The Road to Wellville (66 page)

“Movement Therapy,” the Doctor spat contemptuously, “
Die Handhabung Therapeutik
,” and he made it sound filthy, utterly depraved. “He manipulates her womb.”

It took a moment for this to sink in—manipulates her womb? What in Christ’s name did that mean? But then he began to think about that, Eleanor’s womb, and its point of ingress, that private place that it was a husband’s privilege, and only a husband’s privilege, to … but no, it couldn’t be. Will was appalled. He felt his face coloring.

“Your own wife,” the Doctor repeated. “But that’s what happens when patients play doctor, when they think they know better than the keenest medical minds of the age, when they presume to treat themselves, sir.” There was something else in his face now, a shade of malice. He snapped his fingers: “Bloese!” Will was barely conscious as the secretary moved forward with the cloth satchel which Will only now and dimly realized he’d been carrying all along—he was underwater, deep down at the very bottom of the deepest pit in the deepest ocean, the weight crushing him, his lungs crying out for air, as Bloese reached into the satchel and produced a familiar apparatus, an electric belt, slightly used but still in excellent condition, and the genital suspensory that went with it.

The two men, Doctor and factotum, ramrods of righteousness, folded their arms and leveled a withering gaze on him. A moment went by, thin and niggardly, and the least paring of another. “Nurse Bloethal found this under your bed, sir,” the Doctor said at last. “And what do you have to say for yourself?”

Will hung his head. All he could think of was Eleanor, Eleanor and Badger, Eleanor and this quack doctor, Eleanor and her womb.

Brandishing the Heidelberg Belt, the Doctor stepped closer and pinched his words for emphasis: “This is the curse of my profession,” he hissed, “the very sort of thing that is even now putting your wife at risk. Self-doctoring. Lending an ear to every huckster and mountebank that comes along. Pandering to the sickest and weakest of the sensual appetites. Don’t you know that this thing can kill you? Don’t you realize how ill you are? Why, a man in your condition—” he broke off in astonishment. “Even a single discharge of seminal fluids could be fatal. But what really astounds me is that here you are secretly practicing to build up your reproductive organs and all the while your wife is in the very gravest danger because of them. I say develop your resolve, sir, not your genitals.”

Though he couldn’t quite follow the Doctor’s logic, Will was mortified all the same, as deeply and thoroughly mortified as ever he’d been. He wanted to bolt, fly off crazily across the lawn, trample the flower beds, throw himself in the river and be done with it. He stared numbly into the blaze of the Doctor’s spectacles.

But the Healer, as if divining his thoughts, had hold of him again,
and his grip was like iron. “I can’t do anything for her,” he said, his voice pitched low, dead earnest. “I’m not her husband, only her physician. But I tell you this, sir, and I say it with all my heart: look to your wife.”

Eleanor wasn’t in her room. She wasn’t in the Palm Garden, the parlor or the Ladies’ Gymnasium. Will carried his loose joints up and down the stairs, rapped on the doors of a dozen rooms where she was known to visit with one or another of her lady friends, stalked Virginia Cranehill and Mrs. Zachary Cornish, the yellow-taffeta lady. No one had seen her. Heartsick and fuming, Will went up to dinner early, hoping to confront her there, and sat for two hours listening to Hart-Jones rhapsodize about the bird life of the Lake District, where, to the everlasting dismay of everyone within hearing distance, he’d been born and raised. Neither Badger nor Eleanor put in an appearance.

