Fever (8 page)

And if it was really true that Elizabeth Bowen died, then of course that bothered her. Of course. The girl was only a child, and deserved no badness.

EIGHT

When Mary was a child, her grandmother told her that as long as she kept the piss pot clean and her apron white, there would be no mistress who would turn up her nose at her. It was over her grandmother’s turf fire that Mary learned how to make griddle cakes and brown bread, where she first browned bacon and boiled beef, made salmon with butter and cream, eel and trout. It was her grandmother who taught her the best way to tuck the turnips and potatoes around the meat, and it was her grandmother who saved enough to buy Mary a one-way passage to America when Mary was fourteen. There would be food in America that Mary had never seen, but the rules were the same: cook it right, draw out what’s good, don’t be afraid of putting things together. Her grandmother’s sister, Kate Brown, would give Mary a place to live, help her find work in New York. “Send her,” Kate’s letter back to Mary’s grandmother had read. “I’d love to have her.”

Mary’s first impression of America when she arrived in Castle Garden in 1883 was that it wasn’t a kind place. Soon after she had steadied herself, her bag secure in her hand, she was hustled into one grim line after another, like one mangy cow in a herd. Other ships had also arrived that day and she waited and watched as the kaleidoscope of colors kept shifting: green aprons, yellow head scarves, red tassels brushing the ground, dotted ribbon pulled through belt loops to hold up short pants. The American men were the ones with the broad faces, and derby hats pulled low. She imagined a welcoming party, but instead one ugly man shoved a card in her face and another, even uglier, braced Mary’s head with his large hand and told her to hold still while he used a buttonhook to lift her left eyelid and then her right. “Trachoma,” he said. “Highly contagious.” Mary didn’t understand the first word and barely heard the others, locked as she was in a posture of fear. When he finished and announced her eyes clean, she noticed that the man wiped the hook on a towel draped over the railing before moving on to his next victim.

Paddy Brown, Aunt Kate’s husband, met Mary when she’d completed all the lines and gotten all her stamps. “Mary Mallon?” he said when she approached the only man left in the waiting area that fit his description. “Follow me.” She followed him down a flight of stairs to the sunshine outside. They passed through the gates of what seemed like fortress walls, and then she was on the outside, on the streets of New York City. They climbed aboard a trolley drawn by a pair of glum-looking horses. When they came to the end of the track, they got out and made their way on foot. Mary struggled to keep up with the old man, who with his hunched shoulders and his badger’s head kept disappearing into the crowd. “Where is this?” she asked, hoping conversation would slow his pace. “Where are we now?” He raised a callused finger and pointed roughly at a street sign that read “Thirty-Seventh Street.” Finally, as the crowds thinned, and she followed him onto Tenth Avenue, Paddy Brown loosened his stride.

“Wait here a minute,” he said just before ducking into a store with a tuft of wheat carved on the sign outside.

“How much farther?” Mary asked.

“Just two doors down.”

Mary dropped her bag to the sidewalk and tried to get a feel for what waited for her, but two doors down looked the same as every door they’d passed for the last several blocks: dark and plain. Rusted staircases stuck to the faces of every building, and from their railings hung a variety of sheets and blankets. Where home had been full of greens and blues in summer, oranges and reds in winter, New York was the same color wherever she looked: the muddy avenues, the muck-splattered carriages, the gray shingles, the faded red brick, the coal smoke that hung in the air and blurred the outlines of everything. The buildings were tall—five, six stories. When Paddy came out of the shop with a loaf of bread, she pointed at the bedding hanging above their heads and asked him why. “Too heavy for the lines,” he said.

“I see,” she said, though she didn’t see. She looked forward to Aunt Kate, and tried to comprehend that somewhere inside one of these buildings that showed their shame to the world lived her nana’s sister. She searched herself for the tug of home.

“How was the journey, anyhow?” Paddy asked then, looking at her for the first time since meeting her.

The girl in the berth below Mary’s had died when they were ten days at sea. In twenty-one days, Mary watched seven bodies slide into the sea, all wrapped in sailcloth and sewn tight. The girl was dropped on the same day as another person, a man by the size of him, and when she fell through the air between the deck and the water, her body bent at the hips, Mary wondered if they’d double-checked, if they were absolutely beyond-a-doubt sure. Someone in the crowd remarked that it was only the Grace of God that would keep the rest of them out of the water, and someone else said Amen, and Mary wondered why God would grant any of them that Grace and not those who’d already been thrown away. It wasn’t the first time Mary noticed that God had a haphazard approach to things.

