Wickett's Remedy

by Myla Goldberg

  The day of the study’s commencement was unseasonably warm, a breath of Indian summer in an otherwise cold autumn. The inaugural assembly, which was to have been held inside the volunteer barracks, was moved to the flag circle. On one side of the flagpole the medical staff stood in two white-clad rows of five; on the other, the gray-clad volunteers were arrayed in three rows of ten, each row punctuated by a blue-uniformed escort.

  From her place in the second row Lydia could see only the swirl of hair along the nape of Nurse Foley’s neck and the navy blue nurse’s cape that fluttered about her shoulders like her own flag. Staring at that cape, Lydia was once again a little girl at the department store window, gawking at the objects on the other side of the glass. Her body assumed the posture years at Gilchrist’s had taught her: she thrust back her shoulders and raised her chin; she held her arms at her sides and aligned her feet.

  The day was too warm for her cape. Cynthia spent the assembly worrying about the widening perspiration stains under her arms.

  On the opposite side of the circle, the volunteers were variously stooped and erect, excited and anxious—but Frank Bentley stood patiently in the front row, second from the left, like he was waiting for a pal who was slightly late. Lydia found it difficult to maintain her regal stance: her toes wanted to tap; her arms wanted to cross. After days of endless preliminaries, she could barely contain the urge to yell, “Now! Now!” into the wind. Then Dr. Gold began to speak.

  “It is beyond my power to express the pride and pleasure it gives me to be here with you today,” he began.

  He left the ranks of the medical staff and crossed the circle to present himself before the volunteers. As he approached, the men stood at attention. Dr. Gold was their captain, his words the ones they would take with them into battle.

  “You are here because you have agreed to embark upon a noble and selfless journey of vital importance, as vital as fighting the war itself. For just as the Hun threatens tyranny, disease exerts its own tyranny. Our country has never known an epidemic the breadth of that which afflicts us today. Thousands have died, thousands more have fallen ill, and if influenza continues to blaze unchecked across our nation countless more will suffer and perish. It is my hope that with your invaluable help, this is a tragedy our country will never know again.”

  The doctor paused. The wind-gripped halyard was striking against the flagpole. Before that morning, history had never impressed Lydia as anything more than a dull litany of names and dates she was expected to memorize in school. But listening to Dr. Gold, the taxidermied specimen became a breathing creature. History was not the province of the dead; it was the daily result of people living their lives.

  “It is no easy thing you will be doing,” Gold resumed, his voice quieter but no less powerful. “The risks are clear. If any of you have developed reservations or doubts, now is the time to come forward. It is not too late to return to Deer Island, nor is there any shame in doing so. You will be free to resume your lives as before. Is there anyone here who wishes to reconsider? Speak now, as they say, or forever hold your peace.”

  Though this particular speech was not preserved, Dr. Gold would like to point out that a recording of his voice resides within the Library of Congress.

  Lydia scanned the faces of the volunteers. The silence stretched tighter. Being free to return to a jail cell did not strike her as a particularly desirable freedom. Apparently the volunteers agreed.

  “You are bringing honor to yourselves and to your country,” the doctor declared. The entire assembly let out its breath. “Surgeon Bertram Peterson will now acquaint you with the protocols of the study.”

  Dr. Peterson plodded across the flag circle to join Gold. Though he and Dr. Gold were both in their early fifties, Gold gave the impression of a man still in his prime, while Petersons paunch and thinning hair marked him as fully subscribed to middle age.

  “Good morning, men,” Dr. Peterson began, his dry professorial voice unequipped to follow the powerful orator who had preceded him. Lydia sensed the assembly’s attention lag, as if they were all at a vaudeville show, impatiently sitting through a trained poodle act. “I will now describe the specifics of our undertaking.”

