The Road to Wellville (47 page)

The Doctor’s voice rang out through the room. Fully half the audience was in tears, handkerchiefs waving like flags of surrender. A second-year nurse in the front row raised her face to him, her eyes soft, cheeks wet, a reverential glow illuminating her plain features. The Doctor cleared his throat and bathed the audience with his most compassionate gaze.

“I take nothing myself,” he said, his voice pitched low. “Not a cent.
Nothing. You all know that. My time here—and you all know just how much of my time and energy I devote to this institution—is given freely, willingly, gladly, in the service of mankind. This is my life … and I trust, I fervently hope, it will be yours.

“I will not ask you to pray for your fallen comrade; Poultney Dab would not have had it so. If I knew his heart, and there’s not a man or woman amongst us today who can better lay claim to that knowledge, he would have exhorted you to carry his name into battle like a regiment following its guidon; don’t shed your tears for Poultney Dab, my friends, but sing out his name. Use it as a prick, a lance, the shining symbol of our holy united endeavor….” And then the little man in white began to sing, his voice naked and grief-stricken, alone in the first bar but swelling, swelling with the full complement of all the kindred spirits in the room before he’d drawn a second breath:

And with that, he left the podium, his right arm raised high and beating time, the hymn ringing to the rafters, as he made his way through the sea of broken faces and grasping hands for the door.

Night fell over the San. It was the night of the death of Poultney Dab, and Dr. Kellogg and his new secretary, A. F. Bloese, were working late. The Doctor had triumphed, as usual, but at what cost? His stomach was sour, his joints ached, his eyes were tired. There were just too many troubles, too many things pressing on him, too many hands reaching into his pockets. Despite the rigors of the physiologic life and the fortitude of mind and body it inspired, he was depressed. Tired. Overworked. And it was the deep black icebound nadir of the year.

Bloese, his features ironed with concentration, sat beneath the lamp at the typewriter, polishing up the Doctor’s early dictation. The wind
was still up and the Doctor, momentarily distracted, heard it come and crouch in the trees with the forlorn wail of a demon lover risen from the grave to take its own back again. He toyed with his pen. Pushed a pair of scissors up and down the length of the blotter. It was then that he thought of Florida. Miami Springs. The golden sun, the everlasting sun. Palms. Sea breezes. Sand. Miami Springs. And wouldn’t it be nice to—?

There was a knock at the door.

Bloese’s head snapped up like a guard dog’s.

“I’m not in, Aloysius,” the Doctor said.

Bloese rose and answered the door, holding the plane of oak rigidly to him and speaking through the crack. “The Doctor is not in,” he repeated. “He’s gone home for the day,” he said, and then stepped swiftly out into the hallway, slamming the door behind him—but not before Dr. Kellogg caught the drift of the commotion outside. A voice was raised, a voice that grated on him like a harrow dragged the length of his body: it was the voice of Lionel Badger. Badger! He’d forgotten all about him. But, yes, come to mention it, he did seem to recall something in his calendar about Badger’s coming to lecture and stay again—for God knew how long.

“I know he’s in there,” came the hoarse nag of Badger’s voice.

“I assure you, sir—” Bloese countered.

The Doctor pictured Badger’s great swollen head fringed with a red fluff the consistency of pubic hair, the bulging eyes, the grim set of the jaw. The last time he’d visited he’d had the temerity to take the Doctor to task for wearing shoes of animal hide—leather, that is—while he, Badger, wore rope sandals, winter and summer. Lionel Badger—he was a fanatic of the worst stripe, the nearest thing to a flagellant the Vegetarian Movement could lay claim to. The Doctor shrank from the thought of confronting him, humoring him or whatever:
Not now
, he prayed,
not tonight.
The voices disputed in the hallway, the wind rattled the panes, and now, more strongly, in all its greens and cerulean immensity, the vision of Miami Springs arose before him again.
Organized rest without ennui.

It took him one minute. Sixty seconds, that was all. John Harvey Kellogg picked up the phone, asked for Nichols at the front desk.
“Nichols?” he inquired, keeping his voice low lest Badger overhear—the man’s ears were keen as a rabbit’s.

Properly unctuous, Nichols’s voice came back at him. “Yes, sir, Dr. Kellogg?”

“Phone home, Nichols, and inform Mrs. Kellogg—and my sister, too—to pack their things, and a small bag for me.”

“Sir?”

He’d gone off in a reverie for a moment, the sound of the surf whispering in his ears. “Oh, yes—and make a reservation for three, private sleeping compartment…. Yes, on the Michigan Central Line…. We’ll be going through to Miami.”

