Deadly (16 page)

I understood Mary suddenly, knowing that small bit of her past. I understood her bitterness and her tenaciousness and her anger.

Over supper, I spoke with Marm about the whole case. She blew on her soup, thinking. So much has changed in our lives since I started this job, and I think she wanted to be careful about advising me. After a while, she said, “It's going to be hard for you to believe that what you're doing is right, Prudence, because you're a pioneer, and you don't know what lies ahead.”

“It seems like no one knows,” I said. “No one understands why a healthy woman carries the typhoid inside her. No one knows how to help her.”

“That's why they're keeping her in quarantine, so they can study her,” Marm said.

I've thought long and hard about Marm's answer. I'm not sure I have the strength to study Mary like a pinned insect long enough to solve her case. Even remembering the girls who died from Mary's cooking doesn't help when I see her on a ward full of consumptives. Dying women who cough out contagion with every breath, yet Mary is bursting with
health! Couldn't she catch their disease? What can we do to protect her? She can't go back into the world. She can't stay where she is. It is this place of purgatory that disturbs me.

I long to push myself above human feeling and into science. Yet I can't see with a cold eye. I don't know if I am fit for this life of the mind as I had once thought I was.

L
ast night
I had a terrible nightmare. Mary had escaped from quarantine and was fleeing through the city streets, smearing disease over crowds, people falling ill in her wake as if in a plague. Somehow I spotted her and followed her to Mr. Soper's home, a place of brilliant light. He slept peacefully in a gauzy bed. Mary stood over him with that wild, trapped look in her eyes. Suddenly he awoke, and seeing Mary, sat straight up in a fright.

She wailed, “Why are you tormenting me?” in a most wrenching voice, then she opened her mouth horribly wide, and I could see the round typhoid germs bubbling up from inside her.

She saw me and screamed: “You!”

I ran down a bright hall, the sound of Mary's feet pounding after me. I feared for Mr. Soper, whom I had left behind. I
knew he had succumbed to the fever. I was crying and calling his name, turning corners, barely dodging Mary each time. The bends and steps of the house were endless. I ran until I couldn't breathe and then collapsed on the floor, sobbing with the little breath I had.

Mary came behind me, pleading, “Help me, girl! Don't lock me up! Don't put me away! I beg of you, please! Help me!”

I tried to get up, but she kept pushing me down and begging, begging without end.

I woke to find myself on the floor, my back pressed into the cold stove.

Dread sank into my bones; I felt sick. The image of her filled with typhoid germs has not left me all day. Feelings of death and helplessness, fears too deep for me to name, swell inside me. The sense of loss bleeds through me.

And what happened with Mr. Soper today makes my ache more real.

This afternoon Mr. Soper received a mysterious telephone call. I was working at my desk, transcribing his study of Mary's case, only half listening to his replies. Expecting the report from Dr. Parks, I noticed a stiffening of my chief's body and a lowering of his voice. I glanced furtively at him,
wondering if it was the Bowing family, still so upset with our trespass. Usually Mr. Soper deals with them in a calm, short manner, but this time, color flushed his cheeks. He asked the speaker to wait a moment, and held his hand over the horn.

“Prudence,” he said, “will you please fetch me a sheaf of paper from the supply closet?”

“I have some here,” I said. I reached into my desk.

“And ink. Please go to the supply closet right now and get me a bottle of black India ink,” he said, indicating the door. “Please go.”

I rose from my desk, watching him. He wanted to take the call alone. He had never done that before. Was it a woman?

The forbidden love I kept bottled so tightly rushed into my throat, and I left the room.

Choking on jealousy, I closed the door quietly and stood just outside the glass, trying to hear what my chief was saying without seeming obvious to the fellows who passed me in the hall. I needed to find out who was on the telephone. I heard “a private matter,” and “not authorized to speak,” and “Mr. Briggs,” things that were enough to tell me it was a business call.

But the poison had been released in me.

Love flooded my chest and ached in my stomach. I hurried down the hall to the supply closet, gulping back the fear that I had lost him. My hands shook as I unlocked the door. I stood looking at the shelves of paper and pens, inks and blotters, white stars of light dancing before my eyes. I worked so hard to hide my love from him, to remember Anushka's three rules, but underneath everything I did, during every moment of the day, it was there. The power of it, now released, nearly overcame me. I drank down air, trying to fit my feeling back into the small, secret box where it belonged.

But it wouldn't go.

It's like walking to the center of a bridge and looking out over a long, wide river and trying to fit that vastness into a small box. I had managed it somehow before.

Now it just won't go.

I
sit
in the office every day with my chief, all my nerve cells exposed, sensitive to his every move and word. I wish I could talk to someone about these emotions, to free myself from them somehow. My letters to Anushka no longer seem like enough. I need to talk to another girl, to hear her advice, but there is no one. My mind wanders to Marm, but I cannot speak to her about this poisoned side of me. I think of Dr. Baker; inside me, I find a lingering anger at her for treating Mary Mallon so poorly. Still, I wonder how she has managed her own feelings. I wonder if being in a man's profession has made her cold and forceful. Could I ever learn to be like that?

I
visited
Dr. Baker today. On my lunch break, I excused myself from the office and slipped upstairs, to the fourth floor, to talk to her. I felt I needed some answers. Not about Mr. Soper, but about myself. Answers only she could give me.

