The Road to Wellville

  Eleanor held her peace, but gave Badger a congratulatory little smile.

  “But there were accusations of all sorts of improper goings-on there,” Mrs. Hookstratten countered, “of sun worship, nudity, free love—”

  Free love. The term hung over the table like a visible thing, palpable, shining. For a moment no one spoke and Will turned over in his mind all that he knew about the Sinclairs’ experiment in communal living—which began and ended with what he’d read in the newspapers. It was a big story at the time. They’d purchased a rather grandiose property in Englewood, a former preparatory school, and set up a colony on Socialist principles, pooling the resources of their forty members—New Thoughtists, vegetarians, Single-Taxers, suffragettes, assorted college professors, muckrakers and Socialists of every stripe. The press made a big to-do over the issue of free love, to which Sinclair apparently subscribed, and titillated readers throughout the Hudson Valley and beyond with visions of midnight rendezvous and wives available for the asking. It was all very exciting in a voyeuristic way, but then the place mysteriously burned to the ground and that was the end of that. Until Will and Eleanor arrived at the San, that is, and saw Meta Sinclair wandering the halls like Ophelia, gliding along with a natural and unconscious grace, her bouquet of hair wild on her shoulders, her cat’s eyes fixed on some glittering thing in the distance. Will tried to picture her—Mrs. Sinclair, Meta—in the arms of another man and relieved of the flowing gowns and Wraps she favored, and felt himself going faint with the possibilities.

  “Nonsense,” Badger rasped. “Upton is a great and forward-thinking man—a vegetarian champion—and as respectable as anyone at this table. Yes, he was a heliophile—or, rather, Meta was, and he went along for her sake—but who isn’t? I certainly am, and no less an authority than our own Dr. Kellogg is a vigorous supporter of sunbathing—and that means, by definition, with as little sartorial impediment as possible—and not just sunbathing but all other forms of light therapy as well. And is there anything even remotely scandalous about Dr. Kellogg?”

  Mrs. Tindermarsh had gone pale. She was so agitated she couldn’t lift her eyes to Badger’s, addressing her plate instead. “But Mr. Badger,” she said in a voice that seemed reluctant to leave her throat, “what of these accusations of, of free love? Certainly, in a civilized society—” She couldn’t go on.

  Badger was unflappable. “Free love shouldn’t be seen in a pejorative light, not at all, Mrs. Tindermarsh. Indeed, its roots are purely feminist. Have you ever considered that conventional marriage”—and here the muddy eyes came to rest briefly on Will and then darted away again—”is a sort of prison—for the woman, that is? The man is free to indulge his whims, but if a woman should presume to take a lover, why, the president wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.”

  Eleanor applauded this grand speech with a quick soaring laugh and Hart-Jones joined her, belatedly, with a bucolic guffaw all his own. “Women in chains!” he cried, choking on his own wit. “White slavery!”

  Ignoring him, Badger went on: “Both the Sinclairs, whom,’ as I say, I know and admire as intimate friends and companions, happen to feel that one should go wherever love leads and that it is not love but jealousy which is the obscenity. Love gives all rights, and a true marriage, a forward-thinking marriage, takes none away.”

  Badger seemed to be studying Will as he said this, and all at once Will was irritated. What was the implication? That he was holding Eleanor back? That he should share her around like breeding stock? “I beg to disagree,” Will croaked, and the tenor of his voice seemed to startle the table. Before he knew what he was saying, he was launching a passionate plea for nuptial fidelity, for love offered up like a gift, whole and complete in the giver and receiver, but all the time, in a kind of panic, he was thinking of Irene.

  “Cant,” Badger pronounced, dismissing him with a wave of the hand. “Nothing but cant and platitudes.”

  Mrs. Tindermarsh sat rigid, her head bowed, as if she’d just sustained a crippling assault. Hart-Jones had lost interest—his powers of concentration ran no deeper than a gnat’s—and returned to his food. Her eyes darting from one face to another, Mrs. Hookstratten sat back in her chair and brought a contemplative thumb to her chin. Will, in the meanwhile, felt personally affronted, felt like arguing the issue into the ground, felt like tearing off his jacket and hammering Badger till the smug little dirt-colored eyes went as cold as two marbles, but he never got the chance. Just then Eleanor gasped and put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, my God, Lionel—I’m late for my appointment,” she cried, rising hastily from her chair. “Please excuse me,” she murmured, turning to the table at large and covering herself with a smile as the men rose and the women tried on looks of mild surprise.

