Wickett's Remedy (17 page)

“I won’t let you down, Sir!” I replied.

Quentin Driscoll rose from his desk and strode toward me. He placed his broad hand on my shoulder.

“Ralph,” he declared. Though I had been called that name all my life, I felt I was being christened anew. “It is a fine, fine name!”

In This Issue

A Very QD Christmas Page 3

The Collectible Christmas List Page 4

QD Christmas Recipes Page 5

T
he parade was not a week past when Malachy came back ill from the shipyard. Alice sickened a day later and Mrs. Feeney removed the children to her flat hoping to subdue the contagion, but each in turn took ill and was returned across the hall to what had become the family sickroom. News of the second floor’s fate spread through 28 D Street. The second-floor hallway was pronounced off-limits for indoor games and breaths were held while climbing the stair. A doctor was reluctantly summoned: according to him a virulent flu had started at the pier. His prescription of bed rest, food, salts of quinine, and aspirin cost Mrs. Feeney one dollar. Ever since Lydia could remember, her mother and Jennie Feeney had nursed one another’s families whenever sickness blazed through Southie, so when Lydia returned from Gorin’s to find no sign of her mother in the kitchen, she knew for certain Alice and her brood had grown worse.

In happier times the doors to the second-floor flats stood open, Alice’s children dashing between their apartment and their Gran’s as supper smells wafted from both kitchens. Now the doors were shut. A note written in Jennie Feeney’s careful hand was fastened to
her daughter’s door, and read: “QUARINTEEN! DO NOT GO IN!!” It was strange to think that only a few weeks prior, the same hallway had been used for dancing.

After a perfunctory knock, Lydia opened the door. The front room was dark and quiet, but toward the back she discerned low voices.

“Alice? Mrs. Feeney?” she called. “It’s me, Liddie, come to see if you’re needing anything.”

Alice’s flat was a testament to the life that would have been Lydia’s had Southie triumphed over life across the bridge: there was the couch and end table purchased on credit from McCormick’s Slightly Used Furnishings; there was the picture of the Virgin given Alice by the church Sisterhood on her marriage; there was the heirloom rocking chair, resembling almost exactly the one in which Lydia’s mother hoped to rock her own grandchildren. When the unfairness of Henry’s death still knocked the wind out of her, Lydia had sought comfort envisioning this version of life, which would have been hers had she laughed on receiving Henry’s first letter. But as she faced the trappings of this unchosen path, Lydia felt protective love for her handbag filled with letters, her suitcase of dresses, and all the memories that would not be hers if Alice’s flat was her own.

The air was stale and smelled of fitful sleep, reminding Lydia of long Southie winters when the windows were closed against the cold for weeks and the stove tinged everything gray. Opening the windows helped. As the cool outside air wafted in, she could practically hear the stifled apartment exhale. She thought she heard barking. Small packs of abandoned
dogs haunted the alleys behind butcher shops and trailed the water truck in summer. These strays were adopted by children, who surreptitiously left scraps on stoops. This dog was likely expecting one of Alice’s brood to feed it.

“Alice? Mrs. Feeney?” she repeated. “I hope you don’t mind—I’ve opened a few windows.”

“Liddie?” came her mother’s voice from the bedroom. “Be a dear and go fetch Jennie from across the hall.”

Her mother’s cheerful urgency was even more unsettling than the flat’s fetid air. Lydia dashed into the hallway and through the door to Jennie’s flat without bothering to knock. Mrs. Feeney was deep asleep, the circles under her eyes attesting to a string of wakeful nights, but at the touch of Lydia’s hand she snapped awake.

“My ma says to come,” Lydia explained. Jennie Feeney bolted from her bed and rushed to her daughter’s flat across the hall.

Alice and Malachy occupied the bed by the window. Patty, Meagan, and Brian shared the pallet on the floor. The bed frame was made of the same poor wood as the Kilkennys’, its blocky design perforated by knotholes. On the wall above Alice’s and Malachy’s heads hung the same Sacred Heart to which Lydia had directed her nightly prayers as a girl. That she had never entered this room before did not temper its familiarity: only the curtains, which were green gingham rather than white with lace trim, distinguished it from the one below.

The bedroom was even danker than the rest of the apartment. The air was dense with the smells of fever
sweat, phlegm, and unwashed sheets and seemed, by its very thickness, responsible for the prostration of its inhabitants. Whether sickness alone or a combination of poor health and poor light contributed to the family’s complexions, their skin reminded Lydia of potato broth, save for Brians lips—which were tinged blue, as though it were possible to be chilled in that stifling room. When Brian coughed, Lydia realized the barking she had heard earlier had not come from any stray dog.

