Fever (3 page)

A creditor, she decided.

“What’s it to you?” Mary asked.

Soper stepped closer. She could smell tobacco on his skin. She tightened her grip on the knife. “My name is George Soper. I’m a sanitary engineer and have been hired by Mr. Thompson to investigate the Typhoid outbreak that occurred at his home in Oyster Bay this past summer. I’ve reason to believe you are the cause not only of that outbreak but of several outbreaks in and around New York City. You must come with me immediately, Miss Mallon. You must be tested. Can you confirm that you were employed by the Warren family last summer and that you worked for them for six weeks at the home they rented from Mr. Thompson in Oyster Bay?”

Mary couldn’t remember her first response, only her wonder at what that had to do with anything.

“Pardon?”

“You’re sick, Miss Mallon. You must be tested.”

“I’m sick?” Mary forced a laugh. “I’ve never felt better.”

“You are carrying sickness. I believe you are a Typhoid Fever carrier.”

She felt dumb and slow, like she’d been turned around and around and then been asked to walk a straight line. She leaned her hips against the counter to steady herself.

“Leave now, please,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You don’t understand, Miss Mallon. It’s imperative that you come with me now for testing. I’ve alerted the lab at Willard Parker Hospital to be ready for your arrival. You must cease cooking immediately.”

He went to take her by the arm, but she held out the knife and the roasting fork together and made a swipe in his general direction. “Get out,” she hissed. Mrs. Bowen hadn’t been feeling well all day but was upstairs being dressed. Mr. Bowen was hard of hearing. Someone had let Soper into the house, surely. Someone knew he was down in the kitchen, yet no one seemed to be coming. She went for him again with the fork in the lead.

Soper stepped backward into the hall. “You must listen, Miss Mallon.”

“I’ve a mind to stab you with this fork, so you’d better get out of my kitchen.”

“It’s not your kitchen, Miss Mallon.”

Mary made another move for him and he took several steps back. He stumbled for a moment, his knuckles white where he gripped his hat’s brim. He looked at her as if he had more to say, but then retreated quickly down the hall.

A few minutes after Soper left the kitchen, Frank, the butler, appeared.

“Where were you?” Mary asked.

“Mr. Bowen was giving me instructions. Who was that? He’s just standing on the sidewalk looking at the house. I think he has a mind to come back in.”

“He had some cock-and-bull story he’ll tell them,” Mary said, laying down the knife and fork. She began to pace. They heard the sound of the doorbell.

“Leave it to me,” Frank said after a moment. Mary crouched in the hall as Frank opened the door.

“They’re not available at the moment,” Frank said when Soper asked for Mr. or Mrs. Bowen. “Would you like to leave a message?”

“I could wait.”

“I’m afraid not. A dinner party, you see.”

“A message then,” Soper grumbled as he searched his breast pocket for a note card and pen. He scribbled as much as he could fit onto the small space. “Make sure you give this to them,” Soper said, looking the older man in the eye.

Frank gave an abbreviated bow, took the note from Soper, and wished him a good night. When he had closed the door on the doctor, he walked the message to the fire and threw it in.

“Thank you,” Mary said. They watched the paper vanish until Mrs. Bowen’s bracelets jangled a warning from the top of the stairs.

  •  •  •  

Soper’s appearance in the Bowen kitchen was Mary’s first warning, but it had come coded, and Mary couldn’t decipher it. By the time she was sure Soper had left for good, and the ducks were roasted and sliced, she’d decided it was a misunderstanding, and wondered at herself for not saying more. Why had she not told him that she never had the fever, and that she was the one who’d nursed the Warrens back to health? Why had she not told him to check his facts: that the local doctor in Oyster Bay had already concluded that they’d gotten the fever from soft-shell crabs? Mary liked working for the Bowens, but if that man called again and told them his story, or if he sent them a letter by the post, and they believed him and fired her, she’d go back to the office and have them place her somewhere else. If he told that agency, she’d use another agency. If he told all the agencies, she’d go over to New Jersey, where they didn’t like to pay fees.

