Newspaper accounts of the day do not support Soper’s version. Tests, it is said in the press, were in fact administered by a Dr. Norris L. Ogan of the Health Department. Mary Mallon, still working at the hospital after the outbreak was discovered, supplied stool samples, as did every other cook and servant and employee. When the results came back, revealing trace amounts of typhoid in her sample, she was soon no where to be found.
Dr. Soper was not alone in claiming to have tracked down Mary Mallon, Public Enemy Number One. Dr. Josephine Baker claimed later to have recognized Mary in the hospital kitchen, ‘among the pots and pans’. A New Yorker magazine article written years later states that Dr. Baker ‘notified the police and health authorities’ and that ‘that afternoon, when Mary left the hospital, she was followed. She had wrapped up a bowl of gelatin which she had lovingly prepared with her own lethal hands, and was taking it to the home of a friend who lived in Corona.’
Newspaper accounts, crediting Mary’s discovery to the hospital stool sample, say she was tracked ‘through friends’ after going into hiding at the Corona address – a much more credible scenario. The story of Mary, caught in the act, about to deliver a ‘lethal’ bowl of gelatin to a friend, sounds like someone trying way too hard to build suspense into a rather humdrum account. It is more than likely that Mary’s capture was the result of a friend giving her up. That’s the way most fugitives are caught.
This didn’t prevent a Sergeant Bevins on the New York Police Department from claiming that he had, in the course of his duties, recognized by ‘her walk’ a veiled Mary Mallon walking into a Corona home, and called in reinforcements.
However they got there, it came down to this: Sergeant Bevins, his lieutenant, Belton, another police sergeant, named Coneally, and ‘various interested parties,’ including Dr. Westmoreland (no mention of Soper or Baker), surrounded the Corona house. Sergeant Coneally rang the front doorbell. No answer. He rang again. No response. A ladder was found and Sergeant Coneally climbed to a window on the second floor and stuck his head into a dark room. A bulldog barked, provoking a fast retreat. The intrepid cop came down the ladder, found some meat with which to distract the intimidating pooch. Up the ladder again, followed by Bevins and others. They heard the sounds of doors being shut, one after another, and they followed.
In a bathroom, they found her. Typhoid Mary Mallon, crouching on the tile floor. She didn’t struggle. She gave up without a fight. It was the end of the road.
She had known it was coming. She had had to know. Working at Sloane, in Manhattan, amongst doctors – some of whom were in the middle of extensive typhoid vaccine trials – was an insane risk, a desperate venture. The other cooks had even teased her, called her ‘Typhoid Mary’ – never dreaming she actually was. It was only a joke, yes, but one would picture an earlier, more energetic Mary Mallon taking that as a cue to leave. When she’d heard – as she must have – that the kitchen staff would be tested, she hadn’t run. She had supplied a sample. Knowing the possible result, she hadn’t bugged out for the sticks, avoided her usual haunts, or called a lawyer. She’d halfheartedly hidden in a bathroom when they came – and when confronted, had given up without a peep.
She was older now. And broken. Three years of imprisonment, living a convict’s rules: eating when they told her to eat, sleeping when they told her to sleep, followed by five years in the culinary hinterlands, scrounging a living in bottom-rung jobs, one-lung rooming houses, taking orders from God knows what kind of despotic taskmasters. Those private homes where she might briefly have found employ, were most certainly not of the caliber she’d once enjoyed. To cook in the lower rungs of domestic service was not the same. The number of other servants were necessarily fewer. Cooking functions would be combined with the less glamorous tasks of laundry, cleaning, and scullery. The food would not have been as good, the masters less lovely, less generous. Who knows what she must have endured, what boorish and despotic bosses, flaky housemistresses, whining, inept servant girls, speaking to her with rudeness and contempt. She was tired. She was old. And she was guilty.
It’s a measure of how little she cared about herself or anybody else that she would risk infecting pregnant women and newborn children with typhoid. It was . . . well . . . indefensible. Even taking a small chance that she could infect an infant or nursing mother with typhoid was contemptuous and contemptible. That she clearly couldn’t even be bothered to wash her hands carefully after going to the bathroom – an easy measure, the least she could have done even if she was teeming with typhoid – speaks volumes about how far she had fallen and how little she cared.
Soper, in a smug but relatively sympathetic (for him) examination of subsequent events, says:
Mary was now about 48 years of age and a good deal heavier than she was when she slipped through a kitchen full of servants, jumped a back fence, and put up a fight with strong, young policemen. She was as strong as ever, but had lost something of that remarkable energy and activity which had characterized her young days and urged her forward undaunted. In those eight years since she was first arrested, she had learned what it was to yield to other wills than her own and to know pain. In the last five years, although she had been free, there had been times when she had found it hard to fight her battles unaided.
