The Road to Wellville (12 page)

“Are you all right, sir?” The waitress looked stricken.

All right? Was he all right? The immediate and shooting pain of shin and patella was nothing, kindling to the inferno raging in his gut. He wanted to bay at the moon, claw at himself, get down on all fours and tear out his innards like a poisoned dog. All right? He’d never be all right.

Tears of anguish in his eyes, he looked up into the startled faces ranged round the table before him and found himself staring into the chartreuse eyes and high green cheekbones of the girl he’d noticed in the hallway the previous night. Seeing her there flustered him, and he glanced down at his hands, into which the waitress, with a thousand apologies, inserted a menu.

“A bit eager today, aren’t we?” a voice spoke in his ear. The voice belonged to an Englishman, sixty or so, with a white tonsure and teeth like a mule’s. He was sitting to Will’s immediate right. “Champing at the bit, eh? I know the feeling. All of this simple living builds an appetite and there’s no arguing that.”

Will agreed with him, wholeheartedly, his eyes affixed to the menu.

“Endymion Hart-Jones,” the Englishman’s voice announced after a pause, and Will at first thought he was recommending a dish—but no, he was introducing himself.

Will had grown up in a proper household and gone to proper schools. He knew how to behave in society. In fact, he was normally gregarious, barely containable—but to say he was out of sorts would be an understatement. He locked eyes with the Englishman. “Will Lightbody,” he said in his rain-barrel tones.

The Englishman introduced the others, Will nodding at each in turn. The heavyset woman to Will’s immediate left was Mrs. Tindermarsh, of Indianapolis; beside her, a dwarfish man with a tiny pointed beard and bulbous head, a Professor Stepanovich of the Academy of Astronomical Sciences, in Saint Petersburg, Russia; at the far end of the table, Miss Muntz, the greenish girl, from Poughkeepsie, New York; and beside her, Homer Praetz, the industrialist, from Cleveland.

“The Nut Lisbon Steak with Creamed Gluten Gravy is absolutely divine,” Mrs. Tindermarsh offered without a trace of irony.

Will could only blink at her. He could feel the presence of the waitress—or was it one of Mrs. Stover’s dieticians?—hovering at his elbow as he tried to make sense of the menu:

“Do you feel up to an entrée today, Mr. Lightbody?”

Will gazed up into the broad honest faces of the table waitress and dietician, buxom girls and young, radiating health, wisdom and the secret knowledge of diet and health to which their Chief and idol had made them privy.

“My name is Evangeline,” said the taller of the two, “and I’ll be your dietary advisor during your stay with us. And this”—indicating the second girl—”is Hortense. She’ll be your waitress. Now, if I might explain the menu to you, sir.” She cleared her throat. “I hope you’ll notice the numbers printed beside each food item….”

Will clutched the menu as if it were a rope suspended over a pit of crocodiles. His fellow diners had fallen silent, absorbed in his deliberations: this wasn’t merely eating, this was science.

“Well,” she went on, “these numbers, when summed up, will give you the total calories consumed—simply add the figures in the first, second and third columns and put down the sums at the foot of the respective columns. Mark each item eaten, sign the bill of fare, and
hand it to your physician—for each meal, each day. It’s really quite simple.”

“Yes,” Will agreed, his eyes jumping from the dietician’s to those of Miss Muntz and the others, “yes, I suppose it is.”

“Well, then,” Evangeline said brightly, “may I repeat my original question: Do you feel up to an entrée this morning? Either the Nuttolene and jelly or the Protose patties would be very therapeutic for a man in your condition.”

Will ran a hand through his hair. His stomach began to announce itself, an old adversary backed into a comer but not about to give up without a fight. “Uh, well,” Will fumbled, “uh, I think I’ll just have the toast. And water. A glass of water.”

“Toast?” the girls harmonized, a look of shock and incredulity on their faces. “But surely—” began the taller one, and then she trailed off. “We can get you your toast, of course, if that’s what you like, sir, but I’d recommend a serving of the corn pulp, the brown soup and prune fritters to go with it. At the very least. I can appreciate that you’re not yet up to digesting a large meal, but I do advise you to eat generously and flush your system of its poisons.”

