On D Street there was no need for alarm clocks: the drays, ever punctual, were an army storming the gates of sleep. The wooden wagons were heavy and low-riding with loud rattling wheels, their broad planks too battered and begrimed to recall distant origins as trees. Each dray was pulled by horses—two, four, or sometimes six per wagon—pound-ing down nearby Third Street. Windows rattled and floors shook; the sound was a giant hand shaking Lydia Kilkenny’s sleeping shoulders. Each morning she did not awaken to the sound, but inside it. In winter the drays came when the sky was still dark, their pounding hooves sharp reports against the frozen cobblestones. In summer, perhaps because the sky was already pale with light, the sound of the horses seemed kinder.

When her daughter was still a wee thing, Cora Kilkenny recalls Liddie crediting the sound to God waking up all the good Catholics of D Street.

She knew the clattering wagons were bound for Boston proper, but the vague tangle of streets across the Broadway bridge surfaced in her mind with the sound of the horses and resubmerged with its diminishment. As the flow of drays sub-sided—the wagons no longer traveling two by two but single file—pounding hooves gave way to the creak of floorboards and the muffled voices of neighbors. Factory whistles blew. Church bells rang. The vegetable man made his way down D Street shouting, “Fresh tomatoes,” even if there were no tomatoes, because those words distinguished him from the other vegetable men who plied their carts through Southie.

As Lydia stirred, her mother put up water for cocoa and oatmeal. By the time Lydia had the little ones dressed, Michael and their father had finished their morning ablutions and the washbasin was hers alone. By the time she had brushed and pinned her hair, the drays were gone. Indeterminate Boston had once again been vanquished by the certainty of Southie.

Jamie remembers the warm press of his sister’s hands as she lifted him from bed and set him down beside the clothes she had waiting for him, the sound of the horses rattling inside his head like loose marbles.

South Boston belonged to Lydia as profoundly and wordlessly as her thimble finger. Her knowledge of its streets was more complete than any atlas, her mental maps reflecting changes that occurred from season to season, day to day, and hour to hour. Each time she left 28 D Street—one among a row of identical triple-decker tenements lining the street like so many stained teeth—her route reflected this internal almanac. If on a Tuesday afternoon her mother wanted flour and jam from Hennessy’s, Lydia would avoid the more direct route along Fifth Street due to her dislike of the soap grease man and his fleshy block of laundry soap. No matter what the errand, Third Street was best avoided in early evening when the flood tide of drays returning to their stables posed a threat to both body and nose.

In deep winter, when ice and hard-packed snow made walking treacherous, West Broadway was the place to catch a ride on the tailboard of a snow dray delivering milk, groceries, or beer, but sledding was best saved for Dorchester Heights. If a good enough sled could be found, and if the streets were not too crowded, it was possible to start at G Street and traverse almost a quarter of the alphabet—all the way to L Street. Whether because he was luckier or a year older, Michael was the superior sledder; at her best Lydia could only make J Street before her sled or her resolve gave out.

Because Dan Kilkenny was an iceman, the whole D Street gang was in thrall to Lydia and Michael in summer. In the thick of that season there were few things more magical than ice—the blocks that emerged, impossibly, from the back of the wagon, steaming not with heat but with cold, the unmistakable stomp of the iceman conquering the stairwell, gleaming blocks of ice piled on his broad back like enormous melting diamonds. Contrary to Father O’Brian’s Sunday descriptions of a place streaming with light and angel song, Lydia was certain Heaven resembled the interior of her father’s ice wagon: a dark place, cool and quiet. There the salt hay, sawdust, and straw effaced the airborne tang of leather and glue from the nearby shoe factory and muted the call of the ragman.

On very hot days there was no need to confer in advance. The lot of them would be playing ball in Commonwealth Park, or ambling toward the beach at City Point, or playing marbles or Kick the Wicket on the street. Without a word Michael would turn to Lydia, or she toward him, and with a whoop they would preempt the day’s pursuit and set out for ice. At the sight of Dan Kilkenny’s brood, the iceman would toss out an extra block, the surplus ice arcing toward the street in a dream of captured light before exploding into frozen bliss on the cobbles. Decorum was traded for the fleeting comfort of ice pressed into the perfect place. Frozen shatterings found their way into mouths, inside shirts and dresses, under chins, and atop closed eyes. Ice was nestled into the hollows of throats and hammocked by the webbing between fingers and toes. Ice bent the iron rule of summer for a few precious moments before the heat clamped down again.

