Fever Read online

  “My mistake.”

  The servants’ entrance was just a few short steps down from the sidewalk but Mary barely made it inside before she started laughing. Bette and Frank were in the kitchen making preparations and could tell by Mary’s face she had a story to tell, so she told it, and they all had a laugh over Mrs. Bowen’s expression, which Mary did for them again and again as they unfolded the counters from their compartments and laid out the knives and waited for the additional cooks.

  They laughed and laughed, and the work went quickly.

  A week later, the daughter of the family declined all of her meals and told her governess that she felt poorly, and would have to do her lessons another time. By evening, her fever was so high she had to spend the whole night in the tub. One month later, Mary was taken away.

  • • •

  “Nonsense,” said John Cane, when Mary told him the whole story of the hat not long after she was moved to her private hut on North Brother. John had asked if she wanted to keep him company while he transferred to the ground some of the plants he’d started from seed over the winter. She was quiet, at first, content to watch him work, and then he’d asked how it was that they’d captured her, taken her to North Brother.

  “It isn’t nonsense,” Mary said, raising her voice. “They chased me down like a dog. They harassed me at the Bowens’ first, then in my own rooms, then they got me one day when the Bowens were out. They had to carry me! They each took an arm or a leg and they carried me. They didn’t even give me a chance to get my things.”

  “What things?” John asked. “You’ll send for them. Tell the matron.” But Mary didn’t know the matron, didn’t know what brand of woman she was. Perhaps the matron would like to get her hands on Mary’s hidden envelope, her three good blouses, her beautiful cobalt hat.

  How to explain that if it wasn’t the hat specifically, it was the fact that Mary had purchased the hat, had worn it, had admired herself in it. That she was the type of woman who counted out her earnings—a full month’s worth of earnings!—and slid it in a neat stack across a counter to purchase for herself something as impractical as a beautiful hat. If she’d been the type of woman who saved her money, or gave it to someone who needed it more, a neighbor with children, perhaps, or the church, if she’d been a married woman who handed every dollar over to her husband, or better yet a married woman who didn’t have any earnings because she was taken up with the care of her own home, she’d never be in the situation she was in. She couldn’t prove it, but it was the truth nonetheless.

  She’d broached the idea with Mr. O’Neill two years later when he came to see her on North Brother, but it was like trying to explain to a cook in training how to tell when a duck is done even when the juices lie, how to predict whether a soufflé will fall just by feeling the air in the room. “A hat?” Mr. O’Neill said. Then he changed the subject and she could see him dismiss it entirely.

  SIX

  Mary followed Mr. O’Neill by several paces as they entered the courtroom. The time was two minutes past ten o’clock.

  Almost every chair was occupied when she walked down the narrow center aisle. She’d pictured benches, polished wood, the judge elevated above them on a kind of throne, but instead the cramped and musty room was filled with straight-backed chairs in uneven lines. Some reporters had turned their chairs to make a cluster with others they knew. Some people who had no involvement in the case but had been following it in the papers nudged their chairs out of line bit by bit with impatient shifting. She wanted to know if Alfred was there, but she kept her eyes fixed on the neat seams of Mr. O’Neill’s suit jacket. There was a momentary hush when those closest to the door spotted her, and a collective creak as several dozen spectators turned to see her for themselves.

  Some were on her side, Mary hoped as she crossed the room and kept her focus above the heads of the witnesses. She’d seen the editorials in the paper, the people who believed she’d committed no crime and should be set free to live and work in society like everyone else. Then there were the papers that refused to use her real name even after it had become public knowledge. The Germ Woman, their headlines still read. Readers had written in to ask if breathing near Mary Mallon put a person at risk. What about touching what she touched? What about entering a room shortly after she’d left? She hoped the sympathetic were in attendance at the hearing, but all she felt as she made her way to the front of the room was the scrutiny of fifty people looking at her so closely in the muggy air that she felt handled, groped, every bit as dirty as she was accused of being.

