Wickett's Remedy Page 4

  They had not been married long before she learned that, Latin vocabulary aside, her husband’s enthusiasm for his medical studies was limited. On evenings following surgeries or dissections Henry would leave his dinner untouched and retire to bed early, complaining of headache. Even on days in which he avoided the operating theater he complained of dull classes and overdemanding instructors. Far more interesting to him was the news from Europe. Henry’s journalistic aspirations had been stanched by his mother, who did not think newspapers a proper occupation for a Wickett, and so he had made his passion an avocation instead. When not decrying the latest development in European affairs, he was attacking the newsprint itself with a pen, reworking sentences and sometimes whole paragraphs he found lacking in flair, and then sharing with his wife the results of his labors. While Lydia enjoyed a newspaper as much as the next person, she did not see why Henry should take such pains to rewrite something that had already been printed. Nor did she share her husband’s passion for news from somewhere so distant as Austro-Hungary: she had certainly never heard of the Archduke Ferdinand before he was shot. She looked forward to the end of Henry’s medical studies. Once he was a doctor they would be freed from Mr. and Mrs. Wickett’s purse strings and he could focus on an aspect of medicine that he liked, perhaps one that did not involve too much blood.

  Franz Ferdinand is far more popular among Us than he was in Sarajevo: his memories of his wife, Sophie, remain delectably keen. For this We are thankful. On average, erotic memory possesses a woefully short half-life.

  In Southie, Lydia would have thought nothing of taking a break from housework to visit a neighbor’s kitchen for tea and conversation, but the Somerset did not offer that comfort. Though she supposed somewhere within the Somerset lurked another young married couple, the building had not yet yielded such a treasure. Short of wandering the halls and crouching before closed doors with her ears perked for sounds of another young wife, Lydia reasoned she would just have to wait until she met such a person by chance—in the lobby, perhaps, or in the stairwell. In the meantime she did her best to banish the small troubles that dogged her thoughts through the long afternoons. When the silence of the empty flat grew oppressive, she reminded herself that in a year such quiet would likely seem precious. She hoped they would have a girl first: though Michael had been of some use, Mrs. Kilkenny often exclaimed that she did not know how she would have managed her brood without a daughter. As Lydia dusted and swept, ironed and folded, she shuffled her features with her husband’s to create a girl with her light freckles and Henry’s long fingers, and a boy with Henry’s green eyes and her upturned mouth.

  She was thus engaged one afternoon when Henry burst into the flat with such exuberance that she thought the door had been staved in. She rushed to the hallway armed with the metal pot she had been preparing to put on the stove. Break-ins were rare in Southie, but Southie offered little to steal. Before she realized the intruder was her husband, she had steeled herself to defend every last stick of rented furniture in their rented flat.

  “I’ve done it!” Henry announced on seeing his wife. He circled her waist with his arm and drew her to him, painting her neck with kisses.

  “Darling!” she squealed. Her neck grew progressively damp. “What did you do?” She could not imagine what would inspire such high spirits, unless Henry had somehow graduated medical school early or convinced his father to raise his allowance.

  “I’m done with the whole business,” he murmured to her left earlobe.

  “Done with what?” She enjoyed standing in the hallway being kissed by her husband, even if his kisses were a little too wet.

  Unlike Ferdinand’s superb conjugal recall, Lydia’s sensory impressions of Henry have been effaced. Sadly, his kisses here are purely semantic.

  He held her at arm’s length in order to gaze into her face. “All of it,” he proclaimed. “The tedious lectures, the revolting dissections and surgeries. I feel like an immense weight has been lifted.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.” She examined her husband’s face for clues.

  “But of course you do!” he giggled. “After all, I was only taking your lead.”

  “I’m sorry, dear, but really I don’t understand.” She turned from her husband and entered the parlor. “Has something happened?” She felt the need to sit. Henry followed her in; he kneeled beside her as she rested on the settee.

  “Really, I don’t know how you tolerated me for as long as you did.” He beamed. “Sometimes I think I don’t deserve you—you were criminally patient with me, listening to my complaints night after night, month after month, but I suppose you knew all along if you let me wander long enough in the desert, finally I’d come home.”

  “Henry,” she began carefully, trying to keep her voice calm in direct opposition to her fluttery stomach. “I think you ought to tell me exactly what you’ve done.”

  “You want to hear it from my own lips, don’t you?” He nodded as though she had answered him. “Well, I finally did it, my darling. I’ve resigned from medical school.”

  She smiled. “Tell me really.”

  “I just did, my love.”

  According to Henry, his wife embraced him at this moment. He has no memory of an argument and is certain of Lydia’s unstinting support for his new career.

  Her smile froze along with the rest of her. While she felt pinned to the divan, her thoughts flew at such a speed that the room might have been filled with other voices. “You didn’t,” she amended, her voice practically inaudible above the din inside her head. “You wouldn’t actually do that, not actually.”

  “But darling,” he countered, “it was you who showed me that this was what I was meant to do.”