Had Margaret Kelly, of 32 D Street, claimed an iceman for her da, she would not have been so lordly about it. Liddie and Mick always waited until the worst of the heat and then made them line up for Indian knuckle burns before bringing them down the right street.

For ten years, this was enough. Then in fifth grade, Lydia saw a city map and realized her entire world was the smallest finger of Boston’s broad hand. The hazy destination of the morning drays acquired focus. Across the bridge lay Boston Common and the swan boats of the Public Garden. Across the bridge lay Washington Street—the longest street in all New England—which began like any other but then continued south, a single, determined thread of cobblestone that wove itself through every town from Boston to Providence. Once Lydia saw Washington Street she knew she could not allow it to exist without her.

She had imagined Washington wide like West Broadway but instead it was narrower, its buildings taller. On Washington, men in blazers and boaters strutted three and four abreast and bustled women drifted cloudlike between shop-windows. The air on Washington smelled neither of factories nor piers but of occasional cigar smoke and wafting perfume. The buildings—with their marble façades and grand entranceways and their seemingly endless layers of arched win-dows—resembled fancy wedding cakes. On Washington Street there was not a clothesline in sight, not a single vegetable or fish man. Striped awnings stretched proudly above showcases containing objects Southie had never seen: a silk opera gown with black glass buttons, a set of tortoiseshell combs, a rocking horse with a mane of real hair. Lydia turned toward Michael—whose trolley fare she had provided from a cache of saved pennies, their passage across the Broadway bridge her eleventh birthday present to herself—and announced that this was her future.

Mick recalls only his disappointment. Before Liddie went gaga over Washington Street, they had always pooled their copper for penny fudge.

On graduating eighth grade, when her girlfriends found jobs behind sewing machines, Lydia rode to Washington Street alone and procured a position in the stockroom of Gilchrist’s department store. Now every morning she had to wake before the drays in order to make the streetcar. During dreary hours of inventory and reshelving, her resolve to work on the far side of the bridge would falter, but her doubts vanished whenever she was called onto the gleaming sales floor. Walking among the wonders of the display rooms, she would calculate the weeks of salary required to purchase a beaded French chapeau or the impossible amount of roast ham that could be eaten in lieu of one opal earring. Rather than discouraging her, these extreme calculations bred optimism. Once she was promoted to sales, she hoped eventually to save enough so that she too could point to one of those fantastical objects and have it delivered into her outstretched hand.

Michael joked that his sister rode the streetcar every day to make up for never having outdistanced him on a sled. Though he was as immune as the rest of the family to the forces that drew her to Washington Street, he formulated a theory to explain the aberration.

“I don’t know how it came to be,” he informed her once it became clear she would not be abandoning her streetcar commute, “but it looks like you turned out the migrating bird in a family of pigeons.” Lydia treasured his gift, picturing herself as she rode the streetcar as one of the long-necked geese whose silhouettes she observed angling south in late autumn.

On the other side of the bridge, Lydia learned the difference between a heavy tub silk and a crepe de chine shirt and the relative merits of a Norfolk versus a sacque suit. She learned that the best suit jackets were nipped in at the waist and slope-shouldered. When a counter girl was fired for tardiness, Lydia was ready. She claimed the sales floor for herself.

For four years she worked behind a lustrous wood counter on the store’s ground level, amid polished marble floors and hanging crystal lamps. Gilchrist’s Tiffany rotunda gazed down from three levels above like an emerald eye. Inside her starched, white shirtwaist, her hair piled into a careful bun, she felt as if her best self lurked just beneath her skin, a shimmery fish that might breach the surface at any moment. Standing before a selection of men’s shirts in a dazzling array of colored fabric, she could eye a man’s collar size, budget, and tastes in a glance and knew, just by looking, the thread count of a cotton shirt or the origins of a piece of silk.

Maisie French, in Collars, insists the Tiffany rotunda was blue, not green.

Even after four years, she thrilled at sealing a customer’s payment into a pneumatic capsule and sending it to the cashier for change. Miles and miles of pneumatic tubing crisscrossed Gilchrist’s walls and ceilings. Capsules left Men’s Furnishings on a current of compressed air to travel over Silks and Velvets, over Embroideries and Trimmings, past Veilings, and past Black and Colored Dress Goods. Lydia pictured her customers’ sales slips speeding past counter girls whispering among themselves in Millinery, past the solitary salesgirl at Umbrellas who every day prayed for rain.

