Wickett's Remedy Page 12

  Zachariah Obedy remembers this particular young lady no better than she remembers her history. He was a Civil War veteran.

  Against a street clock leaned a veteran of uncertain vintage, clad in a faded uniform from the Spanish-American War. At unpredictable intervals the antique soldier placed a weathered bugle to his faded lips and produced sounds of astonishing vigor, startling Lydia, who had not at first noticed him. At the sound of the horn she recalled a scene from a war picture, in which a bugler summons his regiment. The theater accompanist had played reveille on the piano but there was no comparison to the sounds emanating from the old man’s battered instrument. She had never heard a live bugle before. If at that moment the bugler had beckoned to her, she would have followed without question.

  Her family slowly made their way toward State Street until, reaching the corner of State and Congress, they could progress no farther—the crowd had grown too thick. At first John squatted, hoping to peer at the parade through the legs of the crowd—but when this provided only glimpses of shoes and pant cuffs, he resigned himself to receiving the parade in the irregular interstices offered by the constantly shifting crowd. Lydia bragged to fellow spectators that her neighbor was in the parade, but her thoughts were with her brother. Today’s parade was necessary preparation for his eventual appearance on a street like this one, on his way to a ship that would carry him to Europe.

  BANISHES HER PET FLOWER TO PROVE HER PATRIOTISM

  Hears Kaiser Likes Them

  Mrs. Charles A. Abbot, wife of the engineer of the webbing mill, had planted a garden beside her home for many years, and particularly loved bachelor’s buttons. But now her hollyhocks and the spicy little pinks bloom alone. For last Tuesday night when Mrs. Abbot unfolded her evening paper she could scarcely believe her eyes when she read that the inoffensive blue blossoms in her garden were the favorites of Kaiserism, associated with our enemy’s domain, in a word, the official flower of Germany. Mrs. Abbot’s fighting mood was aroused immediately. She hustled out to her garden and with a hoe and a rake removed all traces of the alien blossoms.

  “To think,” she exclaimed indignantly, “that people have been driving past my house all summer thinking maybe I was a sympathizer with the Kaiser. You would never believe how many bachelor’s buttons I had.”

  Perhaps, as Mrs. Abbot says, the summer may come soon when the blue bachelor’s buttons can grow again unmolested.

  In the meantime, hats off to Mrs. Abbot’s staunch patriotism that forced her to sacrifice something she loved out of loyalty to America.

  Well, Quentin, I must admit that when you first took up with that tonic, I wasn’t sure it was the standout product you were looking for. There was something just slightly off about it.

  Gee, Mr. Thornly, why didn’t you tell me?

  I didn’t want to quench your fire! You reminded me too much of myself when I was your age and, besides, I’m an old man. It was possible I was missing something.

  You wouldn’t hold back on me now, though, would you? That is, if you’ve still got doubts?

  Quentin, I’ll be straight with you: you’ve definitely got something. What made you think of it?

  Well, it was partly the widow. She reminded me how Dr. Wickett had never thought of the Remedy as a medicine—

  You tried to explain this to me before. Some cocka-mamy thing having to do with letters?

  I never quite followed it either, but I didn’t let it bother me on account of the tonic’s taste. And then it hit me—I wasn’t any more interested in medicine than they were: I was interested in flavor! And what do people drink when they’re after something that tastes good? Soda!

  What does the widow think?

  I haven’t told her yet. You see, if no one likes it, I don’t want to risk upsetting her over nothing. I figure if I can come to her with guaranteed money from proven sales, it’ll help my case.

  Well if it keeps selling like it has been, then you’ve got nothing to worry about.

  THE QDISPATCH

  VOLUME 9, ISSUE 6 NOVEMBER 1991

  QP and Me: A Sodaman’s Journey By Ralph Finnister

  Chapter 4 The Promise

  That night I could barely sleep. Why did Quentin Driscoll want to see me? For two years I had been moved from department to department like a bottle on a conveyor belt. At every stop I had worked my hardest, only to feel the belt lurch beneath me and move me on. Was Quentin Driscoll’s hand on the lever? Sometimes this seemed the only answer and sometimes this seemed a boy’s folly.