  Dr. Petersons voice was no match for the wind, and his stiff manner before the assembly suggested that he was more accustomed to associating with petri dishes than people. He had the pallid complexion of someone seldom outdoors, and Lydia expected he looked much more at home inside a laboratory. In a hypnotic drone that Lydia had not been subjected to since she was a schoolgirl, Peterson explained that each test would last a week, during which the test subjects would be quarantined with brief opportunities for outdoor exercise. Test subjects were expected to cooperate fully with the administration of each procedure and with the daily monitoring of their conditions. Then Lydia’s attention was brought back into sharp focus.

  “Are there any questions?”

  These words were blown seaward as quickly as the rest, but Lydia felt a change in their wake. Some of the men shifted from foot to foot and peered at the ground. Others gazed at the sky, while still others stared blankly at the assembled medical staff standing opposite them. Finally, from behind the first row of gray uniforms, came an anonymous query—quiet and worried and impossible to trace.

  “What happens when we get sick?”

  As if the word “sick” carried its own smell, there was a palpable shift among the men. Hands clenched and unclenched, stances shifted. The word loomed over them, freighting the air.

  Dr. Peterson stood with his mouth half-open, blinking as if he had been suddenly thrust into a bright light.

  “I will personally attend any man who manifests symptoms,” Dr. Gold interceded. “I will do everything in my power to return him to full health. Because we will be monitoring each of you quite closely, we can commence treatment at the very earliest signs of onset. We will spare nothing in the care we administer—every treatment, every medication will be at your disposal. If Surgeon General Rupert Blue himself were to fall ill he could not expect better care than that which you will receive at our hands.”

  Dr. Gold’s words evinced murmurs and nods. Shoulders and stances relaxed, but Lydia felt unassuaged.

  Having waited for this moment, Percival Cole left his place in the front row to join the two doctors. Though Lydia could not be sure, she suspected that Cole had rehearsed this moment. Several times she had heard his voice on approaching the examination room, only to discover that Dr. Gold’s protégé was alone. Lydia had never met a more meticulous fellow than Percy Cole; he was not the sort to leave anything to chance.

  Once Cole reached the volunteers, he consulted his notebook. “Good morning,” he said without raising his head. Lydia was certain that a bird perched on his shoulder would have seen every word he was about to speak. “It is a great honor to be called on to initiate these tests, and I’d like to take this moment to personally thank each and every one of you for doing your part.”

  Cole raised his head in acknowledgement of the assembled men, then returned his gaze to the page. “The following men should collect their belongings and report at once to the hospital,” he announced. “Able, Bentley, Cataldo, Cohen, Denson, Evert, Fells, Gray, Harris, Kipling.” This had been the first group to report to the lab room each morning, the first names Lydia had memorized.

  Staff and volunteer alike remained in place, silently watching the leave-taking. There was Harry Able and Teddy Evert. There was Billy Gray, whose ropy arms would have required custom tailoring for a truly smart suit. There was John Kipling, who rolled his eyes before having his temperature taken, as if this were just the next in a series of injustices against him. There was Joe Cohen, the perpetual whistler, his lips forming their customary pucker but the wind making it impossible to hear the tune. And then, of course, there was Frank Bentley, who walked like a man who had never been lost a day in his life.

  Finally the silence was broken:

  “Show your stuff Sammy!”

>   “Hang in there Joe.”

  “Lucky, stay strong!”

  “Show ’em Frankie!”

  The calls tumbled one over the other, some loud, some soft, an uneven chorus of encouragement tinged with relief. Their five-day wait had ended.

  Lydia and Nurse Foley preceded the men to the hospital’s east ward. Beside each of the room’s ten perfectly made beds rested a footlocker onto which Lydia had affixed a name the night before, wondering as she did so if her actions on Gallups would ever feel like something other than playacting. Now that time had arrived. As she placed herself behind her wheeled cart with its culture dishes, tubes, cotton swabs, and syringes, Lydia allowed herself to picture Michael alive and with his regiment, marching toward his first real battle after all those weeks of training. For a moment, she allowed herself to march with him.

