Wickett's Remedy (7 page)

“So you took up the matter with him,” she confirmed, as though such a thing were not wholly revolutionary.

Henry hesitated. When he did speak his words came quickly. “We had a bit of an argument then and things became rather unpleasant—but it all worked out in the end.”

Lydia waited. “And?”

“And,” Henry confirmed. “And—” He looked toward her and then away again. “Starting tomorrow, and until the Remedy is on its feet, I’m to clerk at Father’s office.”

“But you hate your father’s business!” she protested. “You’ve told me countless times of the tedium of the import industry!”

“It’s only temporary, only until the Remedy gets on its feet.” He smiled weakly, and she realized that no revolution—whether conducted from a battlefield or a chaise lounge—came without casualties. “It will provide us an income in the interim, and some of what I do at the office I’ll be able to apply to our work with the Remedy.”

“I can work,” she offered quietly, avoiding her husband’s face as she spoke. In the afterglow of their wedding she had shared Henry’s view that she had been spared a weary life of gainful employment, but a household was tedious in its agreeability: a rug required no persuasion to be beaten, a dish did not need coaxing to try on a coat of soap. Lately she had been assigning to her housework the names of Gilchrist customers, so that waxing the floor turned into a dialogue with Mr. Tanner on the relative merits of British and French tailoring, and cleaning the stove became an exercise in selling a shirt to Mr. Ludlow. “It would be easy to find a store that would take me,” she shrugged in an attempt to counter the excitement that had crept into her voice. She would enjoy working again, at least part-time; at least until a baby came.

Henry shook his head. She could not tell if his disappointment lay with her or with their new circumstance.
“I knew you would offer to find employment.” He sighed. “But if you do return to work, it ought not to be with any store.”

For one horrifying instant, she pictured herself installed in the Wickett household, imprisoned within a black dress and a white apron.

“You may have grave reservations about the Remedy’s prospects,” Henry continued, “but you spent four years on a sales floor. Nothing I could read in a book would equal that experience.”

“But Henry,” she objected, “what would you have me do? I’m a counter girl, not a doctor or a pharmacist.”

“That doesn’t matter,” he insisted. “You know how to make something appeal to a customer; you know the little tricks that make a product catch a person’s eye.”

“I sold shirts,” she reminded him.

“And you were brilliant at it,” he pressed. “Lydia, I need you to invent Wickett’s Remedy. The bottle, the label, the liquid inside. If people aren’t attracted to Wickett’s to begin with, then my letters haven’t got a chance. I need you to convince customers to try their first bottle.”

She could feel her pulse in her neck. He was right; this was something she could do. Her mind began assembling a list of elements to consider, her memory recalling the various bottles that had, at one time or another, claimed her family’s allegiance.

“I suppose I could manage a label pretty well,” she conceded, “but Henry, you can’t ask me to invent a medicine.”

“No,” he agreed. “You’ll do nothing of the sort. Wickett’s Remedy will not purport to cure yellow fever, or pneumonia, or even a simple headache, because
the illnesses I propose to treat have no foothold in the body. Your tonic is to be an accompaniment to the true medicine of my letters, without any power of its own save for the power of suggestion. What you concoct I leave completely up to you. If you wish, it can be a simple sugar syrup.”

When he paused, she could tell he wanted her assent, or at least an encouraging smile, but she had been a salesgirl, not an actress. If she opened her mouth now it would only be to say that he was asking too much. Henry jerked his chin up and down. It was the sort of quick, sharp nod given in response to bad news. She turned toward the door. There was housework to do and supper to cook.

“Lydia,” he called. His voice was softer now. “Whether or not Wickett’s succeeds may be beyond our control,” he conceded, “but without you I know it is absolutely certain to fail.” She turned to face her husband. Henry was standing beside his chair, one hand resting on his desk as if for support. “Please. Will you help me?”

He had asked for her companionship and he had asked for her hand, but never before had he asked for her help. In the silence she examined him with a scrutiny previously only accorded her in his sleep. She was shocked by how well she knew his face. There was his nose, narrow and slightly off center, its subtle curve to the right only noticeable when observed straight on. There were his eyelashes, longer than she had ever seen on a man, which tempted her to brush her fingertips along their tips as one would against the wing of a captive butterfly. A year ago this face had belonged to a stranger, and now it beheld her as though she were all
that mattered in the world. She was struck by the ease with which she could wound the man. She could already taste the strange, sharp sweetness of such an effortless victory. Then the feeling passed. The face of the man sitting at the desk once again became the face of her husband. His vulnerability became hers; his features became her own.

