The Road to Wellville (67 page)

It was a vision that stayed with him, that haunted and inspired him, and he walked around in a dream for the rest of the week. He saw Eleanor only at meals, and she didn’t move him, not at all. Which was just as well, because she refused even to glance in his direction, let alone speak to him. She was coming off her fast and taking peach, apple and pear pulp, a spoon or two of pabulum and egg pastina, cautiously working her way up to breads and puddings and the rough-edged but cleansing bulk of the aspiring vegetables. Will watched her eat with the detachment of a scientist, and found that he didn’t care one way or the other, didn’t care whether she ate or starved, and he listened to her dialogue with Badger, Hart-Jones and the others as he might have
listened to a language he couldn’t place. On the third day after their falling out, Eleanor moved back to her old table, and she took Badger with her.

But Eleanor wasn’t the issue, Eleanor wasn’t what concerned him—it was Irene. Irene of the caressing voice and soothing hands, the farm girl, the nurse, the angel:
Irene
. She couldn’t accept a gift—no, that was against the regulations—but flowers were different. They were like little bits and pieces of the sun, she cooed, and they were the gift of God—she could never refuse flowers. And so each morning that week Will walked all the way out to a poultry farm at the end of Washington Avenue, battling hay fever and gnats and the stink of chickens and the sun that bit into the back of his neck, just to purchase a bouquet for her. Lilies and gold alexanders, phlox and cinquefoil, he let the farmer’s wife choose them, something new each day, and when Irene came in to take him to his eleven-o’clock vibrotherapy session, the flowers were there for her, in a vase on the night table. He didn’t say anything about the ticket in his wallet or how he was leaving Eleanor and needed a nurse, a friend, a companion, a lover and soul mate to accompany him to New York and stay there with him and be his wife, not a word, not yet. He smiled and flattered her and told her she was prettier than any bouquet, and she looked at her hands and blushed. No, he would save the speeches for Sunday, in the boat, as they drifted out over the bosom of Goguac Lake, vernal breezes wafting off the shore, swans bobbing beside them like accomplices, and there would be no place to go, no appointments to keep or regimen to follow, no doctors or orderlies, no prying eyes.

Of course, as luck would have it, he discovered on Thursday that both the Countess Tetranova and Mrs. Solomon Teitelbaum were coming along, as per the Christmas expedition to the Graves homestead, and that took the wind out of his sails—or, rather, the oars out of his hands. The news—Irene let it drop casually as she was changing his bed—depressed him. Utterly. There was nothing special here, nothing romantic in the least—it was all in his head. For Irene it was merely charity work, a duty, just another therapeutic outing for a pitiful bunch of shut-ins and autointoxicatees, nothing more. Hurt, stricken, insulted to the core, Will brooded over his disappointment through the course
of a long afternoon, his plans in ruins. Didn’t she realize how he felt about her after all this time? Was she blind? Coy? Or was it shyness?

Whatever it was, Will wasn’t about to give up so easily. By dinnertime, he’d already managed to speak with Mrs. Teitelbaum. He found her in the Palm Garden, pale as a peeled egg, reading a novel and struggling to relax in the clutch of an orthopedic chair. He allowed himself approximately one hundred and twenty seconds of small talk, then launched into a discussion of the insect life of the Goguac Lake region. They’d been talking about Mrs. Tindermarsh and her virile stage presence as the husband in
The Fatal Luncheon
, when Will shifted the subject. “She was bitten during rehearsal, you know,” he said.

“Bitten?” Mrs. Teitelbaum looked confused.

“Oh, yes,” Will assured her, shaking his head. “Just under the ear—it’s so swollen they’re afraid she might not be able to go on. One of those nasty biting flies from Goguac Lake—greenheads, I believe they call them. I hear they’re positively swarming out there this time of year, clouds of them so thick you can barely see the water.”

With the Countess, he chose the direct approach. “I want to be alone with her,” he said.