  Cole was the first to arrive, looking visibly relieved to have finished with his small speech. Between leaving the flag circle and arriving to quarantine, he had collected a flask filled with milky fluid.

  “Is that one of your broths?” Lydia asked, remembering Cole’s lab collection of various colored liquids.

  “Exactly. This is our inoculation medium.” He passed it to her as if handling a baby bird. The action evinced a gentleness that Peterson lacked and that seemed wasted on the sterile confines of a laboratory. Lydia held the flask up to the light. It had the yellowish tinge of chicken soup rather than milk’s bluish undertone.

  “You did well at the assembly,” she assured him as she placed the flask in her cart.

  “Thank you,” he sighed.

  At the sound of approaching footsteps, Lydia looked toward the door.

  Dr. Gold was the first to enter, ushering the volunteers into the room with a grand sweep of his hand. Each man arrived carrying whatever scant personal belongings he had managed to acquire while at Deer Island: a deck of cards, a pair of dice, a few envelopes worn from frequent handling, a photograph, a page torn from a magazine. The men could just as easily have been recent immigrants, the bulk of their earthly possessions given away in exchange for passage to the New World.

  Lydia had anticipated that she would feel at ease inside quarantine once the volunteers appeared, but their presence made the room seem even less like a hospital. The men were too healthy, their faces ruddy from time spent outdoors. They moved with none of the deliberation displayed by hospital patients and visitors. Footlockers creaked, feet stomped, and bedsprings squeaked as mattresses were tested. Voices called out in normal tones and not in the hushed whispers reserved for sickrooms. A stranger peering through the window might have thought he was watching a traveling baseball team.

  When Tommy Fells saw how much nicer this joint was than the cages at Deer Island, he knew he had done right volunteering.

  When Teddy Evert saw how nice the place was, he was sure that they were in for something terrible.

  Once the ten beds had been claimed, there was some confusion as to the proper bearing of a person who was expected to fall ill but was not yet sick. Joe Cohen and Harold Able stood at attention beside their beds as if being inspected. George Denson tested his mattress by rolling on it. Sam Harris and Frank Bentley moved toward the tables and chairs, while Tony Cataldo investigated the washroom at the ward’s front left corner. Teddy Evert removed his shoes and lay down in anticipation of what was to come.

  Dr. Gold explained the procedure: he and Dr. Peterson would look into each man’s nose and throat, then a blood sample would be taken and an inoculation applied. The men would be expected to remain lying down for a few moments to allow the inoculation to sink in, but afterward they would be free to go about their business so long as they remained in the room.

  Cole opened a notebook and began writing. Nurse Foley gestured to Lydia, who approached the first bed with her cart. The cart squeaked when she pushed it, causing Dr. Peterson to glare as if she had made the noise herself. At the sound, ten gazes converged on the cart’s contents.

  “Able, is it?” Peterson asked, referring to Cole’s notebook.

  “Yes sir,” Harry Able replied, still staring at the cart, his hands gripping and releasing as if he was squeezing an invisible railing. Harry was older than the other men by a few years, with a face that appeared both kind and disappointed—the latter quality perhaps the result of the former not having done him much good. He had what Lydia’s mother would have called a tippler’s nose, burst capillaries alluding to the path that had led him to his gray uniform.

  Harry took a drink now and again, but he wasn’t half the boozehound his father was. As he recalls, he was thrown in the brig for oversleeping after he had finished drinking, and not for the drinking itself.

  “We will now examine the nasopharynx of Subject One,” Peterson dictated while Cole duly scribbled. Having forced his eyes away from the cart Harry now stared intently at the door through which he had entered as if he might, through the power of his gaze, compel himself to the other side.

  “All right, Able,” Gold continued, “we’ll need you to open your mouth and say ah.”

  Harry opened his mouth but his eyes remained fixed on the door. He had ceased squeezing his palms and instead stroked one trembling hand with the fingers of the other as if the former was a small, nervous kitten.

  Harry was not nervous. Sometimes his hands just shook on their own.

