The Road to Wellville (28 page)

He saw nothing, heard nothing. Where was the damn thing? Would it cry out as he flung open the door, as his fingers locked round its thankful throat? He had to be careful. If anyone should discover him … He could see the Doctor’s severest face, the firm set of the goatee, the shrewd unforgiving little eyes.
And just what do you think you’re doing with my turkey, sir?
His hand was on the latch—and how to work it? A bolt. Here, under his fingers. He slid it across. Nothing. The turkey stench rose to his nostrils, harsh, penetrating, ammoniac, the smell of the barnyard, manured fields, the dank working mold of the darkest corner of the darkest cellar. And then it materialized, a black heap of feathers on the floor of the cage, refuse already, a sack of nothing. He took a breath and reached for it.

No gobble, no cluck, no gasp of surprise: the thing was inert. Cold. Bloodless. Slack. Dumbstruck, Will closed his hand round its naked feet and yanked it from the cage in a dark moil of feathers and dust. With an effort, he held it up before him in the weak light. The big bird’s neck hung limp, the wings were skewed. Will felt a chill run through him. Dangling, eternally thankful, the thing twisted round like a hanged man finding his center of gravity at the end of a rope.

Dead. Already dead.

   
Chapter 1   

A
s Christmas approached, the San was transformed. The halls were decked with ground pine and holly, a twenty-foot tree appeared in the lobby, everywhere you turned there was a spangle of tinsel, crepe paper and mistletoe. Dr. Kellogg had always made good and provident use of the holidays, from Groundhog Day to the Fourth of July, doing his utmost to co-opt the spirit of the day and turn it into a triumph of health advocacy, but at Christmas he outdid himself. He kept his staff busy arranging sleigh rides, sing-alongs, gift grab bags and the like (an occupied patient is never a restive one, he always said), while the Sanitarium Orchestra incessantly worked over selections from Bach, Handel and Monteverdi, and “Professor” Sammy Siegel wandered the dining room with a triangle and pennywhistle, rendering versions of “Jingle Bells,” “Silent Night” and the “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy” that were by turns comical and touching. The nurses seemed to have an extra spring in their step, doctors and busboys passed each other in the hallway whistling Yuletide ditties, and even the moodiest of patients couldn’t help brightening just a bit. It was all part and parcel of the Battle Creek Experience.

But despite the holiday cheer and the prospect of distributing antiscorbutic treats from his cornucopian basket while dressed as the true and original Saint Nick, a part he’d always relished, to John Harvey
Kellogg it seemed a cold season. He was in a funk. A hole. A pit. A depression so deep that if he were his own physician he would have prescribed the physiologic life and the full slate of the neurasthenic’s regime, but of course that was the paradox—he already lived the physiologic life to the hilt and yet it seemed, ever so imperceptibly, to be letting him down. But maybe he was just tired. Maybe that was it.

As he sat quietly in his office, spooning up a bit of yogurt and arranging his notes for the evening’s Question Box lecture, he tried to pinpoint the source of his malaise. It was George, he supposed, the latest in a string of imitators, schemers, gate-crashers, leeches, bunco artists and pretenders, not only to the fruits of the Kellogg genius but to his very name itself. He felt like a fierce old king besieged by rebellious underlings, like Laocoön in the grip of the serpents: throw off one coil and another springs up to replace it. Why couldn’t they leave a man alone?

From the beginning they’d tried to tear him down, horn in, profit where they had no right. No sooner had he invented caramel-cereal coffee than there was Charlie Post to pirate the recipe, make a shipload of money from tawdry advertising, buy out half the town, including the morning newspaper, and make his life a living hell. No sooner had he invented the corn flake than a howling pack of scoundrels descended on the town, bribed his employees and started up rival concerns in every shanty that had two doors and a window to it—and his brother Will was the worst offender of the lot. The Doctor was still seething about that. The breach between them that winter was like the Grand Canyon, the Pacific Ocean, and still growing. To think he’d trusted him, to think he’d been naive enough to imagine that blood was thicker than water—well, he’d learned a lesson there, that was for sure. But it still hurt. Hurt like a tooth being pulled—the same tooth, a hundred days in a row.

The Doctor had rescued his younger brother from obscurity and made him bookkeeper, fund-raiser, chief factotum and majordomo of the San, but Will wasn’t satisfied. Or grateful. He wanted to go head-to-head with Post, marketing the Doctor’s Sanitas Corn Flakes like some infernal vegetable compound or snake oil, but John Harvey Kellogg had put his foot down. No sir. No way at all. He was more concerned with his standing as a physician and surgeon than he was with huckstering products.
Besides, the medical community frowned on that sort of thing, cheap advertising, money grubbing and all the rest—it had taken him thirty years to distance himself from the swamis, nudists, antivivisectionists and snake charmers, and he wasn’t about to go back now.

