Wickett's Remedy (36 page)

Sir, you’ve got to return to your bed.

Where is she?

You ought to be in the men’s ward.

Nelly, it’s Poppa!

Please! You’re upsetting the others. You must get back—

I won’t. I’m fetching my Nell.

Sir, you are very ill. And you’re upsetting the children. If you’ll just come—

Don’t touch me, you bastard. Nell, where are you?

Oh! Help! Doctor! Come quickly!

Nell, we got to get out. There was a fellow beside me, and he just—we been tricked. We ought never to have come. Hey! What the—

It’s going to be all right, sir.

Get off me! Nelly, run!

We’re going to return you to your bed now.

Where’s my little girl?

Please, sir.

Her name is Nelly Grace Dearborn.

If you’ll just return to your ward—

I won’t! You can’t make me! I’m a free man!

Sir, please come along.

Please, mister, just tell me true. Is she gone?

James, quick, fetch the ether.

Where is my little Nell? Where is my—

Easy boy, easy. You get his feet. Let’s get him back before he wakes up.

My Dear Boy—

I used to say that any successful businessman was the equal of any headshrinker when it came to knowing how people tick, but now I am not so sure. Wasn’t it one of them who talked about our dreams coming from someplace outside of ourselves? I am thinking there might be something to that theory.

It always goes the same way: A dead man lies on a table but his face is blocked by the doctors standing all around him. I do not know who this man is and I suppose I never will. All I know is that he is dead. I expect if I had fought in the war a dead man would not be such a shocking sight, but I did not fight in the war and so it hits me upside the head every time. Especially when a doctor cuts into the dead man’s chest. He carves a Y that starts below the shoulders and ends below the belly button. Once the cutting is done, it looks less like a man’s chest than a brisket butchered all wrong.

When the dream changes I become the one lying on the table—except that it is not me. It is Henry Wickett’s widow. She is older than when I met her, but I still recognize her. And in the dream I
am
her, looking through
her
eyes as she lies on a bed. I am holding a baby to my chest, trying to feed him, but I am hungry myself. The hunger is boring into the pit of my stomach. The baby is crying and cannot suck, and I am crying too, for myself and for the babe in my arms. When I wake up, that jagged, hungry feeling follows me into waking and I scream just like you used to scream when you had your nightmares. It turns out that my scream and your scream sound exactly the same.

Your Loving Father

W
inter arrived to Gallups. The island’s denuded tree branches were nubbed with migrating birds, Gallups a comma punctuating their southward journey. The disappearance of the season that had greeted Lydia’s arrival—in combination with the foreshortened days—made it seem like months rather than weeks had passed. The fear that haunted Southie, the emptiness of Bostons streetcars and the desolation of its shuttered shops, all blurred in her memory, their intensity diminished. Sometimes entire days passed before she thought of Carney. Her amnesia was aided by letters from home—which lately avoided all talk of the epidemic—and by the newspapers—which were subject to the same frustrating delay as the mail—forcing Gallups’ inhabitants to traffic in old news, war and epidemic unfolding in three-day intervals. News of Boston had come to feel as remote as news from Europe. When she took her nightly walk along Gallups’ shoreline, both places were equally invisible, confirming the notion she was impossibly far from everything and everyone she had ever known.

Every Sunday a Protestant chaplain was brought in by ferry to lead a nondenominational service in the dining hall. Though the chaplain’s aim was to satisfy Christians of all creeds, his service was familiar to no one and sparsely attended. She would have preferred a priest empowered to hear her confession, but the chaplain was always happy to talk with her after the service. Had he been Catholic she would have told him of her immoderate affection for the men in the east wing, but such a topic felt indecorous outside the confines of the confessional. Instead she related her anxieties regarding the volunteers’ health and her ambivalence toward her role in the study’s mission. The chaplain’s kindness girded her for the week ahead.

By the end of their second day, the men inhabiting the west ward remained as stubbornly healthy as their counterparts across the hall. Disquiet began to spread among the medical staff. During the days following the first inoculation, wisecracks about the volunteers’ contrarian constitutions had been commonplace—but when the second group often also defied infection, the jokes disappeared. Talk among the junior medical staff avoided the topic of failure, which remained foremost in everyone’s minds. The resultant dinner conversations about Europe and bridge made Lydia feel as if she had been deposited into a drawing room occupied by vacationing pensioners.

Forty-eight hours following the second inoculation, Dr. Gold began dining in his office, enabling Percival Cole—whom Lydia suspected found communal dining an unwelcome distraction—to take his meals in the lab. This reduced poor Cynthia Foley to sitting with
Bertram Peterson. The junior table could have accommodated one extra diner but not two and the circular tables did not lend themselves to being pushed together—though Lydia suspected that even had the tables’ geometries been more accommodating, pride would have prevented their merger. The sight of Nurse Foley soldiering through meals with the doctor left Lydia feeling that, for once, she might possess the more enviable position.

Even filled with healthy men, two quarantine rooms required constant maintenance. Whatever time was not taken up by the logistics of meals and temperature readings was spent assisting with throat cultures and blood samples, leaving less time in which Lydia was tempted to visit the east ward, where she continued to spend far more time than she knew was proper. She doubted Foley was blind to her habits, but so long as the nurse did not see fit to mention it, Lydia was content to pretend she was the embodiment of the impartial professional. For their part, Harry, George, and the rest were careful to refrain from calling her “Nursie Lydia” in the presence of Foley or the other medical personnel.

Then, on the fifth afternoon of the east ward’s confinement, Lydia arrived to ten empty beds. This had happened once before: on hearing her approaching footsteps, the east warders had hidden beneath their beds or inside the bathroom. If Harry Able had not attempted to fit under his bed, the deserted ward would have come as more of a shock. Instead, Lydia had distributed meals to the empty beds with barely a hitch in her stride, a reaction that profited those in the ward who had wagered on her sangfroid.

“Olly olly oxen free!” Lydia called into the ward on finding it deserted a second time. But the men did not appear. It was not mealtime and the next temperature reading was ninety minutes away. The excuse for her visit was a fresh towel that no one had expressly requested—in truth she wanted to see who was ahead in the perennial checkers match between Frank and Tony. Though she never placed any actual bets with Billy, the ward’s unofficial bookie, she had privately predicted she would find Frank up by three games.

“Frank?” she called. “Georgie?” The nightstands beside the vacant beds were bare and the few pictures that had been affixed to the walls had been removed. Then she heard Nurse Foley’s footsteps behind her.

“Where are they?” Lydia demanded.

“The first study ended just before lunch,” the nurse replied. “Assuming they’re not still at the mess hall, the men are most likely in the barracks.”

“It’s just that I was surprised to find the room empty,” Lydia stammered. “I expected I would be asked to help when the time came.”

“It happened rather suddenly,” Foley explained. “Joseph had been in communication with the Chelsea Naval Base for days trying to get the necessary transfer permissions and when they came through this morning there was no time to waste. He left on a special ferry just before lunch. Even Dr. Peterson is rather excited about the whole thing.”

“Are we getting more volunteers?” Lydia asked.

“Heavens no,” the nurse replied, “though there are more than a few people around here who would be thrilled to trade ours in for new ones. The Chelsea
Naval Base patients will be enabling the direct transmission study. Joseph has high hopes. According to him, our first two tests here were pro forma; this is the test that will yield the real results. I’ll need your help now, of course, in preparing the room for the next group.”

She turned to go but stopped before she reached the door.

“You know, Lydia,” she added, “your dedication is admirable but you mustn’t become too attached. I think perhaps it was for the best that Joseph and I supervised the men’s return to their barracks without you.”