The Road to Wellville (31 page)

It took him a moment, but then his eyes adjusted to the dim light and he saw the fuscous mounds of potatoes, rutabagas, turnips, carrots shrunken like the fingers of the dead. Amidst them, his puny limbs mocked with shivers, his teeth chattering and nose running snot, lay George, atop a mound of orange peels, apple cores and nutshells. He looked dazed, bewildered, as if he were still crouching beside the corpse of his mother in that bleak and barren tenement. His black cold eyes fixed on the Doctor without the least hint of recognition. He coughed.

“George,” the Doctor demanded, furious still, furious at the tricks of nature, at himself, at this little wad of misery before him, “George, come out of there now and take your punishment.”

The boy didn’t move. But that yellow-toothed smirk sprang to his lips. “Father,” he said. “Merry Christmas.”

   
Chapter 2   

A
n expectant hush fell over the crowd gathered in the Grand Parlor for the evening’s lecture. The palms stood firm in the sockets of their earthenware pots, here and there a patient on the psyllium diet fought down the urge to visit the restroom, and the milk-glutted tycoons were as alert suddenly as turkey cocks spying out a fleck of glitter in the barnyard dust. Dr. Kellogg had just delivered his thunderbolt—there was a couple sitting amongst them, he announced, apprentices to the physiologic regime, who had engaged in marital relations against his express injunction and who would henceforth have to suffer the consequences—and now he paused, his spectacles ablaze with light, to let this startling information have its effect. Three hundred pairs of eyes were riveted on his plump white surgical hands as he poured a glass of water from the pitcher on the lectern. Three hundred pairs of eyes watched as he held the glass up to the light as if to say,
Here, here is all the human animal needs to satisfy its appetites, aqua pura and a handful of roots and nuts
, and three hundred pairs of eyes followed the glass to his lips and the fine physiologic rise and fall of his Adam’s apple as he emptied it.

If to this point the Doctor had felt uninspired, no one knew it—and yet they’d all been waiting for this moment. The lecture had been provocative, stimulating and informative, yes, but they missed his patented
stunts and the talk had lacked a certain titillation, the frisson they’d come to expect. Till now, that is.

He’d begun, nearly an hour earlier, by responding to half a dozen inquiries patients had dropped in the Question Box during the course of the past week, expatiating on the link between brain work and dyspepsia and the use of the frigid bath as a means of hardening oneself against the common cold, while taking time out to lament the sad fact that the American foot, like American teeth and the American man and woman in general, was undergoing a process of deterioration. And to prove the latter point, he’d adduced the case of the Filipino foot, in which the great toe is so much longer than the others and so far separated from them that it renders real service in grasping and clinging—so, too, the Japanese foot. Why, he had personally known Japanese who could walk unshod across tile roofs severals stories from the ground, weave, write, and even, in one case, play the violin with their bare feet alone. Like all his audiences, this one was eager, partisan, crying out for initiation into the secrets of health and vigor, and they’d listened raptly, though the Doctor knew he really wasn’t on his mark. But then he spied the Lightbodys in the fifth row, and he began to discover the real subject of the evening, and the old fire began to stoke his furnaces once again.

It was Nurse Graves who’d informed him of the occasion on which Mr. Lightbody had vented his lust on his enervated and all-but-prostrate wife—nearly two weeks ago now, around the time the Thanksgiving bird had turned up dead. But the Doctor had been away on business to Sioux City, Minneapolis and St. Louis, addressing gatherings of the Western Cracked Wheat Association, the National Cheese Congress and the American Soybean Association (of which he was a founding member), and he hadn’t yet had an opportunity to consult with the couple individually and ascertain the severity of their lapse. Certainly the evidence was against them. Mr. Lightbody had, as best anyone could determine, spent the night in Mrs. Lightbody’s room, and while of course no one could say what went on behind closed doors, it certainly looked suspicious—especially to one who knew human nature as thoroughly as the Doctor did. Perhaps the husband had simply sat up with the wife or slept—merely slept—beside her. Still, all excuses aside, it was an outrage, and no matter the culpability, the Doctor, already wound up
by his little confrontation with George and his confederates, was determined to let them writhe a bit one way or the other.

“I do not mention this transgression lightly, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, setting the empty glass down and leveling his sternest gaze on the audience, “but rather as an example to you all and a strict admonition to avoid the greatest risk to life and health I can imagine.”

He was warming up now, his brain choked with a logjam of medical terms, horrifying statistics, the names of eminent physicians and arresting conditions, his arms twitching with their inchoate gestures, feet breaking away—and all of a sudden he was out from behind the lectern, standing bold and upright among the good but misguided people who had gathered to hear him. “Even the youngest, healthiest and most vigorous among us are, my friends, subject to the debilitating effects of sexual excess, I’m sorry to say. But I shudder to think of the consequences when the systems of both partners are already depleted—as the systems of this particular couple most certainly were—by the twin shocks of autointoxication and neurasthenic prostration.” And now his voice reached out on the tendrils of their attention, demanding, proclaiming, laying down the law: “There is a hygiene to be observed in marriage, ladies and gentlemen, and that hygiene is no more to be disregarded than forgoing a bath or failing to change one’s linen.”

