Wickett's Remedy

by Myla Goldberg

  So this gob is milking a cow when a patriotic dame walks up and says: “Young man, why aren’t you at the Front?” And then so the gob, he says—

  Aw quit it, you told that one a million times.

  I don’t know that one, Georgie. What’d he say?

  You do too know it! You was there with me the last time.

  No I wasn’t neither, or else I’d know it too.

  Who’s up for Twenty-One?

  Already? Those cards ain’t lost their sea legs yet.

  Count me in. I got a feeling the change in scenery changed my luck. What about you, Tommo?

  Count me out.

  He’s still shaky from the boat ride. Ain’t ya, Tommo?

  Yeah, I s’pose so.

  Aw look at him, he’s still green around the gills!

  I’ll play, but not ’til Soapy tells the rest.

  Have you got soup for brains? He told that one just the other day!

  Not to me he didn’t, Georgie.

  And I’m telling you he did! You was standing right beside me in the yard!

  Well then maybe it was too windy for me to hear.

  You laughed, ya knucklehead!

  Then it’s somebody else you’re thinking of ’cause I’m tellin’ ya I ain’t never heard it.

  Yeah, you’re right, it must of been that other gob I’m always stuck with in the yard.

  Hey, when was they letting you in the yard and not me?

  Chucklehead, you are so dim that when a doctor looks in your ear it’s like looking through a peephole.

  And so the gob, he says, “Because the milk is at this end, lady.”

  That one went right over his head.

  Naw it didn’t neither! It’s one of them scientific jokes, ain’t it? Cows don’t even practic’ly exist over in France, am I right, Soapy?

  Sure you’re right, Chucklehead. Deal him in, Lucky.

  February 11, 1924

  Dear Mr. Driscoll,

  It has been almost six years since you asked my permission to sell Wickett’s Remedy. I always supposed you had no luck with Wickett’s or, even worse, that you were killed in the war. Then, last week, I happened to try QD Soda for the first time. You can imagine my surprise when it tasted just like the Remedy, only with bubbles! After that it did not take me long to learn that the same young man I once met was now the president of QD Soda. I am glad for your success. When I met you I thought you were a person who would make his own way in the world.

  Mr. Driscoll, I know that you would not have forgotten our agreement. Perhaps you sent me a letter that I never received, or perhaps you lost my address. It does not matter. Here is my present address and a phone number where I can be reached. Please contact me however you like.

  Sincerely,

  Mrs. Henry Wickett (former)

  Ralph Finnister

  QD Soda Headquarters

  162 B Street

  Boston, MA 02127

  June 7, 1993

  The Honorable Mayor Raymond Flynn

  Mayor’s Office

  1 City Hall Plaza

  Boston, MA 02201

  Dear Mayor Flynn:

  On behalf of everyone at QD Soda, I would like to congratulate you. Your nomination by President Clinton to the United States Ambassadorship to the Vatican brings pride to every citizen of Boston.

  Although we are losing a mayor, it is both humbling and soul-stirring to think that in some small but tangible way we are all gaining a place in the house of His Holiness!

  I imagine the demands on your increasingly limited time are impressive, but we at QD Soda sincerely hope that in the final days of your mayorship you will choose to honor us with your presence at the QD Soda block-renaming ceremony, which remains the cornerstone of our 75th Anniversary Jubilee celebration. If by the time of our festivities you have already been confirmed, we hope that you will attend in your capacity as the United States Ambassador to the Vatican.

  The Jubilee is honoring more than a soda—it is honoring a man. Though Quentin Driscoll has not been one of Bostons leading lights for many years, both he and the soda that carries his name live on. Quentin Driscoll now abides in a South Boston retirement home, where he has been largely forgotten by the city to which he has given so much. It would mean a great deal to me personally if you were to join him for the Jubilee. He is three years shy of his hundredth birthday and has, of late, become agitated. It is my heartfelt belief that it would bring him great peace to be in the presence of a man who will soon be in the presence of the Pope.

