Typhoid Mary (14 page)

   
Her first show of friendship to me she came up from one of her visits  . . . and brought me this exquisite apple  . . . she was rubbing her hands  . . . and well  . . . her hands were tremendous. She was a big woman and she managed to cover every piece of that poor apple. She presented it to me – What do I do with it? I didn’t want to eat it. I didn’t even want to touch it!

     Sherman tells how she placed the gift deliberately close to a centrifuge, making sure to contaminate it with spilled fluid so she could discreetly dispose of the gift without offending her assistant. She later threw the apple out.

     Others at the hospital still referred to Mary as ‘Typhoid Mary’, but only behind her back. No one called her that to her face, and all were careful to not raise the subject in front of her. Some maintain that she would fly into a rage if the matter of typhoid was discussed in her presence – but maybe they were just frightened of the imposing-looking woman and her reputation. She was still bitter about the forces which had put her on the island – still claiming she’d been the undeserved target of evil doctors, without justification. From time to time, she wrote threatening letters to Dr. Baker and Dr. Biggs. In her bungalow, she kept the shades and curtains drawn, to keep out prying eyes.

     ‘There never seemed to be any youth in her,’ says Emma Sherman. She still never discussed her past, never reminisced about old loves, fondly recalled picnics or her childhood.

She must have had fun. She must have had friends. She must have gone around places with people. There was never any mention that she did. She was very, very closemouthed.

     In 1918, the hospital began allowing Mary to make day trips off the island unsupervised.

     ‘She never told me where she went when she went off the island. Always back the same day’, says Sherman.

     One place she went was to the home of Dr. Alexandra Plavska. Another likely destination was the home of Mary Lempe, a friend in Woodside who had apparently put her up during her time on the run. She always dressed ‘very fashionably’, according to Sherman, though, other witnesses claim, always in black. Black dress, black shawl, black stockings and black shoes. ‘She looked very substantial.’ Though Sherman was curious, she never questioned her. ‘What am I going to ask her? “Who’s your boyfriend?” I wasn’t going to ask her, “Were you ever married?” ’

     Dr. Plavska, like Adelaide Offspring, was as close a friend as Mary had during this last period of her life. Plavska was (it is said) a countess, who had graduated from the school of medicine at Moscow University in 1917. When she arrived at Riverside in 1925, she gave Mary a job as her lab assistant. As Mary had apparently been doing less than stellar work with Sherman, one can only assume that this was make-work – a kindness on the part of Dr. Plavska – as must have been her previous work. Mary was a frequent visitor to Plavska’s home in the years during her work with the doctor and for years after.

     Julie Efros, Plavska’s granddaughter, says:

She would bring little things. She was very beholden to my grandmother. My grandmother was a baroness. They became good friends  . . . she felt flattered that she was part of the family. And we really loved her.

   
She looked like a man  . . . We’d scrub the dishes and boil the dishes when she had dinner with us. She was warm and dear and was always trying to help in some way.

     In the BBC documentary, Efros speaks warmly of Mary as a beloved friend. At one point, she remembers a crocheted shawl which Mary gave her and models it for the camera. What did they talk about at these gatherings, the countess-turned-doctor, the little girl and the notorious Mary Mallon?

     Maybe life wasn’t so bad, considering.

     Mary Mallon, during the worst years of the Great Depression, had her own home, a paying job, and the freedom, at least, to visit friends, shop, sightsee as she wished. She had little money, but few did in those days. Many of her peers in the domestic cooking trade were probably faring much, much worse out in the world as jobs dried up and the rich became less rich and the poor starved. It was hardly a resort she was living in – but by Depression era standards, it was a warm, dry, secure home, with three squares a day, free medical care should she have wanted it, a paying job and leisure time. As retirement facilities went, not too shabby. Not that this was much comfort.

     In December 1932, Emma Sherman noticed that Mary was late to work in the lab. She had never been late before and Sherman became worried for her. She walked over to Mary’s bungalow.

The stench that came out of that doorway  . . . It was dark, because she never raised the curtains  . . . grimy, filthy-looking on the outside  . . . I called and there was no answer. I knocked. So I pushed the door open. I could barely get it open because there was so much junk  . . . I almost slid into the place it was so filthy. The odor was overwhelming. There she was  . . . lying [on the floor] moaning  . . . I couldn’t get near her  . . . I just couldn’t – it was a physical impossibility with all the stuff that was around.

