The Road to Wellville (64 page)

Hannah Martin said nothing. George sat rigid. Collectively, the children held their breath.

Finally, with a sigh, the Doctor pushed himself up, set down the paper and walked the length of the table till he stood directly behind the boy. “Well, George,” he said, laying his hand on the boy’s shoulder as Hannah Martin lost her color and the children hovered on the edge of the moment, “what will it be? Calomel? Castor oil? Or are we going to stop this nonsense and eat up our food?”

George seemed to shrink into himself, the Doctor’s touch eating through his skin like acid, all eyes fixed on him, the house fallen into a trough of absolute unbroken silence. Slowly, degree by slow degree, the pointed little chin rose till it reached the shoulder, and the black pits of the eyes confronted the Doctor’s. “Food?” George spat. “You call this food?”

The Doctor was dumbstruck. He had to restrain his hand from lashing out, curling round that stunted little face with all the sudden outraged power of muscle, tendon and bone.

But George wasn’t done yet, not by a long shot. “Meat and potatoes, that’s what we want,” he cried, the unformed voice gone suddenly shrill, and he turned his back on the Doctor as if he were negligible, throwing
a fierce, giddy, triumphant look into the faces of his adoptive brothers and sisters. “Meat and potatoes!” he cried, taking up his fork and beating time on his plate, “meat and potatoes, meat and potatoes!”

The others looked on, stunned, their faces gone white, but for one child, a new boy from West Virginia, no more than five or six years old, towheaded and open-faced. He picked up his fork as if in a game and began to beat rhythm along with George, his tiny angelic voice crying out for “meat and potatoes, meat and potatoes.”

No one would have faulted the Doctor for putting a quick and savage end to it, but he was not a violent man—would not be a violent man, would not be ruled by the bestial passions—and he held back. Hammered in brass, locked in place, his eyeglasses harsh with light, he stood there immovable till the towheaded boy grew sensible of him and choked off the chant in midphrase, till Hannah Martin reached for George’s arm and the other children wilted under his gaze. Then, George’s brazen taunt ringing in his ears as Hannah Martin fought to contain it, the Doctor turned on his heels, threw back his head and marched out of the room.

George. And that was George. For a full month and more he took absolutely nothing, so far as anyone could see—and the Doctor made certain he was watched day and night. He was made to sit at table with the other children and he was served precisely as they were. He wouldn’t touch a thing. No matter what it was or how it was served. He sat numbly over his plate as egg dishes, vegetable foods, dairy, predigested grains and savory sauces passed in front of him, meal after meal, day after day. Never a robust child, he rapidly dwindled in the joints and the long muscles, and the flesh tightened round his skull. In her moments of lucidity, Ella pleaded with the boy, and every time Hannah Martin laid eyes on him, tears started up in her eyes. The Doctor was concerned, and guilt moved in the deeps of him like a stone rolled by the currents across the floor of a vast sea, but he wouldn’t give in, wouldn’t dream of it. George would either eat what he was given or die of inanition. And that was that.

The night closed around him in its faint calibrations, and finally, though it was past four and creeping toward dawn, Dr. Kellogg gave in to it. He felt himself slipping away, and George’s face became his wife’s,
his dead father’s, a nameless patient’s, and he was almost there, almost asleep, when a sudden dull booming noise reverberated through the house like the drumroll of calamity. Bolt upright in bed, as awake as he’d ever been, he listened for it again—was it thunder, was that it? The rain fell with a steady sibilance, the sound of it like distant frying, like a thousand Yankee chefs bent over pans of salt pork and flapjacks with their stomachs of iron, and he strained to hear the fainter sound, the harsh rasping friction of the struck match blooming in the darkness.

