Read Online Wickett's Remedy by Myla Goldberg - Free Book Online

furnish the same information to any nation on earth which has the price to pay for it.”
THE QD SODA WALKING TOUR
Second Stop: The West End
    For the next stop on our tour, walk to the northwestern edge of City Hall Plaza, at the corner of Cambridge and Sudbury streets. Imagine a bustling intersection, with an impressive theater on the right and stores on all sides. Until 1960, you wouldn’t have had to use your imagination to see Bowdoin Square, once part of Boston’s old West End, which in 1894 witnessed the birth of one of its favorite sons, Quentin Driscoll. It was here where he first worked behind a soda counter—and here where he dreamed of a new soft drink.
    There is not even a plaque where Quentin Driscoll’s childhood home once stood. In the name of urban renewal, this entire neighborhood of historic buildings and winding streets was demolished to make room for high-rise luxury apartment buildings. When the West End was destroyed, a crucial part of QD history was destroyed along with it.

 
    T he following words appeared in the newspaper two weeks after Henry reported for work at his father’s office:
    Try WICKETT’S REMEDY for a new lease on life!
Find your spirits lifted, your outlook improved!
All queries answered personally.
Send 25¢ and an accompanying letter to:
Post Office Square, Box 27, Boston.
    The printed word is our most reliable benchmark of memory. We collectively recall entire libraries.
    The authority of crisp newsprint bestowed on the venture the aura of imminent success. Seeing the notice, Lydia could not help but feel that Henry would not be consigned to his father’s office for long.
    In becoming a clerk Henry became a man divided, Monday through Friday manifesting the melancholy that had marred his medical school career but on Saturday emerging from the chrysalis of his unhappiness to engage in his work with the Remedy. The difference was striking enough that Lydia felt married to two men; and she privately vowed to do all she could to enable the timely replacement of the former with the latter.
    By the time of the advertisement’s appearance in the paper, she had—per Henry’s request—invented both a Remedy recipe and a label. Of the two, only the recipe gave her trouble. She had wanted Wickett’s to taste different: interesting but not unpleasant, not too sweet but also not bitter. As a girl she had been subject to her mother’s faith in Jenson’s Indian Cure, which was administered for everything from headaches to bunions. She hated the taste and smell of Jenson’s which contained—in addition to other undiscernible unpleasantries—sage and not a small bit of alcohol, two ingredients she was determined not to include in her own creation.
    Maureen Kilkenny takes no credit for the recipe, but she would like to think she engineered her appearance in her American granddaughter’s dream. Our whisperings are most often heard in life’s interstices: in dreams, in sickness, and in the moments preceding sleep or waking.
    After a week in which she experimented variously with salt, pepper, parsley, onion, lemon, and hickory root to no avail, the Remedy’s recipe came to her in a dream of her Granny K, whom Lydia had only ever known from the faded tintype her father had carried with him across the Atlantic. In Lydia’s dream, Granny K stood before the sod house where Lydia’s father had been born and patiently explained to her granddaughter what flavorings she ought to add and in what proportion. Lydia, who did not generally remember her dreams, was struck by her grandmother’s hands: their broad palms and strong fingers resembled her own. On waking, Lydia jotted down her grandmother’s instructions and purchased the proper ingredients, along with a pot large enough to cook ten bottles’ worth of Remedy at a time. That afternoon—feeling as though her own hands were being guided by her grandmother’s—she boiled up the first batch of Wickett’s.
    In the tintype to which her