The Road to Wellville (40 page)

“Oh, I think I do, I think I do!” the Doctor cried, twirling round with an exaggerated dip of his shoulders and an antic shuffle of his boots. “Santa knows everyone in the San, all his guests, great and small….” The place erupted in laughter. He leaned forward with a wink. “Help me out, now, help me out. Mr. Hodgkins, isn’t it, of Dayton? No? Well, sir, tell me this—you’re not one of my patients then, are you?”

“No, I—”

“A visitor?”

“Well, I—”

“Ho-ho, ho-ho! I knew it, I knew it!”

It was Eleanor who unwittingly came to the rescue. She was laughing—heartily, disingenuously, laughing like a girl in pigtails in the
front row at a Punch-and-Judy show. “Doctor,” she gasped, breaking off in a little trill of giggles and countervailing hiccoughs, “Doctor, let me introduce”—she broke off again—”introduce a friend from New York, Charles—”

“Tarrytown, actually,” Charlie blurted, hoping to deflect attention from the name, lest it should turn the tumblers in the little man’s brain and lead to a scene unpleasant in the extreme.

“—Ossining,” Eleanor said.

But Kellogg wasn’t listening. Lit by the madcap possibilities of his role, he cried, “Yes, yes, Mr. Tarrytown-Ossining!” playing to the house, and everyone was laughing, genial, vegetable-fed, free of vices and glowing with health—everyone in the place, from waitresses to grandes dames to the dishwashers, who stood at the kitchen door in awe. “A pleasure, sir, a pleasure,” the Doctor hooted, and in the next instant he was bounding across the room to a roar of approval, and Charlie was left cradling his pineapple like an anarchist with a bomb that hadn’t gone off.

   
Chapter 5   

W
ill had been hung over before—in fact, given the slow spiritual death of his managerial position at his father’s plant, combined with Eleanor’s descent into the morass of vegetarianism, neurasthenia, frigidity and quackery, he’d been crapulous the better part of the past five years. But never like this. This was different, a scourge that assaulted him from both ends, as if he’d drunk hydrochloric acid instead of whiskey, eaten iron filings in place of beef, bun and pickle. He vomited for two days, a thin sour mash tinged red with blood. A watery gruel cascaded from the other end, and it was red, too. His fingertips tingled, his feet were blocks of ice, his tongue sprouted a new coat. He lay there on the rack of his physiologic bed, praying for equilibrium, and when he caught his breath to hold the pain in place for ten seconds at a time, he was sure he’d swallowed a long snaking strand of molten wire.

He didn’t know how he’d got back to the San or how he’d found his bed and crashed through the wall of consciousness into oblivion. All he knew was the next morning, Christmas morning, and the old pain, recidivist, glowering, reborn like an avenging demon: all he knew was the toilet and the sink. That first day, he had only two visitors—Nurse Bloethal and Eleanor. Gauging his condition at a glance, Nurse Bloethal mercifully set aside her hot wax and whey culture and canceled his
morning regimen of Swedish Manual Movements, laughing exercises and the sinusoidal bath. If she knew anything of Homer Praetz and the previous day’s events, she didn’t let on. Will vomited and shat and trembled. He said nothing of having left the San, of Charlie Ossining, pickled eggs or the Red Onion, though the nurse could count up the milk feedings he’d missed and make her own nearest guess.

Eleanor appeared at nine, irate and red about the ears and nostrils. Where had he been? She’d looked all over for him before giving it up and going off to Frank’s party on her own—or with Mrs. Rumstedt, rather, for appearance’s sake. But Will didn’t seem to care much for appearances, did he? Her own husband! And on Christmas Eve, no less! Well? And where had he been?

“I’m sick,” he croaked. Outside the window it was as gray as the grave, the very clouds fallen from the sky to press down on the earth as if there were no intermediate plane, no trees, no buildings, no life.

Eleanor stalked across the room and flung her handbag down on the table. She was dressed in green and red, festive for the season. “I’m sick, too,” she cried as the handbag found its mark with the harsh killing thump of the blackjack or cudgel. “Sick to death of this, this
attitude
of yours. And where were you? Answer me!”

Where was he? Where had he been? Even as she asked, even as she demanded an answer, a vivid, if disjointed, series of images flashed across his brain, careening helter-skelter from the stark puckered white soles of Homer Praetz’s feet to the amber glow of the whiskey in its glass and the purse of Charlie Ossining’s lips as he sucked an oyster from its shell. Homer Praetz, he thought, Homer Praetz. It had started there, he was sure of it. Or was it with Irene and the way she’d turned her back on him and his gratitude alike? “Homer Praetz,” he mumbled, hugging his shoulders and turning his head aside on the pillow. “He, he died.”

