The Road to Wellville (25 page)

A THANKFUL BIRD

And why was it thankful? Because two weeks hence the full complement of nearly a thousand San guests would be dining on Nuttolene steaks, thank you, with mock giblets and gluten-soya gravy to go with their turnips, mashed potatoes and cranberry sauce. Will had to hand it to Kellogg: he never missed a trick.

“Isn’t it hilarious?” Miss Muntz breathed in his ear, her face radiant in its greenish glow.

It was as if a weight had been lifted from Will’s shoulders: it
was
hilarious, yes, it was. And more, much more. Here was this noble bird, this avatar of winged flight and oven-browned skin, this provider of drumstick and wing, white meat and dark, their fellow creature who had every right to his life, liberty and pursuit of wattled happiness, here it was strutting about its pen and eating the same nuts and grains they were, spared forever the butcher’s block and the fatal drop of the cleaver. This was what it was all about, the vegetarian ethos, a new kind of spirituality and moral bonding, and Will saw it pecking there before him, felt it deep in the pit of his stomach. At least he believed he felt
it. Of course—and even in his moment of rapture the thought occurred to him—it might only have been a psyllium seed, expanding in its secret nook.

After breakfast, Nurse Graves escorted Will to the Men’s Gymnasium for a session of Swedish Manual Movements and laughing exercises, followed by Vibrotherapy and a half-hour immersion in the sinusoidal bath. The Swedish Manual Movements, as developed a hundred years earlier by Ling, of Sweden, after reading an ancient Chinese text in French translation, consisted primarily of jumping and clapping in various contorted and unnatural attitudes, so far as Will could see. A hundred men of all ages and conditions took part en masse, while the chief therapist—a Swede with a prominent forehead and huge lumpish bread-loaf muscles—exhorted them. For the laughing exercises, designed not only to improve the patient’s mood but to allow him to breathe more deeply and naturally, the same group reconvened in the same gymnasium to watch a pair of mimes in blackface take pratfalls while the stocky tenor, Tiepolo Cappucini, led them all in a tortured session of operatic laughter. Purged, half-starved and disoriented, his limbs numb from the Swedish movements and his gut leaden with seaweed, Will didn’t find it all that funny. But he pranced and jogged up and down and shook his lean buttocks along with his fellow sufferers, with the old men in suspenders, the obese and the emaciated, the outwardly healthy and the visibly decrepit, and before he knew it he was laughing uncontrollably, desperately, without reason or cause, laughing like a lunatic rattling the bars of his cage.

Vibrotherapy came almost as a relief. This, the attendant explained to Will and a splinter group of half a dozen men similarly exhausted by the effort of laughing, was a passive exercise. The idea was to sit on a chair or stool or lie on a table fitted out with an electrical motor that caused the entire apparatus to quake, shiver and lurch like a buggy with broken springs hurtling down a washboard road. Will heard a brief lecture on each of the three forms of vibration—percutient, lateral and centrifugal—and learned how Vigoroux, Granville, Schiff and Boudet
had found them effective in either increasing or diminishing nervous sensibility, according to the case at hand, after which he was strapped into a chair bolted to an iron plate and shaken like a Christmas eggnog for the next three-quarters of an hour. And that wouldn’t have been so bad, really, but for the man in the chair bolted directly behind his, a grunter and tooth grinder of the first magnitude who kept butting the back of his head against the headrest of Will’s chair. Or the man to his left, who blathered incessantly in a high clonic squeal about the vicissitudes of the stock market. Once that was over, Will was introduced to the special vibrators for the hands, arms and feet, as well as the vibrating stool, the vibrating table and the vibrating cot. By the time he left the Vibrotherapy Department, the walls, curtains and lamps had begun to vibrate, too, and it took him a good five minutes of pacing up and down the corridor with Nurse Graves before the world stopped trembling beneath his feet.

His final stop that morning, prior to being bundled up like a newborn infant and deposited by Nurse Graves on the frozen flagstones of the veranda, was the Electrical Department. Here, patients were subjected to varying degrees of electrical shock as a way of either stimulating or depressing groups of nerves and muscles—each according to his symptoms and needs, of course. Will was scheduled for the hot glove, followed by half an hour in the sinusoidal bath. He wasn’t looking forward to either. For one thing, he was feeling cranky and tired, having been subjected to enough abuse for one day. For another, he didn’t like the sound of the first treatment—the hot glove—and he’d always had an aversion to public baths and swimming pools, all that exposed flesh; apelike men with hairy shoulders and fur growing in clumps on their thighs, calves, between their toes; women like squashed melons in their lumpy bathing costumes. During their courtship and the first few years of their marriage, Will and Eleanor had bathed in the Hudson on those blistering, eternally blue days of July and August, but they’d always managed to find a spot to themselves—on the Brinckerhoff estate or his father’s place or some such private enclave. At school, of course, there had been no escaping the public bath, and Will had been one among a throng of naked boys during his eight years at the Crowley Preparatory School for Boys in New Milford, Connecticut. But he hadn’t
liked it. And he wasn’t in school anymore. And he resented having to remove his clothing in the presence of strangers—or for that matter, having to endure the sight of strangers removing their clothing in his presence, or appearing in public in any state of dress short of what would be considered good and proper attire for an evening at Sherry’s or Delmonico’s.

