Fever (11 page)

“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 root 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 with 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.”

Alfred pointed to a step where they could sit. “For now, I like it. The boss says the horses like me. There’s not much to it, really, except brushing them and feeding them and making sure the stalls are clean. I run the ones who don’t get assigned a truck on a given day, and there are a few injured ones, but there’s not much to do for them until they heal. If they heal. I had to put one down. That was the only really bad day, and it was hard going back after that. He was hit by another truck on the corner of Madison and Fiftieth and his leg broke at the ankle. I had to go up there and shoot him.”

Alfred put his hand on her hair and traced his finger along her hairline, around her ear, down her neck. He stopped at the collar of her blouse. “But why are we talking about me? How about you? You look well, Mary. God, it’s good to see you.”

Mary brought his broad hand to her lips and kissed it. She studied his face. “You said I was the only one who asked whether you like it. Who else would ask? I mean, who else have you told?”

Alfred shrugged. “What do you mean? I tell whoever asks me what I do.”

“You seemed surprised that no one else has asked if you like it. Who would ask that, except for me?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Nothing.”

“All right.”

“I’m only saying that it’s a funny thing to say. That I’m the only person who asked that. To say it when you wouldn’t expect anyone else to ask that. Would you?”

“Mary.”

“Are you seeing someone?”

He pulled his hand away. “Why would you ask that? Are you?”

“Am I? Are you serious?”

“There’s people out there. You’re not alone. That gardener.”

“You’d know the lunacy of that question if you’d really read my letters. If you’d written more often—”

“Look. No point discussing it now, Mary, is there? With you coming home?”

“But I told you in the letters how lonely I was, how worried I was about you. If it was you out there I would have written every week. You know I would.”

“Well, you’re a better person than I am, Mary. Isn’t that it? I’m a beast with no regard for anyone but myself, and you’re a paragon of virtue.”

It wasn’t supposed to go like this, arguing over a past neither of them could change, criticizing each other’s choices just like they’d been doing before she was taken. She was hurt. She was very hurt. But she had to make her mind change the subject if they were going to be together again once she got home. She’d resolved to not start up on him the first time she saw him after so long, that she’d be pleasant and forgiving and that they’d start from scratch if he was willing, but as usual she found it impossible to stop. Just as her mind was warning her not to say something, her lips were already saying it. Alfred shifted on the step. He wore that expression of disdain that had made her so wild before she left, like every word she spoke was something to recoil from.