  Eleanor was already backing away from the table, the smile stuck there on her face as if it wore pins on the underside. “Therapy, you know,” she said, and tried to shrug and curtsy at the same time, like some sort of circus performer. “That’s what we’re here for.”

  And how did all this affect Will? His wife had fallen under Badger’s spell and she was undergoing some sort of arcane treatment outside the Sanitarium—that much he gathered, though he’d yet to confront her with it—and she was exercising rigid control over her appetite. Will had never been much for rigid control—he was more inclined to grill up a steak and quaff a bottle of Sears’ White Star Anything Cure—but he was exercising rigid control over himself just to keep from setting the San afire and catching the first train back to New York. And why was he doing it? For Eleanor’s sake, that was why. Because he loved her.

  But as he slipped surreptitiously into the cab behind hers on a sunstruck afternoon a week later, he couldn’t help wondering if that love had already begun to discover its limits. He was spying on her. Following his own wife as if she were a criminal. He didn’t stop to examine what he was doing, but it was a terrible thing and he knew it, and as the hack started off with a lurch and the startled trees of the drive went by in a blur, his stomach sank in on itself. “Where to?” the driver said, leaning into the window. He was wizened, white-haired, short as a man sawed in half, with a glob of a nose, and two hard cynical eyes that shone like penny candy. Will, his gut cinched to the very last loop, told him to follow the hack in front of them, at which point the driver gave him a knowing look, turned his head to spit in the street and flicked his lash lightly across the horse’s pounding buttocks.

  They turned right on Washington and then left on Manchester. The houses grew bigger and finer as they traveled up the street, shadows galloping along ahead of them, the odd automobile pulled up at the curb or standing solitary in a shaded drive, as if on display. Another left on Jordan took them within sight of the roiled Kalamazoo River, and then Eleanor’s cab was slowing in front of a mustard-colored Tudor with burnished brown beams and matching shutters. “Keep going,” Will told the driver, and he shrank back against the canopy lest Eleanor see him, “but slowly, very slowly.”

  The driver obliged, and Will’s cab crept by Eleanor’s, which had come to a halt at the curb out front of the house. As they passed by, Will could see his wife in silhouette as she paid her driver, and then the driver emerged to open the door for her. Momentum pulled Will forward and he had to twist himself round in the seat and look over his shoulder to frame her in the back window as she made her way up the walk. “Slower,” he hissed to the driver, and he saw the door of the house draw back and a man there, receding; a monocle, the pencil-stroke of a mustache, and that was it: she was gone.

  Will had the driver turn round at the end of the block and make another pass. The cab slowed as they went by again and Will studied the house so intently he might have been looking through the walls, but it refused to become anything more than just a building—stone, mortar and plank. As the house fell away behind them, Will leaned forward and asked the driver if he knew who lived there.

  Jostling in his seat, the little man considered the question a moment, spitting rhythmically over his shou
lder three or four times in the process, as if the act were an aide-mémoire, and then, speaking into the breeze, he said: “A doctor.”

  “You know his name?”

  Another flurry of throat clearing and expectorating, the head nodding and bobbing on its stalk of a neck, the horse jogging, streetlamps and tree trunks flicking past like pictures in a deck of cards. “Nope. All I know is I take your sick ladies from the Sanitary Hospital and then sometimes I pick ‘em up again, depending, and, well …” (More hawking, the sleeve across the mouth, a quick flick of the lash.)

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I can’t say what-all goes on in there, but the ladies? They seem a whole lot calmer on the way out than when I drop ‘em—so it must work, whatever it is. No lack of ‘em, either. Ladies, I mean.”

