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  • • •

  In some of the homes where Mary had worked, the families had pots and pans by the dozen, sinks with two chambers, iceboxes that could keep a hock of ham frozen for a whole summer. In the rooms she and Alfred shared, they had one skillet, one tall stockpot for boiling, and one small saucepan. But those three vessels were enough for two, enough for the sort of meals Alfred liked most.

  That evening, in case he would return, Mary walked downtown from Nation’s door and then east, to the butcher on Second Avenue that stayed open until six. When she finally got there and smelled the raw meat combined with the sawdust on the floor and the fresh herbs on the counter for those who liked to take home their cuts already seasoned, she knew that he would come home.

  Back in her own silent kitchen, she cleared off the cluttered table and used it to prep. She filled the pot with water. She rubbed the small pork tenderloin she’d purchased half-price with plenty of salt and pepper, a bit of nutmeg she grated, a pinch of cinnamon, a dash of sugar, a teaspoon’s worth of onion powder she measured with her cupped hand.

  After a while, she heard noise on the stairs, steps on the fifth-floor landing. She opened the door and waited.

  “Mary,” he said, and stopped climbing two steps from the top. He clutched the railing.

  “Are you all right?” she asked. Not seeing him for a long time and then seeing him again was a famine and a feast her body knew the rhythms of better than her mind. The light was dim, and Alfred, with his dark hair and eyes, his dark clothes, threatened to fade into the paneling, the deep wines and forest greens of the cheap wallpaper the building’s owner had pasted up so many years ago. Mary couldn’t stop herself from walking over to him. She couldn’t stop herself from holding out her hand. He was every bit as handsome as he’d been when she was seventeen and he twenty-two. He was every bit as strong.

  “I’m all right,” he said, taking her hand between his and drawing it closer for a kiss.

  “I made supper,” she said to him, tugging him gently up the last two steps until he was standing in front of her.

  He put his hands on either side of her head and then cupped her face. He clutched her shoulders and pulled her to his chest.

  “Thank you, Mary. I’m very glad.”

  • • •

  Things stayed good between them for two weeks, and then like a balloon with the tiniest puncture, they started to sink. He came home later. He wouldn’t touch what she cooked. Instead of talking with her in the mornings, he rolled over and stared at the wall until she left to spend the day cooking down at a firehouse social, or a church hall, or a company picnic, or one of the other day jobs she’d arranged by grasping at connections, following up on every rumor, showing up at doors with her knives folded neatly in her bag to say that she heard there was need of a cook.

  September, October, November: they moved around their rooms keeping furniture between them. Once, just before Christmas, they’d been about to pass each other on the stairs when Mr. Hallenan stepped out on the landing and said the missus had kicked him out. Alfred and Mary had looked immediately to each other and laughed, she facing up the stairs, he facing down. They’d laughed together at Mr. Hallenan’s expense, and for one instant they stepped outside of that particular moment in time.

  Sometimes, very late at night, he told her he knew that all the cruel things she said to him were the truth, and it was easy to talk to him then, to pile on more and more because in those moods he would just accept it, tell her she was right, absolutely right. But during the day, whenever she caught him sober, and worked up the courage and energy to face this thing that was eating away at them, she’d take a breath to speak and before she uttered one single syllable he’d already be cringing, closing his eyes, looking away, bracing himself for the volley that would follow, and it was that cringe, before she’d even said a word, like she wasn’t even allowed to speak, like she wasn’t even allowed to raise the slightest objection to the way he was living his life, the way he winced before she’d even fully turned from the counter, that had driven her to the office to find a situation that would keep her away from him. She told Mr. Haskell, who ran the agency, that a regular day off to come home didn’t matter to her. She was willing to go as far as Connecticut. She’d go up to Tuxedo if they paid her enough, and gave her a private room.

