Fever: A Novel Page 7

  He held up his hands as if to say it wasn’t his fault. Nothing was his fault.

  She wasn’t going to argue with him that day. She’d save any arguing for the judge downtown.

  “You look nice anyhow,” John said, and Mary’s hand went to her throat. She wished she had a brooch. “Good luck today.”

  “I mightn’t be seeing you again, John. If I don’t see you, I wish you all the best.” She clasped her hands together and nodded at him. “You were kind to me.”

  “But surely they won’t let you go today, will they? They’d need to see you a few times more?”

  “Mr. O’Neill said maybe today.” He also said the judge had probably made up his mind long before he stepped into the courtroom. Judges were supposed to be as cold and accurate as scales with the weight of proof added equally to each side, but Mr. O’Neill said they often stepped into the courtroom with the scales already tipped.

  “Oh, I’ll see you later, Mary. I’m not worried.”

  “You’re supposed to hope you won’t see me later.”

  “Well, now.”

  “What do you mean? It’s like wishing me bad luck. Do you wish me bad luck?”

  “Not a bit! And I’ll bring a bit extra for your dinner tonight. You’ll be starved after all that traveling.”

  Mary felt the twitch start up again and pressed her hand to her eye before it became too strong to stop.

  • • •

  For the short journey from North Brother Island to the mainland, she folded two small squares of paper over the sharp points of her collar so they wouldn’t be soiled in transit. She kept her tie—blue, flecked with black—folded in her pocket until she arrived downtown. She’d known that the journey across the East River would be choppy, and that the ferry would create its own breeze by its speed, so she’d waited to pin her hair until she was escorted onto the pier at 138th Street. “Excuse me,” she’d said to her guard, a young man, eighteen, perhaps, twenty at most, and before he could answer she strode off toward the small one-room depot and the door marked Ladies. He’d performed his duty well enough, stepping down into the boat ahead of her like any gentleman in case she should stumble, and up onto the dock when they reached the city. But he didn’t offer his arm, and during the crossing—the nose of the boat rising to meet each roll of gun gray water before falling, rising, falling, the two passengers and one crewman jostling side to side on the long bench seat—he’d kept his face turned away from hers and clutched the railing that rimmed the edge of the boat so that he wouldn’t brush against her during the passage. When she tried to speak to him, placing her face close to his so he could hear her over the sound of the slapping waves and the roar of the boat’s engine, he’d grimaced.

  Once inside the narrow lavatory she took two long hairpins from her handbag and held them in her mouth as she twisted and tucked her strawberry blond hair into an arrangement at the back of her neck. The mirror she was accustomed to looking at every day since 1907 was merciless; it was placed near the single window in her cottage and faced north. This lavatory mirror was shadowed and freckled, and Mary examined her face carefully in the forgiving light. Some of the newspapers had included images of her with sharpened features. Others had drawn her fat and aged, cracking human skulls in a skillet like they were eggs, with a bosom that should have tipped her over. To herself, the morning of the hearing, she looked like she always had—pretty, but not unusually so. Clean. Efficient. Ready for work. In different clothes, and a different accent, and with hands that had not spent the better part of twenty years in scalding water, she might have been mistaken for a lady. She’d often been told she was haughty enough.

  In the days leading up to the hearing, she kept telling herself there were three possibilities: Alfred would be off the wagon, too drunk to keep track of dates and time and would not come, or Alfred would sober up and get himself there. The third possibility was the worst, and it wasn’t until that moment, staring at her reflection in the lavatory mirror, that she faced it head-on: he might not want to see her. Perhaps, in twenty-seven months, he’d worked up the courage to speak to that bright thing who made up the beds at the hotel on Thirty-Fourth Street and who sometimes waited outside Nation’s Pub for her brother. “She reminds me a bit of you, at that age,” he’d told Mary once, a passing comment, an answer to her question of how his day had been. She liked when he painted a full picture of his day for her and instead of drawing himself slumped on a stool, his head filled with goose-down feathers until halfway into that first tumbler, he told her about the world outside on the street, the call of the chestnut man, the rough comments about President Roosevelt’s oldest daughter, the man dressed in a suit of newspaper.