  The room was silent save for the sound of Cole writing. The eyes of the other nine men focused on Harry with an intensity Lydia could practically feel on her skin.

  “Tonsils are slightly enlarged, with minimal congestion of the pharynx,” Peterson dictated to Cole. Peterson swabbed Harry’s nose and throat with such casual efficiency that they might have been furnishings from which Peterson was removing dust. The doctor then handed the swab to Nurse Foley, who smeared it across the interior surface of a culture dish. Gold took Peterson’s place, gazing into Harry’s mouth a little longer, his expression pensive.

  “Very good,” Gold remarked, as though Harry had performed a clever trick. “Nasopharyngeal examination and culture complete,” he announced to the accompaniment of Cole’s assiduous note taking. “And now for the blood sample. If you would be so kind, Able, as to expose your inner arm.”

  “I don’t much care for shots,” Harry protested in a gravelly voice while he pushed up his sleeve, his eyes fixed on the cart from which Lydia handed Nurse Foley a syringe. The skin of his arm was pale and soft and seemed too vulnerable to belong to a man with such a rough voice.

  “Don’t worry, Able,” Gold assured him. “Cynthia is a veritable angel with a needle, isn’t that so, Nurse?”

  Foley nodded. “You’re not even getting a shot,” she cooed as she swabbed a small patch of Harry Abie’s flesh just above the crook in his elbow in a manner that again reminded Lydia of housecleaning.

  “A shot’s when you have something put into you and I’m—” She slid the needle into the skin with one deft, seamless motion. Harry did not even flinch.”—taking something out.” The nurse drew the stopper steadily up, the space it revealed filling with red. The syringe was replaced with a wad of cotton gauze and the forearm bent upward to hold it in place.

  “Blood sample obtained. We will now proceed to the inoculation,” Peterson continued, his eagerness leaving a sour taste in Lydia’s mouth. “Able, please lie on your back and open your mouth while keeping your face as relaxed as possible.”

  “What’re you putting in me, Doc?” Harry asked, remaining upright. His eyes darted from the doctor’s face to the glass dropper Peterson now held in his hand.

  “Quit mewling,” muttered George Denson. “This ain’t dancing school.”

  Harry blushed. “I’m gonna do everything the doc here says,” he mumbled. “I just wanna know.”

  “It’s an enhanced dextrose solution,” Peterson explained. Harry looked at him blankly. “In other words, sugar water. Now lie down, open your mouth, and hold still.”

  Slowly, as though he were afraid he might come down on s
omething sharp, Harry lowered himself down, nine wary gazes following his progress, the room silent save for the creaking of his bed. Once Harry was supine, Peterson administered drops to his subject’s nostrils and mouth. Harry began to cough. “Try not to do that,” Peterson instructed. He dictated, “We are now administering one point five ccs of Mather’s coccus solution via both nose and throat.”

  “What the Jesus, Joseph, and Mary did you just say?” Harry demanded, bolting upright.

  “Able!” Peterson squawked. The dropper fell to the floor. “Now look what you made me do!” Peterson’s face flushed red. The glass dropper lay in several pieces at his feet. “Now lie back down or I’ll have to readminister the inoculation.”

  Harry shook his head. “I don’t care if there are ladies present. Hell, I wouldn’t care if it was Mabel Normand herself.” He blew his nose and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. “I wanna know: who’s this Mather bastard?”

  “Well, Able,” Peterson sniffed, “you’ve just wiped inoculation all over your sleeve. Now I’ll certainly have to repeat the procedure. Mather, if you must know, is the individual who isolated this particular bacterial sample. Hence, Mather’s coccus.”

  The room gave a sigh. Several men snickered. Harry Abie’s face turned the color of his nose.

  “What is so amusing?” asked Peterson. Oblivious, Cole continued to write in his notebook. Nurse Foley’s face, rather than blushing, lost all color, lending her the appearance of a blanched almond. Finally a bemused Dr. Gold leaned toward Peterson and whispered in his ear.