The Road to Wellville (58 page)

E
leanor wasn’t eating. Now that she’d switched her affiliation more or less permanently to Will’s table, he had an opportunity to observe her at meals, and he was alarmed to see that she never did much more than stir the food with her fork, as if she were an artist mixing paint. She’d grown thinner, and that was alarming, too. Her cheekbones, always prominent, were stark against her eyes now, and the flesh fell away from them to the corners of her mouth with the harsh tympanic tension of hide stretched over a last. Her wrists were two pairs of thimbles bound together with a cord of skin and her eyes were haunted, growing bigger and more luminous by the day. One evening at dinner he noticed that she wasn’t wearing her wedding ring, and he was mortified, but didn’t mention it at the table with the others present. When he took her aside in the corridor and asked about it, she fished the diamond band from her purse and showed him why: it would no more fit her finger than it would a pencil.

“But what’s the matter, El?” he asked her then. “You’re here to gain weight, not lose it.”

She shrugged, looked up at him sheepishly, and her eyes drank up her face. “I’m eating,” she said.

“You’re skin and bone.”

“You should talk.”

“All right, granted, but I’ve had stomach problems, you know that—and at least I’m eating solid food now, even if it is bran mush or wet pasteboard or whatever it is they serve up around here, but you’re eating next to nothing, as far as I can see.”

She was leaning into the wall, pouting, playing with her necklace. “I’m not hungry,” she murmured and smiled past him, showing off the full complement of her even white teeth to an elegantly dressed couple passing by.

“Not hungry?” Will was incredulous. He was pained, outraged. “But you’re the biologic liver, you’re the vegetarian princess, you’re the one who thinks mock oysters and Sanitas fricassee are the height of culinary art—”

She was already moving, her face composed, sweeping serenely along the hallway as if she hadn’t heard a word he’d said. But she had. Because she stopped before she’d gone ten paces and swung round on him. “It’s temporary, I assure you,” she said. “I’m not feeling hungry right now, that’s all. Can’t you give me a moment’s peace?”

Later that night, after shuffling round the halls in his slippers by way of exercise and trying, unsuccessfully, to get through the first page of
The Awakening of Helena Ritchie
(it was putting him to sleep), he confided in Irene. “I’m worried about Eleanor,” he told her, lingering over his ablutions in the bathroom while she tidied up his room and turned back the bed for him. “She’s not eating.”

Irene appeared in the doorway. “Yes, I’ve noticed it myself,” she said, watching as he dredged his molars with the toothbrush, “and I’ve seen this sort of thing before in other strong-willed women. Women like your wife, that is.”

Will paused, removed the toothbrush from his mouth. “You’ve seen it before? What do you mean?” He gargled, talking around a froth of tooth powder before bending to rinse his mouth. If Eleanor had lost weight in recent weeks, Irene had gained it, rounding out gloriously where it counted most. She’d always been robust, but now she was fairly bursting at the seams, big-shouldered and -bosomed, her thighs standing out in vivid relief against the pale firm clutch of her uniform.

“It’s not pathological, I don’t think. She’s not vomiting, is she? Purposely, I mean?”

“No, of course not. Or not that I know of.”

Irene was on the far side of the room now, arranging things that had already been twice arranged, never really at ease alone with him in the room anymore—though the door was always left open for the sake of propriety, and in accordance with the Chief’s mandate. Since that long-ago evening of the kiss, she’d shied away from physical contact with him, unless it was for strictly medical purposes—monitoring his condition, administering grape, lactobacillus and enema, nursing him through his postoperative trauma. They were friends, certainly—he felt more warmly toward her than ever—but there were no more gifts, no more kisses. He wished there were. “You know, Mr. Lightbody,” she breathed, turning round as he entered the room, settled himself in the armchair and idly lifted
The Awakening of Helena Ritchie
from the table, “the physiologic life takes tremendous courage, a real effort of the will—”

He smiled. Crossed his legs. “Who should know better than I?”

