Fever (2 page)

“Tobias isn’t feeling well,” Mary told the nanny, and the nanny told Mrs. Kirkenbauer. The three women convened in the parlor, where Tobias had fallen asleep on a pillow.

“Too much sun yesterday,” his mother said, as she put her hand to his face. “And he had all that pie after dinner last night.”

“Should I ask the doctor to come?”

“No,” Mrs. Kirkenbauer said. “Sleep will cure him. He’ll be better by supper. Leave him where he is.”

But he did not get better; he got worse, and after four days of the doctor coming by to tell them that there was nothing to be done except draw the cool bath and try to get him to eat, and on the same day as Mary served Mr. Kirkenbauer milk that had gone thick and sour overnight, Mrs. Kirkenbauer began to feel low, and then the nanny, and then the butler, and then the gardener, who came only twice a week, always taking lunch with them when he was there. After Tobias they all seemed to get sick at the same time, in the same hour, and God forgive her but she ignored the others until she got that baby into the tub. “Tub,” he said, a whisper, when she put him in the water, keeping a hand under his arm so he wouldn’t slip. She floated chunks of ice she’d hammered from the block and told him they were icebergs, and he a sea captain, and it was his job to make sure the ship didn’t run aground. He didn’t object to the cold. He didn’t demand a toy. He didn’t ask for his mother. He didn’t cry. After the bath, after his fingers had gone to raisins and she was afraid to leave him in there any longer, she wrapped him in a clean sheet and told him stories while he curled up in a ball like he was still a newborn, his knees tucked up to his chest. He looked more like a baby in the sheet, his curls damp, his cheeks so pink that a portrait of him at that moment might have made him look like a healthy child, the healthiest, like he’d just spent an hour running outside on a chilly winter’s day.

And then, on the seventh night of his illness, after a few hours of rocking, while the others called for her from distant rooms, his little body went limp, felt heavier in her arms. His head against her shoulder was a ton weight, his legs like anchors across her thighs. The hot flutter of his breath that had tickled her neck for the past several hours had disappeared. Mary rocked him faster, telling herself he’d be better after he’d had a good sleep for himself. He hadn’t had a proper rest in a week and now he was just having a sleep. Just sleep. A good, sound sleep.

After a while, she laid him in his crib and went to tell Mr. Kirkenbauer, the only other member of the household who was not sick. “He’s gone, sir,” she said, and put her hand on his shoulder before she realized what she’d done. The doctor said Mrs. Kirkenbauer should not be told if she was to have any chance of recovery, and so Mary tried to keep the news from her face when she went in to nurse her. But, one week later, Mrs. Kirkenbauer died as silently as her son, and the butler the day after that. The nanny and the gardener recovered.

  •  •  •  

Two weeks after the boy’s death, after seeing to his little funeral suit, Mary packed her things and walked to the train station, leaving Mr. Kirkenbauer alone to decide what to do about all those dresses, that big, infected house, all those toy boats, the wooden horses, the collection of little shoes and caps. Maybe it was the timber, people said. Where had it been shipped from? Maybe it was the slope of the land and the way the water ran off down to the river. Maybe it was the pipe leading from the indoor privy. Maybe it was all the pickled herring and pigs’ knuckles Mrs. Kirkenbauer asked her cook to buy in town. Maybe the mistress didn’t know how to run a house, being the daughter of a Philadelphia grocer and the granddaughter of a cabbage-shaver. How lucky for her, the neighbors said, to have caught the eye of Alexander Kirkenbauer. How unlucky for him.

People said the old country was full of death, Mary’s old country and everyone else’s. The American papers would have a person believe Europe was one large sick ward, the people dying in ditches, blown over by every stiff wind. Alfred’s Germany was like her Ireland, from the sound of it: people fighting every minute to stay on the side of the living, killing one another over a bowl of rabbit stew, and praying every day that the roofs of their shelters would stay where they were. When babies were born everyone willed them to live, but there was no surprise when they died, eventually, almost all of them, including the two Mary had cared for herself, bringing them eight, nine, ten times a day to the teat of a neighbor’s goat so they could suckle what Mary’s sister couldn’t offer, having died bringing them to life, and what Mary couldn’t offer, being only fourteen at the time, and having no babies of her own. The goat let them suck, but they died anyway, first the boy, and then the girl, and that’s when Mary’s nana told her it was time for her to leave Ireland, to leave while she was able. In America, Nana said, people didn’t die so easily. It was the air, she supposed. The meat.

