The Road to Wellville (16 page)

At some point in the night—ten minutes later, an hour, two?—he woke in the chill darkness to the fruity rasping sound of a cough,
hack, hack, hack
, and for a moment he didn’t know where he was. Instinctively, he clutched at his wallet:
Mrs. Hookstratten’s money.
But then he remembered. He was at Mrs. Eyvindsdottir’s rooming house in Battle Creek, in the middle of the first night of his new life, the life that would make him a millionaire and the equal of anybody, and that was Mr. Bagwell coughing his guts out on the other side of the partition, and it was so cold that the water in his washbasin was no longer water but a solid brick of ice. The money was safe. Three thousand eight hundred forty-three dollars and fifteen cents, minus the five dollars Bender had given him for living expenses, was finally beyond the reach of accident, theft or loss, nestled in the two-ton safe at the Post Tavern Hotel. It was a relief to be rid of it, and a relief finally to be here, at the very start of something, something big.

But the cold spoke to him—he might just as well have been laid out in his tomb for all the heat of the place—and he shrugged out of his clothes and under the bedcovers, pulling the comforter up over his head to take advantage of the sole heat source: his own breath. As he lay there shivering, shifting about in the bed and alive to every nuance of Bagwell’s terminally irritating cough, he couldn’t seem to get comfortable. Even after he’d warmed up enough to stop shivering for minutes at a time and Bagwell’s coughs had turned to ragged intermittent snores, Charlie couldn’t seem to get back to sleep. It was the mattress. It seemed to be filled with corncobs—or, no, some sort of paper stuffing, newsprint or ticker tape. He tried his left side, his right, his back, his stomach, tried the fetal position, the crouch, the spread-eagle. Nothing worked. He lay there in the dark, exasperated, as tired as any man could be. Finally, annoyed out of all patience, he lurched up in bed, fumbled for a match and lit the wick of the kerosene lamp.

The room bloomed with light. Shadows lurked in the corners. There were cracks in the plaster and the wallpaper was faded. Bagwell ripped through logs on the other side of the wall. With a curse, Charlie sprang from the bed and began a vigorous rearrangement of the mattress, lifting it off the frame and working the ticking till it undulated like waves at sea. But still the stuffing wouldn’t settle—it kept bunching up like a
sack of mail. Puzzled, furious, confounded—not to mention half inebriated still—he took his penknife to the seam at the base of the mattress, loosening the threads with the idea of inserting an arm and rearranging the stuffing.

Ah, yes: it was paper, all right. Paper. He seized a fistful of it in disgust and pulled it through the rent in the ticking.

A nasty little surprise awaited him, the last in a string that stretched back to the moment he’d stepped down off the train. This wasn’t merely paper. No, it was very high quality paper, almost as supple as a banknote and embossed with the rich blue-green figure of a sheaf of wheat. Across the nexus of the bound stalks, printed in bold black characters, was this legend:

ONE SHARE, PREFERRED STOCK

THE MALTA-VITA BREAKFAST FOOD CO., LTD.

BATTLE CREEK, MICHIGAN

   
Chapter 7   

A
fter the ceiling came toppling down and the floor fell out from under him, Will Lightbody found himself back out in the corridor under the watchful and distinctly disapproving gaze of Mrs. Stover. Eleanor had ducked his embrace in the middle of that quietly seething dining room—and rightly so: what had he been thinking?—and then escorted him all the way up the central aisle, beneath the hortatory banner and through the Grecian portals of the pompous, overblown entrance. She stood before him now, her lips drawn so tight they seemed to be segmented, each little pursed line a division in itself. She was angry. As angry as he’d ever seen her.

“I just won’t have this, Will,” she said, biting off each word cleanly and then spitting it out again. Her pupils were shrunk to pinpricks and a petulant little furrow was drawn neatly between her eyebrows.

A moment ago, in the dining room, overcome by gastric distress and emotional confusion, he’d seemed to be on the verge of blacking out. It never occurred to him that a diet of unbuttered toast and artesian water might not exactly meet the full range of his nutritional needs, or that he was three-quarters starved and fully emaciated and the lightheadedness and peristaltic agony he experienced might be linked to inanition, pure and simple. No: it had to be more complicated than that. This was the Progressive Era, after all, and “reform” was the
catchword of the day. Will was sick because his way of life was sick. He would become well when he reformed his eating habits and submitted himself to the regimen prescribed by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg and the high muckamucks of health. Or so they told him.

At any rate, Eleanor did not fall into his arms, a familiar wooziness stole over him, and he felt his eyes rush up into the cover of his upper lids. Somehow, Mrs. Stover was there, short but strong of shoulder and capacious of bosom, and then one of her equally buxom nutritional girls—a strapping girl, corn-flake-fed and yogurt-toned—and finally, a male attendant. The scene was abbreviated, and Will, tenderly supported in the arms of strangers and shepherded by his wife, escaped the dining room. Now, in the relative privacy of the corridor, Eleanor wanted an apology. She wanted contrition, promises, protestations and expostulations; she wanted to drive the first post of the fence that would keep them apart.

