Fever (17 page)

FOURTEEN

When Mary was seventeen but passing herself off as twenty-five or twenty-six, turning from the sidewalk and pushing the heavy wrought-iron gate that led to the front door of a house like the Warrens had rented in Oyster Bay, or the Bowens had on Park Avenue, would have made her body a hard knot of dread. It was worse when the woman of the house was young, newly married, maybe only eighteen or twenty herself. Girls of twenty know by instinct who is at least their own age and who is younger, and Mary would compensate by marching into the kitchen with authority, maybe even a little disdain. She’d thicken her accent like a gravy on the stove and hope that would explain to them why she seemed so young. A cultural difference, Mary could see the young mistress thinking. This is the way Irish are, I suppose. Once, when she arrived to cook for the Hill family on Riverside Drive, the mistress had taken one look at her and told her outright that she didn’t believe Mary’s age or experience. Mary had just turned eighteen, and had slowly been getting jobs the agency didn’t know about. Aunt Kate would hear about something from a friend, or Mary would answer an ad in the newspaper. In addition to a home so large that it could have housed a dozen families, the Hills had three carriages, six horses, and a pair of Shetland ponies for the children, who were not yet old enough to ride them. Mrs. Hill told Mary to be on her way.

“I only look young,” Mary insisted, feeling as she said it exactly what she was: a skinny child who hadn’t eaten a proper meal since her last employment. “You’ll get no one else out here today. I might as well make dinner before I go.”

Mrs. Hill hesitated. “I am hungry,” she admitted, and patted her considerable belly. “Only porridge this morning.”

After showing Mary to the kitchen, Mrs. Hill left her alone to create something wonderful out of the bland bits and pieces that had been left behind by the previous cook and the pale chicken carcass the porter had been sent out to fetch that morning. Mary found flour, butter, eggs, raisins, rosemary, three old apples she knocked on and then tested for juice with her front teeth. An hour later she brought Mr. and Mrs. Hill, along with their two children, plates of walnut and raisin chicken salad, with fresh bread and baked apples on the side. She stayed at the Hills’ until her true age was exposed by a porter who’d overlapped with her at a job in Brooklyn Heights. For the next few months Mary had to go back to washing and ironing, giving her the feeling that life was just one long, narrow road, with no turns, no peaks or valleys.

“I can’t take it,” she used to say to Aunt Kate when she’d go home.

“You’ll take it,” Aunt Kate assured her. “You’ll take it like everyone else.”

  •  •  •  

She’d been repeating the words to herself since stepping onto the ferry: You are no longer a cook. You are a laundress. You signed the papers. Better to be a laundress in New York City than a cook trapped in a bungalow on an island of death.

The boardinghouse where she’d slept since Friday night served decent-enough food, to Mary’s surprise, but she didn’t like the company. Men slept on a different floor than the women, but they all took their meals together, and there was too much eyeing and gawking for Mary to be able to enjoy her plate. To the one wall-eyed man who kept breathing in her direction, and then whispered that he liked the look of her, she’d stated plainly that she’d make him sorry if he ever came near her. He’d laughed, the food he’d just eaten a pulp on his exposed tongue, but she’d stared at him without changing her expression. He snapped his mouth closed and turned back to his beef and barley.

When Mary walked into the laundry on that Monday morning in February 1910, she felt flat, tired, and hungry, as if all those years between hurrying after Paddy Brown in Castle Garden and that moment, pushing open the door to a Chinese laundry, were no more than a matter of weeks, and she was no older now than she’d been then. The laundry was on Washington Place and Greene Street, directly next to the taller Asch Building, and on Mary’s first day the entrance was blocked by a lake of icy slush so deep she had to hitch up her skirt to stride through it. It was a busy street, full of students from New York University and women working at the factories up and down the block.

