Wickett's Remedy (13 page)

When he was alive, it was easier to be angry at you than at him. Now I am only angry at myself. Forgive me, if you can. Even if you can’t, please know that I wish you well.

Beside the letter was a fifty-dollar bill. Even when she had worked at Gilchrist’s Lydia had never seen anything larger than a twenty. The bill was crisp and unlined. It felt heavy in her hand and smelled slightly bitter. Fronting the fifty was a portrait of Ulysses S. Grant. On its back, rising from the middle of the ocean, was a picture of a woman named Panama.

Lydia opened the box and removed Henry’s favorite white collarless shirt, the one with a tea stain on the right sleeve. On top of the box, Lydia left the fifty-dollar bill and several pieces of Remedy correspondence. “Dear Mrs. Wickett,” she wrote in reply, “I am angry too, but at everyone and no one all at once. I am leaving some letters for you. They were written by people your son made happy. Maybe they can give you some happiness in return.”

The two suitcases and the handbag were not too much to carry. After she locked the flat she slipped the key under the door. The hallway did not smell like the fiat. The hallway smelled like strangers.

She had been in Southie six weeks when, by a stroke of good fortune, the need for a part-time counter girl arose at Gorin’s and a neighbor’s cousin’s brother-in-law was persuaded to offer her the position. Though Lydia was not ungrateful, the opportunity seemed simply another of her mother’s bowls of soup that she knew she ought to eat while it was still warm. With the
job’s commencement it seemed possible time had reversed. Once again she found herself rising with the sound of the drays to assume the starched, white shirtwaist of the shopgirl; once again she took breakfast at her mother’s table, careful not to spill jelly on her sleeve—but this was an illusion impossible to sustain. With its airy rooms, ample dimensions, and up-to-date furnishings the Somerset had permanently altered Lydia’s sense of comfort. Now the small rooms and sturdy furniture of her childhood were suffocating. The space created by Michael boarding at Mrs. Flynn’s had been more than taken up by Tom, James, and John—all of whom had grown far too much in her absence still to be considered little brothers. On her return to D Street, a sheet was hung between the front room and kitchen to allow Thomas, James, and John privacy as they dressed. The addition left Lydia feeling like she had devolved from the sister who had once bathed them to a spinster aunt. In retrospect she realized her underestimation, among all the Somerset flat’s amenities, of its hallway. Nowhere in Southie was a room permitted the sole, luxurious purpose of leading to other rooms.

Outside the D Street flat every aspect of Lydia’s person proclaimed her a stranger. Liddie Kilkenny had been a D Street girl but Lydia Wickett just as certainly had been born across the bridge. Lydia Wickett pinned her hair in far too elaborate a style for a Southie girl; Lydia Wickett did not put her elbows on the table at employee lunch; and Lydia Wickett’s accent was certainly not Irish. When she attempted to resume the Southie inflections after so many years of assiduous
correction, she felt as if a stranger’s tongue had been sewn into her mouth. Shopkeepers called her Madam instead of Dearie; conversations ceased when she neared; children froze as she walked through their midst, their games resuming only once she had passed; and at Gorin’s the shopgirls took her for a stool pigeon and remained guarded. Liddie Kilkenny had known this brand of distrust. She had felt it toward the society women who were driven down West Broadway for a taste of “local color,” as well as toward the occasional Harvard boys who ventured across the bridge for an evening’s diversion. Liddie had rolled her eyes at these interlopers. She had spoken with a brogue so exaggerated she knew she would not be understood and pointed them opposite their desired direction. Then, once they had gone, she had laughed at their receding backs while secretly longing to follow them across the Channel.

Mornings, on her way to work, she half expected to encounter this younger self, a girl with thick braids down her back wearing a carefully mended yellow dress, who would dash past as though Lydia were invisible. At times she thought she spied this girl in the afternoon gaggle of unfamiliar children who now laid claim to Southie’s stoops and curbs, but every girl who caught Lydia’s eye invariably revealed a face as strange as any other. In each instance Lydia was grateful to have been spared a meeting: she would have felt duty-bound to offer advice but was not sure whether to warn Liddie Kilkenny never to leave Southie or never to return.