Nurse Graves returned the smile, and it was a smile that acknowledged the magnitude of his own sacrifice in his personal war for physiologic equilibrium—he bore the battle scars on his abdomen, after all. “Of course you do,” she said in her husky whisper of a voice, “it was just a rhetorical figure … but what I mean is that a very strong-willed person can sometimes take the struggle too far, from engaging in sound eudaemonic practices to the point of denying the body its essential needs. If one conquers the urge for meat, tobacco, alcohol, coffee, tea, pharmacopoeia of any kind, then perhaps the will clamps down even further, do you see?”

Will didn’t see. Not at all. He’d given up a whole world and what had it gotten him? A partially ruined stomach instead of an utterly ruined one. And for what? To be able to eat corn pulp and gruel?

She tried a new tack. “Women are particularly suggestible. If dietary control can cure autointoxication and neurasthenia, as well as practically any other malady you can think of, then it follows—to the overreaching mind, that is—that the more rigid the control over the appetites, the more complete the cure.”

Will lifted his eyes from the first paragraph of the novel, a paragraph he’d read over at least eight times in the course of the past hour without
registering a word of it, and wondered aloud if this was what was wrong with Eleanor—and, if so, what was the cure?

Irene was moving briskly now—she had other patients to irrigate and put to bed, and in any case, she was no great friend of Eleanor, who’d tried to have her removed from all contact with Will until Will got wind of it and overruled her—and at first she didn’t answer. Her brow was furrowed with concentration as she measured out the ingredients for the enema, and Will just sat back and admired her. He’d been feeling increasingly randy of late—in fact, he’d had to cut back his use of the Heidelberg Belt to three hours a night, rather than wearing it straight through till morning—and Nurse Graves excited him more than ever. Especially given the new lushness of her figure and the sad fact that Eleanor showed no interest in him whatever—all he had to do was poke his face in the door and she would put her hands to her temples and mutter, “Not now, Will, please—I’m a shattered woman.”

Irene turned to him with the venerable tool and an official smile and he felt his bowels loosening at the sight of it. “I’ll speak to her doctor,” she said finally in her puffiest, breathiest, tiniest little scratch of a voice. “And now”—and the soft soothing whisper of the words made him tingle as if it were seltzer water and not blood percolating through his veins—“are you ready for your irrigation?”

Another meal.

Yet another.

And how many meals constituted a life, Will wondered, picking at his Protose hash and macaroni cutlets, how many four-and-a-half-ounce servings of mush, paste, gruel and boiled oats? Outside, it was a day of insistent beauty—the angels spoke on the breeze, every bud on every tree, shrub, flower and weed was firing perfume into the air, every bird singing—while here, in the dining hall, biologic living went on with a vengeance. Oh, it was elegant enough, well-to-do gentlemen with facial hair and English suits, ladies in the latest fashions from New York and Paris, a warm murmurous undercurrent of chitchat and higher discourse, but was it life, life as it was meant to be lived, raw and untamed and
exhilarating, or just some glassed-under simulacrum? Will lifted the fork to his mouth, inserted a tasteless lump of roughage and sighed.

Eleanor sat to his left, insouciantly poking at a yogurt-drenched mound of fava beans and brightening only to the conversation. Mrs. Tindermarsh was seated beside her, and Badger in Miss Muntz’s former spot. Hart-Jones, brick-faced and obtrusive as ever, sat at Will’s right, and their new dining companion occupied Homer Praetz’s old place. But that was all right by Will, that was just fine—Mrs. Hookstratten was like a letter from home. Better. She lived and breathed and spoke of the one place in the world he most wanted to be. She’d filled him in on everything from his father’s health (vibrant) to the quality of the loaves at Shapiro’s bakery (declining) to the status of the Peterskill Yacht Club’s forthcoming season (ambitious). Peterskillian society had suffered in their absence, she assured him, but everyone was hoping for his and Eleanor’s speedy recovery and return—at least in time for the theater season. The duration of her own stay was indefinite—she didn’t like to be away from her flower beds—but, of course, Dr. Kellogg would be the final arbiter there.