The laundry was open to customers every day except for Sundays, and the washers, too, had the day off. But those who ironed and hung had to show up for at least four or five hours on Sundays in order to press and fold or hang what had been washed the day before. It was a small operation—a front room to welcome customers; a middle room where Chu, the owner, slept; and a back room where all the washing and pressing took place alongside a little kitchen and sitting area that they were allowed to use for thirty minutes out of every day. Chu did not speak to Mary, but directed all his instructions to another Chinese man named Li, and Li translated all Chu’s instructions for Mary. Here is where you stand, he told her. Here is how you wring. Here is how you shake out, how you hang, how you feel for dampness. In certain fabrics it was preferable to iron before completely dry; in others the garment must absolutely be bone-dry before touching with a hot iron or else the iron would stick, and the garment would burn, and Mary would be out of a day’s wages. The irons must be kept hot, but not so hot that they would scorch, and they must be kept clean. Mary would find, Li warned, that by the end of the day the irons would feel heavier, and Mary would be slower to move them, and so she should be on guard for this always. Everyone was to take turns up front if Chu was not available, or if he couldn’t make himself understood, or if the customer did not want to speak to a Chinese.

Li gave her the main instructions for handling the customers: No one, under any circumstances, could pick up laundry without a ticket unless Chu gave his explicit permission. Mary should not be surprised if people came in asking for clothes that had never existed, and then demanding compensation for those imaginary clothes. She must never concede. If she thought she was being swindled, she should stop and get help. Keep the cash drawer locked. And finally, because Mary spoke English, she’d be asked to serve as interpreter from time to time.

“But you speak English,” she said, interrupting him.

“You are white. They won’t try so many tricks with you. My father was born here, and me as well, but I still have a Chinese face.”

“But not as Chinese as Chu,” Mary said, before she’d stopped to think that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to have him know she’d been studying his unusual face.

Li regarded her with an expression she couldn’t read. “My mother was white. And my father’s mother. There are only two dozen Chinese women in all of New York City. Three dozen at the absolute most.” His face was very grave, and Mary knew that whether it was true or not, he believed it. Then when she thought about it, she realized she couldn’t remember ever seeing a Chinese woman. Not in the markets. Not on the streets. Not in the tenements. Nowhere.

“You are Irish, we know, and we hope that doesn’t cause trouble for us. The Irish cause trouble for the Chinese more than any other. You being here is a favor because Commissioner Lederle vouched for you.”

Mary didn’t know what to say to that, so she didn’t say anything.

“How do you know him, by the way? Did you work for his family?”

“No, I don’t know him,” Mary said quickly.

“Yes. Well,” Li said, and then told her to get to work. “He brings his shirts here from time to time.”

The work was as tedious as Mary remembered, with none of the magic that came with cooking. Where she needed only her knife and a pan of hot butter to turn a few ordinary, ugly spuds into something wonderful, the laundry offered no real transformations. The two Lithuanian women remained hunchbacked over their tubs of water all day long, their bodies angled to get strength in their arms where there wasn’t any left. They had red faces, and Mary supposed it was the physical effort of their work, and from keeping their noses so close to the hot water and its broth of chemicals made to strip the clothes of odor, of any evidence of the bodies that had worn them. After twenty minutes of instruction on the box, Mary was made the mangle woman. Li stood at the head of the contraption, a flat box about three feet long and ten inches high, and showed her how to wrap bed linens or tablecloths around the pins below, and then how to push the wheel on top to make the box roll over these large, flat items that didn’t need detailing or shape. Later, when she was done with the items that needed mangling, she could be boss of the irons, sanding and polishing the ones that had cooled. Amid all of this labor, this orchestra of pushing and pulling and wrestling with waterlogged fabrics, walked Chu, who gave Mary stern looks and clicked his tongue.

On Mary’s second day, she arrived at the laundry at the appointed time, but an hour into her work realized she’d been expecting something different that day, some slight deviation from the day before. By the third and fourth days she realized that there would never be any deviation. She arrived. Hung her coat. Pushed up her sleeves. Began to work. At precisely the noon hour she stopped to eat an apple and a wedge of cheese, while the Lithuanians sat across the table from her and made a picnic of black bread and dumplings stuffed with some kind of minced meat that Mary wanted to take apart with her fork and examine. They spoke in their own language and didn’t bother with Mary at all. At half noon she was back mangling, rolling the large, flat board over florals and plaids, linens and thin cottons. In the afternoons she marked time by the sudden surge of girls that spilled onto the sidewalk as the shift changed at the shirtwaist factory next door. The ones arriving called out greetings to one another as they hurried to the entrance. The ones leaving for the day stood in groups of three and four on the sidewalk outside the laundry and talked of their plans. Once in a while one of them would hold out her hand for the others to admire a new engagement ring. Listening to them, Mary felt apart from everything around her, as if someone had gotten hold of her and was warning her to stay quiet as she watched the hours and days of her life unfold, someone else playing the lead.

