Wickett's Remedy (15 page)

Without the diversion of her mother, Lydia realized what a curiosity she had become. Since her return to Southie she had only ventured from the flat to go to work or to run errands, so Michael’s party functioned as her inadvertent debut. She realized too late the mistake of reviving her West end wardrobe. The blue dress was the costume of a visitor for whom Southie was only a Sunday destination, causing the guests who entered her family’s kitchen to treat her as a guest herself. Well-intentioned friends with whom she was no longer intimate made polite queries, while people Lydia knew only thirdhand—their restraint likely loosened by a few pints—so often repeated the same unflinchingly direct questions that she was tempted to hang a sign around her neck: yes, her late husband’s
family was wealthy but her late husband was not; yes, it was true she had no children; no, she did not mind being back in Southie; no, she did not dress like this every day.

Michael saved her from her inquisitors when he burst into the front room, his hair tousled from dancing and the top two buttons of his shirt undone. Her brother pretended not to know he was good-looking, just as he pretended not to care about how he dressed—when in truth he had made the most of having a sister who, for four years, had dressed men for a living. The shirt and trousers he was wearing that day had been Christmas presents from Lydia’s Gilchrist period but they still looked new due to the care he had taken with them. Her brother was the only fellow Lydia knew who was as adept with an iron as any housewife.

“Where’s Liddie?” he bellowed as he made for the kitchen.

On hearing his voice, Lydia cursed her earlier reluctance to go upstairs. An entire hour had been wasted when she could have been watching her brother. Now he was sixty minutes closer to being gone.

“You’re too pretty to be stuck in the kitchen,” he pronounced on finding her. “That’s a dancing dress.” Grasping her shoulders, he propelled her into the front room. The particular clasp of his fingers on her clavicle recalled barreling with him through City Point when nothing in life had been more urgent than securing a seat for the Punch and Judy show.

As they made their way through the crowd, Michael stopped for every bit of advice or congratulations offered him by young husbands, who were variously regretful
or relieved that their wives and children had earned them service exemptions. All agreed that with American soldiers smashing through the German line and Babe Ruth bringing home the pennant, now was an auspicious time to be called up. Men too old for the draft pounded Michael’s back with a vigor meant to prove their own fitness for combat, while boys too young looked at him with a wistfulness generally reserved for first love. To each well-wisher Michael sensed just what to offer in return, whether a few confiding words or a handshake, a clap on the back or a bear hug. At his side, Lydia realized what her brother had clearly known from the outset: a going-away party was as much for those being left as it was for the one who was leaving.

The second-floor hallway was filled with dancing bodies, the dancers spinning in place to avoid collision with the walls or each other and forming a frantic centipede with gartered legs. The air was thick with beery sweat. The smell of dancing caused Lydia to realize how keenly she had missed it. With a whoop Michael maneuvered her into the chain of dancers, which through some magic of synchronicity was moving up and back along the hallway without mishap, as though the dancers truly had become a single creature. At times the stomping feet overpowered the sound of the phonograph or caused the record to skip, but this only spurred the dancers on. Lydia’s face grew shiny. She immersed herself in the scent of her brother’s cologne and the solidity of his arm. It felt good to stomp her feet and swing her hips. As if she were a rug receiving a needed airing, each collision with a neighbor brought out the accumulated grief of the past eleven months,
bursting from her in invisible clouds. Then she remembered that tomorrow her brother would board a train and she wished she was not dancing but downstairs, the seven of them seated around the kitchen table like this was any ordinary Sunday.

“You’re already practically gone.” She murmured beneath the strains of “St. Margaret’s Waltz.” If she started crying she was not sure she would be able to stop.

Her brother grinned. “I go back and forth between feeling like a kid on Christmas Eve and feeling like I’m back in Miss Donnegal’s class not having studied for a test. Try to be happy for me, Liddie. I’m going to France!”

As the song came to an end, Alice rushed from Malachy’s side, threading her way between frozen couples to change the record.

“Aren’t you frightened?” Lydia asked in the pause before the next song began. She was not sure if Michael had not heard her or did not wish to answer, but then he turned his face toward hers.

“Do you remember the time Mr. Riordan caught me sneaking you into the Imperial?” he asked. “I’d told you it was foolproof and there you were waiting for me by the side door in your Saturday dress just as he came out of his office?”

She smiled. “I thought I was going to faint.”

“Right,” Michael agreed, “but then, when Mr. Riordan saw you all dolled up, he let you in himself? Well, I feel like that, Liddie—like I’m being allowed to get away with something that’s too good to be true.”

The music had started up again but they were not dancing. “Promise me that you’ll be very, very careful,” she demanded, as though he were twelve again and
they were standing at the top of Sixth Street, their sleds in their hands.

“Liddie, you know I’ll be as careful as I can. How about if I promise to keep my head on straight and my wits about me? That’s a promise I can make for sure.”

She shook her head. It was not nearly enough. “Will you write at least every Sunday?”

Michael nodded. “If I didn’t Ma would come across the ocean after me! But you gotta promise me to start getting out more. Henry wouldn’t want you keeping yourself to yourself the way you have been.” He kissed her on her forehead. “I love you, Lydia Claire. Now stop your snuffles and go find yourself a nice fella to dance with; I’m going to sit a spell with Da.” Within moments she had lost sight of him.