They were in the corridor just outside the ladies’ sudatorium, the odd patient moving languidly past them, the faint hiss of steam in the background. The Countess lifted an eyebrow. Will could see the pellet of gossip ricocheting in her eyes—the whole Sanitarium would know by Sunday. But, then, what did he care? He was already gone, and he’d never look back. Never.

“With your nurse?”

He really didn’t want to go into it, and so he gave her what he hoped was a rakish look. “A man has his urges,” he said.

She peered up at him from her little porcelain doll’s face. “Especially when his wife is so ill, am I right? But then
you
must have made a remarkable recovery … Will,” she purred, laying a tiny hand on his arm.

His instinct was to pull away, but he fought it. He was a lover, a Lothario, a man of the world. He gave her a lewd grin.

“Yes, I see,” she said finally, giving his arm a squeeze. “You know, I’ve just remembered—I promised Amelia Hookstratten I’d help her
plan for her luncheon. I really must do something about this memory of mine…. Mustn’t I, Will?”

The day was perfect, high-crowned and glorious, no clouds to filter the sun, warm but not overpowering. There was a breeze—Will’s straw boater sailed off his head and across the lawn the minute he stepped out the door to climb into the car Irene had arranged for them—and that was potentially worrisome, but, then, you couldn’t have everything, could you? One of the San’s bellhops fetched the hat back and Will kept it firmly in place with one hand as he helped Irene into the automobile—an Italian Zust donated by one of the San’s patrons—which was, unfortunately, open to the elements. It was a struggle. Will never let go of his hat the whole way out to the lake, and the anxiety of it prevented him from enjoying himself or engaging in the witty banter and romantic innuendo he’d been looking forward to. In contrast, Irene, in a great wide-brimmed panama decorated with artificial flowers and silk butterflies, seemed perfectly at ease—never once did she touch her hand to
her
hat, no matter how stern the gust. The mysteries of the feminine, Will thought, his arm aching from holding his hat so long in one position. Or maybe it was just hatpins.

The sight of the lake cheered him. They wound through the trees and out to a public beach, where scores of people sat around on blankets picnicking, and children ran about raising a healthy din. The lake gave back the sunlight in rolling flashes and sudden incendiary sparks, pushing at the shore as if testing its limits, and there were a number of boats out on the surface despite the wind. Will saw sculls, rowboats and half a dozen sails, and way in the distance one of the steamboats that brought people to Picnic Island and Jennings’ Landing. He was encouraged. Excited. Nothing could have kept him from those oars.

Unfortunately, the wind had combed through the fields all morning, explosive with its load of pollen, and that slowed him down a bit. His eyelids itched, he couldn’t seem to stop sneezing and there was a spot over the bridge of his nose, just between the eyes, that throbbed as if it had been struck with a mallet. He was having a little difficulty breathing,
too—a certain constriction of the windpipe—but these were the familiar symptoms that had dogged him, spring and fall, since boyhood. So what if he had flat feet, hay fever and a ruined stomach? Would it have stopped Roosevelt, Peary, Harry K. Thaw? This was his best chance and he wasn’t about to let it get away from him on account of a ninny nose and itchy eyes. Of course, there was the matter of the rowboat, too—he’d lain awake half the night trying to recall just exactly where one sat while rowing. Was it with the back facing forward or the front facing backward?

If he was tentative—there went his hat again, damn it, and he only just caught it this time—Irene seemed oblivious. She was utterly serene, a soft smile of anticipation on her lips, ready to yield herself up to the moment, spontaneous and free, ready for anything—Goguac Lake today and Peterskill tomorrow. What a woman. What a jewel of a woman. But she seemed to be saying something to him as he helped her from the car and fumbled to hand her her parasol without letting go of his hat. She had to repeat herself, the wind playing tricks with his ears: “Would you mind bringing the hamper along, Mr. Lightbody?”

The hamper. Yes, of course. And she was practical, too. Couldn’t very well have a picnic without a wicker basket chock-full of Sanitarium goodies—bean-paste sandwiches, endive salad and Graham-grit cookies—and some fine foamy kumyss and grape juice to wash it all down. But what a beautiful dress, what a beautiful fit. He’d have to ask her about that. Lovely material. Really.

