Wickett's Remedy (10 page)

But ladies and gentlemen, we find ourselves faced with a new and even deadlier scourge, a scourge that threatens not only our lives but our country, and that is the scourge of War. As typhus is a disease of the body, so War is a disease of nations. Like any disease, it is spread by a germ. It is no accident that those same four letters spell the name of our enemy, ladies and gentlemen.
Germany.
Mile by mile, the
Germ
-man line has been snaking its way westward, an infection of continental proportions. Many a noble soldier has fallen and many still fight in their attempt to keep this infection at bay.

The good men and women of Europe have turned to us for help in defeating this deadly scourge and we have answered their call. We have done so not only because it is right, but because it is crucial. This disease is not limited to Europe, ladies and gentlemen. This disease could easily cast its shadow across the Atlantic to reach our very shores. But sending our soldiers is not enough. It is up to you, ladies and gentlemen, to provide the force for an American vaccine against
Germany.
Only by putting our national wealth in the service of this great cause can we make it strong.

It is vital that you support the Liberty Loan. It is our duty as a healthy, modern nation to hurry to the War Front with every resource that our two hundred and fifty billion in national wealth can command. We need every cent of these billions not only to stave off
further infection, but to reclaim the health of Europe and to defeat the
Germ
-man. Kaiser, once and for all. Only if we do our duty, ladies and gentlemen, and support the Liberty Loan, can the disease of War be banished forever into the history books. Buy bonds now so that in the future you can say that you did your part to render the dread disease of War obsolete.

Now turn your attention to City Hall Plaza and Government Center. As you walk the stately brick plaza, try to imagine you are walking instead on a brightly lit stage, surrounded by beautiful young performers. It’s not as big a stretch as you might think: what is now City Hall Plaza was once part of Scollay Square, an area chockablock with theaters featuring everything from vaudeville to movies to burlesque shows to boxing. And prime among these entertainments was the
QD Follies.

QD Soda became a national sensation thanks, in large part, to the first “QD Cutie,” Sara Lampe, who also became the first Mrs. Quentin Driscoll and whose beautiful voice turned “I’m Just a QD Cutie” into a national hit. In 1926, with Sara pregnant, Quentin picked for his next “Cutie” a young singer from Newton named—Cara Blaine. It is often forgotten that one of our most beloved Hollywood stars got her start as the spokesmodel for one of our most beloved soft drinks!

In 1931—the year of the tragic boating accident that killed Sara and the couple’s young son, Ralph—a heartbroken Quentin Driscoll lowered the curtain on the QD
Follies. Though this spelled the sad end of the QD Cutie, it marked the beginning of a new era in entertainment. Stars from Clyde Hanley to George Kent got their start on
QD Comedy Hour
, one of the nation’s most popular and long-running radio variety programs. In 1949 the
QD Comedy Hour
made a brief foray into television, but when the show’s longtime host, Preston “Hewey” Hughes, died of a sudden heart attack during a live broadcast, the show was unable to survive him.

By the 1960s, the Scollay’s heyday was long past and the area was rife with drugs and crime. In a sweeping attempt to revitalize the area, the Boston Redevelopment Authority razed Scollay Square to make way for the very complex in which you now stand. Though the
QD Follies
is just a memory, the soda it celebrated lives on.

H
ours would pass with no sign Lydia lived in a country at war. War had not altered the clang of the alarm clock, nor the difficulty of brushing out her hair, nor the way the stove burner burst into blue flame beneath the tea kettle. There were still dishes to clean and floors to mop and dusting to be done. After a year of war it seemed the air ought to have grown thicker or acquired a different smell; water ought to have taken longer to boil and made dirt and dust more difficult to banish from beneath furniture or inside corners. She was grateful for Wheatless Mondays, Meatless Tuesdays, and Porkless Saturdays: these, at least, affirmed the change in the world.

Outside the flat, the war’s progress was more readily apparent. With her Liberty Bond button affixed to her coat she felt that the city was filled with friends—strangers would nod and smile, pointing meaningfully to their own buttons as they passed. Billboards reminded her to conserve electricity and coal; street corner paperboys hawked the news as though they were making and not just reading the headlines. She was most fond of the changes the war had wrought on Scollay Square, where the profusion of flags adorning
the theaters and streetcars lent the place a carnival atmosphere even in midday. Beginning in the afternoon and carrying into the evening, Scollay would fill with uniformed men, their crisp haircuts and brass voices jumping the wattage of the marquee lights. Scollay embraced these men with the smell of its roasted peanuts and the bravado of its vaudeville hucksters, with cobbles worn flat and with posters promising never-before-seen wonders. These men would crowd before the stage door to the Old Howard to catch a glimpse of one of Billy Watsons Orientals. They would fidget in line at Joe and Nemo’s where a quarter and their uniform would buy them two victory dogs, a coffee, and a slice of apple pie. While Lydia would never have allowed herself to accompany these bright-eyed boys who smelled of sweat and shoe polish and cheap cologne, her stomach fluttered at their proffered invitations; the Sunday roto and the newsreels teemed with pictures of soldiers in training and boarding ships and marching in formation. Being addressed by such men was the closest she had come to meeting movie stars. Some girls asked for autographs but Lydia thought this common. She was content merely to smile in their direction.

