Wickett's Remedy (5 page)

At least once a week, but never on Saturday—because Lydia hated to think that she might miss one of her brother’s visits—Henry would grasp her hand after dinner and lead her to the bedroom. According to
Marriage and Parenthood: The Catholic Ideal
, with which Father O’Brian had equipped Lydia the week prior to her wedding, intercourse was to be completed as quickly as possible in order to preserve its power and
to keep it from becoming disgusting. But even
The Catholic Ideal
—which Lydia found fusty and which told her nothing she and Margaret Kelly had not deduced by the time they were fourteen—did not call it a sin for a husband and wife to enjoy each other’s bodies while engaging in their Catholic duty. Having grown up within the confines of three thin-walled rooms, Lydia knew what that enjoyment sounded like, but neither she nor Henry made the sounds she thought they ought to make. Henry’s passionate—but in retrospect vague—letters had implied a certain level of worldliness that he refuted with shy pride their first night together, explaining that as a surrogate he had carefully studied the relevant portions of his medical texts. On their wedding night, as if to prove his diligence, he whispered the Latin names of their respective anatomies as they lay together, a tutorial that ended when Lydia confessed that the words reminded her of Sunday Mass. The ensuing silence was briefly interrupted when Lydia attempted to imitate sounds she remembered emanating from her parents’ bed, but her performance so startled Henry that he shrieked like a girl. The brisk performance that followed removed any lingering doubts regarding Henry’s naiveté. This left Lydia secretly disappointed. Among her girlfriends it had been agreed that while it was fine for a husband to claim inexperience, it was best if he had also learned a few lessons at Scollay.

Under the command of her old heart, Lydia would have known whom to approach with questions of conjugation, but her new station in life left her stymied. She feared her mother’s acceptance of her non-Catholic son-in-law was too fragile to support queries on such
an intimate topic, and she could not imagine asking her father or brother. She supposed she could have sought counsel among her married girlfriends, but even between her and Margaret Kelly—who had once run three blocks to announce to Lydia the arrival of her first monthlies—there had grown an undercurrent of reserve that now confined them to discussions of fashion, movies, and the price of ground hamburger. Lacking an alternative, Lydia resigned herself to the notion that diligent repetition would allow her and Henry to improve on their own.

They had not been married long before she learned that, Latin vocabulary aside, her husband’s enthusiasm for his medical studies was limited. On evenings following surgeries or dissections Henry would leave his dinner untouched and retire to bed early, complaining of headache. Even on days in which he avoided the operating theater he complained of dull classes and overdemanding instructors. Far more interesting to him was the news from Europe. Henry’s journalistic aspirations had been stanched by his mother, who did not think newspapers a proper occupation for a Wickett, and so he had made his passion an avocation instead. When not decrying the latest development in European affairs, he was attacking the newsprint itself with a pen, reworking sentences and sometimes whole paragraphs he found lacking in flair, and then sharing with his wife the results of his labors. While Lydia enjoyed a newspaper as much as the next person, she did not see why Henry should take such pains to rewrite something that had already been printed. Nor did she share her husband’s passion for news from somewhere so distant as Austro-Hungary: she had certainly never
heard of the Archduke Ferdinand before he was shot. She looked forward to the end of Henry’s medical studies. Once he was a doctor they would be freed from Mr. and Mrs. Wickett’s purse strings and he could focus on an aspect of medicine that he liked, perhaps one that did not involve too much blood.

In Southie, Lydia would have thought nothing of taking a break from housework to visit a neighbor’s kitchen for tea and conversation, but the Somerset did not offer that comfort. Though she supposed somewhere within the Somerset lurked another young married couple, the building had not yet yielded such a treasure. Short of wandering the halls and crouching before closed doors with her ears perked for sounds of another young wife, Lydia reasoned she would just have to wait until she met such a person by chance—in the lobby, perhaps, or in the stairwell. In the meantime she did her best to banish the small troubles that dogged her thoughts through the long afternoons. When the silence of the empty flat grew oppressive, she reminded herself that in a year such quiet would likely seem precious. She hoped they would have a girl first: though Michael had been of some use, Mrs. Kilkenny often exclaimed that she did not know how she would have managed her brood without a daughter. As Lydia dusted and swept, ironed and folded, she shuffled her features with her husband’s to create a girl with her light freckles and Henry’s long fingers, and a boy with Henry’s green eyes and her upturned mouth.

She was thus engaged one afternoon when Henry burst into the flat with such exuberance that she thought the door had been staved in. She rushed to the hallway armed with the metal pot she had been preparing
to put on the stove. Break-ins were rare in Southie, but Southie offered little to steal. Before she realized the intruder was her husband, she had steeled herself to defend every last stick of rented furniture in their rented flat.

“I’ve done it!” Henry announced on seeing his wife. He circled her waist with his arm and drew her to him, painting her neck with kisses.

“Darling!” she squealed. Her neck grew progressively damp. “What did you do?” She could not imagine what would inspire such high spirits, unless Henry had somehow graduated medical school early or convinced his father to raise his allowance.

“I’m done with the whole business,” he murmured to her left earlobe.

“Done with what?” She enjoyed standing in the hallway being kissed by her husband, even if his kisses were a little too wet.

He held her at arm’s length in order to gaze into her face. “All of it,” he proclaimed. “The tedious lectures, the revolting dissections and surgeries. I feel like an immense weight has been lifted.”

“I don’t know what you mean.” She examined her husband’s face for clues.

“But of course you do!” he giggled. “After all, I was only taking your lead.”

“I’m sorry, dear, but really I don’t understand.” She turned from her husband and entered the parlor. “Has something happened?” She felt the need to sit. Henry followed her in; he kneeled beside her as she rested on the settee.

