Fever (18 page)

She walked and walked, and finally turned on Eighth Avenue for the final stretch.

“Yes?” a woman answered Mary’s knock, but a young woman, younger than Mary, with Mary’s same style of hair and a nicer blouse.

“I’m here about the bed. I wrote last week and Mrs. Post wrote back to say I should come today.”

The woman sighed, throwing up her hands. “Come in.” She moved aside with a theatrical half curtsy, and Mary stepped past her into the small kitchen. She admired the window over the sink, and the little square of stained glass that someone had hung to catch the light. Then she turned slightly and noticed a cot. That would be fine. She’d slept in plenty of kitchens. Abutting the foot of that cot, she noticed another. Then, on the other side of the kitchen, another.

“Oh, there’s more,” the woman promised, pointing to the next room. Mary peeked into a darkened bedroom and took in the larger bed pushed up against the wall, the buffer of cots all around. There was nowhere to walk. The person or people who slept in the larger bed must have to crawl over the cots to get to the door.

“But the ad,” Mary said, wanting to argue the situation into the one she’d imagined, and not the one that was.

“Look, you want to stay? Great. I’m out of here next week. You on a regular shift or a night shift?”

“Regular. Day.”

“Well, that’s working for you. The night shifts—we have two nurses here—are the real losers in this. They can’t get a wink all day with the racket she makes. She needs us here but she hates us here. You already left the other rooms you were in?”

Both women looked down at Mary’s small bag, and the other woman laughed.

Mary’s was one of the cots in the bedroom. She thought she’d gotten lucky when she saw that hers was closest to the door, but then she learned she’d been right when she imagined that the others would have to crawl across the other beds in order to get out of the room. In the middle of the night she was woken by a knee near her face, a foot flicked across her belly, the general rocking and creaking her cot made with the weight of another body trying to pass. There was a flushing indoor lavatory down the hall from their rooms, but long before Mary’s arrival, someone had made the decision that the hallway privy encouraged too much movement in the middle of the night, and so a chamber pot was set up in the corner of the bedroom farthest from the door. If she wasn’t woken by someone traveling on top of her, she woke to the sound of someone letting go a stream of urine into a ceramic pot, followed by the sound of four other women tossing violently in their sleep to shut out the noise.

She had to find something else. She thought about her old building, about Fran and Joan. Fran’s place was full up with her own family, and Joan? They would make room for her, she knew. They would sympathize. But it was their sympathy that stopped her. They had each warned her about Alfred in their different ways—Joan quietly, and Fran less so, but she had not listened. And now here she was, just a few years later, living in a boardinghouse while Alfred made a new family with a new woman. No, she wouldn’t be able to stomach it, the inevitable human need they’d have to point out that they’d been right, and she was wrong. Instead, she asked Li if he knew of anyone looking for a boarder. She told him she’d even live with a Chinese. She tried to ask the Lithuanians, but they didn’t understand her. She stopped in at all the churches, Catholic or not, between the laundry and Mrs. Post’s, to read the bulletin boards. She scoured the ads in the papers. She quietly suggested to two of the other women at Mrs. Post’s that they strike out together and find a place to themselves, but neither of them was interested, or else they didn’t believe it would be possible for three women to rent rooms together without a man to sign for them.

Then, very early one Tuesday morning, she heard her name being called.

“Mary!” a woman’s voice chased her from across the street. “Mary Mallon!”

She turned and saw Joan Graves hold out her hand to stop traffic as she rushed across the street to Mary’s side.

“I can’t believe it!” Joan said, and threw her arms around Mary.

“Joan,” Mary said simply, and let herself be hugged. She was happy to see Joan, silly Joan, talented Joan, who could sew more surely than anyone Mary had ever known.

“I heard there was a hearing, but I thought they’d taken you back to the island.”

“Oh, you heard all about it, I’m sure.”

“Well, it was in the papers. We followed it, Fran and I did. But you’re here. And look at you! I thought you were sick. Have you been sick? What are you doing now? Where are you living? Why didn’t you come see us right away?”

“I was planning to, but—”

“And what about Alfred, have you seen him? He told Fran’s Robert that he did the Oppenheimer cure.”

