The Road to Wellville (27 page)

She held him. They kissed. He felt the flutter of her tongue, the heat of her, and suddenly his hands came into play, roaming, massaging, re-exploring familiar territory. She took his arm and led him to the bed. “Hush, Will,” she whispered, “don’t fret now. My speech … it was for your own good. And the San’s. Now come to me, Will. Take your jacket off.”

He fumbled with his clothes, jerking at the cravat, the shirtfront, feeling light-headed and confused. “But, but … your condition,” he protested, “Dr. Kellogg—”

She was watching him, her gaze steady, strong, without a flicker of vacillation. “I want a daughter, Will. Give me a daughter.”

A daughter. Give me a daughter, Will.
He was beside himself, trembling like one of the vibrotherapist’s prize patients, and he fell on her—a bit awkwardly, perhaps, but with true passion and utter conviction.

Unfortunately, at that precise moment, a knock sounded at the door. A knock. They weren’t at home, after all, nestled in the big dark canopied bed from across the sea while the servants busied themselves in distant regions of the house and the soft light of dusk pressed at the windows—no, they were inmates of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, where no less a figure than Dr. John Harvey Kellogg himself had strictly enjoined them from connubial relations, and there was a knock at the door. They froze. Guilty, panicked, discovered. Will was about to make a leap for the closet, when Eleanor, in a show of surprising strength, pushed him off her as if he were a heap of old rags. There was a moment of sustained tension—Would the intruder persist? Would he go away? Would the door handle turn with a click—and then, from out in the hallway, came the breathy clinical voice of reason and regimen: “Mr. Lightbody? Mr. Lightbody, are you in there?”

Nurse Graves.

Eleanor rose to answer the door, totally composed, regal, frosty—Eleanor, who a moment before had been passionate in his arms. “Yes?”

Nurse Graves stood in the doorway, a saucer balanced in one hand. The saucer supported a single truncated four-ounce glass, opaque with
its burden of milk. “I’m very sorry to disturb you, ma’am,” she breathed, barely audible, the color high in her cheeks, “but it’s time for your husband’s quarter-hour feeding. Of milk. And Mr. Lightbody”—looking beyond Eleanor now to where Will sat hunched on the bed in dinner jacket and undershirt—”you really should be preparing for bed. It’s past ten. Quarter past. Sir.”

Eleanor never moved a muscle. She listened to the nurse’s speech in silence, and the soft trailing devolution of the younger woman’s words seemed to fortify her composure. She was taller than Nurse Graves—Irene—by an inch or two, anyway, and she was slimmer, and her self-possession was unshakable. Of course, Eleanor was a woman of the world, thoroughly sophisticated, while Nurse Graves was a girl, an ingénue—firm, healthy, buxom, with a smile that was like the morning sun on a field of wheat, but an ingénue all the same. San or no San, Eleanor was in command here. “You may leave the milk with me, nurse. Mr. Lightbody is engaged at the moment, as you may have noticed. And while we appreciate your solicitude, I can’t really say that we need to be followed around like children with a nanny.” Eleanor never took her eyes from the younger woman’s face. “That will be all, thank you.”

But Nurse Graves surprised him. Instead of handing over the medicinal milk and bowing meekly out of the room, she stood firm. “I’m very sorry, and begging your pardon, ma’am, but Doctor’s orders are that I should administer the feeding myself and observe the patient until the feeding is completed.”

A long moment interposed itself, and Will thought of armies digging in, posting sentries, establishing lines of communication, shoring up defenses. Finally Eleanor let out an exasperated sigh. “All right,” she said, “administer the feeding, observe the patient. Be my guest.”

Nurse Graves entered the room in a brisk official way, her steps short and quick, her back rigid. Wordlessly, she bent over Will, handed him the saucer and waited while he drained his sixty-first glass of the day. And then, all business, she marched directly across the room with the empty glass balanced on its saucer, hesitating only at the door. Ignoring Eleanor, she addressed Will in her little itch of a voice—”I’ll be waiting in your room, Mr. Lightbody”—and then she was gone, leaving the door gaping behind her.

Three quick steps and Eleanor set the door to with a shudder of lintel and jamb that made Will’s ears ring. She was enraged, her eyes swollen, lips drawn tight. “Who does she think she is—your nursemaid? God, did you see the way she stood there and confronted me on my own doorstep? As if I couldn’t be trusted to see that you drank your precious milk?”

