Wickett's Remedy (21 page)

The sounds of the ward were made more ominous by the screens that blocked their sources from view. It was difficult not to attribute each cough to Brian. When Lydia reached the other end of the ward there was still no other nurse in sight, and it seemed cruel to allow his solitude to continue.

“Brian!” she called. She was being true to the nurse’s request—she was not peering inside the curtains. “Brian, it’s Auntie Liddie from D Street. Just make a little sound so I know how to find you.”

The noises of the room seemed to intensify. Lydia perked her ears for a moan or a cough that sounded more familiar than the rest, or a small voice whispering her name.

Then the Head Nurse emerged from behind one of the curtains. “Miss, I must ask you to restrain yourself,” she ordered. “We can’t have that here.” The hollows shadowing her eyes extended below the upper edge of the mask stretching across her nose and mouth.

“Please, I’m looking for a boy called Brian O’Toole.”

“O’Toole,” the nurse echoed. “He was brought in yesterday?”

“That’s right,” Lydia replied. “Yesterday afternoon, going on evening.”

The nurse gave a quick nod. “Are you a relation?” she asked.

“A friend of the family. I brought him here myself. He’s six but small for his age—”

“I’m very sorry to tell you,” the nurse replied quietly, “but he passed late last night. The grandmother was here this morning. She has made provisions.”

The air rushed out of Lydia’s lungs. “Are you quite sure?” she asked, the words almost inaudible. “He was very ill but the nurse said they’d look after him. She said the doctor would see to him.”

“I’m sorry,” the nurse repeated. “Once they become that ill there is very little we can do.”

“Were you with him?” Lydia asked. “When he died, were you there?” She did not mean to sound angry, but
in the space of a day the world had become a place where shops closed early and children disappeared overnight.

“No,” the nurse answered. “It happened during the night shift. We lost four. Not since yellow fever have we lost that many at a time. When the duty nurse realized the graveness of the situation she woke one of the Sisters and they took turns sitting at the beds.” The nurse’s voice remained steady, and because of the mask it was impossible for Lydia to know the set of her features as she spoke. “I’m certain that one of them was with Brian when his time came.”

The walk back to D Street was longer than Lydia remembered. The few children playing on stoops or along streets, regardless of their age or appearance, reminded her of Brian. At the sight of a small boy with auburn hair she stopped in her tracks, certain the nurse had erred. Then the boy turned toward her, and the nurse’s news reasserted itself. Lydia felt strangely relieved for Alice, who was at least spared such unwelcome knowledge.

As she reached her block, Lydia found herself studying objects that had for years evaded her notice: a streetlamp, a tree, a hydrant, the small pebbles that collected between cobblestones. She could not describe what she was looking for, only the imperative of the search. If the rules had changed, then she would learn them. If this was some new and dire season, then she would come to know its name.

Lydia expected the same heavy silence that had greeted her on her first return from the hospital. She was not prepared for shrieks, and her throat clenched at the intensity of the sound. Anguish verged on overwhelming
the very medium that carried it, perhaps causing the air to bleed black ash or gray dust. It was a sound that only ever meant one thing, conveying that meaning to all who heard it even if they had never heard it before.

The cries were so sense scrambling that they were at first difficult to pinpoint. Lydia assumed they emanated from the upstairs apartment until she opened the door to her family’s flat. Her next thought was that Mrs. Feeney was downstairs, but instead there was her mother bent over the couch, raw sound pouring from her open mouth and from the mouths of her brothers and her father. None were standing or sitting; they were crouching like animals. And as much as Lydia wished it could be true, she knew it was impossible that they would cry like this for poor Brian.

What do you call it again?

QD Soda, sir.

But last week you said it was a tonic.

Oh no, sir, that was something else. This you can sell right along with your lemon-lime and your orange and your rickey, something with a new taste all its own. A soda, not a remedy.

In case you didn’t notice, we’re standing at a counter here. I don’t sell soda in bottles.

I’ll sell you the syrup, then.

I don’t know.

Honest to Abe, sir, you’ll be letting your customers down if you don’t. They’ll start going over to Klyborn’s on Revere or Pinkney’s on Allen.

