Fever

by Mary Beth Keane

So the Warren girl survived, and everyone else in the Warren house survived and they still wanted her.

  That’s part of what was so worrying about the Bowen girl, that they wouldn’t let her anywhere near. If she could only just see her, but even now, with the police searching the house for her, Mary was sure the girl’s nurse had not so much as stepped out into the hall to see what was going on. When they knocked on the door to pass in ice and fresh linens, the nurse blocked their view of the girl’s bed with her body, accepted what was given, and shut the door again.

  Then she thought of the boy, the Kirkenbauer baby, only two years old. Just two. Barely two. Crouched in the Alisons’ storage shed, her hands stinging with the cold, she tried everything to keep him out. She hummed songs. She recited poetry. After returning home from the Kirkenbauers’ back in 1899, she didn’t even look for another situation for a whole month. She made sandwiches and sold them to the men who worked at the lumberyard on Twenty-First Street. When they handed over their coins and she handed over the sandwiches, they were perfect strangers to her, and she decided that was what she wanted: to cook for people but not to know them at all. She didn’t want to see people when they woke up in the morning. She didn’t want their children hugging her legs and learning her name.

  Mary waited in the shed for what felt like hours. She was hungry. She was stiff and cold and worried about getting sick. Who would cook for the Bowens if she got sick? She unwound a long piece of burlap from around the garden equipment stored on a shelf behind her and wrapped it around her shoulders. She hugged her knees to her chest and exhaled hot breath on her fingers. At one point she thought she heard Bette calling her, so she opened the door and saw a policeman’s hat moving along the other side of the fence. She tried not to think about time, and whether she’d be there all night, whether she should risk running alongside the Alisons’ house and out to the sidewalk and away downtown. In one moment she felt sure they’d give up, go home, and never come for her again, and in another moment she knew they’d be waiting for her on Thirty-Third Street. They’d be waiting for her everywhere she went.

  After what felt like several hours of almost perfect stillness, she heard the creak of the fence door swinging open, the crunch of footsteps in the snow. Frank, she prayed. Come to tell her the coast was clear. She heard footsteps pass her little shed, the shadow of a man darkening the slim spaces of sky between the wood slats. A person was standing at the shed, facing it. Mary could feel the stranger sizing up the little structure, the perfect hiding place. “Mary Mallon,” a man called out. The world was thin, brittle, frozen solid, and the man’s voice threatened to crack everything open, smash all the lovely icicles hanging from branches. She pressed her lips together and closed her eyes. More steps approached to join the person already at the shed. A woman’s voice, efficient, fed up, stood out from the others.

  “She’s in there,” the woman said, as if it should have been obvious to everyone, and in one last surge of hope Mary imagined her pointing her finger away from the storage shed to the trees, to the clouds.

  “Mary Mallon,” a man said again, and it was the tone in his voice that told Mary it was over. He really did know she was in there, and he’d give her a moment to decide to come out before he went in and got her.

  Someone pulled the lever that opened the door, and four men and one woman leaned in to look at her. Mary’s hips and knees felt like a kitchen scissors gone to rust.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Mary said as she worked to ignore the searing pain in her joints. “Leave me alone.”

  “Mary Mallon,” one officer said. “You are under arrest. You have—”

  She shoved him. She put her head down and threw out her arms and shoved him. When another officer approached, she kicked, and next thing she knew one was trying to pin her arms, while another had gotten her around her waist. She felt one at her ankles. She reached out and grabbed a handful of the woman’s hair. The snow in the Alisons’ backyard was churned up, and Mary felt the wet of her skirt through her thick wool stockings. One of the men caught her left arm, and when he did he twisted it around behind her back. When she turned to knee him, another officer grabbed her right arm. They lifted her, carried her across the Alisons’ small yard to the narrow path that ran beside the Bowens’ house. She tried to kick, to buck, to twist in their arms, raising her knees in the air and then letting fly with every bit of strength she had left, but she was stiff from sitting in the cold for so many hours, and her movements felt clumsy, poorly aimed. One of the officers was telling her to be quiet, relax, that she was only making everything worse for herself, and next to all of this buzzed Dr. Baker, who rushed up to the door of the truck and pulled it open so that the men could shove Mary inside.

