Wickett's Remedy (31 page)

The Jubilee is honoring more than a soda—it is honoring a man. Though Quentin Driscoll has not been one of Bostons leading lights for many years, both he and the soda that carries his name live on. Quentin Driscoll now abides in a South Boston retirement home, where he has been largely forgotten by the city to which he has given so much. It would mean a great deal to me personally if you were to join him for the Jubilee. He is three years shy of his hundredth birthday and has, of late, become agitated. It is my heartfelt belief that it would bring him great peace to be in the presence of a man who will soon be in the presence of the Pope.

Thank you.

Very Sincerely,
Ralph Finnister

T
he days prefacing the test’s official commencement served to confirm that Dr. Gold had procured viable test specimens. Thirty men were subjected to daily pokes and proddings with throat swabs, thermometers, and stethoscopes to produce baseline measurements of health against which flu infection could be charted. The examination room in which this occurred was a brightly lit, windowless space whose white tiled walls reminded Lydia of the bathhouse at City Point, an association confounded by the sight of Assistant Surgeon Percival Cole heating a flask of amber liquid over a small flame and looking as content as Mrs. Kilkenny at the kitchen stove.

“That looks like soup,” Lydia offered once the two had exchanged good mornings. Because Cole was the only assistant surgeon who ate with Nurse Foley at the senior medical staff table, Lydia knew little about him beyond his name—but his manner had already distinguished him from the junior staff she dined with. The other assistant surgeons made her feel like a child brought before a table of adults at a dinner party: they tendered her exaggerated greetings and then treated
her as if she were invisible. In their brief interactions thus far, Cole had treated her no differently than anyone else.

“It
is
soup,” Cole affirmed, his eyes catching hers before returning to the task at hand. Everything about Cole eschewed wasted motion, from his precisely parted hair to the efficiency with which he wielded the tongs that held the flask above the flame. “I’m creating an agar culture medium for our throat samples. I wouldn’t personally recommend it, but bacteria quite enjoy it.”

Lydia drew closer. Cole was not the sort of person to invite notice, but notice—once paid—revealed a man whose mien matched his manner. He was proportionate rather than handsome, every aspect of his person optimized to meet its obligations. The hand preparing the broth had a square palm with fingers that seemed neither long nor short and which ended in clean, square fingertips. It seemed an ideal doctor’s hand, specially designed for the handling of medical instruments and the examination of wounds.

“Nurse Foley tells me you lack clinical experience,” he said in a way that did not make Lydia feel the need to apologize. “The preparatory examinations we’ll be conducting here should provide a good opportunity for observation and basic skill acquisition. You can start by bringing me that tray of petri dishes.” Wordlessly, she brought him the empty glass dishes and watched as he poured equal amounts of amber liquid into each one without spilling a drop.

“Making agar plates is wonderfully relaxing,” he said, his calm voice speaking in congress with the
methodical motion of his hands. Lydia realized she was witnessing the medical equivalent of knitting.

Any ambitions Cole might have instilled with his agar plates were tempered by the appearance of Nurse Foley, who informed Lydia that her examination room duties would be limited to recording temperatures and pulse rates in the medical log, an undemanding task that represented the upper bound of Nurse Foley’s estimation of her. Lydia hoped through close observation to improve her standing, and in the meantime vowed to act as engaged as possible for a person performing a task just as easily accomplished by her youngest brother.

Awaiting the volunteers, Lydia felt the same reflexive excitement as she had anticipating the opening of Gilchrist’s doors each morning. Though she was standing behind a ledger now and not a sales counter, the names recorded there might as easily have belonged to her regular customers, men from whom she had collected an entirely different set of vital statistics. Watching Nurse Foley arranging a set of throat swabs was not so different from watching the Men’s Department manager put the finishing touches on a floor display. In this way, Lydia brought familiarity to Gallups.

The men arrived in groups often in the company of a blue uniformed escort who, having delivered his charges, leaned against the laboratory door lighting cigarettes and then picking his teeth and fingernails with each spent match. Nurse Foley read off each man’s name as he entered and wished him a good morning, to which Lydia added her own greeting in quiet echo. The fellow who yesterday had called her
part-angel was second in the alphabetized line, which—according to her ledger—meant she could start thinking of him as Frank Bentley and not as the man whose gray uniform pinched his shoulders.

“Hello again,” he said in lieu of tipping an invisible hat. He turned to the fellow behind him—a carefully groomed man whom her ledger informed her was Tony Cataldo. “She’s the one who got me into trouble yesterday.”

