Wickett's Remedy (25 page)

Never had I dared to dream that my words—however spontaneous and heartfelt—would bring tears to the great Sodaman’s eyes.

“My son!” Quentin Driscoll declared, rising from his desk like a mighty oak. We embraced like soldiers. I can imagine no greater honor than the one bestowed on me that day by those two words.

In This Issue

A New Look at Cara Blaine, QD’s Most Famous Cutie … Page 4

Renaming B Street: How You Can Help Page 5

T
he next morning, even as Lydia waited for the streetcar, she doubted the cogency of her plan. It was nonsense to think she would be offered the position—and if she was she did not know how she could possibly tell her family. But she was haunted by the timing of her discovery. A day earlier and the newspaper notice would have meant nothing; a day later and she might have been obliged to return to her sales counter. She preferred to present herself and be turned away by Mr. Cory than never to have made the attempt.

The streetcar driver wore a mask. A handwritten sign above his head read:
IF YORE FEELING SICK PLEESE DO NOT RIDE
.
I HAVE A WIFE AND FAMLY
. The last time Lydia rode the streetcar into Boston, people had sung as they made their way to the soldiers’ parade. But the streetcar was no longer a place where people even exchanged greetings. When a man sitting toward the middle of the car coughed, the passengers around him recoiled as if snakes had slithered from his mouth.

All her life Lydia had taken for granted the showmanship of Boston’s streetcar conductors. Some intoned each successive stop as one small part of a larger
song, while others bellowed like Fenway Park umpires. Today’s driver dispensed the names from inside his mask in a muffled monotone. Perhaps even more contagious than the flu germ itself—which may or may not have inhabited that car—was the fear being inhaled and exhaled, spoken and swallowed, invisible yet tangible as it passed from person to person. Lydia knew she ought to have shared this fear; inside the moving streetcar she provided fear a captive audience. Instead she felt resignation. If flu wanted her, it would take her as it had already taken Henry and Michael. If it did not, then riding this streetcar would make no difference.

The trolley made its way over the bridge to reveal a city of empty streets and shuttered stores. Lydia had not counted on the sight of Boston free of traffic. Until now her cognizance of the epidemic’s breadth had been as provincial as her first conception of the war. Newspapers had described the flu’s effect in Boston and elsewhere, but their full meaning was easily upstaged by daily circumstance. The sight of the city shut down vivified all that newsprint. Boston’s shuttered storefronts had their equals in Philadelphia and New York and Washington, D.C. All across New England and the east coast there were hospitals like Carney, overflowing with the desperately ill; and in the past few days, newspapers had reported flu making inroads west. Riding the streetcar, Lydia imagined a United States map like the one Henry had purchased of Europe, but this time she populated it with pushpins of a single color, pushpins that did not represent an army but a disease.

She debarked on Tremont Street. Morning here felt miscued, as if flu had muddled the earth’s diurnal rhythm. Such a deserted street ought to have belonged to the dark, anonymous hours of night. She began striding—and then running—toward Boylston. Of all the buildings on the block, her destined address was the liveliest, but its activity was not a blow against the epidemic—it was a marker of it. These were the offices of the Public Health Service.

Inside the front lobby, a sign instructed each visitor to don a gauze mask from a box beside the door. A masked receptionist directed Lydia to a small elevator, which she shared with two masked officials carrying briefcases. At the sight of the briefcases, Lydia realized the extent of her folly. She was riding an elevator to meet a man who did not expect her, in order to apply for a position for which she was not qualified, and which would fill her family with dread. She examined her clothes. She had been too tired to clean her shirtwaist the night before. Several small stains dotted the sleeve and collar, one of which was likely blood. Looking at the two officials, Lydia was frozen by the notion that there were millions of men in the world, and her brother was no longer among them. The elevator door opened.

According to the lobby receptionist, Mr. Cory’s office was just beyond the elevator. To the right, an open doorway cast a slanted oblong of light into the darker corridor. Lydia started toward it and then turned around. If she stopped now she could leave without anyone ever knowing she had come.

