Wickett's Remedy (4 page)

Washington is a street of firsts. Across from Filene’s is the Gilchrist Building, which originally housed Boston’s first department store. But most importantly, Washington Street was the first place in the world to offer QD Soda! Continue two blocks past Filene’s and cross the street. In this very spot once stood the first restaurant to sell QD Soda. There’s a different restaurant there now, but if you mention the QD Soda Walking Tour when you purchase any sandwich, you can buy a QD Soda for five cents,
^†
the same price people paid in 1918.

B
y the time they announced their engagement, Henry had visited 28 D Street often enough to have acquired a nickname, and Lydia’s visits to West Roxbury no longer ended with Mrs. Wickett presenting her with parcels of cast-off clothing to take back to Southie. To demonstrate the seriousness of his intent, Henry began arriving to Southie early enough to attend Sunday Mass, where he sat between Lydia and her mother and intently studied the hymnal.

As the Wicketts were not practicing Protestants, Lydia’s Catholicism was less troubling than her social station. Having been schooled by Henry in advance of her first visit to West Roxbury, Lydia had known where to place her teaspoon when she finished stirring in the milk and when to murmur appreciatively during the elaborate genealogical recitation that linked Henry’s family to several Founding Fathers. When Ernestine Wickett requested that, “in the interest of social intercourse,” Lydia choose to hail from “some other place—perhaps Winchester or Milton,” she knew she had been paid the highest compliment she could ever expect from her future mother-in-law. The ladies to whom Lydia was presented in Ernestine Wickett’s
damask parlor were Southie gossips with nicer clothes and an inexplicable fondness for English muffins, which—even with the addition of butter and jam—absorbed all the moisture from Lydia’s mouth. In the interest of social intercourse, Lydia settled on a respectable Winchester address. Though she was certain West Roxbury’s ladies suspected her family seat was located elsewhere, none suggested so while sitting in Ernestine Wickett’s parlor. Because it was their best option, Lydia and Henry chose to find humor in the fact that her side of the bridge thought her strange and his side thought him seduced.

On marrying, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Wickett rented a furnished five-room flat in the West end, an area that neighbored Beacon Hill. Though the West end had ceased to be a fashionable address several decades previous, it evinced its former pedigree in its architecture, which far surpassed Southie’s. From its start Southie had been a repository for factories and the immigrant fodder that kept them running. Accordingly, Southie’s buildings were functional and simplistic, and only inadvertently charming when these traits combined to best advantage. By contrast, the West end address where the newlyweds took up residence not only possessed its own name—the Somerset—but also a curved façade replete with terra-cotta, full-length windows, and a peaked roof. Lydia and Henry let the smartest of the top-floor flats, situating them a floor above a married German couple roughly the age of Lydia’s parents, and down the corridor from a grouping of lesser flats inhabited by an international assortment of bachelors—two Italians, a Swede, and one Pole who was possibly a Jew. A few times Lydia observed an Irishman in
the downstairs lobby, but uncertain a married woman ought to be seen talking with an unfamiliar man, she refrained from introducing herself.

Her first night in the flat, wearing the taffeta-waisted dress and matching hat that Henry had bought her as a wedding present, she traveled from room to room touching each piece of rented furniture with the giddiness of a child who has received everything on her Christmas list. “This is our settee,” she declared, stroking its faded chintz. “This is our armoire.” The next morning, beside the sink, she smiled to think of the Gilchrist girls straightening their stock while she, a married woman, cleaned the plate of her husband, who every passing minute was closer to becoming a doctor.

She began to feel strange directly after putting away the breakfast things, once there was no longer the distraction of running water or the clink of plates and cups. The strangeness manifested as a nervous feeling in her stomach. She speculated, hopefully, that she might already be pregnant; but when she sat at the table, ceasing even the sound of her footsteps, she realized its origins were external. Previously in her life she might have chanced, fleetingly, to occupy an otherwise empty room but there had always been her mother through the kitchen doorway or her brothers nearby. Never before had silence filled her mouth and ears the way it did now, silence so absolute it was tangible. Lydia sat gape-mouthed at the table: for the first time in her life she was truly alone.

Slowly, she rose from her chair. She crept from the kitchen to the hallway on the balls of her feet. She blushed to think of the previous night’s giddy waltz
among the flat’s furniture and the gross misunderstanding such an action represented. It was now clear to her, as she stood alone in the flat, that this silence—and not a divan or an armoire—was truly the finest object she had ever owned. Stealthily she crept down the hall, peering into each quiet room in turn, but when she reached the parlor she could no longer contain herself: she made a small sound. The sound liberated her; she realized she was no slave to this silence but its master, free to destroy or create it at whim. After glancing about the room, as though to make certain there was no one to stop her, she sat on the settee. Speaking with the bearing of a queen she intoned her name aloud:

“Lydia.”

Almost as soon as the word was spoken it was absorbed by the surrounding silence.

“Lydia Claire Kilkenny,” she proclaimed a little louder, then clapped a surprised hand over her mouth.

