The Road to Wellville (34 page)

The afternoon progressed. The fire leapt at the fender; there were songs; the Countess Tetranova accepted a glass of cider as if it were strained offal; Leila Teitelbaum shrank into the corner until Irene’s mother drew her out on the subject of molten lard; the smell of roasting chestnuts basted the air; Will sang, sledded and bobbed for apples with the children; and the dogs, cats, a pet raccoon and the pulsing current
of brothers and sisters kept up a continuous but joyful din through the shank of the afternoon. Will enjoyed himself thoroughly. So thoroughly, in fact, that for minutes at a time he forgot he was an invalid (though Nurse Graves reminded him, every quarter of an hour, by uncapping yet another four-ounce bottle of milk, while his bladder sent him out the kitchen door to the outhouse in a periodic scurry). But it was amazing. His stomach was quiescent; his prurigo, eczema and boils had dried up; his heart was nonpalpitant and his tongue uncoated. He felt better than he had in months, in years. He felt human, felt youthful, felt like a man who had never known the despair of a ruined gut, a limp organ or a turkey laid low by the hand of fate.

As darkness fell, Tetranova and Teitelbaum made their way precipitately to the sled, but Will could barely tear himself away. The dogs licked his hands, the children kissed him, Mrs. Graves wrapped up a dozen cookies against the day of his recovery. And on the way home, slicing through the night that wedded earth and sky so completely he couldn’t tell if the runners had left the ground or not, Will settled himself luxuriously beneath the rugs and furs and heavy blankets, and though he knew it was improper, though she was his nurse and he a married man, he slipped his arm round Irene’s shoulder and held it there till the lights of the Sanitarium rose up out of the cold streets to engulf them.

And now he was out again. In the air. On his own. Heading down Washington Avenue with his billfold clutched tight, the snow brushing his cheeks and lashes with soft wings, every scent of the earth as new as if he’d just uncorked the bottle that contained them. There were two days to Christmas, and he was on his way to the local jeweler’s to see if he might not find something there to please Eleanor. That was his conscious purpose. But deep in the exfoliate layers of his mind, there lay a second thought, a thought he couldn’t approach too directly for fear of chasing it out into the open: he was thinking of getting something for Irene, too. Nothing too significant, of course, nothing she might tend to take in the wrong way—no rings or lockets or anything like that. A brooch maybe, or a pendant. Something for her hair, a necklace, a bracelet. Just a token, that was all. A little thing that would say
Thank you for the care. The service, that is. The personal attention.
He didn’t see
anything wrong in that. He always gave a little something to the postman, the maids, the delivery boy from Offenbacher’s—Christmas was the season of giving, wasn’t it?

As he was crossing Champion, the air seemed suddenly to congeal and a single electrifying odor rose up out of nowhere to drive all else before it and stop him dead in his tracks. Apprehension was instantaneous: this was the natural pure unapologetic aroma of meat sizzling in the pan—a hamburger, to be specific—and it was emanating from the restaurant on the corner.
The Red Onion
, read the sign out front, and Will recognized the place as the iniquitous den in which the San’s gizzardites and yogurt gobblers took refuge when they could tolerate the Kellogg regime no longer. The Doctor had spies there, Will had heard, and it was said that he’d once dismissed a physician who’d been caught red-handed in the back room with a double order of short ribs in tomato sauce. Will couldn’t remember ever having smelled anything as keenly, even as a boy, and he stood there transfixed in the middle of the road, wondering at this dominance of the olfactory sense. Was it some sort of organic reaction to the deadening of his senses through those eternal mucousy feedings of milk?

It was. It had to be. But oh, what a smell!

