Wickett's Remedy Read online

  The room broke into applause. Dr. Gold shook hands with everyone in the room. His grip was firm, his palm cool—and when he looked at Lydia she did not perceive dismissal but avidity. Not until he departed the room did she realize she understood no more about the study than she had before.

  OUR MAIL BAG

  Enforce the Anti-Spitting Law

  To the Editor of the Herald:

  There is a law on the statute books of this state prohibiting spitting on sidewalks, subway stairs, and other public places, which, so far as I know, has never been repealed. Not so many months ago there was remarkable activity among the police in seeing that this law was enforced, and the morning papers reported many names of men brought into court and fined $3 for indulging in this disgusting and now extremely dangerous habit.

  Why in the name of humanity cannot the police commissioner be induced to instill some enthusiasm among the patrolmen in trying anew to stop this spitting, which is done on the streets every day, apparently without fear of interruption from anyone, and the condoning of which, under the present conditions in the city, is nothing short of criminal?

  HERMAN W. ABORN,

  111 Devonshire Street

  My Dear Boy—

  Very late at night, it gets so quiet that I feel I am the only geezer left alive in this place. I have learned not to check the time. If I start looking at the clock, then I cannot stop. Before these dreams started their rotten habit of waking me up, I never saw a minute hand move. Now if I am not careful I end up watching the damn thing trace a full circle while my brain shows old home movies.

  Remember when I took you to the boat show? Your mother wanted me to take you to the circus, but once you saw all those beautiful boats you quit bawling pretty quick. Do you remember what you did when I asked you which one you liked best? Without batting an eyelash, you pointed at the Chris Craft Triple and said, “That one, Father.” And when we came home with it, the look on your mother’s face was worth ten times the cash I had paid! God she loved that boat. That is why I know it must have been an accident. Because when it happened she was with the two things she loved most in the world.

  I can always tell it is morning when I hear the medicine cart go rattling past my door. That sound means I can get out of bed and pretend I am just starting my day.

  Your Loving Father

  Lydia’s first night on Gallups was interminable. Spurred by the unfamiliar room and her unaccustomed solitude, her mind reviewed in excruciating detail her actions since Michael’s death. She was struck by the folly of the blind, determined thrust that had brought her to the island. Lying on a small, narrow mattress in a draughty room meant for four, Lydia’s desire to prevent others from dying as her brother had died faded to gray insignificance beside the crime of deserting her family, a callous act that more than justified her current solitary confinement. There was nothing here to counteract night’s dramatic powers. She could not turn to the deep, even rhythm of another’s slow breathing for comfort, nor to familiar sights outside her window; and so the night seethed with strange sounds, amplified by the emptiness of her room. The wind rattled doors and moaned. The surf crashing on the beach sounded like the thrashings of a drowning woman, and every so often something somewhere screeched in such a way as to raise the hairs along the back of her neck. Twice she put her ear to the wall separating her room from Cynthia Foley’s, straining to catch the sound of her neighbor, but the nurse was as self-contained asleep as she was awake.

  As the night stretched longer, Lydia’s thoughts turned to the island’s anonymous graveyard. Though she considered herself neither morbid nor superstitious, insomnia’s power to amplify vague notions allied lying on her back with Michael in his coffin and then with the forgotten tenants of Gallups’ lonely graves. She wondered how many of Gallups’ dead had left family behind, fatal illness condemning them to permanent isolation and exile. When exhaustion finally overpowered unease, she collapsed into a dead sleep for two hours before reveille. Bleary-eyed and lead-limbed, she began her first morning on Gallups.

  This is Ismael Gorodo’s only sign that his whispers among Us were overheard. Unable to send word of his debilitating Atlantic passage, he is tormented by the thought that his wife interpreted his earthly silence as his willful abandonment of her and the children.

  The island air proved tonic. Southie’s piers reeked of dead fish and rotting wood; Castle Point smelled of brine, doughnuts, and fried clams—but on Gallups the scents of human habitation had been winnowed by the air’s passage over the ocean. It was the scent of new beginnings. As she left her barrack, the breeze combined with the morning sun and the memory of Dr. Gold’s dinnertime speech to lessen the severity of the previous night’s indictments.

  The volunteers were expected later that morning. Lydia found Nurse Foley at the hospital, straightening pristine bed corners and recounting stacks of clean linens.

  “Oh good, now we can begin,” the nurse declared on Lydia’s arrival. Foley was as meticulously dressed as she had been the day before—her uniform blindingly white, her cap pinned to her head with taxidermic precision. “Before the subjects arrive, I hope to show you how to make the daily log entries that I will expect you to maintain for the duration of the study. The rest you’ll just have to learn as you go.”

  The medical logbook, with its various columns, was not much different than the Remedy accounts. In place of supplies and sales, Lydia would track temperatures and pulse rates. Pleased with her pupil’s quick mastery, the nurse progressed to basic principles of patient care, but every few minutes Foley turned her head toward the windows that faced the water.

