Deadly (23 page)

We have spent long years hiding ourselves, waiting for a man who will never come.

I
tried it
today. Instead of spending Sunday morning by the window with my tablet, I went out. I walked straight across town to the Hudson River, along the way admiring the crocuses and daffodils that shot up from the parks and lawns, and the pink blossoms on the trees, and the songs of the sparrows and chickadees, and the barks of the dogs, and the cries of the children. I admired the rainbow on the neck of a pigeon. At the river's edge, I watched wild boys swimming in the chilly water, and talked to a girl on the dock, a girl around my age with no ribbons on her collar. She seems thoughtful and kind, and her name is Betty.

Later in the afternoon, I met Dr. Baker at her home near Washington Square, a small and elegant set of rooms where she showed me her models of the human digestive system. We ate apple tarts and drank tea like two ladies while we
talked about the function of the large intestine. She brought out her notes from the time she was in medical school, which greatly inspired me. Her careful drawings seemed familiar, and her attentive observations of the human organism were quite astute. She encouraged me to continue writing my tablets—not to the exclusion of all else, but rather as a supplement to my studies.

All day I found myself thinking of how I might translate what was happening into notes. Then I had to stop, to allow myself to live, as Marm said. I felt like a seesaw, tumbling down into thoughts, then working hard to pull back out again. Out into the sunlight, the fresh air, the voices of people and the sounds of moving traffic. After talking to Dr. Baker, I see what I must strive for. To keep the seesaw moving evenly from the inner world to the outer without becoming stuck in either.

A
great relief:
Mary Mallon's case concluded today with the judge's decision. For the last few days, the families have been describing how they fell ill with the typhoid fever just weeks after hiring her. The weight of the evidence was too heavy to bear, it seems, and finally the judge stopped the proceedings.

He hammered his gavel to signal a break and looked at us from under his thick eyebrows.

“This case is very clear to me,” he said. “I have read all the medical evidence submitted, and listened to enough testimony to see the pattern. Where Mary Mallon cooks, people are infected with the fever.”

I could see Mary's head drop; my heart went out to her, for her terrible fate.

The judge went on, “I feel it's in the best interest of the
public to keep Mary Mallon on North Brother Island, where she will stay until medical science can find a solution to this problem. I order her returned to quarantine.”

Voices cried out in the courtroom; Mary and O'Neal started to protest the judge's ruling, and the rummy huffed and fussed, half rising from his bench. Our lawyers patted each other's backs. Dr. Baker reached over and squeezed my shoulder. Mr. Soper held out his hand; I met his warm palm with mine and gave him a firm shake. I didn't have to look at him to know the immense relief he felt.

The judge hammered his gavel until the room quieted.

“It's not a question of innocence or guilt,” the judge said, “but a matter of circumstance. Miss Mallon, the doctors on the island will try to make your life as comfortable as possible while they attempt to discover a cure for you. In the meantime, I cannot in good conscience free you. I'm sorry, but that is my decision.”

He ordered the bailiff to take Mary away. The efficient man went to Mary and held her elbow; it seemed as if he had to physically lift her from the chair. As he led her past me, she turned her head and met my eyes. Her stare took my breath away, her anguish, her fury, like a caged creature, helplessness flooding her face red, like in my nightmare about her.

That nightmare.

The bailiff pulled her away. Over the movement around me, I watched her back as she crossed the room.

In the dream, Mary had pleaded with me.

A strange feeling came over me, a calmness, as if I felt my papa beside me. Mary had helped me to find him.

In my mind, I thanked her. I thanked her for being so stubborn, for without her obstinacy, I would never have known about Papa.

I wanted to help her in kind.

All I could give her was a promise.

I closed my eyes and made this silent vow:
Mary Mallon, if I get into medical school, I will go into the field of research. I'll do my best to discover why you carry typhoid, even though you are healthy.

As I write it out now, I extend my promise: For Papa, for Benny, for all the girls and babies who've died in childbirth, I'll research the body—how it works, what sickens us, how to prevent those deaths that come too early.

I'll find answers to the questions that have haunted me for years.

When I was growing up, Typhoid Mary was an urban legend—she had purposefully killed hundreds of people; she was an evil murderess who spread disease to those she hated; she was a comic-book villain. Her nickname had become part of our lingo, a term for someone who carries a dangerous disease and spreads it because they refuse to take proper precautions. She was a symbol, not a person.

