The Road to Wellville (26 page)

The meal itself—the meal the others were allowed to eat, that is—was haute San all the way, from the semimiraculous hothouse-grown-sliced-tomato-garnished-with-everything hors d’oeuvre to the vegetable meat loaf, sweet peppers stuffed with cream cheese, brick ice cream and after-dinner Health Koko. Will found the woman seated to his left (a Mrs. Prendergast, of Hackensack, New Jersey) to be perfectly charming, in addition to being a dog lover, and he regaled her in his echolalic tones with stories of Dick the wirehaired terrier and his various feats and doggy pranks. The man across from him was all right, too—a big red-faced Scotch-tweed character with a bad heart who seemed fixated on the subject of General Castro, the truculent Latin American dictator, but was perfectly happy to give a point-by-point analysis of Army’s chances in the forthcoming Army-Navy game when Will abruptly changed the subject. And if there was a focal point at their end of the table, it had to be Eleanor. She shined, she really did, arching her neck and cocking her head to deliver one of her little verbal thrusts, or stopping cold in the middle of a sentence to give her auditors her best cross-eyed look of comic distress. Gardening, that’s what it was. The fellow to her right—Will didn’t catch his name—could talk of nothing but his estate and the improvements he’d made to it, the avenue of plane trees and the rhododendron arbor ad nauseam. Eleanor made mincemeat of him.

When it came time for the talk, the toastmistress, a lady doctor so salubrious she could have posed for the “Sweetheart of the Corn” portrait, raised her glass of prune juice and welcomed Will and Eleanor, Mrs. Tindermarsh and some dozen or so others to Battle Creek. “Here’s to the thrill of an ice mitt in a cold gray dawn,” she said, her glass held high, “to the tingle of that sinusoidal current up your spine and the rewards of a meatless life!” Next was a square block of a woman, the stone before it’s been hewn, a woman so dense she made Mrs. Tindermarsh look petite. She was a missionary from Iceland, as it turned out, and she recited a Norwegian-dialect poem about stewed prunes and quick
cold trips to the outhouse under a starveling moon. Then it was Eleanor’s turn.

Will could feel his heart thumping as she ascended the dais and arranged her notes on the podium. He’d never been much at public speaking—had twice failed elocution, in fact—and he marveled at her self-possession as she stood there serenely and took the measure of all those strangers—dignitaries and bigwigs at that. She didn’t even have to clear her throat or take a sip of water—she merely began, in a soft conversational tone that projected beautifully throughout the room. “I want to talk to you tonight, ladies and gentlemen, friends all, of my life before Battle Creek, of my own personal Dark Ages, when all my holy temples were besieged by the barbarian hordes of gluttony, flesh foods and sleepless nights. I was a lost soul. Twenty times a day I found myself in tears over things so trivial I’m almost ashamed to mention them—though I will, because I want you to understand just how very sick and lorn I was before I discovered Dr. Kellogg and La Vie Simple.” She paused, her eyes huge, her mouth set in a pathetic, determined pout. “A torn postage stamp. The fine exquisite age lines in one of my Sèvres cups. A bird in a cage. The thought of a fen in the woods, dreary and forgotten, with the night closing round it like an apparition. A pen with a broken nib. Aigrettes. Apricots. The way the sun would slant through the parlor windows in late afternoon and strike the portrait of my mother in her best bonnet and gown. These, my friends, were the sorts of things that would set me off.”

She went on in this vein for five minutes or so, and it was charming and frank and there wasn’t a listener in the room unaffected by what she was saying, but she was speaking to the initiated, to a society of neurasthenics, and why in God’s name was she being so sanctimonious about it? Will shifted uncomfortably in his seat, wondering when she would lighten things up with a flash of her satiric wit, or even clown a bit, as the Icelandic lady had, but he waited in vain. She dwelled on her symptoms and her sorrows in a way that smacked of symptomitis—but, then, Will supposed, that was part of the rhetorical strategy. Play their heartstrings for all it was worth, and then bring out the big guns in a thundering salvo in praise of the little goateed saint who made it all possible.