  •  •  •  

After a week at Willard Parker, Dr. Baker finally came to check on her. “Where were you?” asked Mary. “You said I could get word to someone.”

“And you haven’t?”

“I keep telling them, but it’s been a week.”

“I’m sorry, Mary,” Dr. Baker said, and Mary’s frustration wavered at hearing her first name. The other doctors called her Miss Mallon. “I work at a lab uptown and can’t get down here as often as I’d like.” She removed a few lined pieces of paper from the thin stack on her clipboard.

“You can . . . ?”

“Yes,” Mary said, too grateful to be insulted. “Yes, of course.” Dr. Baker also handed over an envelope. “There should be a pen at the nurses’ station. I’ll tell them you’re permitted to use it. When you finish give it back to them and they’ll post the letter for you.”

“Thank you,” Mary said, and placed paper and envelope on her bedside table. Now that she had a means of getting in touch with Alfred, Mary wanted to consider what she’d say, how exactly to describe what had happened. They’d argued the last time they’d seen each other, but none of that mattered now. And there were practical concerns, too. Her friend Fran had asked her to make a birthday cake for her daughter and it was starting to seem like Mary would not be freed in time. She had planned to shape the cake like a daisy, with yellow and white buttercream frostings. The child would be disappointed.

“Will you walk with me?” Dr. Baker asked.

They strolled along the corridor with the guard trailing just behind. “Mary,” Dr. Baker said finally, “they’ve asked me to talk to you about surgery. About removing your gallbladder. I know Dr. Soper has already explained it, but perhaps there are questions he hasn’t answered.”

In the week since Mary had last seen Dr. Baker, there were several doctors in addition to Dr. Soper who tried to convince her to let them remove her gallbladder. Just that morning, Mary had been called to a meeting with three doctors at once. “We’ll get the best man to do the cutting,” said a doctor named Wilson, and Mary asked the three men present if they’d agree to be sliced open as well, since there was nothing in the world wrong with them either. What would New York come to if surgeons went around cutting open all the healthy people just to take a look at what was inside? They explained it to her over and over, as if she didn’t know what it was to cut a body from neck to navel, but she was a cook, for God’s sake; she once butchered a Jersey heifer with only one other person to help and when she was finished, even after draining the cow well before cutting, she was bloodied to her shoulders, and all those wet and glistening parts that made up the cow, when they were laid out on her table, would never have fit back inside that animal the way God made her had Mary decided to change her mind, put her back together, stitch her up like new. All the worse that they planned to slice her alive.

“I won’t let them open me. I’ve told them already. You can tell them, too.”

Dr. Baker regarded her in silence for a moment, and then nodded. “They’ll send you to North Brother Island. They’ll put you in quarantine.”

“They can’t. I’m not sick. I didn’t do anything wrong.” Mary thought of the paper and envelope waiting for her by her bed. No matter how Alfred was feeling, no matter what kind of week he was having, he’d hear the beating heart at the center of her message and he’d leave whatever he was doing to find her and help her figure a way out of this trouble. Once, about five years earlier, when she was miserable at a job in Riverdale, he’d shown up in her employer’s kitchen one morning to see for himself how low she was, and when she told him everything that she’d promised herself she would not tell him—that the missus had slapped a tutor and threatened to slap Mary, that the man of the house found reasons to brush up against her—Alfred did not make a scene, did not raise his voice; he only listened. And when she was finished he told her the decision was entirely up to her; he’d only come to see her face, but if he had half her talent for cooking, he’d walk out of that horrible house and find something else. “Come home with me right now,” he said, and even as she protested that she’d already mixed the batter for muffins, had already sunk a turkey breast in a bucket of brine, she felt a shiver of recklessness and knew she wanted to do exactly that. Alfred put his hands on her waist and made her look at him. “Leave it,” he said. So she left the batter to harden on the counter and walked with him to the train station. Along the way, he sang a German folk song and danced along the sidewalk to make her laugh. Miraculously, the family never told the agency, or else the message got lost, because the same agency placed her in a new situation the very next week.

