Fever (16 page)

“No,” he said. “There’s more here than I thought. It’s like its own little village. And yet . . .”

“What?”

“It’s still empty. Where is everyone?”

“They’re patients. Most of them will die here. Or they work here, and they go home at night.”

Mary waited for him to kiss her again, but the moment seemed to have passed. He seemed darker now, caught up in thoughts of his own, and she worried that he regretted coming, that he’d come up with an excuse to leave.

“How are things at the ice company?”

He didn’t seem to hear her. “What’s to stop you from getting on the ferry one day and going over? Disappearing? Couldn’t you work under another name?”

“The guards, for a start. The ferry captain. It’s always the same man, and he knows me.”

“You could hide. You could wait for a moment when he’s not looking and then hide on the boat, under the bench, and then sneak off on the other end when he’s occupied with something.”

“You saw the size of the boat. And they run it only if there’s people to take it. Do you think it would work?”

Alfred was silent, brooding over something.

“Besides, I don’t want to work under another name. I haven’t done a thing wrong. I should be allowed to work under my own name. Mr. O’Neill says he’s making progress, and . . .”

“Mary—”

“. . . there are men who’ve done the same as I’m accused of and they’re walking free—”

“I have to tell you something.”

Alfred walked to the water’s edge, picked up a stone, and threw it.

So this was it, Mary thought, this, whatever this was, this was the thing that had driven him uptown and across Hell Gate to see her. He kept his back to her, and she remained silent. She would not make it easier by drawing it out of him.

“I wanted to tell you when you were kept at that hotel, but then they wouldn’t let me see you, and I didn’t want to tell you during the hearing because I was afraid you’d make a scene and hurt your case, so this is better, really, this way, alone here. I think it’s best anyway.”

“Why would I make a scene?” Whatever it was, she would not make a scene in this spot, the only peaceful place she’d discovered on the entire island.

“You’ve been gone for more than two years now . . .”

Mary put her hands to her head and her chin to her knees. She knew it. She damned well knew it. She knew it, and she didn’t know she knew it.

“. . . and most of the papers say they’re never letting you off this island.”

Mary stood up from the log, brushed off the back of her skirt, and headed up the path. He took a few quick steps after her and caught her arm.

“Like I told you, I couldn’t afford the Thirty-Third Street rooms, so I took a bed at the Meaneys’.”

“Oh, yes! The happy Meaneys and their son Samuel, for whom you like to set a good example.”

“For whom Mrs. Meaney forced me to set a good example. After a week there she said I could stay on only if I stopped drinking.”

“And yet you’re still there.”

“I did the Oppenheimer Treatment. I’m still doing it. Her husband did it and it worked for him and she thought it might work for me.”

“It’s bogus. Everyone knows it’s bogus. They take your money and you drink the quinine until you’re so sick you can’t take a sip of anything, and then the cure is telling you not to drink. Then the day you stop the quinine it doesn’t work anymore. The husband is still not drinking?”

“The husband is dead.”

Mary squatted on the path, touched her fingertips to the ground to steady herself. That was it. She almost smiled. She’d felt it between them when she saw him in New York, but she couldn’t put a name on it. Now she could. Alfred remained standing.

“How long dead?”

“About five years now.”

Mary felt her stomach lurch. “You said the Meaneys might let me stay with you there until we found our own place. You said you’d ask. When you spoke of them you said ‘They’ and implied a mister and a missus.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“I”—Alfred leaned against a tree—“I just thought I’d explain it all later, away from all those people. Or I thought maybe I’d leave the Meaneys that afternoon once you got free and we’d get our own place again. I hadn’t decided. I was still deciding. Liza is not as strong as you are. I’d have to be very careful about it.”

“And now you’ve decided.”

“I wasn’t given a choice! Those judges decided! What am I to do, Mary? Live like a monk for the rest of my life? You know I love you. And as God is my witness, to this day I’ve never met anyone like you, but I thought there were things we understood about each other. And there’s the boy. He’s a good boy, a smart boy. He—”

Mary held up her hand. “I don’t care one fiddle about that boy, or about delicate Liza.” She itched to slap him, but it would hurt him more if she didn’t care. She felt her lungs heaving, her blood moving just under the surface of her skin, but instead of taking a stick and beating him, instead of unleashing the long string of words that had lined up, she simply walked away. At the top of the path, at the point where John had to get on his knees with his scythe and clear the brambles and thorns, she turned around.

“I have only one question, and I want you to tell me the truth.” She would not cry. She would not let her voice waver. “I begged you to stop drinking. I hauled you up all those stairs. I gave you money when you couldn’t work. I shaved you. I cut your hair. Do you know how good things would have been if you hadn’t been drinking? Remember how good those stretches were when you didn’t drink? Do you remember?”

