Deadly (7 page)

I examined each page he gave me as I typed it. I had expected at least one source to show positive for the disease, yet they all, every single one, came out clean. When I told him, Mr. Soper double-checked, frustration wrinkling his brow. The information seemed to move him to work harder, to search deeper for an answer to the question before us. We must go back, he says, and ask more pointedly about the family's agenda, what they did, who they saw, how the disease might have traveled into their home.

I'm coming to dislike these drives to Long Island—not the trip, but the way the children run to the door, their mouths expectant and wide, the worried peak of Mrs. Thompson's brow when we return once again having uncovered nothing. It's another day they must remain in the house, away from their city home, and school, and friends.

Strange where clues can come from. After shopping for Mrs. Zanberger one evening (she's now home from the hospital, and acting the perfect invalid), I sat with her in her kitchen, peeling a five-pound sack of potatoes for her as
her hands hurt too much for the work. In the course of the labor, she asked me about my job at the department, and I told her of the case. She said that her cousin got the typhoid once from a bushel of clams he fished out of Sheepshead Bay. Nearly the whole neighborhood had fallen ill with the disease from those clams, she said. I took this report to Mr. Soper, and the information illuminated his eyes, and he shuffled through our notes, saying that bottom-feeding shellfish
was
a common cause of the illness, and that next week we would thoroughly investigate that angle. Warmth gushed through me, pride, I guess, at finally having something to offer.

Lately I seem to think about my father and brother more and more. Not actual thoughts, but pictures. I see them in
the boys and men at the office. What Benny might have become. What Papa might look like now. Around the time my father decided to go to Cuba to fight against Spain, I felt a darkness about him, as if a shadow had engulfed him and wouldn't let him go. I think I was confused and so angry at him for signing up to leave us, I couldn't speak, not enough to pierce his darkness. I remember thinking,
What about us?
Over the years, I've invented reasons for his leaving us: Grandfather fought in the Civil War, and maybe that's why my father wanted to fight too. Maybe it was a way for him to feel he could win, after death won the fight with Benny.

Or maybe I will never understand.

Even as I think of my father and brother more, with this new job I feel the emptiness less. My days are filled with work, writing and typing, figuring and organizing, and when I come home, I am eager to spend the evenings and weekends keeping up with my own personal record here in my tablets. The pain of missing Papa and Benny is overtaken by the busyness of my mind and hand. I am grateful to Mr. Soper; the difficulty of the tasks he entrusts to me, every moment of the day my thoughts absorbed by puzzles he presents me. It's the type of work I have needed, the challenge that will help me overcome old sorrows.

M
arm agreed
that the first weeks of my pay should go toward improving my wardrobe, so I went to Macy's and bought three shirtwaists (a mint green, a pale yellow, and peach), and two brown tweed skirts, which are more professional than my school skirts. I used the last of my pennies to surprise Marm with a sliver of her favorite cheesecake from Rosario's Bakery. As I was leaving, I glimpsed a familiar face at one of the tables, sitting alone in front of a giant chocolate bonbon. For a moment I couldn't place her, then of course it struck me; it was Josephine, from school. School has been so far from my thoughts, but upon seeing Jo, it came rushing back to me, the easy company of the girls, the undemanding work.

My unhappiness there.

Wiping the sticky smear from her lips, Jo asked what had
happened to me. It seems Mrs. Browning pretends I never existed, and the girls were talking of coming to my apartment to search for me. Jo asked if I was sick—I think they were afraid I might have died. I told her about Marm's argument with Mrs. Browning, and my new job, and she asked me to help finish off her forbidden delight. She wanted me to go on a trolley ride to Coney Island with her and the girls this Sunday, but I told her of my commitment to spend the day catching up in my tablet. I tried to explain how important my notes were to me, then stopped when I saw her eyes drifting. She mentioned her engagement to Will Stryker, the marriage date set for a month from now. When I inquired why the wedding was so soon, a sunrise pinked her cheek, and I asked the poor girl no more questions.

Seeing so many girls who are nearly my age having babies, it makes me think—will I ever have one? I have thought it through, and for three reasons, I feel childbearing distant from me: (1) because I've seen the pain of birth, and the rate of death alarms me—until I know more about why mothers and babies die, I wouldn't take such a step; (2) I want to have my life to myself, and not give it away to a helpless creature who needs me at every turn: food, comfort, bath, shelter; and (3) while I would be curious to observe the process of
a child growing inside me (cell by cell?), the thought of its flesh and bones and muscles pushing me outward to make room for itself makes me somewhat queasy.

I talked my thoughts over with Marm, and she was quiet. Then she said I felt that way because I had not found a beau to love. I could nearly touch her soreness, the way my father left us. And I wonder if it's true: Do I not dare to love someone the way other girls my age do? When I think of love with a boy, that place in my chest tenses, and the question comes: If I loved someone, if I allowed that sort of warmth into my heart, would he go away?

My solitude at times is overwhelming, but I fear the pain of loss is worse.

A
fter our
inconclusive test results, Mr. Soper and I traveled to Long Island once again to speak with the family and servants, and to visit farms and food establishments nearby the house.