   
Chapter 8   

T
he weather was indifferent. One minute a tepid pale rinsed-out sun would poke through the clouds to feebly illuminate the grounds of the San, and the next, clouds would close over it, big-bellied and truculent. It was anybody’s guess as to whether Dr. Kellogg’s groundhog would see his own shadow and thus be startled back into his burrow for another six weeks’ sleep, but after enduring nearly three months of gray cold changeless Battle Creek afternoons, Will Lightbody, for one, was praying that it would be overcast just this one last time. Not that he put much credence in such nonsense, but, then, who could say? The creatures of the wild did seem to have an uncanny way of predicting the weather—skunks and raccoons growing extra fur between their toes at the approach of a severe winter, swallows building their nests higher in advance of a rainy season, grubs and earthworms digging deeper before a drought and so on.
The Farmers Almanac
depended on them.

Will watched from his window as the Doctor’s tame deer roved across the yard in little groups, the uncertain light now silvering their backs, now blotting them, until they seemed to flicker like images on a moving-picture screen. He thought back to the day he and Miss Muntz had lain side by side on the veranda, wrapped like Eskimos and watching these same deer at their hard work, pawing at the frozen ground for a tidbit
here and there. Miss Muntz, poor girl, had found them charming, but Will saw them then as he saw them now, as instruments of the Doctor’s message, as propaganda. So, too, with the mangy chimp and the dispirited wolf the Doctor kept in a cage in the basement and fed exclusively on scraps of bread to illustrate the carnivore’s docility when deprived of the kill. Or the white rabbits that bounced from bush to bush, happy in their pacifistic pursuits, and the Christmas goose, which had somehow managed to survive the Doctor’s regimen and could be heard honking blissfully from a pool in the Palm Garden. And, of course, the celebrity of the day, the groundhog.

In honor of this rodent, Dr. Kellogg had built an enclosure on the south lawn of the San and proclaimed it “Groundhog Glen,” a neat and unobtrusive hand-lettered sign identifying the place for the curious. It consisted of a four-foot-high fence of chicken wire, presumably sunk deep, a tumble of rock and a log or two for authenticity, and a concrete trough of drinking water, long frozen. The burrow itself had apparently been engineered by its occupant—a creature Will had never laid eyes upon, at that. When he’d arrived in November, the burrow was silent and unrevealing, cold dirt, black hole. As a boy he’d shot dozens of groundhogs at his grandfather’s country place in Connecticut and hadn’t thought much about it one way or the other. But this one had taken on a special, almost mystical significance, part and parcel, as it were, of the Doctor’s newly announced scheme of “Organized Rest Without Ennui” (every least holiday an occasion, as well as a reminder to abide by and respect the rights of the animal kingdom). Despite himself, Will couldn’t help feeling a real and compelling interest in seeing the deserted hole in the ground come to life. No matter what the trappings, it was a pledge of renewal, rebirth, the coming of the sun. And he was curious, too: how would the little white-clad impresario manage it? Was the ground electrically wired? Had he put an alarm clock in the hole? Or would one of the attendants simply dig the thing out?

The deer moved on. The sun stabbed through the clouds. Will put his fingertips to the window and belched softly, tasting milk, always milk. He felt his stomach clench suddenly, and it clenched around an idea, an apprehension that had been with him for days, off and on,
minute to minute. The fact was that neither he nor Dr. Kellogg would be present for the groundhog’s performance, scheduled, according to the San’s house organ, for twelve noon, amid the usual Sanitarium hoopla, with a formal out-of-doors luncheon and a “Groundhog Ball and Cotillion” to follow. No, they would be engaged in an intimate prognostic performance of their own—at twelve sharp, Will was scheduled to go under the knife.

He’d been spared for better than a month now, a month during which he’d consulted endlessly with Linniman and the beard-pulling, lip-tugging, inappropriately grinning and evasive staff of the Colon Department. The tests had been repeated, and then repeated again. Milk came back into the diet, psyllium and seaweed departed. There were no grapes. And there was no Dr. Kellogg. He’d disappeared, called off on urgent medical business to some distant place, from which he’d only recently returned, brown as a walnut served up in the crisp white napkin of his worsted suit.

During all that time—the entire month of January—Will’s condition remained static. He didn’t improve, he didn’t worsen. His routine was unwavering, all the usual treatments redoubled (with the exception of the sinusoidal bath—Will drew the line there). He didn’t take any sleigh rides, didn’t visit the jeweler’s, didn’t stop at the Red Onion (every time he stepped out the door to take a stroll round the grounds he was shadowed to make sure he didn’t fall prey to the temptation). His stomach was an acid pit, his stool nonexistent, the enemas ceaseless. All he wanted was to go home to Peterskill, to be away from the San and Dr. Kellogg and his fixation with the mouth and anus, but the whole institution rebelled at the thought. Doctors and nurses alike echoed Eleanor: it would be suicide. And as for Eleanor herself, she meant to stay another three months at least. Maybe longer.