Wickett's Remedy (20 page)

Though Thomas, James, and John had slept in the front room as always, on waking they tried to avoid it as much as their morning routines would allow. Lydia knew without asking that her brothers were thinking of the body on the couch inside the room one floor above. Lydia was struck—as she had been the day she returned to the Somerset—by the treachery of appearances. Familiar walls and furnishings fostered the illusion that each day would resemble the one before. Certainly Alice Feeney O’Toole had never looked at
her sofa and imagined her corpse there. As Lydia made her way toward Gorin’s, the familiar streetscape became a backdrop for an unknown and potentially ominous future.

Gorin’s occupied the first floor of a narrow brick building, the name of its proprietor painted on the window in large, red capitals below a sun-faded canopy. Its interior was long and plain. Walking toward the back of the store felt like entering a messy closet. The walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves crammed with stock, some in labeled boxes and some in open view, a sight that at Gilchrist’s was consigned to the back rooms. In front of these, leaving just enough space for a girl to stand, were simple glass counters in which each department’s fanciest goods were displayed, though from the perspective of Washington Street these were strictly middlebrow, representing the shoddier imports or the better ready-made items. What might have been a generous center aisle was bisected by tables of sale merchandise, which made it impossible for two people to walk abreast. Instead of pneumatics, ropes and pulleys conveyed overhead baskets to the back of the store, where Mr. Gorin himself made change at the register. To Lydia the persistent squeak of the pulleys was the sound of all things second-rate. She missed the soft suck of air that had accompanied the release of a capsule into a pneumatic dispatch tube, the decisive plunk of a capsule’s return, filled with change.

Several of the girls were out that day, leaving Lydia responsible for more counters than usual, but there were fewer customers as well. Since everyone seemed to be suffering from a cold, Mr. Gorin ran a sale on handkerchiefs and instructed his girls to inform customers
that silk handkerchiefs—which cost twice as much—were the most hygienic, though Lydia observed that Mr. Gorin used plain cotton.

The rules at Gorin’s were more relaxed than at Gilchrist’s. During slow stretches the girls were permitted to talk among themselves but today they did not. To fill the dull silence, Lydia envisioned a giant conveyance that could move her back in time with the speed and elegance of a pneumatic capsule. The previous twenty-four hours would unknit. If the world could be as it had been yesterday, perhaps events could manifest differently: somehow they would persuade Alice to enter the hospital; somehow Brians mother would be saved. But instead—perhaps while Lydia was handing a customer a card of faux-pearl buttons or while she was writing a receipt—the undertaker would come for Alice’s body. Lydia’s mother would take up a collection for a wreath. Lydia felt as if only half of her had left 28 D Street, her other half remaining to post invisible vigil at the second-floor landing.

Lydia’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of something large colliding with the floor. Her gaze sought the fallen object, and instead encountered a customer backing away from Ladies’ Neckwares. At first Lydia was confused. Everything about that counter seemed in order—except there was no longer a girl standing behind it.

“Kelly!” cried one of the counter girls as she rushed toward Neckwares. Mr. Gorin pushed his way past several customers who had frozen in place as he made his way down the aisle.

“Is she hurt?” Mr. Gorin called as he reached the counter, kneeling out of view.

The customer who had backed away from the counter rushed toward it again.

“She were just about to fetch me a collar from the case when she looked all of a sudden pale and before I could ask what were the matter, she fell over!”

The store burst into sound. Several customers ran toward Neckwares, craning to get a look at the stricken girl; others remained frozen. Voices issued from all corners.

“She’s so pale!”

“Poor thing.”

“What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s burning up!”

“Fetch a doctor!”

“Give her some air.”

“Give her a drink.”

Occasionally girls fainted: tight girdles or stingy breakfasts were two possible causes. Normally such an event was cause for nothing more than momentary excitement but today was different. Mr. Gorin appeared above the counter, the color drained from his face.

“When she came in this morning she only said she were feeling a little poorly,” he began quietly, as if talking to himself. “It didn’t seem no different from how I felt, otherwise I would’ve told her to go home, get some rest. My own daughter’s at home in bed, you know, and she were feeling fine just yesterday. It don’t come on the way you’d think; it sneaks up from behind.”

He paused, as if thinking something over. He looked at the girl on the floor, then returned his gaze to the assembled.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he announced, scanning the faces before him. “I’m closing early. I’ve had a bad feelin all day and this clinches it. There’s something strange going around. Please take a handkerchief from the front table on your way out, any one you like, compliments of myself; and I’d like to recommend that every one of you go straight home and check on your families, because that’s certainly what I’ll be doing as soon as I get this young lady home.”

A few customers quit the store without their complimentary handkerchiefs. Others grabbed blindly from the pile on their way out. A minority rooted through the bin, in case prolonged inspection would yield one square of cheap cotton superior to the rest. Along with the other girls Lydia began closing down her counter. Her hands trembled as she refolded her stock. She thought Mr. Gorin was wrong to close early when only a few hours remained in the workday. The other girls’ faces confirmed her opinion. Kelly’s sudden illness had startled them, but it had taken Mr. Gorin’s announcement to make them scared.

The last of the customers watched along with the counter girls as Kelly—who had revived but was too weak to walk unassisted—was led to a hansom cab by Mr. Gorin, who paid the driver with money from his own pocket.