  Will mulled over this information as the cab proceeded up the street, but he didn’t find much comfort in it. If this was just another one of Eleanor’s “progressive” enthusiasms (the term “crackpot” occurred to him as being more appropriate), then it really wasn’t anything to worry about. Could it be worse than the sinusoidal bath, after all? But what if it were truly dangerous, addictive, subversive? Just because the other ladies flocked to the treatment didn’t legitimize it—they were all San habitués, veterans of every harebrained health adventure that came along, as susceptible as if they’d been bound, gagged and delivered to the doorstep. And who was this mysterious “doctor,” anyway? And if he was legitimate, then why wasn’t he at the San or one of its imitators? Worse: why should Eleanor keep the whole business a secret from her own husband? Fishy. Very fishy.

  Absorbed in his thoughts, Will didn’t notice that the driver had brought him back to the San until they turned into the circular drive. He looked up and there it was, looming grand and impregnable before him, the Temple of Quackery, an Idea and a Way made concrete, cut, hewn and stacked in stone. The wheels glided over the pavement, the sun scoured the windows, patients wandered the lawns, and Will, suspended in his carriage, had an unsettling revelation: he was coming home. No longer was he William Fitzroy Lightbody of Parsonage Lane, Peterskill, but an open checkbook, a card-carrying member of the Gizzardite Society of America, a votary at the shrine of rigid control. “Driver,” he called, and there was an edge of panic in his voice, as if he’d just risen to the surface of a pond after being tangled in the weeds, “take me away from here.”

  He was answered by a deep-throated frictive command and a tautening of the reins. The wheels chopped to a halt, though there was another hack behind them and a high-crowned Buick automobile behind that. “Where to, friend?” the cabbie asked with a leer.

  “I don’t know. Anywhere. Take me downtown.”

  The driver let him off at the corner across from the Post Tavern and Will got out to stretch his legs and have a look around. Though the Doctor’s spies no longer shadowed him (apparently they thought him harmless now that the offending kink had been removed), he didn’t get downtown much and he really didn’t know why. Maybe it was because he’d fallen into the San routine like a sleepwalker, all of society and its entertainments incorporated there in microcosm, or maybe it was just that the town held little interest for him if he couldn’t dine out or stroll into a tavern, put his foot up on the brass rail and have a drink at the bar. But anyway, he was bored and the day was fine and all of Battle Creek was spread out before him like the petals of a flower opening to the sun.

  He poked his head in a bookshop, bought a handful of soda crackers at the grocer’s, watched two men in shirtsleeves dig a hole in the lawn out front of city hall and set a sapling in it. Later, it must have been around five, he sat on a bench and read an editorial by C. W. Post in the Morning Enquirer. It was while he was sitting there, wondering if Eleanor had finished with her treatment for the day and thinking he ought to walk back up to the San and see what sort of food substitute they were passing off as supper—not that he was hungry, but just for the comfort of the routine—that he glanced up from the paper and caught the eye of a man passing by on the sidewalk.

  The man looked away and seemed to quicken his pace, but beneath the patchy whiskers, the smoked lenses and the superfluous overcoat there was something about him that looked familiar. This was no stranger, this was—“Charlie!” Will called out suddenly, as if the name had come to life on his tongue, “Charlie Ossining!”

  Drawn up short, head turtled in the socket of his collapsed shoulders, Charlie looked like a scab fingered from the picket line. He looked tentative, nervous, worn down, his shoes scuffed, his body twisted in a defensive cringe. Lowering the shaded lenses, he peered back over his shoulder with a pair of eyes that had no expectation of pleasure—or even clemency—in them.

  “Charlie!” Will repeated, and he was up off the bench now, shaking the limp hand that stuck out of the overcoat like a decoration. “How are you? How’s Per-Fo going? Taking the world by storm, eh? Yes?”

  Charlie gave him a tepid smile. Was that a mustache? It was so sparse you could count the individual hairs.

  “By the way,” Will went on, relieved to be talking to someone, anyone, “your Mrs. Hookstratten’s been assigned to our table at the San, talks about you all the time—but you probably know that already.” A pause. No encouragement from Charlie. Nothing. “Well. And so. It’s good to see you.”

