Wickett's Remedy

by Myla Goldberg

  A New Name for an Old Street

  The next afternoon, we headed back to 162 B Street for the Jubilee’s main event. While it’s true I would have attended QD Soda’s seventy-fifth birthday party whether or not Quentin Driscoll was going to be there, I am not alone when I say that meeting the inventor of the best soda in the world was something I had dreamed of since I was a little girl. I even sewed a special dress to wear to the occasion! Now before you QDevotees get too excited, let me tell you I had no designs on Mr. Driscoll—after all I am a happily married woman and he is old enough to be my grandfather. I just wanted the day to be special, as it isn’t everyday you get to fix your eyes on your girlhood hero.

  The weather was nice, and it was good to see so many neighborhood children in attendance. There were free balloons and free cups of soda. Recordings from the QD Radio Comedy Hour “Best of” collection were played, which was a real hoot.

  We hadn’t been there long before Ralph Finnister arrived with Quentin Driscoll. The two of them were absolutely adorable in their matching QD Soda ties. But Quentin Driscoll was so old! I know that’s a silly thing to say considering that unless Quentin Driscoll had his famous dream while he was still in the womb he would have to be even older than his soda, but I’ve always thought of him as eternally in his prime—sort of a Sodaman version of Cary Grant in His Girl Friday.

  Knowing how thrilled we were to meet Mr. Driscoll, Ralph Finnister led him right over to us to shake our hands and take pictures. I haven’t developed the film yet but I’m sure my smile is a mile long.

  Mr. Finnister spoke first, and as you might expect from having read his fine writing in past issues, his speech was quite inspirational. The way he talked about the soda over the years brought tears to my eyes! We were a little disappointed not to see the Mayor in attendance, but I suppose it’s hard to be everywhere when you’re in charge of a whole city.

  Then came the moment we’d been waiting for, which is to say it was Quentin Driscoll’s turn at the microphone. He didn’t speak at first, which I took for his being overwhelmed by the emotions of the moment. Then he smiled at the crowd and raised his cup of soda as if he was about to begin a toast—and I’ll be durned if he didn’t surprise us all! That man might be in his golden years, but he has some spunk in him yet. If he hadn’t made it in the soda business, I bet he would have gone far in show business. He stood on that stage and with a completely straight face said that he was not the actual inventor of QP Soda! It was hard to hear what he said after that because of all the laughs, but it was something about the soda’s true inventor being a woman he had known back when he was a young man. Then he suggested that the block of B Street be named after her instead! We thought that was a real hoot and gave him a big round of applause, though Mr. Finnister looked none too pleased as he led Mr. Driscoll off the stage. I only hope that when I’m that old I have as good a sense of humor!

  Fond Fairwells

  Once the ceremony was over it was time to say our good-byes. After a grand time sharing old memories and making new ones, we went our separate ways feeling new bonds with our old soda friends. To Quentin Driscoll, whose appearance made our trip so special, I offer on behalf of all of us QDevotees the following words from a certain inspiring memoir: Sir, you have filled my little bottle with everything that you have, and I am all the richer for it.

  In This Issue

  Should QD Go Twist-Off? The Great Bottle Cap Divide…. Page 4

  Soda Fountain: Ken Gerard’s Jubilee Tribute Reprised…. Page 5

  LAWNVIEW SENIOR COMPLEX

  “Right in the Thick of It!!”™

  9/2/93

  Dear Mr. Finnister:

  Greetings from Lawnview Senior Complex! Please call us at ext. 62 regarding Mr. Quentin Driscoll. A representative will be available to take your call Monday through Friday, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. We look forward to talking with you soon!