It was then that he remembered the look on George’s face the day he finally began to eat again, without explanation or apology, sitting down to a breakfast of taro gruel and gluten biscuits as if there were nothing to it, as if he’d eaten supper the night before and dinner before that and all the long succession of meals that dwindled into the past, so many pounds of flesh totted up on the ledger, so many bowel movements and micturitions. Flushed with excitement, biting her tongue, Hannah Martin had come to fetch the Doctor as he meditated over his notes and spooned up his own breakfast in his private quarters. She led him through the house to the children’s wing and into the dining room, and there he was, George, working his spoon and reaching for his glass just like any other child. He never lifted his eyes when the Doctor entered the room—just sat there, neckless, fleshless, his bones like sticks at the bottom of a dried-up pond, and ate. He never lifted his eyes, but his face gave him away. Wasted, drawn, the eyes ponderous in their sockets, he wore the expression of a hero, a conqueror, a man—no longer a boy—whose point has been made.

One sleepless night couldn’t really faze a physiologic marvel like John Harvey Kellogg, but round about three in the afternoon he did feel himself slowing down just a bit, as if there were an invisible tether attached to him. He was sitting at his desk in the afterglow of a particularly gratifying kinkectomy, taking a cup of hot beet juice for strength and working up a sketch of a new apparatus for suspending patients with circulatory problems by their heels, when there was a knock at the door. He couldn’t suppress a look of annoyance, but Bloese bounded up like
a hound from his desk in the corner, announcing, “That’ll be your three-fifteen consultation—Mrs. Lightbody.”

Clamping his eyeshade firmly in place, the Doctor rose to greet her as Bloese drew back from the door.
Consultation?
he was thinking, wondering when he’d last examined her and who had referred her and why, and he was in no way prepared for the sight which greeted him. It was Eleanor Lightbody standing there in the doorway, no mistake about it, but she was a ghost of herself, wan and emaciated, her eyes blunted and her clothes in need of taking in at the seams. The welcoming smile faded from the Doctor’s face. Bloese dropped his eyes. How long had it been since he’d seen her, really seen her? A week? Two? A hot little pinprick of fear stabbed at the Doctor—was he going to lose another one?—but he covered himself by moving out from behind the desk to take her hand and offer her a seat.

Eleanor sat primly, thrillingly beautiful for all her loss of weight. Dr. Kellogg’s keen diagnostic gaze never left her. Was it cancer? Marasmus? Tuberculosis? Or was it a-balky sphincter, a plugged loop in the small intestine, a case for scalpel and clamp? Yes, now he remembered—it was Frank Linniman who’d expressed concern over her condition, but the Doctor hadn’t really given it much credence. Eleanor Lightbody was one of his prize patients, one of the healthiest and most cooperative, well along the road to recovery and with the very brightest of prognoses. He glanced at her sharply cut cheekbones, the stab of her shoulder blades and the attenuated line of her tibia beneath her skirts and couldn’t suppress a quick sharp whistle. “You’ve lost weight,” he observed.

Her voice was muted. “Yes.”

“Well,” and he began to pace now, a panther of health measuring out the cage of his knowledge, “we’ll have to put you on a new dietary, more taro, tapioca, nut milk and the like.”

She gazed at him out of placid eyes. “Oh, no, Doctor,” she murmured, and even her voice was listless, “you don’t understand. I’ve been fasting.”

“Fasting?”

“Yes.” She produced a booklet from her purse. “I’ve been reading in Mr. Sinclair—The Fasting
Cure
—and thought … well, I thought I’d give it a try.”

The Doctor shook his head. An admonitory finger rose from his fist as if by its own volition and he began to shake it at her. “Do you mean to tell me that you’ve been fasting without consulting me? But I’m speechless. You come to this institution and put yourself under my care and then you arbitrarily go off on a dietary program—a fast, no less—without so much as a by-your-leave?”

“But Dr. Kellogg,” she protested, “it’s only for twelve days—just as an experiment. Mr. Sinclair is so convincing, I just—well, I thought I’d give it a try. After all, what better way is there to control one’s appetites than to deny them altogether?”

Secretly, the Doctor was relieved. She was fasting, that was all. No harm done. Start her off in the evening with some yogurt and warm milk and prescribe some starchy sauces for her vegetables, whole-grain bread and Italian spaghetti, and she’d be back to normal in a week. Still, he couldn’t let the relief show in his face, couldn’t allow her to think he would condone any instance of a patient’s attempting to treat him or herself—there was no telling where that would lead. “That’s not the point,” he said.