At this point, the Englishman got into it: “That’s right, old boy, flush the system. You’ll be getting your flora changed, too, I’ll wager”—and here, inexplicably, the whole table burst into laughter—”and it’s never too early to give the little blighters a hand.”

Will’s face reddened. Flora? What on earth was he talking about? And the menu. That was nonsense, too. Nuttolene, Protose patties, Meltose and gluten and all the rest of it—Eleanor’s concoctions, as unlike food as anything he’d ever had in his mouth. His jaw hardened. He fastened on the eyes of the waitress. “Toast,” Will repeated in a firm tone. “Dry. And that will be all, thank you.”

Suddenly meek, the girls melted away from him. When he turned back to the table, he found himself staring into Miss Muntz’s startled yellow eyes, until she turned abruptly to the bulbous Russian and began talking of the weather—terribly cold for this time of year, wasn’t it? The Englishman had suddenly become absorbed in studying his shirt cuffs, and Mrs. Tindermarsh gazed out the windows into intermediate
space. Homer Praetz, he noticed, was carefully chewing a bit of something that looked vaguely organic. It was then, in that moment of relative calm, that Will again thought of Eleanor. Where was she? Why hadn’t she come to the table to wish him a good morning? Was this the Kellogg method—to drive a wedge between husband and wife? To segregate them? Well, he’d be damned if he’d sit here and eat his toast without her.

He was just rising from the table when the waitress reappeared with his toast and a glass of kumyss for Mrs. Tindermarsh. Reluctantly, Will sank back into his chair, all the while looking over his shoulder for a glimpse of Eleanor. She was nowhere to be seen. Other women were, though—hundreds of them, ranging in age from fifteen to eighty, every last one of them dressed in the latest styles (as modified by their Chief, of course) and enjoying a healthy, bubbly, convivial meal. Their chatter was electric, all-pervasive, the buzz of a field of insects droning toward the intersection of afternoon and evening. Will bowed his head and morosely lifted the toast to his mouth.

No sooner had he taken a bite than his stomach began to rumble—or not just rumble, but growl and spit like a caged animal poked with a stick. “Down, boy!” the Englishman exclaimed, playing to the table with a show of his horsey teeth. Miss Muntz put a pretty green hand to her mouth and tittered. Will gave them a sick grin and munched his toast.

Just as he was transporting a second spear of scorched bread to his mouth, his stomach rumbling like Vesuvius and his coated tongue swelling in his throat, he felt a pressure on his shoulder and turned to find himself gazing up into a great shrewd globe of a face that hung over him like a Chinese lantern. The face belonged to a rubicund, snowy-haired man built on the Chief’s mold—that is, stocky, foreshortened and expansive round the middle. The man had his hand on Will’s shoulder. His look of sagacity almost immediately turned to one of consternation, and he began emitting a moist clucking sound. “No, no, no, no, no,” he said, wagging a finger for emphasis, “you’ve got it all wrong.”

Will was baffled. Did he know this man? He studied the blistering
blue eyes, the firm jowls, the hair leached of all color dancing round the great pumpkin of his head … come to think of it, he did look vaguely familiar….

“Chew,” the man said, and he made a command of it. “Chew!” he cried, his voice corkscrewing upward. “Masticate! Fletcherize!” And he removed his hand from Will’s shoulder to point to the ten-’foot banner draped across the wall just under the entranceway at the far end of the room. The banner, in bold black letters three feet high, echoed the stocky little man’s exhortation:

FLETCHERIZE!