But people died in America, too, Mary learned quickly. It was just a sneakier death, a crueler death, in a way, because it always seemed to come by surprise. She didn’t notice at first, but then she began to see it all around her. A meal pushed away for lack of appetite. A nap in the afternoon. A tired feeling that turned into a head cold, a rash into a ring of fire, a head cold into a fever that ravaged the person, left him beyond the reach of help. If they didn’t die of illness, they died in fires, they were run over by streetcars, drowned in the river, suffocated after slipping into a coal hill and unable to scramble back to the surface. Neighbors, strangers on the street, peddlers at the market, children, priests, landlords, ladies. They all died, and every death was brutal. So what’s a body to do? Mary thought as she stared out the train window at the Hudson and counted the minutes until she’d see Alfred again.

But that warm, clever little boy this time. The more she instructed herself to think about other things, the more she thought of him, like lifting a black tarp to glimpse something horrible below. Glimpses were all she could manage. His face. That peculiar, angled light in the Kirkenbauer kitchen. The dead weight of him.

Recently, when she and Alfred were talking about marriage and managing to not raise their voices, he’d asked whether she wanted a child. If she wanted to have a child, then that was different. Then they’d have to be married for the child’s sake. “But I thought you didn’t want that,” Alfred pointed out, and she realized it was probably something she’d said. Not because she didn’t think she’d love a child, or because she didn’t think she’d be a good mother. She knew she’d love their child fiercely, entirely. She’d think about him or her every minute of her life, and that was the danger. They were so fragile, and it was so long until they grew strong. She thought of her sister’s babies curled against each other in their cradle, and then the girl alone, how at only eight days old she seemed to be searching for her brother, her newborn fists closed so tight Mary believed for a day she might live. She thought of Mr. Kirkenbauer, the day he picked her up from the train, how he had no idea what was coming.

I’m sorry I left, she’d say to Alfred, who would be surprised to see her home so soon. But she wouldn’t tell him what had happened, because how could she possibly explain to anyone about that boy, that baby? How could she begin? Thinking about him for a single second—the strong grip of his small hand, his belly, the happy swing of his leg on the chair when he bit into a piece of orange—any thought of him at all brought a roaring into her ears like she’d been plunged into the ocean with a weight tied around her foot.

No, she decided. No. She’d go home and try to forget and do as she’d always done, which was work hard and be thankful every day for her good health, her life.

HABEAS CORPUS

NEW-YORK DAILY COURANT

March 24, 1907

Cook Accused of Giving Typhoid to New York’s Prominent Families

_______________

So Say Authorities Holding Her Prisoner

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Sanitary Engineer Alleges She Communicates the Disease to Others Although Immune Herself

(Staff) New York—The cook for a prominent Upper East Side family has been forcibly removed from her employment and quarantined in Willard Parker Hospital after sanitary engineer and medical investigator George A. Soper alleged that she has been passing Typhoid Fever through her cooking, though she manifests no signs of the disease herself. At the time of her capture she was cooking for one of the wealthiest families on Park Avenue. Dr. Soper further alleges that the daughter of the family was battling Typhoid Fever at the time the cook was apprehended, and has since succumbed to the disease.

Dr. Soper, the medical sleuth at the center of this case, put the pieces of this groundbreaking puzzle together after being called upon to investigate a Typhoid outbreak that occurred in Oyster Bay last summer. He identified the cook as an “asymptomatic carrier” of Typhoid Fever, which, in layman’s terms, is a healthy-seeming person who passes a disease along without suffering any symptoms of said disease, and most likely without any knowledge of doing so. Dr. Soper has spent several months making his case to the Department of Health, and one source reports that there are many within that organization who are skeptical about the notion of a healthy carrier, despite the evidence.

It is Dr. Soper’s belief that the woman poses a life-threatening risk to all of those who eat the food she cooks, and has been the cause of Typhoid outbreaks in almost every prominent family she’s worked for going back at least five years, likely longer. The case of this human culture tube, as some would describe her, is attended to with more secrecy than any other this reporter has encountered in his career. It can only be assumed that authorities do not want to further embarrass those families who hired her and welcomed her into their homes. In response to a question on how rare this woman is to science, one doctor who asked to remain anonymous answered: “We just don’t know.”

The woman is rumored to be of fair complexion with a buxom figure and rosy cheeks. Whether she understands the charges piled against her is a matter of concern for the DOH. “We’re talking about brand-new science,” a senior health inspector explained. “If what Dr. Soper posits is true, then she is the first healthy carrier of Typhoid Fever discovered in North America.”