Eleanor was paging through the book in her lap. “With all due respect, Dr. Kellogg—and I’m in no way making a comparison between you and Mr. Sinclair, who is after all only following your lead—I still have to say that I’m feeling better. These eleven days have given my system yet another way of cleansing itself—a sort of vacation for my bowels, as it were….”

“I see.” The Doctor was tight-lipped. He wanted to be generous and understanding, receptive to progressive views and new ideas, but all he felt was irritation. He put on his lecturer’s face as a warrior might have plucked up a shield. “Fasting can be an invaluable tool in the complete physiologic regimen, of course,” he said, “and though you must never forget that Mr. Sinclair is, after all, a layman, his notions do have some validity according to the most advanced medical thinking. You may be aware that I myself have addressed the question of fasting cures in my
Good Health
column.”

Eleanor dipped her head in acknowledgment.

“Yes, well.” He rubbed his hands together vigorously. “And may I
see the book in question? I must confess that I’m not familiar with it.”

“It’s just in typescript, Doctor,” Eleanor murmured, handing him the text. “It’s not yet been published.”

Settling himself casually on the edge of the desk, the Doctor thumbed through the book, until, in a section called “Some Notes on Fasting,” his eyes came to rest on one particularly disturbing passage:
In the course of my search for health I have paid to physicians, druggists and sanatoriums not less than fifteen thousand dollars in the last six or eight years. In the last year, since I have learned about the fast, I have paid nothing at all
. Dangerous stuff. The worst kind of cant and pecksniffery. He shut the book with a firm clap of its covers and handed it back to her. “And where did you say you obtained this, Mrs. Lightbody?”

She colored, fumbled for her words. “I, uh, well, to tell the truth, I’ve been seeing another physician—I mean, one outside the Sanitarium. He gave it to me. Through Lionel, that is.”

Now this was something new—a real blow and no mistaking it. An outside physician? Lionel? The Doctor gathered his brows. Bloese, bowed over his desk in the corner, winced. “I’m astonished,” the Doctor said finally. “I really am. Mrs. Lightbody. Eleanor. This is one of the very gravest matters that has ever been laid before me in all my years as head of this institution. Don’t you understand how dangerous it is to listen to such a chorus of voices, however well-intentioned? Worse, don’t you realize how many ill-informed, ill-equipped and unscrupulous practitioners there are out there, each of them willing to prey upon the businessman with a bankrupt bowel or the housewife with shattered nerves? As well-meaning as they are, neither Lionel Badger nor Mr. Upton Sinclair is a physician and neither has any right to attempt to direct the medical program of any of my patients. It’s an outrage, that’s what it is—an outrage. How could you, of all people—?” He couldn’t go on. Incomprehension had turned to rage and he was afraid of what he might say next.

Eleanor Lightbody stared at the floor. Her hair was a mass of curls, piled up high on her head like the plumage of some exotic bird. She was sad and beautiful, and all the more beautiful in her sadness. “I’m sorry,” she murmured.

“Sorry?” he echoed, and he was pacing again, unable to sit still for
a minute. “Sorry? For what? For whom? Don’t be sorry for me, my dear lady—I live right and think right through every minute of every day. Be sorry for yourself—you’re the one at risk here, you’re the one racked by neurasthenia and the aftereffects of autointoxication, you’re the one gambling all your progress and future happiness on a whim, a misapprehension.” He stood over her now, trembling in the rush of his righteous anger, and she couldn’t look him in the eye. “And who, might I ask, would this ‘physician’ be, this great genius to whom you’ve entrusted your health in utter abnegation of everything we seek to accomplish here? Who? Who is it?”

She spoke a name, but her voice was pitched so low he didn’t catch it.

“Who?”

A sidelong and sorrowful gaze. There were tears in her eyes and the flanges of her nostrils were red. She sniffed and touched a handkerchief to her face. “Dr. Spitzvogel,” she choked, and a tremor of emotion went through her.