Wickett's Remedy (23 page)

A
sound pounded in Lydia’s ears. On first waking, she was confused by the narrowness of her bed. Then the tide of drays subsided and she opened her eyes. At the sight of Michael’s two letters still tacked beside the faded picture of the Sacred Heart, the previous day’s events emerged from sleep’s temporary blind. Today was the first day of Thomas’s illness and the second day without Michael. Lydia’s father and brothers sat motionless at the front room’s threshold as if staring hard enough would permit them to see through the dividing curtain that separated them from the kitchen and Tom’s sickroom.

“It’s so quiet,” John whispered.

If their mother had not barred them from the kitchen, Lydia could have put breakfast on. She was not hungry—she doubted any of them were—but she needed to do something. She did not think she could bear to wait there, useless as a severed limb.

They heard their mother before she saw her. Not more than a few seconds elapsed between the sound of her step on the floorboards and her appearance in the front room, but in those interminable moments,
steps too slow or too fast would have foretold unwelcome news.

“Is he all right?” they asked as one when Cora appeared.

“He’s asleep,” she replied, “but it were a strange night. Maybe two hours after I had got him settled down, we were both of us resting when Tom on a sudden sat up and asked did I recall Sally, the oldest Connelly girl? I told him sure, and then he says in a voice that weren’t like him at all: ‘Well, she just passed on.’ Then he lay back down, calm as can be, and drifted off to sleep.” Cora’s mouth tightened. “I kept my eye on him after that; his fever climbed awful high, and I kept a cold cloth on him ’til it went down. Every time he opened his eyes I got a dreadful feeling, wondering what he’d say next.”

“Is Sally all right?” Lydia asked. She remembered the Connelly girl from Michael’s send-off. She was a few years younger and had spent the party dancing.

“I don’t know one way or the other,” her mother replied. “And neither does Tom. When I asked him this morning he had no memory of such a thing.”

James rose from the mattress. “Then he’s awake? Can I see him, just for a minute?” he pleaded. “If you like, I’ll hold my breath. I won’t say a word and I won’t touch him. I’ll just see him, is all, and I’ll wave.”

Their mother shook her head. “None of you are to go into that room until he’s improved. I know it’s a hard thing to ask, but the very best thing is for you to go about your business same as always. At the very least I can’t have you staying here. I won’t have you setting in a sickhouse all day long.”

Lydia thought back to the fainting girl and the way Mr. Gorin’s voice shook as he told them he was closing the store. Her mother’s request seemed pointless. All of Southie was a sickhouse.

“Your ma’s got a point,” her father agreed. “We’d not be doing a thing to honor Mick’s memory if we fell ill.”

“But Ma, you’ll need someone,” Lydia reasoned. “At least let me spell you while you rest up from last night.” Michael had died miles distant, but Tom was right here, where she could do something to help before it was too late.

“Stupid girl!” Cora scolded. “Do you think I’ll let you knit your own shroud? It wants the young!”

“I’m sorry, Ma,” Lydia breathed. She no longer felt twenty-three, but thirteen.

“Good Lord,” her mother whispered, “I didn’t mean to yell.” She enclosed Lydia in her arms, surrounding her in the scents of soap and rose water.

“I couldn’t stand to lose you,” she spoke into her daughter’s hair. “It would kill me for sure. And that’s why you’ll obey along with your brothers and leave me to care for Tom.”

“I’ll do whatever you ask,” Lydia promised, her words absorbed by the fragile skin of her mother’s neck.

John was sent to school, James to the factory. Lydia’s wage could be used for medicines for Thomas, an assurance that did nothing to assuage the futility of reporting for work.

Several people she passed on the way to Gorin’s wore gauze masks over their noses and mouths. Others wore pouches around their necks filled with camphor.

Southie’s streets were silent, as though it had been determined that even trading pleasantries risked contagion. The houses were similarly changed. Funeral wreaths adorned doors in a grim profusion of black, gray, and white. At first Lydia was consoled that she was not alone in her grief, but by the time she reached West Broadway the unceasing displays had crowned Death a conquering hero.

She could not remember when she had seen so few cars and carriages on West Broadway. So many stores were shuttered that she did not realize she had passed Gorin’s until she reached the end of the block and was forced to retrace her steps. In Gorin’s front window a sign read,
CLOSED FOR THE DURATION OF THE WEEK
, in handwriting other than Mr. Gorin’s. The handwriting affected Lydia more profoundly than the message, for only something terrible would have prevented Mr. Gorin from creating the notice himself.

As she turned to face the deserted street, she made a decision. The notion had occurred to her after her mother had barred her from the house, but Gorin’s shuttered window gave her the license and the resolve. She walked the length of West Broadway, all the way to Dorchester, and then on toward Telegraph Hill.

On arriving at Carney Hospital, the sight of white canvas tents filled with patients and stretching in orderly rows across the lawn banished the doubts that had trailed her from West Broadway. Her instinct—informed by her memory of the overcrowded clinic and the hospital hallways lined with beds—was correct: the situation had grown worse. She never would have imagined tents here, but the sight was unexpectedly comforting. Michael had been quartered inside a tent.

The young man in the first tent she entered was near Michael’s age. He had matted brown hair and asked through chapped lips for a glass of water. Exiting the tent, Lydia nearly collided with a passing nurse.

