Fever (7 page)

She’d broached the idea with Mr. O’Neill two years later when he came to see her on North Brother, but it was like trying to explain to a cook in training how to tell when a duck is done even when the juices lie, how to predict whether a soufflé will fall just by feeling the air in the room. “A hat?” Mr. O’Neill said. Then he changed the subject and she could see him dismiss it entirely.

SIX

Mary followed Mr. O’Neill by several paces as they entered the courtroom. The time was two minutes past ten o’clock.

Almost every chair was occupied when she walked down the narrow center aisle. She’d pictured benches, polished wood, the judge elevated above them on a kind of throne, but instead the cramped and musty room was filled with straight-backed chairs in uneven lines. Some reporters had turned their chairs to make a cluster with others they knew. Some people who had no involvement in the case but had been following it in the papers nudged their chairs out of line bit by bit with impatient shifting. She wanted to know if Alfred was there, but she kept her eyes fixed on the neat seams of Mr. O’Neill’s suit jacket. There was a momentary hush when those closest to the door spotted her, and a collective creak as several dozen spectators turned to see her for themselves.

Some were on her side, Mary hoped as she crossed the room and kept her focus above the heads of the witnesses. She’d seen the editorials in the paper, the people who believed she’d committed no crime and should be set free to live and work in society like everyone else. Then there were the papers that refused to use her real name even after it had become public knowledge. The Germ Woman, their headlines still read. Readers had written in to ask if breathing near Mary Mallon put a person at risk. What about touching what she touched? What about entering a room shortly after she’d left? She hoped the sympathetic were in attendance at the hearing, but all she felt as she made her way to the front of the room was the scrutiny of fifty people looking at her so closely in the muggy air that she felt handled, groped, every bit as dirty as she was accused of being.

Mr. O’Neill placed his briefcase on a scratched and dented wood table at the front of the room. The men from the Department of Health were already seated at a similar table across the aisle, and Mary made the mistake of looking at them, one by one, until her glance jumped to the row behind them, where Dr. Soper’s dark head was bent over his notes. A man in a blue uniform stepped forward and announced the arrival of Judges Erlinger and Giegerich. Mary hadn’t expected two judges, but she was relieved to see that she’d be able to keep them apart in her thoughts: Erlinger was a big man and Giegerich was no larger than a girl.

“All stand,” the court officer called out, and the clap of chairs being pushed back was thunderous. Mary looked toward the three large windows on the western side of the room and noted that the day had darkened, the metallic smell of rain had seeped indoors. When the people returned to their seats, there was stirred up in the room the odor of vegetables, of horse, of blood. Judge Erlinger pressed a handkerchief to his forehead and then briefly to his nose.

Mr. O’Neill cleared his throat. He began the way they’d discussed, with an account of her arrest in March of 1907. “Without a warrant,” he said, “without due process, the liberty of a perfectly healthy individual . . .”

Mary could see that he was nervous. He was five years younger than she, only thirty-four, but he never seemed as young to her as he did when he touched his fingertips to the edge of the battered table and stood.

“Mary Mallon has been quarantined for twenty-seven months with no one to keep her company but a gardener who delivers her meals three times a day. She has submitted to testing—urine, blood, and stool—twice a week for that entire period. The nurses who collect her samples are certainly no company, and she dreads their visits because of the anguish they cause. Her friends are not permitted to visit, despite the fact that every doctor associated with her case admits she is contagious only through cooking.”

Mr. O’Neill continued, sticking only to what was relevant, and as he spoke Mary found her thoughts drifting. For twenty-seven months she’d craved the streets of Manhattan, the chaos, the noise, haggling over the price of an orange, debating the accuracy of the butcher’s scale. She missed her work, rising before the rest of the house, removing the first shining pot from its hook, lighting the fire under it, dropping in a spoon of butter and watching it skid across the warmed bottom. She missed earning money, walking to Dicer’s on First Avenue, picking out a basket full of groceries, paying for it with clean, new bills.

She missed Alfred most of all and every morning when she woke she wondered whether he was also awake. She often caught herself thinking of him the same way she once thought of the people from home when she first got to America, all the way across the ocean, twenty-one days at sea. And then when she remembered that the East River was not the ocean, was not even as broad as the mighty Hudson, everything felt more urgent and these were the moments that made her wild, as the doctors called it. Combative. Difficult. Stubborn. Obstinant. Ignorant. Female. There were almost five million souls rushing through their days over there. She could see their chimneys and hear the sharp whistle of trains. Somewhere over there walked Alfred, and unlike those she missed from Ireland who were so far away that she’d quickly drawn a curtain across the possibility of ever seeing them again, the idea of being so close to him and not seeing him made everything worse.