  “There is one family that just got in touch yesterday,” Mr. Haskell said as he went through her file. “Bowen is their name.” He looked up to gauge whether the name rang a bell. “There are cooks in front of you, but you have Priority in Placement.” Priority in Placement was a phrase she’d seen on her employment file and scribbled on the envelope where her employers gave the agency honest reviews of her work, her person, how she fit with the family, how open she was to suggestion, how she got on with the other staff. That she had this designation made her lucky, Mr. Haskell wanted her to understand, but she still had to be careful. The Warrens might take that same house in Oyster Bay next summer, and the summer after. Did Mary know how many cooks in New York City would love to spend the summer in Oyster Bay? Did Mary know that President Roosevelt had a home there?

  How could Mary not know it? Every head in town was swiveled toward the ugly brown mansion. Mary gathered that not all of the Warrens’ guests had voted for the man, but by God were they happy to be eating and sleeping and swimming so near.

  “There was sickness in the Warren family over the summer,” Mr. Haskell said after reading the letter Mary had carried for him all the way from Oyster Bay. “Typhoid. You didn’t get it?”

  “No.”

  “Ever had it?”

  “No.”

  “And you stayed on to help nurse those who got it.” He glanced at the letter again as if to double-check what was written there.

  “What else could I do? I’ve been near it before and never got it. I helped nurse the Draytons. Remember the Draytons?”

  Mr. Haskell frowned, and Mary felt a clutch of panic. Had she gotten the Drayton job through the agency? She couldn’t remember.

  “I’m sure the Warrens appreciated it very much.” Mr. Haskell leaned back in his chair. “Did they give you a bonus?”

  “They kept paying me the wage we’d agreed on for August, so I got three additional weeks.”

  “And no more?”

  “No more.”

  The more was given in cash and had been deposited in her bank account weeks earlier.

  Mr. Haskell regarded her for a moment. “Report to the Bowen residence by noon on Monday,” he said.

  TEN

  Someone had propped open the doors and the ceiling fans were humming, but none of it made a bit of difference in the sweltering courtroom. Mary heard the creak of Alfred’s chair behind her, and was about to turn when Mr. O’Neill scribbled a word onto his pad and pushed it toward her: “Soper.” She looked up to find the guard crossing the room toward him, and one of the other lawyers announcing his full name. “Do not react,” Mr. O’Neill had warned her during their preparations. “Show that you are paying attention, but be respectful.” Soper stood from his chair as neatly and silently as a paper removed from an envelope and unfolded along the seams.

  How had he figured it out? Everyone wanted to know. And, oh, how he loved to tell the story. Mary imagined him perfecting that calm remove in front of a mirror at home. How? It was simple. One merely had to be brilliant and determined. She wanted to point out that the story had been in all the newspapers—surely everyone sitting in the room already knew it—but no, they would give the doctor a platform, and they’d all have to sit through it again. She felt her stomach clench as he sat back in the chair and crossed one leg over the other. Mary closed her eyes, counted to ten.

  “Dr. Soper,” the other lawyer said after listing Soper’s credentials, “please explain to us the events leading up to your investigation in Oyster Bay, and your conclusion that Mary Mallon was at the ro
ot of the outbreak that struck the Warren family in the summer of 1906.”

  Soper relaxed further, placed his hands neatly atop his knees. He was so well rehearsed that Mary wondered if he even had to pay attention to what he was saying.

  “I was busy with the subway sanitation problems, but there was something about this case that pushed me on the train to Oyster Bay to have a look. I got there in the second week of January 1907, and I’ll admit that I was no more clever than the other investigators Mr. Thompson hired, at first. Like them, I initially thought the family might have gotten Typhoid after eating soft-shell crabs, and then I thought perhaps it was the water. I dropped blue dye in the commode and then waited to see if the drinking water ran blue. It didn’t. I swabbed the tank but found no typhus bacilli. I stayed for three days and interviewed shopkeepers in town, a police officer, the postman who delivered mail to the Warrens the previous summer. Except for a governess and a music teacher the Warrens had brought with them from Manhattan, they’d hired all local staff, and I went to their homes and asked them to recall everything they could from the week the illness broke out, who among the household had gotten sick and when. Finally, the stable hand, a man named Jack, mentioned in passing at the conclusion of our interview that he didn’t think any of the sick would have made it if it hadn’t been for Mary. I double-checked the notes the other inspectors had forwarded to me, but none mentioned a servant named Mary. The only cook on my list was a woman named Bernadette Doyle. When I pressed Jack, he said that Mrs. Doyle left at the end of July. Her daughter was expecting a baby that came early. So the Warrens sent for another cook. Mary got there on the third day of August.