“Really, I don’t know how you tolerated me for as long as you did.” He beamed. “Sometimes I think I
don’t deserve you—you were criminally patient with me, listening to my complaints night after night, month after month, but I suppose you knew all along if you let me wander long enough in the desert, finally I’d come home.”

“Henry,” she began carefully, trying to keep her voice calm in direct opposition to her fluttery stomach. “I think you ought to tell me exactly what you’ve done.”

“You want to hear it from my own lips, don’t you?” He nodded as though she had answered him. “Well, I finally did it, my darling. I’ve resigned from medical school.”

She smiled. “Tell me really.”

“I just did, my love.”

Her smile froze along with the rest of her. While she felt pinned to the divan, her thoughts flew at such a speed that the room might have been filled with other voices. “You didn’t,” she amended, her voice practically inaudible above the din inside her head. “You wouldn’t actually do that, not actually.”

“But darling,” he countered, “it was you who showed me that this was what I was meant to do.”

He was too skinny. Southie men were never as skinny as Henry, and if they were they found jobs as streetcar conductors or soda jerks or store managers, but she did not think he was suited for any of these. He certainly could not be an iceman or a factory hand. Lydia realized that she was still holding the pot she had grabbed from the kitchen. She wished the door
had
been broken in. She could have given the burglar a solid knock to the head and sent him on his way.

“I did nothing of the sort,” she insisted.

“But you did,” he averred. He sat beside her on the settee and reached for her hand, but she would not give it. When he spoke again his voice had softened. “You accomplished this feat by healing me in mind and body. Lydia, when I met you I was unwell. I had no strength, no stamina! My childhood was wasted on expensive doctors who achieved nothing at all. Then I met you. You believed in me; you appreciated me for who I was. You cured me, Lydia, and for the first time in my life I’m healthy. No fevers, no coughing, no weakness. Today, after I did what I ought to have done months ago, I actually
skipped
home. Can you imagine? Before you cured me I would have exhausted myself just walking from the trolley to the front door. Darling, you’ve shown me that medicine is bunkum!”

She could certainly work until they had children, but after that he would need to bring home a salary. She supposed he could work at Wickett Imports, Ltd., but he hated his father’s business. She felt strangely exhausted. She needed to lie down.

Henry’s voice grew more certain. In his excitement he launched himself from the settee to pace the room. “And so now, instead of doing what others expect, I’m going to follow my destiny,” he declared.

If she went immediately to sleep, there was a chance her husband would arrive home at the expected hour. She would apologize for not having dinner ready and tell him about her strange midafternoon dream.

But instead he continued. “Today is the beginning of a new life for us, Lydia. We are going to be the sole proprietors of—you’re going to like this—Wickett’s Remedy!” He stood tall and proud before the window, the light behind him transforming his face into a
silhouette of the sort found inside anonymous, abandoned cameo brooches.

“You’re not making any sense,” she insisted from the couch, a veritable wax statue save for her moving lips. Then, as though the pin holding her to the divan had been spontaneously withdrawn, she started up in a burst of movement and began to pace the path her husband had abandoned. It still seemed possible he would reveal his announcement to be a terrible joke.

“No, my dear, for the first time in my life I
am
making sense,” he rallied. “I finally know what I am meant to do. You can’t imagine how stultifying it is to spend life so uncertain of what path to take, going through motions someone else prescribed simply due to an inability to choose a different course. When I look back on my boyhood I can’t help but despair at how much time spent in sickbeds might have been avoided.”

In his renewed excitement he resumed his pacing, matching his steps with his wife’s. “I ask you: how much sickness is caused by loneliness? By lack of sympathy? These are the people I intend to reach, darling. These are the people Wickett’s Remedy is meant to cure.

She hated the whisper of her house slippers against the floor. Her steps sounding like a curtain being pushed aside. She would have gladly traded her nicest pumps for a pair of her brother’s work boots in order to fill the room with sound.

“Henry Wickett,” she cried, “if I’d wanted to marry a man who thought loneliness could be cured by something from inside a bottle I would have stayed in Southie.”

Henry smiled. “You’re exactly right, darling, you can’t cure loneliness or provide sympathy with a bottle. But you can with a letter.”

She stood at the far corner of the room and stared at her husband as if he were speaking Chinese.

“If I hadn’t written you,” Henry explained in the patient, tender voice she had adored in every circumstance until now, “you would either still be working at Gilchrist’s or you would be a Southie wife. And I—I would still be sickly and devoting myself to something I despised.”

Though it was petty, she would have liked to remind Henry that she had not received a single letter since becoming his wife. She did not know why she had expected Henry’s letters to continue once the days no longer kept them apart, but for months Wednesday had felt hollow when it brought no blue envelope bearing her name.

Henry’s voice swelled. “If letters could bring us so much good, then what’s to stop them from helping others? Sufferers of hypochondriacal illnesses will never find lasting relief from a bottle, but if my letters can offer them some pale happiness or companionship, then perhaps they will feel a small degree of the rejuvenation that has blessed me, through you.”

“But Henry,” she cried, “I didn’t write you any letters! And while it’s true your letters brought us together, if I hadn’t been inclined toward you already, your letters wouldn’t have made a bit of difference!”

“Exactly!” Henry exclaimed, and it was all she could do not to shriek. “And the people who buy remedies
want
to get well! Just as my letters coaxed a latent
feeling from within you, they will foster an inclination already present within my customers! What does it matter if someone buys a bottle of Wickett’s looking for a cure inside it and instead finds one in the letter that comes with it? The important thing is that they are cured! People will not accept being cured by words alone. They want something they can hold in their hand, something they can point to and say, ‘This did the trick.’ This is my calling, Lydia. This is why I have left medical school behind. So that I can help those whom medicine cannot.”