Fever

by Mary Beth Keane

  Then she said, “Is it really because you don’t feel like it? Or is it because you haven’t anyone to marry?”

  “Aren’t you bold!” Mary said. “How would you like to pick up someone else’s socks all day long?”

  Elizabeth made a face.

  “Isn’t it better to earn wages?”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said, entirely convinced.

  “And don’t forget,” Mary told her, “if I were a married woman, I probably wouldn’t be here making your supper.”

  The first sign that Elizabeth was sick came when she wandered into the kitchen and announced that she was tired. Mary had looked carefully at the girl and thought of Tobias Kirkenbauer.

  On the day Mary was taken, the girl had been upstairs, sleeping, her governess watching over her. She’d had the fever, yes, Mary remembered that well. She’d wanted to tell them the best way to help her, the best times to put her in the tub, the coolest cottons to wear next to her skin. She’d sent up a bowl of beef broth to give the girl energy, but they didn’t want to listen to her, and sent the broth back down with Frank. She wanted to see the girl for herself, but once the family called the doctor they closed the girl’s door to all of the staff except for the governess, and when the governess became ill they had the doctor tend to her as well.

  One of the reporters had gotten Bette to talk, and Bette told him that Mr. and Mrs. Bowen loved throwing dinner parties more than anything else in the world, and now they were afraid that no one would ever want to come to their home again. According to Bette, Mrs. Bowen vowed that every domestic she hired from now on would be a Swede or a German, because they were more impeccable than every other race. When the reporter asked what Bette thought of Mrs. Bowen’s opinion of Germans and Swedes, Bette agreed that it was probably true. She was fired within an hour of the paper landing on Mr. Bowen’s desk.

  Since the Bowens didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to even admit in court that they’d welcomed such a woman into their home, that they’d eaten her filthy food and become sick because of it, Dr. Soper interviewed their friends and neighbors instead, and once one of the reporters caught wind that Soper had been talking to the Bowens’ neighbors, so did that reporter. It was printed in the Evening Sun that the Germ Woman had too many ideas about herself, and because Mrs. Bowen didn’t tolerate her attitude, the Germ Woman infected her on purpose. The stories claimed that Mary was resistant to some of the ways of good Christian households, and purposely defied them by meeting strange men on corners.

  Mr. O’Neill made a point of addressing the main rumors that were printed in the 1907 papers, because those would be the details the judges would recall. How can I be resistant to Christianity when I’m a Catholic? Mary demanded of Mr. O’Neill. Tell me that, please. And the man I met once on the corner was a stranger only to them, not to me.

  Mary shared with Mr. O’Neill the observation she’d made ages ago, that all the great houses of New York City are the same. They are headed by women who should have been male, and should have been ministers, women who go down to the employment agency in their white gloves to look around like they are in a brothel, discussing terms with the madam while each whore to be hired looks on. Then when the terms are agreed upon, instead of directing the cook to the kitchen or the laundress to the laundry, every lady gives a speech about joining a Christian home.

  “The first thing they ask is whether I’m churchgoing. You’d think it would be something to do with cooking, but no, they want to know whether I get myself to a church on Sundays. Do you think the right answer is ‘Yes’?” Mary asked Mr. O’Neill, who listened and waited without showing any indication of what he thought. “Well, it isn’t. Experience taught me that the better answer is ‘No.’ This gives the lady a chance to instruct a new hire on the beneficence of Our Lord. They all say they want a good cook, but what they want even more is a worthy project.”

  “What has this to do with anything?” Mr. O’Neill asked. “We were talking about rumors we’ll need to address one by one when we’re in front of the judges.”

  “What does it—? It has everything to do with everything we’ve been talking about! Don’t you see? They—”

  “Yes?”

  Mary thought to tell him again about the hat, but remembered she’d long since given up on making that point. “Look, if you don’t see, you don’t see. I wasn’t a project for them. I refused to be. I was there to cook as well as I could—and I was damn good at it—but at thirty-seven I was past the project stage.” She went along with it in previous employments, but that time, with Mrs. Bowen, a mood took her. The first time Mrs. Bowen brought up Our Lord, Mary laughed, and said He hadn’t made it downtown in years.

  “Oh, Mary,” Mrs. Bowen had said.