She imagined Alfred storming through the main entrance of Willard Parker. If they block him at the front door, she thought, he’ll come through the back. If they lock the back door, he’ll build a tunnel, he’ll scale the walls, he’ll drop in from the sky to fend them off so that I can get home. Alfred, she thought, willing him to hear her. It was something she used to do when she began getting more jobs that took her out of town and away from him. She’d take her break on a quiet back porch and think hard on his name. She’d crawl into bed at night and extinguish every other thing in her mind except for him. Later, when she was back home, she’d tell him what she’d done, and he’d sit up taller and ask which days, exactly, what times, because there was one afternoon when he was walking through the park and had a feeling she was there, trying to tell him something.

“They can, Mary. And once you’re on North Brother it will be more difficult to . . .”

“To what?”

“To get back.”

“Miss Mallon,” a nurse called from behind them. “It’s time to give another sample.”

“I’ll be back in a few days,” Dr. Baker said, placing her hand lightly on Mary’s arm.

“Wait,” Mary said, and heard the panic in her own voice. “Don’t forget to tell the nurses. About the pen. About posting my letter.”

“I won’t forget.”

  •  •  •  

When Mary got back to her room, the paper and envelope were gone. She opened the small drawer next to her bed. She dropped to her knees and searched the floor. She checked under the pillow, inside the pillowcase, under the top sheet, down by the steel casters in case they’d been carried in a draft.

“Did anyone take the paper and envelope that were left here for me?” she asked, looking from cot to cot to decide which among them was healthiest, which among them would have the nerve. “They were mine and I’d like them back immediately.” Her voice was the loudest sound the women had heard since arriving at the hospital, and some of them who had not stirred in days turned to look at her.

“One of the doctors,” the girl by the window said. “He came in and put them on his clipboard when he saw you weren’t here.”

“Which?”

“Him,” the girl said, pointing.

“Miss Mallon,” Dr. Soper’s voice came from behind her, and when she turned he was backlit by the lamps of the corridor. “Did Dr. Baker speak to you about surgery?”

“Can I have my paper back?”

“Not until we’ve talked about surgery.”

My God, she thought, pressing her fingertips to her temples. Didn’t these people know when a subject was closed? Had she not made her position clear? Or did they mean to drive her insane with the same questions over and over and over? Everything in the room seemed to slide to the left. She walked quickly to the window and pushed it up. She had a birthday cake to make. She had a man who had no idea where she was. She had to find a new job. There was a quartet playing at Our Lady of the Scapular in two weeks time and her friend Joan had offered to make her a dress. The cold pushing in through the open window was a salve on her hot skin and she could hear someone whistle for a taxi. The music of a banjo floated through the air from some point north of the hospital. Passing under the light cast by the single streetlamp were a few feathery flakes of snow.

“Dr. Baker said—”

“Dr. Baker isn’t in charge here. She shouldn’t have made promises.”

Mary felt his words like a fist to her gut. She leaned out the window as far as she could. “Hello!” she cried at the street below. She waved her arms so someone might see her. She shouted again but her voice was choked, and Dr. Soper had his arm around her waist. “Help me,” she said to the other women as Soper and the guard dragged her across the room, into the hall, and then pushed her ahead of them to a private room farther down the corridor, where Dr. Soper continued to brace her from behind, and a nurse struggled to open a small vial and pass it under Mary’s nose.

“I don’t know why you always insist on making a scene, Miss Mallon,” Soper muttered in her ear as they struggled. She could feel his breath on her neck, the sharp point of his chin where it pushed into her scalp.