  She awoke to the expectancy that had once accompanied birthdays and Christmases. Her body was a coiled spring, the dawning day a hand unfurling its fingers to reveal the small treasure held in its palm. Swinging her bare feet to the floor, she savored the breeze playing across the surface of her skin. She relished the perfection of her vertebrae stacked one atop the other, the velvet air that ebbed and flowed from her lungs. She did not realize she was smiling until she walked to the window and caught her reflection in the glass. The sight made her smile wider still. The last time she had been happy—but she could not remember when that had been. Not on Gallups, certainly, or during the weeks leading up to her arrival. At Carney she had felt satisfaction, but that was not the same thing. It shocked her that she had not noticed the duration and degree of happiness’s banishment. She needed to remember that this was how she was meant to feel. This was the essential state to which life—after necessary digressions and detours—ought to return her.

  She wbas grateful that her feet were dirty and that the hem of her nightdress was soiled: this proved that she was not basking in the afterglow of a particularly potent dream. She could recall with delicious precision the press of Frank’s hand on her back, the briny smell that had enveloped her as they danced, and the fleeting warmth of his breath gracing her skin.

  She looked at her clock: she had woken early. She lay back down and closed her eyes to enjoy the novel feeling of being awake without needing to be anywhere. At the sound of footsteps in the hallway she almost got up again—she found the notion of surprising Cynthia in the hallway to wish her a good morning oddly appealing;—but when the door to the barracks opened and closed she did not really mind having missed her chance.

  Cynthia is profoundly grateful Lydia did not choose that morning to become an early riser. She could not have borne the consequences had Lydia seen who was truly leaving their barracks at that hour.

  When she next opened her eyes it was to the sound of reveille. Her earlier, first awakening had the distant and slightly embarrassing feeling of an impassioned midnight conversation whose fervency, by day, seems due less to its substance than to the lateness of the hour. As she dressed she thought of the east ward. She dreaded entering that room. Her anticipation of that moment muted her happiness, but it did not vanquish it entirely. As she made her way across the compound, her memory of the previous night lodged warm and solid in her chest, a small blue candle.

  No one in the east ward was asleep when she arrived, but it was difficult to discern whether the men’s wan expressions were the product of encroaching sickness or fatigue. Some lay propped against their pillows. Others sat rigid at the edge of their beds. The room’s stagnant air held a sour, sweaty odor. She did not mind the smell of a room where men had been working, but this smell—sharper and more pungent—was different.

  “What’s going on?” Roland Thompson asked as soon as Lydia had closed the door behind her.

  “What do you mean?” she countered. Until now she had forestalled—from one moment to the next—considering the larger implications of last night’s encounter. Though reason assured her that Roland’s question had nothing to do with Frank, her imagination conjured less comforting possibilities.

  “I mean all that running back and forth, and the voices, and us pounding on our door fairly begging them to tell us the trouble, and them acting like we was invisible,” Roland fumed. “It ain’t right. After all the hullabaloo last night we oughta be told.”

  “Rollie thinks it was one of ours from the west ward,” chimed Arthur Sealey from Evert’s bed, “but I say it’s one of them gobs that breathed and coughed all over us.”

  “If you ask me, they oughta’ve told us last night, ‘stead of making us wait like this,” protested Leonard Veeson from across the aisle, where Cataldo had once been. “Like Rollie says, we gotta right to know.”

  “The way they was actin’, it could’ve been a fire,” Francis Maddox accused from Denson’s bed in the far corner. “For all we knew the hospital was burnin’ down.”

  “I’m so sorry,” she apologized. “I’m afraid
I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Several of the men scowled; a few muttered under their breath. She was divided between alarm that something had happened and relief that it did not involve her and Frank.

  “I haven’t talked to anyone yet this morning,” she explained. She wondered if news of whatever had happened in the hospital had reached the volunteer barracks. “As soon as I learn anything I promise to tell you straightaway.”

  She distributed the breakfast trays. The men accepted them grudgingly, most placing them beside their beds uneaten.

  “You wouldn’t hold out on us, would you?” Roland asked, eyeing her. “Thinking it was for our own good? ’Cause I don’t know about these fellas, but I’d rather have it straight.”

