Wickett's Remedy

by Myla Goldberg

  Of course, the best part of the weekend was catching up with old friends. In our usual suite at the Days Inn we stayed up past our bedtimes listening to tapes of the old radio programs and swapping remembrances. To those of our regulars unable to join the fun this year due to poor health: I wish you a speedy recovery and hope to see you next year!

  An Unexpected Call

  I was sitting at home one night a few weeks ago when the phone rang. When I picked up, the voice on the other end said, “Hello, Lorena, this is Ralph Finnister.” Of course at first I thought it was one of you QDevils out there up to your usual good-natured hijinks, but the voice at the other end of the line assured me that this was no trick. I asked him to prove it.

  When he asked me how he might do that, I suggested that he tell me the secret recipe for QD. He laughed and said that he was afraid he couldn’t do that and then it was like we were old friends. Of course the President of QD Soda has been on the QDispatch mailing list for as long as the QDispatch has been in existence, but I certainly never expected that he would call yours truly! Or that he’d ask to submit something for an upcoming issue!! But friends, that’s exactly what happened, and so, starting with the next issue, the QDispatch will be appearing bi-monthly in order to run a multi-part series by the President of QD Soda himself entitled “QD and Me,” which Mr. Finnister hopes some day to turn into a book. I’m of course honored that we’ll be printing it first and I’m sure you’re looking forward to the first exclusive installment as much as I am!

  In This Issue

  Cooking with QD … Page 3

  QP Soda in Hollywood Page 4

  How to Spot a Fake: Is Your Collection Safe… Page 5

  Henry’s transformation on quitting medical school was dramatic. Traits Lydia previously had assumed integral to her husband’s character instead were revealed to be manifestations of his former unhappiness, while habits she would never before have associated with her husband emerged like butterflies from latent cocoons. Henry metamorphosed into an early riser, often preceding her out of bed and preparing their morning tea. He had been an absentminded medical student at best, but now he kept ordered notebooks and had transformed the small room off the parlor into an immaculate office. The first time she heard him whistle she thought she had left the kettle on, though she thought it strange that the teapot had managed the first few bars of “Hello My Baby”; then she discovered the sound was coming from her husband, who had arrived home with a new selection of business titles. Henry no longer resembled an old man inhabiting a young man’s body. His belief in Wickett’s Remedy had remade him, and while this had not made a believer out of Lydia, she thought her husband’s new happiness might.

  Henry hoped to persuade his father to make him a loan for the Remedy’s starting costs, and toward that end he procured a book entitled Business Finance Made Easy. He drew up, in his elegant hand, a chart listing the Remedy’s expenses and projected earnings and prepared a small speech, which he practiced in front of Lydia so often she memorized it as well. Saturday evening, she pressed Henry’s shirt and trousers and pretended not to notice he could not fall asleep.

  Her offer to accompany him to West Roxbury that Sunday was politely rejected—he thought it best he face his parents alone. Lydia was chagrined by her relief at being spared the visit, but the prospect of witnessing Mr. and Mrs. Wickett’s reaction was even more unpleasant. Her only uncertainty concerning her husband’s fate in West Roxbury was whether his parents would dissuade him by reason or by force. When she visited D Street alone that Sunday she kept silent on the topic of Henry’s absence, preferring her family to think she and Henry had quarreled rather than cause him future embarrassment. She told herself she was performing a kindness, but her silence felt disloyal, as if she was abetting the return of her husband’s lifelong discontent. And because that made her feel terrible, she tried—as she went through the motions of her weekly visit home—not to think of West Roxbury at all.

  Lydia had no cause for shame. Henry was just as relieved to stay his wife from the scene of his almost-certain failure.

  She returned to the West end with a cold portion of the Kilkenny Sunday ham wrapped in wax paper. She found Henry at his desk, his silent figure offering no sign of his parents’ verdict.

  “Henry?” she began softly, not wanting to startle him.

  “Don’t do that!” he gasped.

  “I’m sorry.” She placed a tentative hand on her husband’s narrow shoulder. “Did it go well?”

