Wickett's Remedy

by Myla Goldberg

  The ferry met the dock with a lurch. She was tendered only slightly more consideration than the burlap sacks that preceded her disembarkation, the boat-hand’s farewell the same grunt offered her at boarding. A nurse stood halfway down the dock observing the boat’s landing with her head cocked to one side, as though trying to catch faint strains of music. The wind, which was constant, had dislodged a fine blond ribbon of hair from the woman’s bun, but had made no progress with her white cap, which must have been anchored to the crown of her head with innumerable pins. Her spotless nurse’s uniform seemed, on her, less like a uniform than like something fashionably up-to-the-moment that might be worn to one of the city’s better theaters. Carney’s nurses had never looked so elegant as this woman, who made even the simple act of waiting on a dock seem somehow expert and accomplished. Lydia felt a surge of excitement at the sight of her: she was the nurse Lydia meant to become.

  “Nurse Foley?” she asked in a hopeful voice, this the name supplied her by Mr. Cory. Though she had pinned her hair for the ferry crossing, the wind and sea spray had dismantled her efforts. She made a start of tucking stray strands back into place but stopped on realizing the hopelessness of the task.

  The woman smiled and offered her hand. “Yes. And you are Nurse Wickett. I can’t begin to tell you how happy I am that you’ve arrived, so I won’t even try. You’re a veritable angel for coming on such short notice. And please, call me Cynthia.”

  Cynthia had been born into the good diction Lydia had spent her Gilchrist career trying to emulate. Her hand was much softer than Lydia’s, with long, tapered fingers Lydia could imagine playing a piano.

  “I’m called Lydia, or sometimes just Liddie,” she answered.

  “I prefer Lydia,” Cynthia answered. “Much more elegant, don’t you think? Around here we need whatever elegance we can get. Doctors are so awfully plain. They live like bachelors, even the married ones. Of course, they haven’t got time for the niceties that are second nature to a woman, especially not here, where there is so much to do.” Cynthia paused. “Forgive me for babbling, but it’s such a relief to have another nurse here. I’m afraid Mr. Cory didn’t tell me much beyond your name and when to expect you. Are you Red Cross?”

  “No—” Lydia began and then stopped.

  “Of course you aren’t,” Cynthia agreed. “They never would have given you up. But the hospitals certainly aren’t giving away nurses now either. I don’t suppose you’re Navy or Public Health. …”

  “No,” Lydia hesitated, afraid her answer would countermand her warm welcome.

  Cynthia tilted her head to one side as she had at the ferry’s arrival, but now the gesture reminded Lydia of a cat in an unfamiliar room. “Well then,” she asked with a thin smile, “what exactly are you?”

  “Didn’t Mr. Cory tell you?” Lydia prompted. She attempted a smile that would place her securely among the Cynthia Foleys of the world, but suspected she more closely resembled a shopgirl proffering a rain check.

  “Apparently not,” Cynthia answered.

  “I was at Carney Hospital before this,” Lydia began, “but as I explained to Mr. Cory I was more of a volunteer assistant.”

  Lydia turned to look behind her. She did not so much wish to reboard the ferry as assure herself that she still could, but the boat was far beyond the dock.

  “You mean to tell me that you are not a nurse?” Cynthia asked. Her mouth had gathered in on itself as if cinched by a drawstring.

  “It’s only just what I told Mr. Cory,” Lydia insisted. “When I read the listing—when I learned that you were looking for a way to prevent this epidemic from ever happening again—” Without warning she recalled her father’s hand cradling the back of her head.

  “My brother died of the flu,” she said. She forced back the taste of salt.

  Cynthia stopped examining Lydia’s face. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she replied.

  “Please forget I mentioned it,” Lydia urged. “I prefer you to judge me on my own merits.”

  “But Miss Wickett,” Nurse Foley exclaimed, “you have just led me to understand that you have none!”

  Cynthia was at that moment trying desperately not to cry herself.

  Lydia blushed. She could feel the hairpin at the back of her neck dangling uselessly against her collar. “It’s only just what I told Mr. Cory. If you like, I can send word to the nurses at Carney. I’m sure they would vouch for me.”