Lydia once visited the Cashier’s Office just to see the veritable pipe organ of commerce where each capsule arrived with a thunk, its contents scrutinized by a woman whose hands were bound to smell like money. Lydia wondered if the woman scrubbed the scent from her fingers each night, or if her dreams wafted with visions of wealth. Whenever Lydia retrieved a returning capsule containing a customer’s correct change, she felt the cold, dry breath of the tube tickle the back of her hand. On slow days she hearkened to Gilchrist’s pneumatic exhalations. After four years, she still marveled at the notion that money pumped through the store no less fervently than the blood in her veins.

The morning of Lydia’s first lunch with a customer, she had been standing with her back to the sales floor straightening stock when her attention was redirected by a neighboring counter girl, who whispered Lydia’s name once the gentleman had been standing a few moments unattended. The fellow was impressively dressed for someone so clearly uncomfortable in his own skin. His clothing seemed to subsume rather than enhance his form, as if his legs were no match for worsted wool, his chest unequal to the task of imported linen. Though he was a striking man, Lydia was reminded of a child dressed with care by his mother.

Maisie does not blame Lydia for forgetting her name, as they were not particular friends—but she thinks Lydia’s memory has been awfully kind to Henry Wickett. If the fellow had been a looker, Maisie would have helped him herself.

“How may I help you?” she asked, having already determined his measurements. She intended to skip straight to silk unless cotton was specifically requested, and then only cambric would do; Fridays were slow and the hardest days in which to meet her sales quota.

“Oh, but you see, you already have helped me,” the man stammered. “I wanted to thank you. The shirt you sold me? My mother liked it very much.”

Henry had not intended to speak at all. Recalling the young woman in Shirts, he had hoped only to observe her from afar. Finding her unengaged, he had approached without thinking.

“Of course!” Lydia lied with professional zeal. She racked her brain for a memory of the sale; normally she was good with faces. “I suppose you’ve come for another shirt,” she offered. “I’ve just the thing. We received the shipment this week from Italy—they’re brand new for the season. I’m sure you’ll appreciate the quality.” She hoped to convince him to buy two.

The gentleman shook his head and looked at Lydia with such regret she wondered if she had insulted him, though she could not imagine anyone taking offense at an Italian shirt.

And here the gentle lie of Lydia’s memory is revealed, for had Henry’s features been distinctive she would not have forgotten them. Vision is memory at its most fickle. It is practically impossible to retain the homeliness of unfamiliar features once they have grown dear.

“Ah no,” he replied with a quavering sigh. “Thanks all the same, but I don’t intend to make any purchase today.” He was blushing with unusual violence. “I was hoping I might accompany you to lunch. To thank you. You see, my mother really did like the shirt and she is so often hard to please. You were very kind and patient, and I thought it was the least I could do.”

“You want to take me to lunch?” Lydia echoed.

Henry credits his uncharacteristic boldness to the obvious pleasure the young woman in Shirts took in even the smallest aspects of her work. Such élan could not be purchased, even at Gilchrist’s.

“To thank you,” the fellow repeated. Though he appeared to be in his twenties, he had the demeanor of a much older man. “For your assistance. That is, if you’re permitted?” With her silence, his blush returned. “I’ve never done anything like this before,” he mumbled. “I’m sorry. I haven’t even introduced myself. My name is Henry Wickett. You can be certain of my good intentions, and if my motives prove unseemly you could easily wallop me yourself.” By this time the fellow’s voice had grown so soft Lydia could barely hear him above the bustle of the store.

Henry was terrified. In his memory of this moment, the entire store is silent save for the sound of his anxious breathing.

Lydia scanned the floor for the manager, but Miss Palantine so seldom left her desk that she had been dubbed “Her Royal Boulder.” There were rumors Miss Palantine had been barred from sales after an incident in which she had tearfully but with some force thrown a ladies shoe at the head of a male customer after a heated exchange in Neckties. It was difficult for Lydia to imagine the drab, officious Palantine involved in passionate discourse of any sort, but then she had also been shocked to learn that Her Royal Boulder was not a spinster in her thirties, but merely twenty-three.