“It’s all right, Eleanor,” Will crooned, rising from the bed to embrace her, to begin where they’d left off, “she’s only doing her duty.”

“Her duty?!” she cried, angrily shrugging him off. “Is it her duty to imply that your wife is incompetent? Untrustworthy?” Her face was small and hard, and she stood poised on the balls of her feet, half-crouched, a wrestler moving in for the takedown. Will backed up a step. “What’s her name?” she suddenly demanded, and there was a keening, unsteady edge to her voice.

The words stuck in Will’s throat. “Nurse Graves.”

“Graves? All right. Thank you.” She turned her back on him and strode to the writing desk in the corner, where she took up her pen and furiously scratched the name across a sheet of paper.

Will was sunk in misery. If they took Nurse Graves away from him he’d have nothing, nothing but an unbroken succession of days with their oceans of milk, the mystical pronouncements of Drs. K. and L., and the hard heavy hand of Nurse Bloethal. “She’s very good, really,” he murmured. “She is, El. Very attentive.”

But Eleanor wasn’t listening. She’d stepped into the bathroom, where Will could see her sprinkling something that looked suspiciously like flaked hijiki into an enormous tumbler of water she was filling from the tap. As she bent to the sink, the nightgown caught at her hips, revealing shape and definition and giving him another glimpse of her white, white ankles. Will couldn’t help himself. He moved lightly across the floor, slipped into the bathroom and wrapped his arms round her. “El,” he whispered, hoarse with passion, “let’s go back to bed.”

“Oh, Will,” she sighed, “I’m too flustered now. I don’t know what I was thinking, anyway—any of that business would be a terrible mistake for both of us. You know what Dr. Kellogg said.” He was watching her eyes in the mirror, but he saw nothing there to encourage him. “Go back to your nurse, Will. Get well. Go to bed.”

He heard her, but his blood was up and he couldn’t stop now. Taking her by the hand, gently, gingerly, he led her back to the bed, reaching up to flick off the lamp on the night table as they eased down side by side on the rock-hard physiologic mattress. Darkness enveloped them like a blanket. The smallest sounds echoed through the room—the ticking of the clock on the bureau, the soft even suck of her breath. After a moment, a hint of light revealed itself at the edges of the curtains and in a single glowing band beneath the door. He turned to kiss her and got a mouthful of hair. “No, Will,” she said, and her tone was firm. “My nerves simply can’t take it.”

“Please?” His voice was a squeak in the darkness, a child’s plea, pathetic. “I’m better now, I am. And I need you.” He was desperate, grasping at straws. “Our marriage vows, what about our marriage vows? And our daughter?”

Even as he spoke he knew he was doomed to failure. No argument could move Eleanor. Her father had spoiled her shamelessly and she’d done exactly as she’d pleased ever since Will had known her. And if once in a great while she seemed to give in, it was only because she’d decided it was to her advantage, a sort of bartering of concessions. No, she was a rock. She was adamantine. He might just as well give it up now and shuffle off to his solitary cell.

“Oh, all right, Will,” she breathed in the darkness, and her acquiescence stunned him, electrified him, “but please hurry. Your milk’s liable to get warm.”

There was a whisper of flannel as she lay back and lifted the nightgown, her thighs palely glowing in the defeated light. Will tore at the buttons of his trousers—hurry, hurry—and jerked at his long johns. A moment—there—and again he fell on her. But there was something wrong. He couldn’t seem to … it was … there was nothing there. Thunderstruck, he reached down to examine himself and found that he was limp—
limp
, after that barrage of unclean thoughts and all that unseemly stiffening in the crotch,
limp
, now that the hour had finally come.

Eleanor’s voice spoke out of the void. “Come on, Will. My nerves. Get it over with.”

He tried to concentrate, tried to think of Nurse Graves and the woman
in the waiting room, but it was no use. He was a wreck, a hulk, a burned-out husk of a man. Even this, the most elemental human act, was beyond him now. He went cold with fear. He was a sick man, sick unto death.

“Will?”

He drew back from her, fishing in the gloom for his clothes.

“Will?”