The fourth floor is a long hall, rooms with glass doors on either side. Girls fill delivery baskets with cream and eggs at one table; at another, white-dressed nurses tend to infants with dirty faces, rag-clad mothers hovering nearby. On the wall, a sign reads,
HELP A CHILD, GIVE TO THE NEEDY
.

At the far end of the hall, Dr. Baker sat in an office, her name stenciled across the clear glass door. Seeing her, I felt what I might become one day, a woman with her own office in a world of medicine. Then I caught the distress in her eyes. Across the desk from her a dandy twirled his hat with
one hand and brandished a cigar with the other. I couldn't hear their words through the closed door, but I worried for her and revealed my presence through the window. Her face brightened when she saw me, and she nodded and waved as if she'd been waiting for me. She excused herself to the man, got up, and opened the door for me.

“Come in, please come in, Prudence,” she said, ushering me in. She said to the man, “Yes, so, that's really all I can tell you now.”

He stood slowly, looking suspiciously from her to me. “I'll hear back from you soon?” he asked.

“Oh, quite soon,” she said.

Words seemed to gather in his mouth, but none came out. He turned and left the office.

Dr. Baker sighed and returned to her desk. “Please, sit,” she said to me.

The chair was still warm from the man. I slid to the edge and folded my hands, nearly overcome by the cheap cologne and cigar stink in the air.

Dr. Baker touched her curls, took off her spectacles, and wiped them clean. Her bare face surprised me, the thin skin around her eyes, the weakness of her vision. I did not think she contained such frailty. I wanted to ask about the man,
but it was not my place. Returning her glasses to her nose, it was as if her strength had returned. She looked at me expectantly and asked how she could help me.

“I want to talk to you about—about school,” I said.

“Ah,” she said, and smiled. “It would do my heart good to have you join the women's cause.”

I didn't know what she meant by the cause. Perhaps she was talking about the suffragettes. I've seen them march in the streets in order to gain the vote and women's rights. Their voices are loud, and with their arms hooked together in protest, they don't seem afraid of anything. Marm also calls them pioneers, setting the way for other women to follow.

“How old are you, Prudence?” Dr. Baker asked.

“I'm almost seventeen.”

“And where do you attend school now?”

“Ma'am, I left to take this job,” I said.

She picked up the ink pen on her desk and tapped the end of it against her blotter. It was as if something in her moved away from me.

“Does Mr. Soper know you left?” she asked.

“I mentioned it at my first interview, ma'am. But I told him I could work, so he hired me.”

“Well, that seems neglectful of him,” she said. “I thought he was more interested in your future—”

“It's not his fault, ma'am. It was my own decision to leave school. I did go to Mrs. Browning herself and try to plead with her to let me continue my schooling at the same time. But she wouldn't, so I left.”

“Mrs. Browning?” the doctor repeated. “Did you attend Mrs. Browning's School for Girls?”

I nodded.

“Why would a girl with your scientific skills go to a vocational school, of all places?”

“My mother didn't want me to go to Free School,” I said. “She thought Mrs. Browning's would give me a better chance in life than she had. She doesn't want me to end up a midwife like her.”

Dr. Baker's eyebrows raised. “Your mother's a midwife?”

“Yes,” I said. “I spent last summer helping her.”

“So, you've done some doctoring.” Dr. Baker smiled. “And now you want to go to medical school?”

I had never thought of my work with Marm as doctoring.

“I'm not sure,” I said.

“Is that so?” Dr. Baker's eyes urged the truth from me.

“Ma'am, it's just … this case with Mary Mallon has got me questioning myself,” I said.

“Questioning, how?” she asked.

I spoke delicately, but something in me trusted I could be honest. “Well, ma'am, when I started working for Mr. Soper, I saw illness as a kind of weed, something that could be found and cleaned away. I didn't think it could live inside a person without sickening or killing them, not like with Mary. Now it's as if the disease and the person are inseparable. When the police officer threw Mary in the snow and they locked her up, they were treating
her
like a disease. But she's a person, she has feelings. I can't seem to think about the case without thinking about her, too.”

The doctor looked at me as if she was evaluating my words, then she laughed one short bark; I was relieved at her laughter, though I didn't understand it.

“That's exactly what they try to teach you in medical school,” she said. “Compassion.”

“But I can't pull apart what she feels and what I feel, ma'am.”

“That will come with time,” Dr. Baker said. “You'll learn to see the larger picture.”

I wished I felt as confident as she did.

“Do you understand the need for quarantine, Prudence?” Dr. Baker looked hard at me. I didn't have an answer. She said, “Keeping Mary at a safe distance from the public is the difference between one person's temporary discomfort and hundreds falling ill. Disease is a removable evil—that is the motto of our department. Mary carries the typhoid, Prudence. There is no way around that fact.”

I wanted to ask her if she thought Mary herself was evil because she carried disease, but something in her face kept me quiet.

Her eyes relaxed.

“You are an observant girl, your notes are thoughtful and clear, you seem to care about people. You have a wonderfully curious mind. You know, Prudence, I think you'd make a fine doctor,” she said.

Her words warmed me, like hands holding me. It was the strong opinion I longed for, the outside view I'd been seeking. She presented me with my innocent self again, the girl who wanted to do something meaningful with her life.

Then my memories returned, of what we had done to Mary, of my own weak emotions. My doubts came back quick and strong.

“Medical school is the most difficult kind of education,”
Dr. Baker went on. “It involves the study of many subjects, and you will have to cut open bodies and handle inner organs. In order to succeed, you must want it more than anything.”