If she had more courage she might have tried swimming across like the young men from the House of Refuge on Rikers tried from time to time, but then she reminded herself that most times, if the papers told the truth, those men turned back, often stopping at North Brother for a rest before doing so, or drowned. John Cane once told her that the East River was the fastest, roughest river he ever knew, especially around North Brother. At the time, she’d been on the island only a month and thought he’d been rubbing it in, reminding her that there were no options for her. But after watching those same waters for twenty-seven months, she knew he’d just been stating the truth.

  •  •  •  

Ten o’clock in the morning was not Alfred’s best hour. She thought of his long, white legs, splayed out on the starker white of their bedsheets. She thought of him standing by the window in his shorts. She thought of all the eggshells and orange peels that had probably collected in the sink for twenty-seven months, all the bottles that would need scouring. She thought of him in work clothes, making his way up the building’s stairs to their flat on the sixth floor. Who talked to him in the course of a day? Where did he take his meals? She thought of him running his hand along the curve of her back to her backside and pulling her toward him.

She missed seeing human beings other than herself and John Cane, who had a strange fascination with watching her eat what he brought for her from the hospital kitchen. The night before the hearing, when he should have been worrying about getting her that iron in time, he’d brought her two slices of beef threaded with gristle, a limp salad, a roll. “The people cooking for this hospital should be lined up before a wall and shot,” she said as she inspected the meat. John was the tiniest little sparrow’s fart of a man, but he laughed with the strength of someone full-size. She’d been asking John to bring her flour, yeast, butter, a few vanilla beans, nothing to make a proper meal, but ingredients for bread, something she could work with in the mornings when it was too early to step outside, but he just held up his hands and ignored her. She wondered what they’d told him about her, why asking for simple ingredients always prompted him to say good-bye and hurry across the green space like he was being chased.

Mary observed two flies float in through the window and then out again. The clop of horses, a large team from the sound of it, passed on the street outside and Mr. O’Neill paused for a moment; Mary heard the door at the back of the courtroom open. She heard a man’s low voice asking pardon as he tripped across knees to an empty seat. She heard the voice again, louder, and the sound of it was like a wire pulled up her spine. She felt the small hairs at the back of her neck. The stirring she heard behind her seemed to be moving closer. She felt bodies shifting. Chairs creaked. People exhaled the hot breath of annoyance.

“Sir,” Judge Giegerich said, looking at the source of the disruption while holding a hand up to Mr. O’Neill. “Is this entirely necessary? There are two seats on the aisle right in front of you.”

“I want to sit near Mary,” the man said, and Mary turned to find herself no more than three feet from Alfred, who was dressed in a gray sack suit with the jacket over his arm, and wearing polished shoes. Borrowed, Mary thought. The shirt, too. She hoped he’d give it all back in the same condition. “Hello, Mary,” Alfred said. He looked healthy, fuller in the face than he’d been when she last saw him. Eating, she hoped. Sleeping at night. Mary drew a breath, wanting to speak to him, but felt everyone in the room looking at her, the reporters poised with their pencils to paper, the others with their arms folded or their eyebrows raised. She turned back in her seat and faced the judges. Mr. O’Neill concluded his point.

“Mary,” Alfred whispered. He’d gotten the seat behind her.

Mr. O’Neill cast a sidelong glance at her, a warning not to turn around.

“You look nice.”

Mr. O’Neill turned abruptly and gave Alfred a stern look as one of the lawyers for the Department of Health launched into all the various reasons Mary Mallon must remain in quarantine.

Mary dropped her hand to her side and made a little wave beside the seat of her chair. He would see it if he knew to look for it. The flies flew in through the window again, and this time circled the room. Two more followed. A child’s voice below the window called out the names of the newspapers he was selling. There was the sound of someone running. A cart being pushed down the hall on the other side of the courtroom doors.

“How are you?” she whispered over her shoulder. Beside her Mr. O’Neill dropped his pencil and pushed his pad of paper away.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Alfred whispered back.

“You look well.”

“I’m better, Mary. Much better. Than before.”

“Good. That’s good.”

They stared at each other. Mary twisted in her seat, Alfred leaned forward on his elbows. She felt hot, reckless, and wondered what would happen if she got up out of her seat and walked out of the courtroom on Alfred’s arm. She noticed that he didn’t look nearly as uncomfortable as everyone else in the room. His hand was cool when he reached out and covered hers.

“Will there be a break?” he asked, no longer bothering to whisper.

“Mary, please,” Mr. O’Neill said.