But the Electrical Department surprised him. There was no sign of the mob of bearded, hirsute characters in loincloths of which he’d had one brief horrifying glance when Ralph had taken him on a tour of the place and pushed open the doors to the men’s swimming pool. Nor were there any strangers, male or female, lounging about in deshabille. The attendant, dressed in a suit, shirt, collar and tie like anyone else, took him into a private booth, bade him remove his shirt and directed him to lie prone on a padded table beneath a crisp white sheet. The hot glove, which was supposed to excite the muscles of his lower back (and, when he turned over, his much-abused abdomen), actually felt good. The shocks it administered were minimal, and the warmth was soothing. Afterward, he was instructed to dress himself but for his jacket, and roll up his sleeves and trousers so that he could immerse his forearms and lower legs in the elevated buckets of water that comprised the sinusoidal bath.

He complied passively. And the whole thing would have been at least tolerable if it hadn’t been for the presence of a second patient, not exactly a stranger, but a man to whom Will had said so little he might just as well have been: Homer Praetz. They were seated side by side, Will and the industrial giant, in identical chairs that had been tricked out with four white galvanized buckets and the electrical wires that provided the healing charge. Homer Praetz had evidently just come from the pool or one of the more vulgar baths, as his hair was wet and he was wearing an enormous blue cotton bathrobe. “Lightbody, isn’t it?” he’d cried, taking Will’s hand in a moist and flabby grip. “Getting a bit of the old sinusoidal, eh?” And then he’d lowered his voice: “Can’t say that I like this part of it, myself. Feels like ants crawling up and down my legs. And my privates, that’s what kills me. Hurts a bit, too—nothing much, but enough to make you wince from time to time.”

He heaved a sigh and threw off his robe to reveal a tumultuous
puckered belly hung with twisted black hairs, and then he stalked round the room in his loincloth two or three times as if to show it off properly before easing himself into the chair beside Will. Casually, as if he were dipping a shirt in a washtub, he lifted first one blocky pale dead-looking foot into its receptacle, and then the other. “Anything for a cure, eh?” he whispered, giving Will a wink.

But Will didn’t have a chance to respond. He could feel it in that instant, the attendant in his dark proper suit throwing the switch, the Chief’s big generator whirling round somewhere in the depths of the building, and this tiny little jolt nibbling at him, biting, pinching, kneading, and it wasn’t like ants at all—no, Will thought, closing his eyes on the whole strange business, it was like fish, fish in a pond, a school of hungry fishes pecking at each little etiolated hair up and down the length of his weary limbs till he felt he was being eaten alive.

On Saturday, the day of Will’s emancipation from the laxative diet, the Chief had arranged for a formal “New Arrivals Banquet,” a regular feature of the Social Department, which was intended to introduce the newcomers to a select group of a hundred or so of the more distinguished patients. Will and Eleanor had been asked to attend—together, arm in arm, just like husband and wife, like lovers, like cohabitors of the proud brick house his father had built for them on Parsonage Lane—and Eleanor had been cajoled into preparing a brief speech about her work in organizing the Peterskill Ladies’ Biologic Living Society. Will was elated. Not only for the opportunity to spend some time with his wife—and show her off, in all her rare beauty and sophistication, to the ailing millionaires—but because, at long last, the psyllium seeds and the seaweed were behind him.

Of course, it wasn’t all sunshine and roses—there was still the matter of the new diet to contend with. The milk diet, that is. The diet that commenced after his morning enema with exactly four ounces of pure white whole milk from the immaculate Sanitarium Dairy, where the cows were vacuum-cleaned twice a day to prevent even the remotest possibility of a speck of dander or bovine hair winding up in the finished
product. The diet that prescribed an identical four-ounce glass of milk every fifteen minutes during the waking hours, and every hour on the hour throughout the night, to continue for as long as Drs. Linniman and Kellogg deemed necessary. The trouble was, Will had never much liked milk. Not even as a child. And for the past fifteen years or so the only use he’d had for it was in the odd milk punch or to lighten his morning coffee—if he put away three quarts a year it would have surprised him. And now he was soaked with it. Blotted, drenched, saturated. Now it would be milk, milk, milk, till it came out his pores and he dreamed of nothing but good pasture and pendulous dugs. Still, even in the context of that grim dietary, there was some cause for hope: Dr. Kellogg—ever genial, ever twinkling, ever coruscating with health and positive thought—had hinted at a change, somewhere down the road, and if conditions warranted, to the grape diet.

The banquet was held on the fourth floor, in a lofty meeting room just across the corridor from the main dining hall. The room was tricked out with the same sort of intercolumnar palms and exclamatory banners (
THE BATTLE CREEK IDEA
!) as the main hall, but here the tables were longer, seating twenty and more, and a podium had been installed on a dais against the far wall. Eleanor wore a green silk dress to bring out her eyes, with an ivory tatted collar and reticule to match. She was beautiful in her fluid, long-necked way, like some exotic bird, and Will had to admit that the Sanitarium was doing her good—if you didn’t know, you’d never have guessed there was anything at all the matter with her. As he did every night, though it was only to bolt seeds or sip milk, Will dressed in a snowy shirtfront and a fine old-fashioned black tailcoat.

They were seated near the head of one of the long tables, which was already occupied by a party that included Mrs. Tindermarsh, Admiral Nieblock of the Naval Academy, Upton Sinclair, the novelist and reformer, and the Great Masticator himself, Horace B. Fletcher. The lighting was muted, with little shaded lamps set at intervals along the walls and candelabra on the tables. Will looked approvingly on the carnations, the glittering silver and crystal, and he restrained the urge to dig into a bowl of salted almonds that had been set out along with celery, olives and bran in sugar bowls to whet the guests’ appetites. For
the first time in as long as he could remember he felt a twinge of hunger, but the Doctor’s voice spoke in his head—
No almonds for you, sir, no celery or bran even, not yet, not yet
—and he folded his hands and waited patiently for the first of his supernumerary servings of milk.