The Road to Wellville (7 page)

BETTER YOURSELF IN BATTLE CREEK

   
Chapter 4   

F
ather. Hello, Father.

He’d give him
Father
—he’d give him a swift kick in the hind end, is what he’d do. God, he was disgusting. Nineteen years old and he looked sixty. Filthy, fetid, a sleeper in doorways and alleys like his mother before him. And wasn’t that meat on his breath? Meat? It was, of course it was, and it turned the Doctor’s stomach.

And his posture. His posture alone was enough to send John Harvey Kellogg through the roof—the concave chest, the drooping shoulders and slack jaw, the pigeon toes and knock knees—and that sick sly hangdog look even now creeping into his crapulous eyes. How many times had he admonished him to stand up straight like a human being instead of some infernal prancing ape? How many? And now look at him. Look at him!

The audience was coming up the hallway, Bigelow Jennings and Mrs. Tindermarsh at the front of the pack, trying to catch his eye, and Dab all the while wrestling with his high-pitched squeal of a voice: “Not here, Doctor, not here where everyone can see.”

People were beginning to take notice of them now, staff members and patients alike, some self-consciously averting their gaze, others openly gaping at this freak, this avatar of filth and degeneracy sprung up like a toadstool between their Chief and his secretary. It was maddening
. It was. For a long moment the Doctor stood frozen there in the middle of the wide gleaming terrazzo floor, the man of decision, crusader for the clean and the correct, brought to a grinding standstill. “George,” he said under his breath, and he spoke the name almost involuntarily, almost as if he couldn’t bear to individualize this lump of dejection before him.

George said nothing. He merely slouched there, ragged and twisted, ugly as a turnip, and grinned to show off his yellowed teeth and rotten gums.

It was too much. The boy was a walking, talking nightmare, the breathing refutation and antithesis of everything Dr. Kellogg and the Sanitarium stood for, an insult, a provocation, a slap in the face. Suddenly, before he knew what he was doing, the Doctor lashed out and snatched him by the arm, and in the next instant they were moving swiftly up the hallway toward the lobby, George hanging back sulkily, the Doctor’s grip like iron. “Come out of this, George, come out of this
now
,” the Doctor hissed.

“I want money,” George spat, showing his teeth again, and the Doctor tugged at his arm as if at the leash of a willful dog.

Through the lobby, the Doctor said to himself, and into my office in the far corridor, a hundred and twenty steps to safety. They’ll think he’s a charity case, that’s all, and then he’ll be gone, out the door and into the night. “Money,” he muttered, tossing it back at him out of the corner of his mouth. “You’ve had all the money you’ll ever get from me.”

George was striding along beside him now, a full-grown man, longer of leg, and for all his lousy posture a good head taller than the Doctor. “We’ll see about that,” he sneered.

They were just emerging from the corridor and entering the grand expanse of the lobby, with its careening bellhops, its benches and palms, the crush of luggage and new arrivals. Groups of patients lounged about, contentedly sipping milk and peach nectar from long-stemmed glasses; nurses bent over hypochondriacal matrons in wheelchairs; a murmur of voices whispered of the stock market, the theater, Caruso and Farrar, and the newest motorcars from Ford and Olds. There was Dr. Baculum with that Pittsburgh woman, wife of the steel magnate, what was her
name?—Wallford? Walters? Walldorp?—and Admiral Nieblock at the telegraph cubicle with the Crouder woman, a blur of nurses, Meta Sinclair. Dr. Kellogg moved purposively through the room, nodding, waving, nothing in the world the matter, a bit of a hurry, that was all, some poor unfortunate at his elbow, and of course he knew they didn’t want to see this side of things, but the Sanitarium
was
a charitable institution, after all, and their Chief was a saint, they had to understand that, a veritable saint.

Halfway across—fifty people at least crowding round the desk, the staircase, lining the benches and flowing in and out of the Palm Garden at the rear—George suddenly jerked his arm from the Doctor’s grasp and came to a halt. “One hundred dollars, Dad, Pater, Pa—one hundred dollars or I scream my lungs out right here and now.”

Fifty pairs of eyes were on them, the Doctor all grins and smiles, throwing kisses, winking, waving, nodding, everything under control. One sharp glance at his son: “In my office. We’ll discuss it there.”

Dab crowded them. George wouldn’t budge. “
SHALL I
,” he suddenly barked, his voice a ragged tear in the genteel fabric of the room before it dropped again to a whisper, “Shall I raise my voice?”

No one got the better of John Harvey Kellogg, no one. He was master of all he surveyed, Chief, king, confessor and patriarch to his thousands of dyspeptic patients and the forty-two children he and Ella had adopted over the years. There were the Charlie Posts of the world, to be sure, there was his brother, Will, who’d bought the corn-flake concession out from under his nose, there were the Phelpses and the Macfaddens and all the rest of them, and maybe they won the skirmishes, yet John Harvey Kellogg won the wars. Always. But the situation was delicate, he understood that, and he fought down his anger. “March down that corridor and into my office this minute,” he said in a harsh whisper, “and it’s yours.”

George stood there half a beat longer, whiskers bristling, malice dancing in his loamy eyes. Then he dropped his arms and collapsed his shoulders. “It’s a deal,” he said.