Across the aisle, Dr. Soper coughed, and when Mary looked over at him he was looking right back at her, as if daring her to do exactly what she was tempted to do. His hair was combed back off his face and he was one of the few men in the gallery still wearing his suit jacket.

“I don’t know,” Mary said to Alfred. “I really don’t know.”

“Well, then I’ll see you after. Won’t I?”

Judge Erlinger interrupted the man from the Department of Health. “Miss Mallon, do you need to excuse yourself?”

Mr. O’Neill gave her a look that meant it was her last warning. If you leave this room, the look said, this is the last you’ll see of me. Mary felt Alfred’s hope float up behind her, wrap itself around her shoulders, and pull her toward the door. They would send guards with her, she knew. Without looking at the judges or at Soper, Mary turned and faced the front of the room.

“No, sir,” Mary said. “He’s an old friend.”

A titter went up in the gallery and Mary put her hand to her left eye.

“Go on,” the judge said to the lawyer who’d been speaking.

  •  •  •  

On the other side of the room, in the very back row, a reporter for the
Examiner
noted that the Germ Woman seemed upset. Was she crying? Was she scratching her face like a cat? He leaned forward in his seat, tried to get a better angle. Crying would go over. Crying made sense. He watched her bring her fingertips to her eye and then back to the table and felt his body flinch. He opened his notebook. “Germ woman tearful through proceedings, careless with bodily fluids even in court of law.”

SEVEN

Once the hearing date was set, Mr. O’Neill came to North Brother once more. They went over their strategy, and he told Mary that he wanted her to swear before the judges that she’d never cook for hire again. “It’s your best chance,” he said. They believed she was sick, that she was passing Typhoid Fever from her hands to the food she served. That she’d never been sick a day in her life was of no relevance.

“How can it be of no relevance?” Mary asked. The last ferry going back to the city was due to depart shortly, and she wanted to be clear with Mr. O’Neill on her position before she said good-bye. “How can I spread an illness that I’ve never had myself?”

“I only mean that it’s of no relevance to
them
. But it’s entirely relevant to our argument. It’s a new theory of disease, Mary,” Mr. O’Neill explained. “Dr. Soper—”

“Don’t talk to me about Soper,” Mary warned him. “What kind of a doctor is he anyway? I’ve been asking for two years and no one has explained it properly.”

“He’s a sanitary engineer. He—”

“A what?”

“Part of his job is to track diseases to their source. The garbage, for instance. He’s done a lot of work for the Department of Sanitation. And he’s been a consultant for the IRT since it opened. Remember when everyone was worried about breathing microscopic steel shavings? They called him. He was already making a name for himself, but finding you has made his reputation.”

“That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? So he can make his name?”

“Mary,” Mr. O’Neill sighed. “Things could be worse for you. You have a private cottage. You have the freedom to move about the island.”

“An island the size of a park. Where everyone I meet shrinks away from me.”

“It could be worse.”

“Well, yes, Mr. O’Neill. You’re absolutely correct. I could be dead, I suppose.”

  •  •  •  

Of the many witnesses called the morning of the hearing, a few surprised Mary. Most were people who worked for the Department of Health, or who worked at labs scattered across the city, and who canceled out one another with their opposing views of her case. Half thought that since Mary was a healthy person and had never shown any symptom of the disease she was accused of passing on to so many, the city had no right to imprison her. Others felt just as strongly that it was precisely because Mary showed no symptoms that she must be kept in quarantine for life. “Think of the innocent,” urged a doctor named Stamp whom Mary had never seen before. “No one will think to avoid her in the streets, no one will hesitate from inviting her into his home. Seeing her good health and her experience, what would stop her from being hired to cook in a good house? The Bowen child was only nine years old when she died of Typhoid Fever.”

Mary had hoped that Elizabeth Bowen’s death was one more thing Dr. Soper had made up, wanting to make her situation worse. It had seemed too convenient to their cause. But Mr. O’Neill confirmed it was true, and Mary supposed he had no reason to lie. And now there was an unfamiliar doctor on the stand confirming that truth. Mary remembered the quiet girl who read books and listened to her governess and preferred her bedroom and the parlor to the fresh air outside. Sometimes she came downstairs to see what Mary was making in the kitchen, and a few times Mary had let her dip her finger in a sauce, or take a stewed apple out of a pot with a spoon. One time, Elizabeth asked Mary why she wasn’t married and when Mary told her it was because she didn’t feel like it, Elizabeth said she’d marry Mary in an instant if she’d been a boy.

Then she said, “Is it really because you don’t feel like it? Or is it because you haven’t anyone to marry?”