And now his stomach asserted itself for the first time in a good long while, and he had a sudden epiphanic vision of himself at a comfortable table with a checked tablecloth, a bottle of beer at his elbow, the waiter setting down a plate of fried potatoes and a hamburger sandwich with a garnish of onion and a dill pickle fresh from the barrel. The vision was so palpable that he’d actually begun to reach for the plate when a man in a hack brought him back to reality. Will looked up into whiskers, teeth, heard the shriek of wheels and the thunder of hooves. “Get out of the street, you goddamned moron!” the man hollered, and then he was gone, the hack swaying indignantly up the road.

Will crossed to the sidewalk, his eyes fixed on the window of the restaurant—he saw a man in side-whiskers lifting a fork to his mouth, movement, a waiter in mustaches, apron and suspenders—but he continued on past.
No
, he told himself, and he was a man of steel,
no.
He was making real progress—Drs. Linniman and Kellogg had promised a switch to the grape diet for Christmas if everything went well—and he
couldn’t risk throwing it all away on a single impulse, no matter how enthralling. Was he insane? Lunatic? Mad? Was he willing to measure his life against a hamburger sandwich? The answer rattled around like a loose bearing inside his head:
Almost, almost.

He passed a buttermilk shop on West Michigan and didn’t look twice—he’d had enough dairy to last him six lifetimes—but the Christmas display of fruits, nuts and candies in the window of Whalen’s Grocery slowed him down, and Tuckerman’s Meat Market, with its rubbernecked geese and broad-beamed hams, brought him to a halt. A ham, he thought, and what a terrific gift that would make … but for whom? He no longer knew a soul in the world who’d want it. Except for his father or Ben Settember down at Ben’s Elbow—and they were so far away, through space, time and disposition, as to be on another planet in another galaxy. How far he’d come. And how far—how interminably, exhaustingly, impossibly far—he had yet to go.

But enough of that. It was Christmas, and nothing could suppress his delight in the season. His pace was jaunty, the bowler winking low over one eye, the tails of his scarf flying behind him in the breeze. To the denizens of Battle Creek he was a remarkable sight, all prancing shank and flapping elbow, a great gangling mantis given human form and marching through the icebound streets like a parade of one. He tipped his hat to the ladies, called out Christmas greetings to men and boys alike, and despite himself, he allowed the notion of a gift for Irene to work its way to the very top of his list of charitable intentions.

The jeweler’s—Casaubon’s, by all accounts the best in town—was right where Homer Praetz had said it would be, on McCamly, just across the street from the Post Tavern Hotel, another den of iniquity. Will paused a moment at the jeweler’s door, craning his neck to study the great looming brick-and-granite building behind him, where no doubt the backsliders and the blissfully ignorant were even then digging into legs of mutton, beefsteaks and pork loins, and washing all that delicate indigestible flesh down with schooners of beer and shots of good malt whiskey. With a sigh, he turned his back on it and entered the shop to the soothing mercantile tinkle of the bell over the door.

In an instant, Will was transported. Warmth embraced him. A murmur of voices whispered in sacerdotal tones of stones and settings, of
Vever, Gaillard and Lalique. A pretty girl, trying on an opal ring at the near end of a long gleaming display case, glanced up at him and smiled. In a kind of reverie, Will felt the coat fall from his shoulders, discovered the luxury of a plush chair interposed between his lean buttocks and the nullity of intermediate space, opened his hands to receive a steaming redolent cup of the finest
chocolat chaud
from Paris, allowed the shop owner himself to present him with the full pageant of reigning jewels and their habiliments of gold and silver and champlevé enamel. He bought too much and he paid too much for what he bought. But it didn’t matter. Not a whit. Patrick Henry Casaubon was the soul of hospitality and his shop a pasha’s palace, and together they gave him a welcome respite from the antiseptic and the physiologically correct.