Understanding began to dawn on Will. This was none other than Horace B. Fletcher himself, standing there before him in all his mandibular glory. Will knew him—of course he did. Was there a man, woman or child in America who didn’t? Fletcher was the naturopathic genius who’d revealed to the world the single most fundamental principle of good health, diet and digestion: mastication. Thorough mastication. Fletcher maintained (and Dr. Kellogg concurred with all his heart) that the nearest thing to a panacea for gastric ills and nutritional disorders was the total digestion of food in the mouth. And he wasn’t content merely to chew each morsel of food once for each of the thirty-two teeth in the human mouth, though he’d admit that it was a good start; rather, you were to chew a given bit of food fifty, sixty or seventy times even, until it dissolved in the mouth, the “food gate” opened and the mouthful was gone. With a shout of acclamation, the entire alimentary community had heralded this simple but momentous discovery. And now here was this celebrated figure, this hero of the oral cavity, standing before Will in the midst of this dining room crowded with luminaries, this great man coaching him in the intricacies of masticating a scrap of toast. Despite himself, Will was impressed.

He chewed slowly and thoughtfully, chewed as he’d never chewed before, the fluid mentorial tones of Horace B. Fletcher counting off the strokes in his ear: “… ten, eleven, twelve—that’s it—thirteen, fourteen, yes, yes.” And even in the depths of his concentration, Will felt the touch of the Great Masticator’s strong square fingers as they gently wrapped themselves round the nape of his neck and forced his head
down in the proper Fletcherizing position. Will chewed. And chewed. At the count of twenty, he felt a sharp pain in one of his lower rear molars; at twenty-five, his tongue went numb; at thirty, the toast was paste; at thirty-five, it was water; at forty, his jaw began to ache, and the toast was saliva. And then, miraculously, it was gone.

The whole table watched this operation in silence. When it was completed, and Will cautiously lifted his head, the Great Masticator gave him a congratulatory slap on the back, winked one sharp blue eye and sauntered off with an air of satisfaction. Will saw that Mrs. Tindermarsh was beaming at him—they all were, the whole table. For a moment, he thought they were going to burst into applause. He couldn’t imagine how the simple act of grinding up a bit of toast could give them such a thrill, but it pleased him nonetheless, and he smiled shyly as he bent forward to repeat the performance.

It was not to be. For at that moment the thread of a single voice disengaged itself for just an instant from the general hubbub—a voice he knew as well as his own—and he jerked round in his chair as if electrified.
Eleanor.
And then he was on his feet, the chair thrust back from him as he scanned the crowd for a glimpse of her. Her voice came to him again, this time as it rose to cap off a witticism and trail away in the musical little laugh he’d already begun to miss.
Eleanor.
The feeding heads dipped and rose, waitresses waited, dietary advisors dispensed dietary advice. Will felt frightened suddenly, frightened and sick. “Eleanor!” he cried like a stricken calf. “Eleanor!”

He saw her in that moment, rising startled from a table not thirty feet away, the dark silk of her hair piled atop her head, her quick green eyes fixing him with a look of shock and admonition.
Not here
, that look warned him,
not now.
He saw the faces of her breakfast companions gaping up at him, a distinguished company, a brilliant company, no doubt. And who was that beside her, the napkin folded surgically in his lap? Who was that with the flaxen hair and the adamantine jaw? Who with the perfect teeth and the subtle, healing hands?

Not here, not now.

Will didn’t care. He was already lurching toward her, the fist in his stomach beating at him as if to force a way out—he didn’t want to be here, didn’t want to be in Battle Creek, didn’t want to be in a place
where his wife was lost to him and people had to tell him how to chew his toast. He didn’t know what he was doing—it had been ten hours since he’d seen her last, ten hours, that was all; and here he was awash in loss and self-pity. “Eleanor!” he cried.

They were all watching him, every anointed, spoon-fed, Fletcherizing one of them, and suddenly he didn’t care. He blundered into a chair occupied by an immovable fat man, ricocheted off him and felt the strength fall away from his legs. Still, he staggered on, thinking nothing, thinking to embrace her, claim her, right there in the middle of the room.

Eleanor stood poised at the table, and she didn’t look startled or even angry anymore. No: she looked embarrassed, only that.

   
Chapter 6