Wickett's Remedy

by Myla Goldberg

  Invitations from customers were uncommon but not unheard of; it was not technically improper to take lunch elsewhere so long as one did not return late. Until now Lydia’s curiosity had been tempered by her refusal to be an object of pity or lust. Such intent was absent in Henry Wickett who, true to his own appraisal, looked far easier to fend off than the Southie boys she had, on occasion, needed to put in their place.

  “I haven’t got time for a proper lunch,” she replied, “but I won’t say no if you don’t mind being quick about it.” Never had consent garnered her so sweet a smile.

  Walking beside Lydia, Henry felt as if he were on parade. She moved like a living, breathing portent of spring.

  As well as she knew Washington Street, she was a stranger to its early afternoon habits: Gilchrist’s was a creature that inhaled its personnel in the morning and held its breath until evening. Among the businessmen and lady shoppers Lydia was revisited by the feeling, birthed by her girlhood visits, that she had arrived at the center of things. After years of close observation she had perfected her bearing. She walked with the ideal combination of confidence and propriety, and held her chin at just the right angle. The appeal of this lunch invitation, she realized, lay in walking in such a fashion and in such company. Having studied the world of Washington Street for so long, she could now display her erudition.

  Timeliness demanded she elect Monty’s, a salaryman’s lunchroom convenient to the store, but once inside she wished that she and her lunch date might have promenaded longer. Monty’s was a noisy place that smelled of boiled beef. Its counter was overhung with stooped diners abridging as much as possible the distance between mouth and plate. A harried plug of a man in a stained apron served as cook, waiter, and cashier and was adept at none. At the sight of Lydia Kilkenny and Henry Wickett he gestured dismissively at the restaurant’s few tables. Lydia selected one in the front corner that offered a view of the street. With her back to the restaurant she could imagine she was dining in more genteel circumstances.

  Though none among Us recall a different moniker, Mortimer Montague insists that the name painted on his front window was not “Monty’s” but “Montague’s.”

  “It’s not much to look at,” she apologized, “but I hear the food’s decent. Anything fancier and I’d risk being late.”

  Henry feared grinning like an idiot if he stared at her any longer.

  “Please order anything you like,” Henry Wickett urged. As they waited to place their orders he concentrated on his flatware, displaying the absorption of a child immersed in a private game. She waited for him to speak; she was uncertain what sort of topics gentlemen discussed over lunch and feared sounding common. At unexpected intervals Henry Wickett darted his head upward—a swimmer gasping for air—and she leaned forward in anticipation of conversation but each time was disappointed: his intention was merely to look at her before blushing and returning his gaze to the table, as if she were some brightly burning thing that could only be glimpsed at intervals.

  “It was kind of you to ask me to lunch,” she offered. “It’s nice to get a bit of air.”

  “Please don’t thank me,” he demurred. “I’m afraid you’ll find I’m not very good at conversation.”

  “No?”

  “No,” he confirmed, and returned his gaze to his fork.

  “Are you a student?” she attempted. Henry Wickett had small, uncallused, unscarred hands marred only by habitual nail-biting. In Southie such unused hands would be cause for embarrassment but here, across the bridge, Lydia viewed them as she might an exotic zoo specimen.

  “Yes,” he affirmed, his head darting once again upward as if for a lungful of air. “I study medicine. I’m meant to be a doctor. This table is really quite interesting.”

  “What?” she stammered. The table was filmed with grease and scarred from top to bottom with the names and initials of former diners, details that had previously escaped her notice. Before she could speak, the waiter arrived to take their orders. Her dismay over the state of the table was compounded when, after ordering the daily special for herself, her companion requested only a bowl of chicken broth. “I’m sorry,” she sighed. “I suppose this isn’t the sort of place you’re accustomed to.”

  Henry remembers Lydia spilling the water.

  “No need for apology!” Henry Wickett exclaimed. His startled hands winged upward and upended his water glass, revealing the surface of the table to be sloped in his direction. One hand enlisted an oversized handkerchief to stop the flow while the other righted the glass. Lydia watched, powerless as a small rivulet escaped blotting and dropped onto Henry Wickett’s imported wool trousers.