Invitations from customers were uncommon but not unheard of; it was not technically improper to take lunch elsewhere so long as one did not return late. Until now Lydia’s curiosity had been tempered by her refusal to be an object of pity or lust. Such intent was absent in Henry Wickett who, true to his own appraisal, looked far easier to fend off than the Southie boys she had, on occasion, needed to put in their place.

“I haven’t got time for a proper lunch,” she replied, “but I won’t say no if you don’t mind being quick about it.” Never had consent garnered her so sweet a smile.

As well as she knew Washington Street, she was a stranger to its early afternoon habits: Gilchrist’s was a creature that inhaled its personnel in the morning and held its breath until evening. Among the businessmen and lady shoppers Lydia was revisited by the feeling, birthed by her girlhood visits, that she had arrived at the center of things. After years of close observation she had perfected her bearing. She walked with the ideal combination of confidence and propriety, and held her chin at just the right angle. The appeal of this lunch invitation, she realized, lay in walking in such a fashion and in such company. Having studied the world of Washington Street for so long, she could now display her erudition.

Walking beside Lydia, Henry felt as if he were on parade. She moved like a living, breathing portent of Spring.

Timeliness demanded she elect Monty’s, a salaryman’s lunchroom convenient to the store, but once inside she wished that she and her lunch date might have promenaded longer. Monty’s was a noisy place that smelled of boiled beef. Its counter was overhung with stooped diners abridging as much as possible the distance between mouth and plate. A harried plug of a man in a stained apron served as cook, waiter, and cashier and was adept at none. At the sight of Lydia Kilkenny and Henry Wickett he gestured dismissively at the restaurant’s few tables. Lydia selected one in the front corner that offered a view of the street. With her back to the restaurant she could imagine she was dining in more genteel circumstances.

Though none among Us recall a different moniker, Mortimer Montague insists that the name painted on his front window was not “Monty’s” but “Montague’s.”

“It’s not much to look at,” she apologized, “but I hear the food’s decent. Anything fancier and I’d risk being late.”

“Please order anything you like,” Henry Wickett urged. As they waited to place their orders he concentrated on his flatware, displaying the absorption of a child immersed in a private game. She waited for him to speak; she was uncertain what sort of topics gentlemen discussed over lunch and feared sounding common. At unexpected intervals Henry Wickett darted his head upward—a swimmer gasping for air—and she leaned forward in anticipation of conversation but each time was disappointed: his intention was merely to look at her before blushing and returning his gaze to the table, as if she were some brightly burning thing that could only be glimpsed at intervals.

Henry feared grinning like an idiot if he stared at her any longer.

“It was kind of you to ask me to lunch,” she offered. “It’s nice to get a bit of air.”

“Please don’t thank me,” he demurred. “I’m afraid you’ll find I’m not very good at conversation.”

“No?”

“No,” he confirmed, and returned his gaze to his fork.

“Are you a student?” she attempted. Henry Wickett had small, uncallused, unscarred hands marred only by habitual nail-biting. In Southie such unused hands would be cause for embarrassment but here, across the bridge, Lydia viewed them as she might an exotic zoo specimen.

“Yes,” he affirmed, his head darting once again upward as if for a lungful of air. “I study medicine. I’m meant to be a doctor. This table is really quite interesting.”

“What?” she stammered. The table was filmed with grease and scarred from top to bottom with the names and initials of former diners, details that had previously escaped her notice. Before she could speak, the waiter arrived to take their orders. Her dismay over the state of the table was compounded when, after ordering the daily special for herself, her companion requested only a bowl of chicken broth. “I’m sorry,” she sighed. “I suppose this isn’t the sort of place you’re accustomed to.”

“No need for apology!” Henry Wickett exclaimed. His startled hands winged upward and upended his water glass, revealing the surface of the table to be sloped in his direction. One hand enlisted an oversized handkerchief to stop the flow while the other righted the glass. Lydia watched, powerless as a small rivulet escaped blotting and dropped onto Henry Wickett’s imported wool trousers.

Henry remembers Lydia spilling the water.

“Oh dear!” she cried, and started up from her chair with her napkin.

“Please don’t!” he urged. The water was sopped, the glass righted. Henry Wickett darted a glance in Lydia’s direction while his hand furtively blotted his pant leg. “Since childhood I have been allergic to most foods,” he explained. He reached for his water glass and brought it to his lips: it was empty. “My stomach is quite sensitive and so in unfamiliar restaurants I order only calming liquids. And as for the table, it reminds me of an oak.”