  Thank you.

  Very Sincerely,

  Ralph Finnister

  The days prefacing the test’s official commencement served to confirm that Dr. Gold had procured viable test specimens. Thirty men were subjected to daily pokes and proddings with throat swabs, thermometers, and stethoscopes to produce baseline measurements of health against which flu infection could be charted. The examination room in which this occurred was a brightly lit, windowless space whose white tiled walls reminded Lydia of the bathhouse at City Point, an association confounded by the sight of Assistant Surgeon Percival Cole heating a flask of amber liquid over a small flame and looking as content as Mrs. Kilkenny at the kitchen stove.

  “That looks like soup,” Lydia offered once the two had exchanged good mornings. Because Cole was the only assistant surgeon who ate with Nurse Foley at the senior medical staff table, Lydia knew little about him beyond his name—but his manner had already distinguished him from the junior staff she dined with. The other assistant surgeons made her feel like a child brought before a table of adults at a dinner party: they tendered her exaggerated greetings and then treated her as if she were invisible. In their brief interactions thus far, Cole had treated her no differently than anyone else.

  “It is soup,” Cole affirmed, his eyes catching hers before returning to the task at hand. Everything about Cole eschewed wasted motion, from his precisely parted hair to the efficiency with which he wielded the tongs that held the flask above the flame. “I’m creating an agar culture medium for our throat samples. I wouldn’t personally recommend it, but bacteria quite enjoy it.”

  Lydia drew closer. Cole was not the sort of person to invite notice, but notice—once paid—revealed a man whose mien matched his manner. He was proportionate rather than handsome, every aspect of his person optimized to meet its obligations. The hand preparing the broth had a square palm with fingers that seemed neither long nor short and which ended in clean, square fingertips. It seemed an ideal doctor’s hand, specially designed for the handling of medical instruments and the examination of wounds.

  “Nurse Foley tells me you lack clinical experience,” he said in a way that did not make Lydia feel the need to apologize. “The preparatory examinations we’ll be conducting here should provide a good opportunity for observation and basic skill acquisition. You can start by bringing me that tray of petri dishes.” Wordlessly, she brought him the empty glass dishes and watched as he poured equal amounts of amber liquid into each one without spilling a drop.

  “Making agar plates is wonderfully relaxing,” he said, his calm voice speaking in congress with the methodical motion of his hands. Lydia realized she was witnessing the medical equivalent of knitting.

  Any ambitions Cole might have instilled with his agar plates were tempered by the appearance of Nurse Foley, who informed Lydia that her examination room duties would be limited to recording temperatures and pulse rates in the medical log, an undemanding task that represented the upper bound of Nurse Foley’s estimation of her. Lydia hoped through close observation to improve her standing, and in the meantime vowed to act as engaged as possible for a person performing a task just as easily accomplished by her youngest brother.

  Awaiting the volunteers, Lydia felt the same reflexive excitement as she had anticipating the opening of Gilchrist’s doors each morning. Though she was standing behind a ledger now and not a sales counter, the names recorded there might as easily have belonged to her regular custom
ers, men from whom she had collected an entirely different set of vital statistics. Watching Nurse Foley arranging a set of throat swabs was not so different from watching the Men’s Department manager put the finishing touches on a floor display. In this way, Lydia brought familiarity to Gallups.

  According to William “Kewpie” Gray, escort was too nice a name. This was one of the same lunks who bullied him at Deer Island.

  The men arrived in groups often in the company of a blue uniformed escort who, having delivered his charges, leaned against the laboratory door lighting cigarettes and then picking his teeth and fingernails with each spent match. Nurse Foley read off each man’s name as he entered and wished him a good morning, to which Lydia added her own greeting in quiet echo. The fellow who yesterday had called her part-angel was second in the alphabetized line, which—according to her ledger—meant she could start thinking of him as Frank Bentley and not as the man whose gray uniform pinched his shoulders.