“Relax,” the nurse whispered. “Just relax.”

TWO

Just as Dr. Baker had warned, after two weeks of testing at the Willard Parker Hospital, Dr. Soper told Mary that since she would not agree to have her gallbladder removed, the Department of Health had no choice but to transfer her to North Brother Island. There were facilities on the island where researchers could continue testing, “in a calmer, more focused atmosphere.” She could notify her friends and family when she arrived on the island, but not before. Soper watched her every chance he got, and when he turned away Mary felt space to breathe for a moment, until he turned back. She would not beg—they had enough power over her already. Soper had forbidden anyone at Willard Parker to give her a means to contact her friends—no more promises to post messages—and Mary clung to her composure by reminding herself that Alfred must have seen the newspaper articles. A night nurse had shown Mary the article that was in the
Sun
, and said there were others; her capture was mentioned in almost every major paper. The papers didn’t have her real name—they referred to her only as the Germ Woman—but Alfred would figure it out. It was possible, she thought, that he’d already tried to come to her. That he’d shown up at the hospital demanding to see her, but had been turned away.

“Isn’t that a Consumption island?” Mary asked.

“Riverside is a Tuberculosis hospital, yes. But they’ve seen Typhoid, too. Diptheria. Measles. Everything.”

Mary shivered. “How long?” she asked.

“A few weeks,” Dr. Soper said. Mary told herself that she could put up with anything for a few weeks. She’d let them test her and when they got whatever it was they needed from her, the ordeal would be over, and she’d never have to see Soper again.

  •  •  •  

From the first hour of her arrival, North Brother Island seemed to Mary too flimsy for the roiling East River. It was as if a jagged corner of Manhattan had broken off and floated away before getting caught in the prehistoric rock that lurked just below the surface of the water. North Brother was a little skip of land, an oversized raft made of dirt and grass where the dying went to wait their turn. It was located just above Hell Gate, that point in the East River where half a dozen minor streams met head-on before rushing out to sea, and only a fool would dip her toe in the water there. The entirety of North Brother would barely be big enough for a respectable estate if it were anywhere but New York, but in New York, or at least in Manhattan, where even the very rich live within arm’s length of their neighbors, it was a rarity: a stretch of space that was quiet, and private, and where everyone there was meant to be there, adult men and women whose names appeared on the roster of approved persons the ferryman kept under the bench seat of his small vessel, protected from the spray.

There were no automobiles on North Brother, only a single horse, and that one old and mangy, retired from pulling a sanitation cart and donated to science. During the day, there were always a few bicycles leaning against the western gable of the hospital, the side closest to the ferry that carried the nurses and doctors back and forth from 138th Street in the Bronx, but no one ever used those bicycles to pedal around the island, and seeing them there, leaning haphazardly against the redbrick wall or lying on their sides on the grass, Mary needed no further proof that she’d been removed from the city. If she were in the city, in the real city, and not this in-between place, those bicycles would be gone inside an hour, liberated from their spots and cycled away by Lower East Side teenagers. There were few urban sounds on North Brother. No store shutters creaking open in the morning, clanging closed at night. No bells, no rumble of the El overhead, no peddlers hawking their wares, no children hopping balls, no old women shouting from upper-story windows. In their place were the sounds of tree frogs, birds, the gardener’s clippers slicing the hedges into neat squares, and everywhere, always, the sound of water lapping the shore. Everything, everyone, stayed put, at least until evening came, when the doctors hustled out to the pier to make the awkward step down into the ferry, and the night shift leaned into the slight incline of the walking path and through the hospital’s wide front door. The evening croak of a heron on the island’s eastern shore sounded to Mary like a taunt, and chilled her.

