Wickett's Remedy

by Myla Goldberg

  When the dream changes I become the one lying on the table—except that it is not me. It is Henry Wickett’s widow. She is older than when I met her, but I still recognize her. And in the dream I am her, looking through her eyes as she lies on a bed. I am holding a baby to my chest, trying to feed him, but I am hungry myself. The hunger is boring into the pit of my stomach. The baby is crying and cannot suck, and I am crying too, for myself and for the babe in my arms. When I wake up, that jagged, hungry feeling follows me into waking and I scream just like you used to scream when you had your nightmares. It turns out that my scream and your scream sound exactly the same.

  Your Loving Father

  Winter arrived to Gallups. The island’s denuded tree branches were nubbed with migrating birds, Gallups a comma punctuating their southward journey. The disappearance of the season that had greeted Lydia’s arrival—in combination with the foreshortened days—made it seem like months rather than weeks had passed. The fear that haunted Southie, the emptiness of Bostons streetcars and the desolation of its shuttered shops, all blurred in her memory, their intensity diminished. Sometimes entire days passed before she thought of Carney. Her amnesia was aided by letters from home—which lately avoided all talk of the epidemic—and by the newspapers—which were subject to the same frustrating delay as the mail—forcing Gallups’ inhabitants to traffic in old news, war and epidemic unfolding in three-day intervals. News of Boston had come to feel as remote as news from Europe. When she took her nightly walk along Gallups’ shoreline, both places were equally invisible, confirming the notion she was impossibly far from everything and everyone she had ever known.

  Every Sunday a Protestant chaplain was brought in by ferry to lead a nondenominational service in the dining hall. Though the chaplain’s aim was to satisfy Christians of all creeds, his service was familiar to no one and sparsely attended. She would have preferred a priest empowered to hear her confession, but the chaplain was always happy to talk with her after the service. Had he been Catholic she would have told him of her immoderate affection for the men in the east wing, but such a topic felt indecorous outside the confines of the confessional. Instead she related her anxieties regarding the volunteers’ health and her ambivalence toward her role in the study’s mission. The chaplain’s kindness girded her for the week ahead.

  Chaplain John Grimes remembers Lydia well. When she stopped attending services he worried that she had fallen ill.

  By the end of their second day, the men inhabiting the west ward remained as stubbornly healthy as their counterparts across the hall. Disquiet began to spread among the medical staff. During the days following the first inoculation, wisecracks about the volunteers’ contrarian constitutions had been commonplace—but when the second group often also defied infection, the jokes disappeared. Talk among the junior medical staff avoided the topic of failure, which remained foremost in everyone’s minds. The resultant dinner conversations about Europe and bridge made Lydia feel as if she had been deposited into a drawing room occupied by vacationing pensioners.

  Forty-eight hours following the second inoculation, Dr. Gold began dining in his office, enabling Percival Cole—whom Lydia suspected found communal dining an unwelcome distraction—to take his meals in the lab. This reduced poor Cynthia Foley to sitting with Bertram Peterson. The junior table could have accommodated one extra diner but not two and the circular tables did not lend themselves to being pushed together—though Lydia suspected that even had the tables’ geometries been more accommodating, pride would have prevented their merger. The sight of Nurse Foley soldiering through meals with the doctor left Lydia feeling that, for once, she might possess the more enviable position.

  Even filled with healthy men, two quarantine rooms required constant maintenance. Whatever time was not taken up by the logistics of meals and temperature readings was spent assisting with throat cultures and blood samples, leaving less time in which Lydia was tempted to visit the east ward, where she continued to spend far more time than she knew was proper. She doubted Foley was blind to her habits, but so long as the nurse did not see fit to mention it, Lydia was content to pretend she was the embodiment of the impartial professional. For their part, Harry, George, and the rest were careful to refrain from calling her “Nursie Lydia” in the presence of Foley or the other medical personnel.

