Wickett's Remedy Page 13

  Somehow Alice found the strength to scream.

  AN APPEAL BY AMERICAN BREWERS TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

  In many publications the word “German” is applied to the word “brewer” and there is continued and persistent effort to create in the minds of readers the impression that brewers are of a class unpatriotic. This is a malicious and cowardly lie!

  Since the beginning of the war brewers have been among the largest purchasers of every Liberty Bond issue. They have contributed in large amounts to the Red Cross and other war activities. Brewers themselves are wearing the uniform of service, and the sons and grandsons of brewers are fighting under the Stars and Stripes.

  In the many acts of disloyalty discovered by the Department of Justice prior to and during the war, there is not one single instance where any brewer, directly or indirectly, has in any way been found guilty of an act which could be considered disloyal.

  WE ARE APPEALING TO YOU AS CITIZENS TO HELP PROTECT THE GOOD NAME OF OURSELVES AND OUR FAMILIES.

  But I heard it started on the pier.

  Nah, nah, I’m tellin’ you it was the cruisin’ ships what brought it. See, first they got to pass through the Arctic and then they got to pass through the Gulf Stream—so first they’re catchin’ colds and then they’re gettin’ fevers. It’s the perfect recipe. Beats me, though, why anyone would be takin’ a cruise at a time like this, what with the war. If you ask me, it’s disrespectful.

  If you could afford it you’d be singin’ a different tune.

  You’re both of you wrong. Don’t you read the papers? It’s Fritz. It’s a known fact a Gerry submarine was spotted in the Harbor releasing gas into the air. Spanish influenza gas.

  You’re pullin’ my leg.

  Honest! I read it with my own eyes.

  Now that’s low.

  The Hun’ll stop at nothing. When I read that it made me want to sign myself up, even if it would be helping the English.

  Molly would kill you.

  That’s why I didn’t.

  Ralph Finnister

  QD Soda Headquarters

  162 B StreetBoston, MA 02127

  May 27, 1993

  The Honorable Mayor Raymond Flynn

  Mayor’s Office

  1 City Hall Plaza

  Boston, MA 02201

  Dear Mayor Flynn:

  You suggested in your letter that it would neither be practical nor appropriate to rename B Street—which exceeds twenty blocks in length—in QD Soda’s honor. Prior to your response, the repercussions of such a name change for letter carriers and mapmakers had not been considered, nor that sizable urban thoroughfares are generally reserved for figures such as notable clergy and slain civil rights leaders.

  In light of those pertinent facts, we submit an alternate proposal: that only the 160 block of B Street—upon which QD Soda Headquarters has been in continuous operation since its construction—be renamed. Given the quarter mile of South Boston roadways honoring the former location of the New England Confectionery Company—by which we refer to Necco Court, Necco Place, and Necco Street—this proposal both falls within existing parameters of corporate signage and poses a negligible burden to signage industries and their related affiliates. Additionally, the renaming of a single block of roadway would honor QD Soda’s founder, Quentin Driscoll, without challenging the primacy of thoroughfares such as Cardinal O’Connor Way and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard.

  Mr. Mayor, thank you for your reconsideration of this revised request. For your edification and enjoyment I have enclosed The QD Soda Walking Tour, a limited-edition pamphlet that highlights over seven decades of QD Soda history. I am also enclosing a limited edition QD Soda lapel pin and a framed and numbered reprint of a vintage QD Soda magazine advertisement, all of which I hope will illustrate, in decor-enhancing and collectible ways, the import and value of QP Soda.

  I look forward to hearing from you.

  Very Sincerely,

  Ralph Finnister

  President and CEO

  QD Soda

  Running, intrinsic to childhood, becomes in adulthood an act of last resort. The sharpness of the cobbles beneath Lydia’s thin soles recalled the slap of each stair as she raced to the Somerset lobby to summon an ambulance. Just as then, the world dimmed save for the path before her. The only sounds were hers and those made by the boy she held in her arms.