  Mr. O’Neill placed his briefcase on a scratched and dented wood table at the front of the room. The men from the Department of Health were already seated at a similar table across the aisle, and Mary made the mistake of looking at them, one by one, until her glance jumped to the row behind them, where Dr. Soper’s dark head was bent over his notes. A man in a blue uniform stepped forward and announced the arrival of Judges Erlinger and Giegerich. Mary hadn’t expected two judges, but she was relieved to see that she’d be able to keep them apart in her thoughts: Erlinger was a big man and Giegerich was no larger than a girl.

  “All stand,” the court officer called out, and the clap of chairs being pushed back was thunderous. Mary looked toward the three large windows on the western side of the room and noted that the day had darkened, the metallic smell of rain had seeped indoors. When the people returned to their seats, there was stirred up in the room the odor of vegetables, of horse, of blood. Judge Erlinger pressed a handkerchief to his forehead and then briefly to his nose.

  Mr. O’Neill cleared his throat. He began the way they’d discussed, with an account of her arrest in March of 1907. “Without a warrant,” he said, “without due process, the liberty of a perfectly healthy individual . . .”

  Mary could see that he was nervous. He was five years younger than she, only thirty-four, but he never seemed as young to her as he did when he touched his fingertips to the edge of the battered table and stood.

  “Mary Mallon has been quarantined for twenty-seven months with no one to keep her company but a gardener who delivers her meals three times a day. She has submitted to testing—urine, blood, and stool—twice a week for that entire period. The nurses who collect her samples are certainly no company, and she dreads their visits because of the anguish they cause. Her friends are not permitted to visit, despite the fact that every doctor associated with her case admits she is contagious only through cooking.”

  Mr. O’Neill continued, sticking only to what was relevant, and as he spoke Mary found her thoughts drifting. For twenty-seven months she’d craved the streets of Manhattan, the chaos, the noise, haggling over the price of an orange, debating the accuracy of the butcher’s scale. She missed her work, rising before the rest of the house, removing the first shining pot from its hook, lighting the fire under it, dropping in a spoon of butter and watching it skid across the warmed bottom. She missed earning money, walking to Dicer’s on First Avenue, picking out a basket full of groceries, paying for it with clean, new bills.

  She missed Alfred most of all and every morning when she woke she wondered whether he was also awake. She often caught herself thinking of him the same way she once thought of the people from home when she first got to America, all the way across the ocean, twenty-one days at sea. And then when she remembered that the East River was not the ocean, was not even as broad as the mighty Hudson, everything felt more urgent and these were the moments that made her wild, as the doctors called it. Combative. Difficult. Stubborn. Obstinant. Ignorant. Female. There were almost five million souls rushing through their days over there. She could see their chimneys and hear the sharp whistle of trains. Somewhere over there walked Alfred, and unlike those she missed from Ireland who were so far away that she’d quickly drawn a curtain across the possibility of ever seeing them again, the idea of being so close to him and not seeing him made everything worse.


  If she had more courage she might have tried swimming across like the young men from the House of Refuge on Rikers tried from time to time, but then she reminded herself that most times, if the papers told the truth, those men turned back, often stopping at North Brother for a rest before doing so, or drowned. John Cane once told her that the East River was the fastest, roughest river he ever knew, especially around North Brother. At the time, she’d been on the island only a month and thought he’d been rubbing it in, reminding her that there were no options for her. But after watching those same waters for twenty-seven months, she knew he’d just been stating the truth.

  • • •

  Ten o’clock in the morning was not Alfred’s best hour. She thought of his long, white legs, splayed out on the starker white of their bedsheets. She thought of him standing by the window in his shorts. She thought of all the eggshells and orange peels that had probably collected in the sink for twenty-seven months, all the bottles that would need scouring. She thought of him in work clothes, making his way up the building’s stairs to their flat on the sixth floor. Who talked to him in the course of a day? Where did he take his meals? She thought of him running his hand along the curve of her back to her backside and pulling her toward him.