  He was too skinny. Southie men were never as skinny as Henry, and if they were they found jobs as streetcar conductors or soda jerks or store managers, but she did not think he was suited for any of these. He certainly could not be an iceman or a factory hand. Lydia realized that she was still holding the pot she had grabbed from the kitchen. She wished the door had been broken in. She could have given the burglar a solid knock to the head and sent him on his way.

  “I did nothing of the sort,” she insisted.

  “But you did,” he averred. He sat beside her on the settee and reached for her hand, but she would not give it. When he spoke again his voice had softened. “You accomplished this feat by healing me in mind and body. Lydia, when I met you I was unwell. I had no strength, no stamina! My childhood was wasted on expensive doctors who achieved nothing at all. Then I met you. You believed in me; you appreciated me for who I was. You cured me, Lydia, and for the first time in my life I’m healthy. No fevers, no coughing, no weakness. Today, after I did what I ought to have done months ago, I actually skipped home. Can you imagine? Before you cured me I would have exhausted myself just walking from the trolley to the front door. Darling, you’ve shown me that medicine is bunkum!”

  She could certainly work until they had children, but after that he would need to bring home a salary. She supposed he could work at Wickett Imports, Ltd., but he hated his father’s business. She felt strangely exhausted. She needed to lie down.

  Henry’s voice grew more certain. In his excitement he launched himself from the settee to pace the room. “And so now, instead of doing what others expect, I’m going to follow my destiny,” he declared.

  If she went immediately to sleep, there was a chance her husband would arrive home at the expected hour. She would apologize for not having dinner ready and tell him about her strange midafternoon dream.

  But instead he continued. “Today is the beginning of a new life for us, Lydia. We are going to be the sole proprietors of—you’re going to like this—Wickett’s Remedy!” He stood tall and proud before the window, the light behind him transforming his face into a silhouette of the sort found inside anonymous, abandoned cameo brooches.

  “You’re not making any sense,” she insisted from the couch, a veritable wax statue save for h
er moving lips. Then, as though the pin holding her to the divan had been spontaneously withdrawn, she started up in a burst of movement and began to pace the path her husband had abandoned. It still seemed possible he would reveal his announcement to be a terrible joke.

  “No, my dear, for the first time in my life I am making sense,” he rallied. “I finally know what I am meant to do. You can’t imagine how stultifying it is to spend life so uncertain of what path to take, going through motions someone else prescribed simply due to an inability to choose a different course. When I look back on my boyhood I can’t help but despair at how much time spent in sickbeds might have been avoided.”

  In his renewed excitement he resumed his pacing, matching his steps with his wife’s. “I ask you: how much sickness is caused by loneliness? By lack of sympathy? These are the people I intend to reach, darling. These are the people Wickett’s Remedy is meant to cure.

  She hated the whisper of her house slippers against the floor. Her steps sounding like a curtain being pushed aside. She would have gladly traded her nicest pumps for a pair of her brother’s work boots in order to fill the room with sound.

  “Henry Wickett,” she cried, “if I’d wanted to marry a man who thought loneliness could be cured by something from inside a bottle I would have stayed in Southie.”

  Henry smiled. “You’re exactly right, darling, you can’t cure loneliness or provide sympathy with a bottle. But you can with a letter.”

  She stood at the far corner of the room and stared at her husband as if he were speaking Chinese.

  “If I hadn’t written you,” Henry explained in the patient, tender voice she had adored in every circumstance until now, “you would either still be working at Gilchrist’s or you would be a Southie wife. And I—I would still be sickly and devoting myself to something I despised.”

  Though it was petty, she would have liked to remind Henry that she had not received a single letter since becoming his wife. She did not know why she had expected Henry’s letters to continue once the days no longer kept them apart, but for months Wednesday had felt hollow when it brought no blue envelope bearing her name.

  Henry’s voice swelled. “If letters could bring us so much good, then what’s to stop them from helping others? Sufferers of hypochondriacal illnesses will never find lasting relief from a bottle, but if my letters can offer them some pale happiness or companionship, then perhaps they will feel a small degree of the rejuvenation that has blessed me, through you.”

  “But Henry,” she cried, “I didn’t write you any letters! And while it’s true your letters brought us together, if I hadn’t been inclined toward you already, your letters wouldn’t have made a bit of difference!”

  “Exactly!” Henry exclaimed, and it was all she could do not to shriek. “And the people who buy remedies want to get well! Just as my letters coaxed a latent feeling from within you, they will foster an inclination already present within my customers! What does it matter if someone buys a bottle of Wickett’s looking for a cure inside it and instead finds one in the letter that comes with it? The important thing is that they are cured! People will not accept being cured by words alone. They want something they can hold in their hand, something they can point to and say, ‘This did the trick.’ This is my calling, Lydia. This is why I have left medical school behind. So that I can help those whom medicine cannot.”

  He stared triumphant from the opposite corner, his arms crossed, looking like he expected her to applaud.

