The Road to Wellville (18 page)

“Mr. Lightbody?” The attendant stood at the door, a little man, balding, sallow, no healthier-looking than anyone else in the room, but with the Battle Creek Sanitarium smile stamped on his face as surely as if he’d come off an assembly line. “Will you step this way, please?”

The remainder of the morning gave testimony to the advanced estate of the diagnostic sciences. Will stood before the X-ray machine and breathed in and out for the Oriental doctor—a Dr. Tomoda, the first Japanese Will had ever seen in the flesh—and his sallow, shrunken assistant. “You are not breathe too deep much,” Dr. Tomoda informed him, squinting severely behind the glittering disc of his monocle. “Must
fill lung.” To demonstrate, he had the attendant stand before the machine and huff and puff mightily so that Will could watch the glowing bones of his rib cage swell and shrink on the fluoroscopic screen as his lungs took on their burden of air and expelled it again. It was amazing, really, like a magic trick, as if tiny rods of light had been inserted in the man’s skeleton. “This,” Dr. Tomoda solemnly intoned, “is the way how you must seize the air with your lung.” The attendant, looking enervated—no doubt from the stress of having his bones illuminated for the edification of every shallow-breathing patient who came along—smiled weakly.

Will’s next stop was the Ear, Nose and Throat Department, where a doctor with a bristling, linty beard carefully peered into Will’s cranial cavities while delivering a running monologue reprising each stroke of each hole of golf he’d played the previous summer. Will drifted off in reverie to a description of a particularly knotty par three with a dogleg to the right, thinking back to his boyhood, when examinations were as clear-cut as right and wrong, when he was as healthy and lively as a cricket and the answer was a sum, a verb tense, a date or a place. But this exam was different. The answers were recondite, beyond his apprehension or control; they were coursing through his veins, hidden in his bones, his organs, seething in his gut. There was no right or wrong—only good news or bad.

After twenty minutes or so, the ear, nose and throat man put down his instruments. Will learned, for the third time since he’d reached the San, that his tongue was coated (though with what and how it affected his health remained a mystery), and as the doctor showed him to the door the man advised him to eat right and take up some form of outdoor exercise—a sport, perhaps, one that might involve some walking and perhaps the swinging of clubs and irons.

Nurse Graves led him next to the Dynamometer Room, where he waited his turn on one of several devices meant to gauge muscular capacity. A pair of cheerful, bulging young men in tights instructed Will to tug on various levers, bend over, stand on one leg, fasten leather straps to his brow, elbow, abdomen and knee, and generally fight against the resistance provided by the steely immovable apparatus. His efforts were measured on a dial set in a glass housing, and though Will was
assured that the device had been created by the almighty Chief for precise and vital diagnostic purposes, the whole operation bore a suspicious resemblance to the sledge hammer and gong at the county fair.

As the morning wore on, Will gave blood, endured an unpleasant introduction to both the gastroscope and rectoscope, breathed into a vial of clear liquid to determine the amount of acetone in his breath and walked a treadmill like a blinded horse while a fussy little doctor with a huge watch auscultated his chest and scribbled notations on a printed form bearing the imprimatur of John Harvey Kellogg. At one o’clock, Nurse Graves left him in the care of a frigidly smiling Mrs. Stover at the entrance to the dining room, and Will sat again with Hart-Jones, Miss Muntz et al., mournfully spooning up a bite or two of the Rice à la Carolina the nutritional girls forced on him, and nibbling at a slice of Graham bread, toasted. If Eleanor was present, he didn’t see her, though after his bout with the Universal Dynamometer, he really didn’t have the strength to turn his head and look.

But the good Dr. Kellogg, in his wisdom and benevolence, saw the need for rest, and had already prescribed, on this day of relentless examination, an hour’s nap. That sounded fine to Will—but there was a catch. The nap was to be conducted outside, on the veranda, in the bracing atmosphere of a sunless and hellishly cold November afternoon. And why? Because Dr. Kellogg believed in the curative powers of nature and couldn’t overemphasize the necessity of breathing the air of the great outdoors, summer and winter alike. Nurse Graves provided Will with a hot-water bag, and then, with the help of a male attendant—was that Ralph?—swaddled him so tightly and in so many layers of woolen blankets he thought the weight would crush him, placed a nightcap on his head and wheeled him out onto the veranda, where he was lifted into an Adirondack chair and positioned so that he was facing the sun—or, rather, the spot in the firmament the sun might have occupied if it hadn’t gone south for the winter.

Will gazed up at the leaden sky. A dull gray bird hurled itself across the horizon. The arctic air stiffened the little hairs lining Will’s thoroughly examined nostrils, shocked his lungs, brought a distant but palpable ache to the thin layer of flesh that clung to his cheekbones. On either side of him, as far as he could see, stretched a phalanx of similarly
cocooned patients, as alike as infants in swaddling clothes. He wondered if they felt as ridiculous as he did, a grown man, a rational adult, lying out on a flagstone veranda in a Michigan winter as if he were on a beach in the south of France. Below him, on the yellowed, rock-hard lawn, a pair of the Doctor’s deer nosed at a bale of hay. Despite himself, Will began to feel drowsy.

It was then that he became aware of a small disembodied voice speaking to him from out of the gray void. “Hello,” the voice piped, “lovely afternoon, isn’t it?”

It wasn’t easy, bound up in those blankets, but with an effort Will managed to wrench his neck round and focus on the figure to his right. He discovered a nightcap identical to his own, a protruding, deeply rutted nose and a pair of purplish eyelids, unfurled. “Over here,” the voice called, appending a giggle, “to your left.”