“Lydia Claire Wickett!” she corrected. She strode from the parlor to the hallway. She felt giddy with the knowledge she was completely unobserved. Henry would not be home for hours; her family lived two streetcars and one bridge away. She stood on one leg and hopped several times. In the dining room she held her skirt above her head and loudly hummed, “I’m Afraid to Go Home in the Dark,” before, blushing, she returned to the kitchen and attempted to resume her housework—but there the fierce silence of the flat seemed to intensify, gripping her with a strength of will independent from her own. Lydia froze, imprisoned by the relentless quiet. She strained her ears for anything—a footstep, the creak of a stair, a distant voice. She began to feel as if she were dead. The longer
she remained motionless, the stronger this sensation became. Surely this was what it was like to be dead: the stillness, the quiet. Worse, this was what it was like to be buried alive. The only slight sounds—coming and going like sputtering matches in an airless room—were the rasp of her own breath and the frantic beating of her heart. With a shriek she ran to the nearest window and threw it open. From the street below came the soothing sounds of motorcars and the welcome screech of the trolley. From that day forward, no matter what the weather, one window was left ajar.

Her first bout of homesickness arrived with the realization that even simple errands had been made arduous by her new surroundings. After a lifetime in Southie she so took for granted her ability to locate fresh groceries that her first day in her new home she waltzed onto the streets of the West end already hearing her accustomed “Good morning, dearie” from Mr. Leary at the vegetable stand. But when her feet guilelessly traced the path that in Southie would have led to Mr. Leary’s green awning, she found herself instead at the corner of Hawkins and Chardon, feeling disoriented to the point of tears. When finally she located a stand where the produce met with her satisfaction, it was so strange to have her purchases weighed and tallied by a colored man that she found herself wiping the palm into which he delivered her change. The potpourri of Italians and Poles and Jews and coloreds she passed on her way back to the flat left her convinced that the cabbage and potatoes in her grocery sack would differ from the sort sold across the bridge. Her discovery that these foods tasted the same in the Somerset as on D Street engendered such gratitude that she
swore allegiance to the colored produce man, a promise she kept even after discovering a more convenient stand on Bullfinch.

Her acclimation to her new church was equally difficult. Prior to its reconsecration, Saint Joseph’s had been a Unitarian meetinghouse, and as such lacked steeples and—even more egregious—stained glass windows. With its stately columns and marble pediment it more closely resembled the county courthouse than a cathedral. Lydia attempted to put aside these differences during the service, but the familiarity of the psalms was undercut by their delivery in Father Gianino’s weighty bass and not Father O’Brian’s bright tenor. Sitting among the Irish parishioners she could transport herself across the bridge to the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary. The voices surrounding her sounded enough like Southie voices that when she closed her eyes she could hear her former neighbors and friends and even hints of her mother’s shy soprano. These fleeting moments became as essential to Lydia’s nourishment as her mother’s recipe for colcannon, which she found herself making with a frequency that would have engendered culinary despair had she still lived on D Street.

During her tenure at Gilchrist’s, Lydia’s Southie friendships had been sustained by the notion of a shared fate. For four years she had neither reason nor desire to rebut Southie’s claim on her future; then Henry expanded her heart’s terrain. As Mrs. Henry Wickett, Lydia mourned Southie’s daily absence, but among old friends and old places she became impatient to return to her new life across the bridge.

The differences in her spurred differences in others. Inside the Somerset flat, Lydia’s Southie girlfriends
became formal. They moved as though they feared breaking something and invented reasons to leave after one cup of tea. None visited more than twice before the invitation itself and not the second cup of tea was met with an excuse, most often the lack of trolley fare. When Lydia offered to pay their way, always smiling and easy about it—it was really no different than one fellow standing another to a pint—her girlfriends colored and cast their eyes downward. They explained that they really ought not to, nickels did not grow on trees, and besides it was the time as much as anything else; they were none of them girls anymore. Just the trip there and back took ninety minutes, and there were husbands to feed and errands to run and clothes to mend.

When Lydia visited Southie, aspects of people she had known all her life were tucked away as matter-of-factly as a flat tidied in anticipation of an infrequent guest. That these shifts were affected without malice did not assuage Lydia’s deepening loneliness. Every other month, when her family piled into the streetcar to visit, her mother made everyone wear church clothes. Cora Kilkenny insisted it was nothing to do with Lydia or Henry—she just wanted Southie shown at its best advantage to the rest of Boston. When Henry’s mother visited, Lydia exhausted herself examining Ernestine Wickett’s every word and gesture for assurance that the dress she had chosen to wear conveyed the proper respect without suggesting she was spending too much of her father-in-law’s money.

Michael was the only guest who seemed to feel at home at the Somerset flat. Like any Southie bachelor, Michael acknowledged the city across the bridge only
on weekends, when he visited Scollay Square or Fenway. Initially Lydia and Henry’s had been the first stop on Scollay evenings for Michael and his friends, many of whom Lydia had known since first grade, but the visits had struck Henry as improper. Whether they were improper or not Lydia could not say, but it was certainly true that Henry did not know what to do during these social calls. Though the fellows were polite and Henry and Michael shared a certain rapport, her husband not being Southie-born precluded his joining most conversations. After a time Lydia would realize that her husband was no longer in the sitting room. And when it came out that Lydia, before becoming Mrs. Wickett, had accompanied a few of Michael’s friends to matinees at the Imperial, that was the end of that.

Occasionally Michael still came to the West end alone. Lydia loved that he draped himself across the divan just like it was the sofa at 28 D Street, and that he drank his beer straight from the bottle. Because she never knew when to expect him, she always finished her Saturday errands early, just in case. She would wait a few moments before answering Michael’s knock, hiding the extent of her gratitude for his arrival, afraid it might scare him off.