  • • •

  Dr. Baker walked to the front of the courtroom. It was the pattern of the day; one description of Mary in a given moment was not good enough. They had to get two, three, four people up there to say the same thing. One of the police officers had already had his turn and had told them all about it, said Mary was an animal, worse than an animal because even the wildest animal can be coaxed, usually. There was no coaxing Mary that day. No reasoning with her. She was like no other person he’d arrested in his life. He had scratch marks on his arms and neck for days after.

  As Mary observed the plain-looking woman turn to the judge before taking her seat, she knew it would look worse that she’d attacked a woman, and Dr. Baker was a smaller woman than Mary, and a woman of the class that allows women to become doctors.

  But Dr. Baker surprised her. She admitted that she’d had to sit on Mary during the ride to the Willard Parker Hospital, but other than that she said simply that Mary had seemed frightened, and that the others had covered for her. “As anyone would expect them to,” she added, “being Miss Mallon’s friends.” No one else had said anything about her having friends.

  “Dr. Baker, did you find her to be unreasonable?”

  Dr. Baker hesitated. “We didn’t try to reason with her. When she went missing we focused on finding her, and when we found her we simply forced her into the truck. So I couldn’t comment on that. Other than two brief conversations we had when she was still being held at Willard Parker, I’ve never spoken to Mary Mallon at any length.”

  “Wouldn’t you agree that a woman who hides in a shed for so many hours to avoid arrest has a guilty conscience?”

  Again, Dr. Baker hesitated. “I would say that person doesn’t want to be arrested, guilty or not guilty. And I would say that none of us here would like to be arrested.” Dr. Baker stared out across the heads of all the witnesses in the gallery, her hands folded neatly in her lap. The attorney asking the questions searched through several sheets of paper and then pushed them aside and turned to Dr. Baker without notes.

  “Dr. Baker, as a resident of New York City and as a medical doctor, would you feel comfortable letting Mary reenter society? Allowing her to leave North Brother Island and return to her former life?”

  Dr. Baker frowned. She remained silent for a long time, and in the gallery the spectators wondered if she’d heard the question. Finally, she spoke. “It’s my opinion that Mary Mallon does not understand the medical threat she is to those around her. However, neither do many of the medical personnel who’ve become acquainted with her case in these past two and a half years. I can say only that I don’t think Miss Mallon should be allowed to cook. All the medical doctors in this room have admitted that she is a healthy person. What happens when more healthy carriers are discovered? Do we send them all to North Brother?”

  Mr. O’Neill smiled in his seat. The other attorney frowned. “Dr. Baker,” the other attorney asked, “is it possible that you have particular sympathy for Miss Mallon because she is a female?”

  Dr. Baker tilted her head and considered. “Perhaps.”

  ELEVEN

  In the end it took several more days for the judges to decide what to do w
ith her. Instead of sending her all the way back to North Brother for the night, they put her in a hotel with guards posted outside her room, and on the morning of the second day, ten minutes were wasted in arguing over who would foot the bill for such a luxury. The City of New York? Which department? One of the DOH representatives shouted, “That woman is expensive enough as it is.”

  She spent three nights in the hotel all told, and except for the fact that her bed was made every afternoon when she came back from the hearing, it wasn’t that different from North Brother. The hotel laundry wouldn’t lend her an iron, so she gave in and sent her skirt and blouse downstairs for them to clean, which they did, in plenty of time for each morning’s proceedings. The mousy girl who brought up her clothes on the morning of the fourth day said, “Good luck to you, Missus. We hope they let you go,” and Mary imagined a whole staff of women standing behind her, rooting for her, waiting to hear what would happen.