  “Oh dear!” she cried, and started up from her chair with her napkin.

  “Please don’t!” he urged. The water was sopped, the glass righted. Henry Wickett darted a glance in Lydia’s direction while his hand furtively blotted his pant leg. “Since childhood I have been allergic to most foods,” he explained. He reached for his water glass and brought it to his lips: it was empty. “My stomach is quite sensitive and so in unfamiliar restaurants I order only calming liquids. And as for the table, it reminds me of an oak.”

  “An oak—” she echoed. She observed her reflection in the restaurant window for the first time since leaving the store. The starch had left her collar, and the bodice of her shirtwaist was deeply creased from a morning of refolding stock. Her hair had become mussed and dark shadows ringed her eyes. She was grateful her back faced the other diners. The restaurant had become strangely silent since she had risen from her seat.

  Memory’s egoism is often a kindness. None of Monty’s regulars recall this incident.

  “Yes!” Henry affirmed, seemingly unconcerned or unaware of their impression on their fellow diners. “The venerable trunk of an oak, carved by generations of courtship beneath its branches—” His eyes widened. “That isn’t to say—I didn’t mean to imply—” But words failed him. He dabbed vehemently at the water stain on his pant leg.

  Henry was too busy watching Lydia eat. This, too, reminded him of a parade. Her every gesture expressed refinement and vivacity.

  Their food arrived. According to the restaurant clock she had fifteen minutes in which to eat her meal and return to her counter to avoid being fined for lateness, precluding the possibility of further conversation. By the time she finished her lunch, her companion had taken barely three spoonfuls of soup but insisted he was satisfied. After escorting her to the store’s employee entrance he scurried toward the bustle of Washington Street with the single-mindedness of a mouse seeking its mousehole and Lydia assumed that was the last she would see of Henry Wickett.

  Once he had lost himself in the crowd, Henry allowed himself to skip, briefly, before becoming winded.

  But in the days that followed, while Lydia rode the trolley or tallied receipts, Henry Wickett’s image surfaced in her mind. His unexpected observation—initially forgotten in her embarrassment over spilt water and inelegant dining—now echoed in her memory. “It reminds me of an oak,” she would think to herself, and the smaller details of the world would sharpen.

  When Henry Wickett reappeared the following Friday and asked her to lunch a second time, she was taken completely by surprise. “Are you sure?” she asked. Though pleased at the chance to refine her first impression, she feared for Henry Wickett’s digestion, as well as for his trousers. “We’d have to go to Monty’s again.”

  The handkerchiefs were a purely practical consideration. Henry had not expected his pragmatism to tender such sweet recompense.

  “I’ve come prepared this time,” he replied, and pulled three handkerchiefs from his pocket. Lydia had never laughed inside Gilchrist’s before; until now, that pleasure had been relegated to the other side of the bridge. Henry’s smile at the sound reminded Lydia how guarded most faces were. Even once the smile passed, she could see its stamp on his face in the small, light lines around the skin of his mouth and eyes, faint ripples that only graced a face that smiled ofte
n.

  Mortimer Montague made it his business not to recognize anybody. He looked at shoes, not faces.

  The man behind the grease-stained apron pretended not to recognize them as they reclaimed the same window table. Though Henry’s shyness and Lydia’s limited time made conversation difficult, she learned her companion was the only son of a West Roxbury businessman, his medical school career the family’s first chance at claiming a doctor. Henry had few friends, as his studies and uncertain health occupied most of his time. His mother had despaired of his eligibility as a bachelor and hoped his becoming a doctor would compensate for his other failings. Though Henry Wickett tended to keep his eyes downcast, when he spoke he gazed at her with a forthrightness much more common to children than to adults. His openness and gentleness—qualities she was unaccustomed to seeing in young men—convinced her that his motives for seeking her company, while mysterious, were almost certainly not dishonorable. Perhaps Henry Wickett wanted to improve his conversational skills preparatory to whatever future courtship he planned to undertake; perhaps he simply did not like to eat alone. Whatever the reason, she was happy to oblige him. In poignant tones she described to her brothers the poor fellow she had begun accompanying to lunch each Friday, her depiction so woeful that all save Michael assumed an act of charity for a man greatly advanced in age.