  “Rollie, drop it,” Arthur Sealey groaned. “She don’t know and neither do you. And even if she did there’s nothing anyone could do either way. If we’re goners, we’re goners. If we ain’t, we ain’t. Maybe it was a gob got sicker, maybe not. I don’t know why some fellows think that knowing a situation is a good thing, when usually knowing just makes it worse.”

  “If something has happened, it’s only right that you be told,” she confirmed. “I promise that if there’s anything to know, I’ll tell you as soon as I can.”

  Roland nodded glumly and turned his attention to his breakfast, the rest of the room following his lead. Since arriving on the island, Lydia had become accustomed to being a source of disappointment, but not in the wards.

  “Hey, Nursie!” Max Stein complained after she completed her breakfast duties and was wheeling her empty cart toward the door. “I got a bum plate. There ain’t no bacon on it.”

  “I told the cook to give you extra eggs instead,” she replied.

  “Aw, whaddya do that for?” Max groaned. “How am I s’posed to keep my strength if I don’t get meat? Now I’m a goner for sure.”

  “But it was bacon!” she explained. “When Joe Cohen was in here—”

  “Do me a favor, honey,” Max interrupted. “Keep Joe out of it. I don’t go in for none of that dietary mumbo jumbo. Be a doll and fetch me some bacon before they run out and I gotta cut a slice off the Mad Ox over there.”

  “Let’s see you try,” warned Francis Maddox from his bed.

  The west ward still wanted breakfast, but she did not want to appear there without answers to the questions she knew would be waiting for her. She tried to imagine which of the four seamen might have deteriorated, but their features had merged into an amalgam of all the young men she had seen inhabiting hospital beds. She left her cart in the hallway and ventured to the forward portion of the hospital. Nurse Foley, Dr. Gold, and a good number of medical staff were already in the recovery room, anxiously gathered outside a fifth curtained bed opposite the aisle from yesterday’s four arrivals.

  “Who?” she asked to the air, her mind reeling off names as she fixed on the curtain, as though it might tell her which of the volunteers it concealed.

  As she neared the bed Dr. Gold gestured for Peterson and Foley to follow him. Lydia positioned herself to catch a glimpse of the patient’s face when the curtain was parted, but so many medical staff filed past that there was no need for her to hang back.

  She could feel her pulse in her neck. In the split second before approaching the bed, she tendered an urgent prayer that its tenant be anyone save for a particular volunteer. It was a child’s impulse, and her knowing that it had been an empty, impotent plea had little bearing on her guilt when Percival Cole opened his eyes.

  “Hello Miss Wickett,” he said at the sight of her. Cole’s skin was wan and his voice thin. She could not return his greeting; her reply would have been too absurd. All she could think to say was that he was far too fastidious a person to fall ill.

  “How are you feeling, Percival?” Dr. Gold asked.

  Cole held out a bandaged arm. “Do you need any more, Doctor?”

  “No, son,” Gold affirmed. “You’ve given us quite enough.”

  “You can take more if you’d like. I would hate for the opportunity—” Cole’s words were truncated by violent coughs.

  “Your dedication will not be forgotten,” the doctor assured him. “You have a bright future with the Health Service, son. I can promise you that.”

  “But first you’ve got to get better,” Nurse Foley chided. “You really ought to have reported to the infirmary earlier. Flu can’t be given any leeway.”

  “But I wanted to make absolutely certain first,” Percy whispered, his breath gone. “I assure you I kept out of quarantine and kept my mask on even outside the hospital.”

  From his supine position, Percy Cole had the pleasure of observing Miss Wickett’s nostrils, which were dainty and well formed, Cole considering himself a particular connoisseur of female nostrility. This was additionally the first and only time Miss Wickett touched him.

  Foley stroked Percy’s head. “That’s fine but I wish you’d shown as much concern for yourself.”

  “You must conserve your strength,” Gold instructed. “Bed rest is a potent medicine.”

  “Yes sir,” Percy replied, closing his eyes.

