The Road to Wellville (10 page)

W
ill Lightbody fell into the wheelchair as if he’d been dropped from a great height—say, from a spot just to the left of the chandelier. His knees had suddenly lost their elasticity, his calves gone slack, and there he was, in the wheelchair, staring up at the ceiling like an octogenarian with egg in his lap. The Doctor—Dr. Kellogg, the Chief, the great and famous healer in the white spats and matching goatee—had disappeared, hustling off down the hallway till he receded in the distance like a scrap of paper blown by the wind. He’d been cordial enough—Will couldn’t fault him there—but he’d seemed distracted, frazzled, not at all the solid and immovable rock he’d expected.

Not that it mattered. Not anymore. Not in the face of that cursory but terrifying examination. The great man had stuck his fingers in Will’s mouth, though he was so short—another surprise—that he had to go up on tiptoe to insert them, and Will had seen the look of alarm in his eyes. It was a look that penetrated to the core of Will’s being, a look that prefigured the coffin and the funeral wreath, and suddenly Will had felt as sick and weak as he’d ever felt in his life. He felt rotten. Light-headed. Doomed. And his stomach—there it was, as palpable as the hands before his face—his stomach clenched as if he’d caught a whiff of the grave
.

“As severe a case of autointoxication as I’ve ever seen,” the Doctor pronounced.

The words hit home like a storm of bullets. Will tottered, actually tottered, and then the wheelchair was there and he lost all conscious control of his muscles just as surely as if he’d drunk down a pint of Old Crow in a single gulp. He was frightened. His heart beat like a hammer in his chest. The ceiling seemed to fall in on him and then recede again.

“Eleanor!” a voice cried out, and the sound of it, hearty and bold, smooth as a surge of water over the buffed blue stones of a stream, brought him out of himself. The muscles of his neck tightened, the cords and sinews did their work, and all at once the ceiling was a memory and he was staring into the boyish eyes, cleft chin and brilliant naked teeth of Dr. Frank Linniman. “But you’ve lost weight,” Dr. Linniman chided, clutching Eleanor’s gloved hand and practically twirling her like a ballerina.

Eleanor called him “Frank.” Not “Doctor,” not even “Dr. Linniman.” Just “Frank.” “Yes, Frank, I know it, I know it, but it’s just about impossible to eat scientifically in Peterskill, New York”—the way she pronounced the name of their hometown, she might just as well have been describing some huddle of huts in the Congo—”and Cook, though she’s a dear, just can’t seem to get the hang of Dr. and Mrs. Kellogg’s recipes.” Eleanor was glowing, her color high, her eyes struck with the light of the chandelier. She made a little moue, shrugged one shoulder, dipped her head ever so slightly to set the artificial bird atop her hat in motion. “I tell you, Frank,” she breathed, “it’s just heaven to be back here again.”

In that moment, Will’s fear of his own mortality was replaced by another emotion, one more often associated with the youthful and vigorous: jealousy. This was his wife, after all, the woman he loved, the woman who had borne his baby girl in tragedy, the woman whose breasts he’d held in his hands and whose curves and intimate places he knew like no other, or used to know … yes, and here she was fawning all over this, this
doctor
with his starched white suit and sunny grin. Good God, he looked more like a baseball player than a medical man, more like a brawling ham-fisted catcher or lumbering first baseman. Will
cleared his throat. “Will Lightbody,” he said, or tried to say, but unfortunately all that came out was an incoherent croak.

“Oh,” Eleanor gasped, a hand to her bosom, and in that moment the little group that was gathered round Will—his wife, the bellhop, the attendant at his back and Dr. Linniman—seemed to converge, the whole world and universe radiating out from that little gasp. “Forgive me,” Eleanor went on, “but Frank, Dr. Linniman, I’d like you to meet my husband.” And then, in a rush of breath: “He’s a very sick man.”

Suddenly, Frank Linniman’s earnest face was hanging over Will’s and his big friendly mitt of a healing hand was pumping Will’s limp scrap of wrinkle and bone as if he were trying to draw water from a well. “Never fear,” the physician was saying, conversant with the usual platitudes, “you’ve come to the right place. We’ll have you scaling mountains in no time.”

