Fever (9 page)

Just that morning, on her way from Tenth Avenue, Mary had to hold her breath as the trolley rolled by a horse stable, where on Sunday nights the men who cleaned the stalls pushed out all the horse shit and old hay. Next to the stable was Weiss’s bakery, and before dawn on Monday mornings the Weisses splashed out all the old milk that hadn’t sold the week before. They threw it over the shit pushed out by the neighboring stable. As the sun rose, the milk soured and infected the air. Often, they tossed old eggs, too, and the carcasses of chickens, and crates, boxes, papers, packaging, overflowing ash cans. The eggs bothered Mary most of all, and every time she passed on a Monday, she wondered why they didn’t put them in a cake. Or give them to someone who needed them. The waste of it made her never want to buy anything there.

“Why can’t she speak for herself?”

“Oh, she can,” the assistant said meekly, but the cook sat down on a stool and put her head in her hands.

“You’re dismissed,” Mrs. Cameron said, taking another step backward. “Please go home and tend to yourself. Be in touch with the agency when you’re better.”

The cook showed no signs of moving as the assistant fetched her shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders. “You have money?” the girl asked, then looked around. “Could we pitch in for a fare?” Along with Mary, there were two others of the house staff present. Mary slid her hand into her apron pocket and closed her fist around the dime and five pennies resting there. Mr. Cameron always left a tip when she starched his shirts, and it was a game to find it. Sometimes he left it in one of his shoes, twisted into a hanky and tied off with a string. Sometimes in the pocket of one of the shirts. Sometimes he came upon Mary while she was working, sneaked up behind, and dropped it into her apron pocket. Mary would jump at the sudden tug of the money and he’d be there behind her, smiling. It was something, Mary understood, she wasn’t to tell the others.

Everyone put coins on the counter. Mary’s quick fingers separated out three pennies and she added hers to the lot.

“Well,” the assistant said when she came back. Mary could tell she’d already elevated herself to head cook. “I’ll need to go to the fish market. One of you will need to start—”

“Pardon me,” Nathaniel said, breathless from running down the stairs. “Missus says you’re to go, too. And that if any of the rest of you feel ill, you should do the right thing and excuse yourself.”

“Me?” the assistant asked. “But I feel fine!”

Nathaniel shrugged. “And the rest of us are to take fifteen minutes to scrub the kitchen again.”

After the scouring, Mr. Cameron appeared in the kitchen and asked who could cook a meal until the office sent over another woman.

“I can,” Mary said, taking a silent survey of the fruit and vegetables on the counter, the cheese and milk she’d seen in the icebox. Mr. Cameron ignored her.

Martha could not change positions and was off limits. “Jane?” he asked the children’s tutor, but she said she’d never cooked a thing in her life.

“I can cook,” Mary said again.

Mr. Cameron frowned. “Mary, then.”

And so Mary took off her laundering whites and put on the cook’s apron instead. After that first meal—baked whitefish with leeks and tomatoes, and a vanilla cake for dessert—Mr. Cameron teased that they would cancel their request to the agency for a replacement cook and instead ask for a replacement laundress. He took on the habit of having his morning coffee in the kitchen before heading out to work, and then, after one morning when Mrs. Cameron came looking for him and demanded to know what exactly he thought he was doing, he stopped. And Mary was left alone. A week later, the new cook arrived, and Mary was sent back to the pile of muslins and linens that had been waiting for her. I will leave this position, she decided. I will go to a new agency and tell them a history as cook, and they will believe me. And if they don’t believe me, I’ll go to another agency. She took out her small brush, her square of starch. She rubbed the dry patches on her hands.