  Then, on the fifth afternoon of the east ward’s confinement, Lydia arrived to ten empty beds. This had happened once before: on hearing her approaching footsteps, the east warders had hidden beneath their beds or inside the bathroom. If Harry Able had not attempted to fit under his bed, the deserted ward would have come as more of a shock. Instead, Lydia had distributed meals to the empty beds with barely a hitch in her stride, a reaction that profited those in the ward who had wagered on her sangfroid.

  “Olly olly oxen free!” Lydia called into the ward on finding it deserted a second time. But the men did not appear. It was not mealtime and the next temperature reading was ninety minutes away. The excuse for her visit was a fresh towel that no one had expressly requested—in truth she wanted to see who was ahead in the perennial checkers match between Frank and Tony. Though she never placed any actual bets with Billy, the ward’s unofficial bookie, she had privately predicted she would find Frank up by three games.

  “Frank?” she called. “Georgie?” The nightstands beside the vacant beds were bare and the few pictures that had been affixed to the walls had been removed. Then she heard Nurse Foley’s footsteps behind her.

  “Where are they?” Lydia demanded.

  “The first study ended just before lunch,” the nurse replied. “Assuming they’re not still at the mess hall, the men are most likely in the barracks.”

  “It’s just that I was surprised to find the room empty,” Lydia stammered. “I expected I would be asked to help when the time came.”

  “It happened rather suddenly,” Foley explained. “Joseph had been in communication with the Chelsea Naval Base for days trying to get the necessary transfer permissions and when they came through this morning there was no time to waste. He left on a special ferry just before lunch. Even Dr. Peterson is rather excited about the whole thing.”

  “Are we getting more volunteers?” Lydia asked.

  “Heavens no,” the nurse replied, “though there are more than a few people around here who would be thrilled to trade ours in for new ones. The Chelsea Naval Base patients will be enabling the direct transmission study. Joseph has high hopes. According to him, our first two tests here were pro forma; this is the test that will yield the real results. I’ll need your help now, of course, in preparing the room for the next group.”

  She turned to go but stopped before she reached the door.

  “You know, Lydia,” she added, “your dedication is admirable but you mustn’t become too attached. I think perhaps it was for the best that Joseph and I supervised the men’s return to their barracks without you.”

  She was on the verge of asking who Joseph was when she realized Nurse Foley was referring to Dr. Gold.

  “Now that both wings are to be continually occupied,” Nurse Foley offered, “I suspect that you’ll find it easier to manage your time. If what Joseph says has any bearing on things, we’re going to be rather busy from here on out.”

  Mechanically, Lydia stripped the beds and made them up with fresh sheets. She removed ten names from ten footlockers and threw the labels in the rubbish bin. She opened the room’s windows and rid the room of the smell of men until, finally, there was nothing left.

  Just as they had at the volunteers’ arrival, the entire staff was on hand to meet this newest ferry. The first person to emerge from the ship’s cabin was Dr. Gold. Lydia thought they all could have benefited from a rousing speech but without preamble Dr. Gold enlisted the aid of the junior personnel and Dr. Peterson in carrying four stretchers from the boat, leaving as spectators only Lydia and Nurse Foley. On each stretcher lay a man, his head emerging from a cocoon of bedding. Three lay with their eyes c
losed; whatever curiosity they might have had about their new surroundings was trumped by illness. The last was either too weak or too tired to raise his neck and saw only as much as the placement of his head on the stretcher would allow. Only the color of the uniforms beneath the bedding identified them as naval recruits who had fallen ill before shipping out.

  The path leading to the compound was unpaved and ran uphill, precluding the use of wheeled gurneys. As the stretchers got under way Nurse Foley assumed the head of the slow procession, walking beside the stretcher carried by Peterson and Gold. Watching the nurse from her own place at the rear, Lydia tried to recall the sense of limitless possibility that had struck her on first spying Gallups from the bow of her own incoming ferry, but that feeling seemed to have belonged to someone hopelessly young.