  Brian’s breathing eased on his exposure to the open air and his coughs lessened but his body had not unclenched since his mother’s scream. Banishing thoughts of Henry from her mind, Lydia attempted to comfort the boy as she ran, holding him against her body to dampen the jostling.

  When Auntie Liddie took him from his bed, Brian was sure he was going to be spanked. He did not want to go out—he wanted to go back to bed—but Auntie Liddie was holding him too tightly for him to say so.

  “Wee little chick,” she murmured, “wee little kitten, it will be all right.” By the time Henry’s ambulance had arrived, it had been too late. “Wee lamb, littlest mouse.” The moment she had returned to the bedroom, she had known something was wrong. She had gone to the bed and held Henry’s hand and talked to him as if he were still living, but she had known. She pressed her lips together, pursing her mouth against further thought.

  Brian whimpered. She wondered if there was a better way to carry him. The last time she had held a child she had been fourteen. She was out of practice. Finally she felt Brian’s body relax as something warm and wet seeped into her shirt. It was good if he cried a little—in the bedroom he had been too frightened even for tears. “That’s right, let it out,” she panted. Barely discernible beneath the smell of Brian’s sickness was the sweet scent of a child’s skin.

  By the time she caught sight of the hospital building at the base of Telegraph Hill, her chest and throat burned, her arms ached, and her breath came in jagged bursts from her mouth. Sweat had soaked the fabric of her shirtwaist and she worried it would soak into Brian’s clothes and give him a chill. She ignored her body’s plea to walk. She would rest later, when Brian was safe. She was convinced the boy’s breathing was much improved. The air had certainly done him good—perhaps the doctor would examine him and send him home.

  Carney Hospital was half a mile from the flat. We strongly doubt Lydia ran this distance, especially with a child in her arms.

  She avoided the grand stone archway at the hospital’s main entrance, opting for the smaller clinic door to the left. The registering nurse took one look at Brian and directed Lydia past the few waiting patients to the far end of the room, to the doorway that led to the hospital itself. With no choice but to obey, Lydia focused on that door to the exclusion of all else, knowing better than to look at the clinic patients, who would be staring with a mixture of dread and relief at witnessing a circumstance worse than their own. To combat her own uneasiness Lydia forced a smile, but when she passed over the threshold even this shred of optimism faltered.

  The hospital corridor loomed before her, thick with the sound of coughs and the smell of stale breath. A Sister of Mercy led Lydia up a flight of stairs, the wings of her wimple fluttering with each upward step. What Lydia remembered most clearly from her girlhood visits to the Carney clinic were those broad white wimples, which had looked to Lydia like angel wings hovering about the nuns’ heads. When she had needed the glass removed from her foot, this vision had simultaneously assured her and intensified her fear—for while the extraordinary sight of angelic nuns had drawn her attention away from the doctor’s efforts, the Sisters’ cherubic appearance seemed to confirm her belief that the hospital served as Heaven’s antechamber.

  Cora Kilkenny is sure it was Mick who stepped on the glass and Liddie who only watched it happen. As for Liddie’s scar, Cora suspects it came from her daughter once holding her foot too close to the stove in winter.

  The children’s ward was a narrow, white room with a row of ten metal beds running along each of the two longest walls, the space between them forming a wide aisle. Some of the
beds were concealed by screens, but beside each visible bed was a small nightstand on which rested a single water glass and a white enamel pitcher. Lydia, who had never been beyond the clinic door, was disquieted by the ward’s simplicity. Each of its children ought to have been taking medicine or receiving an examination. The hospital of Lydia’s imagination housed one doctor for every bedside, but here there was not a doctor in sight. The nun who had led Lydia up the stairs seemed unalarmed by the ward’s dearth of personnel and instructed her to place Brian in a bed midway down the row. A nurse followed immediately with a screen to partition the bed as Lydia set Brian down.

  “I’m just putting you into a bed of your own,” Lydia explained when Brian began to whimper, tightening his grip on the fabric of her dress. “You’ll need your own bed if you’re going to get better.”