Having been denied his own trip overseas, Henry purchased a four-foot-by-three-foot map of the war zones, upon which he charted troop movements with colored pushpins. Black pushpins represented the German soldiers, red the French and English, white the Belgian, and blue the American Expeditionary Forces. Until beholding Henry’s map, Lydia’s conception of the war had been provincial. She had not appreciated the war’s breadth and scope, the brute numbers of men
involved—men fighting not only in Europe, but in Arabia and Palestine, places as seemingly distant as the moon itself!

In the evening Lydia would read aloud the pertinent articles from the afternoon edition while Henry adjusted his pushpins accordingly, moving his troops east or west, north or south, to reflect the changing military landscape. Within weeks of its purchase the map became so riddled with holes that its pockmarked terrain seemed to her a fair approximation of the battlefields she and Henry projected on it nightly. Sitting with Henry, her voice enunciating the strange place names of European towns while her husband’s hands took in the width and breadth of a continent, the newspaper stories no longer felt distant or irrelevant. The war felt thrillingly close.

War had little effect on sales of Wickett’s Remedy, which continued to provide a meager income and a rich supply of pen pals. When one of Henry’s newest correspondents proposed himself as a business partner, Lydia assumed Henry would rid himself of at least one epistolary freeloader, but to her shock he expressed interest in the notion. Apparently this Quentin Driscoll fellow was taken with the flavor of Wickett’s and thought it would hold its own on pharmacy shelves. In exchange for permission to be Wickett’s exclusive store representative, he would share half his profits.

Lydia was against it. Wickett’s, she reminded Henry, was not a medicine. But Henry countered that if Wickett’s was sold in pharmacies, a purchaser needed only to send him their receipt in order to receive a letter. If the fellow was right about Wickett’s chances in the pharmacy, he coaxed, this might be the opportunity
they had been waiting for. Lydia was skeptical, but she could not bring herself to oppose the prospect of Henry’s liberation from the import trade. She agreed they could give Quentin Driscoll a try.

Meanwhile, Henry continued to work for his father and, in lieu of frontline reporting, funneled his thwarted ambition into his Wickett’s correspondence. “Stay Healthy for the Boys” became his motto, which he penned in red ink across the back of each sealed envelope. He attributed April’s marked increase in business to his new approach, but Lydia reasoned the more likely cause was the appearance in Boston of an unseasonable flu. She was loathe to confess her suspicion to Henry as she did not wish to dampen his fire: since he had been refused a uniform, his letters and their subsequent recitations had taken on a fierce energy whose spirit recalled the long-lost author of her love letters.

Henry’s renewed pride in his missives was evinced by his reading manner. Calling Lydia to the settee, he would mount a straight-backed chair and declaim to her as if she were a crowd of hundreds. His body would sway, his free arm would gesticulate as though conducting an orchestra—but at the eye of this oratorical storm, the hand holding the letter would remain perfectly still. Lydia found her husband’s speeches as rousing as the ones she heard in Adams Square and began dressing for his performances, each evening after dinner changing into his favorite blue tea gown. Henry, in kind, adopted a naval cap he had found in an empty seat at the Olympia after a screening of
Shoulder Arms.
Lydia assured Henry the hat became him when in truth it was slightly large for his head and occasionally flew off when his recitations became fervent—but
while the hat remained in place Lydia enjoyed the illusion she was being addressed by a sailor.

“We each one of us embody our own vital American Expeditionary Force!” Henry declaimed. “An Army resides in our muscles, a Navy in our blood, and an Air Service in our lungs. As the health of Europe depends upon the efforts of the national A.E.E, so too does the health of our country depend upon the efforts of our internal A.E.E We must make it our personal duty to rally this force to action with no less strength and courage than if we were each General Pershing himself!”

He spoke with such passion that Lydia could practically feel the power of the country pounding through her blood, as if miniature American soldiers were fighting inside her on her behalf; so when Henry caught a cold, Lydia felt as violated as though the Hun had invaded Boston itself.