  And then, back in the oppressive courtroom, at ten o’clock in the morning of July 31, 1909, Judge Erlinger stared out across the heads of every man and woman in the room and announced that Mary Mallon’s release would be a hazard to every New Yorker and could not be justified. She would be returned to North Brother Island immediately.

  Mary heard the words as a kick to the gut and gripped the table to steady herself. “What does it mean?” she demanded of Mr. O’Neill. Everyone in the room seemed to have woken up. Some of the reporters jumped from their seats to shout questions at the judge, at the collection of experts, at Mr. O’Neill, at Mary.

  “It’s just for now,” Mr. O’Neill said. “We’ll keep working. Look, their own experts said there are others like you, that—”

  “Others like me? Do you believe I’m giving out the fever?”

  “I think it’s irrelevant, Mary. I’ve tried not to think about it too much, but yes, the lab work is sound in my view, and two-thirds of the time it comes back positive.”

  “Their labs! Run by their people! I’m telling you, it’s Soper. He’s—”

  “Mary, calm down. Please. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are perfectly safe to be around as long as you are not cooking, and they can’t go locking up healthy people whenever they feel like it. There has to be a better solution.”

  Mary absorbed Mr. O’Neill’s calm response and remembered that for him, and for everyone else in the courtroom, the hearing was no more than a handful of days, a set of hours, an errand, an item on a list. For Mary, it was her entire life. After this, Mary made herself understand, all of them can go home to their families, meet someone for a picnic, take a trip to the ocean if they want. Each person here has complete freedom, except for me.

  When she thought about going back, the long automobile journey uptown, the ferry crossing to North Brother, it all seemed inevitable, and all the other possibilities she’d imagined—being with Alfred, getting new rooms together, finding work—were just dreams behind locked doors.

  “The judges said you can have visitors now,” Mr. O’Neill offered by way of consolation. “You can write to your friends and let them know.”

  Mary stood on her tiptoes so that she was almost his height and felt tempted to spit at him, to walk up to the judges and spit at them as well. As for Soper, she felt her hands turn to fists. Their experts had worried that she had a violent streak—what proper woman would raise a knife to a man of status?—and perhaps they were right. Who among her friends, after not seeing her for more than two years, would put aside their work to spend half a day traveling all that way uptown, all the way across Hell Gate, to sip a cup of tea in her cramped kitchen for thirty minutes?

  And how would Alfred react to this news? She was glad he was absent.

  • • •

  John Cane was there to meet her ferry and tell her all the news since she left. The she-cat who skulked in the vegetable garden had birthed a litter of kittens, and all the babies had been taken home by nurses except for one. Did Mary want it? For company? The hydrangea by the south wall were fully bloomed in the heat, even though he didn’t expect that for several more weeks since last year they hadn’t blossomed until August. Did Mary remember? Did she remember planting the rusted nails with him? Well it worked, that trick, and now they’ve flowered a deep periwinkle blue. He went on and on, as if she’d been gone for a year and not just a handful of days. The moment she opened the door to her cottage it was as if she’d gone out only for a walk, and everything—the courtroom, the judges, Dr. Soper, the hotel—seemed like a hallucination, like she’d never left, like she’d never seen Alfred at all. He’d tried to see her at the hotel the first evening, but they told him to see her over at the courthouse. He never did. Working, she supposed. He could have left a note with the clerk at the courthouse or one of the guards at the hotel. Even if they had to read it before handing it over, she’d like to have had a note from him. But there was no note, no visit, and now she was back on North Brother with John Cane buzzing in her ear.

  She went over to her desk and removed a sheet of paper. She sat for a while, not sure of what to say. After a few minutes, she picked up the pen.

  Alfred,

  You’ve heard by now that I was taken back to North Brother. Mr. O’Neill said he is going to keep trying. I’m not sure what to think—I’m just so tired. I barely saw you at all.

  I’m allowed to have visitors now. I would love for you to visit me here, Alfred. It’s not ideal, but at least it’s something. I’ll wait to hear from you.