  He smiled, but looked tired. “Yes, very well.” He hesitated, scanning her face. “Not at first, of course. They weren’t very pleased to hear that I’d left school.”

  “No,” she confirmed. “I didn’t think they would be.”

  The silence of the flat engulfed them. Henry turned to face her, but his gaze sought other moorings. She felt as if time had reversed, returning them to Monty’s lunchroom. She waited for her husband to continue but each potential recommencement dissolved, an uplifted eyebrow or an intake of breath instead presaging more silence.

  “What did your mother say?” she prompted once she could not bear to wait any longer.

  “She didn’t like it,” he replied. “But this was a business proposition, which is my father’s arena.”

  Henry admits to being deliberately vague. In fact, his father threatened to cut off his allowance in six months if he had not returned to medical school—an ultimatum Henry thought best to keep to himself.

  Lydia could not fathom how Henry had gained his father’s ear within Ernestine Wickett’s domain. Her mother-in-law was not a woman who deferred to anyone in any matter, business-related or otherwise. Henry’s cheeks were perhaps more flushed than usual, but his appearance was otherwise unchanged. There was no outward sign of her husband’s new-forged mettle.

  “So you took up the matter with him,” she confirmed, as though such a thing were not wholly revolutionary.

  Henry hesitated. When he did speak his words came quickly. “We had a bit of an argument then and things became rather unpleasant—but it all worked out in the end.”

  Lydia waited. “And?”

  “And,” Henry confirmed. “And—” He looked toward her and then away again. “Starting tomorrow, and until the Remedy is on its feet, I’m to clerk at Father’s office.”

  “But you hate your father’s business!” she protested. “You’ve told me countless times of the tedium of the import industry!”

  “It’s only temporary, only until the Remedy gets on its feet.” He smiled weakly, and she realized that no revolution—whether conducted from a battlefield or a chaise lounge—came without casualties. “It will provide us an income in the interim, and some of what I do at the office I’ll be able to apply to our work with the Remedy.”

  This was the only time Henry was untruthful to his beloved. He reported uninvited to Wickett Imports, Ltd., hoping his father’s aversion to public scenes would secure him a position. Because his ploy worked, his wife was spared knowledge of his bluff.

  “I can work,” she offered quietly, avoiding her husband’s face as she spoke. In the afterglow of their wedding she had shared Henry’s view that she had been spared a weary life of gainful employment, but a household was tedious in its agreeability: a rug required no persuasion to be beaten, a dish did not need coaxing to try on a coat of soap. Lately she had been assigning to her housework the names of Gilchrist customers, so that waxing the floor turned into a dialogue with Mr. Tanner on the relative merits of British and French tailoring, and cleaning the stove became an exercise in selling a shirt to Mr. Ludlow. “It would be easy to find a store that would take me,” she shrugged in an attempt to counter the excitement that had crept into her voice. She would enjoy working again, at least part-time; at least until a baby came.

  Henry shook his head. She could not tell if his disappointment lay with her or with their new circumstance. “I knew you would offer to find employment.” He sighed. “But if you do return to work, it ought not
to be with any store.”

  For one horrifying instant, she pictured herself installed in the Wickett household, imprisoned within a black dress and a white apron.

  “You may have grave reservations about the Remedy’s prospects,” Henry continued, “but you spent four years on a sales floor. Nothing I could read in a book would equal that experience.”

  “But Henry,” she objected, “what would you have me do? I’m a counter girl, not a doctor or a pharmacist.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” he insisted. “You know how to make something appeal to a customer; you know the little tricks that make a product catch a person’s eye.”

  “I sold shirts,” she reminded him.

  “And you were brilliant at it,” he pressed. “Lydia, I need you to invent Wickett’s Remedy. The bottle, the label, the liquid inside. If people aren’t attracted to Wickett’s to begin with, then my letters haven’t got a chance. I need you to convince customers to try their first bottle.”

  She could feel her pulse in her neck. He was right; this was something she could do. Her mind began assembling a list of elements to consider, her memory recalling the various bottles that had, at one time or another, claimed her family’s allegiance.

