The Road to Wellville (57 page)

There was rain at the end of the week, on Friday, a warm seasonal rain that puckered on the pavement and dropped musically down the gutters. Eleanor had finished her daily regimen by four that afternoon and was dressing to go out when Will stopped by her room. “Hello, darling,” he said, hesitating in the doorway, “I just dropped by to see how you were doing—you’re not going out, are you? In this weather?”

She’d made up her face and was buttoning the cape of her cashmere mackintosh and making a final adjustment of her blue velvet toque in the mirror. Will’s question, ingenuous as it seemed, contained a hint of criticism—was she blind? couldn’t she see that it was raining?—and it irritated her. Especially now, especially today. Her nerves were in a flutter, and she felt light-headed, odd, almost as if her feet weren’t touching the floor. For though she’d dressed in one of her smartest suits (the latest English cut, double-breasted, royal blue, with an exaggerated collar appliquéd in taffeta silk for contrast) and one of her best French satin blouses, she wore nothing beneath her slip and nothing to contain her breasts. The sensation was freakish and liberating at the same time, her nipples coming into random contact with the polished fabric, a coolness between her legs, but she felt it necessary to the experience—at four-fifteen she was meeting Lionel, who was escorting her to Dr. Spitzvogel’s for her inaugural treatment, and she didn’t want to be thought unprogressive. “Oh, I’m just going for a stroll,” she said, watching Will’s face in the mirror.

“A stroll? But it’s raining out there, dear.”

She turned round on him now, crossed the room and let him hold her elbows while she pecked a kiss at his cheek. “But you know how I love to walk in the rain—it’s my artistic nature. I let my soul soar like the lark ascending.”

Suddenly Will was beaming. “I know,” he cried, “I’ll go with you! I could use the exercise. But listen to me—I’d make Dr. Kellogg proud, wouldn’t I?”

“No, Will,” she said, suddenly flustered. “Or, yes, you would make Dr. Kellogg proud and I’m pleased to see you taking a more positive attitude toward physiologic living, but I mean I think I’d rather walk by myself—and please don’t take that the wrong way. I just need to be alone with my inner self, that’s all.”

Will looked hurt., “You mean I can’t even take a stroll with you anymore? Eleanor, what’s happened to you? I’ve done everything you’ve asked—eaten grapes till they came out my ears, jumped up and down laughing with a bunch of overweight tycoons in the gymnasium, had the kink in my intestine snipped out like a wart. God, let’s go home, can’t we, El? just go home?”

“We will,” she murmured, drawing away from him, “all in good time.”

“Oh, don’t give me that, El—that’s what you always say.”

The fact was, she couldn’t bear the idea of going back to Peterskill after the excitement of the San. What could she do there—play bridge, do church work, watch the grapevine snake its way through the trellis? She couldn’t stay at the San forever. She knew that in some way she was prolonging the inevitable, forestalling her real life and avoiding her mother’s grave and her father’s desolation and the pink room with the bassinet at the top of the stairs that was meant for her daughter. But she was sick still, a very sick woman, and she couldn’t leave yet. Not yet. “I mean it, Will,” she said, “I promise you.”

His face was like a big bruise. He looked as if he might break down and cry. When she reached out to comfort him, alarmed, he flung her hands away. “Don’t,” he said, harsh, bitter, put upon, “I don’t need it. Go walk in the rain,” he said, “let your soul soar.” And then he turned and was gone.

She met Lionel in the lobby and went wordlessly into the cab waiting at the curb. It was stuffy and close inside and she was acutely conscious of his knee pressed against hers as he tried to arrange his legs in the tight compartment. “You’re doing the right thing,” he told her. “You’ll thank me a thousand times over for this.”

She wanted to be witty and gay, wanted to command the situation,
but it just wasn’t in her. She listened to the clatter of the horses’ hooves on the wet pavement, watched the trees come at them over the driver’s shoulders, smoothed a wrinkle in her glove. “I’m sure I will,” she murmured.

Dr. Spitzvogel’s offices were in his residence, a perfectly respectable-looking Tudor on the fashionable West Side, not far from Dr. Kellogg’s own residence. Eleanor gave a glancing thought to her Chief and mentor—what would
he
think of what she was doing?—and felt like a traitor. But the look of Dr. Spitzvogel’s home reassured her, as did Lionel’s presence at her side—the President of the Vegetarian Society of America wouldn’t very well lead her astray, would he? Besides, though Dr. Kellogg prided himself on keeping up with every medical advance in the world, from the doings at the Pasteur Institute to the Royal College of Surgeons, even he couldn’t be expected to know everything. And so many other women at the San found Dr. Spitzvogel’s innovations effective—and gratifying. What did she have to lose? Eleanor stepped out of the hack with an open mind, determined to give herself up wholly to the Spitzvogel regime, come what may, and make her judgments without prejudice, as befitted a forward-looking and progressive spirit.

The enigmatic physician turned out to be an ordinary enough man of medium height, with a dark slash of slicked-down hair, waxed mustaches and a monocle clenched in his right eye with what seemed an amazing effort of muscular control. His accent was thick, but had none of the harshness Eleanor associated with German speakers—he didn’t talk so much as purr. He was dressed in tweeds and there was a faint smell of wood smoke and licorice about him. She liked him immediately.