As proud as he was of her, he nonetheless found himself drifting a bit as she worked her way into the regenerate mode, but he snapped to attention when the appellation “my dear husband” dropped from her lips. Her “dear husband” was only now going through what she’d suffered in struggling toward the light, and the taste for meat, for liquor—even, she feared, for narcotic drugs—ran deep with him.

Will was mortified. She was looking him dead in the face, a, soft compassionate glow illuminating her till she seemed to radiate like some saint in the Roman church, and every eye in the house was on him. He wanted to crawl under a chair, become a disciple of Father Kneipp in Worishofen and run barefoot through the snow, wanted to flog himself, wanted, more than anything, to smoke, swill whiskey, devour chops and steaks and gouty drumsticks in despite of them all. He shrank against the physiologic tines of his chair.

Eleanor went on to detail his excesses and the depth of despair to which he’d sunk even while supporting her in her struggle for wellness at the San. She told how she’d found him in his besotted state, his clothes spoiled, dog and servants alienated, the whole neighborhood in an uproar. And then she drew a breath so deep and piteous it was as if the entire congregation were breathing through her. “And it was me!” she cried suddenly, flinging her arms out in extenuation. “All me. I was the one to blame. In my selfishness, in my illness, in my passion to think positively and make myself well at all costs, I neglected my pillar, my partner, my husband. He was falling even as I took the first tottering steps toward recovery.”

There was no sound in the room. No breath was expelled, no foot tapped, neither cough nor sniffle intruded on the awestruck silence that gripped the audience. “But that’s not the end of the story, my dear friends and supporters, and those of you just now embarking on the adventure of biologic living. No, let me tell you that he sits here among us tonight.” Pause, two beats. “Will?
Will?
” Was she addressing him? Was she pointing him out? Did she expect him to stand up and be welcomed into the flock? She was. And she did. “Will, stand up please, darling, won’t you?”

His knees were rusted hinges, his legs as ponderous as anchor chains. Applause sounded round him, cries of “Bravo!” and “That’s a boy!”
And then Eleanor was there, sweetly, sweetly, all in sweetness, and this time it was she who was embracing him.

Post-lecture, there were refreshments and the usual palaver. The hand pressers and well-wishers clustered six deep round Eleanor, while Will, shrinking into a corner, was assailed by a battery of total strangers who hemmed and hawed and shuffled and took him by the elbow and patted him on the back, offering up volumes of unsolicited advice, charitable thoughts and expressions of maternal concern. It was agonizing, and it lasted through three separate feedings of milk, a measurement of time that already seemed as regular and natural to Will as the chiming of the bells at St. Eustace’s in Peterskill. When it was over, finally, when the last long sober well-meaning face had finished hanging over his with its concatenation of dreary advice and maunderings about Uncle Bill’s drunks and Aunt Molly’s furtive tippling, Will found himself alone with Eleanor, striding purposefully out the door and up the corridor.

But where were they going?

He could feel her glowing at his side, generating a current all her own, warmer than the sinusoidal bath, hotter than the hot glove. She was pleased with herself. Very pleased. She’d done her part for the San—she was a booster if ever there was one—and the audience had liked her, sincerely liked her. She was a success. The talk of the place. “Did you see how they crowded round me at the end? I could barely catch my breath. Will, oh, Will,” she gushed, slipping her arm through his and leaning girlishly into him, “it was such an honor to stand up there before people like the Sinclairs—that was Meta there at the end of the table, the dark striking gypsy-looking woman? And of course Horace B. Fletcher. And did you see the funny little man in black broadcloth, looked as if he were attending a funeral? That was Almus Overstreet, the banker—and do you know what he said to me afterward, sweetest man in the world, really?”