Sixteen buildings anchored North Brother, ranging in size from the main building of Riverside Hospital to the gardener’s toolshed. There was also the morgue, the chapel, the physical plant, the coal house, the doctors’ cottages, the nurses’ residences, the X-ray building, the greenhouse, and so on. The circumference of the entire island could be walked in less than three-quarters of an hour, and from any point on North Brother, unless there was a building or a tree blocking the view, one could look back and see upper Manhattan, and north of that, the invisible seam where Manhattan met the Bronx. When it rained, the current that charged over the pebbles and jagged stones of shore reminded Mary of a pack of galloping horses steaming toward the sea.

  •  •  •  

There were no Typhoid patients at Riverside on the day she arrived, so they assigned her a bed in the main Tuberculosis ward. A nurse provided her with paper and envelopes, a pen with a reservoir of ink. She wrote to Alfred what, by then, surely, he already knew, but unlike the letter she’d drafted in her mind when she was still at Willard Parker, the first letter from North Brother was matter-of-fact. No patient at Riverside Hospital was permitted to have visitors, so she counseled patience, told him it might help to pretend she’d gotten a situation too far away for her to visit—Maine, perhaps, or Massachusetts—and before he knew it she’d be home. She was angry, but had learned that anger wouldn’t get her far. “So I may not see you until Memorial Day,” she wrote. Worst-case scenario, she thought. Two whole months should be plenty of time. He’d had a difficult stretch over the winter, not working, spending far too much time at Nation’s Pub, but she decided not to mention any of that. “Remember the rent if you haven’t already.”

After listening to the hollow coughs from her fellow patients for a few days, Mary learned to predict the end: when a rattle in the chest sounded like a penny thrown into a very deep well that had gone dry. She observed that the consumptives looked like relatives: the same pall, the same dark rings under the eyes. They would stare at Mary and wonder what she was doing there. At night, she slept with the sheet over her face in case she might breathe in their disease, but after a week she stopped worrying. During the day, she couldn’t stop herself from flaunting her health, walking back and forth by the windows, asking the nurses if she could be of assistance. On sunny afternoons she took a book from the hospital library and read in the courtyard. On less temperate days she jotted down ideas for recipes so as not to lose her sense of purpose. She made sure to get outside every day, even if it was just for a few minutes, and when she got back to her cot and nodded to her neighbors, she felt the pink glow in her cheeks, the rise and fall of her chest, the power in her lungs. The confusion on their faces confirmed what she already knew: a mistake. A terrible error had been made, but would soon be corrected.

She submitted to their tests without protest and hoped that the sooner they collected all the information they needed, the faster they would let her go. She had not seen Dr. Soper since the first day she arrived on North Brother, and when she asked about it, Dr. Albertson told her that she likely wouldn’t be seeing much of Dr. Soper anymore. He might check in on her now and again, and of course her test results would be shared with him, but his part in her case was likely over. This tiny piece of good news lifted her spirits for a day.

The doctors on North Brother seemed even more greedy than those at Willard Parker to look at her body. They wanted her hands, her belly, her breasts, her hips; they wanted every wet thing that came out of her, top to bottom—but when they came to her face their eyes flicked away. Some of her interrogators weren’t doctors who had patients but different types of medical men, like Soper, who called himself an engineer but seemed to know diseases. Some of them only studied things and took notes. The questions had changed since Willard Parker. There, they wanted to know about every fever she’d ever had. Had she ever had a rash on her bosom? Now they demanded to know when she knew. You’re an intelligent woman, they said. Several of your employers said you read novels when you had time off. You must have known. How can you ask us to believe you didn’t know?

Mary tried to think of images that would block out the questions—any memory at all that would take her away from North Brother. But more often than not, thinking of Alfred and her friends made her less patient with their questions, more frantic to get home. She paced. She counted to one hundred, and when she was finished, she counted again. She closed her eyes, held her hands to her ears, and still, each question was a dripping tap, a loose shingle in the wind, a fly buzzing by her ear that she could never slap away.