“Of course I will help you,” she said.

For the next stop on our tour, walk to the northwestern edge of City Hall Plaza, at the corner of Cambridge and Sudbury streets. Imagine a bustling intersection, with an impressive theater on the right and stores on all sides. Until 1960, you wouldn’t have had to use your imagination to see Bowdoin Square, once part of Boston’s old West End, which in 1894 witnessed the birth of one of its favorite sons, Quentin Driscoll. It was here where he first worked behind a soda counter—and here where he dreamed of a new soft drink.

There is not even a plaque where Quentin Driscoll’s childhood home once stood. In the name of urban renewal, this entire neighborhood of historic buildings and winding streets was demolished to make room for high-rise luxury apartment buildings. When the West End was destroyed, a crucial part of QD history was destroyed along with it.

T
he following words appeared in the newspaper two weeks after Henry reported for work at his father’s office:

The authority of crisp newsprint bestowed on the venture the aura of imminent success. Seeing the notice, Lydia could not help but feel that Henry would not be consigned to his father’s office for long.

In becoming a clerk Henry became a man divided, Monday through Friday manifesting the melancholy that had marred his medical school career but on Saturday emerging from the chrysalis of his unhappiness to engage in his work with the Remedy. The difference was striking enough that Lydia felt married to two men; and she privately vowed to do all she could to enable the timely replacement of the former with the latter.

By the time of the advertisement’s appearance in the paper, she had—per Henry’s request—invented both a Remedy recipe and a label. Of the two, only the recipe gave her trouble. She had wanted Wickett’s to taste different: interesting but not unpleasant, not too sweet but also not bitter. As a girl she had been subject to her mother’s faith in Jenson’s Indian Cure, which was administered for everything from headaches to bunions. She hated the taste and smell of Jenson’s which contained—in addition to other undiscernible unpleasantries—sage and not a small bit of alcohol, two ingredients she was determined not to include in her own creation.

After a week in which she experimented variously with salt, pepper, parsley, onion, lemon, and hickory root to no avail, the Remedy’s recipe came to her in a dream of her Granny K, whom Lydia had only ever known from the faded tintype her father had carried with him across the Atlantic. In Lydia’s dream, Granny K stood before the sod house where Lydia’s father had been born and patiently explained to her granddaughter what flavorings she ought to add and in what proportion. Lydia, who did not generally remember her dreams, was struck by her grandmother’s hands: their broad palms and strong fingers resembled her own. On waking, Lydia jotted down her grandmother’s instructions and purchased the proper ingredients, along with a pot large enough to cook ten bottles’ worth of Remedy at a time. That afternoon—feeling as though her own hands were being guided by her grandmother’s—she boiled up the first batch of Wickett’s.

From the moment Henry invested her with the task of designing the Wickett’s label, Lydia had known it
would be a pale blue shield depicting a girl with dark plaits clutching a flower blossom, topped by the words
WICKETT’S REMEDY
in bold, dark letters. She had assumed an artist would be needed for its execution, but to her surprise Henry not only lettered the label but drew the requisite portrait, emerging from his office only a few hours after she had submitted her design.

The picture came as a shock. In her mind, the girl on the Wickett’s label was one of those generic, soft-haired cherubs who graced cookie tins and cough syrup. Henry’s creation had Lydia’s rounded nose and his gentle eyes. Though her daydreams were filled with children who shared her and Henry’s features, seeing an actual picture caused her chest to ache. Her first instinct was to hide the girl’s portrait in her top dresser drawer with her letters from the worldly suitor who also had not succeeded from paper to flesh and blood.

After the first months of marriage, their shared silence on the topic of childlessness seemed to stem from the mutual sense that discussion would grant the subject unwanted substance. The appearance of such a picture after a year of fruitless, wordless efforts breached this tacit agreement. A different portrait would be better, one that did not take as its model their unrealized hopes. But when Lydia turned toward Henry to explain this, the yearning she saw there revealed the cruelty of such a request. He had created a child. And so, because she had to say something, she exclaimed that she had no idea she had married an artist. In answer, he explained that he had been embarrassed by his doodling until medical school, where to avoid wielding a scalpel he had diagrammed dissections for his lab mates and, in so doing, improved his technique. Thus
was the unspeakable topic opened and closed without either of them ever saying a word.