Clearly, I didn't know her real story.

When I met Mary Mallon in my research, her actual life surprised me. A poor Irish immigrant, she tried to fit in with wealthy New York families. She wanted a better life for herself and couldn't understand why she was being persecuted. I saw how the deaths she caused were based on ignorance, not willful intent to kill. She was a woman of her time—when “bleeding,” or opening up arteries to let out bad blood, was
still a regular practice among doctors, and the idea of bacteria, good or bad, had not yet become common knowledge. I felt I needed to tell Mary's true story, to restore her honor, in a way.

To me, Mary's life was a special kind of immigrant's tale, and I wanted to find a sympathetic protagonist who might understand her. It was my grandmother who allowed me to comprehend the immigrants' (and their children's) journey from “foreigner” to “American.” I have a photo of Grandma as a girl slouching in front of a ride in Coney Island with a rebel look in her eye, wearing dark lipstick and a loose dress, probably taken around 1920. I knew that she fought against her own Eastern European father's Orthodox religious practice (a picture of him, a long-bearded rabbi, hung in her living room, but she never spoke about him). As a second-generation American Jew, Grandma's behavior conflicted with the stereotypes I often read about immigrant families who passed down their Old Country ways and stayed the same. Grandma couldn't have been more different from that stereotype. For instance, she held Passover every year, but lit no Shabbat candles, said no prayers, and rarely stepped foot inside a temple. By the time I met her, she was a tough old New Yorker, an American through and through.

In
You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II
and other books, I read the stories of those immigrants who fiercely wanted to be American, first and foremost, and did everything they could to become so. They told how they quickly modified their foreign habits by learning English, dressing in factory-made clothes, and going to the popular entertainments of the time. Many of them kept ties to their roots and religions but loosened the hold their past had on them. Mostly, what stayed the same was their cooking (which explains my grandmother's sumptuous Passover spread!).

I was influenced by my paternal grandmother as well. An independent woman, she raised my father alone while working full-time as a nurse. She was, in fact, the first nurse to use the X-ray machine. I will always remember the white hat, dress, and shoes that defined her.

Making fiction from reality is a tricky business. When piecing together the past from documents that may or may not be accurate, a writer has to arrive at her own interpretation of history. Jacob Riis's newspaper reports, books, and photographs helped me see how people really lived in the tenements. Despite their exaggerations, the yellow journalism of the day gave me a sense of the public's reactions to
Mary. Mr. Soper's own articles in medical journals showed me his path to Mary. Judith Walzer Leavitt's book
Typhoid Mary
explained why Mary herself didn't accept her label as a healthy carrier of typhoid fever.

I had to fill many gaps and accept the fact that the real players were going to have to engage with fictional characters. Mr. Soper, Dr. Baker, Mr. Briggs (or Biggs), Mr. Thompson, and of course Mary Mallon all existed, though their roles were altered to fit this story. The way Mr. Soper discovered Mary, through his investigations of the household, his interviews of the families, and ultimately the peach ice cream, is true. Mary's physical threats to Mr. Soper were real (though I think her verbal assaults were probably much worse!). The time line of events was the most difficult for me to re-create. I had to shorten the action of things. What took days or weeks in my book often really took months or years. It took Mr. Soper longer to find Mary. And she didn't petition the courts until 1909, years after she was captured.

I end my story with Mary's return to quarantine, leaving the reader to wonder what became of her. One year after her hearing, in 1910, a newly elected judge who wanted to maintain voter approval discharged Mary from North Brother Island. She returned to Manhattan, promising she would
find other work and never cook for the public again. Just five years later, in 1915, a typhoid epidemic broke out at the Sloane Maternity Hospital. A cook named Mrs. Brown was discovered working in the kitchen. This cook had passed the typhoid bacteria to twenty-seven victims, two of whom died. Upon further investigation, it was found that Mrs. Brown was actually Mary Mallon. She simply never understood how, being healthy as a horse, she could be responsible for passing the typhoid fever. Or maybe, without help from the Department of Health, she was unable to find other work.

After Mary Mallon's second capture, she was returned to North Brother Island, where she spent the rest of her life, nearly twenty-five years, in a small cabin with her dog. The doctors never removed her gallbladder. In her lifetime, they found no remedy for a healthy carrier of the typhoid fever.