Mary didn’t remember Joan being so aggressive. She didn’t remember her as a piler of questions, and she was absolutely certain that the old Joan would never have brought up the cure, which was a roundabout way of bringing up the problem, and the drink, and the late nights, and Mr. Hallenan’s shouts up the stairs. The Joan Mary knew might have brought it up privately, with such subtlety that Mary wouldn’t know what she was talking about right away. Not out on the street. Not first thing after seeing her after so long.

“Where did you see Alfred?” She might as well ask rather than be distracted by wondering all day long.

“In the building. He does odd jobs for Mr. Driscoll now and again after he finishes up at the stable. You haven’t seen him?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry, Mary. I heard about . . . his new place. I don’t know why I asked that.”

Mary wanted to ask several questions at once: Did he seem happy? What did they talk about? But she didn’t ask anything. No, she was not interested. She would not beg for information. She would not ask for Joan’s husband, and all of their neighbors, just so at the end of that long list she could ask discreetly about Alfred. She wouldn’t do it.

“I’m late, Joan. It was great seeing you.”

“But you haven’t seen me! Mary, you must come by! Will you come for supper one night? On Sunday? When were you released?”

Mary was already sidestepping toward the laundry, which she could see was open and accepting customers. Let them fire her, she thought. Let them try. She’d march straight up to Lederle’s office and ask him for the money from his wallet. She’d wait in the street outside Soper’s office and mug him as he made his way home.

“I’m not sure I can, Joan. I’ll let you know.”

“Yes, let me know. If not this Sunday, then next Sunday.”

“I’ll let you know.” Mary had turned now, was walking away.

“Oh, and Mary!” Joan called after her. “Mary! I almost forgot!” Mary steeled herself. She’d met Alfred’s Liza. She’d met precious Samuel. Mary wanted to take her scarf and stuff it in Joan’s mouth.

“We have a baby girl now. She’s eleven months. You have to see her. She’s the sweetest thing, and—”

Mary stopped. “You had a baby? You’re kidding me.”

“I’m not kidding,” Joan laughed. “You were right. Sometimes it does take a long time. Will you come by, Mary? To meet her?”

“I can’t believe it.” Mary looked around as if the baby might be hiding in an alley, peeking out at them.

Joan laughed. “Fran is minding her. She lets me get out by myself for an hour.”

It was Mary’s turn to laugh. “Fran! I thought she said she was done with babies once she got her last one in school. She once told me she’d push Robert straight out the window if he said he wanted to have another.”

“You know Fran. She was the first one cooing into the bassinet when she was born.”

“What’s her name?”

“Dorothy Alice.” Even saying the child’s name, Mary saw, cast a glow of joy on Joan’s face. All the impatience Mary felt just a few minutes previous was gone, and now she hugged her friend, told her that she was happy for her. Joan would be a good mother, and if the child had half the heart Joan had she’d be a kind person. For the first time since leaving North Brother, Mary forgot why she hadn’t seen her friends in so long, and wanted to go straight over to the old building to tease Fran. Joan would make a pot of coffee and the three of them would gab away the morning. Who cared about Alfred? Not her. If she passed him in the hall she wouldn’t even turn to look at him.

As the moment began to pass, Joan frowned. “And you’re not sick, right, Mary? You don’t look sick. What they said about you and those people you cooked for? It’s not true, is it? That’s why they let you out?”

Mary sighed. “They only ever said it was the people I cooked for who got sick.”

“And that wasn’t true?”

“Well, a few got sick. A handful really, out of how many I’ve cooked for. But it was a coincidence. It was a—well, it wasn’t fair anyway. There’s a dairyman upstate—”

“I knew it. I said to myself, our Mary has no disease, the way you used to work so hard and run up and down those stairs. So you’ll come and meet the baby, won’t you?”

And as Mary heard herself promise that she would, she knew it was true. She wanted to see Joan’s baby. She wanted to see Fran. Even Patricia Tiernan would be a familiar face, and what had she craved those three years on North Brother but a familiar face? What had she wanted most but to talk to someone who knew things about her that had nothing to do with Soper or Typhoid or even cooking. And they were her friends. They would understand that she didn’t want to talk about Alfred, that there was nothing to say. Never in all the years they’d known one another did either Joan or Fran say a word about their not being married, only concerns about his health, and how hard she worked, and if, perhaps, she didn’t sometimes wish she had a man who took care of her and not the other way around. But there hadn’t been judgment, not really. And she had to hope there would be no judgment now, either, after the humiliation of his leaving her, marrying someone else.