“I—I think you’re right, El. We can’t do this. Not now. We’re too ill, both of us, we’re—”

“Will, stop it now. Don’t be foolish. Come to me.” She sat up and in the dim light he could see her holding her arms out to him. “Will.” Her tone sharper now. “
Come. To. Me.
”

But Will had sprung to his feet, jumping into his clothes as if he were escaping a burning house, tearing open the door and hobbling barefooted into the hall, shoes and shirtfront dangling from his fingertips. “Will,” she called at his back, imperious, demanding, shriller and shriller, “Will, Will,
Will!
”

He didn’t know how long he wandered the halls, shambling along hopelessly, an inmate forever, an invalid, not a man but a eunuch, a castrato, a stud put out to pasture. His mind closed numbly around the sad truth of it, and for the first time in his life he began to question the value of going on with it all. What was the sense? There was nothing left to him now.

He drifted aimlessly, thinking only to duck into a doorway or behind a palm when a nurse or attendant happened by. They were sure to be looking for him by now—Nurse Graves would have sent out the alarm. He’d missed the last of his diurnal feedings, not to mention his bedtime enema, and even if Nurse Graves had gone home, the night nurse, who roughly shook him awake each hour for his nocturnal dose, would be wondering over the empty bed. He hid for a while in the Palm Garden, feeling like a child playing at hide-and-seek, and when the San settled down into the deep caverns of the night, he began moving again, haunting the hallways, the obscure corners, the back rooms. It was then
that he thought of the turkey, that thankful bird roosting in its cage in a corner of the dining hall. He pictured it gargling and clucking to itself, folded in its feathery dreams, oblivious to the naked cheat of life. A thankful bird. Yes. And what did Will have to be thankful for?

It was late, and his reason had begun to slip. The turkey loomed up before him like a bugbear, symbol and embodiment of all the false promises the San made, all the bland reassurances and deadly assessments. The turkey was thankful and he was not. Suddenly he wanted to see it writhe. He wanted it to know pain, wanted to seize its leathery wattles and twist them from its stupid narrow bulb of a thankful head—he wanted to throttle it, pluck it, tear the wings from its body and the feet from its legs. Unconsciously, as if a force were pulling him, he found his way to the stairwell, and then he was climbing, a sleepwalker, a zombie (but not such a zombie that he didn’t avoid the elevator—no, that would never do: they’d be expecting him there). It was six flights up. By the time he reached the top floor he was wheezing, choking for breath, and the sweat trailed down the back of his neck.

He spent the next several minutes recovering himself in the shadowy arena of the stairwell. An absolute unbroken silence had fallen over the San, and he pictured Miss Muntz asleep in her room; the Doctor in his Residence, breathing properly and rigorously even in sleep; Linniman snoring lustily in his bachelor’s quarters; Eleanor settled finally into a light, cranky, dreamless sleep. The upper floor was deserted at this hour: no patients, no physicians, no nurses, no attendants. Will stepped out into the corridor and made his way along the wall to the grandiose entrance of the dining room, half expecting to see Mrs. Stover stationed there like a three-headed dog. But even Mrs. Stover had to sleep sometime. No one was there. Will stood before the door for a long moment before he took hold of the handle, pulled it open a crack and slipped inside.

The room seemed even vaster in the half-light seeping through the windows from the streetlamps that dotted the grounds. Solemn pillars, spectral palms: it was like some cavernous mausoleum. Overhead he could make out the bold black letters of Horace B. Fletcher’s injunction and, in the far corner, the pale vacancy of the proclamation that hung
over the turkey’s pen. The tables, he saw, were set for breakfast. There was no sound from the thankful bird.

But what was he thinking, what was he doing? He felt like a thief, a murderer—he’d upheld the law all his life, and now here he was, about to commit mayhem. That innocent bird, that blameless life. But then he thought of the Doctor, smug and infallible, with his ready slogans and his easy, pink-cheeked health and all the rest, and the seductive irony of the deed overwhelmed him. A thankful bird throttled in its cage. Would they sweep it aside at first light and slip it out to the dustbin? Would the Doctor hustle in an imposter? How would he explain the empty cage, death in the place of life? Will squared his jaw and stalked across the room with the remorseless tread of the executioner, and there it was, the cage, right before him, its ghostly pale slats like pickets against the deeper gloom within.