“Was it very rough?” Paddy asked.

“No, it was grand,” Mary said and looked back at the garbage lining the street, the haggard people rushing about on the sidewalks.

Mary’s aunt had more welcome for her, and scolded her husband thoroughly for not carrying Mary’s bag. She’d prepared a rich lamb stew with carrots and potatoes that went cold before them because every time Mary went to put a spoonful in her mouth, Aunt Kate asked another question about a person from home. Paddy and Aunt Kate had no children and were too old to remedy that fact.

“Well, now,” Aunt Kate said when Mary had finished giving her the news and they’d taken five minutes to eat what was on their plates. “First thing is to find you good work. Then we’ll see. What can you do?”

“I can cook,” Mary told her.

“Cook what? Spuds? A bit of ham? What else can you do?”

“I want to cook.”

“Mary, love, they have stoves in America you’ve never seen the likes of.”

“I can practice on yours.”

“This!” Aunt Kate laughed. “This is nothing. This is a stone’s throw from the turf and the open fire. There are kitchens in some of these houses that have stoves wider than—” Aunt Kate stretched her arms as wide as she could to either side. “They have stoves with four burners, two ovens.”

“I can learn, can’t I?”

“That’s true, I suppose.” Kate regarded Mary with a smile. “Patience, love. It’s very good to see you.”

  •  •  •  

After giving Mary a few weeks to settle in, to get accustomed to the pace of the streets and the chaos of the pedestrians, the horses, the freight train that plowed along Eleventh Avenue and didn’t stop for anything; after showing her the spider’s web of clotheslines hidden behind the tenements, and the tub for washing; after letting Mary get used to her cot next to the kitchen table and showing her how to put coal in the stove, and empty the ashes; after taking Mary to meet yet another neighbor who wanted to know her business; and after learning that no one understood her when she spoke except for other Irish and teaching her how to enunciate, speak slowly, try to talk more like an American, Kate finally announced it was time to go to the agency and see what kind of job Mary could get for herself. Mary had just turned fifteen. Kate told her everything she should say, and made her practice at the table after Paddy had gone to bed. She had Mary sit across from her with her hands folded, and then she asked questions about the jobs she’d had in New Jersey and Connecticut. Mary was to describe how she was an accomplished cook and had cooked for families in Ireland before leaving. “You are twenty years old. Same birthday, just subtract five years from the year.”

“But what if they ask where? What if they ask me to describe New Jersey or Connecticut?”

“They won’t. But if they do, you go ahead and describe whatever you imagine. Be confident. They’ve probably never been there themselves.”

Mary tried to speak slowly and sound older than she was, but the woman at the agency just told her in a blank tone that they’d place her as a laundress. “Are you a worker?” the woman had asked. “A real worker?”

“I’m a worker,” Mary assured her.

“Report with clean clothes. Spotless. And keep your person clean at all times. Be respectful to the family and their guests, and for God’s sake don’t try to engage them if they don’t engage you. If one of the family enters a room that you are in, simply exit as quickly as possible. You have no opinion of politics whatsoever and in fact do not follow politics of any kind. You don’t read the newspapers. Do you understand, Miss Mallon?”

“Yes.”

The agent handed her a folded pamphlet that repeated everything she’d just said.

“Are you religious, by the way? Catholic, I imagine.”

“Catholic.”

“The family has probably already assumed you’re Catholic, or will when they meet you, but don’t mention it yourself.”

Mary didn’t know what it meant to be a laundress and hoped she could prove herself and one day be allowed to cook, but she discovered in that first situation that cook and laundress are two different tracks, and a laundress never becomes a cook any more than a cook becomes a Lady. At home, they’d washed their clothes in the river and draped them on rocks to dry. Aunt Kate washed her clothes in a basin, twisted them roughly when she pulled them out, and hung them on the clothesline that stretched across the tops of the outdoor privies to the back wall of another tenement. The night before Mary began, Aunt Kate showed her the little square ounce of Reckitt’s Blue she kept in the pantry, and explained to her about using it for the final rinse to take out any hint of yellow. Fine clothes needed more careful treatment and she warned Mary that if she encountered anything with a lace collar or cloth-covered buttons, to go over them with the sponge instead of sinking them in the tub with the rest.