  She suspected the ease with which she bedded the boy was due more to his fatigue than to her powers of reassurance.

  Brian was not tired but embarrassed: he had just peed his pants.

  “How long has he been ill?” the nurse asked. Her mask made it difficult to tell her age.

  “He fell sick only yesterday or the day before,” Lydia explained. “The whole family’s stricken. The doctor said it was the flu but that was before it grew so dire.”

  The nurse turned toward the boy. “You poor dear,” she murmured as she applied a compress and then a plaster. “You poor, poor dear.” Neither action impressed Lydia as efficacious—both were too reminiscent of her ministrations for Henry. Had Brian remained at D Street he would have received no better care but at least it would have come sooner.

  Brian is sure the mean nursie was rough with him and never said a word.

  “Was I right to bring him here?” she asked.

  “You were,” the nurse confirmed. “It’s a terrible flu that’s going round and it’s been bringing a pneumonia with it even worse. We’ll be able to keep an eye on him here and of course the doctor will see him. Now as soon as you get home, remove your clothing, rub yourself dry, and take a laxative for protection. Otherwise it’s just as likely you’ll be back yourself.” She patted Brian on the head. “I know it smells awful, dearie, but you’ve got to leave that plaster on your chest. It’s going to help you breathe. I’ll be back to check on you soon.” With a smile, she slipped through the break in the screen. Lydia began to button her coat.

  “Don’t go,” Brian wheezed. The sound startled Lydia. This was the first time he had spoken since D Street. His words were wet and thick, as if the syllables were coated in phlegm.

  “I can only stay a little while longer,” she answered. “The nice nurse is going to take good care of you while I go back home to check on your ma and da and sisters. Before you know it, it’ll be morning and you’ll have visitors again.”

  Brian shook his head, his eyes filling with tears. “Please—” he whispered.

  “Brian, love—” she sighed, her smile faltering. “You’ve got to be brave like your da said. You know, I came here once when I was a girl and as you can see for yourself they fixed me up just grand. They’ll do the same for you, you’ll see.”

  Brian nodded, she the precipice to which he clung.

  “That’s a good, brave boy,” she whispered. “Your da is going to be so proud.” She kissed his forehead. “Now close your eyes and try to sleep.” She stayed beside him until he drifted off, his chest rising and falling with the frantic breaths of a small bird. The screen around his bed reflected the sound, but on the other side of the screen, the sound was barely audible. Brian’s bed became indistinguishable from the other screened beds lining the aisle. Lydia waited until the nurse of indeterminate age reappeared.

  He was not asleep. He heard Auntie Liddie’s footsteps disappear and felt scared at being all alone.

  “Is he going to be all right?” she asked.

  The nurse was evasive. “It was good you brought him when you did.” Likely, nurses were schooled not to answer that sort of question.

  “But Brian’s not the only one sick,” Lydia continued. “His mother’s just as bad.”

  The nurse shook her head. “If his mother’s as sick as that, she ought to come in too.”

  “She won’t,” Lydia said. “Isn’t there someone you could send?”

  “We’re too short-staffed to send nurses into the field, not to mention doctors,” the nurse apologized. “I’m afraid the best way to help her is to convince her to come.”

  She could not return to D Street with so little to offer. “Isn’t there anything else I can do?” Lydia demanded. “It’s a desperate situation.”

  “You can go home,” the nurse replied gently. “You can do what I told you to do and you can pray to stay healthy. They’re saying that down at the pier—” The nurse’s features shifted. “But you’re hurt!” she exclaimed. She swabbed Lydia’s shoulder and brought back blood.

  Lydia touched her shoulder. The pressure of her hand recalled her recent cargo. “I’m fine,” she answered dully, nodding toward the white screen that shut Brian off from the rest of the world. She would have much preferred the blood to be her own. “That was where he lay as I carried him.”

  The nurse wiped what she could, then moved down the aisle. Lydia did as she had been told, quietly leaving the ward and descending the stairs, but she would have preferred to pull Brian back into her arms and run with him all the way home.