  “The boat is on its way,” she finally said, interrupting her own enumeration of the merits of thorough hand washing. From the ward window, Lydia saw a cluster of medical staff posting lookout from the compound’s fence. A smudge was visible on the northeastern horizon. When the smudge resolved into a boat with a definite heading, the morning’s lesson was abandoned. Along with the others, Lydia and Nurse Foley headed toward the dock.

  Gallups was no less foreign than it had been yesterday but—as Lydia traced in reverse the path she had taken just the day before—her arrival felt much more distant. Trailing Foley, she passed the barracks and the flagpole with its two flags; she walked through the gate and past the rabbits’ meadow. By the time she reached the dock, the boat was close enough to expose the barnacles stubbling its hull. The ferry was larger than yesterday’s, with an enclosed cabin rather than an open deck. Lydia pictured a floating sick ward lined with rows of stretchers. She did not notice the bars bolted to the windows until the cabin door opened.

  The sight of the volunteers was preceded by a metallic clanking sound Lydia associated with invalids and stretchers. But the men who emerged from the ship’s cabin were not lying down: clad in rough, gray uniforms, they walked upright in synchronized, shuffling steps, their motion hampered by shackles at their wrists. Lydia’s first thought was that the ferry had intercepted a German U-boat on its way to Gallups and that these were captured Germans. Then it occurred to her that the reverse might have happened, and that by some horrible twist of fate she had become a prisoner of war. But no one else betrayed alarm at the appearance of the shackled men, and now Dr. Gold was shaking the hand of a uniformed officer—the only one not in chains.

  “Dr. Gold,” the officer began. “Do you accept charge of these prisoners?”

  “Officer Clancey, I accept these men into my care,” Dr. Gold affirmed.

  “I hereby grant transfer of custody to you.” A cheer among the handcuffed men was squelched as the officer spun to face them.

  “Under the terms previously presented, to which you have voluntarily submitted yourselves, I hereby declare you provisionally restored to service. You will be expected to conduct yourselves accordingly. Any infraction, however small, will be viewed as a dereliction of utmost gravity. There will be no second chances. Is that understood?”

  Captain Harold Clancey disapproved of this arr
angement from the start. Had he been warden of Deer Island, he never would have approved the doctor’s plan.

  “Yes sir!” thirty voices answered.

  “Officers, release these men.”

  Only now did Lydia see the uniformed MPs standing at the end of each row. They went from man to man, freeing each from the heavy chain to which he was tethered.

  Thirty handcuffs were unlocked. Thirty men appeared instantly taller.

  “Excuse me,” Lydia whispered to Nurse Foley. “Aren’t these men supposed to be ill?”

  The nurse raised one eyebrow, her expression suggesting Lydia had said something funny. “I should hope not!” She smiled, returning her attention to the recent arrivals. “You can’t very well study transmission after the fact!”

  Lydia reconsidered each word of Foley’s response. “You mean to tell me that they’re perfectly healthy?” she gasped. Foley, intent on watching the disembarkation, merely nodded.

  The wind was fierce at the dock but Gallups’ new arrivals gave no indication of the cold. Had Lydia not seen them chained moments before she would not have taken them for prisoners. They were all cleanshaven, with shorter, blunter versions of crew cuts that drew attention to each head’s weakest feature—a lumpy skull, a weak chin, a crooked nose. In handcuffs the men had seemed threatening; unbound, their appearance produced the opposite effect.

  “Are they really criminals?” Lydia asked.

  “Don’t sound so impressed,” Foley muttered. “They’re cowards, mostly. Or at least they were until they met Dr. Gold.”

  The debarking men were close enough that Lydia could have brushed her hand against their passing sleeves. Until now she had only ever encountered convicts in the newspaper, in which case they were invariably escapees considered armed and dangerous. She was trying to reconcile her past associations with the present situation when one of the men turned toward her.

  “I’ve died and gone to Heaven.” He spoke in a Galway accent no different from the B Street greengrocer’s. Lydia gasped. She would not have been more disconcerted if one of Gallups’ gravestones had spoken her name.

  “Mind your manners.” Lydia thought she was being chastised, but the nurse was addressing the debarkee. The prisoner shrugged and continued forward, and soon Lydia lost sight of him.

  “You’ll have to excuse Patrick,” offered another as he passed. He was too broad-shouldered for his gray uniform. “It’s been months since he’s seen a lady and you really do look two parts angel.” This man’s voice was not Irish, but something in the way he carried himself struck Lydia as familiar.

  Lydia Wickett’s generally angelic appearance was helped along that day by the halo of sunlight in her hair. Frank Bentley was not the sort to speak to unknown women and his forwardness that day shocked him.

  “Ignore them,” Foley counseled. In response, the broad-shouldered man doffed an invisible hat in Lydia’s direction, inspiring several men after him to do the same. Once the arrivals had cleared the dock, the rest of the staff trailed behind them over the gravel path. Lydia was only vaguely aware of her movements. She felt warm despite the wind and could feel her pulse in her neck.