In the wake of her own return, Southie’s prodigal daughter quickly learned that she was expected to be
mourning a soldier. A country at war anticipated losses from battlefields, not sickbeds. Correcting the impressions of the well-intentioned became so tiresome Lydia abridged her period of public mourning, deciding she could mourn Henry better without the black armband that elicited constant requests for her husband’s rank and regiment. People were not so much unsympathetic as disappointed at her answer. It was far more fashionable to die in a trench than of the flu, and it was tempting to lie. If she became a war widow, then Henry became a hero. Heroism and journalism had been alike enough in Henry’s mind that a soldier’s death overseas was a postmortem gift she was tempted to give him. Instead she replaced her black armband with a personal disregard for the Armed Forces, which she privately held responsible for Henry’s demise—for had her husband been permitted to enlist, he would have been across the ocean from the flu that struck Boston that spring. In observance of her antipathy, Lydia refrained from discussions on the progress of the American Expeditionary Force and refused to take sides in her brothers’ ongoing debate as to the relative superiority of the Navy or Air Service.

Southie did all it could to foil her boycott. Little boys played soldier, their sparrow chests thrust out in single file as they pounded the soles of their hand-me-down shoes into the sidewalks. Every woman and girl occupied her idle moments with the knitting of sweaters, mufflers, or socks in khaki or gray four-ply Number Ten wool for donation to the Red Cross. Newspapers were particular enemies. Lydia was so accustomed to Henry’s editorial revisions that the sight of an unmarked broadsheet was a provocation to grief.
She hated being at the mercy of such a commonplace object—she deserved to mourn when and where she pleased. She began avoiding street corners commandeered by newspaper boys and asked her father not to leave his copy of the afternoon edition in the front room.

Newspapers had the added detriment of reminding her of the Remedy. At Henry’s death, the Wickett’s advertisement had been paid through the end of the month. Once it lapsed, the face of the girl with Lydia’s nose and Henry’s eyes disappeared from the pages of the
Herald.
In spite of her original misgivings, Lydia had grown fond of that small face. Given a choice, she would have preferred to prolong its worldly life, but the best she could hope for was to provide it a dignified end.

The beginning of that end did not commence until her dread of a post office box clotted with letters was overshadowed by visions of a box whose contents had been repossessed by the postmaster. Lydia used one of her days off from Gorin’s to return to Post Office Square. She donned an old dress plainer than her West end wardrobe and waited until midafternoon to catch the streetcar, in order to arrive when she would be least likely to encounter familiar faces. Approaching the building, she refused her lips their accustomed Hail Mary. Despite these attempts to exorcise her old ways, her habitual excitement shadowed her up the post office stairs. Even now, the familiar sensation of pushing open the heavy wooden door fired one last dumb yellow flare of reflexive anticipation through her limbs. This unhappy trip was her most fruitful, yielding up almost twenty envelopes bearing her husband’s name.

Alone in her mother’s kitchen, Lydia drafted twenty identical notes on the backs of twenty unused Remedy labels. After the fifth note her hand no longer shook; after the tenth she was no longer crying; and by the eighteenth she was not thinking of the words at all. Each unopened letter was sealed with one of Lydia’s notes into a new envelope addressed to its original sender. As she worked, she trained her eyes on the return addresses in the upper left-hand corners to spare herself the recurrent shock of seeing Henry’s name.

She had utterly forgotten about Henry’s business partner until she spotted an envelope from Mr. Driscoll. Though she would have preferred to treat Mr. Driscoll’s letter no differently than the others, she slit the envelope open. She generally opened an envelope along its length, but she found herself opening this one along its width. Only as she withdrew the letter from this smaller opening did she recognize it as Henry’s habit. Mr. Driscoll’s writing was compact and clear, reminding her of a department store circular. Henry had missed their monthly meeting. Mr. Driscoll hoped all was well and suggested that Henry propose an alternate date.