The butler of the family who was the cook’s most recent employer, and who gave his name only as “Francis,” claims that the daughter’s illness and death is nothing more than a tragic coincidence. He tells us that his own wife died of the illness several years back, and so have others he’s known who never had any contact with the accused cook. He claims further that the cook was healthy and showed absolutely no sign of illness. “They took her like they would a common criminal,” he said, showing visible signs of distress. “And for what? I don’t believe what they’ve said about her.” A female eyewitness to the cook’s capture stated that “she fought with the strength of ten men, but they overpowered her.”

This incredulity, authorities say, is a matter of education, and further denials from the woman may lead to her permanent quarantine. A nurse at Willard Parker, who asked that her name be withheld, says the accused woman at the center of this case is the picture of fury. She refuses meals, declines company, and walks back and forth like a caged animal. When asked if she believes what’s been alleged about the woman, the nurse replied, “I myself don’t understand it, but I think the woman should try to listen to them. She’s not helping herself the way she is now.”

Several leading doctors believe Typhoid bacilli are manufactured in the gallbladder, and a representative from the Department of Health states that if the accused woman does not submit to surgical removal of her gallbladder within the month, she will be transferred to North Brother Island in the East River, where she will remain segregated from society for an indefinite length of time.

When asked for his opinion of the case, Mr. Robert Abbott, a criminal attorney who practices in New York City, says that her situation strikes him as somewhat similar to that of Niall E. Joseph, whom Boston authorities have isolated upon suspicion of being a leper.

ONE

Mary wasn’t arrested right away. There were warnings. Requests. It all started with an air of courtesy, as if Dr. Soper believed that if he simply notified her of the danger lurking inside her body she would excuse herself from society. And after, when he and his colleagues resorted to far-less-polite means, they said it was her fault for raising a knife instead of listening, for not doing as she was told.

On a cold morning in March 1907, the Department of Health coordinated with the New York City Police Department and decided that Mary Mallon must be brought in. Dr. Soper suggested she might surrender more easily to a woman and sent a doctor named Josephine Baker to ring the bell of the Bowen residence, where Mary was employed, with four police officers standing behind her. They had not considered that even in the face of such authority her friends would lie for her, help hide her, insist that she could not be the person they were seeking. When they finally found her, she would not come peacefully, so each officer gripped her by a limb and carried her across the snow-covered yard while the rest of the domestic staff looked on. Once the police got her into their truck she started swinging and kicking, until finally they wedged her between their stout bodies and held her as well as they could, and Dr. Baker sat on her lap. “Please, Miss Mallon,” Dr. Baker said, over and over, and after a while, “Please, Mary.”

Mary assumed they were bringing her to the police station on East Sixty-Seventh, so when the truck continued downtown in a southeasterly direction along the same route she took from the Bowens’ to the rooms she shared with Alfred on East Thirty-Third, she thought for a hopeful moment that they might be dropping her at home. They had come to teach her a lesson, she prayed, and now they would set her free. She glimpsed street signs through the small barred window as the driver turned east at Forty-Second
Street. They traveled south along Third Avenue until Sixteenth Street, and then east again with such urgency that she could feel the rhythm of the horses’ sleek heads pumping. The truck stopped just before the river, at the main entrance of a building Mary didn’t recognize, at the very end of a block so desolate that she felt the first stirring of panic that no one she knew would ever find her there.

Dr. Soper was waiting at the entrance to the Willard Parker Hospital, but instead of speaking to her, he just nodded to the pair of policemen who had her braced by her elbows. Up on the sixth floor, they hurried her along the corridor to the Typhoid Wing, where more doctors were waiting in a room with a gleaming mahogany table. One of her guards indicated where she should sit, and before she could properly look around the room, Dr. Soper told her and the rest of the people present that the newest theory of disease had to do with germs and bacteria, and although Mary appeared perfectly healthy, he had good reason to believe that she was, at that very moment, manufacturing Typhoid bacilli inside her body and passing along the disease to innocent victims. He accused her of making twenty-three people sick and being the cause of at least three deaths. “Those are the cases we know of,” he said. “Who knows how many more we’ll find when we can investigate Miss Mallon’s full employment history?” In front of five other men and Dr. Baker, Dr. Soper turned to her, finally, the source of all this trouble, as if waiting for her to say something. Mary felt like her mind had dropped straight out of her head like a stone.

“George,” Dr. Baker said, “she hasn’t even been here fifteen minutes. Perhaps we could give her time to collect herself.”

“Back here in half an hour, then?” one of the other doctors asked.

“In the morning, gentlemen,” said Dr. Baker. “There is nothing that can’t wait until morning, is there?”

No, Mary thought, this mistake will be corrected by morning and I’ll be gone. I’ll walk straight home, make a pot of coffee, tell the whole story to Alfred, and never come near the Willard Parker Hospital again.

