The Road to Wellville (32 page)

He brought his hands together, as if in prayer, dipped his head. “I thank you.”

And then the applause started up, startled, shocked, an applause
surprised by itself but growing increasingly firmer, steadier, more thankful and heartfelt, an offering to the one man who would stand amongst them and speak the painful but unvarnished truth. Dr. Kellogg bowed his head in humble acknowledgment. A full minute elapsed before there was any diminution in their enthusiasm, and then, as the applause began finally to die down and the Doctor gathered up his notes, a hand shot up in the front row and a voice called out over the clamor: “A question, Dr. Kellogg—will you take a question from the audience?”

The request had a calming effect, and the applause fell away to a spatter and then it ceased altogether. The Doctor focused on a man in his early twenties with something of an effete air about him. He wore a thin black mustache, waxed at the ends, and an artist’s plume of hair at the point of his chin. He lowered his arm languidly and rose to put the question—but who was he, now? John Harvey Kellogg knew, he knew them all. Let’s see: Crampton? Cruthers? Crowley? No, no.
Krinck
, that was it.
John Hampton Krinck, Jr.; Hyde Park, New York; morphia addiction, venereal disease, autointoxication.
Oh, yes. A libertine of the first stripe, a reader of the plays of Shaw and that tripe of Dreiser’s. “Yes, Mr. Krinck?” the Doctor said, bracing himself for a challenge.

Young Krinck stood there a moment, his shoulders slumped forward as if they’d been molded of butter, a sick sly rebellious look sunk into his sensualist’s face. His voice was blown through a reed, nasal and nasty. “I’m very sorry, Doctor, but don’t you seem to be advocating extinction for the race? If sexual connection is to be avoided at all cost, even within the bonds of marriage, then what hope is there for us, outside of virgin birth?”

This provoked a titter—certainly the impudent young mooncalf meant it as a provocation, a sick joke, the sort of thing George might have conceived or enjoyed—but no one in that crowd dared so much as a smile. The Doctor was angry. This addict, this pampered, snot-nosed sponge of craven desires and self-indulgence, this notorious black sheep who was a disgrace to one of the wealthiest and most respected families in New York, dared to twit him? Ha! He could crush him, demolish him with a single phrase—but no, that wasn’t the physiologic way. This was a learning experience—for all concerned, even Mr. Krinck. Demonstrating a lofty restraint, the Doctor held the young man’s
gaze a moment, perfectly straight-faced, before glancing up to play to the audience. “Virgin birth, did you say? Well, as a scientist, I hardly find it feasible”—pause for the appreciative chuckle—”but as a moralist and physician, I couldn’t wish for anything more.”

As usual, Dab was waiting for him in the corridor, and as usual, the secretary was in a huffing, puffing, sweat-running dither about something or other. Whatever it was, the Doctor didn’t want to hear about it. He was coasting on the glory of the moment, and he felt his heart sink as Dab came thumping up to him, wringing his hands and sputtering inarticulately—
Not now
, he was thinking,
not today
—but he allowed his secretary to fall into stride beside him and paused just long enough to growl, “All right, Poult, let’s have it—what’s the problem?”

But there wasn’t just a single problem—the problems, plural and multifarious, each swelled to crisis proportions and each required his immediate attention. First, there was George. Apparently agitated over the Doctor’s earlier dismissal of him, the boy had made use of the intervening hours to get himself violently and shamefully drunk, and he was now crouched in the middle of the public street just opposite the San’s main entrance, hurling epithets at the crème de la crème of health-reform society as they climbed into their conveyances in the San’s circular drive. “He’s calling them ‘gizzardites’ and ‘chaff chewers,’ Doctor, and the bellman reports that he actually threw a projectile at one of the patients.”

They were striding up the hallway toward the main lobby, Christmas glitter spangling the walls, the genteel clamor of the lobby opening up around them. The Doctor fixed his eyes straight ahead, struggling to control himself. Every word out of Dab’s mouth was a straight pin jammed into his nerve endings—he had to rest, he had to; no mere mortal could cope with all this. “Projectile?” he said, striding along furiously, nodding curtly at this doctor or that.