One morning, at the end of her second week on North Brother, she looked out from a fourth-floor window to see if she might spot the mail sack being transferred from the ferry and noticed a trio of men framing a small wood structure a short distance away. As soon as she saw it she knew it had something to do with her, and wanted to disown it immediately. Why go to the trouble of building something for a person who will be let go in a few weeks? No, it must be for some other purpose.

“Pardon me,” she said to a passing nurse, and pointed out the window. “Do you know what they’re building?”

“It’s your cottage,” the nurse looked confused. “Didn’t they tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“You’ll be transferred there once it’s complete. You won’t have to be here with the TB patients anymore.” She smiled gently at Mary as if this might be received as good news. Mary felt as if she’d waded into a lake of cold water and just felt the bottom drop away.

“Why? If they’re going to let me go soon?”

“Did they say that? That they’re going to let you go?”

“Yes, they did,” Mary said quietly as she felt her throat constrict and her body begin to tremble. She stumbled back to her cot and sat at the edge. She calculated back to the day they took her from the Bowen residence—nearly a month. How much more testing did they need to do? She got out a sheet of paper and again wrote to Alfred.

Dear Alfred,

In case you sent a letter in response to my last I wanted to let you know that I haven’t received it. I don’t trust anyone here and maybe you sent it but they didn’t give it to me. They are building a room for me separate from the hospital—just a hundred yards or so away. I don’t know why they would go to that trouble if they’re going to let me go soon. Will you ask around and see if anyone knows of a lawyer who might help? I hope you are getting on fine. I keep thinking that the last time I saw your face we were arguing and it doesn’t sit right that I haven’t heard from you since then. Try again to send a letter, Alfred. It will put my mind at ease.

Love,

Mary

She asked a nurse to post the letter immediately, and one week later, she got a response.

Dear Mary,

I was just sending a response to your first letter when I got your second. I saw the article in the paper and knew the Germ Woman was you since you were supposed to return for the weekend that Saturday night and never did. And also because of them mentioning Oyster Bay. I went up to the Bowens and Frank told me everything. I went straight to Willard Parker but a nurse there told me you’d already been moved to North Brother.

Tell me what I can do. I know things were not so good when we last saw each other but I’m feeling better now, no late nights, and I met a Polish man who has a connection in the water tunnels. We have to think about how to get you off that island. Billy Costello has a rowboat but said the waters around North Brother are too rough and no sane person would risk it. I didn’t believe him at first and went over to the East Side fishery but the fishmongers there all said the same thing. What do they want with you? If they really think you have Typhoid couldn’t they treat you at Willard Parker? Or St. Luke’s?

I’m going to ask around to see who knows a lawyer. Don’t worry.

Alfred

Mary read the letter three times before folding it and placing it carefully on her bedside table. It was the longest letter she’d ever gotten from him in the nearly twenty-two years that she’d known him, and thinking of him sitting down to write it made her more eager to be back home. The room they were building for her had four walls now, a roof, a door, and needed only shingles and a window. Dr. Anderson said she’d be moved in a matter of days. Alfred hadn’t mentioned anything about how he was getting by without her, whether he paid the rent for April, but he knew where she kept the spare cash in their rooms, and maybe that water-tunnel job would be a real lead, maybe he’d love it, maybe he’d find someone who knew exactly how to help her and she’d be back home by summer.

Sometimes they called it a cabin. Sometimes a cottage. A bungalow. A hut. A room. A shack. Whatever it was, they moved her there in April 1907. It was a simple ten-by-twelve-foot structure with a two-burner gas range, a kettle, a sink with running water. They gave her a small box of tea, a bowl of sugar, two teacups. She was not allowed to cook, but prepared food would be delivered from the hospital cafeteria three times a day. To pass the time between visits from medical personnel, Mary was told that she could sew for the hospital, or if she had a knack for crochet, they would provide needles and yarn. She could read. She could explore the island. Mary took all of this information blankly, and as she looked around her new home for the first time, she felt disoriented.