  “I suppose I could manage a label pretty well,” she conceded, “but Henry, you can’t ask me to invent a medicine.”

  “No,” he agreed. “You’ll do nothing of the sort. Wickett’s Remedy will not purport to cure yellow fever, or pneumonia, or even a simple headache, because the illnesses I propose to treat have no foothold in the body. Your tonic is to be an accompaniment to the true medicine of my letters, without any power of its own save for the power of suggestion. What you concoct I leave completely up to you. If you wish, it can be a simple sugar syrup.”

  When he paused, she could tell he wanted her assent, or at least an encouraging smile, but she had been a salesgirl, not an actress. If she opened her mouth now it would only be to say that he was asking too much. Henry jerked his chin up and down. It was the sort of quick, sharp nod given in response to bad news. She turned toward the door. There was housework to do and supper to cook.

  “Lydia,” he called. His voice was softer now. “Whether or not Wickett’s succeeds may be beyond our control,” he conceded, “but without you I know it is absolutely certain to fail.” She turned to face her husband. Henry was standing beside his chair, one hand resting on his desk as if for support. “Please. Will you help me?”

  He had asked for her companionship and he had asked for her hand, but never before had he asked for her help. In the silence she examined him with a scrutiny previously only accorded her in his sleep. She was shocked by how well she knew his face. There was his nose, narrow and slightly off center, its subtle curve to the right only noticeable when observed straight on. There were his eyelashes, longer than she had ever seen on a man, which tempted her to brush her fingertips along their tips as one would against the wing of a captive butterfly. A year ago this face had belonged to a stranger, and now it beheld her as though she were all that mattered in the world. She was struck by the ease with which she could wound the man. She could already taste the strange, sharp sweetness of such an effortless victory. Then the feeling passed. The face of the man sitting at the desk once again became the face of her husband. His vulnerability became hers; his features became her own.

  “Of course I will help you,” she said.

  NEWTONVILLE MAN PLANS TORPEDO-CARRYING BATTLESHIP WITH GUNS BEARING ANAESTHETICS WHICH HE THINKS WILL BRING PEACE

  A new scheme of war—or, rather of war against war—has been developed by Carl M. Wheaton of Newtonville, Mass., several of whose inventions along other lines are at the present time in successful use. Mr. Wheaton feels confident of his plan for a torpedo-carrying battleship: it will fire a powerful anaesthetic and render the crews of hostile ships unconscious and also release a “smudge” which, enveloping their ships, will prevent the gunners on board from seeing their opponents, consequently causing their fire to be totally ineffective.

  “I have offered the navy department to make perfect drawings of all my devices, if they pay me a reasonable salary for the time required,” Mr. Wheaton said. “I will now offer to furnish the same information to any nation on earth which has the price to pay for it.”

  THE QD SODA WALKING TOUR

  Second Stop: The West End

  For the next stop on our tour, walk to the northwestern edge of City Hall Plaza, at the corner of Cambridge and Sudbury streets. Imagine a bustling intersection, with an impressive theater on the right and stores on all sides. Until 1960, you wouldn’t have had to use your imagination to see Bowdoin Square, once part of Boston’s old West End, which in 1894 witnessed the birth of one of its favorite sons, Quentin Driscoll. It was here where he first worked behind a soda counter—and here where he dreamed of a new soft drink.

  There is not even a plaque where Quentin Driscoll’s childhood home once stood. In the name of urban renewal, this entire neighborhood of historic buildings and winding streets was demolished to make room for high-rise luxury apartment buildings. When the West End was destroyed, a crucial part of QD history was destroyed along with it.

  The following words appeared in the newspaper two weeks after Henry reported for work at his father’s office:

  Try WICKETT’S REMEDY for a new lease on life!

  Find your spirits lifted, your outlook improved!

  All queries answered personally.

  Send 25¢ and an accompanying letter to:

  Post Office Square, Box 27, Boston.