  Back at 28 D Street she was met by a silence that would have driven away anyone who did not live there. When Lydia stepped into the front hall, the door to her flat opened.

  “Ma’s upstairs,” Thomas whispered into the stillness of the stairwell. The door opened wider and Da appeared beside Tom.

  “Brians in hospital?” Da asked. She nodded. “It was good you took him when you did.”

  “That’s not what his ma thought,” Lydia replied. “Alice was sure I was the devil himself.”

  “Well she’s in a better place now,” Da offered, his words lending incontrovertible shape to the quiet. Lydia turned and took the stairs two at a time until she reached the Feeneys’ landing.

  “Who’s there?” came her mother’s voice.

  “It’s me, Ma.”

  “There’s none of them with you?”

  “All downstairs.”

  Mrs. Kilkenny sighed. “Then you may as well come in.”

  Alice’s corpse lay across the front room sofa. Beside the sofa knelt Alice’s mother, who was motionless save for the steady activity of her hands, which neither ceased nor slowed at Lydia’s arrival. Jennie Feeney was carefully unbraiding her daughter’s hair.

  “When it’s done, she braids it up again,” Cora explained in a cautious whisper. Mrs. Feeney gave neither indication that she had heard Cora nor that she knew she was not alone. “She was wailing like a banshee before but Mr. Feeney quieted her for the sake of the girls. He’s with them now. Malachy told them that their ma’s in hospital but I don’t fancy they believe him.”

  Meagan knew her ma was in Heaven because the Virgin told her so.

  Cora turned toward her neighbor. “Jennie darling?” Even as Jennie turned toward the sound, her fingers continued their dogged work. “Dearie, look who’s here. Liddie’s back.” Cora gently stilled Mrs. Feeney’s hands. One half of one braid remained.

  “Where’s my grandson?” Jennie Feeney asked, her eyes searching Lydia’s face.

  “I left him in good hands,” Lydia answered with more assurance than she felt.

  “She—oughter’ve gone too,” Mrs. Feeney whispered, her sobs interspersing themselves between her words. “I oughter’ve—made her go.” She rocked back and forth, the floor creaking as she shifted.

  “Alice wanted to stay,” Cora countered, her voice tired from repeated, fruitless consolation. “You did everything you could.”

  Jennie turned to her daughter’s corpse and stroked its face. “Such a lovely—girl,” she whispered.

  There had been no extra sheet in which to wind the body. Alice’s right arm—the
hand curled into a claw at the collar of her nightdress, the arm bent at the elbow—rested on her chest like a dislocated wing, while her left arm pressed at her side straight as a soldier’s. Alice’s mouth was frozen in a grimace, her eyebrows raised in astonishment. She looked neither asleep, nor at peace. The body, which had begun to stiffen, lay rigid on the couch, its loose, limp hair adding incongruous color to the faded, threadbare sofa. Mrs. Feeney gathered the leftmost strands of her daughter’s hair and resumed the braid.

  Jennie Feeney is certain her daughter looked beautiful.

  “Mrs. Feeney,” Lydia ventured softly. As girls she and Alice occasionally had played jacks, a pastime at which Alice had excelled. Jennie Feeney’s hands recalled with eerie clarity the deftness with which Alice had scooped five and six jacks at a time while Lydia languished on threesies. “Mrs. Feeney,” she repeated, turning her gaze from those hands, “is there anything I can do for you?”

  Jennie shook her head, though whether in response to Lydia or to some internal query it was at first impossible to tell. “She were a wife and a mother,” Mrs. Feeney murmured. “A wife and—a mother.” Lydia thought her question had not been heard until Jennie turned toward her and exclaimed, “She were a wife and a mother!”

  Jennie Feeney remembers blessed little of that terrible day, but she never would have said something so unkind.

  “I’m so sorry,” Lydia whispered. “I’ll leave you now.” She was shaking so violently that her hand could not at first turn the knob of the door.

  TWO HITS FROM SONG HEADQUARTERS