  “I was calm as I made a note, and then checked it against the first sign of fever: August eighteenth. You can imagine how exciting this was.”

  The lawyer nodded that he could imagine, and glanced toward the judges.

  “I wanted to make absolutely certain,” Soper continued. “ ‘Are you sure about the date?’ I asked Jack.

  “ ‘Sure I’m sure,’ Jack said. ‘The day she came was my birthday. She made the best peach ice cream I’ve ever had, and she was nice to look at.’ These were Jack’s words, you understand. He told me that this cook named Mary stayed on to look after everyone who had come down with the fever. Not until they had all recovered did Mary return home. At that point it was mid-September.

  “After that,” Soper said, “it was so simple, a child could have figured it out.” He described returning to Manhattan and contacting the agency the Warrens had used to find Mary. He had them send a list of all the other families Mary cooked for through the agency, in addition to the residence where she was currently employed.

  “One by one the families got back to me reporting Typhoid outbreaks within a few weeks of Mary’s arrival. I assembled the data, and one afternoon in late February, I went over to the Bowen residence and rang the bell. I was willing at that point to believe it wasn’t her fault—as you know, there are still many doctors who cannot accept the theory of a healthy carrier—and I was prepared to explain it to her. I had not expected to be spoken to so rudely and threatened with a knife. I left a note for Mr. Bowen, but when I passed again several days later, I was shocked to see Mary’s head disappear into the servants’ entrance.”

  “And what have you since learned about that note?”

  “That the Bowens never received it.”

  Mary could still see the flick of Frank’s wrist as he threw the note into the flames. The Bowens had fired him several weeks after Mary’s capture, and she hadn’t heard anything about him since. Fired for helping her, she considered once again and felt the guilt of that press up against her. Fired for knowing her. For being her friend.

  “When did you next attempt to speak to Miss Mallon?” the lawyer asked.

  “A week or so later, at the building where she lives on Thirty-Third Street.” Mary noticed that the courtroom seemed to darken around the edges of her vision, and she felt herself pull away. She felt all over again the shock of arriving home after a week’s work, just getting settled, hearing the knock on the door, and seeing Alfred open it to find Dr. Soper. “It’s very important that I speak with you,” he’d said, ignoring Alfred entirely and taking a slight step forward as if he’d been invited inside.

  She sipped from the glass of water Mr. O’Neill nudged toward her.

  “And?” the lawyer pushed.

  Dr. Soper glanced in her direction so quickly that Mary wondered if she had imagined it. He smoothed the lapel of his jacket.

  “And I was unsuccessful. Neither she nor her companion would listen. It’s possible that the first time I met Miss Mallon I was too abrupt, too scientific about the problem. I’ll grant that. I had a sense of urgency when I went to see her at the Bowen residence, and perhaps I didn’t consider her feelings. When I visited her at her own rooms, I tried a different tack. When she saw it was me at her door, she shouted, ‘What do you want with me?’ So I asked her very calmly, ‘Haven’t you noticed that disease and death follow you wherever you go?’ ”

  He was telling the truth about what he’d said, but Mary remembered his tone, and it wasn’t calm. It was an accusation. Still standing at the door, Alfred had looked back and forth between them, and then stepped away. She remembered shouting, but not what she’d said. She remembered that he seemed to grow more calm as she got more upset.