  “Oh crumbs.” Cynthia Foley sighed, staring past Lydia to the water. “It’s pointless railing against you. You’re here and I suppose you’re all the help Mr. Cory was able to send.” She turned and began walking toward the compound. “If you’ll follow me we can get started,” she said, sounding only distantly related to the woman who had extolled the elegance of Lydia over Liddie.

  It was not a long walk from the dock. When they reached the summit of the small rise on which the compound rested, a flash of white crossed Lydia’s path. She spun her head in time to see two long ears disappear into a meadow. She stood stunned as if she had just learned of the existence of fairies: she had only ever seen a rabbit on the tin of her father’s hair oil.

  “The island is infested with them,” Nurse Foley called back. As Lydia continued forward her head remained turned. When the breeze parted the tall grass she spied a rabbit, frozen in place and staring at her with one round, dark eye.

  For the fifty years preceding the war, Gallups Island had served as a quarantine station for newly arrived immigrants too ill to be permitted entry past Boston Harbor. Inside the station gate stood a flagpole displaying both an American flag and a white flag bearing a red cross. This, Lydia was informed, was in case of German invasion. War, unlike epidemic, honored certain protocols: anything designated a medical operation would remain unharmed. Gallups was not the most easterly island in the harbor but members of its staff nonetheless took shifts posting watch for the ominous rise of a periscope from beneath the surface of the waves.

  The island housed a collection of utilitarian brick and wood buildings divided between barracks, mess halls, and a hospital. To the west of the complex stood a modest graveyard. The compound’s squat, blocky construction was at odds with the sloping island and its graceful trees. Fifty years of strong easterly winds had worn the buildings in the same uneven way, leaving their leeward sides the most pristine, as if each building had turned their best face toward Boston in hope of rescue.

  We would like to think We contributed at least in part to Lydia’s impression of the island. Among Us are several who whisper of purgatory in that drab place.

  Lydia’s introduction to the station began with her living quarters. When fully operational, the quarantine station maintained a larger staff, which permitted each current member of the flu study the luxury of a private room. As the only female medical personnel, Lydia and Cynthia would be neighbors, each inhabiting one room of a two-room barrack originally intended to sleep eight. Good manners required that Cynthia offer Lydia assistance unpacking. Lydia was not sure who was the more relieved when she said she would rejoin the nurse as soon as she was settled in.

  Alone in the strange, empty room, the tears Lydia had swallowed on the dock returned. She had not wept like this since the day she learned of Michael’s death and it frightened her to cry like this now. Her family had been right. Of course it was too soon.

  She opened her suitcase. In addition to her necessities, it contained her three favorite love letters from Henry, a button from one of Michael’s shirts, her Communion Bible, a devotional card featuring the Sacred Heart, and a picture of Boston Common torn from a magazine. She pressed Michael’s shirt button into her palm, and then into the softness of her inner arm, imprinting its shape on her skin. She would have liked to carry the button with her but should she happen to lose it, nothing of him would remain. She left the button in her room.

  Gallups’ hospital was its largest building, having been built to house and treat every immigrant unlucky enough to be sent to the island
. In the late afternoon its elongated shadow swallowed several of the barracks and dining halls. Its façade, however, was too spare to inspire fear. It was a simple rectangular prism with a door at its center, windows at regular intervals, and a slanted roof—a child’s rendition of a building.

  Georgio Maripone—who was diverted to Gallups on his arrival from Sicily in 1890—begs to differ. In all his life he had never seen a more frightening place.

  The moment Lydia rejoined Cynthia she understood that any endeavor to emulate the nurse would fall short. At Carney, Lydia had not given any thought to her clothes, but now she was acutely aware of the ways her drab shirtwaist differed from Cynthia’s proper nurse’s uniform. She knew it was pointless to covet Foley’s fitted dress or her handsome blue nurse’s cape, but she hoped she might eventually be supplied with a cap.

  The hospital tour Cynthia provided placed special emphasis on all Lydia was unequipped to do. Lydia had never taken blood, nor procured a throat culture; she was unpracticed with medical charts and examination protocol. At first the nurse met each of Lydia’s admissions of inexperience with downturned lips and a barely perceptible nod, but by the end of the tour even these expressions had seized up, as if the woman who had met Lydia at the dock had been replaced by a wooden decoy. Lydia wanted to grasp Cynthia’s elegantly tapered fingers and plead to be given a chance to prove herself. Instead she assured Nurse Foley—whom it was probably best to forget even had a first name— that she would devote herself to improving her skills, a declaration that was received as mutely as the others.