“An oak—” she echoed. She observed her reflection in the restaurant window for the first time since leaving the store. The starch had left her collar, and the bodice of her shirtwaist was deeply creased from a morning of refolding stock. Her hair had become mussed and dark shadows ringed her eyes. She was grateful her back faced the other diners. The restaurant had become strangely silent since she had risen from her seat.

“Yes!” Henry affirmed, seemingly unconcerned or unaware of their impression on their fellow diners. “The venerable trunk of an oak, carved by generations of courtship beneath its branches—” His eyes widened. “That isn’t to say—I didn’t mean to imply—” But words failed him. He dabbed vehemently at the water stain on his pant leg.

Memory’s egoism is often a kindness. None of Monty’s regulars recall this incident.

Their food arrived. According to the restaurant clock she had fifteen minutes in which to eat her meal and return to her counter to avoid being fined for lateness, precluding the possibility of further conversation. By the time she finished her lunch, her companion had taken barely three spoonfuls of soup but insisted he was satisfied. After escorting her to the store’s employee entrance he scurried toward the bustle of Washington Street with the single-mindedness of a mouse seeking its mousehole and Lydia assumed that was the last she would see of Henry Wickett.

Henry was too busy watching Lydia eat. This, too, reminded him of a parade. Her every gesture expressed refinement and vivacity.

But in the days that followed, while Lydia rode the trolley or tallied receipts, Henry Wickett’s image surfaced in her mind. His unexpected observation—initially forgotten in her embarrassment over spilt water and inelegant dining—now echoed in her memory. “It reminds me of an oak,” she would think to herself, and the smaller details of the world would sharpen.

Once he had lost himself in the crowd, Henry allowed himself to skip, briefly, before becoming winded.

When Henry Wickett reappeared the following Friday and asked her to lunch a second time, she was taken completely by surprise. “Are you sure?” she asked. Though pleased at the chance to refine her first impression, she feared for Henry Wickett’s digestion, as well as for his trousers. “We’d have to go to Monty’s again.”

“I’ve come prepared this time,” he replied, and pulled three handkerchiefs from his pocket. Lydia had never laughed inside Gilchrist’s before; until now, that pleasure had been relegated to the other side of the bridge. Henry’s smile at the sound reminded Lydia how guarded most faces were. Even once the smile passed, she could see its stamp on his face in the small, light lines around the skin of his mouth and eyes, faint ripples that only graced a face that smiled often.

The handkerchiefs were a purely practical consideration. Henry had not expected his pragmatism to tender such sweet recompense.

The man behind the grease-stained apron pretended not to recognize them as they reclaimed the same window table. Though Henry’s shyness and Lydia’s limited time made conversation difficult, she learned her companion was the only son of a Roxbury businessman, his medical school career the family’s first chance at claiming a doctor. Henry had few friends, as his studies and uncertain health occupied most of his time. His mother had despaired of his eligibility as a bachelor and hoped his becoming a doctor would compensate for his other failings. Though Henry Wickett tended to keep his eyes downcast, when he spoke he gazed at her with a forthrightness much more common to children than to adults. His openness and gentleness—qualities she was unaccustomed to seeing in young men—convinced her that his motives for seeking her company, while mysterious, were almost certainly not dishonorable. Perhaps Henry Wickett wanted to improve his conversational skills preparatory to whatever future courtship he planned to undertake; perhaps he simply did not like to eat alone. Whatever the reason, she was happy to oblige him. In poignant tones she described to her brothers the poor fellow she had begun accompanying to lunch each Friday, her depiction so woeful that all save Michael assumed an act of charity for a man greatly advanced in age.

Mortimer Montague made it his business not to recognize anybody. He looked at shoes, not faces.

The first letter arrived by courier on a Wednesday afternoon. She was certain some mistake had been made, but the
[ 12 ]

messenger’s docket read: “To Miss Lydia Kilkenny, Who Works Behind the Shirt Counter in the Gilchrist Department Store.” On D Street very occasional letters arrived from a distant cousin in County Cork and Michael had once written to Babe Ruth for an autographed photo, but never in her life had Lydia received an envelope bearing her name. Before an audience of gawking counter girls, she signed for the post with a pale, trembling hand; she was certain only bad news traveled with such pomp. From his pouch the courier withdrew an elegant envelope of cream-colored linen, embossed with a wax seal depicting the silhouette of a bird in flight. The nearest thing to it that Lydia had ever seen was the certificate she had received confirming her successful graduation from the eighth grade. To avoid breaking the wax seal, which seemed too fine a thing to corrupt, she slit the side of the envelope with a hatpin. The words were penned in a clear, elegant hand, in even lines of dark blue ink across a single, powder blue page:

Fond repetition is amnesia’s adversary. To this day each word of Henry’s letter retains its savor.