“Hello?” came a voice from inside the room. She heard a chair scrape against the floor. A head was
silhouetted in the hallway. “Hello? Miss?” a man called as Lydia willed the elevator to return. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“I’m sorry. I made a mistake,” Lydia apologized. “I had come about the notice—”

“You mean the Gallups Island project?” the man asked.

“Yes,” Lydia answered, “but I don’t—”

“Don’t worry,” he assured her. “You’ve made no mistake. Did we have an appointment? No matter. You’re here. Please do stop standing beside the elevator. If word gets out that I let you go without interviewing you, I’ll never hear the end of it.” His head darted from the doorway, then reappeared. “Are you coming? Good.” The head withdrew.

Lydia retrieved the listing from her pocket. Sweat from frequent fingerings had blurred the words into illegibility and fuzzed the paper’s edges. She smoothed the scrap against her dress and folded it in half before returning it to her pocket. Then she followed the man in.

H. G. Cory’s office was a small, cramped room whose walls were adorned with health advisory posters. Its single window was open to its limit, allowing a brisk breeze into the room. In spontaneous defense against the open window, the haphazard piles of paper concealing the desk had been secured by objects not originally intended as paperweights. A daunting metal medical instrument anchored one pile; a soda bottle topped another.

Mr. Cory was a frenetic man with shoulders that sloped as if also weighted by random objects. The gauze mask across his nose and mouth looked oversized on his small face.

“The office is a mess, I’m afraid, but don’t let that scare you,” he said. “There should be a chair here somewhere.”

“Thank you,” Lydia replied, “but I don’t want to waste your time.”

“You’re confusing me, Miss—Miss—what is your name?”

“Wickett.”

“First name?”

“Lydia.”

“Miss Lydia Wickett. If you came about the Gallups Island position then you are most assuredly not wasting my time. You’re a nurse, are you not?” Mr. Cory was bent over in his chair, opening and closing various drawers in search of something, the piles on his desk obscuring him from view.

“No,” she answered.

“Well then, that’s all—” He straightened in his chair, and was again visible from the shoulders up. She was reminded of a burrowing mole. “Did you say that you’re not a nurse?”

“That’s right. I really am sorry. I’ll just leave you to your—”

“You’ll just—” He shook his head with quick, sharp movements. “No, please, not yet if you don’t mind. You say you’re not a nurse. Then what are you?”

“Pardon?”

Mr. Cory had produced a paper form from one of his drawers. “You must have experience, or else you wouldn’t have come, yes?”

“Well, yes. I volunteered at Carney Hospital,” she began, hungry to tell someone, even if only a stranger. “When I brought a neighbor’s child there, it was
already overcrowded, and then when I returned the next day there were so many ill that they’d been forced to put tents on the lawn—”

“So you’re a nurse’s aide then?” Cory asked as he wrote, once again obscured by the papers on his desk. “And how long have you been at Carney Hospital?”

“Just one day,” she replied.

Cory stopped writing. “One day?”

At Carney masks had seemed appropriate, but here—inside an otherwise normal office—they gave the conversation the feel of a waking dream.

“Yes,” she acknowledged. “You see, I oughtn’t to have come. It’s one thing to volunteer, but to seek a position, an official position—” She rose from her chair. “Good day, Mr. Cory.”

“Please, Miss Wickett,” Mr. Cory coaxed. “You would be doing me a great service if you allowed me to finish this interview.” He held up his paper. “I’ve already begun to fill out the form, you see.”

She sat.

“Age?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Address?”

“28 D Street.”

“Single?”

“Widowed.”

“Oh.” He looked up again. “My condolences.”

The mask made it impossible to read his face. He returned his attention to his desk. His window looked out on the windows of other buildings. Without a view of the street, she could almost pretend the city was unchanged.

“It’s really quite good of you to bear with me,” Mr. Cory continued. “Just a few more questions and then we’ll be done. Have you any children?”

“No, sir.”

“Are you a drinking woman?”

“Certainly not!” she retorted.