Dr. Soper tilted his head and considered Mary from across the table. “Tomorrow,” he agreed. “Fine.”

  •  •  •  

Mary’s bed was at the end of a row, in a large room that held sixteen beds, all occupied except for hers, which waited with the sheets tucked tight and the small, flat pillow placed exactly at the center of the head. Guards stood outside the entrance of the room, positioned so they could see her through the narrow pane of glass on the door. A nurse had left her alone for a moment shortly after showing her to her room, and she’d simply opened the door and walked toward the stairs, but an officer shouted at her to stop, and a passing doctor blocked her way. “I was told I could get word to someone,” she said to the officer as he marched her back. “When?” But he only shrugged, rocking back and forth from heel to toe as he eyed her, and she felt a twitch go through her body as she measured the distance to the end of the corridor.

That first night at Willard Parker, when a nurse came in to turn off the lamps, Mary lay on her cot and pressed her hands against her ears. It was a misunderstanding, surely. Everything would be sorted out in a matter of days. Alfred wouldn’t expect her home until Saturday and would have no way of knowing what had happened. Even then, he might not worry, believing she’d been asked by the Bowens to stay on through the weekend. She had only the money in her pocket and the clothes on her back. Dr. Baker had said she’d be allowed a telephone call, but who would she call? There was no telephone in the rooms she shared with Alfred. No one in their building had a telephone. She certainly couldn’t call the Bowens.

Lying on her side and facing the wall, Mary pressed her palms harder against her ears but could still hear her roommates retching, sobbing, calling for people, relatives, probably, loved ones already dead. She’d seen it all before, but not like this, not so many in a single room, fifteen nightmares twisted together, plus hers, the sixteenth, the strand that didn’t look like any of the others. Finally, she gave up on sleep and went over to the window, which looked west along Sixteenth Street. The sidewalk was dark except for the yellow glow of a single streetlamp, and she searched the darkness for another sixth-floor window, and the shape of Alfred standing at it, not even twenty blocks away. If I shout, she thought, how far away will I be heard? She tried to imagine what he was doing at that hour. He never slept well when she was not at home.

The occupant of the bed nearest the window moaned, and Mary looked down to find a girl, no more than thirteen, her long dark hair wet with sweat and stuck in tendrils around her neck. Mary gathered it together and smoothed it away from the girl’s face. She turned her pillow to the cool underside. She told her it would all be over soon—and it would, for better or for worse—and fetched her a cup of water. She did the same for the rest of them and one woman clutched Mary’s wrist, called her Anna, and begged her not to leave. “We’ll be home soon, Anna,” the sick woman assured Mary, and Mary agreed that they would.

By dawn there were new guards stationed outside her door and she was back in her own bed observing the practiced approach of the nurses as they advanced on each patient with a bucket of cold water and a stack of clean washcloths pulled behind them on a wheeled cart. Mary forgot her predicament for a few moments as she saw how the abrupt coolness of a damp cloth at the head and neck made each woman still, for a moment, as if listening for something. A cloth under each arm calmed the features of their faces, brought them hope, and at the groin brought relief to their whole bodies, and in some patients, tears.

When the nurse who was tending to Mary’s row arrived at her bed, she held up a cloth and looked at her. “You’ve no fever,” she said.

“No.”

“I’m supposed to do the compress to everyone. They didn’t say yay or nay about you.”

“I’ll tell them you did it.”

“Fine.” The nurse continued to observe her. “When did you have it?”

“Never.”

“But you’re passing it along? People catching it from you?”

“Is that what they said to you?”

“Said it to all the doctors and nursing staff.”

“It’s a lie.”

The nurse tilted her head and looked at Mary’s body from her face down to the lump under the sheet that was her feet, back up to her face.

“Well, do you want the cloth anyway? And the water? To wash yourself? I gather you’ve had an ordeal.”

“Yes.” Mary sat up in the cot. “Yes, thank you.”

The nurses repeated the routine every hour, skipping Mary after that first time. At midmorning, Soper came and perched himself on the arm of a chair that was wedged between Mary’s cot and the wall. He told her it was time for her to cooperate, that they had a great deal of work ahead of them. As he spoke his eyes kept glancing over to the nurses as they moved about the room, lifting sheets, moving knees apart. He jumped up and asked to see Mary in the hall.

“How long do you mean to keep me here?” Mary asked, refusing to move until he gave her an answer.

“Come out to the hallway, Miss Mallon,” he said.

“No,” Mary said, lying back on her pillow and pulling the sheet to her chin.