  “Ma’am?” a woman’s voice called from the other side of the door. “The man says you’re to hurry.”

  Mary swung the door open. It was the woman from the ticket window; her fingertips were black with ink, her forehead smudged where she’d rubbed it. “What man?” Mary asked loud enough for her guard to hear. “That?” She laughed. How easy it would be to get away, to leap onto the streetcar and disappear, or even to pick up her skirt and run. There was no running from North Brother, but here in the city she could simply turn a corner, and another, board a trolley, and be gone. John Cane had delivered two five-dollar bills with her breakfast that morning, money sent from Mr. O’Neill for anything unexpected she might encounter on her way down to the courthouse, and Mary had folded them tightly and slipped them inside her shoe. She observed her guard. The boy was so afraid of her it might be enough to just go near him. Just by walking toward him she could back him up into the river.

  • • •

  The plan was that Mr. O’Neill would get his medical men to answer their medical men and after the hearing, if the judge agreed that she shouldn’t have been taken bodily from her place of employment without a chance to defend herself, then she’d be going home to Alfred that evening. Unless Alfred had offered her side of the bed to someone else.

  When they finally arrived at the courthouse, Mary searched for Alfred as she followed Mr. O’Neill down the marble-floored hallway. He’d stay in the shadows, she knew, until the last moment. It was possible she’d passed him as she rushed up the steps outside. Mr. O’Neill led her to a small private room just down the hall from the courtroom, where they had a few moments of peace before they went in to present their case. When he told her it was time, she removed the two squares of paper from her collar. Mr. O’Neill had been doing a sidelong inspection of her appearance since greeting her, and now that they were alone he gave her a quick look up and down.

  “Well?” she asked after a moment.

  “Well nothing,” he said. “Good.”

  FIVE

  Mr. O’Neill warned her that the other lawyers would have rounded up as many of her old employers as they could, other house staff she’d worked with, anyone who might tell a story about her that would keep her on North Brother. Her most recent employers, Mr. and Mrs. Bowen, were unlikely to be in attendance. They would not want their name further tarnished by association, and besides, their daughter had died, it was a fact, and there was nothing they could say that would weigh more than that.

  One of the last times she’d conversed with Mrs. Bowen, before Soper came looking for her, before the girl got sick, Mary had been wearing her new hat. Remembering that hat nagged her, and after more than two years of circling ’round and ’round why and how she’d gone from working and living in New York City, making a good wage, buying what she liked, to being trapped on an island, her thoughts kept returning to that hat. Where was it now? From the moment she was forced into the police wagon and taken to Willard Parker, she felt like she’d been flipping through a book to find a single sentence, running her finger along a page to find a single word, but when her mind lighted on that hat, she stopped. Her stomach sank. Sometimes one thing leads to another even if the line isn’t direct.

  Some of the doctors had intimated that she was not right in her mind, that
her mental state was part of the reason she could not be trusted, along with her being a woman, and being an immigrant, and being the kind of woman who lived with a man without being married. But she knew the hat had something to do with her capture in 1907, and she knew it now that her case was finally being examined, twenty-seven months later.

  It was a lovely hat, cobalt blue with silk flowers and berries cascading around the brim, piled higher on one side of the crown than the other. It wasn’t one of those frothy confections meant to appear suspended over the head by magic, one of those ridiculous dollops of cream that required a morning’s worth of framing and supporting the hair that it sat upon. It was an everyday hat. A walking hat. The kind of hat where a woman could twist her hair as usual and then just place it on top, a pin here, a pin there, nothing more. The flowers weren’t simply cut out from the fabric, but labored over, each one a tiny piece of craftsmanship Mary examined in the shop before pushing her money across the counter. The shop was called Matilda’s, and she’d passed it dozens of times before the day she finally went inside. Nothing in the window had ever cried out to her until that hat, so she went in. She was extending her fingers to feel the brim when at the very same moment she remembered that her hands smelled of onions, and the shop’s mistress asked if she could be of any assistance. Mary wasn’t used to shops being so quiet, the mistress being so solicitous. She could feel the woman’s eyes on her from the moment she put her hand on the door’s handle. That first day, Mary said, “I’m in a terrible rush. I’ll have to return another time.” She let a few days go by, and then she scrubbed her hands well, rubbed her fingertips with lemon, and tried again. This time she picked the hat from its peg and held it to the light.

