The Road to Wellville (45 page)

“Don’t worry? What are we going to do, steal them?”

Bender simply smiled. A rich paternal smile, the sort of smile a teacher might bestow on his prize student when the grades are handed out.

Charlie was incredulous. “You can’t be serious?” he cried. What in Christ’s name were they going to do with fourteen carloads of Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes?
Fourteen carloads.
Where would they hide them? How would they transport them? They’d need a hundred men, wagons, horses, lights, uniformed cops to direct traffic, for shitsake…. But as he watched Bender’s face, the sly thick-lipped grin, the signal flare of a nose, the cracked gray eyes narrowing in amusement, he began to understand: they didn’t need fourteen carloads of corn flakes, no, not at all … all they needed was one thousand boxes.

   
Chapter 7   

I
t was a brisk morning in early January, winds gusting at twenty-five miles an hour, the thermometer sluggish at minus eight degrees Fahrenheit, a black mass of cloud spreading across the sky like a stain in water. The hands of the big walnut clock in the parlor of the Res showed a quarter to seven, and the Doctor, already arrayed in his white worsted suit, sat in his armchair, white-shod feet neatly crossed on the ottoman before him, going over his schedule for the day and finishing up his remarks on the lazy colon for the forthcoming issue of
Good Health
, of which he was editor-in-chief. He’d been working since five, having begun the day half an hour prior to that with his morning enema, a cold bath and twenty minutes of deep knee bends and jumping jacks in his private gymnasium. Some of the older children were up and at their chores by now, and one of them—he’d been so absorbed in the tragedy of the lethargic colon he hadn’t looked up to see which—had brought him his breakfast. This morning it was bran cakes saturated in pure golden butter from his buffed and vacuumed cows and honey from the San’s hives, pea patties with fruit compote, one apple, one orange, one banana and a steaming hot mug of Sanitas Koko.

He ate with good appetite, as he always did, even when aggravated—and he’d been plenty aggravated lately, what with one thing and another, the circle ever tightening, the whole world waiting for him to
stick his head in the noose so they could string him up and rifle his pockets. There was the business with George, a constant source of irritation—and that young scamp he was in league with, Charlie some-thing-or-other, damnable, perfidious man. Liquor on the San’s premises. It was outrageous. Well, he’d called Chief Farrington about that one, and if Mr. Charlie ever had the temerity to show his face around the San again, he would be sorry, good and sorry—John Harvey Kellogg and the statutes of Calhoun County and the great state of Michigan would see to that. But just thinking about that human garbage made his stomach broil over his bran cakes and honey. Yes. And then there was the Staff at the San—they wanted a raise. A raise! As if it wasn’t enough that they were medical missionaries, dietary messiahs, young men and women privileged to work at the very apex of their profession and acquire—gratis, and more power to them—the tools they would need to take that mission out into the world. And they wanted money on top of it—mere money! He shook his head over the irony of it, paging through his itinerary to see when he was scheduled to meet with them—ah, there: two o’clock—and his eyes happened to fall across his surgical schedule at the same time. Eight patients scheduled. All for repair of balky sphincters, or, as he would determine once he got in there, removal of what he’d already begun to think of as the “Kellogg’s Kink” in the intestine. But what was this?

Lightbody
, William F.

A line had been drawn through the name. Were they canceling on him this morning? The Doctor hadn’t been apprised. He lifted his eyebrows in annoyance. The man was a special case—as recalcitrant and backsliding a patient as he’d ever seen—and one of the very sickest. Most definitely. But it was probably just a quirk in the scheduling—he couldn’t operate on them all at once, after all. He’d get to him tomorrow or the next day or the day after that. It didn’t really matter. Still, he made a mental note to consult Dab about it.

As he munched the apple and went back to his text, reworking a phrase here and there—changing “putrefying” to “putrid, foul and moribund”—he couldn’t quite shrug off the button of irritation he’d pushed in his brain. George. Charlie whoever. The old goat of a confidence man with the dyed beard who’d put them up to it. McMickens,
the orderly who’d been stirring up the staff with nonsense about wages and unionizing. Lightbody. The lectures. The papers. The petty details of running the San on a day-to-day basis—good God, they couldn’t even see to the chimpanzee without him. Sometimes it all seemed to weigh him down, harass him till he felt his nerves had been rubbed as raw as a coffee fiend’s.

Revolving the apple in his hand and sinking his strong white teeth into its perfect flesh, he couldn’t help wistfully reflecting on his younger days at Bellevue—life had been so much less complicated then, and just as stimulating, maybe more so. Those were the days. No Georges, no sour employees or rampant chimps. No. It was just the medical texts then, just the cadavers, the lectures, the grateful healing patients. He’d lived frugally, too, and it hadn’t hurt him. Not one iota. Over the course of two years he’d gained nearly seventeen pounds on a diet of oatmeal, apples, Graham bread and pure spring water—and at a cost of sixteen cents a day. Yes, he thought, finishing the apple with a sigh, those were the days. Still, there was no sense in reliving your yesterdays when there was so much to be done today. He’d been a private then in the great campaign to save the alimentary canal, to improve the race and spare the eternal herds from slaughter, and he was a general now—four stars’ worth and aiming for five—and there was no one to stop him but himself. John Harvey Kellogg rose from the chair, stretched mightily, and called to one of the children to fetch his bicycle from the carriage house.