FIFTEEN

She worked. After two months at the laundry Li told her that they’d been worried about taking her on as a favor, but that she was as fine a worker as any Chinese, as any person Li had ever known. He told her that Chu was also very pleased. The Lithuanian women acknowledged her more often, nodding and giving her brief smiles before turning back to their stew of cottons and wools.

In the window of the corner grocer she found an ad for a woman boarder. The building was on Thirty-First Street and Second Avenue, and she decided not to care that it was so close to the old building, but when she went over there she saw that it was little better than Mrs. Post’s. There were cots everywhere, and a pair of exhausted-looking women sitting at a table without talking to each other while she got the ten-second tour and a rundown of the rules. There had to be something better, but it was impossible to really look, with only half a day off every week, and the long hours of the weekdays. She pursued another ad she’d seen in the newspaper, but when she got there nothing seemed right—the large living area, the high ceilings, the separate kitchen, the man who emerged quietly from one of the three bedrooms and held a hushed discussion in the corner with the widow who’d answered the door at Mary’s knock. The man skulked by Mary and ran down the stairs of the building without saying good-bye or good day to anyone, not even the women lounging on the silk sofa like cats stretched out in the sun. Mary realized where she was just as the young widow came over to her and asked her to take down her hair, reaching, as she said it, for Mary’s pins. Mary held tight to the banister as she made her way back down to the street.

She searched for a month. Six weeks. Two months. The weather grew warmer, the rooms at Mrs. Post’s closer. The nightly foot to the face or the belly was growing familiar, and that worried Mary more. She refused to grow accustomed to living that way. There had to be people who were honest and needed someone like Mary to help. June passed. July. Two of the women at Mrs. Post’s left, and with the breathing space those two empty cots offered, Mary decided to wait a few weeks, to spend her Sunday afternoons doing something else for a change, walking in the park, taking herself out for a sandwich. A few weeks turned into the entire summer. Then, at the end of September, as she was walking north along Third Avenue near Thirty-Sixth Street, she ran into Mrs. Borriello and one of her sons at the produce cart that traveled around the neighborhood.

“I remember you,” the son said before anyone had said hello. “Mama,” he turned. “She used to live in the building. Wasn’t she—”

Mrs. Borriello hushed the boy by touching him lightly on the shoulder. She spoke in Italian. “She says hello, how are you doing?” the boy said. “She said she is glad to see you.”

“I’m happy to see you,” Mrs. Borriello said in accented English.

Mary smiled at Mrs. Borriello, who had aged since Mary saw her last. “How are you?” she asked the boy. Carmine, she recalled. And the youngest one was Anthony. She calculated the oldest brother to be dead four years now. How well she remembered that afternoon, the hush that fell over the building when the news went up and down that the boy, sent by his mother to gather wood by the bulkhead on Twenty-Eighth Street, had been reaching for a piece of driftwood when he slipped into the river and was swept away. It came out later that Carmine, who’d gone along with his older brother, had run along the riverbank looking for help and came to a group of laborers having a break up on the pier. “Please!” he begged them. “My brother!” But all they did was look where the boy was pointing, and after a minute, as they all watched the boy drift farther away, and as they took their lunches from their pockets, one of the men offered the boy half a sandwich for strength before he went home to tell his mother. Mary wondered now if they ever fished the boy’s body from the river.

“How is Anthony?” Mary asked.

“He’s doing good.” The boy looked at Mary, and then down at his hands, and then back at Mary. She wanted to touch his face. “Hey, ah, did you hear about my father? That he died?”

“No,” Mary said. She put her hand on Mrs. Borriello’s arm. “I’m sorry to hear about your husband. How? He was a young man.”

Mrs. Borriello pulled her scarf tighter around her hair. “A freak thing,” the boy said. “He was down framing a new building on Broadway and Broome, and they said he had the harness on to do a little welding job up on the beam, and then a strong wind came and he lost his footing and the harness broke. And he fell. It was the fourth-story floor beam.”