  “Hello again,” he said in lieu of tipping an invisible hat. He turned to the fellow behind him—a carefully groomed man whom her ledger informed her was Tony Cataldo. “She’s the one who got me into trouble yesterday.”

  “I was there,” Cataldo reminded him. “And I recall it being Shaugnessy who got himself bawled out and not you. You don’t get in half the trouble you deserve.”

  “Ignore him,” Bentley advised Lydia with a smile before filing past her into the room.

  As the rest of the group entered, Lydia allied some aspect of each fellow in line with the corresponding name on her list—a Gilchrist memory trick that had served her well in her counter girl days. After Tony Cataldo came George Denson, who had the broad back of an iceman and whom Lydia could imagine stoking the furnace in a ship’s belly, his face dark with soot. Theodore Evert was slender and compact, seemingly meant for a tall-masted navy of ships with crow’s nests perched above massive white sails. The two came in talking but fell silent at the sight of Lydia and Nurse Foley. They offered each a formal “Hello Ma’am,” before slipping back into conversation. Among these men, Lydia was no less a nurse than Cynthia Foley.

  George wouldn’t have been caught dead belowdecks shoveling coal—that was Negro work.

  After recording a volunteer’s temperature, Lydia led him to Assistant Surgeon Cole to have his throat swabbed. Agar plates received the products of these swabbings in order to grow whatever bacteria had been collected, results Cole promised to show Lydia as soon as there was anything to see. Men awaiting Foley’s thermometer or those already swabbed by Cole were left to their own devices, a situation that unexpectedly re-allied the examination room with the City Point bathhouse. The voices reflecting off the white tiled walls could have belonged just as easily to Southie’s off-duty drill-press operators and assembly-line workers making the most of a warm summer Sunday. Lydia did not know when her homesickness was greater: in this sound’s presence or after the men were gone. In the silence of the empty, white tiled room, she picked up the spent matches littering the doorway, these remnants of the escort’s boredom the only evidence that anyone had been there at all.

  Henry is especially pleased with this last vision: he had aspired to one day stroll into a Southie pub as if he were a local.

  Homesickness and mourning were so inexorably linked that Lydia was never certain where one ended and the other began. Though she was never so susceptible to tears as her first day on Gallups, she never knew when or where grief for her brother would find her. In the weeks following Henry’s death Lydia had seen him everywhere—striding past the D Street flat, boarding a streetcar, driving a hansom cab, or drinking a pint on the corner. The smallest resemblance between a stranger and her dead husband could spark the transformation. Here on Gallups, an easy way of walking, a head held at a particular angle, or a broad-shouldered silhouette would combine with her mourning to achieve a fleeting alchemy: for a moment Michael would be standing before her or walking just ahead. Then the moment would pass and the figure would revert to a man in a gray uniform, making the most of the freedom allowed him before the commencement of tests and quarantine.

  From over one hundred aspiring inmates, Dr. Gold had selected the thirty whose infractions were so minor they would have earned little more than a fine from a civilian court. Though several among the medical staff would have preferred more stringent restrictions on the volunteers, Lydia did not begrudge the men their short-lived freedom of movement. But more than once, observing a group from a distance or hearing their laughter caused her heart to beat so fiercely that her chest ached. If grief struck while Lydia was walking, she would stumble. If someone was speaking to her, their lips would continue to move but the sound of their voice would cease. The world would dim and Lydia would feel her brother’s absence as keenly as if her chest had been opened.

  Michael will never know if his whisperings sparked these episodes, but We derive solace from the thought that Our whisperings act as latent catalysts for countless private memorials.

  Only in the margins of her letters home, in invisible ink, did she dare imagine writing: Do you see him too? On the street, in the house, created from a stranger or from no one at all? According to her mother, D Street was slowly regaining its balance. Tom was venturing outdoors each day and walking a little farther down the block, Malachy had returned to work, and Cora was helping to look after his girls in the daytime. Not wanting to sully her mother’s reports of cautious recovery with the taint of her own ghosts, Lydia kept her visions of Michael to herself.