The family was called Cameron, and Mary slept on a bunk in a room off the kitchen. She took her meals with the other staff. Room and board would be deducted from her wage. The woman at the agency had gone over the deductions so quickly that Mary didn’t have time to calculate until she got back to Aunt Kate’s, and together they realized there would be hardly anything left over. “But it’s good experience,” Aunt Kate said. “There’s value in that as well.” Paddy Brown made a low sound and shifted in front of the stove.

As the woman at the office predicted, the footman, Nathaniel, who’d been charged with greeting Mary and giving her a tour of the home, told her that she would be required to join in the evening prayers nightly. The mistress did not take her faith lightly and required her staff to approach Our Lord with the same seriousness.

“What if someone refuses?”

Nathaniel studied her face. “Try it,” he suggested.

The Camerons had help that cooked, help that cleaned the house, did the laundry, watched the children, taught the children, tended to the grass and pots of flowers outside. When Mary had a free moment she was supposed to help Martha, who was forever running an oiled cloth over the furniture, up and down the stairs, beginning every day where she’d ended the last and doing everything over again so that no speck of dust ever had a chance to land. The expression she wore on her face was one of combat. She was engaged in a battle that offered no respite, and even while eating lunch at the small kitchen table with the rest of the staff, she was squinting over their heads, peering into corners, and tilting her chin to see in a different light what lurked there. It was the cleanest place Mary had ever been. The newspapers Mr. Cameron left open on the table in the sitting room talked of poor ventilation and crowding in the cities, toxic odors that came from standing water and horse manure, but the Cameron home was so protected from anything like that, so unlike Aunt Kate’s or the rooms of any of the families Mary had visited on Aunt Kate’s block where there was no place to keep the garbage except piled on the curb outside where it would stink until the Department of Street Cleaning came by with their carts, where every person who walked through the door of their building tracked the mud or ash or excrement from the street up the stairs, through the halls, into their own rooms, that Mary started to feel that she was also waging a war, they all were, and Mary’s particular front was at the collars of shirts and blouses, the hems of skirts and trousers. According to the papers, the source of every disease suffered by every New Yorker could be found in a garbage pile on the Lower East Side. Mary heard the word
miasma
and the next time she went home she asked Aunt Kate what it meant. Ever since then she imagined the city streets seeded with invisible landmines, and the landmines were these toxic clouds, miasmas, that floated up from every dirty thing left to fester at the city’s curbs. She tried not to inhale when she made her way to and from the streetcar, or on the many occasions when the sanitation wagon skipped Aunt Kate’s block. She felt safer at the Camerons, where all day long, six days a week, she and the others led a coordinated campaign against dirt and disorder, and where the sanitation drivers never clicked their tongues at their horses to speed them past the door.

Every member of the staff had one day’s leave per week to go home, and perhaps they weren’t as careful when they were back on their own territory. One Monday morning, the Camerons’ longtime cook returned to work with the telltale bull’s neck but pretended nothing was wrong. She just slammed pots and pans and began the ritual of the water with her chin tilted toward heaven, gasping for air. Mary and the others hid her as well as they could, but Mrs. Cameron liked to come down to the kitchen once in a while to discuss the evening meal and she chose that Monday to tell the cook, in person, that the family was bored of beef roasts, and chops, too, for that matter. Could the cook come up with a trout or a flounder on a Monday?

“Oh,” Mrs. Cameron said when she saw the cook’s neck, and retreated to the hall. She put a hand up to her own throat. “You’re ill.”

The cook couldn’t speak, so her assistant—the girl who rinsed and chopped vegetables like they were criminals and her knife a weapon—spoke for her. “She’s just after telling me they have standing water in the air shaft where she lives and on Saturday when we parted she expected the water to be stinking. This morning she told me, yes, it was fierce stinking and no one in her building can keep a window to the air shaft open with the smell of it. It’ll go on until a dry stretch. So she thinks she breathed up that odor in spite of the closed windows.”