Suddenly the three of them were moving again, the audience from the Grand Parlor just now spilling into the lobby behind them, the Doctor firing looks right, left and over his shoulder, practically scampering
on his truncated legs and driving George before him with a firm and unwavering hand. He was almost there, almost out of it, almost safe, when a peremptory female voice took hold of him like a grappling hook. “Dr. Kellogg!” the voice rang out, and he was caught. Feet faltering, a weary automatic smile pressed to his lips, he wheeled round to find an impeccably draped female form engulfed in a maelstrom of luggage. Beside her and two paces to the rear rose the towering sticklike wraith of a long-nosed young man with flat feet and posture so egregious he might just as well have had curvature of the spine. “Doctor,” she chirped, “Dr. Kellogg, what a pleasure to see you again,” and his hand vanished in the grip of her black kid glove.

The party had halted in the middle of the room, Dab arrested in mid-waddle, George drooping like a frost-burned plant, the Doctor pulled up short. “Why,” he gasped, beaming, beaming, the genial host and courtly physician, “if it isn’t Mrs., Mrs.—?”

“Lightbody,” she returned, “Eleanor. And this,” indicating the gaunt, broken-down figure beside her, “this is my husband, Will.”

An awkward pause. Though George had faded back a step, the Doctor couldn’t get the smell of him out of his nostrils, a sick working stench of mold and fermentation, of grease, bodily functions and filth. He smelled like a garbage scow. Worse: a meat wagon. “Lightbody, of course,” the Doctor exclaimed. “And how is your, uh, condition? Neurasthenia, isn’t it? And autointoxication? Yes? Combating both, I trust. Winning the battle of biologic living, eh?”

He made as if to withdraw his hand, but Eleanor held him fast. “I know we’re supposed to think positively, Doctor, and I know you’re going to do wonders for him, for both of us, but I’ll tell you—I must tell you,” and here Eleanor’s voice dropped as she leaned confidentially toward the Doctor, “my husband is a very sick man.”

“Well, yes,” the Doctor said, “of course, of course he is,” and suddenly he was his old self, a magneto of energy, sparks flying from his fingertips, the grand leonine head wagging majestically on his shoulders. “You’ve come to the right place, young man,” he said, disengaging himself from the wife to pump Will Lightbody’s limp and skeletal hand.

All around them the room glowed with a cairn eupeptic health. Life, promise and progress burgeoned in every corner, from the gaggle of milk-sipping
millionaires lounging against the Corinthian columns to the tranquil uncorseted grandes dames, marchesas and housewives gliding in and out of the Palm Garden. The banana tree, in all its exotic glory, could be seen through the high arched portal, rising up from a thatch of palm, succulent and orchid in defiance of latitude and season alike, centerpiece of the Doctor’s own private jungle.

Ignoring George—he could just cool his heels a minute—the Doctor turned to his secretary. “Mr. Dab, I want you to fetch a wheelchair for this gentleman and have Dr. Linniman see to him this evening. And the very best of your attendants—Murphy, find Murphy, will you? And Graves. I want Mr. Lightbody to have every comfort,” he went on, expansive, sagacious, the intrepid man of healing for whom no case was beyond hope, no colon too clogged, no stomach too sour, “and I’ll want to examine him personally first thing in the morning.”

Eleanor fixed him with a look of surprise. The husband fidgeted. “Personally?” she echoed. A rare gift had been dropped in her lap, a boon from the gods. “But Doctor, that’s too kind of you … we know how very busy you are, and—”

“You’ve suffered a great loss,” the Doctor began hesitantly, almost in the way of a fortuneteller or swami, but then his memory—that ironclad infallible airtight faculty that had held him in good stead all these many years—began to coil round the facts of the case.
Lightbody, Eleanor. Caucasian, female. Twenty … twenty-eight years of age. Peterskill, New York. Neurasthenia, autointoxication, loss of child.
Yes, yes, that was it. “Nothing can rectify that, I know, and you have—and will always have—my deepest regret and sympathy, both of you. But you must go on, and scientific eating and rest and fresh air will restore you, just as surely as it’s restored hundreds upon hundreds before you. You’ll see.” He paused, gazing into the wife’s eyes, deciding something. “And I’ll be supervising your case personally, too, my dear, of course I will.”

A geyser of excitement seemed to shoot through her. Her lips trembled and her cheeks flushed; for a moment, the Doctor was afraid she was going to drop to her knees. “Oh, Doctor, Doctor,” she cried, and it was a chant, a prayer, a hosanna of thanksgiving and joy.

He waved his hand: it was nothing. And now he turned to the husband. “And I can see that you’re suffering, young man—I can see it in
the sallowness of your skin, in the whites of your eyes, and, and—” Here he suddenly reached out, took hold of Will Lightbody by the lips and forced his fingers into his mouth like a horse trader. “Yes, yes, say ‘ah’… the coated tongue, I knew it! As severe a case of autointoxication as I’ve ever seen….”

Will’s face sank. Eleanor looked stricken.

“But it’s nothing we can’t deal with here, I assure you,” the Doctor. was quick to add. “Of course, I can’t say for certain till you’ve been properly and thoroughly examined, but I hold out every hope—” He broke off suddenly. Where was George? He gave Dab a sharp glance, made accidental eye contact with half a dozen patients—Hello, hello—and twisted round completely before he spotted him. Suddenly his jaw clenched. There was George, Hildah’s boy, ragged and stinking, a tramp, a bum in toe-sprung shoes, all the way across the room at the elbow of J. Henry Osborne, Jr., the bicycle king, cadging change. “George!” the Doctor cried out, and the whole room turned to him.