Fever Page 19

  Anyway, it didn’t matter anymore, Mary told herself in the morning as she rushed to rub a washcloth over her face. It didn’t matter, she repeated as she struggled to pull on thick tights under her skirt, and watched her own breath hover around her face as she grew more agitated. She knew, once again, that she hadn’t killed that boy any more than she had killed any of the other people in that great, wide, filthy, throbbing city. It would be laughable, really, if it weren’t already criminal for them to have locked her up, one woman, a cook, when every corner of America hid a pestilence just waiting to be stirred up, set free.

  • • •

  After six weeks at the laundry she’d made enough to rent a bed from a widow on the west side. She’d seen the ad in the paper, and instead of mailing her inquiry across town she’d walked it over and pushed it through the mail slot of the building. Although the building was not grand, Mary acknowledged when she was back on the sidewalk looking at it that it was a perfectly decent one. And with just two women in the rooms it wouldn’t be much to keep it clean and everything in its place. The widow wrote to Mary with the date that she should come and the price of the bed. It will be like living with Aunt Kate, Mary decided as she gathered her few things from the boardinghouse. It’ll be something to get used to at first but after a while it will become routine, and she’ll look forward to seeing me, and who knew? Mary might be there for the rest of the woman’s life. She’d heard plenty of cases where a boarder becomes like one of the family, and she didn’t see why it wasn’t possible in her case as well. How difficult it must be, she thought as she crossed the avenues and bent her head against the spring wind, to be an old woman in this city, to have to worry about gathering wood or coal, putting food on the table.

  She walked and walked, and finally turned on Eighth Avenue for the final stretch.

  “Yes?” a woman answered Mary’s knock, but a young woman, younger than Mary, with Mary’s same style of hair and a nicer blouse.

  “I’m here about the bed. I wrote last week and Mrs. Post wrote back to say I should come today.”

  The woman sighed, throwing up her hands. “Come in.” She moved aside with a theatrical half curtsy, and Mary stepped past her into the small kitchen. She admired the window over the sink, and the little square of stained glass that someone had hung to catch the light. Then she turned slightly and noticed a cot. That would be fine. She’d slept in plenty of kitchens. Abutting the foot of that cot, she noticed another. Then, on the other side of the kitchen, another.

  “Oh, there’s more,” the woman promised, pointing to the next room. Mary peeked into a darkened bedroom and took in the larger bed pushed up against the wall, the buffer of cots all around. There was nowhere to walk. The person or people who slept in the larger bed must have to crawl over the cots to get to the door.

  “But the ad,” Mary said, wanting to argue the situation into the one she’d imagined, and not the one that was.

  “Look, you want to stay? Great. I’m out of here next week. You on a regular shift or a night shift?”

  “Regular. Day.”

  “Well, that’s working for you. The night shifts—we have two nurses here—are the real losers in this. They can’t get a wink all day with the racket she makes. She needs us here but she hates us here. You already left the other rooms you were in?”

  Both women looked down at Mary’s small bag, and the other woman laughed.

  Mary’s was one of the cots in the bedroom. She thought she’d gotten lucky when she saw that hers was closest to the door, but then she learned she’d been right when she imagined that the others would have to crawl across the other beds in order to get out of the room. In the middle of the night she was woken by a knee near her face, a foot flicked across her belly, the general rocking and creaking her cot made with the weight of another body trying to pass. There was a flushing indoor lavatory down the hall from their rooms, but long before Mary’s arrival, someone had made the decision that the hallway privy encouraged too much movement in the middle of the night, and so a chamber pot was set up in the corner of the bedroom farthest from the door. If she wasn’t woken by someone traveling on top of her, she woke to the sound of someone letting go a stream of urine into a ceramic pot, followed by the sound of four other women tossing violently in their sleep to shut out the noise.

  She had to find something else. She thought about her old building, about Fran and Joan. Fran’s place was full up with her own family, and Joan? They would make room for her, she knew. They would sympathize. But it was their sympathy that stopped her. They had each warned her about Alfred in their different ways—Joan quietly, and Fran less so, but she had not listened. And now here she was, just a few years later, living in a boardinghouse while Alfred made a new family with a new woman. No, she wouldn’t be able to stomach it, the inevitable human need they’d have to point out that they’d been right, and she was wrong. Instead, she asked Li if he knew of anyone looking for a boarder. She told him she’d even live with a Chinese. She tried to ask the Lithuanians, but they didn’t understand her. She stopped in at all the churches, Catholic or not, between the laundry and Mrs. Post’s, to read the bulletin boards. She scoured the ads in the papers. She quietly suggested to two of the other women at Mrs. Post’s that they strike out together and find a place to themselves, but neither of them was interested, or else they didn’t believe it would be possible for three women to rent rooms together without a man to sign for them.

  Then, very early one Tuesday morning, she heard her name being called.

  “Mary!” a woman’s voice chased her from across the street. “Mary Mallon!”

  She turned and saw Joan Graves hold out her hand to stop traffic as she rushed across the street to Mary’s side.

  “I can’t believe it!” Joan said, and threw her arms around Mary.