“Aren’t you bold!” Mary said. “How would you like to pick up someone else’s socks all day long?”

Elizabeth made a face.

“Isn’t it better to earn wages?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said, entirely convinced.

“And don’t forget,” Mary told her, “if I were a married woman, I probably wouldn’t be here making your supper.”

The first sign that Elizabeth was sick came when she wandered into the kitchen and announced that she was tired. Mary had looked carefully at the girl and thought of Tobias Kirkenbauer.

On the day Mary was taken, the girl had been upstairs, sleeping, her governess watching over her. She’d had the fever, yes, Mary remembered that well. She’d wanted to tell them the best way to help her, the best times to put her in the tub, the coolest cottons to wear next to her skin. She’d sent up a bowl of beef broth to give the girl energy, but they didn’t want to listen to her, and sent the broth back down with Frank. She wanted to see the girl for herself, but once the family called the doctor they closed the girl’s door to all of the staff except for the governess, and when the governess became ill they had the doctor tend to her as well.

One of the reporters had gotten Bette to talk, and Bette told him that Mr. and Mrs. Bowen loved throwing dinner parties more than anything else in the world, and now they were afraid that no one would ever want to come to their home again. According to Bette, Mrs. Bowen vowed that every domestic she hired from now on would be a Swede or a German, because they were more impeccable than every other race. When the reporter asked what Bette thought of Mrs. Bowen’s opinion of Germans and Swedes, Bette agreed that it was probably true. She was fired within an hour of the paper landing on Mr. Bowen’s desk.

Since the Bowens didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to even admit in court that they’d welcomed such a woman into their home, that they’d eaten her filthy food and become sick because of it, Dr. Soper interviewed their friends and neighbors instead, and once one of the reporters caught wind that Soper had been talking to the Bowens’ neighbors, so did that reporter. It was printed in the
Evening Sun
that the Germ Woman had too many ideas about herself, and because Mrs. Bowen didn’t tolerate her attitude, the Germ Woman infected her on purpose. The stories claimed that Mary was resistant to some of the ways of good Christian households, and purposely defied them by meeting strange men on corners.

Mr. O’Neill made a point of addressing the main rumors that were printed in the 1907 papers, because those would be the details the judges would recall. How can I be resistant to Christianity when I’m a Catholic? Mary demanded of Mr. O’Neill. Tell me that, please. And the man I met once on the corner was a stranger only to them, not to me.

Mary shared with Mr. O’Neill the observation she’d made ages ago, that all the great houses of New York City are the same. They are headed by women who should have been male, and should have been ministers, women who go down to the employment agency in their white gloves to look around like they are in a brothel, discussing terms with the madam while each whore to be hired looks on. Then when the terms are agreed upon, instead of directing the cook to the kitchen or the laundress to the laundry, every lady gives a speech about joining a Christian home.

“The first thing they ask is whether I’m churchgoing. You’d think it would be something to do with cooking, but no, they want to know whether I get myself to a church on Sundays. Do you think the right answer is ‘Yes’?” Mary asked Mr. O’Neill, who listened and waited without showing any indication of what he thought. “Well, it isn’t. Experience taught me that the better answer is ‘No.’ This gives the lady a chance to instruct a new hire on the beneficence of Our Lord. They all say they want a good cook, but what they want even more is a worthy project.”

“What has this to do with anything?” Mr. O’Neill asked. “We were talking about rumors we’ll need to address one by one when we’re in front of the judges.”

“What does it—? It has everything to do with everything we’ve been talking about! Don’t you see? They—”

“Yes?”

Mary thought to tell him again about the hat, but remembered she’d long since given up on making that point. “Look, if you don’t see, you don’t see. I wasn’t a project for them. I refused to be. I was there to cook as well as I could—and I was damn good at it—but at thirty-seven I was past the project stage.” She went along with it in previous employments, but that time, with Mrs. Bowen, a mood took her. The first time Mrs. Bowen brought up Our Lord, Mary laughed, and said He hadn’t made it downtown in years.

“Oh, Mary,” Mrs. Bowen had said.

There was also the imbroglio about the food cooperatives just a few days after confronting Mrs. Bowen with the twin to her own hat. Mrs. Bowen found Mary in the kitchen to tell her that she and a few of the other ladies had decided to organize their cooks into groups on a trial basis. Together, the cooks would learn the new French methods and more exotic cuisines that she and the other ladies would decide on.

“The idea is to be together,” Mrs. Bowen said, “and learn from one another, and it would be a help to you, wouldn’t it, having other cooks to work alongside instead of just being here by yourself?”