“Can I help you?” the nurse asked, observing Lydia’s shirtwaist with confusion. Lydia was not nurse, nor nun, nor patient.

“The man in that tent wants water,” Lydia answered, this the first time she had lent breath to the impulse that honored the letter of her mother’s mandate while ignoring the spirit. “I’m going to fetch it for him.”

“Are you Red Cross?” the nurse asked.

“The tents weren’t here when I came yesterday,” Lydia replied. “They all have flu, don’t they?”

“We erected the field hospital early yesterday evening,” the nurse confirmed. “We’re waiting on more nurses from the Red Cross. Have you any nursing experience at all?”

“Let me help. There’s so many—” Lydia paused. In that instant the tents seemed to stretch for miles. “Surely I can do
something
” she urged.

If the nurse turned her away she would find another hospital. She did not know where another hospital was. She would walk until she found one.

The nurse’s voice softened. “Are you able-bodied?” she asked.

Lydia nodded, expectation weighting her tongue.

“Well,” the nurse conceded, “you’d better don a mask before you check with Head Nurse, or she’ll think you’re completely unfit, but as far as I’m concerned we need all the help we can get.” The woman extended her hand, exhaustion inhabiting even her
smallest motions. “Welcome to Carney,” she said, and vanished into a tent.

Diverted by the needs of others, Lydia’s grief faded to a dull ache and then to merciful numbness. She yielded to the serial refilling of water glasses, their transport from sink to tent, and their delivery to myriad lips—men’s lips and women’s lips; lips smooth and lips chapped, some with fever blisters; lips wide and narrow, roseate and pale. The effect of this act did not diminish with repetition. It was a ministration necessarily tender and careful, attuned to the tilt of a chin, the vigor of a swallow. Sometimes she accidentally angled the glass too far and water spilled onto necks and chests, or she angled the glass too slightly, requiring a patient to stretch. The gaffe embarrassed her but the patients did not complain. Grateful stares caressed her even as water soaked bedclothes or necks strained for water just out of reach. With Lydia beside them they were not alone.

Lydia stroked fevered heads. Her fingers clasped other fingers. Never in her life had she so often touched and been touched. Beneath the smells of sickness she sometimes caught the musky scent of skin. Pajamas divulged geometries of chest hair, a small flat scar, a constellation of moles. Sickness and need obviated convention and left, in its place, intimacy. Lydia had perceived this intimacy once before. Because she had been tending Henry, she had assumed it was conjugal but she now discovered it was universal—a shared human undercurrent detectable only when the dictates of name, sex, and social standing were effaced. Revealed, it became an embrace. Lydia had not been
three hours at Carney before she knew she was meant to be a nurse.

Hours passed in which she barely recalled her own name, in which the activity of Carney bestowed its own purpose and belonging. Awareness of the epidemic itself was subsumed by its particulars—the precarious gravity of a tray of water glasses, the smell of blankets imbued with camphor, the cavernous feeling of the sick wards compared to the tents. She preferred the tents. The air was fresher there, the smells less trenchant. Open tent flaps permitted sun and wind, healing forces that could not penetrate Carney’s red brick walls.

Her day at Carney furnished her a strange education. She learned that a few deep inhalations could deaden her nose to the smell of bile and sputum and blood. She learned to steel herself against the sight of soiled sheets. Her face grew an invisible callus that held her features in place so she did not flinch at the gurgling blue-lipped boy; or the bog-chested woman whose skin was covered in dark blotches and whose nose dripped thick, black blood; or the delirious young man who, in his fever, mistook Lydia for his sister, dead days before. But however hard she tried she could not cotton her ears against the sounds of sickness. Influenza loosed pneumonia into the lungs, and pneumonia’s sounds were those of a body drowning from within. Pneumonia turned skin and lips the bruised gray blue of an evening sky before a storm. She was informed in hushed voices by the nurses that those with feet tinged that color seldom lived through the night. Patients unfortunate enough to arrive in such a state
were partitioned from the rest. Doctors did not visit these patients, nor nurses. Only the Sisters in their winged wimples passed through, sometimes in the company of a priest. In the rush, the priest performed last rites over unconscious but still-moving forms, their toes already tagged for the undertaker. Passing through this part of the hospital, Lydia heard these patients struggling for breath, a dirge of clotted lungs.

Across the ocean, the enemy had a discernible face and could be fought with something as simple as a gun. Battles in Europe had beginnings and ends. At Carney, no sooner had she brought water or blankets to one patient when she was called by another, only to be sent elsewhere by a nurse. Lydia could not believe she had given so much of herself to a sales counter, her labor meted in collars and shirts. By the end of the day she felt as if she had spent a lifetime at Carney, her memories of other places the products of dreams.

The hospital’s frantic pace precluded the possibility of a slower, more peaceful existence elsewhere, and yet not ten blocks away her mother was preparing supper. If Lydia arrived late she would have to explain where she had been. The same nurse whom she had petitioned that morning was still on duty when she reluctantly took her leave. Despite the nurse’s assurances that Lydia had far surpassed expectations—that she ought to go home and rest and was welcome to return tomorrow—leaving Carney still felt just short of criminal.