Will brought his head round again, a sudden glacial blast attacking his exposed chin and sending icy jets down his collar, and found himself staring into the yellowish broth of Miss Muntz’s eyes. At least he presumed that those eyes belonged to Miss Muntz—he’d never experienced eyes of quite that color before, like chicken soup after it’s thickened on the stove overnight, and they were, after all, framing a decidedly greenish nose. “Miss Muntz?” he ventured.

She responded with a second, more prolonged giggle. “Don’t you find this cozy?” she asked, after a pause, her voice thin, the breath streaming from her bruised-looking lips and chartreuse nostrils.

Cozy? His idea of cozy was a seat in the inglenook of a tavern, a plate of meat and potatoes and a glass of ale before him, and the stomach to digest it with. But he didn’t want to be uncivil, and he remembered the shape and bearing of Miss Muntz, for all her greenish cast, and the look she’d given him in the corridor the night before.
Her room is only two doors down
, he thought, and that sexual tingle raced through him again. “Yes,” he said finally, regretting the fact that Mrs. Stover had twice now seated him at the far end of the table from Miss Muntz and that Hart-Jones, the braying ass, had so dominated the prandial conversation that Will hadn’t been able to speak two words to her.

Miss Muntz’s face seemed suddenly ecstatic, her eyes burning, a secret smile pressed to her lips, and she let out a sigh of cosmic contentment
as she threw hack her head and let her gaze roam over the sky, the naked trees, the deer on the lawn below them. After a moment, during which a stiff breeze off the icy black waters of Lake Michigan shook the veranda and sent a scrap of paper rocketing over the wall, she murmured, “Aren’t they darling?”

“The deer?”

“Yes. So graceful, so much a part of the world of nature we insist on brutalizing with our guns and nets and fences, our roads and brick houses, so … so
right.
”

Will agreed with her, wholeheartedly, though he couldn’t help seeing them as agents of the Chief’s propaganda, and the very thought of a venison steak, streaming juices and served up with a sprinkle of thyme and pan-broiled carrots and onions, started him salivating. “Darling, yes they are,” he heard himself answer, but now that they’d broken discursive ground, he couldn’t keep his thoughts from drifting toward the morbid: What was wrong with her? What was greensickness, exactly? Was it fatal? Catching? He knew they weren’t supposed to discuss symptoms—the Chief had strictures against it, negative thinking and all that—but his curiosity got the better of him. He cleared his throat and took a breath so bracing he could feel it all the way down to the tip of his tailbone. “Uh, Miss Muntz,” he began, “if you don’t mind my asking, just out of curiosity, I was wondering what a young girl like you would, uh, require from an institution like this—I mean, I hope I’m not being rude, but what’s ailing you, anyway?”

There was a moment of silence. Miss Muntz turned to him finally, and he saw that the ecstasy had gone from her face, sopped up in her greenish pores like ink in a fountain pen. “We’re not supposed to discuss symptoms, you know, though I forgive you because you’re new. And because I like your eyes. And your nose.”

This information gave him a little frisson: she liked his eyes and nose. He was a married man, of course, and, what’s more, a married man deeply in love with his wife, and no woman’s blandishments could really touch him … but still, there it was, a little thrill of pleasure.

“Dr. Kellogg calls it ‘symptomitis.’ The last thing he wants is for his patients to sit around like a bunch of old hens, trading complaints.”

“True enough. But because you like my eyes and nose, and because,
Miss Muntz, though I’ve just got to know you, I have to confess I’m very concerned—without you at the table I’d be at the mercy of Mrs. Tindermarsh and that blathering Englishman—well, not to be too forward, but won’t you put my fears to rest? It’s not anything”—had he gone too far?—“not anything too grave, is it?” Will could feel the cold air numbing his gums as he gave her his best smile—suddenly it had become vitally important, crucial, that she tell him. They were two suffering confused put-upon souls trading confidences, that was all—and where was the harm in that? “It’s my stomach,” Will offered. “That’s why I’m here. I can’t eat, can’t sleep. It feels like there’s a hundred little coal miners in there having a torchlight parade.”

A pretty viridescent hand had worked itself out of the cocoon of Miss Muntz’s blankets. She put it to her lips to suppress yet another giggle—was the simile so amusing? Or his suffering? Will reddened—he’d tried to be sincere with her, hadn’t he?

“I have greensickness,” she announced suddenly, and looked away. “It’s an anemia. ‘Chlorosis’ is the official name for it. Dr. Kellogg says I’m a very severe case, but his prognosis is for full recovery—if I stay on the antitoxic diet, of course.”

“God,” Will said, “don’t you hate that food? I mean, corn pulp and Protose fillets?”

Miss Muntz gave a little sniff. “If it’s going to make me well again, I’ll eat anything. Besides, I’ve learned that it was meat that was poisoning me all these years. My mother is absolutely—well, with her it’s salt pork for breakfast, beefsteak for dinner and a chicken, kidneys, chops or the like for luncheon. Little wonder I’m anemic.”

Will was considering this, the specter of a loving mother unwittingly poisoning her own flesh and blood, when Nurse Graves appeared to change his hot-water bag and see how he was doing. “Get your rest now,” she admonished in quick little puffs of breath as she slipped the hot rubber reservoir down under the blankets, “you’ve got your afternoon enema at two-thirty, and then it’s off to the Colon Department, the Shadowgram Room and the Anthropometric Department. And then”—she held back a moment, as if announcing a visit with the crowned heads of Europe—“the Chief will see you.”

   
Chapter 8