  Mary

  She addressed the letter to the stable instead of Thirty-Third Street, and left it poking out from under her doormat on the step where the mailman would notice it. Then she closed the door of her cottage and curled up on her cot. Her body smelled ripe. Her best blouse would be ruined for good. It was so very hot. The walls so close. Late at night, when she was sure no one would see her, she carried the heavy chamber pot outside, emptied it in the river, and returned immediately to bed. In the early mornings she heard the foghorn of the lighthouse behind the hospital. She listened to the rhythmic tap and scrape of the bricklayer’s instruments as he pointed the brick of the new walkway that connected the hospital to the outbuildings. She heard John and his gardening shears slicing through the green, and she heard someone leave meals on her step three times a day. After a few days she decided that was the way it would be from now on. She’d stay in her hut and if they needed her, let them break the door down. If they wanted her samples or wanted to draw blood, by God they’d have to drug her and get ten men to hold her. No more. After several days—her head felt light from lack of food, her teeth thick and soft, and under her arms itched for a scalding washcloth rubbed with strong soap—John pounded on her door and warned her that he’d brought a nurse and they were going to enter without an invitation if she refused to come outside. Finally, as threatened, he opened the door, and the smell of fresh-cut grass turned her stomach.

  “My God,” he said, turning his face toward the fresh air of outdoors and drawing a deep breath. “Are you suffocating yourself?”

  “Get out.”

  “I’ve brought Nancy,” he informed her, as if she knew who in the world Nancy was. As if she cared. “Tell her,” John urged the girl. The nurses got younger every season.

  Nancy looked at him and then at Mary.

  “Tell her,” he said again, nodding toward her hand. Mary noticed the girl was holding a newspaper.

  “There’s a dairyman,” Nancy said. “In Camden. Upstate.”

  Mary waited. The girl whispered something to John, but he couldn’t hear her. Mary promised that she’d kill them both with a single shot if they didn’t get out.

  “They say she gets mad if . . .”

  “If what?” John asked.

  “Yes, if what?” Mary asked.

  The girl took a step backward. “If anyone says anything about her having the fever.”

  Mary sat up in
her cot.

  “Don’t worry about that,” John assured Nancy. “Just keep going.”

  “There’s a dairyman in Camden who’s passing the fever through the milk.”

  Mary sat up straighter. “What do you mean?”

  John took over. “She’s just after reading it to me. He’s a dairyman. Had the fever forty years ago and hasn’t been sick a day since. There were outbreaks of Typhoid wherever his milk was sent, at groceries and markets all over New York City, and now they’ve traced it to him. Got lots of people sick with it. They’re saying maybe hundreds. More than—”

  “More than what?”

  “More than they claim you made sick. A lot more.”

  “Where are they sending him? Not here, I guess. Camden is all the way up near Syracuse, isn’t it?”

  “That’s just it. They’re not sending him anywhere.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Because he’s the head of his household and has a family, they’ve decided it would be too much of a hardship to put him in quarantine, so he can stay exactly where he is, as long as he promises to never have anything to do with milk production. So he has his sons running it and he’s bossing them.”

  “You mean they’re isolating him somewhere in Camden. Somewhere he can be near his family.”

  “No, Mary. I mean they’re letting him stay in his own damn house. You understand? With his wife. With his dogs and his sons and his grandchildren. Not a thing has happened to this man except being told not to go near the milk that’s distributed for sale. As for the family’s milk he can do as he pleases. None of them have ever had Typhoid, so your Dr. Soper believes they must be immune.”

  “Soper? Soper went up there?” Mary tried to make sense of what she’d just been told. “Hundreds, you said? Hundreds? They say I infected twenty-three.” It was one of the rare times she’d said it out loud.

  Nancy piped up. “I think, if I may, that you’re considered, more of a . . . well, a special case? There’s a bit on you at the end here.” She held out the folded newspaper for Mary to take. “This man knew he had Typhoid forty years ago. He remembers it well. You claim to have never had it at all. So.”