“I remember. Of course I remember.” He stepped toward her, and she stepped back.

“So why, when Liza Meaney asked, did you march yourself straight to the doctor’s office for the Oppenheimer cure?” Mary felt the pin curls loosen from the bun where she’d gathered them. She felt how lank and pathetic each tendril was that hung about her face.

“I don’t know. I do know that I love you, Mary. As much as always. And I could never love her like I love you.”

“You can love her as much as you like, Alfred.”

“Wait.” Alfred grabbed her elbow, and she spun, turned on him ready to fight if he came any closer. “There’s one more thing.”

“What’s that?

“And just know before I tell you that it’s because of the boy. He’s still young, and it’s only—”

Mary laughed. She tipped back her head and laughed. She laughed at the birds, at the tops of the trees, at the waves, at the furious, roiling Hell Gate, at the sound of the foghorn in the distance, at the thought of John Cane hurrying with her plate, at the doctors, at the nurses, at their needles, their test tubes, their glass collection canisters. She laughed at her own stupidity, and at the stupidity of all the fools working and living and breathing over in Manhattan. She laughed at herself, for ever having been sorry to have left it.

“You’ve asked her to marry you.”

“And she’s said yes.”

  •  •  •  

After he left, after she watched the ferry pull away from the dock and churn west, Mary went back to her spot by the water. Her snowy egret had not shown itself while Alfred was there, and stayed hidden now. She hugged her knees, feeling the hollow place that laugh had bubbled forth from earlier. If there was something funny in what he’d told her, she could no longer see it.

After a while, she realized it was getting dark, and it had started to rain again. The loose sand that met with the tree line was pressed down by the drops, and then it was pouring, the drops hitting the river so hard that the surface of the water jumped and frothed, and she hoped if his ferry had not reached the other side yet that it would fill up with this angry weather and sink. And then she hoped it wouldn’t.

Late, long after the supper hour, long after the island had gone dark, she saw electric torches approaching from the small wooded divide that separated her from the hospital. She heard voices on John’s path.

Two nurses approached her and put their umbrellas together to cover her as they walked her back. “What are you thinking, Mary?” the one asked. “What are you doing?”

The other said, “You’ll make yourself sick.”

THIRTEEN

“How are you doing, Mary?” Mr. O’Neill asked.

It was the fourth day of February 1910, their second face-to-face meeting since the disappointment of the hearing the previous summer. It was unseasonably warm, and instead of meeting in Mary’s bungalow, or in one of the meeting rooms of the hospital, Mr. O’Neill suggested they sit at one of the new picnic tables at the Tuberculosis Pavilion and take in the fresh air. So far, Mary had not seen anyone else use the new tables, and said so to Mr. O’Neill. “Even better,” he said. “We’ll be first.” He wanted her to be outside when he told her the news. He wanted her to be able to whoop and shout and dance. He wanted her to be able to celebrate in full view of all those hospital windows looking down on them from above, all those eyes behind the windows, observing, trying to guess what was going on. Hers was the longest case he’d ever worked on, and at home, over the weekend, his wife had already invited their friends to open bottles of champagne and toast him.

Of all the women he’d ever encountered in his life, Francis O’Neill decided that Mary Mallon was the hardest to read. Last time he’d come to see her, just before Christmas, he told her that there was hope for her case, more hope than ever before. A new health commissioner was to be installed early in 1910, and he’d already gone on record with his sympathy for Mary’s plight. “It’s likely he’ll release you once he takes office,” Mr. O’Neill told Mary. He imagined this would be a Christmas gift to her, a baton of hope that she could carry through the holidays, but the news didn’t seem to register at all. A few of the doctors at the hospital mentioned that she seemed to have mellowed since the summer. Where she’d always seemed to take great pains to appear neat and presentable, to tell Mr. O’Neill her opinion on all matters, related to her case or not, she now seemed subdued, worn down. Her hair was unclean and falling out of her bun. Her collar drooped. Her lips were so chapped that he could see where they’d cracked, and bled, and dried, and broken open again.

“I guess we’ll see,” was all Mary said then, and instead seemed more interested in the food he’d brought for her, all wrapped in parcel packages like Christmas presents. Smoked ham, cheese, candied walnuts, chocolate-covered cherries, Christmas cookies. She opened the walnuts for them to share during that meeting, but he didn’t want to put his fingers in the box where her fingers had been, so he told her that walnuts didn’t agree with his stomach. “Shall I open the cherries?” But he said no, he’d eaten just before leaving the city, and she’d leveled a look at him as if to say she’d heard that one before.