  The next morning I reported to the third floor just as I had two years before, but this time with nothing to deliver except myself. The crazy conveyor belt that had carried me for so long was reaching its end. But would my little bottle pass inspection?

  Quentin Driscoll was just as I remembered him. When I entered his office, those dark eyes stared at me with such intensity that I trembled.

  “Let me look at you,” he offered as I stood before him. Though he was unchanged, in the course of my two-year journey, I had grown from a boy into a man. My arms and legs had lengthened, and my voice had deepened. I had even begun to grow a moustache like one I had first seen two years ago—on Quentin Driscoll’s face.

  “When you came to me before, had you ever traveled?” the Sodaman asked me.

  “Traveled?” I replied. “No, Sir.”

  “And what do you think of the trip you have just completed?” he asked with a knowing smile.

  I was as still as flat soda. After two years of uncertainty, it seemed my fondest wish might be true.

  “For two years, my boy, you have been traveling the world of QP Soda. I have been pleased to learn that you learn fast and travel well.”

  “Thank you, Sir,” I replied. Those words of praise would have been enough, but there was more.

  “I’ve been keeping an eye on you, my dear boy. I wanted to see if the instinct I had wasn’t merely a sad man’s fancy. If there was more to you than just a name. I am pleased to say I have not been disappointed.”

  And now, though I could still feel my inspector’s eyes on me, I did not feel fear, but happiness.

  “Ralph,” the Sodaman murmured, his voice becoming softer. “I have great plans for you.”

  I had not returned to Quentin Driscoll as an empty vessel. My bottle had been filled at each stop with some new and valuable ingredient, all according to the recipe of a master craftsman. I was not ready to be capped off yet—no, I still had much to learn—but I was well on my way.

  “I won’t let you down, Sir!” I replied.

  Quentin Driscoll rose from his desk and strode toward me. He placed his broad hand on my shoulder.

  “Ralph,” he declared. Though I had been called that name all my life, I felt I was being christened anew. “It is a fine, fine name!”

  In This Issue

  A Very QD Christmas Page 3

  The Collectible Christmas List Page 4

  QD Christmas Recipes Page 5

  The parade was not a week past when Malachy came back ill from the shipyard. Alice sickened a day later and Mrs. Feeney removed the children to her flat hoping to subdue the contagion, but each in turn took ill and was returned across the hall to what had become the family sickroom. News of the second floor’s fate spread through 28 D Street. The second-floor hallway was pronounced off-limits for indoor games and breaths were held while climbing the stair. A doctor was reluctantly summoned: according to him a virulent flu had started at the pier. His prescription of bed rest, food, salts of quinine, and aspirin cost Mrs. Feeney one dollar. Ever since Lydia could remember, her mother and Jennie Feeney had nursed one another’s families whenever sickness blazed through Southie, so when Lydia returned from Gorin’s to find no sign of her mother in the kitchen, she knew for certain Alice and her brood had grown worse.

  Jennie Feeney wonders if things might have gone differently had she taken the children sooner.

  In happier times the doors to the second-floor flats stood open, Alice’s child
ren dashing between their apartment and their Gran’s as supper smells wafted from both kitchens. Now the doors were shut. A note written in Jennie Feeney’s careful hand was fastened to her daughter’s door, and read: “QUARINTEEN! DO NOT GO IN!!” It was strange to think that only a few weeks prior, the same hallway had been used for dancing.

  After a perfunctory knock, Lydia opened the door. The front room was dark and quiet, but toward the back she discerned low voices.

  “Alice? Mrs. Feeney?” she called. “It’s me, Liddie, come to see if you’re needing anything.”

  Alice’s flat was a testament to the life that would have been Lydia’s had Southie triumphed over life across the bridge: there was the couch and end table purchased on credit from McCormick’s Slightly Used Furnishings; there was the picture of the Virgin given Alice by the church Sisterhood on her marriage; there was the heirloom rocking chair, resembling almost exactly the one in which Lydia’s mother hoped to rock her own grandchildren. When the unfairness of Henry’s death still knocked the wind out of her, Lydia had sought comfort envisioning this version of life, which would have been hers had she laughed on receiving Henry’s first letter. But as she faced the trappings of this unchosen path, Lydia felt protective love for her handbag filled with letters, her suitcase of dresses, and all the memories that would not be hers if Alice’s flat was her own.