You’ll take it, she heard her aunt Kate say. You’ll take it like everyone else.

In the evenings, even though it was late and dark, and even though she didn’t like walking to the boardinghouse at night because the block was almost abandoned, Mary roamed the city and tried to look forward to summer, when there would still be a little light left in the day once her work was over. She drew a large square in her mind and avoided every point between Twenty-Fifth and Thirty-Eighth Streets, and between Second Avenue and Park, in case she would run into someone she knew. Not that it mattered, she reminded herself, with Alfred all the way downtown. After so many years together, even avoiding the place where they’d lived, reminders of him stood on other corners, other blocks. Between the two of them, they’d worked or walked every neighborhood.

At night, in her narrow single room, the light from the lamp not strong enough to read by, Mary lay on her back and remembered she was still young. She was working. She was luckier than most. She was not a woman who felt loneliness. She was not a woman who got weepy or complained. She was not, had never been, and wouldn’t become one now. And then, as sometimes happened when the hour got late, and there wasn’t enough to occupy her, and she couldn’t sleep, and her whole body felt full up with a question in need of an answer though she couldn’t think of exactly what the question might be, she thought of him, the other him, that baby, that boy, dead now for eleven years. She imagined Mr. Kirkenbauer remarried, with other children, another wife, another new house. Did anyone ever visit that boy? He’d been thriving when she met him. He’d been growing, and running, and learning his words, and accepting everything he was taught with joy. And then Mary had arrived for a job and he was dead within five weeks. That one, that baby, more than any of the ones on Dr. Soper’s list, more than even her sister’s twins who’d seemed like little more than empty vessels from the very start, more than any of the ones they accused her of harming, Tobias Kirkenbauer bothered her most.

If it was her fault, like they said it was. If she was to blame. If she was a walking, breathing germ, a death sentence. If it was her arrival that had killed him. Her letting him eat off her spoon. Her kissing him and squeezing him. If he really did die because of her, then she asked Jesus for Mercy. She didn’t mean to, she told God. She didn’t know. Late at night, long after the other boarders were most likely asleep in their beds, she wondered about all those lab tests that came back positive, and all those lectures they gave to her about Typhoid bacilli and hot soup versus cold salad, and what heating at high temperatures does to food, and where germs like to grow and thrive, and how, in all likelihood, it was her ice creams and puddings that were to blame. She thought back to the ship that brought her to America, and all those bodies that had been dropped into the gray ocean, a trail of heavy, sewn-up sacks she could follow back home, if she ever chose to leave America one day.

Anyway, it didn’t matter anymore, Mary told herself in the morning as she rushed to rub a washcloth over her face. It didn’t matter, she repeated as she struggled to pull on thick tights under her skirt, and watched her own breath hover around her face as she grew more agitated. She knew, once again, that she hadn’t killed that boy any more than she had killed any of the other people in that great, wide, filthy, throbbing city. It would be laughable, really, if it weren’t already criminal for them to have locked her up, one woman, a cook, when every corner of America hid a pestilence just waiting to be stirred up, set free.

  •  •  •  

After six weeks at the laundry she’d made enough to rent a bed from a widow on the west side. She’d seen the ad in the paper, and instead of mailing her inquiry across town she’d walked it over and pushed it through the mail slot of the building. Although the building was not grand, Mary acknowledged when she was back on the sidewalk looking at it that it was a perfectly decent one. And with just two women in the rooms it wouldn’t be much to keep it clean and everything in its place. The widow wrote to Mary with the date that she should come and the price of the bed. It will be like living with Aunt Kate, Mary decided as she gathered her few things from the boardinghouse. It’ll be something to get used to at first but after a while it will become routine, and she’ll look forward to seeing me, and who knew? Mary might be there for the rest of the woman’s life. She’d heard plenty of cases where a boarder becomes like one of the family, and she didn’t see why it wasn’t possible in her case as well. How difficult it must be, she thought as she crossed the avenues and bent her head against the spring wind, to be an old woman in this city, to have to worry about gathering wood or coal, putting food on the table.