  At the hospital entrance, the four new arrivals were transferred to wheeled gurneys and brought to the recovery room, which lay along the same hallway that housed the surgery and examination rooms. The recovery room was the twin of the lab where the volunteers had reported for preliminary tests, but here beds took the place of counters, lessening the power of the white tiles to evoke memories of City Point. The beds were arranged in two rows of four separated by a wide aisle. The curtains that had been pulled around the sailors’ four beds reminded Lydia of Carney.

  “We are joined today by four seamen from the Chelsea Naval Hospital, who have generously agreed to aid us in our study,” Dr. Gold explained once the last sailor had been bedded down. “I met and interviewed several seamen at Chelsea who were eager to help our efforts, but these four represent our most ideal donors.” The doctor walked to the bed at the far end of the room.

  “This is Seaman Pruett. An early but acute case, he claims to have experienced the first symptoms this very morning. He arrived at Chelsea just as I did and immediately expressed his heartfelt willingness to help in any way he could. The other three arrived at Chelsea the previous night but represent candidates almost as impeccable.”

  Dr. Gold turned to face the bed behind him. “Son, you’ve done your country a great service by agreeing to come here.”

  “Sure, Doc,” rasped an unfamiliar voice from behind the partition.

  When Davey Pruett got to Chelsea, it was so crammed with flu patients that just the smell of them would have made him agree to practically anything the doc wanted.

  “We’re going to take good care of you, sailor, even better care than you would have received at Chelsea. You’re in excellent hands.”

  “Thanks, Doc. I’m awfully grateful.”

  As Gold proceeded to the next curtained bed, Cole and an escort led ten volunteers into the room. These men represented the last of the thirty, whom Lydia had not seen since the interim days preceding the study’s commencement. She could only vaguely recall their names—but on seeing her, several smiled and cried out, “Nursie Lydia!” their faces lighting up in recognition.

  The men’s faces quickly changed at the sight of the four curtained beds.

  “What’s happened?” she was asked by a tall, narrow-necked volunteer with a prominent Adam’s apple and a thatch of straw-colored hair. “Have the west ward boys gotten a dose after all?”

  Rudy Unger wishes his name fell at the beginning of the alphabet. From what he hears, Nursie Lydia would have had no trouble remembering him if it had.

  “Your friends are fine,” Lydia assured him.

  As if he had been waiting for her cue, Dr. Gold approached.

  “Good morning!” he began, either unaware or unconcerned that he only received wary nods in reply. “Boys, today we will be inaugurating the next phase of our tests, which is called the ‘direct phase.’ Behind these curtains are four enlisted men who, unlike the fellows we’ve been working with here, have managed to catch the flu.” The doctor’s chuckle, emerging from behind the white blind of his mask, elicited uneasy smiles.

  “We’ll be employing two techniques today, split evenly between you,” he continued. “The first couldn’t be simpler: all it involves is talking to these fellows and allowing them to breathe and cough on you a bit. For the second you don’t have to be nearly so sociable, we’ll just be asking to swab your noses and throats with a bit of donated material. Are there any questions? Good. When Dr. Peterson calls your name please proceed to the indicated bed and await further instructions.”

  Gold spoke so assuredly and with such speed that by the time Peterson had divided the men into two groups of five, Lydia suspected they still had not grasped the meaning of his words. While Foley assisted Peterson, Cole motioned for Lydia, the two of them leading their five to the bed nearest the door.

  “Would you like to perform the nasal procedure?” Cole asked as they stood outside the bed’s drawn curtain.

  Lydia was certain she had misheard.

  “All it requires is speed and a gentle touch. You’ve evidenced both in our work together and I think, in this circumstance, the men would be more at ease with a female practitioner.”

  He handed her a swab. “I’ll be your assistant for a change. Just rotate this along the inner perimeter of the donor’s nostril and then use the same technique to transfer the material to the subject.”