Will sipped chocolate like a turncoat, an outlaw, and he nodded an imperial yes or no at this glittering object or that. And when he left, when he girded himself against the cold and started back up the cheerily lit streets for the San, he took with him an opulent necklace of Ceylon sapphires and rose diamonds for Eleanor, and a starburst brooch of seed pearls and one little unostentatious and absolutely forgivable diamond for Irene. Two small elegant velvet-lined packages. They were nestled in his breast pocket, palpable and satisfying, a barely discernible bulge against the rich fabric of his coat, as he strode up the hill to the San. He felt lighter than air all of a sudden, as if he’d shrugged off some heavy burden, and he couldn’t help himself, he couldn’t—though people looked at him as if he were drunk or mad or floating along behind a full sail of Sears’ White Star Liquor Cure, he burst into song:

His voice rose up, hollow as the wind in a drainpipe, tuneless, flat, hopelessly unmelodic, but infectious for all that. First one dog took it up in a crazed stuttering high-pitched yowl that irrevocably shattered
the compact of the night, and then another and another, until up and down the length of Washington Avenue, the whole neighborhood was singing with him.

But the mood wouldn’t hold. How could it? How could that damnable purgatory of brick and stone and marble sustain any measure of joy that wasn’t connected directly to the bowels?

She wouldn’t take the brooch. Nurse Graves, that is. Irene. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Lightbody,” she breathed, and Will’s room was still as a mortuary, no hint of sound from the radiator, the water pipes, the hallway or the room next door, “but we’re not permitted to accept gratuities from the patients. It’s strictly forbidden.”

Will was stunned. “Forbidden? To accept a gift, a Christmas token given selflessly and in commemoration of the season?” He was outraged. “By whom? Forbidden by whom?”

The light of the postulant shone in her eyes as she pronounced the name: “Dr. Kellogg.”

“Dr. Kellogg,” Will repeated, and his emphasis was entirely different. “Dr. Kellogg. Is he governor? President? God? Does he have to dictate every last thing that goes on here, from our bowel movements to our emotions?” Will was stretched out on the bed, in robe and nightgown, his thin ankles crossed in front of him. He sat up now, his voice tight with anger. “And what about me? What about my right to express my, my affection and gratitude to my fellow man—and woman. To people, I mean, people I consider friends?”

There it was, he’d said it:
friends.
The term lay there before them like the trunk of a toppled tree, the bigger, more complicated terms—
gratitude, affection
—tangled in its branches. Nurse Graves chose to ignore it. “When we’re hired,” she said, reaching up to adjust a cap that was already set flawlessly in place, “we sign a pledge to the Sanitarium in which we vow to uphold its principles and to refrain from fraternizing with the patients outside the confines of our duties.”

Fraternizing.
Her tone infuriated him. Dry, cold, impersonal—she might have been quoting from a medical text. And here he’d just quaffed
his final four ounces of milk for the day, without argument, just to please her; here he was, filled with gratitude and the pure unblemished spirit of giving, and she called it
fraternizing.
He watched her preparing his bedtime enema, making a show of heating the paraffin over a burner and filling the reservoir with painstaking precision so she wouldn’t have to contemplate the velvet-lined box on the nightstand with its bow of red ribbon and the personally inscribed card attached. “But that’s ridiculous,” he protested. “I’m the patient, you’re the nurse, sure—but we’re people, too, aren’t we?”

No answer.

“Aren’t we?”

She murmured a reluctant “yes” as she bustled across the floor to the bathroom and ran some water in the sink. He studied her through the open door, the swell of her shoulders, firm, compact, tendons leaping as she worked the faucets, her legs, the neat squared heels of her shoes. Then she was back, looking flushed but determined.

“Well, won’t you even open it then? Won’t you have a look—even if you can’t accept it? I picked it out myself. For you. Thinking of you.”

A mocking smile crossed her lips. “Given selflessly, eh?” she said. “And have you also selflessly chosen little tokens of gratitude for Nurse Bloethal and Mrs. Stover? For Ralph?… Mr. Lightbody, I think you’re deluding yourself—”

“Can’t you call me ‘Will’?”

The apparatus was in her hands, slick, hot, catharsis in an India-rubber bulb. She shifted it nervously from one hand to the other. A pin glinted in her hair. “No,” she said, “I can’t.”