  The first letter arrived by courier on a Wednesday afternoon. She was certain some mistake had been made, but the messenger’s docket read: “To Miss Lydia Kilkenny, Who Works Behind the Shirt Counter in the Gilchrist Department Store.” On D Street very occasional letters arrived from a distant cousin in County Cork and Michael had once written to Babe Ruth for an autographed photo, but never in her life had Lydia received an envelope bearing her name. Before an audience of gawking counter girls, she signed for the post with a pale, trembling hand; she was certain only bad news traveled with such pomp. From his pouch the courier withdrew an elegant envelope of cream-colored linen, embossed with a wax seal depicting the silhouette of a bird in flight. The nearest thing to it that Lydia had ever seen was the certificate she had received confirming her successful graduation from the eighth grade. To avoid breaking the wax seal, which seemed too fine a thing to corrupt, she slit the side of the envelope with a hatpin. The words were penned in a clear, elegant hand, in even lines of dark blue ink across a single, powder blue page:

  Fond repetition is amnesia’s adversary. To this day each word of Henry’s letter retains its savor.

  Dearest Lydia,

  I am certain you did not expect to hear from me so soon after yet another lunch in which you valiantly carried the day while I sat frozen like some awkward creature made of sticks. Oh Lydia, forgive me, but I have always felt so much more myself on paper. I have ceased to seek reasons for this odd truth: I accept I am a man of letters, my heart filled with ink. If I am to hold any hope of winning you, this is something you must know.

  Lydia, I am changed from the poor wretch you took in hand in the Gilchrist’s Men’s Department six short weeks ago. That man was a trembling creature too overwhelmed by the world to think he might ever carve his own bit of happiness from it, a man resigned to a solitary life lit only by the lamp of his studies. His desire to help others did not extend to the belief he could help himself—but Lydia, you have changed that. You have revealed a world in which some measure of shared happiness is reserved even for life’s humblest creatures, so long as they have the courage to lay claim to it when it comes.

  You are my happiness, Lydia. The joy with which you move through the world is infectious, reminding me of the pleasure to be found in even life’s smallest facets. Please know as I sit mute and uncompanionable by your side I am silently praising your person and all its fine attributes: even as I write this I am gathering strength for a day when I might speak aloud the thoughts and feelings presently prisoned by the narrow chamber of my pen.

  Yours in heart and mind,

  Henry Wickett

  Seeing as she was the cause for the couple’s acquaintance, Maisie thinks it stingy of Lydia not once to have read the letter out loud.

  Her hand began to tremble, forcing her to place the letter on the counter in order to read it again. In demeanor Henry was unchanged from the fellow who had, with such difficulty, first requested her company. And yet the idea of a courtship filled her with a sense of imminence, as if she housed an embryonic chick pecking with its egg tooth against the inner surface of its shell. Henry was different from the D Street boys who took her to the Imperial for the Sunday matinee, or to Castle Island for doughnuts and fried clams—boys with rough hands and loud voices for whom a table was only ever a table and never a tree.

  For all the good it did him, Liam Dougherty took Liddie on a Sunday picnic where they ate off an actual tree stump.

  Only now did she admit to herself that for several weeks, unexpected thoughts of Henry Wickett had been finding her. In the middle of a sale, her mind would recall his hopeful smile, or the quiet sincerity with which he spoke, or the mindfulness with which he attended her voice. With Henry’s letter, she acknowledged that her thoughts of him had become a melody in the back of her mind, present even when too soft to hear.

  The next evening she took extra care with her Friday shirtwaist, pressing it a second time.