  The air was stale and smelled of fitful sleep, reminding Lydia of long Southie winters when the windows were closed against the cold for weeks and the stove tinged everything gray. Opening the windows helped. As the cool outside air wafted in, she could practically hear the stifled apartment exhale. She thought she heard barking. Small packs of abandoned dogs haunted the alleys behind butcher shops and trailed the water truck in summer. These strays were adopted by children, who surreptitiously left scraps on stoops. This dog was likely expecting one of Alice’s brood to feed it.

  “Alice? Mrs. Feeney?” she repeated. “I hope you don’t mind—I’ve opened a few windows.”

  “Liddie?” came her mother’s voice from the bedroom. “Be a dear and go fetch Jennie from across the hall.”

  Her mother’s cheerful urgency was even more unsettling than the flat’s fetid air. Lydia dashed into the hallway and through the door to Jennie’s flat without bothering to knock. Mrs. Feeney was deep asleep, the circles under her eyes attesting to a string of wakeful nights, but at the touch of Lydia’s hand she snapped awake.

  “My ma says to come,” Lydia explained. Jennie Feeney bolted from her bed and rushed to her daughter’s flat across the hall.

  Alice and Malachy occupied the bed by the window. Patty, Meagan, and Brian shared the pallet on the floor. The bed frame was made of the same poor wood as the Kilkennys’, its blocky design perforated by knotholes. On the wall above Alice’s and Malachy’s heads hung the same Sacred Heart to which Lydia had directed her nightly prayers as a girl. That she had never entered this room before did not temper its familiarity: only the curtains, which were green gingham rather than white with lace trim, distinguished it from the one below.

  The bedroom was even danker than the rest of the apartment. The air was dense with the smells of fever sweat, phlegm, and unwashed sheets and seemed, by its very thickness, responsible for the prostration of its inhabitants. Whether sickness alone or a combination of poor health and poor light contributed to the family’s complexions, their skin reminded Lydia of potato broth, save for Brians lips—which were tinged blue, as though it were possible to be chilled in that stifling room. When Brian coughed, Lydia realized the barking she had heard earlier had not come from any stray dog.

  Sick as he was, Malachy was still highly embarrassed to be seen by Liddie in such a state.

  Alice lay on her side, her brown hair pasted across her pallid neck. Malachy was barely distinguishable in his stillness from the bedding in which he lay, but when he coughed Lydia was able to discern his head facing the wall. Surely Alice’s original intention in lying on her side had been to watch over her children, but fever had reduced her gaze to a glazed stare. Occasionally during the fever epidemics of Lydia’s childhood, entire families had sickened. As a girl, her dread of purgatory and damnation had been matched by the fear of her mother falling ill.

  On seeing her mother with Alice, Lydia became momentarily disembodied, moving back in time to observe herself in a different room, beside a different sickbed. In the dim light her mother could have been a younger woman, while Alice’s pallor and slim limbs could have been Henry’s. Then the woman before her once again became her mother, who was gently stroking her neighbor’s head.

  “Jennie, she’s only gotten worse. We ought to send her and the little one to Carney,” Cora murmured like she was crooning a lullaby.

  “Ooh, my poor Alice,” Jennie moaned, bending over her daughter.

  “Get away, devil,” Alice croaked. What had initially looked like shivering was Alice’s crippled attempt to wrest her head from her neighbor’s hand.

  “Alice,” Lydia whispered. “What are you saying?”

  Cora shook her head. “It’s no use,” she continued. “She’s burning up.” She turned toward Jennie. “It’s only my talking calm this way that keeps her still, otherwise she’d be ranting and raving and scaring the children half to death. I don’t think Meagan and Patty are quite so bad off but I’m worried for Brian.”

  The truth of Cora’s appraisal was self-evident. The girls were as pale as their brother but their lips were pink, not blue.