  The discouraging nature of Lydia’s tour was offset by its brevity. The hospital’s interior was no more complex than its exterior: it was a square divided into four equal quadrants by a cruciform hallway. During the hospital’s tenure as an immigrant quarantine, the two rear quadrants had served as male and female wards. On Dr. Gold’s watch, they would house the volunteers undergoing testing. The front right quadrant contained medical labs and offices that Nurse Foley made clear were off-limits save by express invitation of the senior medical staff; its neighbor housed the surgery and recovery rooms, the storage and utility closets, and the morgue.

  Lydia offered to begin working at once, but Foley suggested instead that she take the time remaining before dinner to acquaint herself with the compound. The nurse then disappeared down the hallway from which Lydia had been barred, leaving her alone in the empty ward.

  The rooms were larger than that. As she sweat her life away, Gala Theodopolus counted and recounted the beds in the women’s ward and no matter how high her fever went they always numbered at least forty.

  Unused beds seemed indecent when the aisles at Carney were lined with makeshift cots. Walking among the crisply made beds of the quarantine ward, Lydia wondered if the study intended to cater to rich invalids. She had never seen such luxurious sickrooms. Each ward was easily large enough to hold twenty or even thirty beds, but contained only ten. The surplus space instead held several card tables, a writing desk, and a bookshelf. The patients at Carney had been too sick to enjoy such amenities, but she supposed that mild cases would be just as helpful as severe ones if the study’s only concern was how flu was caught. This conclusion would make a fine topic for her first letter home, one that might put her family more at ease.

  Yuri Turovic counted fifty beds in the men’s ward, but he is not so certain of himself: the beds he tallied were usually occupied by dead ancestors.

  Grygor Hansa thinks the lady does not have a good memory for rooms. He was two weeks in the rear barracks waiting for papers. There were fifty beds, almost always empty. Most people left the hospital inside a wood box.

  After quitting the hospital, she took the time that remained before dinner to make a cursory investigation of the compound. Near her own barrack were identical buildings that housed the other medical staff, but behind the hospital was a larger, longer barracks building—a single room that slept at least twenty. Cater-corner from the hospital, the dining hall was at this hour the brightest object in the compound, its large windows casting elongated bars of light across the darkening ground. Like most of the island’s facilities, the space was larger than the flu study required. When Lydia entered, she noticed that only two of the hall’s ten tables were set for dinner. The remaining eight had their chairs stacked on top of them in the manner of a restaurant awaiting the departure of its last, lingering guests. Nurse Foley’s table was already full; and when Foley left her seat in order to present Lydia to the various staff, Lydia learned she was the only personnel member without some sort of medical title, leaving her feeling like a kid sister among the surgeons and acting assistant surgeons. The most senior staff member in the room was a gentleman not much younger than her parents, but the rest of her dining companions could have easily been Henry’s classmates. It felt strange, years after the drastic revisions of her early marriage, to be among the very society to which she had once aspired—as if a genie had belatedly granted her abandoned wish. But if that were the case, Henry ought to have been sitting beside her.

  Her awareness of being one of only two women on staff now struck her for the first time. She was usually at ease with the opposite sex, a trait she attributed to her Men’s Department tenure and a flat full of brothers. But here, the seemingly commonplace experience of sitting at a table of young men was countered by the fact that, introductions aside, Lydia became an invisible party to a discussion peppered with erudite medical terms that struck her as deliberately opaque. After a few fruitless moments of listening, she turned her attention to her meal. She abandoned her best table manners when she noticed they only singled her out further. Apparently her colleagues had left both conversational and dining etiquette on the mainland.

  At this hour Lydia’s mother would have finished cleaning the supper dishes. Her father would be halfway through his nearsighted perusal of the daily paper, newsprint darkening the tip of his nose. John and James would have adjourned to the stoop and perhaps Thomas would have joined them, wearing a light jacket over his pajamas as a concession to maternal concern. Staring at her plate, Lydia experienced her first wave of homesickness. The weeks ahead loomed like long, gray shadows.