  The group followed Gold from the bedside but Lydia lingered, placing a tentative hand on Percy’s shoulder.

  Percy opened his eyes and smiled. Until he held out the notebook he had been clutching, she did not realize how strange such an object should have seemed in the possession of a bedridden man. Percy always carried a notebook; it was as natural to him as a hand.

  “I think you’ll find this of interest. I started keeping it yesterday,” he whispered, “when the aches started. In the event it wasn’t just overwork.”

  Percival Cole’s entries had begun at noon the day before, with hourly notations charting appetite, temperature, respiration, heart rate, and overall condition until he had been confined to bed, after which the observations became more erratic as he awoke and returned to sleep. Even when he was sick, Percy Cole’s handwriting remained immaculate, the chart of his continuing illness a paragon of organization. It was of momentary comfort to Lydia to suppose the order Percy had imposed upon his symptoms would somehow make sense of his disease.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said, returning it to his hand.

  “Wickett?” Foley called from the other side of the curtain. Lydia turned to go.

  “Not yet,” Percy whispered. “Nurse Foley,” he managed a little louder. The nurse pushed aside the curtain. “I would like Miss Wickett to attend my case.”

  No one, not even Dr. Gold, had ever advised the nurse on how to best employ her assistant.

  “She is on her way to becoming an awfully good nurse,” Cole continued. “I’d be pleased if my condition could help her toward that end.”

  Nurse Foley tilted her head—a feline gesture now familiar to Lydia as a bid for composure—then righted herself. “As long as you’re not trying to get rid of me Percy,” she teased.

  “Never,” he assured her.

  “All right,” Foley agreed. “The two of us should have you back in the lab in no time.” She crossed to the other side of the curtain.

  Once she had gone, Percy grinned. “That certainly took her by surprise,” he whispered.

  “Not only her!” Lydia added.

  “Nurse Foley undervalues you,” he said. Talking had tired him, and it was difficult to make out his words.

  “You’re a kind man,” Lydia murmured. “Now get some rest.” But he was already asleep.

  Lydia emerged from Cole’s bedside to find Nurse Foley staring fixedly at his closed curtain. She gazed a few moments more before turning toward Lydia. “You attended numerous flu cases at Carney?” she asked softly.

  Lydia nodded.

  “How does he look to you?” Foley asked. Her brief time on Gallups had traced worry lines on the smooth skin of her forehead.

  “It always comes on frightfully quickly,” Lydia replied. “The next day or so will tell us the chances of him holding his own.”

  “I hate this p
art of it,” Cynthia sighed. She looked toward Cole’s bed. “It’s maddening how much of medicine comes down to waiting. Most doctors don’t think of it that way; they make their diagnoses and move on. We’re the ones who decide from moment to moment if anything more can be done. We’re the ones who stay behind.”

  They both observed the closed curtain, listening to Percy breathe. Then Nurse Foley moved toward a supply cabinet at the far end of the room.

  “Of course, you mustn’t let caring for Percival interfere with your other duties,” she said, making a show of opening and closing the cabinet’s drawers. “I need you to report to the west ward and prepare ten fresh beds.”

  “But what happened to the ten who were already in the west ward quarantine?” Lydia asked. “I’ve got their breakfasts.” Too much was changing too quickly. Time seemed to have accelerated with no concern for her ability to keep pace.

  “Save those for the new men,” Foley answered. “The others are back in the volunteer barracks. Now hurry. Dr. Gold will be needing your assistance.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” she answered and returned to quarantine.

  She was making up the last often new beds when the door to the west ward opened. On seeing Frank standing with Dr. Gold in the doorway, the blood rushed from her head and she wavered on her feet. She wondered if a special ferry would be sent or if she would be kept on Gallups until the next mail delivery, if she would be permitted to eat with the medical staff until her departure or if she would be confined to her room. She looked over the ward she had just prepared. At least she could be satisfied with the last duty she had performed. She turned toward Dr. Gold, determined not to avert her gaze.