  Jennie Feeney nodded and directed herself to her granddaughters. “It’s all right, dearies,” she cooed, adopting the same soothing tone as her neighbor. “Your ma’s not well on account of fever, but now Gran’s here. If I were to fetch some nice broth do you think you might drink it?”

  The girls—their eyes wide and glassy, their hands tightly intertwined—nodded as one.

  “Brian, dearie, shall I fix you some broth as well?” Jennie offered.

  Brian coughed. His coughs were thick and deep, his eyes imploring those around him to make them stop.

  Malachy’s voice came soft from beside the window. “It’s no use, Jennie. He’s too sick. Take him, Cora. You won’t get Alice to go, but take Brian.”

  Meagan does not remember seeing or hearing anyone except the Virgin Mary, who asked her if she and her sister were good girls.

  “No.” Alice rolled her head in protest, the word bubbling thick from the back of her throat. Mrs. Feeney knelt beside her daughter’s bed. Malachy heaved himself away from the window to place a hand on his wife’s side.

  Patricia only recalls a nightmare in which her mother turned into a witch.

  “Alice,” he whispered hoarsely. “Angel, we got to let him go.”

  Alice reached toward her children. Her arm shuddered before exhausting itself, arcing toward the bed frame, and striking the knotty wood. The sound of the collision was unexpectedly substantial, as though more than a hand had fallen—but if it had hurt, Alice’s face betrayed nothing. Sickness had turned her into a spectator of her own body.

  Malachy lifted his head just high enough to see his children. “Brian,” he croaked. “Son, there’s nothing for it but to go. Be a soldier, son. Be brave and go with your auntie Cora.” He turned. “Please excuse my Alice,” he pleaded, his body trembling with the effort of remaining even partially upright. “I’m afraid she ain’t herself.”

  Malachy’s fever was so high that he could not see anything, but he kept this to himself. Sending his son away when he could not see him go was a torment he would not wish on anyone.

  “Don’t we know it, dearie!” Cora cried.

  Malachy eased himself back onto the bed. Jennie put her mouth to her daughter’s ear. Her hand trembled as she stroked her daughter’s face, which seemed finally to relax, but as Cora moved toward Brian, Alice’s hand shot forward and latched on to the fabric of her neighbor’s dress.

  “Keep away!” Alice hissed. Her voice bore little resemblance to the voice Lydia knew, and she could n
ot fathom where Alice found the strength to speak.

  “Ma, I’ll take him,” Lydia offered as calmly as she could. “You stay with Malachy and the girls.” But nothing would placate Alice now.

  “Stay AWAY, devil, stay away, DEVIL, leave him BE!” Alice’s thick, labored speech rose in intensity to become the voice of sickness itself. It was as if a large, phantom hand was squeezing her chest from inside to expel the cobwebby air that powered her words. To Lydia, the prospect of removing Brian to Carney Hospital was no longer an act of desperation; it was an exorcism.

  Alice remembers only feeling awfully tired and deciding to lie down.

  Lydia lifted Brian from the mattress. His head rolled back as if he were an infant too young to manage his neck. Alice howled like she had been struck. Lydia adjusted her arm to hold the boy, pretending he was a newborn and not a child six years old.

  “Brian,” she murmured into his ear. “I’m taking you to Carney where they can help you to get better. Auntie Cora and your gran will take great care of your ma and da and sisters while you’re gone.”

  If the boy struggled, she told herself, she would simply clasp him tightly to her chest and make the best of it. Instead, he whispered, “Hurry.”

  She needed no further encouragement. Making sure to give Alice’s bed as wide a berth as she could, she started toward the door.

  “NOO, put ’im back, put ’im back, put—” but Alice’s voice collapsed on itself.

  Auntie Liddie did not hear right. Brian said, “Sorry.” He knows he was being punished for scaring his sisters with his bad breathing noises. Usually he liked to scare them, but only when he wasn’t scared himself.

  “Fetch the doctor while you’re gone,” Cora called, all pretense of calm abandoned. Lydia was already in the kitchen, Brian easily mistakable for a bundle of bedclothes in her arms. “Tell him they’re much, much worse.”