And then the hand was withdrawn, orders were given, the luggage vanished (and with it, Eleanor) and Will was being propelled across the lobby by an attendant as brawny, fit and eudaemonically sound as Frank Linniman himself. The wheels moved noiselessly, effortlessly, and the faces of his fellow patients—as jolly and robust a group as he’d ever seen—floated past him, barely curious. To them, Will was just one more sick man in a wheelchair.

But what they didn’t know, what Will wanted to cry out to them, was that he’d never in his life been in a wheelchair before. Wheelchairs were for Civil War veterans, amputees, invalids, the superannuated, the infirm, they were for withered crones and doddering old pensioners with one foot in the grave. He thought of Philo Strang, the oldest living human in Peterskill, a blasted relic of a man who’d lost both his legs at Sharpsville when he was forty-two and had sunned himself outside his son’s tobacco emporium in his’ rusting homemade wheelchair ever since, his eyes gone, hearing shot, clumps of yellow hair sprouting from his ears and nostrils and a dangle of phlegm caught in his beard. Well, now they had something in common, old Philo Strang and he, though Will was barely thirty-two and had been as spry as the next man a year ago.

Spry. He’d been spry, that’s what he wanted to tell them.

Yet what did it matter? Now he was in a wheelchair. Now he was
helpless. Old before his time. Used up, cast aside, hung out to dry. Gliding across the lobby through the hum of conversation and muted laughter that bubbled up round him as if the whole thing were some social affair, some cotillion or ball, Will felt a yawning cavern of self-pity open up inside him: surely he was the sickest man alive.

The silver wheels eased to a stop at the mouth of the elevator and Will felt himself swung gently round as the attendant expertly rotated the chair and drew it backward. The sensation was oddly familiar, a feeling of airiness and effortless suspension that wasn’t altogether unpleasant, and Will realized that he’d gone from an old man to an infant in that moment, from Old Philo Strang with the snot in his beard to a babe in a perambulator. “Good evening, sir,” the elevator man said, beaming at him out of a missionary face, “you look all tuckered,” and he clucked his tongue. “Floor, Ralph?” he inquired of the attendant.

The attendant’s voice spoke behind Will as if in some trick of ventriloquism: “Five.”

“Oh,” murmured the elevator man, winking an eye, “very nice, you’re going to enjoy it, sir. Best air in the place, and a lovely view, too.” He paused, sighed, reached for the grate. “Rail travel,” he said, shaking his head. “Poor man looks all tuckered, Ralph.”

At that moment, just as he was about to pull the grate across, a nurse slipped in to join them. Will was in a funk and delirium, and he didn’t take any notice of her at first, but as they ascended, defying gravity, she turned to him with a smile of evangelic intensity. For all his exhaustion and despair, for all his pain and ruination, Will couldn’t help feeling the force of that smile. He looked up. “Mr. Lightbody?” she inquired.

Will nodded.

“I’m Nurse Graves,” she said, and her voice was a tiny puff of breath, as if she were unused to speaking above a whisper. “Welcome to the University of Health. I’ll be your personal attendant throughout your stay here, and I’m going to do everything in my power to make the time both pleasant and physiologically sound for you.” The smile held, perfect, confident, soothing. This was the smile the first cave woman had used on the first cave man, a wonder of a smile, a novelty and an
invention. Who’d ever thought of smiling before this nurse came into the world? “But you must be tired,” she said, and the smile faded ever so slightly to underscore the concern and sympathy of her words.

Will wanted to answer in the affirmative. He wanted to be undressed and put to bed like the antediluvian infant he’d become, wanted the surcease of the liquor and narcotic cures, wanted to drop dead on the spot and get it over with.
Yes
, he was going to say,
yes, tired to the marrow of my bones
, but the elevator man beat him to it: “Rail travel, Irene,” he said, heaving another sigh. “It’s as like to torture as anything they did in the Inquisition, let me tell you.”