  She leaned against the wall for support. She closed her eyes and swallowed. She had worked so hard to make the flat feel new. Just yesterday she had found an old stain on the settee, one that had preceded their arrival, and though it had taken thirty minutes of vigorous scrubbing she had managed to remove it completely from the upholstery. She did not want to have to leave. Henry’s parents certainly would not take them in. They would have to return to Southie.

  Angelina Fratelli is positive Lydia is referring to the pomodoro stain left by a misfired plate of spaghetti thrown by her cross-eyed husband. As long as Angelina lived in the flat, she looked at that couch with fondness.

  “It was a dissection today, wasn’t it?” she began, proud of the evenness of her voice. “I know how hard those can be for you. I’m sure if you returned right now and apologized for whatever it was you said, they’d take you back. You’re the son of a prominent family; I’m sure they’d be happy to do it.”

  “Lydia,” he began.

  “I’m certain it’s not too late,” she continued.

  “Lydia—”

  “You can tell them you weren’t yourself,” she assured him. “Something came over you, but now you’re fine.”

  “LYDIA,” he shouted. It was the first time she had ever heard him raise his voice. “You’re the one who’s not yourself!” The way he was shaking his finger reminded her of Father O’Brian. “I have finally realized my destiny, the very destiny you prepared me for. You can’t possibly be displeased. I remind you that you are my wife.”

  Henry is certain his wife never caused him to speak in anger.

  He left the parlor. His steps moved down the hallway and into the bedroom. She observed the stillness of the room he had left behind: the settee from which she had once proclaimed her name as if she were royalty; the side table on which she had imagined Henry’s medical school friends would rest their drinks during parties they would now never throw; the broad, smooth floorboards of pumpkin pine on which she had imagined hosting dances once they could afford a phonograph. Lydia felt like she was attending a funeral for the room, the various aspects of its stillborn future laid out before her. She thrust her head out the parlor window and sucked in draughts of tepid West end air.

  According to Angelina, the room was much too small for dancing.

  You need an extra man behind the counter today, Mr. Thornly?

  Before the Somerset was divided into flats, Paolo di Franzio points out that it housed a dance academy. He prefers to think Lydia’s thoughts at this moment were influenced by his memory of having waltzed across that once spacious floor. His hope is Our shared desire: that at an unguarded moment, Our whisperings will broach a living ear.

  Hello there, Quentin. I wasn’t expecting to see you until Saturday.

  I know, but I figured the news might make it more like a Saturday in here than usual. You heard about what happened?

  I did. Absolutely terrible. I hate the water, can’t imagine a worse way to die. Gives me a sick feeling every time I think about it. I had to fix myself a bromide and then was too shook up to drink it standing, so I had to sit on one of my own stools.

  One thousand innocent people.

  One hundred twenty-eight of them American! I don’t see how Wilson can keep us out of it now.

  The Huns are lower than a dog’s belly. They all deserve to be sunk. I figure people’ll be wanting to talk.

  Well, so far it’s just a regular Tuesday in here, Quent. I suppose you could check back later if you wanted, but if you want my opinion I think you’re getting too old for this sort of thing.

  What’s your meaning, Mr. Thornly?

  It’s time you started up with something of your own instead of selling sodas for me. You ought to be selling something for yourself.

  One day I will, Mr. Thornly. You just watch. One day I’ll have a store of my own.

  Sure, but how are you gonna go about getting yourself that store, Quentin? When I was your age, I had already been selling headache powder for five years.

  Headache powder?

  It was a good product. I started when I was sixteen, first door-to-door, and then to the drugstores, and eventually I expanded into stomach pills and hair tonics and by the time I was twenty-eight, I had saved enough to rent a storefront.

  You’re not trying to fire me, are you?

  Hell no, Quentin! But if you’re serious about running a store of your own, you’d be doing yourself a favor to take up with a product. It’ll round out the education you’r
e getting here with me.

  I don’t think headache powder’s my line, though. In today’s modern world, you need something that stands out.

  Now you’re talking sharp. If you keep an eye to the world and an ear to the ground, I’m sure you’ll find the perfect thing. In the meantime, have a lemon soda and don’t let this Lusitania business drag you down.

  Thanks, Mr. Thornly.

  That’ll be a nickel.

  All right, but so long as you’re charging me, make it the way I make it—in a nice glass with lots of syrup.

  THE QDISPATCH

  VOLUME 9, ISSUE 2 SPRING 1991

  The Coin-Op Show

  Those of us who were able to make it this year were not disappointed. Stan Apotts won the prize for farthest traveled, having flown in from Wisconsin, as Cathy Beauregard, our usual long-distance spoiler, stayed in California this year to help look after her newest grandchild, who she’s already turning into a QD fan!

  There were several handsome QD ads picked up by yours truly, including an almost mint condition metal sign featuring Delores Opple, my favorite QD Cutie. But the real gem of the show was found by Francis Greely, who was lucky enough to discover a 24-jag crown cap of the sort that was discontinued after the bottling facility was upgraded in 1925! And if anyone out there has thoughts of a swap, believe me, we’ve all already tried and she’s not trading!