NINE

There were times, over on North Brother, with John Cane staring at the way she spread jam over a piece of toast and bit off the corner, when Mary felt like none of it was real. Even two years on, the doctors still spoke to her like she was a child, and she tried to find new ways of reminding them that she’d served food to people who once dined with the president of the United States of America. And after tasting what she’d prepared, they looked up from their plates to study her more closely, knowing she was not entirely what she seemed. Beneath the plain attire and the cook’s hands, behind the thick Irish accent and the working-class posture of exhaustion, they saw something else: a level of taste, an understanding of what those seated at the table were really after—a challenge to the palate, a meal to be enjoyed and not just consumed.

Mary wanted Mr. O’Neill to know that there were some doctors who had an unhealthy obsession with her bathroom habits, far beyond the scope of the case. “They’d watch me go, if I let them,” she told him. Two years earlier she wouldn’t even have been able to say that much, wouldn’t have even been able to make a glancing reference to “going.” They could make all the insinuations and comments they wanted about Alfred, and the rooms they shared, why they weren’t married, what kind of woman this made her. None of it bothered her as much as the discussion of her bathroom habits. Shortly before Mary met Mr. O’Neill, one of the nurses who came to collect her samples joked that she envied Mary. “You’ve got your cottage on the water, free rein of the island, no balance to be paid to the grocer, no child hanging off you, no husband to face at night, no younger brothers to put through school. There’s more than a few who’d trade with you.” The nurse said this as Mary placed on the floor the usual glass canister that contained her sample, mixed in a solution that looked like water. The nurse handed her a second canister for her urine. Mary usually tried to shroud the contents of the canisters with paper or a napkin, wrapping them separately at first and then together, like a package that needed a bow, and doing so allowed her to pretend for a moment that what was happening was not really happening. But that day, because of the nurse’s comment, Mary shoved the jars in the other woman’s direction without wrapping them, pushed them into her hands so roughly that the nurse fumbled, almost dropped them. The contents sloshed inside.

“Careful, Miss,” the woman said.

“I’d say the same to you,” Mary answered.

The doctors admitted that more than a third of the time Mary’s samples came back showing no Typhoid bacilli whatsoever. And her urine came back negative 100 percent of the time. When Mr. O’Neill asked about past pressure they’d put on Mary to submit to gallbladder surgery, they conceded that they no longer believed her gallbladder was to blame. Her intestines, perhaps. Her stomach. They weren’t sure.

“Good thing you were stubborn about surgery,” Mr. O’Neill said to Mary later. “It would have been for nothing.” Mary had occasionally wondered why no one had mentioned her gallbladder in a long time, and now she wanted to go up to the hospital and demand an apology. They were animals. They would have risked her life for sport.

“Let it go,” Mr. O’Neill said. “We’ll address all of it at the right time.”

He said that it was essential that they humanize her at the hearing. “Make me into a human?” Mary asked, confused.

“Well, yes. What I mean is, we have to paint your story so that anyone, no matter what their station, will sympathize. And better yet, make them afraid that they could end up like you.”

“So in acting for me they’re really acting for themselves.”

“Exactly. So. What were your feelings when you were told you were being brought to North Brother? Were you aware of the Tuberculosis hospital here?”

“My feelings?”

“Were you afraid? Did you even know of North Brother? Where exactly it was, for example?”

“Of course,” Mary said, looking at him steadily. “Of course I knew where it was. Doesn’t every person in this city know?”

Mr. O’Neill seemed about to say something but changed his mind.

“You think I don’t follow a newspaper, Mr. O’Neill? Even the illiterate in this city know exactly where North Brother is. There’s more to getting news than reading it in the paper. There’s talking, too, isn’t there? Or did you assume we don’t talk about the same topics you talk about? Wasn’t the
General Slocum
disaster only five years ago?”

She did not admit to Mr. O’Neill that she’d never heard of North Brother before June 1904, when the
General Slocum
burned. But forever after, she thought of those people whenever an errand brought her near
Kleindeutschland
, little Germany, where most of the people on the
General Slocum
that day were from. More than one thousand people had burned to death or drowned, and Mary thought of that number when she looked out over the East River now—men, women, children all bobbing in the rough water, pushed back and forth and under. A story went around in the weeks after the tragedy that the manufacturer of the life preservers had slipped in iron bars to make the weight minimums, that the captain and crew had abandoned the ship and its passengers and taken a tug from North Brother back to Manhattan, refusing to look at those in the water who cried out for their help. Inmates from the House of Refuge on Rikers swam into the water to help people, and then swam back to their prison that night.