“Good.” He sighed gratefully. “Due to the extreme circumstance, some of the hospitals have begun accepting personnel with—handicaps of various sorts, but that won’t do here,” he explained. “We had one respondent, a lovely woman, but then she had some trouble and that scotched it. Oh dear, I believe I just made a pun.” Cory paused and eyed the paperwork arrayed before him. “You’ll have to forgive me, Mrs. Lydia Wickett. It has been a very long week. You don’t have a fever, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Aches? Fatigue? Cough? Congestion?”

“No, sir.”

“Excellent. It is likely to be a two-week study but it could go as long as a month. Influenza transmission, headed by Dr. Gold. We’ve got to sort out how people are catching this thing if we want to stop it and I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that Dr. Gold—”

“Sir?”

“Well, exactly! Any other time and people would be clamoring to work with him. You will live and work on Gallups Island, where you will be expected to assist the nurses and doctors. Food and lodging will be provided. Salary is twenty dollars a week.”

“Sir?” she replied. “You did hear all that I said?”

Mr. Cory consulted his paperwork. “Let’s see. Your name is Lydia Wickett, you have limited hospital
experience, you have no dependents, you are not a drunk, and you are not ill. Is that correct?”

“Yes, but—”

“Lydia Wickett, including yourself do you know how many candidates I currently have under consideration for this position?”

She shook her head.

“One. And while you are not ideal, you are infinitely better than no candidate at all. I don’t need to tell you, Mrs. Wickett, that these are desperate times. Desperate times call for—measures. Would you like the position?”

Her hands were shaking. She had felt this way only once before, a lifetime ago, when she received Henry’s first love letter.

“Mr. Cory,” she answered slowly, measuring each word on her tongue. “I want to be—I am meant to be a nurse. I am as sure of this as I have ever been about anything.”

“Well, Mrs. Wickett, I cannot think of a better time for you to have made such a discovery. Does that mean your answer is yes?”

Along one wall were several wooden cabinets labeled with the word
PERSONNEL
. From this day onward, there would be a file inside one of them bearing her name. She committed to memory the high ceiling, the smell of pipe tobacco, and the way the sun through the window framed Mr. Cory’s figure in yellow light.

“Yes,” she replied.

Cory clapped his hands. “Fabulous. The study begins Monday, so you really mustn’t arrive any later than Sunday. There’s a ferry departing Commonwealth Pier at Sunday noon. I shall reserve you a place. Did I mention it’s to be headed by Dr. Gold? It’s rather a rare—”

“Do you mean this Sunday, sir?”

“Of course,” he answered.

“Isn’t that a bit soon?” she stammered.

“Soon? But it couldn’t possibly be any later. They were expecting someone last week.” He paused and his eyes appraised her, as if it had only just occurred to him to do so. “You seem like a sensible girl,” he concluded. “Do what the Head Nurse tells you and I’m sure you’ll be fine.”

She nodded. She stood and shook Mr. Cory’s hand. Fifteen minutes after she had entered H. G. Cory’s office she found herself outside it again, clutching a ticket for the Sunday ferry. Walking unsteadily toward the streetcar, her disbelief subsided just enough for her to realize that now she had to tell her family everything.

When she arrived home, James and John were racing to set the dinner table: their mother had deemed Thomas well enough to join them for supper. In the process of delivering a serving plate or a glass to the table, each boy’s path curved to detour past the open bedroom door to catch a glimpse of Thomas, who lay propped up in bed. Lydia stood near the doorway and basked in the sight of the bedsheet rising and falling with his regular breathing. Thomas’s flu had not given way to pneumonia. He would live.

Both John and James wanted to escort their brother to the table, but their mother still prohibited anyone else from entering the sickroom and fetched Thomas herself. Thomas looked as if he had been bed bound for weeks and not days. As he took his usual place at the table, he fixed his younger brother with a stare that shrunk James in his chair.

“Squealer,” he muttered, causing James to pale, but then Thomas grinned. “I’m just kidding, Jamie. You did the right thing. If you hadn’t fetched Ma that night I don’t know what would have happened.”