“Well,” she said in her hushed, breathy tones, “I don’t doubt it for a minute, though I’ve never been farther than Detroit myself,” and she cocked her head alertly as the fourth floor rolled by beyond the grate. She stood there like a monument, like an advertisement for biologic living, breathing cleanly and deeply, chin held high, her spine so erect you could drop a plumb bob from it. And her uniform: it was an unbroken field of white, from the hem of her skirt to the cap perched atop the pinned-up mass of her hair, and it was perfectly—and naturally—contoured to the shape of her body, which was free of the corsets and stays the Chief railed against. Even in his fog, Will couldn’t help admiring the fit of that uniform. And from his vantage point in the wheelchair, just behind and below her, he could make out the blades of her squared shoulders, the swept-up hairs at the back of her neck and the delicate little shells of her ears. He fixated on those ears. In that moment they seemed the most precious things he’d ever known. Little jewels. Little monkey ears. He wanted to kiss them.

“But Mr. Lightbody is at the very end of his journey now,” she added, turning from the waist to beam that smile at him, “and we’re here to receive him and comfort him and make him well again.”

Will didn’t mean to stare, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. Something had come over him, a quickening in his groin, a heat he hadn’t felt in months. Sick man that he was, bundle of bones and extruded nerves, he looked up into that smile, studied those ears and more, much more—that rump, those ankles, the bosom presented in profile—and all of a sudden he saw Nurse Graves spread out on his bed
in all the glory of her naked and pliant flesh, and he, Will Lightbody, mounting her like a hairy-hocked satyr. Breasts, he thought. Vagina. What was happening to him?

“I haven’t slept in twenty-two days,” he croaked.

Nurse Graves held his eyes. She was young, very young, no more than a girl, really. “You’ll sleep tonight,” she said. “That’s what I’m here for.”

The elevator man announced the fifth floor, the grate drew back, and in the next moment Will found himself passing down a brightly lit hallway, Nurse Graves at his side, Ralph providing locomotion. There seemed to be quite a crowd in the corridor, seeing that it was nearly ten-thirty on a Monday night in November—nurses, attendants and bellhops hustling to and fro, men and women in evening clothes sauntering along as if they’d just come back from the theater, patients in robes lingering at the doors of their rooms and chatting in low tones.
Grand
, one robed and turbaned woman said to another,
simply grand.
But for the white flash of the attendants’ uniforms, Will would have thought he was at the Plaza or the Waldorf.

And then an odd thing happened. Just as Nurse Graves pushed open the door to his room and Ralph swiveled the chair round to enter, Will had the strange feeling that he was being watched. Nearly devoid of volition at this point, he let his head loll against the leather padding of the chair and gazed up to see a young female peering at him curiously from an open door across the hallway. She was tall, striking, well formed, and the salacious thoughts began to flood his head again … but then the flood ceased as suddenly as it had begun: there was something wrong with her. Desperately wrong. Her skin—it had the color of bread mold. And her lips… they were dead, blackened, two little eggplants fastened beneath her nose as a morbid joke. Sick. She was sick. This was no hotel. He tried a sort of wry grin, commiserative and sad, but she only gave him a blank look and shut the door.

“There, now,” Nurse Graves said as they entered the room, “isn’t this cheery?”

Will took it in at a glance: Oriental carpet, drapes, a sturdy mahogany bed, matching armoire, private bath. He tried to respond, tried to seem interested, but he was sick to the very core. “Breasts,” he said. “Vagina.”

Nurse Graves’s smile fluttered briefly, a hundred-watt bulb flickering between connection and extinction. “Beg pardon?”

Ralph’s voice, blissful with enthusiasm: “He says it’s very nice. But don’t try to talk, Mr. Lightbody, not in your condition, please.”

Nurse Graves—Irene, hadn’t the elevator man called her Irene?—instructed Ralph to lift Will from the chair and lay him out on the bed. Will didn’t protest. Ralph thrust one arm under Will’s knees, wrapped his shoulders up in the other, hoisted him from the chair without so much as a grunt of effort and lowered him to the bed. There, Will found himself supported in a sitting position as two pairs of hands removed his jacket, tie, shirt and collar, and then his shoes, socks and trousers, until he sat before them in his underwear, too far gone to worry about modesty. No woman, save for his mother and Eleanor, had ever seen him in his flannels—and no man, for that matter. And here were Ralph (he didn’t even know his last name) and Nurse Graves standing over him in his underwear as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Perversely, his groin began to stir again. He sank into the bed and closed his eyes.