Will held on to his wife’s arm. He liked the feel of it, resting lightly in the crook of his own, her body moving in tandem with his, and
suddenly he felt charged with the electricity running through her. “No, what did he say? Let me guess—he wants to make you a partner?” He couldn’t restrain his laugh, and it was too loud, too exuberant, a bray almost, but he felt so good all of a sudden he couldn’t help himself. “Or, no, he’s going to send you out on the temperance circuit, advising wives how to resurrect their fallen husbands.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, Will. Though it’s charming, and you’re charming, and I’m so glad you’re here.” Pause, smile; her lips and teeth: God, how he loved her. “He told me it was the most moving speech he’d heard since John L. Sullivan had stood up at an Elks Lodge supper and described how drink had ruined him. And he said you were the luckiest man alive and he had no doubt—he’d bet half his fortune on it—that you’d recover with a wife like me to look after you. And wasn’t that sweet, though of course he was just being polite….”

They were at the elevator doors now, the loquacious day man having given way to an older, more reserved gentleman who looked a bit out of place in the tight-fitting parrot-green uniform he shared with the bell captain and his boys. “Polite or not, El,” Will was saying as he handed his wife into the elevator, “he was right—I
am
the luckiest man alive. And I’m glad, I really am, that you thought to bring me here with you.” He had a whole speech prepared, a sort of act of contrition he’d been silently rehearsing as she stood there at the lectern, an acknowledgment that he’d been difficult, recalcitrant even, a negative thinker, but that now, though perhaps she’d been a bit more personal than he would have liked in front of all those strangers, he’d begun to see the light. The words were on his lips, but he never got the chance to deliver them. “What floor?” the night man asked in a thick lugubrious tone, as if he were asking what plot they’d like to be buried in at the Oak Hill Cemetery, and Will was suddenly thrown into confusion.

Eleanor answered for him. “Two,” she murmured.

“Yes, of course,” Will whispered, giving her arm a squeeze, “I’ll see you to your door.” And then, as the elevator man stiffly drew the gate across, he dropped his voice still further and spoke against the warmth of her ear: “God, it’s like courting all over again.”

Eleanor said nothing to this, but she gave a look that took him by
surprise. It was a look he knew from some distant period in their lives, a time before Coffee Neuralgia, enervated nerves and her sad fruitless pregnancy. He felt his heart skip a beat.

He might have hesitated at the door, the Doctor’s strictures worked into the grain of the wood, the brass of the doorknob, the paint on the walls, but he didn’t. That look encouraged him and he wafted in behind her like a vernal breeze and swept her up in his gangling embrace before she could resist. He held her there against him, the green silk of her dress a whisper of friction against his dinner jacket, and he could feel the ache of her uncorseted and newly physiologic body beneath her skirts and petticoats and the last thinnest undergarment of all. He was desperate. He was trembling. He bent to kiss her.

“But Will…” Her voice was squeezed shut, the gasp of a pearl diver coming up for air. “Darling, dear, I need to … Frank—that is, Dr. Linniman—you see, he has me on the diuretic diet this week and I need to … need to … use the … bathroom….”

Will was a tumble of apology, jumping back from her as if he’d burned himself at the stove, and suddenly he didn’t know what to do with his hands, with his feet, with the whole tense bundle of leaks and wants and hurts that incorporated him. He waited in one of the Doctor’s chairs, one knee crossed over the other, while waters flowed and burbled from behind the closed door and Eleanor made her secret ablutions.

“That was quite a speech, El,” Will observed, addressing the null plane of the door, and he was talking just to hear himself. “A bit close to the bone, maybe—you barely mentioned the Peterskill Ladies’ Biologic Living Society.” From beyond the door, the sound of water, mysterious, enticing. “I was mortified, El. I was. I mean, in front of all those strangers …”

The door opened with a soft erotic click and Eleanor stepped lightly into the room. She was barefooted and she was wearing a nightgown; her hair was combed out and trailing down her shoulders in the way of some exotic witch or geisha. He knew that nightgown—pink flannel with a revelation of lace at the bodice and sleeves—and the recognition excited him.
My wife is in her nightgown
, he told himself,
and we’re in the same room together.
Then he caught a glimpse of her ankles, brief,
scintillating, white flesh and rippling movement, and he was up out of the chair.