She was telling him about a new shop that had opened on Division Street when Hart-Jones distracted her and she fell prey to the general conversation. Will let her go. Lost in a fugue of Peterskill, he stared down at his plate, fork poised over his water-lily salad, remembering how the late-afternoon sun would reach through the windows of the parlor in the house on Parsonage Lane, and how, in happier days, he would sit there in the golden shower of it and browse through
Collier’s
or
The Saturday Evening Post
while the small comforting sounds of the household ticked round him and Dick the wirehaired terrier sat at his feet. And how was Dick holding up?, he wondered. The poor dog. Left in the company of servants, no one to rub his belly or throw a ball to him on the great rolling emerald tongue of the lawn.

“The Sinclairs?” Mrs. Hookstratten suddenly exclaimed, and Will came back to the moment to see her throw her hands up in a gesture of shock and amazement. “
They
were here? Truly?” She was a small woman—smaller than Will had remembered her—with shrewd slicing eyes and a complexion that was bathed in milk. She was sixty if she was a day, and there wasn’t a line in her face. “Oh”—and she clasped
her hands at her breast now—“I can hardly believe it. What was
she
like, Eleanor?”

There followed Eleanor’s description of Meta Sinclair, a description that lauded her beauty at the same time that it undermined it, adjectives like “gypsyish,” “Arabian” and “exotic” applied to her various features and body parts, while her wardrobe was simultaneously admired and dismissed.

“Well, you know, of course, what a scandal they caused in New Jersey,” Mrs. Hookstratten confided, lowering her voice, “in that colony or commune or whatever they called it.” This was gossip, high and delicious, and she set her fork down in her Nut Ragout to concentrate on it.

Hart-Jones, who knew nothing of the subject and wouldn’t have recognized the novelist and his wife if they were sitting in his lap, broke in with a braying and typically asinine comment, but Badger cut him off in a voice of high dudgeon: “
I
was there at Helicon Home, and I can assure you, madame, that the experiment in communal living was a noble and progressive one.”

Eleanor held her peace, but gave Badger a congratulatory little smile.

“But there were accusations of all sorts of improper goings-on there,” Mrs. Hookstratten countered, “of sun worship, nudity, free love—”

Free love
. The term hung over the table like a visible thing, palpable, shining. For a moment no one spoke and Will turned over in his mind all that he knew about the Sinclairs’ experiment in communal living—which began and ended with what he’d read in the newspapers. It was a big story at the time. They’d purchased a rather grandiose property in Englewood, a former preparatory school, and set up a colony on Socialist principles, pooling the resources of their forty members—New Thoughtists, vegetarians, Single-Taxers, suffragettes, assorted college professors, muckrakers and Socialists of every stripe. The press made a big to-do over the issue of free love, to which Sinclair apparently subscribed, and titillated readers throughout the Hudson Valley and beyond with visions of midnight rendezvous and wives available for the asking. It was all very exciting in a voyeuristic way, but then the place mysteriously burned to the ground and that was the end of that. Until Will and Eleanor arrived at the San, that is, and saw Meta Sinclair wandering the halls
like Ophelia, gliding along with a natural and unconscious grace, her bouquet of hair wild on her shoulders, her cat’s eyes fixed on some glittering thing in the distance. Will tried to picture her—Mrs. Sinclair, Meta—in the arms of another man and relieved of the flowing gowns and Wraps she favored, and felt himself going faint with the possibilities.

“Nonsense,” Badger rasped. “Upton is a great and forward-thinking man—a vegetarian champion—and as respectable as anyone at this table. Yes, he was a heliophile—or, rather, Meta was, and he went along for her sake—but who isn’t? I certainly am, and no less an authority than our own Dr. Kellogg is a vigorous supporter of sunbathing—and that means, by definition, with as little sartorial impediment as possible—and not just sunbathing but all other forms of light therapy as well. And is there anything even remotely scandalous about Dr. Kellogg?”