Wickett's Remedy Read online

  The future began with a simple errand. One day the regular delivery boy was out sick, so the manager asked me to take the mail up to Three. I was standing at the secretary’s desk when a voice asked me to bring it in myself. And that voice was none other than Quentin Driscoll’s.

  Over the years I have been asked many times about that moment. Was I excited? Was I nervous? Always I ask in return: Is a star excited before it streaks across the night sky? Is a bird excited before it takes wing? No. Star and bird are only doing what they are meant to do. At that moment, I was just a boy delivering the mail. But I will say this—it was a powerful voice that called from behind that door, the kind of voice you don’t refuse.

  My first memory of Quentin Driscoll is not a memory of him at all. It is a memory of his desk, the likes of which I have never seen elsewhere. It was seven feet wide and made of polished wood. It had curved sides and the letters “Q.D.” across its front in gold. Like everything else in that man’s life, his desk had a story behind it. But I did not know that sad story, at least not yet.

  Only after Quentin Driscoll said, “You are not the usual boy,” did I turn my attention to his face. Once I did, I knew I was in the presence of greatness. The square jaw, the dark, intelligent eyes, and the broad, expressive brow all bespoke intelligence, savvy, and ambition. Though I had seen pictures of great men in history books I had never met one before, and I have not met one since.

  “Tell me your name,” he asked.

  “My name is Ralph,” I replied.

  Imagine my shock when that noble visage blanched!

  “I had a son named Ralph,” the Sodaman said softly. “He would have been seven this year.”

  I was old enough to observe more than sadness filling Quentin Driscoll’s face, but too young to give those other emotions names.

  “I’m sorry,” I replied.

  “Why?” he said in return. “It’s not your fault that my son is dead, or that you have his name.”

  I did not know what to say. A moment ago I had been a boy content to daydream by the radio. Now, more than anything in life, I wanted to impress this man—but I was torn between wanting to appear humble and wiser than my years.

  “I don’t know if Ralph is the name of a great man,” I said, “but I think it is the name of a good one. I feel sorry because it’s sad to think that the world lost someone good.”

  “Is it better to be great or to be good?” Quentin Driscoll asked quietly, with a sad smile.

  I had wanted to sound noble. Instead, I felt foolish.

  “It’s best to be both,” I answered, hoping to make up for what I had said before, “but if a man can only be one, perhaps it would be better for him to be good and not great instead of great and not good.”

  I did not know it then, but with those words my Sodaman’s journey had begun.

  In This Issue

  To Drink or Not to Drink? The Eternal Dilemma of the Sealed, Collectible Bottle Page 3

  At first day and night were meaningless. Lydia slept; and when sleep disowned her she stared at the cracked ceiling and the faded walls, wishing sleep would take her back. Sometimes the familiarity of the room persuaded her that she was Lydia Kilkenny of 28 D Street, who worked at Gilchrist’s and had always slept on the pallet beside her parents’ bed. But then she would remember the sheet being stretched over Henry’s corpse, or the soiled onion poultice that had slipped to the floor unnoticed until she was alone with it in the room. These memories sent the rest rushing back, a crush that left her gasping for breath.

  Grief has obliterated Lydia’s memory of her departure from the West end. We can only surmise she rode the streetcar back over the bridge. We know she telephoned West Roxbury because the call reverberates like a scream in the memories of Mr. and Mrs. Wickett.

  Sometimes she emerged from the gray blur of her mourning to find Michael sitting beside her, his broad hand stroking her forehead as if trying to smooth away a fever. Later, she was told no one else could soothe her during that first week, shards of days she recalled only in narrow slivers of memory.

  Liddie clutched Mick’s hand for hours at a time. That first week he slept on the floor beside her so that she could hold his hand through the night.

  Henry’s funeral took place during those first shattered days. She was unsure how many people attended, or in what church the service was held. She remembered standing across the open grave from Henry’s parents. She remembered gripping someone’s arm so tightly that her nails cut through the fabric of her gloves. The lowering coffin seemed much larger than her husband and her mind flashed to an image of Henry’s body rolling back and forth inside the box. To keep from shrieking, she pictured herself inside there with him, her arms wrapped around his body to hold him in place.