Mary often went down to the spot where survivors had stumbled ashore, sometimes imagining that she’d been on board, that she’d been one of the women who jumped into the river and made it to North Brother, and when she wasn’t looking—occupied, perhaps, by the sound of her own breathing, distracted by her gratitude for her life, her back turned, her ears closed—she’d been left behind and forgotten.

  •  •  •  

The hearing would not be a quick one; that much was clear within an hour. As the sun rose higher and heated the odors of the room, Mary felt weaker. She watched sweat run down the sides of Mr. O’Neill’s face. Judge Erlinger’s eyes had begun to close. One doctor, instead of answering anything specific about her case, lectured exclusively on the bleeding of horses, and how it was no longer necessary to bleed a horse to death in order to obtain the maximum amount of serum to make vaccines. “Take Diphtheria, for example,” he went on. “There have been several cases where the horse’s reaction is so strong that death came too quickly, and the glass cannulae used to collect the blood were broken in the horse’s fall and destroyed.”

A murmur went up among the other doctors. Mary leaned over and asked Mr. O’Neill why they were talking about horses.

“The best thing,” the man went on, “is to always bleed from the carotid vein, and not the jugular. The jugular will weaken the horse too quickly, and in most cases results in less blood collected. But even more important, the use of supports must”—he banged his fist on the chair for emphasis—“become standard practice across the labs. A large male horse can be suspended with two stout ropes, one passing behind the forelegs and one in front of the hind legs. Once the support is in place, the cannula should be inserted into the artery. By this method it’s possible to obtain five usable gallons from a single horse.”

“And where do you stand on the Mallon case?” the DOH lawyer urged the doctor.

“In terms of Typhoid, I think the answer lies in widespread milk pasteurization, cleaner water, better education on personal hygiene. Typhoid is entirely preventable.”

“Should she be let back into society or not?”

“I—” the doctor faltered, looked over at Mary. “It’s my opinion . . . that she should not.”

One Department of Health official asked the judges to consider what exactly motivated Mary to take the job uptown at the Bowen residence in the first place. Did she harbor a resentment of some sort against the upper classes? Did she resent the Bowens in particular? Perhaps because of the food cooperative Mrs. Bowen had attempted to organize? Without waiting for answers, the official then sat back as if he’d just put the final piece in the puzzle.

“I worked for the Bowens because of what they paid me,” Mary whispered urgently to Mr. O’Neill, who bellowed an objection. It was illogical, Mr. O’Neill pointed out. A woman can’t be accused of lacking the ability to comprehend her affliction at one moment, and then accused of wielding it like a weapon the next.

“And why did her employment with the Warrens end in Oyster Bay? Why did she not continue to work for them once they returned to the city?”

“Because it was a temporary job,” Mary whispered to Mr. O’Neill, but he shushed her. He’d asked her the same question during their preparation meeting and already knew the answer. The Warren job was never meant to be permanent. Their regular cook was to resume her position in Manhattan once they returned from Oyster Bay.

Mary studied the judges’ faces and saw doubt.

  •  •  •  

She got home from Oyster Bay on a Friday in September 1906. It was a beautiful day, and better still because she had a pocket full of money that had been pushed into her hand from a grateful Mr. Warren. Little Margaret Warren would play again, would beg ice cream off another cook, would grow up and marry and do all the things a girl should do. Her sister, her mother, the two maids, and the gardener would also live. All the family except for Mr. Warren had already returned to Manhattan, and Mary had left two of the maids drinking cold watermelon soup on the back patio. They’d hugged her good-bye together, squeezing her between them and saying again what a shock each of them got when she pushed them into an icy bath, clothes and all. They blessed her, thanked her, said they knew they wouldn’t have their lives if it hadn’t been for her.

