefer to mingle, to meet some of your fellow guests?”

Will thought not.

Mrs. Stover looked crestfallen. She began to speak in a rush, barely pausing for breath. “I’ll try my very best, for dinner, that is, but I’m afraid—well, I’m afraid I’ve already seated Eleanor, Mrs. Lightbody—such a charming woman, you’re a very lucky man—and her table, number sixty, is full at the moment. You’re quite certain you wouldn’t prefer to sit with someone else?”

“Do I have a choice?”

Mrs. Stover studied the floor a moment before answering, and when she answered, her smile fluttered and her voice couldn’t seem to hold its note. “No,” she said, “I’m afraid not.”

The waitress, a robust young thing who suggested Nurse Graves in the color of her hair and the set of her ears, led him into the huge palmy room with its skylights and twin colonnades. Will tried to hold himself erect, conscious of his fellow patients’ scrutiny, but he felt
unstable and weak and his shoulders seemed unnaturally affected by the tug of gravity. He saw a mass of bent heads, a hundred bald spots, mustaches, beards, the rats and fluffs of the women’s monumental coiffures, the flash of silverware and the serene but constant movement of the host of waitresses in their dark dresses and white aprons. A murmur of conversation bubbled up round him: laughter, repartee, a smatter of economics and politics—he distinctly heard Teddy Roosevelt’s name as he passed a table of six mustachioed gentlemen, none of whom seemed in imminent danger of starvation. He saw, in fact, that all the tables were set for six—no doubt the Chief had determined this to be the optimal number for conviviality and physiologic dining, not to mention superior digestion. A phrase popped into Will’s head—“The Peristaltic Optimum”—and he had to smile despite himself.

He craned his neck to look for Eleanor, but she was nowhere to be seen in that sea of scientifically feeding heads, and when the waitress stopped abruptly at a table in the far corner, he wasn’t quite as alert as he might have been. For a moment he lost control of his feet, which were narrow but overlong, and he suddenly found himself pitching forward in a spastic sprawl just as the waitress pulled back a chair for him.
The embarrassment
, he was thinking,
oh, the embarrassment
, when at the last moment he shot out an arm to clutch at the rigid spine of the chair and managed to rake himself around, swivel his hips and collapse heavily across the seat—but not before barking both shins and cracking his kneecap with a sudden sharp sound that echoed through the room like a gunshot.