  “Nurse Foley,” she entreated, “please tell me what is going to happen to these men.”

  Maybe the clink changed him, but Seaman Ned Frommer remembers Frankie plenty ready to chat up the girls in Scollay Square the night that got him into all that trouble.

  The nurse turned toward her. “Didn’t you hear Dr. Gold’s speech?”

  “Yes, and it was lovely, but he didn’t really explain what we’d be doing.”

  Foley considered her for a moment. “Well, surely Mr. Cory provided you with some information.”

  “I wish I’d had sense enough to ask him!” Lydia exclaimed. She dug her fingernails into her palms, hoping to abort her growing sense of dread.

  “Lydia,” Nurse Foley began. “I can see that you’re upset, but to study the transmission of any disease requires healthy subjects, and Dr. Gold was quite deluged by prisoners wishing to take part. You ought to think of these men as lucky. For every one of them there are at least three prisoners wishing to be in their shoes. Perhaps you would feel better if you thought of their service here as penance.”

  If Lydia had ever doubted Cynthia Foley’s religious affiliation, she could now be certain that the nurse was not a Catholic. No priest would ever prescribe a penance so cruel.

  When Lydia reached the hospital, she learned that for the first five days the men would live in the rear barrack to confirm they had not brought flu with them to Gallups. Alone with Nurse Foley in the ward, Lydia’s training resumed where it had left off before the boat’s arrival, but now it was she who found it difficult to concentrate. Though her eyes attended her tutor, her thoughts inhabited the barrack behind the hospital.

  When Lydia arrived at the dining hall that evening, the room’s eight extra tables had been pushed together to form two long rectangles. She was cheered by the thought of the volunteers filling up those empty chairs—but when she asked one of her dining companions when the other men would be joining them, she was informed that meals were to be served in two shifts, the first being reserved for the medical staff. Her dining companions were Warner, Worth, Killington, and Vanderhuff, four junior medical personnel who wore wire spectacles like Dr. Gold’s and reminded Lydia of little boys clomping about in their fathers’ shoes.

  “If you ask me,” Warner announced as he gestured with his fork, “it’s indecent those jailbirds coming here after what they did. It steams me up just thinking about it! They hardly deserve what they’re getting.” Whenever Warner’s speech became emphatic, his front forelock flopped back and forth like a horse’s tail swatting flies.

  “The flu isn’t exactly a vacation,” observed Killington, who was primarily distinguishable from Warner in that his forelock was blond.

  Warner unleashed an eyebrow-raising technique similar to the one Foley had employed with Lydia earlier that morning. “If I was given the choice between the flu or a Rheims trench I’d take the flu in a New York instant,” he cracked.

  “Let’s face it, boys,” agreed Vanderhuff who, wanting to emphasize the special merit of what he was about to say, removed his spectacles and dangled them between thumb and forefinger. “The only difference between ourselves and those graybacks is that we’re a hell of a lot smarter.” The four men laughed.

  “I’m sorry,” Lydia demurred, “but I’m afraid I don’t get the joke.”

  “You’ve got brothers?” Vanderhuff asked.

  “Sure,” she answered.

  “Then you know as well as the rest of us!” Worth insisted. “Once Wilson started this show anyone with half a brain either got himself an exemption or an assignment somewhere far from the action. Your brothers didn’t wait like dumb bunnies to be drafted, now did they?”

  Lydia felt as if she had been spoon-fed sand.

  “Now you’ve done it,” Warner admonished.

  “What?” Worth protested. “What did I do?”

  Worth’s voice thrummed dully beneath the blood that pounded in Lydia’s ears. Though her feet felt unsteady, she pushed herself away from the table.

  “Wickett,” coaxed Killington, “don’t go. Cecil’s a dope. Whatever he said, he didn’t mean it. Stay and finish dinner with us. Looking at you makes the food taste better.”

  “Excuse me,” she whispered and turned toward the door.

  “Cecil, you idiot,” muttered one of them, indistinguishable from the others now that her back was turned. “Quick, apologize before she’s gone.”

  Cecil Worth found Wickett awfully uptight for an Irish girl. She would have been a lot happier on Gallups if she’d had a better sense of humor.

  “How can I apologize when I don’t even know what I did?” Worth whined, but she did not hear the answer because by then she had closed the door behind her.

  RAPID SPREAD OF DISEASE IN STATE

  The death rate for the city was the largest yesterday of
any of the days since the ailment became prevalent. Physicians who have been attending to influenza patients are puzzled as to the exact nature of the disease. They cannot follow its symptoms coherently enough to make an intelligent diagnosis of the cases which come under their notice. As a result two bacteriologists from Harvard University have been called upon to assist in studying the situation and make a report on their conclusion so that local physicians may know exactly what they are dealing with.

  Watch Milk Stations

  Believing that milk which is not up to the standard might in a measure be responsible for the present condition, the health commissioner had sworn in as his agents a number of the Fore River Shipbuilding Company’s guards to stand watch over two milk stations which the authorities have under suspicion.