At three, Will skipped a session of medicine-ball tossing under the direction of the big-armed Swede, and instead dropped in on a dress rehearsal of
The Fatal Luncheon
, the Deep-Breathing Club’s original drama. He took a seat in the cool afternoon shadows of the downstairs parlor, heart pounding in his ears, waiting for Eleanor to make her appearance. The play, co-authored by Eleanor and Mrs. Tindermarsh, seemed to be about a man with a ruined stomach struggling against the twin demons of alcohol and carnal abuse. Mrs. Tindermarsh, in overalls and greasepaint mustaches, portrayed the protagonist, stalking about the stage spouting lines like “O woe to this digestive tract and unquiet stomach that ever I saw chop or steak!” Eleanor was to play the female lead, the role of the long-suffering wife who contends against all hope to bring her deluded husband to see the redemptive light of physiologic living. Will’s stomach contracted at the thought of it—the play was just one more knot in a string of humiliations stretching all the way back to the night he’d arrived and Dr. Kellogg had inspected his tongue as if he were a horse going to stud. He shrank into the shadows.

The play was difficult to follow and he was so wrought up in any case that even Wilde or Ibsen would have seemed a burden, but after half
an hour or so he began to realize that Eleanor’s part had been taken by another woman. The woman had been onstage since the outset, playing opposite Mrs. Tindermarsh, but Will had assumed she was a domestic or a distant relative, and now he understood that he was wrong. Eleanor wasn’t here, either.

He rose abruptly in the dark and made his way up front, where he attempted to inquire after her but was roundly shushed from all quarters. Sinking nervously into a seat just under the stage, he bided his time till the rehearsal was over and then approached Mrs. Tindermarsh.

“Oh, Mr. Lightbody,” she crowed, “—and what do you think of us? Will we make a hit?”

Faces had gathered round them, garish in their stage makeup. Will glanced up uneasily. “Oh, yes, of course,” he boomed, his voice setting up a shiver in the glass decanter perched beside the fictive husband’s armchair, “splendid, very moving—and true to life.”

Eyes batted, mouths pursed. A squeal of voices started up behind the curtain, someone laughed at the rear of the stage. Will swiveled his neck and masked his eyes. “But where’s Eleanor? I thought she was playing the wife?”

Mrs. Tindermarsh’s gaze fled to the far corners of the room. She stroked her mustaches and came away with blackened fingertips. “Didn’t she tell you?” she murmured, looking round for a towel. “She resigned two weeks ago—her treatments were just eating up all her time. Gloria Gephardt’s taken her role, but it’s a shame, it really is—your wife’s such a natural actress.”

He finally cornered Eleanor in her room late that night—she hadn’t made a supper appearance, either, though Badger was there, the sot, blathering on about esculents and tubers and all the celebrated people he knew. She was in bed, reading, and when he surprised her—he didn’t bother to knock—she looked up guiltily and slipped the book beneath her pillow. “Oh, Will,” she murmured, her voice languid, artificial, fat with venality and deceit, “how are you?” She let out an abbreviated laugh. “We hardly get to see one another anymore, do we?”

Will wasn’t about to be distracted by small talk. “I spoke with Dr. Kellogg,” he said. He loomed over the bed, practically tottering, arms clenched rigidly at his sides.

“Oh? And what did he have to say?” Her nonchalance was infuriating. She was toying with him, pretending, putting on an act. “Come, give me a kiss.”

Will stood rigid. “I don’t want a kiss. I want to talk about Dr. Spitzvogel.”

The name flashed across her face like a whiplash, but she never gave herself away. “Yes? And what about him?”

How could she be so brazen? The man was manipulating her womb and everyone knew it. “I’ve seen his house.” It was all he could think to say.

“Will,” and she was crooning now, her eyes fluid and rich, his own wife, “what’s this all about? Is something troubling you? You’re not jealous of my doctor, are you?” She laughed again, a little trill of private amusement. “Look at you—
you’ve
become the Battle Freak. Here I go to an outside physician and you act as if it’s the end of the world. Really, Will,” she said, and her laugh followed it up.

“Outside physician!” He threw it back at her. “He’s no more a physician than I am.”

Her eyes sharpened suddenly, and the familiar furrow appeared between her eyebrows. “How would you know?”