Mary went to the church hall on Sixty-Fourth Street to meet the other cooks, and saw that there were only two others. They had the whole place to themselves and their conversation echoed in the vastness of the empty, wood-paneled room; it bounced off the many droplets of glass hanging from the chandelier. The back room of this hall featured a state-of-the-art kitchen that sat empty most nights of the week except for Saturdays, when the church held socials for its parishioners. The kitchen had ceramic double-pot sinks, a zinc-lined icebox, plenty of work space. The three cooks were charged with making a meal for six families. It was to be like that just on Mondays and Tuesdays, for a start. One of the cooks, Clare, seemed to know more than the other two and informed Mary that when they finished up Mary was supposed to deliver a meal to the Compton family on Sixty-First Street on her way back to the Bowens’. They were to follow Clare’s direction because she had more training in the French method than the other two.

“So I’m now cook for the Bowens and the Comptons?”

“I don’t think we’re meant to see it that way,” said Ida, the third cook. “I think we’re to see it as the three of us cooking enough of a meal to do for six families. Not you have these two, or you your two, and so on. You see?”

“And where are the cooks for the other families?” Mary didn’t see. She usually considered herself the brightest in any group, but the Bowen girl had been feeling poorly and she was distracted by it. Again and again she’d tried to get up to the girl’s room, and again and again she was barred. No one had yet mentioned the word
Typhoid
.

“The other cooks were scaled back,” said Clare. “Told they are needed only Wednesday on.”

“So,” Mary said, like she was waking up from a dream, “we cook here as a group and deliver the food to all these families. That way six families get fed for the price of three cooks instead of six cooks.”

The three looked at one another.

“For the purpose of saving money?” Mary said. It didn’t seem like the right answer, but there couldn’t be any other.

“There’s something like this happening on the West Side,” Ida said. “I have a friend. Her employer calls it a cooks’ cooperative. It’s cheaper for them, and she says that the idea is that after a while we won’t work for one particular family anymore. We’ll be asked to leave our rooms. Then we’ll have to get rooms elsewhere and commute to the place we are to cook just like any other day cook or common laborer.”

“We won’t do this,” Mary said to the other cooks. And that night, for the first and last time in her life, Mary intentionally ruined good food, and talked the other two into doing the same. They overcooked the tenderloins. They boiled the asparagus until it was stringy mush. They withheld salt from the potatoes and put it on the cobblers instead.

“I hope it turned out well,” Mary said to Mr. and Mrs. Bowen when she served them later. “I’m not used to having to transport my dishes. It’s best, you see, straight from the oven to the table.”

“Could you not choose a dish, Mary, that would support being transported?” Mr. Bowen asked, as he probed the meat with the tine of his fork.

“Of course,” Mary said, bowing her head. “We could limit ourselves to just a few dishes that we know would work.”

“Limit?” Mrs. Bowen asked, and pushed her plate away.

  •  •  •  

Once Elizabeth got sick, and they realized it was Typhoid Fever, there was no more mention of cooking in the church hall, or of cooking at all for that matter. Mary made bread and a thin soup that would keep, and spent most of her hours hauling ice up the stairs and the empty bucket back down—the only helpful thing they would allow her to do. They kept the block in the kitchen sink and Mary put Frank to work charging at it with a butcher knife until it came to pieces, little ones to suck, larger ones to serve as floes in the tubs upstairs where the family bathed, and the single tub downstairs where the servants took turns. There was an ice shortage in 1907, and ice was very dear, but Mary ordered blocks on credit and hoped they wouldn’t ask for a settlement of their books before the girl recovered.

  •  •  •  

In their first interview, Mr. O’Neill asked Mary why death didn’t bother her, why she didn’t notice it following her everywhere she went. Mary didn’t even know where to look for a starting point. After so many months on North Brother, so many years since setting foot in Dobbs Ferry, Mary could still feel the silk of Tobias Kirkenbauer’s curls when he passed under her hand, and the way he settled himself on her hip, his arm slung around her neck, as if he had no fear in the world as long as she was holding him. How could anyone think she didn’t notice, or that it didn’t bother her? No one in any court of law, no man in any room, knows the desperation of squinting through dim light and seeing a baby’s cheeks inflamed, feeling the hot hands, the eyes gone flat with fever. A twist came in Mary’s belly that was the beginning of a prayer. Back in 1899, when little Tobias Kirkenbauer wouldn’t open his mouth to eat, who pressed the creamy water from the boiled oats and spooned it into his mouth? I did, Mary reminded herself. And he held on longer than he would have if Mary hadn’t been there. But they didn’t know about 1899. To them, 1899 was not on the record books.