She looked back over the letter. On the day of his scheduled meeting with Mr. Driscoll, Henry had been almost three weeks dead. Lydia wondered if such a dire possibility had entered Mr. Driscoll’s thoughts as he had waited. She wondered if Mr. Driscoll had been outdoors or indoors, if he had read to pass the time, how long he had waited before giving up, and if aggravation or worry had won the day. She could not tolerate the notion that Henry might have been a cause for annoyance after death had robbed him of the ability to
defend or redeem himself. She wrote to Mr. Driscoll and proposed a meeting.

She arranged to meet him at a restaurant she knew from her Gilchrist days but had never patronized, which was therefore safe from old memories. She did not know if arriving early would give her the chance to collect herself or if anticipation might cause her undoing, but because the thought of Mr. Driscoll being kept waiting a second time was unbearable, she arrived at the restaurant thirty minutes in advance of the agreed-upon time.

Of her nice dresses, only two were not linked to specific memories of Henry. Of those, only one was appropriate for spring, which simplified the issue of her costume, a convenience that felt like a godsend.

Having only ever admired its elegant, if aging, exterior in her Gilchrist days, Lydia was surprised to discover the restaurant she had chosen was a favorite of clerks. They sat on short-legged stools aligned before a narrow counter and at small, close-set tables beneath ceiling fans that wobbled on disreputable axes. They wore interchangeable dark suits several seasons old, their collars softened by sweat. Their ties, having loosened over the course of the morning, had not been reknotted and now hung broken below the knobs of their Adam’s apples. Despite the novelty of her gender and the misplaced prosperity of her West end dress, not one gave Lydia a second glance. This caused her to wonder, not for the first time, if grief exuded an odor as undetectable to its sufferer as the tang of one’s own body, a smell that whether acrid or cloying kept others away.

Seemingly unnoticed, Lydia selected a table in the far corner—the only one not within range of a fan’s
erratic trajectory. She turned her chair to face the door. Henry had only ever described his business partner as a youngish “go-getter,” and she worried she would not recognize him, but at precisely the scheduled time, a man entered the restaurant’s door wearing the prearranged yellow carnation in his lapel and projecting an air of confidence absent from the hunched men hurriedly ingesting the daily special.

Of Henry’s age, though taller and more robust, Mr. Driscoll’s features connoted a specifically non-patrician strain of good breeding. In his pressed suit and starched collar, Mr. Driscoll looked every inch the young businessman, but he had the broad hands and handsome brow of a foreman or tradesman. Something about Driscoll’s face was distinctly and uniquely American—a melding of features suggestive of farflung forebears, united through the auspices of immigration. Lydia did not need to speak to Mr. Driscoll to understand why Henry had accepted him as his business partner: optimism was as natural to him as breath.

“Mrs. Wickett,” he said, extending his hand. “I was shocked by the news. Please accept my condolences. I knew that something had to be wrong when Henry missed our meeting, but I never suspected—” Mr. Driscoll shook his head.

“Thank you,” she answered as she stood to shake his hand. She was impressed by the firmness of his grip. In her experience a fellow’s handshake underwent a marked dilution when its recipient was wearing a dress. “I’m sorry not to have informed you earlier or invited you to the funeral,” she apologized. “My husband’s death was completely unexpected and to be
honest, I’d forgotten your existence until I saw your name on that letter.”

Mr. Driscoll sat opposite her. She was gratified the clerks had taken no more notice of his entrance than her own: it meant that grief was not to blame. “There’s no need to apologize,” Mr. Driscoll assured her. “I’m just glad my letter reached the post office before you did. I hope it doesn’t sound too strange, but I’m pleased to meet you. Henry said he was the voice of Wickett’s but that you were its body and soul. I’d hoped we’d meet one day—but not like this.”