Dab arrived promptly at seven, accompanied by the new fellow, A. F. Bloese, a saturnine rigid little man with a boyish face (or a boy with a mannish face) who happened to be a master stenographer, typewriter and codifier of the lithe symbology of shorthand. A real find. Yes, sir. Dab provided contrast, bloated and puffing, wrapped like an Egyptian mummy in his scarves, overcoats, mittens, sweaters and cummerbunds. He was a shambles of a man, an embarrassment. The Doctor stood there in the vestibule of the Res, regarding him with a cold eye: the man had to be forced into the physiologic regime. For his own sake, and the sake of appearance, too. Here was the Doctor, avatar of the strenuous life, and he was shadowed everywhere he went by this sweating fleshpot, this, this—but enough of that. Time was wasting. “Morning, Poult,” the Doctor said as he pulled on a pair of white gloves and slung
the white scarf jauntily round his neck—no arctic claptrap and dragging coattails and the rest of it for him. Not unless the temperature dropped another twenty degrees and the wall of ice that had gouged out Lake Michigan came back again.

“Morning, Chief,” Dab returned, already beginning to sweat.

“Bloese.” The Doctor acknowledged the understudy with a curt nod.

“Sir,” Bloese said. His carriage, the Doctor noted with satisfaction, was impeccable. His teeth, too. Bone structure. Even his hair, parted in the middle and neatly clipped round the ears.

“All right, men!” the Doctor cried, and they were out the door and into the blast of the electrifying wind. “To work, hey?” One of the children—little Calvin Smoke, wasn’t it, the boy who’d been found living among the Nez Percé in a filthy tepee and subsisting on a diet of squirrel jerky and black-footed ferret?—stood patiently in the driveway, holding the bike. Yes, it was Calvin—of course it was. And what was wrong with his brain these days? He couldn’t even recognize his own children now? It was frightening, deeply disturbing, but he brushed it off. “Thank you, son,” the Doctor crooned, mounting the bicycle and hurtling off down the ice-crusted drive, Dab and Bloese quickstepping behind him.

“Poult,” the Doctor cried over his shoulder, breath steaming, the petite white shoes pumping at the pedals, “we’ll need to accomplish several things on the way to the San this morning, so get your pencil ready—and you, too, Bloese.” And there he was, the blinding white dynamo, cutting a caper on his bike at the age of fifty-five and counting, the front wheel rising from the pavement as he dodged back at his jogging secretaries to give them a moment to prepare pencil and paper. Up the icy curb and down again, a figure eight, and he was back out in front of them, the words flying into the wind at a Kelloggian clip.

“First things first—about the notice for the San in the new issue of
Good Health
, and, by the way, I’ve made some corrections on the colon piece and it will have to be typed up the minute we get in—well, about the notice. I’m looking for a catchy phrase, nothing vulgar like that charlatan conjures up for his Toasties and Post-stickers and the rest—remember, gentlemen, this is not an advertisement, not at all, but a notice, and a notice by its nature has the dignity these hucksters wouldn’t
recognize if it bit them … at any rate, I’ve come up with this phrase, to run under the Battle Creek Sanitarium heading”—the bicycle careening, there’s a dog, narrow miss, the Doctor glancing back over his shoulder at his blowing secretary and the wiry little man beside him, both scribbling furiously and thumping along the icy streets like refugees scrambling for the last train—”and it’s a fine and effective phrase, plenty of dignity to it, but it feels somehow incomplete, as if”—dodging back again, the figure eight to split them—”well, I’ve got this far: ‘The Battle Creek Sanitarium: Organized Rest.’”

Bloese didn’t seem to be breathing hard—good man, that. Dab was pathetic, wheezing like a cart horse, and the Doctor had to keep circling back for him.

“You see what I mean?” the bicycling Doctor cried over his shoulder, weaving, weaving, “rest that isn’t a bore, or something like that—we don’t want to give the impression of a nursing home, not at all, that’s the last thing we want … on the contrary, we want to emphasize the excitement of the Battle Creek”—there’s a wagon, up on the left, look out now—”Sanitarium. Oh, and by the way, Poult—Poult?”

The Doctor let out an exasperated sigh. Dab was lagging now, half a block back, damned inefficient man; the Doctor swung sharply to his right and doubled back. “This Lightbody thing,” he called out, running straight at Dab and swerving at the last minute, a bit of fun here, and why not? “—the man’s been dropped from today’s surgery. Any reason?”

Dab’s ponderous legs carried him in a blind stagger up the bone-chilling street. He looked dazed. His breath was ragged. “No—no reason especially,” he wheezed. “It’s just that—that we—with the employees’ meeting and all—we—”

The Doctor zoomed by him on the left. “All right, fine. But reschedule him. And advise Dr. Linniman. The man’s a certified disaster—the sooner we get to him, the better.”

Bloese came up on the right side then, moving along effortlessly, a born miler making for the tape. “Without ennui,” he said, his voice cast low in deference and respect. At first the Doctor didn’t quite catch on to what he was. saying, but then it hit him: he’d completed the slogan. And beautifully. Of course, that was it: “The Battle Creek Sanitarium: Organized Rest Without Ennui.” Perfect!