She’d gotten to the station in plenty of time to catch an earlier train, but she’d written her plans to Alfred the previous week, and wanted to stay with the schedule she’d sent in case he planned on meeting her. So she sat on a bench in breezy Oyster Bay and watched a train pull in and then pull away. When she got to Grand Central Station she waited on a bench again with her bag on her lap to give Alfred a chance to find her.

After thirty minutes she pushed through the grand doors onto Forty-Second Street and began walking home. Something had come up, she decided. He didn’t have time to send word. He probably had a perfectly good reason for not showing up. Because it was a Friday, every rusted fire escape in their neighborhood would be weighted down with damp cottons and thin wools in every muted shade of white, gray, brown, from Patricia Wright’s careful calico to the yellowed squares of muslin Mr. Hallenan used to strain his coffee. Where twenty years earlier this had shamed her, now she took comfort in the sight and knew she was closer to home. A few tenants had gotten hold of the new roundabout lines that could be extended out a window into the sky without needing to be anchored on another building or another fire escape.

The rooms Mary shared with Alfred were on the sixth floor, at the very top of the stairs. Unlike the narrow tenements of the Lower East Side, 302 East Thirty-Third was a broad building that held within the yellow brick of its exterior walls thirty-six flats. There was a central staircase wide enough for three bodies to climb the stairs side by side, and from this central stair branched two halls that reached north and south, three flats per hall, six per floor. The sixth floor saw the highest turnover, and some of the rooms stayed empty for weeks at a time. Anyone with rooms on the top floor aimed to get lower as soon as possible, but Mary liked the sixth floor. Their rooms always seemed to get better light than those on lower floors and Mary liked standing at the sink and looking out over lower rooftops. When lying in their bed she could turn her head toward the window and see nothing but blue sky.

When Mary arrived home
that Friday in September, she opened the door to their rooms and was hit by the odor of linen that needed washing, rotting banana peels on the counter, the single window shut tight. The letter she’d sent to tell Alfred what time her train was due was open on the table, and she could see that he’d made an effort to flatten the folds. He might have gotten work. It happened that way sometimes: no prospects on the horizon and next thing someone comes looking for him with a tip about a company looking for a driver, or need for a man who could shovel coal.

Mary set about stripping their bed and washing the linens, but when she had everything soaking in the tub, she couldn’t find any soap. She decided to run down to the grocer. Not wanting to break one of the new paper bills Mr. Warren had given her, she went to the jam jar of coins they kept by the stove for the gas meter. But there was no jam jar, no coins, and after seven weeks of missing him, of hoping he was getting on, Mary was as furious as she’d been the day she left. Sometimes—and staring at the empty space where the jam jar used to live was one of these times—Mary felt she’d tripped into a space beyond fury, a place where all of this was so astonishing that perhaps she was the one who was wrong. She took a deep breath and went over the facts: I told him to not dare touch the gas money. Do not dare, I said to him. And he looked at me like he wouldn’t dream of it. His look said: the nerve of you to say that to me. I told him I’d send word when I was due home and if he could have the rooms straightened a bit. After a seven-week job I don’t want to walk into a pigsty. He was insulted. And now Mary stood in the middle of the kitchen and contemplated the naked bed in the next room, the dirty plates and mugs on the sideboard. She could walk out the door with the same bag she’d just hauled from Oyster Bay, and leave him to manage the sopping bedsheets. She smiled. That would be a surprise to him.

But if he’s working, Mary reminded herself, he might have needed those coins to make himself presentable. Unpeeling one bill from the thick fold in her pocket and leaving the rest hidden in the closet, she went down to the street to buy a cake of soap. She hoped that by the time she came back, washed the sheets, and hung them on the fire escape, Alfred would be home.