  “Joan,” Mary said simply, and let herself be hugged. She was happy to see Joan, silly Joan, talented Joan, who could sew more surely than anyone Mary had ever known.

  “I heard there was a hearing, but I thought they’d taken you back to the island.”

  “Oh, you heard all about it, I’m sure.”

  “Well, it was in the papers. We followed it, Fran and I did. But you’re here. And look at you! I thought you were sick. Have you been sick? What are you doing now? Where are you living? Why didn’t you come see us right away?”

  “I was planning to, but—”

  “And what about Alfred, have you seen him? He told Fran’s Robert that he did the Oppenheimer cure.”

  Mary didn’t remember Joan being so aggressive. She didn’t remember her as a piler of questions, and she was absolutely certain that the old Joan would never have brought up the cure, which was a roundabout way of bringing up the problem, and the drink, and the late nights, and Mr. Hallenan’s shouts up the stairs. The Joan Mary knew might have brought it up privately, with such subtlety that Mary wouldn’t know what she was talking about right away. Not out on the street. Not first thing after seeing her after so long.

  “Where did you see Alfred?” She might as well ask rather than be distracted by wondering all day long.

  “In the building. He does odd jobs for Mr. Driscoll now and again after he finishes up at the stable. You haven’t seen him?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry, Mary. I heard about . . . his new place. I don’t know why I asked that.”

  Mary wanted to ask several questions at once: Did he seem happy? What did they talk about? But she didn’t ask anything. No, she was not interested. She would not beg for information. She would not ask for Joan’s husband, and all of their neighbors, just so at the end of that long list she could ask discreetly about Alfred. She wouldn’t do it.

  “I’m late, Joan. It was great seeing you.”

  “But you haven’t seen me! Mary, you must come by! Will you come for supper one night? On Sunday? When were you released?”


  Mary was already sidestepping toward the laundry, which she could see was open and accepting customers. Let them fire her, she thought. Let them try. She’d march straight up to Lederle’s office and ask him for the money from his wallet. She’d wait in the street outside Soper’s office and mug him as he made his way home.

  “I’m not sure I can, Joan. I’ll let you know.”

  “Yes, let me know. If not this Sunday, then next Sunday.”

  “I’ll let you know.” Mary had turned now, was walking away.

  “Oh, and Mary!” Joan called after her. “Mary! I almost forgot!” Mary steeled herself. She’d met Alfred’s Liza. She’d met precious Samuel. Mary wanted to take her scarf and stuff it in Joan’s mouth.

  “We have a baby girl now. She’s eleven months. You have to see her. She’s the sweetest thing, and—”

  Mary stopped. “You had a baby? You’re kidding me.”

  “I’m not kidding,” Joan laughed. “You were right. Sometimes it does take a long time. Will you come by, Mary? To meet her?”

  “I can’t believe it.” Mary looked around as if the baby might be hiding in an alley, peeking out at them.

  Joan laughed. “Fran is minding her. She lets me get out by myself for an hour.”

  It was Mary’s turn to laugh. “Fran! I thought she said she was done with babies once she got her last one in school. She once told me she’d push Robert straight out the window if he said he wanted to have another.”

  “You know Fran. She was the first one cooing into the bassinet when she was born.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Dorothy Alice.” Even saying the child’s name, Mary saw, cast a glow of joy on Joan’s face. All the impatience Mary felt just a few minutes previous was gone, and now she hugged her friend, told her that she was happy for her. Joan would be a good mother, and if the child had half the heart Joan had she’d be a kind person. For the first time since leaving North Brother, Mary forgot why she hadn’t seen her friends in so long, and wanted to go straight over to the old building to tease Fran. Joan would make a pot of coffee and the three of them would gab away the morning. Who cared about Alfred? Not her. If she passed him in the hall she wouldn’t even turn to look at him.

  As the moment began to pass, Joan frowned. “And you’re not sick, right, Mary? You don’t look sick. What they said about you and those people you cooked for? It’s not true, is it? That’s why they let you out?”

  Mary sighed. “They only ever said it was the people I cooked for who got sick.”

  “And that wasn’t true?”

  “Well, a few got sick. A handful really, out of how many I’ve cooked for. But it was a coincidence. It was a—well, it wasn’t fair anyway. There’s a dairyman upstate—”

  “I knew it. I said to myself, our Mary has no disease, the way you used to work so hard and run up and down those stairs. So you’ll come and meet the baby, won’t you?”

  And as Mary heard herself promise that she would, she knew it was true. She wanted to see Joan’s baby. She wanted to see Fran. Even Patricia Tiernan would be a familiar face, and what had she craved those three years on North Brother but a familiar face? What had she wanted most but to talk to someone who knew things about her that had nothing to do with Soper or Typhoid or even cooking. And they were her friends. They would understand that she didn’t want to talk about Alfred, that there was nothing to say. Never in all the years they’d known one another did either Joan or Fran say a word about their not being married, only concerns about his health, and how hard she worked, and if, perhaps, she didn’t sometimes wish she had a man who took care of her and not the other way around. But there hadn’t been judgment, not really. And she had to hope there would be no judgment now, either, after the humiliation of his leaving her, marrying someone else.