Eleanor was standing over him now, hands on hips. There was a crease between her eyes, a vertical gouge that appeared when she was angry. “You’ve been drinking,” she accused. “That’s it, isn’t it? After all I’ve done for you, after all Frank and Dr. Kellogg and these selfless nurses and dieticians and I-don’t-know-who-all have done to help you, you alone, what do you do? You go
drinking
”—she threw the word at him, bloated with disgust—”guzzling whiskey and beer and gin like some
degenerate in the street, falling right back into your old habits as if the whole thing were some sort of joke. What were you thinking, what was it—’I’ll just have a little nip for the holiday’? Huh? Was that it? Some Christmas cheer?” She didn’t give him a chance to deny it, to plead, remonstrate, even open his mouth. “Will Lightbody, you answer me. And don’t you dare lie to me, don’t you dare!”

Will confessed. He was a fool to have admitted anything, but there it was.

Eleanor couldn’t keep still. She raged, stormed, expostulated, preached, lectured, exploded in tears and, at one point, in a wild electric excess of frustration and hate, pounded his frail quivering bones beneath the blankets with the balled-up nuggets of her physiologic fists. Christmas day, in his sickbed, and the green velvet blows rained down on him. “I’m through with you, Will Lightbody. I give up, I really do. I wash my hands of you.”

She’d turned and snatched up her purse and was on her way out the door when Will struggled to his elbows and called out to her, pleading his case. “Homer Praetz,” he repeated. “It was Homer Praetz. Yesterday. In the sinusoidal bath … I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.” He broke down then, rough chesty sobs caught in the thick sour phlegm of his binge, and he felt himself open up till he was a thousand feet tall and as empty as a drainpipe through every last inch of it, weeping for himself, for Eleanor, for Nurse Graves, for the whole sad doomed and deluded human race. “He’s dead, I’m telling you, he’s dead.”

Eleanor had stopped at the door, and she was standing there stock-still and alive in every sense, like a deer surprised along the road. She clutched the Yule-red purse to her green dress, and, like a deer, she seemed ready to bolt. “Dead?”

Will hoisted himself to a sitting position and his hair fell across his face. He closed his eyes, shoved his hair back with an automatic gesture, and nodded.

“But Will, darling”—her voice softer now—”I’m so sorry to hear it. He was the machine-tool man, from Cleveland?” She went on without waiting for confirmation. “But really, you mustn’t take these things so hard … yes, I know you’ve got a hypersensitive nature, like my own, that’s what attracted me to you in the first place, and I love you to be
compassionate and full of fellow feeling and all that, but Will, you’ve got to realize that when one comes late to the biologic life, as your Mr. Praetz did, there can be no guaranteeing that six months or a year of right living can reverse the effects of all those years of debauch and dietary suicide—”

It wasn’t what Will wanted to hear. If Praetz was gone, what hope was there for him? Besides, he didn’t need lectures, he needed sympathy, and her complacent wrongheaded vegetarian righteousness infuriated him. “He didn’t just shut his eyes and pass away in his sleep,” Will boomed out, cutting her off in the middle of her cautionary harangue. “He was killed, murdered, done in by your Dr. Kellogg and his ‘Battle Creek Method,’ just as surely as if the goateed little fraud had pulled the switch himself.”

The crease had returned to Eleanor’s brow. Now he’d done it, now he’d assailed the temple itself. Her eyes leapt at him; she squared her shoulders impatiently. “How dare you call—? What in God’s name are you talking about?”

“Electrocution, loosing of the bowels, frying of the flesh. Death, I’m talking about death.” He looked away in disgust, kneaded his aching temples. “It could have been me.”

Eleanor hadn’t moved. She stood there at the door, exasperated, angry all over again. “You’re still drunk, aren’t you?” she accused.

Miserable, Will just stared at her. He felt his jaws tighten, and he wondered how he’d ever come to love, court and marry this demanding, intransigent, cold-hearted woman—couldn’t she ever see his point of view, even once? “I’m not drunk,” he said. “Though I wish to God I was. Do you understand, Eleanor? The man was electrocuted in your damned sinusoidal bath—electrocuted, fried, just like some convict, some maniac at Sing Sing. Alfred would have been gone, too, but I, I broke the connection … thank God.”

But she wouldn’t have it. “You can’t be serious,” she insisted, and the crease grew deeper, deeper, till he thought it would split her face. “I’m quite sure that Dr. Kellogg would never allow—”

“He’s dead, Eleanor. I saw it all. With my own two eyes.”

She didn’t know what to say. He had her, he could see that. She stood there a moment longer, clouds pressing at the windows, Christmas
laying a gloomy, unredemptive hand over the San and all its goods and chattels and carefully appointed environs, until finally she snapped, “Yes, all right, perhaps he is dead, then—but that’s no excuse for you to drink yourself into a coma, now is it?” There was the sharp tattoo of her heels on the floor, the door jerked open, and she was gone.

The following day it was Dr. Kellogg’s turn.

It was past four in the afternoon when he showed up unannounced, having just come from surgery. He was brisk, excitable, and he wore a mask of high patriarchal dudgeon. His panting secretary followed him into the room, hands clasped before him, eyes downcast, a priest at an execution. “Now, sir,” the Doctor cried, thrusting his hand into Will’s mouth to peer at his tongue, thumping at Will’s chest as if it were a half-empty keg of sauterne and snatching up his wrist to feel for his pulse, “now, sir, suppose you just tell me what’s the matter.”