  It was Mick’s arm. The West Roxbury funeral was mostly attended by friends and associates of the Wicketts, but several Southie neighbors made the long trip out by streetcar.

  Eventually time regained its form. She stopped hoarding sleep, and the bowls of soup her mother delivered to her bedside no longer grew cold. Meals in bed progressed to meals at the table—at first in bedclothes and then in proper clothes—and from there to assisting her mother in the kitchen. Soon she found herself undertaking short trips to the corner grocery for an essential item somehow “forgotten” by her mother; and in this way Lydia gradually reentered the world.

  She would have preferred a world that no longer contained the Somerset. It seemed only fair the building that embodied her life with Henry should disappear along with him. Both Michael and her mother offered to pack up the flat, but she did not wish to cede that task; she was simply furious that the building was still standing when the decent thing would have been for it to sink into the earth. Her wrath was so acute that it overshadowed her dread of being pitied. On the day she returned, anger propelled her through the lobby and up the stairs to the fourth floor, heedless of those she passed on her way.

  Walter Darrow supposes his condolence card escaped Mrs. Wickett’s notice. Once he figured he had been giving the glad eye to a new widow, he traded the Somerset for a men-only building to spare himself any more compromising situations.

  The fourth floor hallway was as indifferent to her as it had always been. Nothing about the door to the flat indicated that a man had died on the other side of it. She had unlocked that door countless times when Henry had been alive. As she unlocked it now she could have just as easily been returning from errands—her wrist rotated the same way; the lock gave its small but resolute click. The idea that anything in this building should feel as it had before was intolerable. Lydia clamped the tip of her tongue between her jaws and held it there, pinioned by her teeth. There was not pain, only a growing pressure that would safeguard against familiarity. Biting her tongue, she opened the door and stepped into the flat.

  It smelled the same. She had never attributed a particular smell to the flat before, but having been away from it she recognized it in an instant. It was cooking and clothes, bodies and housework; it was a compendium of little smells that embodied the scent of her and Henry. Standing inside the doorway, she inhaled the air in greedy draughts, trying to memorize the scent of her marriage before it disappeared.

  According to Michael, at the funeral she had accepted her mother-in-law’s offer to help pack Henry’s things. Without Michael’s reminder she would not have known what to make of the cartons she found neatly lining the hall. In the bedroom, the bed had already been stripped. It was possible Lydia had done this herself but she did not think so. A faint pulse beat in the tip of her tongue. She could feel the edges of her front teeth pressing in. She sat on the mattress and dared herself to look at the floor. The onion poultice was gone. Some angel had removed it. Her hands had been clenched fists, but now her fingers unfurled.

  Ernestine Wickett felt physically ill unmaking her son’s marriage bed, but it allowed her to cry for him rather than for herself—which in turn allowed her, on seeing the onion poultice, to cry for her dau
ghter-in-law.

  Packing did not take long. Her clothes fit into one large suitcase. A second suitcase held odd things: toiletries; a wooden oatmeal spoon brought from D Street; the Remedy ledger, labels, and correspondence. She placed Henry’s love letters in the same handbag that had held them before. Even in her visions of the Somerset’s destruction, she had spared these letters, imagining them resting unscathed on the blighted lot, awaiting her return. The tip of her tongue ached as a fingertip aches when tied too tightly with string. A faint coppery taste filled her mouth.

  In the entryway, Henry’s life had been reduced to four boxes. Placed end to end, they would have made a narrow cot just long enough for Lydia to lie on and just shorter than the man whose effects they contained. She could too easily picture the boxes stacked in a corner of a disused room somewhere above the damask parlor, or their contents dispersed among Ernestine Wickett’s manifold charitable causes. In Lydia’s desire to save the boxes from such a fate, she imagined a room wallpapered with pages from Henry’s letters and notebooks and carpeted with his clothes. She would be the only one permitted to enter this room, and inside it she would do whatever she liked—cry or scream, laugh or sleep. But since no amount of wishing would bring this room into being, she would select for herself one article of Henry’s clothing and that was all.