Are you telling me those fellows are carrying your syrup?

Here, taste a bottle for yourself.

Hmm … you know, you might have something here. What did you put in there—chicory? A little anise maybe?

It’s a taste that people will come back for.

Give me a half gallon and we’ll see how it goes.

I only sell it by the gallon, sir.

Well, if you want my business you’ll sell me half a gallon and check back with me next week.

You won’t be sorry, sir. If you like, I can give you a sign for your front window, absolutely free of cost, of course.

Young man, it’s a little early to be talking windows. Come back next week and I’ll let you know whether or not you’re wasting my time.

My Dear Boy—

Though you have been gone awhile now there are mornings I forget. By the time I am putting up the coffee I have remembered and I am embarrassed that I forgot to begin with. You might think that being alone is protection against embarrassment, but it is not. Solitude is the biggest embarrassment of all.

I could name a few girls here who have made it clear they would be happy to bear the burden of my company, but you will be happy to know I have given up on all that. I have come to realize that I am no longer the sort of man a good woman comes to. I have not been that sort of man for some time now, not since your mother. I used to think that if you and she had lived I would have turned out differently, but I have given up on that as well. All my life I have prided myself on being a self-made man and a self-made man has no right to blame anyone but himself for the way he turns out.

And just how has your old dad turned out? Though I never ranked longevity among my ambitions, I seem to have achieved it anyway. I am not
proud of being old. I do not feel that I have had much to do with it, considering how much trouble I made over the years for my gut and my liver and the rest of the scrapple I am carrying around inside my skin. I suppose I would be grateful if I were not so goddamn bored.

Forgive me for talking to you this way, but it is time I stopped thinking of you as a little boy. You have not been a little boy for a very long time. Not a day goes by when I do not think of you.

Love,

Your Father

T
he drays were clattering down Third Street as if nothing was different. Lydia had forgotten what it was to be hauled from oblivion into a world she had disowned, but now her skin weighed on her body like the pelt of a lifeless animal, and she remembered. For a moment she was confused: in the early days of mourning Henry she had often garbled time and so for one sharp inhalation of breath she thought she was still a new widow. Then came the exhale and her realization that this was something else, something that defied description. There was no word for a sister whose brother had died. This simple, callous fact of language extinguished her desire to speak.

Michael’s last letter had mentioned a flu, but in spite of all that had been happening, she had not recalled that remark until she was told he was dead. This lapse lodged itself alongside her failure to call an ambulance in time for Henry, and became its twin—indictments too tenuous to survive exposure to air, but incontrovertible within the confine of her body.

Her mother was the first to rise when the sound of the drays subsided. Mrs. Kilkenny pulled a dressing gown over her shoulders and shuffled from the bedroom
to the kitchen. From her pallet Lydia heard the icebox door open and close. A pan clattered against the stove. Then came the sizzle and aroma of cooking fat, a scent that this morning turned her stomach. To distract herself she stared at the window, but the blueness of the sky made her angry. She turned her head toward the wall.

“Morning,” her father said. He was looking out the window also, the word not a greeting but an accusation directed toward the sun.

Cooking smells thickened the air. “Breakfast,” her mother said.

“I’m not hungry, Ma,” rasped Thomas from the front room.

“Me neither,” echoed James.

“You’ll eat whether you’re hungry or not,” her mother explained. “We all of us need our strength.”

Moving like an old man, her da eased his legs to the floor. “You’ll do what your ma says,” he ordered. Overnight, his voice had been reduced from a bellow to something small and tinny. There was movement from the front room into the kitchen, then a sharp intake of breath.

“Ma?” she heard Thomas say, his voice tearing the last remaining barrier between Lydia and the beginning of the first full day without Michael. Henry had been hers alone and she had owned her grief for him, but Michael had belonged to all of them.

While her mother stood over the stove, intent on the simmering tea kettle, the eyes of her brothers and father were fixed on a kitchen table choked with food. There were three pots at the table’s center, one filled with oatmeal, one with gravy, and one with cocoa. The
table’s six plates were weighted with double portions of biscuits. A week’s supply of rationed eggs had been fried and divided between them, each plate subjugated by the dumb cheer of runny yellow yolks.