     She had had a paralyzing stroke. When Sherman saw her later in her hospital bed, she saw that Mary’s face appeared to be smiling. The stroke had distorted her appearance, making her look like she was frozen in a grimace. Mary looked at Sherman and took her to be Betty Compton, the one-time girlfriend of Mayor Jimmy Walker. She ‘didn’t know who I was’, says Sherman. But, ‘I kept seeing her regularly for a long time.’ After a while, dismayed that Mary still could not even recognize her, Sherman, who had by now left the island, stopped visiting entirely. ‘There was no point.’ Mary remained bedridden for the next six years, a prisoner now not only of North Brother Island, but of her own flesh. In 1933, five years before she died, Mary Mallon dictated her will to a lawyer.

     Dr. Plavska and granddaughter Julie continued visiting Mary in her hospital bed until the end. Mary remembered the kindness of Dr. Plavska and her family with a final bequest of 200 dollars when she died on November 11, 1938. She left another 200 to the Lempe family and 250 to St. Luke’s Church in the Bronx where her funeral was held. She left a rather astonishing sum of over 4000 dollars, the bulk of her estate, to Adelaide Offspring. She had clearly saved much of the money she’d made on the island. She paid for her own gravestone. Nine people attended her funeral; the Lempe family, the Plavskas, and Nurse Offspring are the only ones named (numbering seven). As far as we know, no one from the Health Department or from any city agency showed up.

     Mary was buried in St. Raymond’s Cemetery in the Bronx. The gravestone inscription reads:

Mary Mallon

Died Nov 11 1938

JESUS MERCY

Epilogue

Goodbyes

It seemed only right to go see her, the woman I’d been reading about, writing about, thinking about for the last year. I thought a token of appreciation would be nice – a gesture, however late and futile.

     I tried to get out to North Brother Island first, wanting to see for myself what it must have looked like from out there. Easier said than done. Getting a boat to take me out, regardless of bribes and inducements offered, was not doable in the time I had. The Coast Guard obligingly offered to take me, but canceled at the very last minute, claiming engine trouble. It was a very cold day in December with high winds, choppy swells in the river – and I couldn’t blame them even if they had simply decided it was better to stay ashore than lug some writer upriver to a deserted island and wait around in very tricky current where the Sound meets the river while he communes with the dead. I settled for a drive in the Bronx, down Fordham road, to the parking lot of a warehouse, where I stood by the shore and peered out over the water to the island only a few hundred yards away.

     There’s a tantalizing and odd fragment on the Internet, some Web site where it is claimed that a portal to another world exists on the island in one of the moldering old structures that once comprised Riverside Hospital. An opening between walls, where some persistent true believer in Bigfoot, Living Elvis and Parallel Universes has painted a mural, decorating some imagined psychic transporter made of crumbling plaster. Empty rooms.

     The cottage where Mary lived the last years of her life before her stroke is gone. But much of the hospital apparently remains, however ruined. I don’t know what I could have learned there, but I’m sorry I missed it. It’s an ominous sight, the island, especially in the harsh, gray light of winter – something a screenwriter or a novelist might describe as ‘brooding’. The tops of chimneys or smokestacks poke through overgrown trees and underbrush; dark shapes are seen through branches. A not-very-confidence-inspiring concrete mooring seems to sag into the water. In the distance, Riker’s Island looks positively cheery by comparison. It’s the end of the world. While the city and its skyline have certainly changed since Mary’s time there, the island can hardly have become much lovelier. It’s a Godforsaken piece of rock in the middle of nowhere. From where I was standing, the greenish water lapping at mossy stones, I could see discarded crack vials, used condoms, a doll’s head. The other shores looked no more inviting. On this day there were no pleasure boats. A single freighter scudded by on the way to the Sound, and that was it. I was glad to leave.