  After the first year—when even the clothes Ernestine had refrained from handling no longer smelledlike Henry—she allowed his father to donate all but her favorites to a South Boston church. Save for framing several illustrations from her sons notebooks, she kept his bedroom as it had always been.

  The letter was fastened to the top of the first box of clothes. When she saw it, her mouth opened in surprise and the blood trapped in the tip of her tongue by her clenched teeth surged back into her body on its way to the heart.

  “Dear Lydia,” the letter read in penmanship that looked just like Henry’s:

  When he was alive, it was easier to be angry at you than at him. Now I am only angry at myself. Forgive me, if you can. Even if you can’t, please know that I wish you well.

  Beside the letter was a fifty-dollar bill. Even when she had worked at Gilchrist’s Lydia had never seen anything larger than a twenty. The bill was crisp and unlined. It felt heavy in her hand and smelled slightly bitter. Fronting the fifty was a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant. On its back, rising from the middle of the ocean, was a picture of a woman named Panama.

  Lydia opened the box and removed Henry’s favorite white collarless shirt, the one with a tea stain on the right sleeve. On top of the box, Lydia left the fifty-dollar bill and several pieces of Remedy correspondence. “Dear Mrs. Wickett,” she wrote in reply, “I am angry too, but at everyone and no one all at once. I am leaving some letters for you. They were written by people your son made happy. Maybe they can give you some happiness in return.”

  The two suitcases and the handbag were not too much to carry. After she locked the flat she slipped the key under the door. The hallway did not smell like the fiat. The hallway smelled like strangers.

  Neither good fortune nor good neighbors were at work. Mrs. Kilkenny importuned Father O’Brian to help her find Lydia a job before her daughter strayed across the bridge again.

  She had been in Southie six weeks when, by a stroke of good fortune, the need for a part-time counter girl arose at Gorin’s and a neighbor’s cousin’s brother-in-law was persuaded to offer her the position. Though Lydia was not ungrateful, the opportunity seemed simply another of her mother’s bowls of soup that she knew she ought to eat while it was still warm. With the job’s commencement it seemed possible time had reversed. Once again she found herself rising with the sound of the drays to assume the starched, white shirtwaist of the shopgirl; once again she took breakfast at her mother’s table, careful not to spill jelly on her sleeve—but this was an illusion impossible to sustain. With its airy rooms, ample dimensions, and up-to-date furnishings the Somerset had permanently altered Lydia’s sense of comfort. Now the small rooms and sturdy furniture of her childhood were suffocating. The space created by Michael boarding at Mrs. Flynn’s had been more than taken up by Tom, James, and John—all of whom had grown far too much in her absence still to be considered little brothers. On her return to D Street, a sheet was hung between the front room and kitchen to allow Thomas, James, and John privacy as they dressed. The addition left Lydia feeling like she had devolved from the sister who had once bathed them to a spinster aunt. In retrospect she realized her underestimation, among all the Somerset flat’s amenities, of its hallway. Nowhere in Southie was a room permitted the sole, luxurious purpose of leading to other rooms.

  Outside the D Street flat every aspect of Lydia’s person proclaimed her a stranger. Liddie Kilkenny had been a D Street girl but Lydia Wickett just as certainly had been born across the bridge. Lydia Wickett pinned her hair in far too elaborate a style for a Southie girl; Lydia Wickett did not put her elbows on the table at employee lunch; and Lydia Wickett’s accent was certainly not Irish. When she attempted to resume the Southie inflections after so many years of assiduous correction, she felt as if a stranger’s tongue had been sewn into her mouth. Shopkeepers called her Madam instead of Dearie; conversations ceased when she neared; children froze as she walked through their midst, their games resuming only once she had passed; and at Gorin’s the shopgirls took her for a stool pigeon and remained guarded. Liddie Kilkenny had known this brand of distrust. She had felt it toward the society women who were driven down West Broadway for a taste of “local color,” as well as toward the occasional Harvard boys who ventured across the bridge for an evening’s diversion. Liddie had rolled her eyes at these interlopers. She had spoken with a brogue so exaggerated she knew she would not be understood and pointed them opposite their desired direction. Then, once they had gone, she had laughed at their receding backs while secretly longing to follow them across the Channel.