“Help her to the door and wait until someone from the family takes her from you,” Mr. Gorin instructed the driver. At Gilchrist’s, a counter girl would have never received such kind treatment, and Lydia felt a wave of tenderness for Mr. Gorin and his narrow, cluttered store with its overhead baskets.

With the hansom gone, the last of the customers dispersed quickly. As Mr. Gorin shut off the lights, Lydia and the other girls huddled together at the front of the store.

“Look after yourselves, girls,” Mr. Gorin advised as they stood before the doors, the store interior dark. To each of them Mr. Gorin solemnly presented two of the penny handkerchiefs he had offered his customers. The fabric would have to be laundered before it would soften. “Don’t come in tomorrow if you’re feeling poorly; it’s bad for a business to have girls fainting.” The store, standing empty in the late afternoon, resembled a stage on which the curtain had failed to descend at the end of a play.

Lydia started down West Broadway with the rest of the girls. A few stores she passed along the way were also shuttered, leading her to wonder if similar scenes had played out there. As they walked, the girls whispered of brothers or friends or neighbors who had fallen ill, and speculated on the condition of Mr. Gorin’s daughter. The other girls were the age Lydia had been when she worked at Gilchrist’s, and all still unmarried. Among them she felt old.

As her counterparts turned onto the lettered streets that led to their families’ crowded flats, Lydia followed West Broadway to Dorchester and turned toward Telegraph Hill. She would not tell Brian about his mother if he did not already know, but whether he had been informed or not, she was sure he could use company.

The traffic on Dorchester was heavier than West Broadway but not until she reached Old Harbor Street did she realize why. The approach to Carney was so thick with ambulances, private cars, and cabs that many
had given up the prospect of reaching the hospital entrance and had debarked their passengers a block or more distant. The afflicted who could no longer walk were carried on backs or held upright by abler bodies.

Something beyond the street traffic struck Lydia as odd, but before she could determine what it was a woman in front of her stumbled. Lydia helped the woman to her feet and placed an arm around her waist, joining the strange tableau. At the top of the hill, she began leading the woman to the hospital entrance but the woman shook her head.

“No,” she whispered. “Clinic.”

The morbid scene on the street had failed to prepare Lydia for the clinic’s transformation. A day seemed somehow both too long and too short a period to have passed since she had carried Brian through the same door. The ill could not be contained by the clinic’s benches. People covered every available space, some sitting, others lying on the floor or propped up against the wall. Open windows and camphor failed to mask the stink of sickness—a moist, mucosal smell that hung, dank and bitter, over everything. Lydia realized with a shock that she was surrounded by people her age. The usual victims of Southie’s flus and fevers—the very young and the very old—were absent. In their place were young men and women in numbers one would expect to see at a dance—only in place of movement there was stillness. Walking carefully to avoid crushing a prone leg or hand, Lydia maneuvered into the room with the sick woman.

“Where shall I take you?” she asked into the woman’s ear, hoping to spot an unclaimed patch of bench or floor.

The woman shook her head, her face panicked. “It’s no good here,” she croaked. She stumbled toward the clinic door, turning to look one last time at those who had preceded her before lurching outside.

One of the Sisters appeared from behind the curtained examination area. The nun’s habit was stained and creased and the wings of her wimple drooped, a sight so startling that Lydia averted her face as if the woman were naked. The Sister wove her way between the supine and the seated with practiced steps.

“If you wish to be seen by a nurse, you may give me your name,” she began. The weariness of her face was matched by her voice. “Only the most dire cases will be accepted for treatment as we are suffering from a shortage of beds. If you are not afflicted with a perilously high fever we suggest you return home, take to your bed, and drink clear liquids. If you wish to remain you’ll need to be patient. A nurse will see you as soon as she can. Raise your hand to give me your name.” Pale hands appeared around the room’s edges like a fairy ring.

Lydia inched her way toward the hospital door, careful to avoid trampling feet or fingers. She never would have imagined Brian lucky in his illness, but its early onset had at least afforded him prompt attention. On the opposite side of the door, benches and cots had been added along the walls, a narrow aisle left between them to permit passage. The only observable difference between the patients lining the hospital hall and those in the clinic was that these people had been waiting even longer.

An extra row of beds had been added down the middle aisle of the second floor children’s ward. Partitions
stood between as many beds as possible, turning the ward into a labyrinth that foiled Lydia’s attempt to find Brian by memory. She discovered several unfamiliar faces before deciding to work her way down the row, screen by screen, until she found him.

The majority of beds were now filled with patients closer to Lydia’s age than Brian’s. Those who were not sleeping either looked through her with fevered eyes, or gazed with such intensity that she felt criminal for replacing their screen and moving on. She was midrow when she was yanked into the aisle.

“What do you think you’re doing?” a nurse cried through a gauze mask. When the nurse spoke, the material across her mouth billowed like a sheet on a clothesline. “You’re spreading germs, going from one bed to another like that. You think these screens are for decoration? Who gave you permission to be here?”

“I’m sorry,” Lydia apologized. “I’m looking for a boy called Brian O’Toole. I brought him last night, but I suppose he’s been moved, or his Gran took him home.”

“You’ll have to ask Head Nurse,” the woman answered, pointing toward the opposite end of the room. “The way they’re coming in it’s more than I can do just to find them beds.” Behind one of the far curtains came the sound of choking. “Excuse me,” the nurse cried and rushed off.