The words were on his lips—
I’m sorry
—but he couldn’t say them. The more he thought about it, and the more he looked into the furious shrinking hard green nuggets of her eyes, the more he felt his own innocence. All he’d wanted was a little reassurance. An embrace from his own wife. He was a sick man and he was new to all of this and it overwhelmed him. Perhaps he’d chosen the wrong place, perhaps such an embrace was a thing to be indulged behind closed doors and not in the midst of a dutifully masticating assembly, but still, shouldn’t she be the least bit aware of his frame of mind, of his needs? “I don’t like this place, Eleanor,” he said finally. “I haven’t been here a full day yet and I’ve been subjected to all kinds of indignities, from your Dr. Kellogg sticking his fingers in my mouth to a Nurse Bloethal plying the other end of me with her tubes and bottles and I don’t know what-all—” He stopped there, short of mentioning Nurse Graves. Nurse Graves, and what had happened between them in the privacy of his own bathroom, was something he knew instinctively he should keep to himself.

Eleanor held her ground. Mrs. Stover, just out of earshot, seemed poised to rush to her aid. “Don’t you spoil it for me, Will Lightbody,” she warned, her voice dropping to a fiery whisper. “Don’t you start in with your self-pitying sermons and your, your—” She seemed stricken
all of a sudden. Her eyes had dilated, opened up like morning flowers, and there were tears in them. Tears.

Will felt ashamed of himself. He felt like a barbarian, an apostate—and yet he couldn’t help deriving a small shred of satisfaction from the stance he was taking, though he couldn’t have said why.

Eleanor’s handkerchief had appeared. She dabbed at her eyes as a pair of white-clad attendants hurried down the hall and the fattest woman Will had ever seen staggered past them and into the dining room. He’d seen a woman nearly as fat once—at the Ringling Bros. Circus—and he was thinking about that, lost in a fantasy of bearded women, roaring cats and dancing pachyderms, when Eleanor, her voice soft and hesitant, spoke again. “I don’t know how to make you understand. It’s just that this is the only place where I think I’m truly happy anymore … and after the baby… I just don’t know, Will. If I ever have a hope of getting well again, it’ll be here, among my friends and mentors. This is where I’ve learned to live the right way, Will, the
only
way.” She paused, holding him with her eyes. “And look at yourself. This is the place for you, too, Will, the only place I know of.”

He heard the conciliation in her tone, heard the plea, but he couldn’t help himself. “Outside the pages of the Sears Roebuck catalogue, you mean. And who was that at breakfast you were so concerned about? Dr. Linniman, wasn’t it?
Frank?
And do the physicians dine with their patients now—is that part of the program?”

“I won’t discuss this with you. I won’t.” Her eyes were sharp again, metallic, the flashing iridescent green of a pair of hovering dragonflies. “Dr. Frank Linniman happens to be one of this country’s great healers, schooled at the elbow of Dr. Kellogg himself, and he’s done more good for me than anyone in this world … since Mother died, anyway. If it wasn’t for him, I don’t think I’d have the strength to get out of bed in the morning.” She looked off down the corridor. “He was here for me when I lost my daughter, the only one.”

“The only one?” Will couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “I was in Peterskill, eating my stomach up with worry and waiting for your telegram. What did you expect me to do—appear at your bedside like the Ghost of Christmas Past? It was you who told me to stay away
.”

“No, no, no,” she said, her voice rising in inflection as she put her hands up to cover her ears. Mrs. Stover made a feint toward them but Will leveled a murderous look on her and she checked herself. “I won’t argue, Will, I can’t—I’m a sick woman.”

“I’m a sick man.”

“I’m sicker.”

“Than me? You’ve got to be joking.”

“I
am
sicker. Far sicker. You know that.”

“I don’t know it. It’s always ‘me, me, me’—how do you think
I
feel?”

But Will didn’t get his answer. Eleanor turned her back on him. Just swung around and stalked up the hallway, his question—his pathetic, self-justifying cri de coeur of a question—hanging unanswered in the air. He watched her shoulders retreating from him, watched her angry stride and the purposeful rise and fall of her feet, watched her until she rounded the corner and disappeared.

“Mr. Lightbody?”

A voice spoke at his shoulder, a familiar voice, mellifluous, breathy and sweet. The voice of Nurse Graves. Will turned to her in a daze.

She looked good, fresh-spanked with health and color, the glow of an uncomplicated morning settling into her eyes and the parabola of her smiling lips. This wasn’t the Battle Creek Sanitarium smile; this was genuine, artless, sincere; this was the smile of resurrection and salvation. Nurse Bloethal vanished from his mind. Dr. Linniman evaporated. Even Eleanor receded into the background. Will felt his own big-toothed smile blazing back at her and he fought to control the sudden tic in his left cheek. “Nurse Graves,” he said, dipping his head, “good morning to you.”

“Good morning,” she returned, holding her smile and looking him candidly in the eye. It was a look that surprised him, made him feel naked.

Sick as he was, Will couldn’t help wondering what that look was all about. It expressed a whole lot more than a cool, detached, nursely concern, didn’t it? Or was he fooling himself? He remembered the touch of her as she put him to bed, the heat of her skin against his, and he stole a glance at her little feet in their white official shoes, saw how
the thin cotton skirt clung to her hips and flat young abdomen. Oysters. What was wrong with oysters?