“Because Dr. Kellogg told me.
Your
Dr. Kellogg. The great and only. And he told me what this Spitzvogel is doing to you, too, in the name of ‘treatment,’ and it’s shocking, Eleanor, and I, I think you owe me an explanation—no, I demand an explanation, and right now, right this minute. No more excuses, no more hiding behind this ‘biologic living’ nonsense—the man’s manipulating your womb, isn’t he? Well, isn’t he?”

She’d gone pale beneath her tan. She was guilty, she’d been found out, but she never flinched and she never took her eyes from his. “Yes, he is. And what does that have to do with anything? It’s a perfectly respectable and effective treatment for a condition like mine, and that’s not all he does, not by a long shot—”

“Yes? And what else does he manipulate? Your breasts? Your bottom?”

The suddenness with which she sprang from the bed surprised him, and he stumbled back confusedly to avoid her. She was in her nightgown, a new one he’d never seen before, loose at the collar and provocative,
but he didn’t have a chance to admire it—she hit him across the face with the flat of her hand, twice, three times, till he took her wrists and held them. “Let me go, you son of a—let me go!” she shrieked, rocking in his arms, and he felt her elbow like a knife in his side, and then she was free. “Get out!” she cried, and he could hear movement in the hall.

“I won’t,” he panted, the rage building in him, pushing him beyond reason and control. He wanted to slap her back, pin her down, hurt her. “And I won’t allow you to go on like this. No more quacks, no more Kelloggs or Spitzvogels or Badgers or any of them—I’m taking you home.”

Her face was fierce, alive with flashing eyes and snapping teeth. “Ha!” she cried, and her voice twisted toward hysteria. “You think you own me? You think you’re my lord and master? You think this is feudal times?”

She wasn’t beautiful in that moment, wasn’t tender, wasn’t his wife. Eyes bulging, crouched like a wrestler, circling him in her rage, she was murderous and hateful. He felt the love go dead in him. “We’ll let the law decide that,” he said.

“The law?” she screamed, and there was a knock at the door now, a voice from the hallway—
Mrs. Lightbody, are you in there? Is everything all right?
“Threaten me with the law, will you, you weakling…. Get out!” she shrieked. “Get out or I’ll call the orderlies—”

“No, I won’t. Not unless you come with me. Now. Tonight.”

The banging at the door. “Mrs. Lightbody?”

She looked at him evenly a moment, and then let herself go, her voice splitting a new register, gathering itself into a face of screaming. “Help!” she cried. “Help, help, help!”

Under the circumstances, who could blame a man for seeking consolation elsewhere?

Will accepted Nurse Graves’s invitation to go boating on the afternoon before Decoration Day, and he didn’t think twice about it. He
was through with enemas and nut butter; through with cranks and quacks and the tyranny of fork, knife and spoon; through with Eleanor. She could have every private flap and wrinkle of her anatomy manipulated by the entire medical establishment of Germany for all he cared. And to prove it to himself he’d gone down to the Michigan Central depot and purchased a ticket to New York—a single ticket, for one passenger, one way only.

Standing there at the ticket window, he closed his eyes and pictured the old familiar house on Parsonage Lane, its rooms and halls and furniture, the horsehide sofa in the back parlor that was perfectly contoured to the mold of his back, the four-poster in the master bedroom with its curtains drawn to shut out the world, his bookshelves and reading lamp and the way the front hall took the morning sun and held it like a gift, and he didn’t see Eleanor anywhere in the picture. He saw Dick the wirehaired terrier and Mrs. Dunphy, the housekeeper, he saw the gardener and the delivery boy from Offenbacher’s … and who else? Who else did he see there? Nurse Graves, that’s who he saw. Irene. In the kitchen, gazing out on the roses, in the pantry, the parlor, the bath—
oh, the bath
—and a plan came to him then, born of the moment and fully formed. He would get a divorce, that’s what he would do, and Irene would climb with him into that high-vaulted connubial bed, soft where Eleanor Was hard, sweet where she was bitter, and he would reach out to her and take her in his arms, and no belt, no diet, no theory or rationale would have a thing to do with what came next….