  When the door to the dining hall opened, she sensed the man striding to the front of the room before she saw him, and knew without being told that this was Dr. Joseph Gold. Conversations halted midsentence as people turned to witness the doctor’s entrance. She would not have thought one man capable of subverting the effect of eight empty tables, but at Dr. Gold’s appearance the perceived boundaries of the room shrunk. Dr. Gold was a tall, imposing man of impressive build, with a neatly trimmed moustache and a regal nose, upon which rested a pair of gold spectacles. On a different face these would have lent an air of fragility, but on the doctor the delicate wire frames had the effect of strengthening his features.

  Rachel Gold assures Us her husband’s stature was unremarkable.

  “Gentlemen—and ladies,” Dr. Gold commenced without preamble. “We come together today to embark upon a truly historic mission.” His voice was simultaneously intimate and grandiloquent and caused the room to shrink even further, until it seemed to contain only the doctor and Lydia herself. Confidence radiated from Dr. Gold like captive sunlight. Previously she had witnessed such self-assuredness in ward politicians, but while they fly-cast their personalities outward, Dr. Gold’s mien resulted from an intense interior focus that could not help but draw people toward him.

  Though Rachel Gold was not among the Gallups Island faculty, she vouches for the tenor of his words. Her husband’s bravura oratories were number-blind. To him, a single auditor was no different than an audience of one hundred.

  “Our task here is not new,” Dr. Gold continued, his eyes flashing, his voice sonorous and crisp. “Just as yellow fever and typhus once demanded our vigilance, so too does influenza. Just as we conquered those blights, so shall we conquer this one. In league with the brave volunteers who have offered to aid in this quest, we shall penetr
ate the innermost mysteries of this affliction and, in piercing the veil, triumph over the ignorance which has allowed the epidemic to spread with such alarming speed. I am sure you have heard of the plight of our neighbors to the south: Philadelphia has suffered an even greater blow than Boston; New York and Washington, D.C., reel under the weight of their afflicted.”

  The doctor’s voice was quiet and urgent now. Along with the rest of the room Lydia found herself leaning forward. No chair creaked and no toe tapped. No one dared risk missing a word.

  “While our discoveries here will not bring the dead back to us or erase the suffering of the thousands now chained to influenza’s yoke, we will prevent future deaths, future suffering. One day, our children will not know the word ‘flu’ and we will explain it is a disease long extinct. Through vigilance, sound method, and cooperation we will triumph. Remember: in our pursuit no task, no matter how seemingly trivial, is insignificant. Every observation, no matter how seemingly slight, may be the one to yield the crucial insight. Together we will function as one mind, striving with the noblest of purpose.”

  The doctor paused in order to sweep his eyes across the faces assembled before him. Lydia was certain he had, for a brief moment, looked at her. Having completed his circuit of the room, he cast his eyes downward before continuing, his voice now humble.

  Dr. Gold would like to clarify that, in his case, the term “doctor” refers dually to his status as Ph.D. and M.D.

  “The volunteers arrive tomorrow. I ask that you treat them with utmost respect. Fully apprised of the risks involved, they have selflessly given themselves to this cause and it is by this that they ought to be judged. Remember: we all make mistakes—mistakes in judgment, mistakes in action. At a time such as now, with our nation at war, these mistakes carry more weight than they might in peacetime. Whatever your politics away from Gallups, whatever feelings you might harbor toward these men, here on the island I ask you to keep them in check—for here, we serve a higher cause. Remember: no matter what their previous actions, these men by volunteering have professed their willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice in order to serve the greater good. And so, I thank you. For though it is the duty of those in the medical profession to ease malady at personal risk, the risk involved here is great and it is unambiguous. Many good doctors and nurses across the country and the world have already fallen to this epidemic, and I fear it is a sacrifice that will continue. I hope and pray we shall all be spared this ultimate sacrifice but I recognize and honor the willingness of every person in this room to place himself directly in the epidemic’s path. Our efforts will not go unnoticed nor will they go unrewarded. The future will be transformed by what we are about to do. Gentlemen—and ladies—that future begins tomorrow.”