“Uh, actually, Chief,” Dab gasped, doing his best to keep up, “it was a corn-flake box—one of your brother’s—and it was stuffed with, uh, well,
corncobs
, sir.
Used
cobs, sir, if you catch my meaning.”

John Harvey Kellogg stopped dead in his tracks. A patient in a wheelchair simpered at him—
Mrs.? Mrs.? Oh, who gives a damn!
—and he ignored her. “Used?” he repeated.

Dab studied his hands. “He must have got, uh, into a, uh, latrine somewhere, and, uh, and then—”

The Doctor drew in a breath so sharp it might have been his last. “God!” he cried. “Damn that boy, damn him, damn him a thousand times!” Twenty heads turned and as quickly turned away again. The Doctor was in motion now, marching across the lobby like an infantryman with fixed bayonet. As he entered the far corridor, striding angrily for his office, he stopped and whirled suddenly on his secretary. “Lock him up,” he said. “Call Farrington and have him thrown in jail. But keep it quiet, understand?” Then he turned on his heels and spun into the office.

Dab was right behind him.

There was more. The furnace had failed in the San’s hothouses and the tomatoes, okra, mango trees and chrysanthemums were freezing; a Mr. Smotkine of Sedro Woolley, Washington, had broken a tooth on a piece of the Doctor’s patented zwieback and was threatening a lawsuit; and Lillian the chimp had locked Murphy in her cage, ripped Dr. Distaso’s pant leg from cuff to crotch and was now loose and running amuck in the experimental kitchens … and then there was the situation with the Christmas goose.

In all his life, through all the crises he’d faced, even the mysterious fire that had left the San in ashes just five years ago, the Doctor had never felt himself so close to the breaking point. It was too much. Too, too much. He’d attained the sanctuary of his desk, and he stood behind it now, the eyeshade clamped firmly in place. “Situation?” he repeated, and he heard the quaver in his own voice. “What situation?”

“Sir?”

“The goose. What’s wrong with the goose?”

“It looks a bit peaked, Doctor. And it won’t eat. Murphy seems to feel it’s caught cold, and we wouldn’t want a repetition of the problem with the Thanksgiving turkey, at least I felt you wouldn’t, and I thought you ought to know.”

Just what he needed. The Thanksgiving bird had been a major embarrassment,
the dining room already half filled with dutifully Fletcherizing patients when one of the nurses discovered the corpse—and how to explain that one to his physiologic novices? If he couldn’t even keep a turkey alive, what did that say for Grandma and Aunt Emmeline? As a distraction, he’d brought the Christmas goose in ahead of schedule and arrayed it in the same spot, under a banner that read:
IS HIS GOOSE COOKED? NOT AT THE BATTLE CREEK SANITARIUM
. What a debacle. Next thing he knew, one of the patients would turn up dead. “All right, all right!” he barked suddenly, and he felt his stomach take a decidedly unphysiologic dip. His hands were trembling, actually trembling, as if he were some sort of coffee fiend or something. It was the moment of truth.

The Doctor was equal to it. Who else? He fought down the negative thoughts that had threatened to drown him all day, reached deep within him and somehow managed to summon the strength to fight back, as he always did, indomitable, indefatigable, positive-thinking and right-living, the one man among the millions of the world to prosecute this crusade and see it through to the end. He was a reformer, a titan, a tower of strength. All at once he was in command again, pacing the room like a panther, firing out orders, his voice powerful, clear, decisive: “Wrap the goose in a blanket and give her a yogurt-whey enema—clearly a case of anserine autointoxication; find a locksmith to release Murphy from the cage and get Barker out of bed and into that power plant,
tout de suite
—and have them mist all the plants so they’ll freeze hard on the surface, thereby preserving their vital parts; George to jail, as I said; offer Mr. Smotkine—odd name, that: is it Bohemian? Polish?—at any rate, offer Mr. Smotkine a year’s free supply of Health Koko and Sanitas Wheat Flakes if he’ll reconsider pressing his suit; and as for Lillian, well, I’ll take care of her myself. Understood?”