  “It’s new,” the shop’s mistress said. “It was made in Paris.”

  Mary asked how much and kept her face very still for the answer. It was an astonishing number, but she had it. She had the whole price of that hat in an envelope hidden in the frame of her bed at the Bowen residence. She was going to do it. As she walked away from the store she knew she was going to do it. Why not? She had no one to answer to but herself, and what was money for if not to be spent on a beautiful hat? On her next visit, Mary told the woman that if she discovered the craftsmanship to be less than it appeared, she would take the hat straight back and demand her money returned. The woman suggested a plain gray toque with a narrow brim and showed Mary the neat stitching as if to tell her that gray and plain might be more appropriate to a head like Mary’s than a cobalt jewel that would draw every glance. Mary ran her thumb along one of the silk petals and bought it on the spot.

  When she returned to her room at the Bowen residence, she studied it in the box for the better part of an hour, those flowers, each one centered with a small piece of glass that drew the light, the blue of the petals slightly paler than the rest of the hat, the blue of the berries slightly darker. It was a beautiful thing and she loved it. It lived in its box on top of her dresser for two whole weeks before she put it on her head and wore it outside. She paired it with the chestnut dress coat she’d purchased secondhand, and she worried for it when she stepped into the weather and found the day not as fair as it had seemed from her room. She didn’t want it to get wet, or be stolen from her head by a thief. Or worse, it occurred to her as she remembered the week before, when a gentleman’s handkerchief was carried away in the wind. Mary had joined the chase for a few steps, until she predicted where it was headed, and when he caught up with it, he found it had landed on the belly of a horse that had died in the street and been left there to rot and draw flies. Mary had laughed when, out of habit, the gentleman reached for his hanky, to cover his face, but of course it was the hanky he’d been chasing in the first place.

  She wore it. She stood in the small private room Mrs. Bowen had assigned to her as cook and slid one pin behind her left ear, and one behind her right. She felt its beauty like a living thing as she crossed the street, as she gathered her skirt and stepped as well as she could over the horse shit that had been pushed to the curb and left in a heap at the corner of Sixtieth Street. She felt it like a light shining over her as she made her way east to the streetcar on Third Avenue, still shining as she transferred to the IRT at Forty-Second Street. Mrs. Bowen was to have a dinner party that evening and wanted something unusual to serve to her guests—lobster, perhaps, or sweetbreads. No fowl, she instructed. No oysters. No pork. Nothing her guests might be served by their own cooks, in their own homes. Milton’s on Second Avenue had a good selection most days, and high turnover, but Mrs. Bowen didn’t trust them, and sent Mary instead all the way down to Washington Market, where she instructed Mary to witness with her own eyes the fish being pulled off the ice. It meant a morning’s journey and more work, just so Mrs. Bowen’s guests would go home and say to one another, That Lillian Bowen, she’d never serve anything as plain as a roast.

  As she descended the staircase to the IRT on Forty-Second Street, she looked down for her next step with her eyes instead of bending her neck and risking the hat. She’d been on the IRT fewer than a dozen times since it had opened with great fanfare, and still found it jarring to see a train shoot out of the darkness so far underground, knowing as she stepped aboard that it would plow into the darkness on the other side. But the hat made her brave. On the train, she fixed her gaze on the doors as the rest of the world pushed in around her.