How many times had the boy heard the story, Mary wondered, to be able to tell it so matter-of-factly? What could he understand about beams and framing and the building of buildings? He was probably about ten years old now, but he seemed to Mary both older and younger. Older with his swagger and his way of speaking for his mama, but younger when she examined his soft face, his long eyelashes, the way, underneath everything he said, he seemed to look at each of the women and ask, Did I say it right? Is that really what happened to my papa? Just a beam and a broken harness and a gust of wind? And before that my brother? Is it really possible that he was there beside me one moment and swept away the next? That there was nothing tying him more closely to his life? Or my papa to his?

“Your poor mother,” Mary said in a whisper as she examined Mrs. Borriello’s dark brown scarf that blended with her dark brown hair, her drawn face, her quick hands passing over one grapefruit and then another until she found one she liked.

Mary leaned slightly toward the boy, wanting to hug him. “When?”

“Almost a year.”

“One year in October,” Mrs. Borriello added, also looking at her son. All three were quiet as the shoppers rushed around them and the produce man kept glancing at them and at their pockets to make sure they hadn’t stuffed them without paying.

“Hey,” the boy said. “I remember the fireworks that time. Remember?”

“I do,” Mary said, taking him by the shoulders and pulling him toward her. I am lucky, she thought. When I think I am unlucky I must remember that I am lucky. I am blessed. The boy let himself be hugged, and then politely pulled away.

The woman said something in Italian, and the boy tried to signal his mother with his eyes that he didn’t want to translate. “She says you have also had sadness,” he said finally. “But your sadness is a blessing in disguise, maybe. Maybe not, but maybe. That man was not a good one, and Our Lord works in mysterious ways.” The boy added on his own, “He comes in sometimes. He seems different now.”

“You might be right,” Mary said, placing her hand on the woman’s arm again to say good-bye. She began to turn away, to wish them a good day and best of luck, when a thought came to her. “Carmine,” she said.

The boy waited.

“Does your mother have a boarder?”

“A boarder?”

“Someone who lives with you and pays a little of the rent.”

“No.” He looked at his mother, who was scrutinizing Mary. Mary got the feeling that she understood everything. She wanted to ask how they were making ends meet, but she knew that would be intruding too far. How to put it? She turned to Mrs. Borriello and spoke to her directly.

Mrs. Borriello waited, and Mary felt she was already preparing a phrase to turn Mary down. “I have a regular job, six and a half days a week, and I earn decent wages, though not as good as I did before. Before the island. You understand? When I was a cook. This job is in a laundry but the pay is regular. I could live with you, Mrs. Borriello, and help out with the rent and around the rooms. I am neat, and the boys already know me. I would—”

Mrs. Borriello let go a stream of Italian, and the boy protested in Italian for a few sentences, before turning and walking down the block a little, leaving the women alone.

“I’ve been thinking about something like this,” the woman said. “I don’t like the idea of a stranger. I don’t like to put it in a newspaper.”

“But I’m not a stranger. You saw me come and go for many years.”

“Yes.” She stared at Mary, and Mary recalled the portrait of the Sacred Heart she’d noted that time she stood in the Borriellos’ dim kitchen after the older boy’s death, Mrs. Borriello not yet able to get out of bed. This was a religious woman, and Mary was sure she’d disapproved of Alfred and their arrangement. What woman would approve? She’d been crazy, and foolish, but what woman would have given up on him, knowing what he was like at his best? He was worth it, she wanted to say to Mrs. Borriello. And she loved him. And Christian doctrine preached forgiveness as much as it preached anything else. Underneath that scarf and those widow’s weeds was a young woman, perhaps younger than Mary. You understand, Mary wanted to say to her. I know you understand.

“No guests,” Mrs. Borriello said. Mary’s face burned. It was no matter, Mary thought. A few weeks of living together and the other woman would see that Mary was not like that. It had just been Alfred she’d made an exception for. Only Alfred. And now Alfred was off and married and raising another man’s son.

“Never,” Mary agreed. She shook her head emphatically from side to side so the woman would understand. She felt a flush of sweat spring up on her neck. The boy was kicking a dried horse turd along the curb and glancing over at them. “My boys stay in their bedroom. You get the cot in my room or the kitchen.”

“Yes. Fine.”

Mrs. Borriello named her price. It was more than at Mrs. Post’s, and it meant Mary would save nothing. Not a single dime unless she ate less, or washed her hair less often, or walked everywhere she went, or picked up another job for Sunday afternoons. If I offer less, Mary considered, she will take it. She said herself that she doesn’t want to advertise.