Dab was scribbling vigorously across the surface of his notepad, murmuring, “Yes, yes, of course,” and nodding his chins in unison—
he really should get the man to try radium emanation as a means of reducing; he was hardly an advertisement for the Sanitarium bill of fare
—when the Doctor looked up to see the gaunt, lust-haunted form of Will Lightbody framed in the open doorway. Lightbody was alone. He stood there, looking uncertain, the naked slabs of his hands dangling at his sides, his sickly
pale mortified features floating up out of the cheery backdrop of the hallway like the bad spot on an otherwise perfect piece of fruit. “Dr. Kellogg?” he boomed in his sepulchral tones, “do you have a minute?” He glanced at Dab and back again. “I need, I mean I want very much to discuss something with you—in private. About your lecture, I mean … but if this isn’t a convenient time …”

Now here was something else. Just as he was mobilizing his forces, just as he was calling up his inner resources to combat strange chances and put his nemeses to the sword, the Doctor found himself confronted with yet another disappointment. The man was a walking cadaver, a hound of venery, and he’d directly and flagrantly contravened his physician’s orders—and now he’d come crawling back. Dr. Kellogg felt something harden in him. He shooed Dab out of the office—”I’ll see to Lillian directly,” he called to the secretary’s retreating form, “keep everyone away from the kitchens”—and then he instructed Will to shut the door behind him and take a seat. The Doctor remained standing. “Yes, Mr. Lightbody? And what seems to be the problem?”

The man looked uneasy. He shifted in his seat, cleared his throat, produced a handkerchief and thoughtfully evacuated first one nostril, then the other.

The Doctor regarded him with a steely gaze. “I’m very sorry, sir, but I must advise you that I haven’t more than sixty seconds to consult with you at this juncture—several minor emergencies have arisen. You say, sir, that my lecture affected you. Have you not perhaps guessed the identity of the couple to whom I was referring?”

Lightbody gave him a blank look.

“Come, come, man,” the Doctor exploded, “don’t play innocent with me. I happen to know for a fact that on the night of November sixteen, overcome with your sick lusts, you inflicted yourself on your invalid wife, thereby risking her life—her
life
, I say—just as surely as if you’d held a knife to her throat. And you. Look at you. Your vital fluids depleted, your digestion ruined, the rotten scrawl of death written all over you.”

Ashen, the long bones of his legs chattering, Will Lightbody got unsteadily to his feet. “What are you saying?” he gasped. “I, I knew I was unwell, but I’m doing my best—it’s hardly fatal, is it, my condition?”

The Doctor grudged him even this—it was time to crack the whip. “It can be—it most certainly
will
be—if you don’t stop this nonsense.”

“Nonsense? But I haven’t—I deny it. I certainly did not ‘inflict’ myself on my wife, and I resent your tone and your implication….” He broke off in confusion, shifting his weight from foot to foot, his clothes hanging from him as if from a peg in the closet. “Or, well, maybe I did lose track of things there,” he admitted, his voice rattling in his throat, “you know how things are, between man and wife, that is—but there was no excitation of the nervous system, no consummation.” He faltered, tugged at his fingers, licked his lips. The cast in his eye gave him the look of a shying horse. When he spoke again, it was in a whisper. “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”

The chimp was amuck, the goose dying, George being carted off to jail, the heating plant in chaos and yet another lawsuit pending, and still the Doctor stood there. He’d heard some shameful revelations in his time, seen men—and women—at their worst, and he braced himself. “Go on,” he said, softening his tone.

“I don’t know what to say,” Lightbody murmured, hanging his head. “I was a slave to the baser appetites, I did come to Eleanor with marital, uh, relations in mind, I did turn a deaf ear on your warnings, and I hope you’ll forgive me and know that I’ll never, not until we’re … what I mean to say is, I failed.”

The Doctor was disgusted. It was just as he’d suspected—and the fool had missed his milk feedings all that night, too. How in God’s name did they expect to get well if they couldn’t follow instructions—even when under direct supervision? “Failed?” he repeated.

The great gangling sack of self-abuse and adolescent lusts that stood there before him flushed crimson even to the tips of his ears. He couldn’t look the Doctor in the eye. “I wasn’t a man,” he whispered.