  Because Mrs. Bowen had left the choice of dinner to her, she had to look at everything the market offered: twenty-five butcher stalls, all the vegetables, all the fruit, the cheese, the nine fish stalls, the smoked meat, the tripe. She sampled the coffee cake, the coffee, the dark bread, the light, the butter from Connecticut, the cheese from Virginia. She bought a nickel slice of Westphalian ham and ate it as she walked. She raised a hand to protect her hat against the flying feathers of the poultrymen, from the rough knuckle-cracking work of the butchers and the bits that flew in the air, the cartilage and marrow that made a slick circle around their stalls and forced women to walk on tiptoe until they were safely past.

  She kept the hat on her head well enough, adjusting it now and again when it started to tip, and she made her way all the way back to Park and Sixtieth loaded down with packages. The other Irish at market had their hair covered in scarves. The European women from other parts wore tight braids coiled at the back of the neck, or old hats of their husbands’ pulled down over their ears. Heads had turned seeing Mary coming in that hat. Seas had parted. When she bargained and told them exactly how she wanted her packages wrapped, they knew she was a domestic, and yet that hat.

  As Mary turned the last corner before the Bowen home, she caught sight of her reflection in a neighbor’s bay window and decided she was as pretty that day as she’d ever been. The coat hugged her figure—slim, back then—and her hair was shiny and clean. Her eyes were bright from the chill in the air, and her cheeks rosy from the effort of hauling her purchases. She was thirty-seven years old.

  She turned onto Park to walk the half block uptown and who did she encounter in front of the residence but Mrs. Bowen herself. And what was Mrs. Bowen wearing on top of her curls? The identical twin to Mary’s beloved hat.

  “Mary,” she said, her eyes fixed on Mary’s head. “I expected you ages ago.”

  “I’m very sorry, madam,” Mary replied, even though Mrs. Bowen had no reason to expect her any sooner. She made a point not to look at Mrs. Bowen’s head, even though Mrs. Bowen had yet to take her eyes from Mary’s.

  “You haven’t forgotten that the guests will arrive at six.” She narrowed her eyes as if deciding whether it really could be the same hat. A copy, perhaps? A poor imitation?

  “No, I wouldn’t forget that.” Mrs. Bowen had called the office that had placed Mary to hire two additional cooks just for the afternoon, and Mary had stripped and scrubbed everything the day before. When Mary arrived at the Bowen residence three weeks earlier, the pots and pans were thick with baked-on carbon, and she spent her first week chipping it away, scrubbin
g them back to their original luster. While she was at it she tied a rag to the end of a broom and pulled the cobwebs from the tin ceilings. She went through a gallon of ammonia scrubbing the floor. No one knows where to find the pockets of grease in a kitchen like a cook knows, and when the other cooks arrived that afternoon, Mary saw them looking. And she saw them not finding.

  Mrs. Bowen seemed satisfied, and though she still wore a curious expression, like she didn’t quite understand what she was looking at, she finally managed to tear her eyes away from the top of Mary’s head. She put her hand to her own hat for a moment, then turned to enter the house through the main entrance. Mary watched the other woman walk away, and as she felt the weight of the packages in her arms, the ache in her wrists and elbows from struggling with them for so long, on the IRT, on the streetcar, up and down stairs, across puddles and stubborn patches of ice left over in the shade of trees, the scald of the cold against her knuckles, she felt the words slipping from between her lips before she had a chance to stop them.

  “I see we have the same taste,” she said to Mrs. Bowen’s back. It was a foolish thing to say, and as soon as the words were out she remembered her aunt observing once, years ago, that Mary had a twist in her that sometimes made her do and say things that she shouldn’t.

  Mrs. Bowen turned. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Your hat,” Mary said, nodding at the other woman’s head as if she might not know where to find her hat. “It’s identical to mine.”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Bowen said, her hand reaching somewhere in the region of her ear, not touching the hat. “Similar, Mary, not identical. But I see what you mean.”

  “Not the same?”

  “No. Similar. Not the same.”

  Mary knew that if she snuck into Mrs. Bowen’s quarters that night and switched their hats she would never in a thousand years of scrutiny have been able to tell the difference.