     Thirty-third and Third, where Mary shacked up with Breihof, where Soper confronted her on the stairs, looks completely different from the old photographs of the site taken back in her day. No ghosts linger. The Third Avenue el, which must have rumbled noisily past her window as she snored in bed, her dog and her man close at hand, is long, long gone. All of New York’s got history. You can barely walk a block without passing the scene of a long-ago tragedy, a mob execution, the last resting place of a famous writer, a place you once scored or groped an old girlfriend, a one-time speakeasy, a KGB money drop, a place with freakish significance. Most now are just patches of concrete, somehow drained of soul over time.

     I visited my mom in a hospital room on the exact site of Mary’s last place of employ. (It was nothing serious – a one-day visit.) It’s a different hospital now, a different world. A glimmer of recognition and wonder still tingles the senses when one walks through the Waldorf Astoria lobby – a place where Mary would hardly have been welcome, but where her masters undoubtedly visited and played. Madison Square is unrecognizable, the Flatiron building emanates something – but that’s probably because my publisher operates out of it – and I have yet to finish this manuscript. The old Luchows on Fourteenth Street, where I once visited during its brief revival as a nightclub, left a lasting impression – as did Keen’s steakhouse – both places where one can easily imagine Diamond Jim and Lillian Russell stuffing their faces. Did Mary ever get a good meal in a fancy restaurant? Did Breihof ever clean up a bit, throw on a suit, and take her out for a dance and some fine food, a couple of cocktails? I still don’t know.

     The territory of feared street gangs, opium rings, white slavers, the tenement districts where Irish immigrants once lived, are expensive neighborhoods now. The Lower East Side looks like a theme park – a Disney recreation of urban living for the young, white and wealthy. Hell’s Kitchen is worse, the shabby burlesque houses and nightclubs and porno houses of even a few years back replaced by theme restaurants, merchandising outlets for the WWF and Warner Brothers.

     The Holland Tunnel inspires awe, still. It’s hard not to imagine the amazement when it first opened, what an engineering miracle it must have seemed – even in a time filled with engineering miracles.

     Oyster Bay? Dark Harbor? Tuxedo Park? Blur your eyes and pretend – and maybe, depending on where you’re standing, you can get a sense of what they looked like then.

     St. Raymond’s Cemetery, in the Bronx, Mary’s final resting place, still has a powerful effect. I went up there in the freezing cold. Dead leaves blew dramatically over the acres of headstones. It took some doing, finding her headstone. They did a lot of dying in 1938, and most of the company around her passed on that same year. The names on the stones are immigrant names, Irish, Italian, a few Slavs and Germans. Plenty of history where Mary lays. Fat Tony Salerno is buried there. It’s where the ransom money for the Lindbergh baby was dropped. Mary’s gravestone, which she paid for herself, is simple and relatively undecorated, looking like thousands of others nearby. The pattern cut into the stone is unremarkable, and the inscription, jesus mercy, as tempting as it might be to infer as evidence of a guilty conscience, is the same as hundreds of others, along with rest in peace, and a score of other Hallmark-style sentiments. In Mary’s case, looking at it, the two words seem particularly personal, as if she herself was saying them. No dearly beloved or we will always remember you, signifying that loved ones remained. Hers, however ubiquitous in the poetry of the dead, reads as plaintive. A last cry for good fortune, better luck, salvation.

     The ground is soft in spots at St. Raymond’s. Approaching her headstone, my foot pushed through the topsoil and plunged to the knee into soft, brittle earth. I didn’t want to get that close to her. I apologized to her neighbor for nearly stepping on his face and stood for a long time in front of her grave. I’d brought her a present.

     In 1973, I bought my first chef’s knife, a high-carbon Sabatier with a polished wooden handle. I was so proud of it – and I’ve held onto it all these years, remembering how it felt in my hand when I first unwrapped it, the way the handle rested against my palm, the feel of the blade, the sharpness of the edge. It’s old now, and stained, and the handle is cracked slightly in spots. I long ago gave up using it or trying to maintain it. But it is a beloved object. Something a fellow cook would appreciate, I hoped – a once fine hunk of quality French steel – a magical fetish, a beloved piece of my personal history. And a sign of respect, I hoped, an indicator that somebody, somewhere, even long after her troubles and her dying, took her seriously, understood, if only a little bit, the difficulty of her life as a cook. It’s the kind of gift I would like to receive, one that I would understand.