  She missed seeing human beings other than herself and John Cane, who had a strange fascination with watching her eat what he brought for her from the hospital kitchen. The night before the hearing, when he should have been worrying about getting her that iron in time, he’d brought her two slices of beef threaded with gristle, a limp salad, a roll. “The people cooking for this hospital should be lined up before a wall and shot,” she said as she inspected the meat. John was the tiniest little sparrow’s fart of a man, but he laughed with the strength of someone full-size. She’d been asking John to bring her flour, yeast, butter, a few vanilla beans, nothing to make a proper meal, but ingredients for bread, something she could work with in the mornings when it was too early to step outside, but he just held up his hands and ignored her. She wondered what they’d told him about her, why asking for simple ingredients always prompted him to say good-bye and hurry across the green space like he was being chased.

  Mary observed two flies float in through the window and then out again. The clop of horses, a large team from the sound of it, passed on the street outside and Mr. O’Neill paused for a moment; Mary heard the door at the back of the courtroom open. She heard a man’s low voice asking pardon as he tripped across knees to an empty seat. She heard the voice again, louder, and the sound of it was like a wire pulled up her spine. She felt the small hairs at the back of her neck. The stirring she heard behind her seemed to be moving closer. She felt bodies shifting. Chairs creaked. People exhaled the hot breath of annoyance.

  “Sir,” Judge Giegerich said, looking at the source of the disruption while holding a hand up to Mr. O’Neill. “Is this entirely necessary? There are two seats on the aisle right in front of you.”

  “I want to sit near Mary,” the man said, and Mary turned to find herself no more than three feet from Alfred, who was dressed in a gray sack suit with the jacket over his arm, and wearing polished shoes. Borrowed, Mary thought. The shirt, too. She hoped he’d give it all back in the same condition. “Hello, Mary,” Alfred said. He looked healthy, fuller in the face than he’d been when she last saw him. Eating, she hoped. Sleeping at night. Mary drew a breath, wanting to speak to him, but felt everyone in the room looking at her, the reporters poised with their pencils to paper, the others with their arms folded or their eyebrows raised. She turned back in her seat and faced the judges. Mr. O’Neill concluded his point.

  “Mary,” Alfred whispered. He’d gotten the seat behind her.

  Mr. O’Neill cast a sidelong glance at her, a warning not to turn around.

  “You look nice.”

  Mr. O’Neill turned abruptly and gave Alfred a stern look as one of the lawyers for the Department of Health launched into all the various reasons Mary Mallon must remain in quarantine.

  Mary dropped her hand to her side and made a little wave beside the seat of her chair. He would see it if he knew to look for it. The flies flew in through the window again, and this time circled the room. Two more followed. A child’s voice below the window called out the names of the newspapers he was selling. There was the sound of someone running. A cart being pushed down the hall on the other side of the courtroom doors.

  “How are you?” she whispered over her shoulder. Beside her Mr. O’Neill dropped his pencil and pushed his pad of paper away.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Alfred whispered back.

  “You look well.”

  “I’m better, Mary. Much better. Than before.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  They stared at each other. Mary twisted in her seat, Alfred leaned forward on his elbows. She felt hot, reckless, and wondered what would happen if she got up out of her seat and walked out of the courtroom on Alfred’s arm. She noticed that he didn’t look nearly as uncomfortable as everyone else in the room. His hand was cool when he reached out and covered hers.

  “Will there be a break?” he asked, no longer bothering to whisper.

  “Mary, please,” Mr. O’Neill said.

  Across the aisle, Dr. Soper coughed, and when Mary looked over at him he was looking right back at her, as if daring her to do exactly what she was tempted to do. His hair was combed back off his face and he was one of the few men in the gallery still wearing his suit jacket.

  “I don’t know,” Mary said to Alfred. “I really don’t know.”

  “Well, then I’ll see you after. Won’t I?”

  Judge Erlinger interrupted the man from the Department of Health. “Miss Mallon, do you need to excuse yourself?”