Back then, he’d attributed her mood to the general lowness some people feel around Christmas, and reminded himself that it was hard enough to be alone at the holidays, and even harder for her. But now, on a fine February day with every promise of spring in the air, he’d come to see her with more news, and she didn’t seem any more interested than before.

“Health Commissioner Lederle has been installed,” he said once they were seated.

“Who?”

“The new commissioner I mentioned when we last met.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“And one of the things we’ve been talking about—not just he and I but many medical people—is how many carriers there are, Mary. It’s become clear now that there must be hundreds of them. Thousands. Your case is not so special after all, and that’s a good thing.”

Mary frowned and picked at a splinter of wood in the tabletop.

“Mary”—he waited until she looked at him—“he’s decided to release you. The paperwork has already gone through. You will be off this island and back home by the end of the week.”

He brought her a present to go with the news. It was his wife’s idea, and when he agreed, she’d gone straight out to get for Mary, whom she’d never met, something colorful and beautiful, something any woman would be proud to wear. “Men don’t understand about having nice things to wear,” she said, and he told her to go to the same shops she visited, spend the same as she would spend on herself. He took it out now, and pushed it across the table toward her. She laid the package on her lap, but only played with the string.

“What do you mean about my case being not so special? That means they still believe I gave the fever to all those people.”

“Well . . . yes.”

They’d been on this case together long enough to be frank. She was every bit as intelligent as she insisted she was. “It is true, you know,” he said. “You are a carrier. It’s difficult to accept, but you must have had time to think about it over these three years. The point is that it’s not your fault.”

“But I cooked for so many people who never got sick. I cooked for hundreds of people over the years. And only twenty-three, I don’t—”

“That’s part of it, too. The way it comes and goes. And some people are immune. That’s one of the reasons they’ve kept you here, to study your patterns, but it’s not your responsibility to provide them with the data they need, and Lederle agrees. They can’t lock up everyone who carries the fever. The best alternative right now is to let you go on the condition that you will never cook for hire again. You are no harm to anyone unless you are cooking.”

Mary sighed. Of course. It was what he’d been urging her to volunteer since the very beginning, to quit cooking, to give up one life and sign on for another.

“The commissioner has objected to your confinement since day one, and through his own contacts he’s already gotten you work at a laundry. It’s on Washington Place, right by the park.”

Mary did a few quick calculations in her head. She’d have to stay in a boardinghouse at first, and then she’d have to get a room to share. A laundry. A laundress. Time was moving backward.

“And you’ll have to check in with the Department of Health every three months, so they can keep track of you, take your samples and all that. You’re not the only one. They’re doing that with all the carriers they know about so they can more easily locate the source of an outbreak if one occurs.”

“For how long? The checking in, I mean?”

“For the rest of your life,” Mr. O’Neill said. “Or until they find a cure. Or until vaccination becomes routine.”

“For the rest of my life,” Mary repeated. “What if I move?”

“You’ll have to let the DOH know, and then you’ll register wherever you end up. Are you thinking of leaving New York?”

“No.” She wasn’t, and didn’t even know why she’d asked. “What about Soper? Will I have to see him again?”

“No,” Mr. O’Neill said. He leaned closer to Mary as if they were old friends catching up. “I hear he’s trying to peddle a memoir and is having no luck.”

Mr. O’Neill’s smile disappeared when he saw Mary’s face. Mary hated that man more than she hated any person she’d ever known in her life.

“Just open the present, Mary.” He tapped the box.

She untied the ribbon, folded back the tissue paper, and discovered the most beautiful emerald green shawl she’d ever seen. Along the edges were birds stitched in royal blue. She wrapped it around her shoulders and pictured how it must look against the red in her hair. She remembered her beloved blue hat with the silk flowers. Where had it ended up? She imagined it hanging in George Soper’s office, a memento of his life’s work.

Mr. O’Neill waited for her to speak, and she knew he wanted her to say more, to jump up and down and be happy, but she couldn’t speak because she didn’t trust her tongue to contain its acid, and it was not his fault if he didn’t understand the difference between a cook and a laundress. She’d make a third of what she was making before, probably less. Her knuckles would itch and crack and bleed and cramp and when she became an old woman her hands wouldn’t work at all anymore, and she’d have to get neighbors to come upstairs and open jars, twist doorknobs. It would be like Mr. O’Neill having to leave his position as attorney and go work instead as the bicycle messenger who brought paperwork back and forth between the law offices and the courthouse all day.

But she closed her eyes and took a breath and decided to sweep away every disappointment, to look instead at what he was offering. She remembered how scared she’d been in Queenstown, waiting for that ship to lower its gangway, and again in Castle Garden, where no one understood her brogue and a stranger had hooked her by the eyelid and peered at her like he would an interesting fish. She’d been scared when she met Alfred, and again when Aunt Kate died. She’d been scared before, she’d be scared again. She’d be fine.