  Cora did not care to mention she was looking afier Meagan and Patty because their grandmother was not up to the task. Jennie Feeney was never quite the same after Alice’s death.

  C’mere Lucky, you got some kinda bug sitting on your lip.

  Leave it, that’s my moustache!

  Some moustache, Harris. Looks like a bug.

  Give it time, I just got started on it.

  You been trying to grow that thing for as long as Riley ain’t been shaving an he’s practically got himself a beard.

  Yeah, well, my hairs need more time to grow on account of that they’re blond.

  That so? Hey Lombardo! Lucky here says blond hairs takes longer than brown ones! That your professional opinion?

  My professional opinion says that Lucky’s all wet.

  Oh yeah, what d’you know anyways? What’s an Italian barber know from blond hair?

  Who’s up for baseball tomorrow? I saw a ball and bat in a supply closet.

  What are you, cracked? They’re starting tomorrow!

  Sure, but they’re only using ten at a time. The rest of us might as well enjoy ourselves, ‘specially if it’s nice weather.

  I’m in.

  Naw, I bet they take you, Frankie. I bet they start at the front of the alphabet.

  You think that might get me out of here sooner?

  I don’t think nothing. Safer that way. Give it a try, Bentley. You gotta stop dwellin’ on things you can’t control.

  UNDERTAKERS ARE RUSHED TO LIMIT

  Decline Some Calls Owing to Lack of Help

  Boston undertakers are seriously handicapped in handling the great number of cases that have resulted from the influenza epidemic, but several of them who were interviewed yesterday declared there is no foundation for the widely circulated rumor that undertakers are refusing to prepare for burial bodies of persons who have died of influenza.

  It had been said that a number of the undertakers had declined cases because of fear of contagion. This is most emphatically denied.

  A majority of the undertakers admitted, however, that they had been compelled, because of the extraordinary amount of deaths and the shortage of assistants and material necessary to their work, to decline to take charge of bodies in families not included in those with whom they had done undertaking work in the past and others not in their own district.

  The undertakers pointed out that they had been working day and night, and that there had been such a heavy demand upon the casket makers t
hat they had been unable to get the caskets as rapidly as desired. There was a shortage of other material also, such as branch candlesticks, not to mention the lack of hearses and undertakers’ wagons.

  Brothers and Sisters, a plague has befallen our fair city, a plague more deadly than that which was visited upon Pharaoh, for this plague does not afflict merely the firstborn son, but every son and daughter that was ever born. Some have blamed this plague on the Germans but Brothers and Sisters, we all know where this epidemic was born: it was born in Sin.

  Amen!

  We have become complacent in our hearts. Because our brave soldiers are fighting the Hun across the ocean we have ceased to fight the war that never stops, the war against iniquity. The Devil has crept into this country and there is no mask that will keep him out, no pill or potion that will drive him out, no doctor who can flush him out. There is only one weapon, Brothers and Sisters, and that weapon is Prayer!

  Hallelujah!

  Every time we are envious, every time we are covetous, every time we speak in anger or with ill will in our hearts, we open the door to the Devil a little wider. The Devil creeps into our chests and steals our very breath from us; doctors call this Influenza but, Brothers and Sisters, I call it Beelzebub!

  Amen!

  There is only one way to drive this epidemic from our chests and from our homes and from our city and that is to Pray it down! Not only on Sundays—

  No!

  Not only before bed—

  No!

  But every day of the week, every hour of the day! And Brothers and Sisters, we are going to start right now! I want everybody to stand up! If you are at all able, I want you to stand up! I know that some of you are in the grips of your own battle, perhaps it was difficult for you to get here today, perhaps it is difficult for you to stand, but stand if you can! Pray that Devil out of your chest! I see that some of you are not standing. Brothers and Sisters, if you find yourself next to someone unable to stand on their own, offer them your arm. And for those who cannot stand at all, we who can stand will Pray all the harder for you so that next time, when we come together, you will be standing right beside us! Let us now all join together and Pray—