  Lizzy Cavanaugh from Notions thought Liddie was more of a snoot than a stool pigeon.

  Mornings, on her way to work, she half expected to encounter this younger self, a girl with thick braids down her back wearing a carefully mended yellow dress, who would dash past as though Lydia were invisible. At times she thought she spied this girl in the afternoon gaggle of unfamiliar children who now laid claim to Southie’s stoops and curbs, but every girl who caught Lydia’s eye invariably revealed a face as strange as any other. In each instance Lydia was grateful to have been spared a meeting: she would have felt duty-bound to offer advice but was not sure whether to warn Liddie Kilkenny never to leave Southie or never to return.

  Mary Williams in Overcoats would no sooner have let a young widow cross her path than a black cat.

  In the wake of her own return, Southie’s prodigal daughter quickly learned that she was expected to be mourning a soldier. A country at war anticipated losses from battlefields, not sickbeds. Correcting the impressions of the well-intentioned became so tiresome Lydia abridged her period of public mourning, deciding she could mourn Henry better without the black armband that elicited constant requests for her husband’s rank and regiment. People were not so much unsympathetic as disappointed at her answer. It was far more fashionable to die in a trench than of the flu, and it was tempting to lie. If she became a war widow, then Henry became a hero. Heroism and journalism had been alike enough in Henry’s mind that a soldier’s death overseas was a postmortem gift she was tempted to give him. Instead she replaced her black armband with a personal disregard for the Armed Forces, which she privately held responsible for Henry’s demise—for had her husband been permitted to enlist, he would have been across the ocean from the flu that struck Boston that spring. In observance of her antipathy, Lydia refrained from discussions on the progress of the American Expeditionary Force and refused to take sides in her brothers’ ongoing debate as to the relative superiority of the Navy or Air Service.

  Southie did all it could to foil her boycott. Little boys played soldier, their sparrow chests thrust out in single file
as they pounded the soles of their hand-me-down shoes into the sidewalks. Every woman and girl occupied her idle moments with the knitting of sweaters, mufflers, or socks in khaki or gray four-ply Number Ten wool for donation to the Red Cross. Newspapers were particular enemies. Lydia was so accustomed to Henry’s editorial revisions that the sight of an unmarked broadsheet was a provocation to grief. She hated being at the mercy of such a commonplace object—she deserved to mourn when and where she pleased. She began avoiding street corners commandeered by newspaper boys and asked her father not to leave his copy of the afternoon edition in the front room.

  Newspapers had the added detriment of reminding her of the Remedy. At Henry’s death, the Wickett’s advertisement had been paid through the end of the month. Once it lapsed, the face of the girl with Lydia’s nose and Henry’s eyes disappeared from the pages of the Herald. In spite of her original misgivings, Lydia had grown fond of that small face. Given a choice, she would have preferred to prolong its worldly life, but the best she could hope for was to provide it a dignified end.

  The beginning of that end did not commence until her dread of a post office box clotted with letters was overshadowed by visions of a box whose contents had been repossessed by the postmaster. Lydia used one of her days off from Gorin’s to return to Post Office Square. She donned an old dress plainer than her West end wardrobe and waited until midafternoon to catch the streetcar, in order to arrive when she would be least likely to encounter familiar faces. Approaching the building, she refused her lips their accustomed Hail Mary. Despite these attempts to exorcise her old ways, her habitual excitement shadowed her up the post office stairs. Even now, the familiar sensation of pushing open the heavy wooden door fired one last dumb yellow flare of reflexive anticipation through her limbs. This unhappy trip was her most fruitful, yielding up almost twenty envelopes bearing her husband’s name.