“I don’t want to have to ask for this man’s assistance,” he said, gesturing toward one of the guards. “One way or another, I must talk to you about your gallbladder.”

“One way or another, I must get word to my friends to let them know what’s happened to me.”

“Later, Miss Mallon. Very soon.”

  •  •  •  

The first time Mary had encountered Dr. Soper was in the Bowens’ kitchen, almost one month earlier. She mistook him for a guest who’d arrived too early. It was a bitter-cold day, and there were fires going in every room except for the servants’ quarters, where the small stove would stay cold until bedtime. The Bowens had the type of home where it was easy to lose oneself: large in some senses, tall and broad, with great rooms—the distant ceilings covered with paintings of different scenes from foreign places—and windows looking out onto Park Avenue. But the natural light disappeared as one retreated farther into the house, and at the rear of the residence the staff had to work by lamplight all the time.

Mary had looked up from her work—a beautiful pair of ducks whose skin she was pricking with a knife so that the fat would drain out when she roasted them—and saw a tall man clutching his hat to his chest. He had a light step, and she didn’t hear him until he was nearly on top of her. He was handsome in that way some men in New York are handsome—neat as a pin, his clothes pressed, his hair and mustache precise. He was not a man who had ever shoveled coal or hauled ice or butchered an animal. He was not a man who owned a pair of work boots. He seemed older, though she later learned that they were the very same age, their birthdays one week apart.

  •  •  •  

Toward the end of her second day at Willard Parker, she answered a few of his questions and hoped that meant he would release her. But just after breakfast on her third morning he summoned her back to the room with the mahogany table and invited five other doctors to ask her questions as well. She recognized three of them from the day of her arrival. Dr. Baker was not present. Led by Dr. Soper, they kept asking if she was absolutely certain that she’d never had Typhoid Fever, if she could recall for them every person she’d known who’d suffered a fever since her arrival in the United States twenty-four years before. “Every person I’ve known who ever had a fever? Since 1883?” Mary almost laughed. Would they be able to do it, if they were asked the same thing?

“Or in Ireland,” one of the doctors said. “Any person who had a fever as far back as you can remember.” Their records on her went back to only 1901, and Mary decided they knew enough about her life in those five and a half years. She would not give them more. “I can’t remember,” she said. Dr. Soper walked over to her chair and asked her to demonstrate how she washed her hands after visiting the lavatory. Feeling so many eyes studying her, and knowing they would just keep asking if she refused, she made a peaceful scene in her mind and walked to the sink at the back of the room with her pulse thumping in her ears. They stood closely behind her to observe, so she went slowly, rubbing the bar of soap on the backs of her hands as well as her palms, between her fingers, taking the kind of time she never did when she had to worry about getting supper on the table at an appointed hour. She dried her hands on the hand towel hanging next to the sink, and they observed this as well.

“What are we missing?” Dr. Soper wondered aloud once they’d all returned to their seats. Missing from his notes were the details, Mary knew, the small things a woman notices, the expression on a person’s face when he turns away and thinks himself unobserved. When Dr. Soper appeared in the Bowens’ kitchen that night, she’d reached up to move a length of hair that had fallen out of her bun. She’d lifted her apron to wipe the duck fat from her hands. She’d closed her fist around her pricking knife and asked if she could assist him. He had blue eyes. His face was longish, and white, his cheeks shaved so close that his face looked as smooth as her own, except for the mustache. His lips were parted in excitement. His eyes were glazed over and once they locked on her they didn’t move, just drank her in, every inch of her. He looked directly at her face, at her mouth, at her body, like he owned her, like there was no one in the world who knew her body better than he did. The knife was greasy and she couldn’t find a sure grip. “Shall I call for Mr. Bowen?” she inquired. “Shall I have someone show you back to the drawing room?” Hadn’t there been just a few days earlier an article about a Greek who’d attacked a schoolteacher inside her own home, raped her, left her to die? Bette, the laundress, had disappeared outside to the narrow breezeway at the side of the house.

Missing from Soper’s notes was the feeling in her belly when she looked up to find a stranger striding into her kitchen, to hear him demand to know if she was Mary Mallon. How disorienting it was to have a man like him—with his perfectly tailored jacket, his ivory white fingernails, his polished shoes extending from the bottom of his pants, the cuffs immaculate, as if he floated above the mud and shit that made up the streets of New York City, and never walked through it like the rest of them—use her full name and know that he was not lost, that she was the one he was looking for. He’d finally come to a stop between Mary and the stove. She could make out perspiration on his sideburns. He had high, sharp cheekbones and his face was flushed.