“I was there,” Cataldo reminded him. “And I recall it being Shaugnessy who got himself bawled out and not you. You don’t get in half the trouble you deserve.”

“Ignore him,” Bentley advised Lydia with a smile before filing past her into the room.

As the rest of the group entered, Lydia allied some aspect of each fellow in line with the corresponding name on her list—a Gilchrist memory trick that had served her well in her counter girl days. After Tony Cataldo came George Denson, who had the broad back of an iceman and whom Lydia could imagine stoking the furnace in a ship’s belly, his face dark with soot. Theodore Evert was slender and compact, seemingly meant for a tall-masted navy of ships with crow’s nests perched above massive white sails. The two came in talking but fell silent at the sight of Lydia and Nurse Foley. They offered each a formal “Hello Ma’am,” before slipping back into conversation. Among these men, Lydia was no less a nurse than Cynthia Foley.

After recording a volunteer’s temperature, Lydia led him to Assistant Surgeon Cole to have his throat swabbed. Agar plates received the products of these swabbings in order to grow whatever bacteria had been
collected, results Cole promised to show Lydia as soon as there was anything to see. Men awaiting Foley’s thermometer or those already swabbed by Cole were left to their own devices, a situation that unexpectedly re-allied the examination room with the City Point bathhouse. The voices reflecting off the white tiled walls could have belonged just as easily to Southie’s off-duty drill-press operators and assembly-line workers making the most of a warm summer Sunday. Lydia did not know when her homesickness was greater: in this sound’s presence or after the men were gone. In the silence of the empty, white tiled room, she picked up the spent matches littering the doorway, these remnants of the escort’s boredom the only evidence that anyone had been there at all.

Homesickness and mourning were so inexorably linked that Lydia was never certain where one ended and the other began. Though she was never so susceptible to tears as her first day on Gallups, she never knew when or where grief for her brother would find her. In the weeks following Henry’s death Lydia had seen him everywhere—striding past the D Street flat, boarding a streetcar, driving a hansom cab, or drinking a pint on the corner. The smallest resemblance between a stranger and her dead husband could spark the transformation. Here on Gallups, an easy way of walking, a head held at a particular angle, or a broad-shouldered silhouette would combine with her mourning to achieve a fleeting alchemy: for a moment Michael would be standing before her or walking just ahead. Then the moment would pass and the figure would revert to a man in a gray uniform, making the most of the freedom allowed him before the commencement of tests and quarantine.

From over one hundred aspiring inmates, Dr. Gold had selected the thirty whose infractions were so minor they would have earned little more than a fine from a civilian court. Though several among the medical staff would have preferred more stringent restrictions on the volunteers, Lydia did not begrudge the men their short-lived freedom of movement. But more than once, observing a group from a distance or hearing their laughter caused her heart to beat so fiercely that her chest ached. If grief struck while Lydia was walking, she would stumble. If someone was speaking to her, their lips would continue to move but the sound of their voice would cease. The world would dim and Lydia would feel her brother’s absence as keenly as if her chest had been opened.

Only in the margins of her letters home, in invisible ink, did she dare imagine writing:
Do you see him too? On the street, in the house, created from a stranger or from no one at all?
According to her mother, D Street was slowly regaining its balance. Tom was venturing outdoors each day and walking a little farther down the block, Malachy had returned to work, and Cora was helping to look after his girls in the daytime. Not wanting to sully her mother’s reports of cautious recovery with the taint of her own ghosts, Lydia kept her visions of Michael to herself.

C’mere Lucky, you got some kinda bug sitting on your lip.

Leave it, that’s my moustache!

Some moustache, Harris. Looks like a bug.

Give it time, I just got started on it.

You been trying to grow that thing for as long as Riley ain’t been shaving an he’s practically got himself a beard.

Yeah, well, my hairs need more time to grow on account of that they’re blond.

That so? Hey Lombardo! Lucky here says blond hairs takes longer than brown ones! That your professional opinion?

My professional opinion says that Lucky’s all wet.

Oh yeah, what d’you know anyways? What’s an Italian barber know from blond hair?

Who’s up for baseball tomorrow? I saw a ball and bat in a supply closet.

What are you, cracked? They’re starting tomorrow!

Sure, but they’re only using ten at a time. The rest of us might as well enjoy ourselves, ‘specially if it’s nice weather.

I’m in.

Naw, I bet they take you, Frankie. I bet they start at the front of the alphabet.

You think that might get me out of here sooner?

I don’t think nothing. Safer that way. Give it a try, Bentley. You gotta stop dwellin’ on things you can’t control.