  “And what was her response?”

  “Anger, as far as I could tell. Once again, she came after me with a knife.”

  A knife with a blade so dull it could barely cut butter, Mary thought. She’d wanted to argue with him that day, but she couldn’t make sense of what he was saying, couldn’t get past the jolt of seeing him again. Disease and death didn’t follow her any more than they followed anyone else. People had been dying her whole life. First her father, in a fire. Then her mother, of a cough. Then, a few years later, her brother, then her other brother, then her sister in childbirth, then her sister’s two babies, and then her beloved nana while Mary was en route to America. Had they had fevers? She supposed they had, but she couldn’t remember, and anyway, those sicknesses that kill a person always come with fever, and in Ireland they didn’t name their fevers. People became sick. They died. She never heard the word Typhoid until she came to America.

  “Was this the first time you learned that she had a companion?” The attorney checked his notes. “Mr. Alfred Briehof?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what can you tell us about that?”

  “When I first arrived at the address the agency had provided to me, I saw Mary outside on the stoop, presumably having just arrived home. I was about to announce myself, but a man approached and embraced her. On the street. I assumed she was engaged to be married, but I’ve since discovered that she is not. It was Mr. Briehof who answered my knock when I tried to speak to her at the door to their rooms not ten minutes later.”

  “Can you describe their rooms from what little you saw?”

  “Mr. Briehof appeared disheveled. I noted dirty dishes on the press, and there was an odor of overripe fruit.”

  The attorney continued. “Please describe to us what you did after failing for a second time to convince Miss Mallon that she must come in for testing.”

  “I leaned more heavily on the Department of Health and the NYPD to take action because I knew I would need their help. After finally persuading them, we came up with a plan. We enlisted a female doctor to help, hoping Mary would be more willing to cooperate with a female, but that was not the case.”

  “And that doctor was Josephine Baker, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  Mary scanned the people on the other side of the room, but didn’t see Dr. Baker among them.

  • • •

  Judge Erlinger called for a lunch recess at noon. Mr. O’Neill suggested they eat together, but Mary wanted to spend the three-quarters of an hour w
ith Alfred. Mr. O’Neill started to protest that they had items to go over, but then he relented. “I have to send a guard,” he said. Mary found Alfred leaning against the back wall of the courtroom, watching her approach. She felt the damp wrinkles in her clothes as she moved closer to him, a rumpled sack of laundry that should be pushed into a basin and wrung out to dry. Her hair had collapsed; she could feel it bobbing at the back of her neck. She was nervous.

  Alfred took her hand and squeezed it once before leading her into the hall and down the steps outside to the corner, where a man with a pushcart was selling ham sandwiches. The guard stayed a few paces behind. What was it that was different about him? He pulled off his collar and unbuttoned his shirt. He pulled off the shirt’s cuffs, rolled up the sleeves, and threw the collar and cuffs in the bushes. Without them, Mary saw that the shirt was worn so thin it was little more than gauze, the outline of his undershirt obvious in the sun. He moved his hand to her waist. She had decided that she wouldn’t let him kiss her until she’d said her piece, but now that the moment had arrived, she decided she could spend the rest of her life saying her piece. She hadn’t seen him in so long, and here he was, looking and smelling and moving like Alfred. She waited, but he only touched her cheek.

  “I have only half an hour myself,” Alfred said.

  “Work?” She doubted it—what job would allow him to show up after noon?—but it was a day for letting things go, for keeping peace. She wanted him to look forward to her release, not dread it.

  Alfred nodded. “It started as a day-to-day thing, but they’ve not said anything about stopping, so I keep showing up and they keep paying me. It’s going on six months now.”

  “What is it?”

  “The ice trucks. Or rather, the ice company stable. They let me drive the truck last week when a man was out, but that was just for the week.”

  “Do you like it?”

  Alfred laughed. “You know you’re the only person who’s asked that?”

  “I know if you don’t like it you won’t keep going.”