“Yes,” Mary said instead. “I can do that.”

Mrs. Borriello seemed surprised for a moment, and then happy. She waved over the boy. Mary shook the other woman’s hand, and then the boy’s. Each paid for her fruit, and they made their separate ways until the following Sunday, when Mary would move in.

She had not given a single thought to the others in the building when she’d made the suggestion to Mrs. Borriello, but when she walked away, and realized what had just been arranged, it felt again like time was moving backward, and that no matter how hard she tried to keep her eyes pointed to the step ahead, she kept getting knocked off balance, turned around.

She gathered her belongings from Mrs. Post’s when most of the others were out. It was only natural to feel that she was going home. Only when she saw the number hanging over the door—the dark entryway, the worn staircase beyond—did she truly understand what she’d done. At the bottom of the stairs was the same faded mural of a man on a horse, children picking fruit from trees. The plaster molding that had long ago been painted to match the wood of the banister had been chipped away further, and sat along the baseboard in small piles of dust. After so many months of avoiding the place, of swinging wide so as not to run into anyone, there she was the prodigal daughter without a thing to show for herself except for a scorch burn on her wrist, and swollen ankles, and a set of ten raw knuckles. They would laugh at her. She imagined Patricia Tiernan standing smug in her kitchen, saying what she always thought, what she always knew, while her fawning family gazed at her and nodded. She thought of the others who had never liked her, had never liked Alfred, and then how she and Alfred had thumbed their noses at what the others liked and didn’t like.

But now she was back, alone, and for the few seconds it took her to cross the landing she thought about returning to Mrs. Post’s, or to a boardinghouse, or asking if she could stay at the laundry for a week until she could find better accommodations. Everything about the place was familiar: the sag in the center of each stair, the smell of damp rising from the basement. If she were still cooking, she could have afforded their sixth-floor rooms on her own. Who lived there now? She thought of her old bed, her table, her sink, the spices she kept in the press.

She began to climb the stairs. When she got to Mrs. Borriello’s and knocked, the door opened immediately, and Mrs. Borriello took her bag and placed it under the cot, which was set up with pillows against the wall during the day to look like a small sofa. She nodded at Mary to sit. As soon as Mary pulled in her chair Mrs. Borriello served her coffee with sweet condensed milk and fresh bread with salted butter. At the center of the table she placed a bowl of fat, ripe blackberries. Mrs. Borriello sat across from her boarder and the two women ate and sipped and enjoyed the silence. It was the most delicious meal Mary had tasted since before North Brother.

“I want to thank you—” Mary began, but discovered a blockage in her throat that the words couldn’t skirt by. There was nothing to cry about, but the pressure behind her eyes was too much, and Mrs. Borriello was beside her, rubbing her back, saying that she must be tired, why not a short nap before the boys come? Mary agreed that she’d like to lie down for a few minutes, not sleep, but just lie down, close her eyes, pray to God that things would get better for her here and not worse. “Oh, first I want to give you this,” Mary said. “Yesterday was the first of the month, so it works out nicely.” She opened her bag and removed from her wallet the price they’d agreed on, but the other woman just looked at it on the table, at the bills Mary had fanned out, at the coins piled on top.

“Is it okay?” Mary asked. There was nothing else in her wallet if she owed more, if she’d misunderstood. She’d bought new wool tights that week, and twice in ten days, after closing the laundry with Li, she’d gone to the little counter that sold hamburger steaks until midnight. She knew she shouldn’t have done that. Once? Fine. But twice? And couldn’t the old tights have been mended?

Then Mrs. Borriello dipped her head and covered her face with her hands. “Yes, it’s okay,” she said after a moment. When she composed herself, she told Mary that she was going to her room to lie down, too.

  •  •  •  

Mary knew that avoiding her old friends now would make everything worse. It would be better to seek them out immediately, try to explain to them what had happened, let them see her face. Her silence from North Brother would be easier for them to understand than why she hadn’t sought them out since her release. Joan was no obstacle—she’d already forgiven Mary by the time she’d flagged her down on the sidewalk. Little Dorothy Alice cried in the mornings and over the sound of her wailing came Joan’s soothing voice, singing about doggies, or sleigh rides, or the Kingdom of Heaven. Later, walking to work, Mary found herself humming along.