On North Brother Island the City offered her a comfortable place to live – a place where she could cook and sleep and read to her heart’s content. Her old age was provided for. There was a good hospital with doctors nearby. She knew by experience that the people on the island would be kind to her.
However she might have felt about it, it was back to the island for Mary Mallon.
It was over. She’d done a terrible thing – and she knew it. No newspapers would be writing friendly pieces about her plight now. The babies and pregnant women she’d risked infecting at Sloane made that unlikely in the extreme. O’Neill was dead – not that he’d ever helped all that much. Breihof was long gone. And there was, maybe, the relief of knowing it was all over. Like the murder suspect who falls asleep in the interrogation room (a famously known indicator of guilt), she went limp, gave in, let all wash over her, turned her fate over to the warders. No more hope – but no more worries. Her life of toil was over. No more scrounging, no more hustling, no more fear. The worst, finally, had happened. She was now, really and truly, away for life.
Chapter Eleven
Life Without
In March 1915, Mary Mallon was returned to North Brother Island. She would live there until she died – twenty-three years later. This time, she didn’t fight it. She returned to her one-room bungalow and watched, begrudgingly but resignedly, as the world passed her by. Until the end, she refused to admit to others that she had in any way caused typhoid. She never discussed it – or allowed it to be discussed in her presence. Even with friends, she was close mouthed to the end – about her past, about her friends, about her personal life. Seemingly resigned to her fate, she kept herself busy sewing, crocheting, and by some accounts, baking cakes which she sold to other women on the island. Presumably, any bacteria she might have spread would be eliminated during the cooking process – but it seems an extraordinary leap of faith on the part of her customers.
She reacquainted herself with a nurse at Riverside, an Adelaide Offspring, and there were others who were kind to her and with whom she socialized. Offspring, judging from the amount Mary eventually left her in her will, was Mary’s closest friend. They were seen walking and talking together many times – though what they discussed and the nature of their relationship remains unknown. Riverside Hospital, while it may have been remote – and the circumstances of her admission uncongenial – was, by standards of the time, an island of compassion. As a TB facility at a time when little could be done for those suffering from the disease, it employed doctors who were used to offering sympathy and kindness in place of as yet undiscovered medication. Dr. John Cahill, who ran the hospital during this final period of Mary Mallon’s life, was remembered by his son, Dr. K
evin Cahill, as saying, ‘What did you do before there were drugs? Before there were antibiotics? . . . You learned to sit on the bedside and hold the hand . . . every once in a while you gave the person a hug.’
Emma Goldberg Sherman, a bacteriologist, described for the BBC, getting off the boat at Riverside for the first time: ‘This is heaven . . . it’s delightful . . . otherworldly . . . unlike New York City.’ She’d landed a job at another facility, but an anti-Semitic boss put the brakes on her employment there, telling her the position ‘had been filled’. Riverside Hospital, on the other hand, was delighted to have her. Sherman talked for the cameras about what happened when she first came ashore at North Brother Island:
I walked into that building and climbed the stairs, a huge empty room with lots of tables standing around . . . and a huge woman in there who kind of terrified me with her hair unkempt pulled back in a tight knot and a huge lab coat which enfolded her despite her size at least double to the floor – filthy as hell with all kinds of stuff on it.
And they told me this was Mary Mallon.
Sherman, who worked with her for some time and seems to have been a sympathetic acquaintance – if not a friend –was clearly repulsed by Mallon’s personal hygiene. She is not ambiguous in relating her first impression that Mary was horrifyingly sloppy and unclean. Perhaps Mary’s relative size and rather imposing appearance gave her pause. The small Sherman appears in a rare photograph with Mary, and Mary, much older and larger now than in earlier depictions, does tower over the bacteriologist. In the photo Mary’s hair is shown pulled back so tightly it looks like a man’s, her skin wattled under a thick neck, fists balled under the too-long sleeves of a voluminous lab coat. She is squinting through clear glasses, her mouth drooping slightly on one side – either from, as Judith Leavitt postulates, an early minor stroke, or from her bad teeth (which she would not allow hospital dentists to look at). In the picture she appears big, scary, sexless and . . . proud. Her back is stiff, her arms are at her sides, and while that may not be a real smile on her face, it is not a look of displeasure. Mary is posing for the camera in her work clothes – with her colleague – and she looks glad to be working. Says Sherman uncharitably:
She centrifuged urine . . . Though what she saw when she looked through the microscope I don’t know . . . She knew nothing. Absolutely nothing. I think she contaminated everything she touched . . . When it came to washing the bottles . . . well . . . what the hell.
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.
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