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s really lovely. Tell your wife thank you, too.”

“I will.”

  •  •  •  

The next morning, she opened the door of her hut to find her newspaper had been opened and refolded so that an article from the city section was on top. “Typhoid Mary to Be Released by Week’s End” the headline read.

“Typhoid Mary,” she whispered as she reached for the paper. Unlike the other names they’d given her—most often the Germ Woman, a title that seemed and felt anonymous, something she could easily disown—Typhoid Mary had a ring to it, and as she studied the boldface type of the paper in her hand she felt it settle on her. She felt it stick.

Word spread quickly around the island. The nurses came in pairs and groups of three to say good-bye. Maybe they had more sympathy than she’d credited, Mary considered as they bade her best wishes and good luck. Maybe she’d been kinder than she thought. Even Dr. Albertson made his way down the path one afternoon. “Good luck to you, Mary,” he said, and continued on his way for a walk.

John Cane avoided her. One morning, when it snowed, he cleared her step while she was in the hospital signing forms, and she could see by the footprints he left that he was avoiding the path. “John!” she called to him another morning. She was walking from the lighthouse and he was over by the nurses’ dormitory, shaking salt on the narrow road. But he didn’t hear her, or wouldn’t listen, and by the time she arrived at the place where he’d been standing, he was nowhere in sight.

Finally, on Thursday afternoon, she caught him walking near her door. “John!” she called out from her step. She waved him over. He seemed to hesitate, but then turned onto the path that led to her hut.

“Are you avoiding me?” she asked, smiling, hoping to disarm him. She didn’t want to leave him angry with her, and she didn’t want to leave without him accepting that he had no reason to be angry.

“Nope.”

“Do you know I’m leaving tomorrow?”

“I heard something about that.”

“Well, aren’t you going to say good-bye?”

“I was going to wait.” He stamped his boots and left treads of snow outside her door. “You still have another day. Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“John—”

“Besides, it’s like you said, those people are tricky and they might change their minds at the last minute, and then won’t we all feel a bit silly for having said good-bye?”

“They won’t change their minds. It’s all signed and sealed. I have a job waiting for me.”

“Well, good. That’s good.”

Mary understood what was eating him, but there was no possible way to say it. After he’d pinned her for not asking him any personal questions, she’d made sure to pose a few, now and again, in light conversation, and over the months she’d learned that he had no wife, no children, and lived on East Ninety-Eighth Street with his younger brother, who was bigger and stronger than John, but who was not right in his mind, and could not hold a job because he was prone to fits so violent that he’d once bitten clear through his own tongue. This brother tried to care for John like a wife, doing the cleaning, the shopping, the cooking, but he was not a wife, not nearly a wife, and Mary also understood without ever needing to ask the question that what John wanted his whole life long was a real wife, and he had not given up.

“I want to tell you something,” John said, and Mary cursed herself for letting it come to this. “I want to tell you that I don’t think things are so bad here on North Brother. I think it’s a pretty spot and your bungalow is sound, if a little on the damp side, but show me a building that isn’t. And I think you have to admit you’ve had pretty good company when you’ve sought it. You’ve had someone to talk to, is what I mean. Would you agree?”

“I agree completely.”

“But you still want to leave.”

“Yes.”

“Well, then I want to tell you something else. That Alfred who came here that time. Your man. Yes, I know you said he’s not your man anymore, and yes I know you didn’t put it like that, but I can put two and two together, and what I want to say is that Alfred is not a good character. I don’t mean because of what the papers said about the way you lived, or any of that. I just mean man to man, I can tell a good one from a bad one, and I don’t trust that one to stay away from you once you’re over there again. Remember I said that, and remember that he didn’t have the patience to wait for you while you were here, like any other man would. Like a few other men I can think of would have done without a doubt. And now look where his impatience got him. Don’t forget that, Mary, once he comes around.”

“I won’t forget,” Mary promised, and all the humor she’d felt a moment earlier, all the warmth toward her friend, disappeared, and instead she felt her stomach tighten, her head fill up with electric sparks.

“Well, I had to say it,” John said, and now, his burden lifted, he seemed like the old John, at home with himself and with the door frame of Mary’s bungalow. “And maybe we can visit sometime, over there, and I can tell you the news of North Brother. We can go for a walk or something.”

“John.” She stepped forward and hugged him, and felt where the top of his head met with her ear. She couldn’t help it, she felt it was like hugging a child, a solid, muscular child, but still a child, a child’s narrow shoulders, a child’s way of clinging to her when he wants comfort, and she couldn’t muster up a single morsel of attraction toward him. “Let’s do that.”