Dearest Lydia,
I am certain you did not expect to hear from me so soon after yet another lunch in which you valiantly carried the day while I sat frozen like some awkward creature made of sticks. Oh Lydia, forgive me, but I have always felt so much more myself on paper. I have ceased to seek reasons for this odd truth: I accept I am a man of letters, my heart filled with ink. If I am to hold any hope of winning you, this is something you must know.

Lydia, I am changed from the poor wretch you took in hand in the Gilchrist’s Men’s Department six short weeks ago. That man was a trembling creature too overwhelmed by the world to think he might ever carve his own bit of happiness from it, a man resigned to a solitary life lit only by the lamp of his studies. His desire to help others did not extend to the belief he could help himself—but Lydia, you have changed that. You have revealed a world in which some measure of shared happiness is reserved even for life’s humblest creatures, so long as they have the courage to lay claim to it when it comes.

You are my happiness, Lydia. The joy with which you move through the world is infectious, reminding me of the pleasure to be found in even life’s smallest facets. Please know as I sit mute and uncompanionable by your side I am silently praising your person and all its fine attributes: even as I write this I am gathering strength for a day when I might speak aloud the thoughts and feelings presently prisoned by the narrow chamber of my pen.

Yours in heart and mind,
Henry Wickett

Her hand began to tremble, forcing her to place the letter on the counter in order to read it again. In demeanor Henry was unchanged from the fellow who had, with such difficulty, first requested her company. And yet the idea of a courtship filled her with a sense of imminence, as if she housed an embryonic chick pecking with its egg tooth against the inner surface of its shell. Henry was different from the D Street boys who took her to the Imperial for the Sunday matinee, or to Castle Island for doughnuts and fried clams—boys with rough hands and loud voices for whom a table was only ever a table and never a tree.

Seeing as she was the cause for the couple’s acquaintance, Maisie thinks it stingy of Lydia not once to have read the letter out loud.

Only now did she admit to herself that for several weeks, unexpected thoughts of Henry Wickett had been finding her. In the middle of a sale, her mind would recall his hopeful smile, or the quiet sincerity with which he spoke, or the mindfulness with which he attended her voice. With Henry’s letter, she acknowledged that her thoughts of him had become a melody in the back of her mind, present even when too soft to hear.

For all the good it did him, Liam Dougherty took Liddie on a Sunday picnic where they ate off an actual tree stump.

The next evening she took extra care with her Friday shirtwaist, pressing it a second time.

“Getting ready for tomorrow’s lunch?” Michael teased as she stood over the ironing board.

“He’s different from you or any of the other boys here in Southie,” she replied. She had not spoken this thought aloud before and the words, leaving her throat, felt like the beginning of a new season.

Friday morning, wanting to look fresh for her suitor, she conducted herself as if she were coated in a thin layer of slow-drying varnish. When five minutes past his customary arrival time he had yet to appear, she was seized by an odd constricture of her throat, and went so far as to risk a dress code violation by unbuttoning her collar. He had never been late before. Then, just as she stepped from behind her counter to join the other girls in the lunchroom, she looked down the center aisle to see him walking toward her with an odd, clipped pace, his face downturned and his neck thrust inside his collar like a sheltering turtle. On reaching her counter he froze, the cords of his neck standing out from his skin as if lifting his head had become a monumental task, achievable only with the aid of ropes and pulleys. Slowly, his face rose to meet hers. The heat of his blush was almost tangible. His eyes were small moons.

Henry was not late, only terror stricken: he was at that moment hyperventilating behind a mannequin.

“Will you come to lunch?” he whispered, his lips trembling.

“I will,” she answered with a shy smile and then Henry blossomed: his spine unfurled, his shoulders broadened, and his smile burst into happy bloom.

By this point anxiety had struck Henry deaf. He intuited Lydia’s consent only by that redemptive smile.