And so, for a consideration, he’d let Will have the right to his patent in order to set up an independent company, the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company (which Will was already calling
Kellogg’s
Toasted Corn Flake Company), with the provision that the Doctor himself retain the controlling interest, as director and majority stockholder. It seemed like a good deal. The Doctor got $35,000 in cash and better than fifty percent of the stock—and, most important, he was able to make money without sullying himself with the machinations of commerce or having to answer inconvenient questions about the tax-exempt status of the San and its enterprises. But Will turned on him. His own brother. Turned on him as if he were a stranger, an enemy, a two-headed snake in the road.

And the irony of it was that Will had taken one of the Doctor’s proudest virtues—his thrift—and turned it against him. For in lieu of salary increases during the past year, the Doctor had issued small blocks of stock to his physicians and staff, as a way of saving himself some ready cash and benefiting his employees with a sort of enforced savings. Fine. So much the better. But Will—and here the Doctor could feel his heart squeeze like a sponge wrung dry—Will got hold of a go-getting St. Louis insurance man, raised some capital, and went round surreptitiously buying up all those shares at something like half their value till he had a controlling interest. Coldly, slyly, like the backstabber he was, he’d waited till they’d sat down to a board meeting, peered out from beneath the brim of the peasant’s cap he always insisted on wearing, and growled, “You’ll make no more decisions in
this
company, John.”

It was maddening. Sickening. A real true testimony to the venality and depravity of human nature—and he didn’t just blame Will; he blamed his doctors, too, for selling out. They’d paid the price, though, ten times over. Half a dozen were already gone, and he had his sights set on turning over another little group, too, just as soon as he could find superior replacements.

Yes. And as if that weren’t bad enough, there was the Sanitarium
business. While John Harvey Kellogg couldn’t take credit for inventing that—there had been some fifty spas and water cures operating in the U.S. alone when he’d taken over the Western Health Reform Institute in 1876—he could certainly claim full and undiluted credit for turning the foundering Adventist enterprise from a twenty-bed clapboard dungeon with a handful of rheumatic patients into one of the greatest and most modern surgical hospitals in the world—and turning a nice profit in the process. And what was his reward? No sooner had he done it, no sooner had he single-handedly established the Battle Creek System and made Battle Creek, Michigan, the health mecca of the world, than a dozen imitators, Post and the Phelps brothers among them, sprang up to challenge him. Post’s La Vita Inn was nothing more than a factory adjunct now, a place where they stored old rotary ovens and malt tubs, or so the Doctor’s spies told him. And the Phelpses, operating on the despicable and cynical principle of reversing everything the Doctor stood for—they served meat, beer, spirits; they even had a smoking room—had gone under in less than two years’ time. But the building was still there, just across the street from the San, and the Doctor had to look at it every day of his life. “The world’s biggest fieldstone building,” as they touted it, had been picked up at auction by Charlie Post and leased to Bernarr Macfadden, a harebrained, posturing, bare-chested, dumbbell-thumping parody of a health professional, who’d christened the place “The Macfadden Health Home” and used it as a front to push his own breakfast food, Strengtho. God, how it rankled.

But it got worse. On the heels of the health prospectors came the confidence men, gypsies, root peddlers and all the rest. A man calling himself Frank J. Kellogg—the “Anti-Fat” Kellogg—showed up one day with a birth certificate validating his right to the name and an alcohol-laced formula for the swill he passed off as “Kellogg’s Safe Fat Reducer.” The Doctor’s attorneys told him there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

And now there was this business with George. Not content with the hundred dollars he’d extorted in November, he was back with a new scheme. Earlier in the day—and this was what was getting the Doctor down, this was the source of his funk, George, George yet again—the
boy had appeared in his office with two men. The Doctor had just come out of surgery and he was settling down to a quick lunch at his desk, simultaneously dictating some two dozen letters and consulting with Murphy, Lillian’s keeper, over the chimp’s sudden loss of appetite, when there was a knock at the door. The knock itself was unusual: the entire staff and all but the very most important patients knew not to intrude on the Doctor unannounced; only in the direst emergency was he to be disturbed. Dab got up from his stenograph to answer the door, and there they were, an unholy alliance if ever the Doctor had seen one.