There was a stir among the audience. Several of the men—was that Homer Praetz?—looked away from his steely gaze.

“And let me ask you this—why do you suppose our gynecologists’ offices are so crowded with worn and exhausted women in this our supposedly civilized society? Because husbands abuse the marital bond, that’s why. The popular view seems to be that any indulgence of the passions is made permissible by the marriage ceremony. No view could be more erroneous.”

The little Doctor strode amongst them like a colossus, now whirling, now pointing a declamatory finger, locking eyes with one abashed husband after another. As he spoke, warming to the subject, denouncing the baser appetites and the priapic urge, the women in the audience seemed to come quietly to life, like so many flowers blooming in a hothouse. Miss Muntz was wrapped in a greenish glow and her eyes seemed to devour her face; Mrs. Tindermarsh wore the tiniest smirk of
recognition, though her acquaintance with the matters at hand would almost certainly have been memorial at this juncture; Nurse Graves, standing demurely with a group of nurses in the rear, held herself with virginal rectitude. Even Eleanor Lightbody, who should have been ashamed of herself, seemed preternaturally alive to his words. Regal, unabashed, she offered up every least particle of her attention.

“We have no room in the University of Health for satyrs and fleshpots, libertines and sybarites, any more than we have room for abusers of the whiskey bottle, the tobacco pouch and the frying pan. Let me quote no less an authority than Jeremy Taylor in this, ladies and gentlemen—and I might add that I most heartily concur with every word. ‘It is a common belief,’ Taylor says, ‘that a man and woman, because they are legally united in marriage, are privileged to the unbridled exercise of amativeness. This is wrong. Nature, in the exercise of her laws, recognizes no human enactments, and is as prompt to punish any infringement of her laws in those who are legally married, as in those out of bonds.’”

Dr. Kellogg paused to scan the audience; there wasn’t a single man or woman in that room who wasn’t perched at the edge of his or her chair. He cleared his throat. “I’d like to add my own italics here, ladies and gentlemen, seekers after health and right living, because Mr. Taylor hits the nail directly on the head: ‘Excessive indulgence between the married produces as great and lasting evil effects as in the single man and woman, and is nothing more or less than
legalized prostitution.
’ I repeat, ladies and gentlemen, ‘
legalized prostitution.
”’

There was a gasp from one of the younger patients—
Froeble
, wasn’t it?
Annaliese; age fourteen, Chapel Hill, North Carolina; Bright’s disease, diabetes, autointoxication, obesity
. That gasp gave the Doctor pause: perhaps this sort of truth telling was too unsettling for young ears? But he dismissed the notion as quickly as it came to him—she would learn the harsh truths soon enough at the hands of some libidinous brute of a husband; better she should be girded in physiologic armor when the time came.

Waving his arms like a dervish, spinning on his diminutive feet, he worked his way back to the little stage and mounted to the podium. “Yessss,” he hissed in a long constricted rush of breath, “and what is
the effect of such failure to control the carnal appetites? What is the danger to which I’ve alluded so many times tonight, the sad fate that awaits married couples who seem to think that connection can be repeated as regularly and almost as often as their meals?”

There was no response. They were as silent as stones, but he had them, had them by their noses—he could see it in the alert looks, the sidelong glances, the bowed heads and nervously tapping fingers and feet.

“Well, then: what would be the effect of pouring gasoline into an engine that had known only water? Most men—most decent men, at any rate—and all respectable women have lived a continent life till marriage, and then suddenly they are thrust into a tumult of nervous excitation which literally combusts their nervous systems and in the process destroys their digestion and bankrupts the emunctories. For the man, at least, giving up as he does so many emissions of life-giving fluid, it is ruin, absolute ruin.”

Miss Muntz shifted in her seat, gave the Doctor a brief mortified glance and looked quickly away. Mrs. Tindermarsh was a living statue, but for that hint of a smirk. Several of the men, Will Lightbody and J. Henry Osborne, Jr., the bicycle king, among them, looked uneasy, unwell even.

“But for the woman”—and here Dr. Kellogg’s voice became saturated with pity—”being of feebler constitution and hence less able to bear these terrible shocks, the result runs the gamut from mild hysteria and nervous exhaustion to cancer, marasmus and death. Little wonder that Midulet characterizes our era as ‘The Age of Womb Diseases.”’ And then, shaking his head piteously, dredging his glistening brow back and forth like a pendulum drifting between heartbreak and surcease, he drew himself up to deliver the ultimate blow. “Finally, my friends, my patients, my fellow travelers in the quest for a life free of disease and impairment, I ask you this: how many women among us tonight can say, ‘I have never been well since the night of my marriage’? Think about it, ladies and gentlemen. Think and act.”