  FIFTEEN

  She worked. After two months at the laundry Li told her that they’d been worried about taking her on as a favor, but that she was as fine a worker as any Chinese, as any person Li had ever known. He told her that Chu was also very pleased. The Lithuanian women acknowledged her more often, nodding and giving her brief smiles before turning back to their stew of cottons and wools.

  In the window of the corner grocer she found an ad for a woman boarder. The building was on Thirty-First Street and Second Avenue, and she decided not to care that it was so close to the old building, but when she went over there she saw that it was little better than Mrs. Post’s. There were cots everywhere, and a pair of exhausted-looking women sitting at a table without talking to each other while she got the ten-second tour and a rundown of the rules. There had to be something better, but it was impossible to really look, with only half a day off every week, and the long hours of the weekdays. She pursued another ad she’d seen in the newspaper, but when she got there nothing seemed right—the large living area, the high ceilings, the separate kitchen, the man who emerged quietly from one of the three bedrooms and held a hushed discussion in the corner with the widow who’d answered the door at Mary’s knock. The man skulked by Mary and ran down the stairs of the building without saying good-bye or good day to anyone, not even the women lounging on the silk sofa like cats stretched out in the sun. Mary realized where she was just as the young widow came over to her and asked her to take down her hair, reaching, as she said it, for Mary’s pins. Mary held tight to the banister as she made her way back down to the street.

  She searched for a month. Six weeks. Two months. The weather grew warmer, the rooms at Mrs. Post’s closer. The nightly foot to the face or the belly was growing familiar, and that worried Mary more. She refused to grow accustomed to living that way. There had to be people who were honest and needed someone like Mary to help. June passed. July. Two of the women at Mrs. Post’s left, and with the breathing space those two empty cots offered, Mary decided to wait a few weeks, to spend her Sunday afternoons doing something else for a change, walking in the park, taking herself out for a sandwich. A few weeks turned into the entire summer. Then, at the end of September, as she was walking north along Third Avenue near Thirty-Sixth Street, she ran into Mrs. Borriello and one of her sons at the produce cart that traveled around the neighborhood.

  “I remember you,” the son said before anyone had said hello. “Mama,” he turned. “She used to live in the building. Wasn’t she—”

  Mrs. Borriello hushed the boy by touching him lightly on the shoulder. She spoke in Italian. “She says hello, how are you doing?” the boy said. “She said she is glad to see you.”

  “I’m happy to see you,” Mrs. Borriello said in accented English.

  Mary smiled at Mrs. Borriello, who had aged since Mary saw her last. “How are you?” she asked the boy. Carmine, she recalled. And the youngest one was Anthony. She calculated the oldest brother to be dead four years now. How well she remembered that afternoon, the hush that fell over the building when the news went up and down that the boy, sent by his mother to gather wood by the bulkhead on Twenty-Eighth Street, had been reaching for a piece of driftwood when he slipped into the river and was swept away. It came out later that Carmine, who’d gone along with his older brother, had run along the riverbank looking for help and came to a group of laborers having a break up on the pier. “Please!” he begged them. “My brother!” But all they did was look where the boy was pointing, and after a minute, as they all watched the boy drift farther away, and as they took their lunches from their pockets, one of the men offered the boy half a sandwich for strength before he went home to tell his mother. Mary wondered now if they ever fished the boy’s body from the river.

  “How is Anthony?” Mary asked.

  “He’s doing good.” The boy looked at Mary, and then down at his hands, and then back at Mary. She wanted to touch his face. “Hey, ah, did you hear about my father? That he died?”

  “No,” Mary said. She put her hand on Mrs. Borriello’s arm. “I’m sorry to hear ab
out your husband. How? He was a young man.”

  Mrs. Borriello pulled her scarf tighter around her hair. “A freak thing,” the boy said. “He was down framing a new building on Broadway and Broome, and they said he had the harness on to do a little welding job up on the beam, and then a strong wind came and he lost his footing and the harness broke. And he fell. It was the fourth-story floor beam.”

  How many times had the boy heard the story, Mary wondered, to be able to tell it so matter-of-factly? What could he understand about beams and framing and the building of buildings? He was probably about ten years old now, but he seemed to Mary both older and younger. Older with his swagger and his way of speaking for his mama, but younger when she examined his soft face, his long eyelashes, the way, underneath everything he said, he seemed to look at each of the women and ask, Did I say it right? Is that really what happened to my papa? Just a beam and a broken harness and a gust of wind? And before that my brother? Is it really possible that he was there beside me one moment and swept away the next? That there was nothing tying him more closely to his life? Or my papa to his?

  “Your poor mother,” Mary said in a whisper as she examined Mrs. Borriello’s dark brown scarf that blended with her dark brown hair, her drawn face, her quick hands passing over one grapefruit and then another until she found one she liked.

  Mary leaned slightly toward the boy, wanting to hug him. “When?”

  “Almost a year.”

  “One year in October,” Mrs. Borriello added, also looking at her son. All three were quiet as the shoppers rushed around them and the produce man kept glancing at them and at their pockets to make sure they hadn’t stuffed them without paying.