The driver, a scrawny antediluvian man with white hair and mustaches, was fussing over the hamper in the front seat. “I can manage it myself,” Will said, taking it from him over his protestations, “no problem at all, really, thank you.” Cradling the basket, Will stood there at attention while Irene gave the driver instructions to be back for them by five-thirty, adding, with a wink for Will, that she wouldn’t want her prize patient to miss his dinner. And then they were off, down the path to the dock where the rental boats bobbed and jerked at their tethers like living things and the wind-driven waves threw foam at the shore. It was a rich and intimate moment, almost domestic, and he wanted to slip his arm through hers, the most natural thing in the world, but he found he didn’t have an arm to spare, what with the hamper in one
hand and the other clamped firmly to his head, so he let it pass. Regretfully.

The dockhand insisted on Will’s getting into the boat first, something about counterbalancing the lady’s weight, and Will, at a loss, crouched low over the edge of the dock and set a foot down in the rearing depths of the boat. As soon as his foot touched the planking the thing plunged away from him, only to fly back up as he planted his weight and snatched the other foot from the dock. There was an uneasy moment, poised between the wet and the dry, and just when he thought he’d achieved equilibrium, he felt himself going over backward and threw out both arms like a tightrope walker. Miraculously, he recovered himself, falling heavily athwart the seat as the waves, black-lipped and ugly, snapped and snarled beneath him. He was dry and unhurt and spared the embarrassment of an unplanned dip, but unfortunately the straw boater chose that moment to permanently part company with his head, sailing out over the chop like a discus and vanishing in a trough a hundred yards out. He hardly noticed. Bareheaded, his hair whipped by the breeze till it stung his eyes, he snatched frantically at the oars, thinking to steady the craft for Irene—and he might have succeeded, too, if he hadn’t been facing in the wrong direction.

At any rate, he swung round at the dockhand’s instigation and found himself facing Irene, who’d somehow managed to slip into her seat without setting up so much as a ripple. They were practically knee-to-knee, an arrangement he found both romantic and nautically satisfying. “Bracing, isn’t it?” he said, showing her all his teeth, and then the dockhand pushed them off with a bamboo pole and they were out on the lake, boating.

It didn’t go well at first, not at all how he’d envisioned it. He fought with the oars, which seemed somehow to have grown absurdly in length since the boat had left the dock, great long recalcitrant logs lost in the depths until suddenly and without warning they emerged to shower poor Nurse Graves with foam and flecks of pondweed. And he couldn’t quite get them synchronized, either—he’d pull on one only to find the other lagging at the surface, and then when he went for that one the boat swung perversely the other way, pulling the first oar out of his hand.
They went round in circles for a good fifteen minutes before Will, with Irene’s help and instruction, began to get the hang of it. By then, the wind had taken them and the shore was a distant memory.

But Irene was a good sport about it—he couldn’t fault her there. She seemed watchful, content, full of some deep inner joy that filled him with hope—was she so happy just to be with him, was that it?—and she was patient with him even when the odd sneezing fit came over him and he had to drop the oars and press a handkerchief to his face. “You seem happy today,” he said, the oars finally at rest, the boat drifting before the wind. “Happier than usual, I mean—not that you’re not happy or that you don’t look happy every day, I just mean that today, you, uh, well—” and he gave it up with a shrug. “You know what I mean.”

She held her smile for a long moment, her face a perfect oval beneath the brim of her hat, a strand of hair caught in the corner of her mouth. “Yes,” she said finally, in her whisper of a voice, appending a little sigh of contentment to the end of it. “You’re very observant, Mr. Lightbody—or
Will
, I should say. It seems absurd to be so formal with you. You’re my patient, sure—you always will be—but you’re my friend, too. I’ve felt that for some time now, and on my lips you may be Mr. Lightbody, but in my heart”—she lowered her eyes—”you’re Will.”