  The printed word is our most reliable benchmark of memory. We collectively recall entire libraries.

  The authority of crisp newsprint bestowed on the venture the aura of imminent success. Seeing the notice, Lydia could not help but feel that Henry would not be consigned to his father’s office for long.

  In becoming a clerk Henry became a man divided, Monday through Friday manifesting the melancholy that had marred his medical school career but on Saturday emerging from the chrysalis of his unhappiness to engage in his work with the Remedy. The difference was striking enough that Lydia felt married to two men; and she privately vowed to do all she could to enable the timely replacement of the former with the latter.

  By the time of the advertisement’s appearance in the paper, she had—per Henry’s request—invented both a Remedy recipe and a label. Of the two, only the recipe gave her trouble. She had wanted Wickett’s to taste different: interesting but not unpleasant, not too sweet but also not bitter. As a girl she had been subject to her mother’s faith in Jenson’s Indian Cure, which was administered for everything from headaches to bunions. She hated the taste and smell of Jenson’s which contained—in addition to other undiscernible unpleasantries—sage and not a small bit of alcohol, two ingredients she was determined not to include in her own creation.

  Maureen Kilkenny takes no credit for the recipe, but she would like to think she engineered her appearance in her American granddaughter’s dream. Our whisperings are most often heard in life’s interstices: in dreams, in sickness, and in the moments preceding sleep or waking.

  After a week in which she experimented variously with salt, pepper, parsley, onion, lemon, and hickory root to no avail, the Remedy’s recipe came to her in a dream of her Granny K, whom Lydia had only ever known from the faded tintype her father had carried with him across the Atlantic. In Lydia’s dream, Granny K stood before the sod house where Lydia’s father had been born and patiently explained to her granddaughter what flavorings she ought to add and in what proportion. Lydia, who did not generally remember her dreams, was struck by her grandmother’s hands: their broad palms and strong fingers resembled her own. On waking, Lydia jotted down her grandmother’s instructions and purchased the proper ingredients, along with a pot large enough to cook ten bottles’ worth of Remedy at a time. That afternoon—feeling as though her own hands were being guided by her grandmother’s—she boiled up the first batch of Wickett’s.<
br />
  In the tintype to which her granddaughter refers, Maureen’s hands are hidden by her dress, but they were just as her granddaughter describes.

  From the moment Henry invested her with the task of designing the Wickett’s label, Lydia had known it would be a pale blue shield depicting a girl with dark plaits clutching a flower blossom, topped by the words WICKETT’S REMEDY in bold, dark letters. She had assumed an artist would be needed for its execution, but to her surprise Henry not only lettered the label but drew the requisite portrait, emerging from his office only a few hours after she had submitted her design.

  The picture came as a shock. In her mind, the girl on the Wickett’s label was one of those generic, soft-haired cherubs who graced cookie tins and cough syrup. Henry’s creation had Lydia’s rounded nose and his gentle eyes. Though her daydreams were filled with children who shared her and Henry’s features, seeing an actual picture caused her chest to ache. Her first instinct was to hide the girl’s portrait in her top dresser drawer with her letters from the worldly suitor who also had not succeeded from paper to flesh and blood.

  The face Henry drew had quietly graced his imagination since his wedding night. It belonged to a daughter whose name—Lucy—he had also intended to share with Lydia until he observed the portrait’s unintended effect.

  After the first months of marriage, their shared silence on the topic of childlessness seemed to stem from the mutual sense that discussion would grant the subject unwanted substance. The appearance of such a picture after a year of fruitless, wordless efforts breached this tacit agreement. A different portrait would be better, one that did not take as its model their unrealized hopes. But when Lydia turned toward Henry to explain this, the yearning she saw there revealed the cruelty of such a request. He had created a child. And so, because she had to say something, she exclaimed that she had no idea she had married an artist. In answer, he explained that he had been embarrassed by his doodling until medical school, where to avoid wielding a scalpel he had diagrammed dissections for his lab mates and, in so doing, improved his technique. Thus was the unspeakable topic opened and closed without either of them ever saying a word.