The Road to Wellville by T.C. Boyle Page B

tongue, I knew it! As severe a case of autointoxication as I’ve ever seen….”
    Will’s face sank. Eleanor looked stricken.
    “But it’s nothing we can’t deal with here, I assure you,” the Doctor. was quick to add. “Of course, I can’t say for certain till you’ve been properly and thoroughly examined, but I hold out every hope—” He broke off suddenly. Where was George? He gave Dab a sharp glance, made accidental eye contact with half a dozen patients—Hello, hello—and twisted round completely before he spotted him. Suddenly his jaw clenched. There was George, Hildah’s boy, ragged and stinking, a tramp, a bum in toe-sprung shoes, all the way across the room at the elbow of J. Henry Osborne, Jr., the bicycle king, cadging change. “George!” the Doctor cried out, and the whole room turned to him.
    He was mortified. This was a place of healing, of peace and tranquillity, where the halls echoed with the soothing strains of the Battle Creek Sanitarium String Quartet and no one spoke above a whisper. And here he was, shouting like an Italian in a tenement.
    In the next instant, Dab was scurrying across the marble floor, and a pair of attendants, big men, sinewy, with rocklike chests and intransigent shoulders, were converging on the Doctor’s errant son. Distracted, the prophylactic smile frozen to his face, the Doctor bowed curtly to the Lightbodys—“Charity case,” he murmured, “nothing to be alarmed about”—and hustled off in the direction of the far corridor, waving a hand over his head to direct the attendants like an overwrought general deploying his troops.

    In his office, settled behind the great mahogany barge of his desk, the bill of his eyeshade pulled down low, the Doctor was another man. He was in command again, in control, everything was in its place and all was right with the world. Except for George, that is. Not in the least contrite, he sat there across from his adoptive father, slumped in hischair, the omnipresent sneer ironed into his face. Behind George, sandwiched between the framed portraits of Socrates and Elie Metchnikoff, Dab stood against the wall doing his best imitation of a henchman, arms folded, shoulders squared, chin thrust forward. The two attendants waited just outside the door.
    The Doctor pushed himself back from the desk and, never fully at ease unless he was in motion, began to pace the carpet. For all his talk of biologic living and the simple life, he drove himself relentlessly, working from 4:00 A.M. to midnight, seven days a week. Sleep? The Doctor disdained it—who had time for sleep? He traveled to Algeria, Italy and Mexico, to Paris, London and Lisbon, he addressed the Northern Nut Growers Association and the National Milk Congress, lectured his patients, dictated his books (
Plain Facts about Sexual Life, Man, the Masterpiece, The Crippled Colon
, and
The Itinerary of a Breakfast
, among others), oversaw the administration of the San, organized the Race Betterment Society and the Health Efficiency League of America, served as president of the American Medical Missionary College and half a dozen other organizations, and still managed to knock off as many as twenty-five gastrointestinal operations a day. If he couldn’t find all the time he’d like for Ella, who’d become deaf and increasingly feeble, or for his forty-two children, who could blame him?
    “George,” he said, still pacing, his head down, “I’m disappointed in you. No, I may as well be frank: I’m disgusted by your behavior. Disgusted. I took you in. Rescued you. Why, your mother was nothing but a common, a common—”
    “Go ahead and say it—a whore. She was a whore.”
    “You know I don’t like to hear that language, George.”
    George’s spine was bent like a strand of wire. He slipped lower and lower, until he seemed to be absorbed in the fabric of the chair. He made a pyramid of his grubby fingers and smiled a bemused smile. He said nothing.
    The Doctor paced. Light