  “Likewise,” Charlie mumbled, and his eyes were busy, reading the street in both directions, leaping from the bench to the trees behind it to the building at the corner.

  “Eleanor’s fine,” Will said, tucking the newspaper under one arm and letting a fruity sigh escape him, “and I’m about the same, no better, no worse—you know how it is. You’re looking”—Will was about to say “good,” but amended it at the last moment—”different. Growing side-whiskers, are you? And a mustache? Very distinguished. I wore one—a mustache—when I was younger, did I ever tell you?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” Charlie said, and he removed the colored spectacles, folded them up and tucked them away in his pocket. He looked less furtive now, more like the old Charlie, the boon companion and razor-sharp entrepreneur to whom Will had entrusted his check for a thousand dollars. “Mrs. Hookstratten,” he said, as if he were just catching up with the conversation, but the name seemed to fall away from his lips and he faltered.

  Something was wrong here, and Will couldn’t quite fathom what it was. He gave Charlie a reassuring grin. The sun fell back a notch and the shade deepened. Birds flicked through the trees. They both turned to watch a man on a bicycle glide up the street.

  “What I mean is, it’s a real joy to have her here,” Charlie said, but there was no joy in his face, “Mrs. Hookstratten, that is. Just like home. I’m arranging a tour of the Per-Fo factory for her.”

  “Oh? That sounds terrific. I’m sure she’ll enjoy it. And where did you say the factory was located, just out of curiosity? I might like to have a visit someday myself, you know.” Will gave a laugh, meant to imply that while it was his prerogative as a stockholder, there was no pressure involved—he wasn’t fishing for an invitation. Or perhaps only partly.

  “Raeburn Street.”

  “Raeburn? I don’t think I’m familiar with—”

  “It’s on the east side of town—or on the south side, that is. South-east.” Charlie’s eyes were busy again—up the street and down, over Will’s shoulder, back to the building on the corner. “Listen, Will”—the old smile, the warm one—”I’ve got to run. Business, you know. But let’s meet for lunch one day. Soon. All right? No whiskey, I promise.”

  Will laughed. “It’s what I want more than anything, but we’ve got to control our appetites, right? Should I bring Eleanor? Amelia? We could make it a foursome.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Charlie said, but there wasn’t a whole lot of conviction in his voice.

  “You know,” Will said, keeping him—keeping him simply because he had nothing else to do in the world but crawl back to his cell at the San—”it’s funny we never met in Peterskill, what with your b
eing Mrs. Hookstratten’s protégé, I mean. But of course she’s my mother’s friend primarily and Eleanor and I have our own circle of acquaintances…. How old did you say you were?”

  It was a simple enough question, straightforward, direct, but Charlie seemed to be having difficulty with it. He retrieved the smoked spectacles from his pocket, wiped them on his sleeve and hooked them first over one ear and then over the other before answering. “I’ll be twenty-six in July.”

  Twenty-six. There was a poignancy in that. A beauty and a sadness. Not so long ago Will had been twenty-six, a happy and a healthy man, happily married and with the sheen of immortality glowing round him like a second skin. All at once he was seized with the urge to take Charlie by the arm and lead him up the street to the Red Onion, to sit over shots of whiskey and tall sizzling beers and compare notes on their boyhoods in Peterskill, the concerts at the band shell in Depew Park, skating on the river, school, baseball, girls they’d known in common and maybe even courted or danced with, but he fought it down. “There’s only five and a half years separating us,” he murmured instead. “Or maybe six. Strange we never met—but I guess we traveled in different circles—”

  “Yeah, I’m sure that’s it. But listen, Will, I’ve really got to be going.” Charlie seized his hand. “Good talking to you.”

  “And you.”

  Will stood there and watched till Charlie turned the corner and was gone, and then he made his way up the street toward the San. They’d be serving dinner soon, and while the prospect of the food didn’t hold much interest for him, Eleanor would be there, and that was something. Though he had to share her with Linniman and Badger and Dr. Kellogg and half the matrons, Foodists and housewives in the place, though he’d followed her to the door of that mysterious house on Jordan Street like a cuckold and sat at her side like a trained monkey, she was his wife still, and he took what he could get.