Dr. Spitzvogel showed them into a sitting room done up in the Aesthetic style of the late seventies, replete with a gilded and ebonized floor screen in a Japanese pattern and a matching curio cabinet by the Herter brothers. They sat round a low table and chatted over bran wafers and a musky-scented herbal tea that tasted of exotic soils and faraway places, making small talk. After a while, Lionel got up and excused himself. Once the door had closed behind him, Dr. Spitzvogel took up a pad and pencil and questioned Eleanor regarding her condition—in general terms at first, but becoming progressively more probing and intimate as the dialogue advanced. She told him of her sudden rushes of emotion,
how the sight of a three-tined fork or a tatted collar filled her with an unbearable overbrimming joy or corresponding sorrow, how she awoke trembling in the night and ran barefoot through the dew, told him of her mother’s death and her husband’s troubles and how she felt that beauty and truth and the pursuit of the physiologic life were the only things worth dedicating oneself to.

He understood her completely. “You poor woman,” he murmured, pulling at his lip and gravely nodding the brilliantined bulb of his head as her litany of woes mounted. When he’d satisfied himself, he gave her a wink so broad and sympathetic it threatened to dislodge his monocle, and then stepped behind the screen. He emerged a moment later in the white jacket of the conventional physician, though the tweed trousers fell away incongruously beneath it, and Eleanor wondered that he would bother to change his jacket and not his pants. “Will you step this way, please?” he asked, placing a peculiar buzzing emphasis on his s’s.

A door to the rear of the screen led to his offices proper, a pair of sedate, wainscoted rooms so softly lit it took a long moment before Eleanor’s eyes adjusted. There was a desk, several straight-backed chairs, the usual physician’s paraphernalia. Through the open doorway to the back room, she could dimly make out a padded examining table and the dull glint of the oil paintings that decorated the walls. Suddenly her heart was pounding. To say something, anything, she commented on the framed credentials displayed on the wall behind the desk, not a word of which was legible in this light. “You’ve had your training in Germany, I presume?” she said, gesturing at the display.

“Oh, yes,” he buzzed, and then he was purring and buzzing at the same time, “at the Universität of Schleswig-Holstein and at Württemberg, too. But not in medicine, dear lady, which as you know is so constrained and narrow a field, but rather in the Philosophy of Physiological Systems, and, of course, Therapeutic Massage—
Die Handhabung Therapeutik
, in particular. But please, allow me,” he purred, taking her lightly by the arm and escorting her into the back room.

Here the odor of licorice she’d recognized earlier was pervasive, as if the air-itself had been spiced, and the room was noticeably warmer than the one that adjoined it. The only light derived from a pair of flickering sconces and there were no windows, not even a bit of stained glass to
admit the light of day, and that was odd. And yet it lent an atmosphere of privacy and retreat to the place, a sense of security untouched by the rolling day, and it lulled her. The effect was instantaneous—she felt languid and her heart slipped back into its accustomed rhythm. In the meantime, Dr. Spitzvogel had crossed the room to pull open the wardrobe in the corner, and as she followed his movements she glanced up and the paintings above the wainscoting came into focus. They were pastoral settings mostly—stretches of lowering sky, sheep in their folds, nymphs, fauns, hovering cherubim, fairies melting into woodland shadow—and they added to the air of unreality that hung over the room. Unaccountably, the word “seraglio” fluttered in and out of her head. And what was she doing here?

“Please,” Dr. Spitzvogel was saying, and he stood before her now, the sheen of his hair and mustaches gone dull in the candlelight, the ghost of a pale silken garment held out in offering. “You will remove your clothing and slip into this—the wardrobe is here for your convenience. And then, please to lay yourself on the table and relax, dream, think nothing but beautiful thoughts.” He smiled—was he winking again or was this a trick of the light.?—and then he was at the door. “I return presently, and then we will begin,
ja?
”

She changed hastily, afraid he’d come back before she finished, feeling a little foolish for having gone without underwear—she could have worn an iron corset for all anyone would have known. The garment the doctor had given her was open at the sides and she felt it against her bare skin as she’d felt the blouse, a sheet of sensation. She lay back on the padded table, her head on the pillow, eyes closed, and waited. It was no good. She was too tense. What would it be like? What would he do? She concentrated on relaxing her muscles, one by one, beginning with her toes and working her way up. By the time she reached her hips she was so relaxed, what with the heat and the incense and the languor of all those perennially bathing nymphs on the walls, that she didn’t notice he was in the room with her till she felt his hands on her abdomen.

His hands simply lay there—there was no movement, no compression, no attempt at massage—and they were hot, fiery, just as Virginia had said. Eleanor kept her eyes closed, fought to remain still, calm. An eternity dragged by. Nothing happened. But then, as if magically, his
hands had migrated to her breasts, her nipples, his hands like smooth river stones heated in the fire, and there was the faintest distant movement of his fingers.

Later, much later, so much later she didn’t know if she’d been lying in that room for hours, days, weeks—if she’d been born there, melting into the padding, through the table, the floor—she became aware of his touch in a place where she’d never been touched before. So delicate, so painstaking, so exquisite in its patience and deep probing wisdom, this was a touch she could never have conjured or imagined. There was no question of resisting it. She sank beneath it, dreaming of those sylvan glades, of men and women alike gamboling through Bavarian meadows, as naked as God made them, and she felt herself moving, too, the gentlest friction of her hips against the leather padding, moving forward and downward and ever so therapeutically into that firm sure touch.

   
Chapter 4