In the letters that now arrived each Wednesday, Henry proved an effusive and poetic correspondent. She came to know of the lonely childhood spent in sickbeds, the time taken up by reading; of Henry’s hope to curry his father’s favor by his successful study of medicine; and of his desire to prove to his mother he could succeed in the world. Lydia was uncertain she knew her own heart as well as she came to know Henry’s. His letters were the equivalent of personal maps, lovingly rendered and lush in detail. In her experience, self-reflection was not a quality widely cultivated, requiring as it did such dear resources of time. Her self-knowledge was a wordless creature of light and contour, whose movements she knew but could not always explain. Henry’s letters accomplished an act of transubstantiation, transforming Henry’s soul from an elusive chimera into a creature Lydia could know and feel. She collected his letters in a small purse she kept near her at all times to protect against their becoming misplaced. During her daily shifts she carried the most recent missive in her shirtwaist pocket so that she could, at any moment, brush her fingers against the smooth paper.

As conversation became easier, Henry graduated from chicken broth to chicken itself, and then to the daily special. His cheeks gained a discernible color, he stopped coughing so often, and a scarf he was inclined to wear both indoors and out disappeared. An entire week passed without Henry once feeling faint or feverish. To celebrate he engaged in the unprecedented act of ordering dessert.

Chocolate pudding, to be precise. Henry recalls the rich brown, the smoothness of the pudding on his tongue and—most prized of all, as taste fades so quickly among Us—the piquancy of cocoa.

Henry’s letters imbued even the banal particulars of Lydia’s day with magic. Passages would come to her at odd moments: while eating in the lunchroom, or while combing her hair. She would hear these words in a stronger, more assured version of Henry’s voice, as if a second Henry, just as real, had taken residence inside her. This second Henry accompanied her to Southie: he was with her as she met her girlfriends for a soda, as she bantered with her brothers, and even as she sat at the Imperial beside the D Street boys, who were no longer permitted to hold her hand. Henry’s letters, now sometimes as long as ten pages, necessitated the purchase, on credit, of a larger purse from Handbags. On evenings when she verged on bursting with his admiration, she would quit the streetcar early and stand at the Channel’s western edge. “Lips like plums!” she would declaim to a gull pecking at a piece of detritus along the bank. “Sympathy and intelligence in rare proportion!” she would sing to the blurred, anonymous faces inside a passing train car. The constant hum of factories and the rattle and whistle of the northbound line provided Lydia rare shelter for her curious tryst—for here and only here did she allow herself to lend breath to her lover’s words, reciting from his letters as loudly as her proud, hopeful voice would allow.

***
FADS OF FASHION

In colors for suits this season grays and browns predominate; antelope gray is much in demand, and all browns, from cream to deep chestnut, are favored.

One of the smart new touches is to match the taffeta dress with a hat faced with the same material, trimming the top of the hat with a contrasting color.

Very attractive are the taffeta-waist models, both in dressy and in semi-tailored finish. The changeable are stronger, but fancy stripes and checks also appear.

The small hat is a mass of budding blooms. The crown is usually dome or bowl shaped, and entirely covered with flowers, half-blown, or buds mingled with foliage.

The popular taffeta suits are elaborately trimmed with ruchings, pleatings, shirrings, or puffings. The skirts show fullness, and the jackets are short and invariably cutaway.

***
THE QD SODA WALKING TOUR

Welcome to Boston!
Hello! If you’re reading this you know that Boston is more than just the home of Paul Revere and the Boston Tea Party. You also know that it’s the birthplace of QD Soda! As you read this guide, whether it’s while sitting in your armchair or walking the streets of Boston, why don’t you open up a chilled QD? Because, as we all know, QD Makes It Better!™

First Stop: Washington Street
As you step onto Washington Street, you may notice that it is narrower than many modern streets. That’s because it is so old! Just as QD Soda is one of Boston’s original soft drinks, Washington is one of Boston’s original streets. When it was named for George Washington after the Revolutionary War, it was already a great place to go shopping! Today, a standout among Washington Street’s fine stores is historic Filene’s Department Store where, if you mention the QD Soda Walking Tour with your purchase of $10 or more, you will receive a free 75th Anniversary QD Soda Makes It Better!™ T-Shirt!*

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.

* Offer limited to Washington Street location, while supply lasts, no rain checks.
†Limited time only, offer subject to product availability, different purchase requirements may apply, offer subject to individual manager discretion.

Excerpted from Wickett's Remedy by Myla Goldberg Copyright © 2005 by Myla Goldberg. Excerpted by permission of Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.