  Mr. O’Neill gave her a look that meant it was her last warning. If you leave this room, the look said, this is the last you’ll see of me. Mary felt Alfred’s hope float up behind her, wrap itself around her shoulders, and pull her toward the door. They would send guards with her, she knew. Without looking at the judges or at Soper, Mary turned and faced the front of the room.

  “No, sir,” Mary said. “He’s an old friend.”

  A titter went up in the gallery and Mary put her hand to her left eye.

  “Go on,” the judge said to the lawyer who’d been speaking.

  • • •

  On the other side of the room, in the very back row, a reporter for the Examiner noted that the Germ Woman seemed upset. Was she crying? Was she scratching her face like a cat? He leaned forward in his seat, tried to get a better angle. Crying would go over. Crying made sense. He watched her bring her fingertips to her eye and then back to the table and felt his body flinch. He opened his notebook. “Germ woman tearful through proceedings, careless with bodily fluids even in court of law.”

  SEVEN

  Once the hearing date was set, Mr. O’Neill came to North Brother once more. They went over their strategy, and he told Mary that he wanted her to swear before the judges that she’d never cook for hire again. “It’s your best chance,” he said. They believed she was sick, that she was passing Typhoid Fever from her hands to the food she served. That she’d never been sick a day in her life was of no relevance.

  “How can it be of no relevance?” Mary asked. The last ferry going back to the city was due to depart shortly, and she wanted to be clear with Mr. O’Neill on her position before she said good-bye. “How can I spread an illness that I’ve never had myself?”

  “I only mean that it’s of no relevance to them. But it’s entirely relevant to our argument. It’s a new theory of disease, Mary,” Mr. O’Neill explained. “Dr. Soper—”

  “Don’t talk to me about Soper,” Mary warned him. “What kind of a doctor is he anyway? I’ve been asking for two years and no one has explained it properly.”

  “He’s a sanitary engineer. He—”

  “A what?”
r />   “Part of his job is to track diseases to their source. The garbage, for instance. He’s done a lot of work for the Department of Sanitation. And he’s been a consultant for the IRT since it opened. Remember when everyone was worried about breathing microscopic steel shavings? They called him. He was already making a name for himself, but finding you has made his reputation.”

  “That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? So he can make his name?”

  “Mary,” Mr. O’Neill sighed. “Things could be worse for you. You have a private cottage. You have the freedom to move about the island.”

  “An island the size of a park. Where everyone I meet shrinks away from me.”

  “It could be worse.”

  “Well, yes, Mr. O’Neill. You’re absolutely correct. I could be dead, I suppose.”

  • • •

  Of the many witnesses called the morning of the hearing, a few surprised Mary. Most were people who worked for the Department of Health, or who worked at labs scattered across the city, and who canceled out one another with their opposing views of her case. Half thought that since Mary was a healthy person and had never shown any symptom of the disease she was accused of passing on to so many, the city had no right to imprison her. Others felt just as strongly that it was precisely because Mary showed no symptoms that she must be kept in quarantine for life. “Think of the innocent,” urged a doctor named Stamp whom Mary had never seen before. “No one will think to avoid her in the streets, no one will hesitate from inviting her into his home. Seeing her good health and her experience, what would stop her from being hired to cook in a good house? The Bowen child was only nine years old when she died of Typhoid Fever.”

  Mary had hoped that Elizabeth Bowen’s death was one more thing Dr. Soper had made up, wanting to make her situation worse. It had seemed too convenient to their cause. But Mr. O’Neill confirmed it was true, and Mary supposed he had no reason to lie. And now there was an unfamiliar doctor on the stand confirming that truth. Mary remembered the quiet girl who read books and listened to her governess and preferred her bedroom and the parlor to the fresh air outside. Sometimes she came downstairs to see what Mary was making in the kitchen, and a few times Mary had let her dip her finger in a sauce, or take a stewed apple out of a pot with a spoon. One time, Elizabeth asked Mary why she wasn’t married and when Mary told her it was because she didn’t feel like it, Elizabeth said she’d marry Mary in an instant if she’d been a boy.