Without her brother, she felt unequal to the hallway’s bustle and sought refuge in a doorway. Her brothers—who had been biding their time in Alice’s flat with the other children—scrambled past her, determined not to let their brother leave their sight. She decided to join them, but it was far more difficult to make her way downstairs without Michael clearing her path. She was flushed from dancing. She would have liked to explain to every woman she passed that she had only been with her brother but the mere thought of doing so exhausted her. She focused on returning to the kitchen as quickly as possible.

In a previous lifetime the fathers and sons who filled the front room had patted Lydia on the head and called her “Mickey’s kid sister.” Today their formality as they stood aside more aptly befit an old maid, but she was grateful for anything that eased her passage to the relative obscurity of the neighboring room.

“Oh good,” her mother exclaimed on her reappearance. “You’re just in time. Himself’s building up to a speech.”

In the sitting room Dan Kilkenny had risen from the couch to stand beside his son. It was strange to see them together. Age had begun to diminish her father, making her brother seem like the original from which their father’s lesser copy had been fashioned. Even slightly diminished, however, Dan Kilkenny needed only to raise his arm to bring a silence to the room that most men could have achieved only with a shrill whistle.

“I’d like to toast me boy,” her father announced. The cadence of his voice carried out the door and up the stairs, quieting the people there as effectively as if he’d been standing beside them.

“Mick,” he began, “I’m proud of you two times over: first for your wanting to sign up as soon as Mr. Wilson declared war and second for agreeing for your ma’s sake not to go until you was called. These things attest that you’re brave but not foolhardy, for though it takes a brave man to fight for his country only a fool would try to go against the wishes of Mrs. Kilkenny!”

Once the laughter subsided her father continued, his voice all the more compelling for being softer. “I know that if you’re even half the man in France that you are here, you’ll make a world of difference in this war. Once you get on that train tomorrow morning, whether you be at Devens or across the ocean, I want you always to remember, Son, that my love and the love of your ma and your sister and your brothers is going right along with you.” As he ended, someone in the room began to sing.

“MICKEY get your gun, get your gun, get your gun, Take it on the run, on the run, on the run, Hear them calling you and me, Ev’-ry son of SOUTH-IE, Hurry right away, no delay, go to-day, Make KILKENNY glad to have had such a lad, Tell your mother not to pine, To be proud MICKEY’S in line.

“O-ver there—o-ver there—Send the word, send the word o-ver there—”

The strains of the song swelled through the ceiling. Soon every voice was joining in, the singers upstairs a few words behind the singers downstairs to create an echo, as though the cluster of people in the front room were standing at the edge of a great divide:

“So prepare (’pare)—say a pray’r (pray’r)—Send the word, send the word to beware (’ware)—We’ll be over, MICKEY’S coming over, And he won’t be back ’til it’s over over there! (ver there!)”

Once the beer ran dry Michael’s pals carried him off to Scollay and the party, having lost its center, dissipated. Mrs. Feeney retired her gramophone. Men called loud farewells as if these were long good-byes, preferring for the moment not to remember that they would be seeing one another tomorrow at the factory or in the shipyard. Several of the older women stayed behind to help Cora and Lydia clean up before heading home to get supper. When Lydia changed out of her dress, she noticed that a small, oblong stain spotted the left sleeve and the collar had lost its starch. The skirt pleats would need to be re-pressed and both the bodice and skirt needed ironing, but she was in no rush. She preferred the dress to hold her brother’s memory.

The next morning the family met Michael at the train to say their final good-byes. The platform was so
overrun that Lydia feared they would miss him completely, which caused her to transform every passing figure into her brother until she spotted him shouldering his way through the sea of well-wishers, debarkees, and duffel bags. Michael smiled through his hangover and promised once again to write every Sunday. Lydia managed not to cry until her mother started. She apologized for the wet spot she left on her brother’s chest at the end of their embrace, but Michael only laughed and hugged her tighter. After he boarded, they found his car and stood shouting last-minute instructions and endearments through his open window until the train began to move. As he waved, he leaned out the window, allowing her to watch him long after she could no longer see his face. She waved back until her brother was not even a discernible shape on the horizon.

Michael’s absence reversed Lydia’s relationship to the daily newspaper. She became avid for news from Europe, scrutinizing the morning and evening editions so that by the time her brother shipped out from Camp Devens, she would be thoroughly versed in the situation overseas. She glossed over the photographic subjects of the Sunday
Herald’s
roto section in favor of the photographic backgrounds. She was not as interested in soldiers-at-arms as she was in the roads, trees, buildings, and tents that would in a matter of weeks compose her brother’s new surroundings.

At first it was impossible to read a newspaper article without hearing Henry’s voice or spotting an untidy sentence that would have aroused his editorial ire, but then the newspaper became a newspaper again and not a harbinger of fresh grief. One day she realized that she
no longer heard her husband as she read. At some point Henry’s voice had fallen silent. Several emotions clashed at this simple proof of time’s passage. Guilt and relief, anger and resignation were easy enough to distinguish, but others faded too quickly after their fierce combustion to be named.