  “Getting ready for tomorrow’s lunch?” Michael teased as she stood over the ironing board.

  “He’s different from you or any of the other boys here in Southie,” she replied. She had not spoken this thought aloud before and the words, leaving her throat, felt like the beginning of a new season.

  Friday morning, wanting to look fresh for her suitor, she conducted herself as if she were coated in a thin layer of slow-drying varnish. When five minutes past his customary arrival time he had yet to appear, she was seized by an odd constricture of her throat, and went so far as to risk a dress code violation by unbuttoning her collar. He had never been late before. Then, just as she stepped from behind her counter to join the other girls in the lunchroom, she looked down the center aisle to see him walking toward her with an odd, clipped pace, his face downturned and his neck thrust inside his collar like a sheltering turtle. On reaching her counter he froze, the cords of his neck standing out from his skin as if lifting his head had become a monumental task, achievable only with the aid of ropes and pulleys. Slowly, his face rose to meet hers. The heat of his blush was almost tangible. His eyes were small moons.

  Henry was not late, only terror stricken: he was at that moment hyperventilating behind a mannequin.

  “Will you come to lunch?” he whispered, his lips trembling.

  “I will,” she answered with a shy smile and then Henry blossomed: his spine unfurled, his shoulders broadened, and his smile burst into happy bloom.

  By this point anxiety had struck Henry deaf. He intuited Lydia’s consent only by that redemptive smile.

  In the letters that now arrived each Wednesday, Henry proved an effusive and poetic correspondent. She came to know of the lonely childhood spent in sickbeds, the time taken up by reading; of Henry’s hope to curry his father’s favor by his successful study of medicine; and of his desire to prove to his mother he could succeed in the world. Lydia was uncertain she knew her own heart as well as she came to know Henry’s. His letters were the equivalent of personal maps, lovingly rendered and lush in detail. In her experience, self-reflection was not a quality widely cultivated, requiring as it did such dear resources of time. Her self-knowledge was a wordless creature of light and contour, whose movements she knew but could not always explain. Henry’s letters accomplished an act of transubstantiation, transforming Henry’s soul from an elusive chimera into a creature Lydia could know and feel. She collected his letters in a small purse she kept near her at all times to protect against their becoming misplaced. During her daily shifts she carried the most recent missive in her shirtwaist pocket so that she could, at any moment, brush her fingers against the smooth paper.

  As conversation became easier, He
nry graduated from chicken broth to chicken itself, and then to the daily special. His cheeks gained a discernible color, he stopped coughing so often, and a scarf he was inclined to wear both indoors and out disappeared. An entire week passed without Henry once feeling faint or feverish. To celebrate he engaged in the unprecedented act of ordering dessert.

  Chocolate pudding, to be precise. Henry recalls the rich brown, the smoothness of the pudding on his tongue and—most prized of all, as taste fades so quickly among Us—the piquancy of cocoa.

  Henry’s letters imbued even the banal particulars of Lydia’s day with magic. Passages would come to her at odd moments: while eating in the lunchroom, or while combing her hair. She would hear these words in a stronger, more assured version of Henry’s voice, as if a second Henry, just as real, had taken residence inside her. This second Henry accompanied her to Southie: he was with her as she met her girlfriends for a soda, as she bantered with her brothers, and even as she sat at the Imperial beside the D Street boys, who were no longer permitted to hold her hand. Henry’s letters, now sometimes as long as ten pages, necessitated the purchase, on credit, of a larger purse from Handbags. On evenings when she verged on bursting with his admiration, she would quit the streetcar early and stand at the Channel’s western edge. “Lips like plums!” she would declaim to a gull pecking at a piece of detritus along the bank. “Sympathy and intelligence in rare proportion!” she would sing to the blurred, anonymous faces inside a passing train car. The constant hum of factories and the rattle and whistle of the northbound line provided Lydia rare shelter for her curious tryst—for here and only here did she allow herself to lend breath to her lover’s words, reciting from his letters as loudly as her proud, hopeful voice would allow.