  She rolled the swab between her thumb and forefinger. “I suppose if you’re fast enough,” she mused, “you won’t give the fellow too much time to think about what you’re putting in there.”

  “Miss Wickett,” Cole replied, “I think you may have a natural propensity for this sort of work.”

  She had not been within the confines of a curtained bed since her time at Carney and, for a moment, she felt like she had been transported back across the harbor. She had a sudden flash of Brian O’Toole struggling to raise his head from his pillow as he begged her not to leave, but this vision was dispelled by the sight of the naval recruit and the nervous silence on the other side of the curtain.

  The only reason Oscar Irvine stayed quiet was so as not to spew all over the nice nurse. He had never heard of anything more disgusting than what those docs were up to.

  The sailor opened his eyes as she entered. He was not nearly as ill as some of the patients she had helped at Carney. Though feverish, he was alert and his breathing was unimpaired. In a kind voice, Cole described the procedure. The recruit lay perfectly still as Lydia circled a swab inside his nostril until the soft white of the swab’s tip had been obscured by a layer of yellow-green mucus. Then, handling the glistening swab with the care a jeweler might lavish on a rare gem, she rushed from the bed to the other side of the curtain, where she spread the contents of the swab inside the nostrils of a volunteer, stroking back and forth within the nostril as though applying a thin, fast-drying coat of paint.

  Once, when Thomas was no more than a few months old, he caught a terrible cold, and she helped to keep his poor nose clear by alternating gentle suction with drops of saline. The mechanics of her current assignment were far easier. She focused on the movement of her hands. She reminded herself that she was acting for the greater good—that they were all here to serve interests larger than themselves. She no longer needed to look at the swab; she could operate by feel alone. She held the men’s gazes while her hands did their work. That was each man’s wish, that his eyes be diverted from her hands. It did not take long, but a moment spent holding the gaze of another made time into pulled taffy. Ages elapsed between blinks. Just one transfer remained. She was grateful to Cole for entrusting her with this task. She was more grateful still to be finished.

  The nasal transfer was the easier job. Lydia’s success only required each man’s immobility. The glass vials under Cole’s jurisdiction were unwieldy things that required far greater collaboration. Lydia watched as, under Cole’s instruction, the bedridden naval recruit cleared his throat and expectorated thick, yellow-streaked spittle into one of the tubes.

  When Cole emerged from behind the curtain holding the vial, the first volunteer paled. “You’re not serious?” he asked.

  “Just tip back your head and open your
mouth and you’ll barely feel a thing,” Cole assured him.

  “Gimme a minute, Doc,” the volunteer said, turning away. When he turned back his eyes were closed. “All right,” he resumed. “Go ahead and do me.”

  “Try not to cough or spit,” Cole advised, “or I might have to repeat the procedure.” He was so quick and gentle the fellow did not even gag.

  When it was done the young man opened his eyes and grinned. “No problem, Doc. That wasn’t nearly so bad as I thought. It’s like swallowing oysters.”

  The next volunteer stared at his tube like it had challenged him to a drinking match. “I’m good for more than that, Doc,” he boasted. “Whatever you can give, I can take.”

  “You tell ’em, Duke!” called one of the men from the other group. “If Riordan could see you now his head would near about fall off.”

  “He’d be a helluva lot better looking that way,” Duke replied, rubbing a scar that lay across his left cheek like a stray piece of embroidery thread.

  Eventually Lydia stopped watching, focusing instead on the recruit, but even as she made polite conversation and adjusted bedding, it was impossible to close her ears to each struggle to permit Cole’s fingers to accomplish Dr. Gold’s bidding.

  When Cole was finished, she led the group to the empty east ward. In silence the men found their beds. In silence, Lydia locked the door behind them.

  How’re you feeling?

  Not so great. S’good t’ be here though. You wouldn’t believe the crush at the pier.

  You coming or going?