Alice lay on her side, her brown hair pasted across her pallid neck. Malachy was barely distinguishable in his stillness from the bedding in which he lay, but when he coughed Lydia was able to discern his head facing the wall. Surely Alice’s original intention in lying on her side had been to watch over her children, but fever had reduced her gaze to a glazed stare. Occasionally during the fever epidemics of Lydia’s childhood, entire families had sickened. As a girl, her dread of purgatory and damnation had been matched by the fear of her mother falling ill.

On seeing her mother with Alice, Lydia became momentarily disembodied, moving back in time to observe herself in a different room, beside a different sickbed. In the dim light her mother could have been a younger woman, while Alice’s pallor and slim limbs could have been Henry’s. Then the woman before her once again became her mother, who was gently stroking her neighbor’s head.

“Jennie, she’s only gotten worse. We ought to send her and the little one to Carney,” Cora murmured like she was crooning a lullaby.

“Ooh, my poor Alice,” Jennie moaned, bending over her daughter.

“Get away, devil,” Alice croaked. What had initially looked like shivering was Alice’s crippled attempt to wrest her head from her neighbor’s hand.

“Alice,” Lydia whispered. “What are you saying?”

Cora shook her head. “It’s no use,” she continued. “She’s burning up.” She turned toward Jennie. “It’s only my talking calm this way that keeps her still, otherwise she’d be ranting and raving and scaring the children half to death. I don’t think Meagan and Patty are quite so bad off but I’m worried for Brian.”

The truth of Cora’s appraisal was self-evident. The girls were as pale as their brother but their lips were pink, not blue.

Jennie Feeney nodded and directed herself to her granddaughters. “It’s all right, dearies,” she cooed, adopting the same soothing tone as her neighbor. “Your ma’s not well on account of fever, but now Gran’s here. If I were to fetch some nice broth do you think you might drink it?”

The girls—their eyes wide and glassy, their hands tightly intertwined—nodded as one.

“Brian, dearie, shall I fix you some broth as well?” Jennie offered.

Brian coughed. His coughs were thick and deep, his eyes imploring those around him to make them stop.

Malachy’s voice came soft from beside the window. “It’s no use, Jennie. He’s too sick. Take him, Cora. You won’t get Alice to go, but take Brian.”

“No.” Alice rolled her head in protest, the word bubbling thick from the back of her throat. Mrs.
Feeney knelt beside her daughter’s bed. Malachy heaved himself away from the window to place a hand on his wife’s side.

“Alice,” he whispered hoarsely. “Angel, we got to let him go.”

Alice reached toward her children. Her arm shuddered before exhausting itself, arcing toward the bed frame, and striking the knotty wood. The sound of the collision was unexpectedly substantial, as though more than a hand had fallen—but if it had hurt, Alice’s face betrayed nothing. Sickness had turned her into a spectator of her own body.

Malachy lifted his head just high enough to see his children. “Brian,” he croaked. “Son, there’s nothing for it but to go. Be a soldier, son. Be brave and go with your auntie Cora.” He turned. “Please excuse my Alice,” he pleaded, his body trembling with the effort of remaining even partially upright. “I’m afraid she ain’t herself.”

“Don’t we know it, dearie!” Cora cried.

Malachy eased himself back onto the bed. Jennie put her mouth to her daughter’s ear. Her hand trembled as she stroked her daughter’s face, which seemed finally to relax, but as Cora moved toward Brian, Alice’s hand shot forward and latched on to the fabric of her neighbor’s dress.

“Keep away!” Alice hissed. Her voice bore little resemblance to the voice Lydia knew, and she could not fathom where Alice found the strength to speak.

“Ma, I’ll take him,” Lydia offered as calmly as she could. “You stay with Malachy and the girls.” But nothing would placate Alice now.

“Stay AWAY, devil, stay away, DEVIL, leave him
BE!” Alice’s thick, labored speech rose in intensity to become the voice of sickness itself. It was as if a large, phantom hand was squeezing her chest from inside to expel the cobwebby air that powered her words. To Lydia, the prospect of removing Brian to Carney Hospital was no longer an act of desperation; it was an exorcism.

Lydia lifted Brian from the mattress. His head rolled back as if he were an infant too young to manage his neck. Alice howled like she had been struck. Lydia adjusted her arm to hold the boy, pretending he was a newborn and not a child six years old.

“Brian,” she murmured into his ear. “I’m taking you to Carney where they can help you to get better. Auntie Cora and your gran will take great care of your ma and da and sisters while you’re gone.”

If the boy struggled, she told herself, she would simply clasp him tightly to her chest and make the best of it. Instead, he whispered, “Hurry.”

She needed no further encouragement. Making sure to give Alice’s bed as wide a berth as she could, she started toward the door.

“NOO, put ’im back, put ’im back, put—” but Alice’s voice collapsed on itself.

“Fetch the doctor while you’re gone,” Cora called, all pretense of calm abandoned. Lydia was already in the kitchen, Brian easily mistakable for a bundle of bedclothes in her arms. “Tell him they’re much, much worse.”

Somehow Alice found the strength to scream.