An old Indian woman with two long braids and colorful embroidered clothing lives in a tent by the shore and sells shellfish to all of Oyster Bay. She let us take some samples of her goods but pointed out that if her foodstuffs were tainted, the whole neighborhood would've become ill. Mr. Soper asked if she fished the waters alone, or if she worked with anyone else along the bay who might have sold the family shellfish. The strange woman said she worked alone, she sold alone, and nobody got fevered from her fish. We checked the medical records in the neighborhood, and she was right. Families contracted consumption, a
pox, and polio, but no one else in Oyster Bay got typhoid this summer.

We took the fish samples and visited two farms in the area. I've never had the opportunity to stand beside a group of cows before—the size and smell of them overwhelmed me. They seemed so odd, with their watery eyes, the flatness of their furred heads banging the stalls to draw my attention, their long tongues hanging out, mouths dripping with saliva. Chickens ran underfoot; low-bellied cats slinked after them. At the lamb stalls, looking at those pink-nosed innocents, a pang of guilt struck me. I thought of Anushka aiming her rifle at one of those animals, I thought of their skins being removed, their bodies being quartered and stewed. I wonder—are we spoiled, here in the city? I have eaten many a lamb stew, but I buy the stock at Mr. Barren's. I never meet with the animal eye-to-eye.

I think living so near the very creatures she consumes has changed Anushka's life. It gave me a glimmer, being on those farms, of the vast difference between the life of a city girl and that of a country girl. How she's had to adapt! What will my visit be like, I wonder.

Will we have the same bond after so much time apart?

I
discovered
the most incredible coincidence, one that blew through me like a tempest. In typing his old notes, I found that the first fever case Mr. Soper ever investigated took him to Cuba in 1898, the year of our war against Spain. I stared at the page when I read that.

Mr. Soper and my father were in Cuba at the very same time.

How shocking, that he might have crossed paths with Papa! I long to ask if Mr. Soper knows anything about him, but it's not a question I feel I can voice—it's too close, too private to discuss.

I'm afraid it might seem like my father ran off and left us.

I must calm this storm inside me. Mr. Soper could have some very important information about Papa—he could know where he is!

I will wait—one day the time will come, the right time will come to ask him. Now is not that time.

Mr. Soper has been working for years to keep epidemics at bay, even in the face of the impossibility of completely ridding humanity of disease. He wants me to learn from his previous examples by transcribing and ordering all of his past cases, which is quite a task, considering how poor the penmanship is of these records—small, tight lettering, words in every margin, drawn maps blotched with ink, all written by Mr. Soper himself. Such a perfect man in every other respect—looking at his handwriting, I feel as if I've discovered a large tear in a very expensive suit. No wonder he sought to hire a girl who knows how to use quill and typing machine.

In Cuba my chief observed the men and realized that the yellow fever spread by contagion: The soldiers fought so closely together, sharing food and water, that they gave each other the sickness. That's when Mr. Soper did something truly revolutionary: He set up a method of separation, keeping the sick apart from the healthy to check the growth of what is called bacteria. I am beginning to understand that it's these bacteria, or germs, that cause disease. He called this method of germ-killing “anti-sepsis.”

I do wonder what bacteria might look like, and how they might travel from person to person as in a contagion.

There were other fever epidemics—thirteen hundred people ill in 1903, six hundred in 1904. I guess we are lucky to have only nine sick, none dead, in our typhoid case. Mr. Soper says he doesn't think the household members of the Thompson family gave the disease to each other the way the soldiers did. He says because the Thompsons came down with the typhoid at nearly the same time, each person must have contracted the disease from an individual source such as a food or water. This makes sense to me.

I see so much of him in the old records, Mr. Soper, the way his mind works, tearing each new bit of information apart, breaking it down to smaller pieces to look at it more closely, to wonder about it and worry it like a sore tooth. He has a mind that doesn't easily let go of things, not without fully understanding them first. That's why he's so good at his job; that's why I'm so glad I can watch and learn from him and listen to his deep voice explaining difficult things to me every day.

O
dd morning.

In working so closely with men, encountering them daily, watching how they behave with each other, and with me, I have to wonder at our differences. We are made to fit together like two halves that combine into a whole. Our minds are supposed to complement each other, women nurture, men provide, yet this design of nature dismays me; it seems so flawed. It often seems that we are as mismatched as horses and rabbits. If it were meant to be, our togetherness, why is it so difficult?

I'm thinking of this today both because of the letter I received from Anushka, and because of a chance meeting this morning between myself and that peculiar science fellow who works in the laboratory, the one who asked me to look at his microscope. I felt eyes upon me as I was purchasing a
basket of eggs from the lady on Hester. There he was, holding a paper he'd plucked from the newsie, staring at me from its pages. He has a way of looking at me that seems far too open and familiar to be proper.

He greeted me too informally as well: “Fancy meeting you here, Prudence,” he said.

His steady gaze made my stomach hurt, but I nodded politely.

“I live on Essex,” he said. “I live alone.”

The implications of that frightened me. I started to walk away when he stopped me: “Hey, you know, you weren't the only one who applied for the job as Soper's assistant. My friend did too, and he should've gotten it. He's like me, a science fellow.”

My breath caught in my throat. I hadn't heard about anyone else in our department applying for the job. I wasn't sure he was telling the truth.

The boy went on: “Mr. Soper gave it to you because he likes to be around pretty girls.”

I felt as if he insulted me in his feeble attempt to flatter me. I turned to face this wicked boy fully and asked, “Can your friend type forty words per minute, write in a neat hand under pressure,
and
dig into a septic field?”

He burst out laughing. I quickly turned and hurried away from him.