  There was also the imbroglio about the food cooperatives just a few days after confronting Mrs. Bowen with the twin to her own hat. Mrs. Bowen found Mary in the kitchen to tell her that she and a few of the other ladies had decided to organize their cooks into groups on a trial basis. Together, the cooks would learn the new French methods and more exotic cuisines that she and the other ladies would decide on.

  “The idea is to be together,” Mrs. Bowen said, “and learn from one another, and it would be a help to you, wouldn’t it, having other cooks to work alongside instead of just being here by yourself?”

  Mary went to the church hall on Sixty-Fourth Street to meet the other cooks, and saw that there were only two others. They had the whole place to themselves and their conversation echoed in the vastness of the empty, wood-paneled room; it bounced off the many droplets of glass hanging from the chandelier. The back room of this hall featured a state-of-the-art kitchen that sat empty most nights of the week except for Saturdays, when the church held socials for its parishioners. The kitchen had ceramic double-pot sinks, a zinc-lined icebox, plenty of work space. The three cooks were charged with making a meal for six families. It was to be like that just on Mondays and Tuesdays, for a start. One of the cooks, Clare, seemed to know more than the other two and informed Mary that when they finished up Mary was supposed to deliver a meal to the Compton family on Sixty-First Street on her way back to the Bowens’. They were to follow Clare’s direction because she had more training in the French method than the other two.

  “So I’m now cook for the Bowens and the Comptons?”

  “I don’t think we’re meant to see it that way,” said Ida, the third cook. “I think we’re to see it as the three of us cooking enough of a meal to do for six families. Not you have these two, or you your two, and so on. You see?”

  “And where are the cooks for the other families?” Mary didn’t see. She usually considered herself the brightest in any group, but the Bowen girl had been feeling poorly and she was distracted by it. Again and again she’d tried to get up to the girl’s room, and again and again she was barred. No one had yet mentioned the word Typhoid.

  “The other cooks were scaled back,” said Clare. “Told they are needed only Wednesday on.”

  “So,” Mary said, like she was waking up from a dream, “we cook here as a group and deliver the food to all these families. That way six families get fed for the price of three cooks instead of six cooks.”

  The three looked at one another.

  “For the purpose of saving money?” Mary said. It didn’t seem like the right answer, but there couldn’t be any other.

  “There’s something like this happening on the West Side,” Ida said. “I have a friend. Her employer calls it a cooks’ cooperative. It’s cheaper for them, and she says that the idea is that after a while we won’t work for one particular family anymore. We’ll be asked to leave our rooms. Then we’ll have to get rooms elsewhere and commute to the place we are to cook just like any other day cook or common laborer.”

  “We won’t do this,” Mary said to the other cooks. And that night, for the first and last time in her life, Mary intentionally ruined goo
d food, and talked the other two into doing the same. They overcooked the tenderloins. They boiled the asparagus until it was stringy mush. They withheld salt from the potatoes and put it on the cobblers instead.

  “I hope it turned out well,” Mary said to Mr. and Mrs. Bowen when she served them later. “I’m not used to having to transport my dishes. It’s best, you see, straight from the oven to the table.”

  “Could you not choose a dish, Mary, that would support being transported?” Mr. Bowen asked, as he probed the meat with the tine of his fork.

  “Of course,” Mary said, bowing her head. “We could limit ourselves to just a few dishes that we know would work.”

  “Limit?” Mrs. Bowen asked, and pushed her plate away.

  • • •

  Once Elizabeth got sick, and they realized it was Typhoid Fever, there was no more mention of cooking in the church hall, or of cooking at all for that matter. Mary made bread and a thin soup that would keep, and spent most of her hours hauling ice up the stairs and the empty bucket back down—the only helpful thing they would allow her to do. They kept the block in the kitchen sink and Mary put Frank to work charging at it with a butcher knife until it came to pieces, little ones to suck, larger ones to serve as floes in the tubs upstairs where the family bathed, and the single tub downstairs where the servants took turns. There was an ice shortage in 1907, and ice was very dear, but Mary ordered blocks on credit and hoped they wouldn’t ask for a settlement of their books before the girl recovered.

  • • •

  In their first interview, Mr. O’Neill asked Mary why death didn’t bother her, why she didn’t notice it following her everywhere she went. Mary didn’t even know where to look for a starting point. After so many months on North Brother, so many years since setting foot in Dobbs Ferry, Mary could still feel the silk of Tobias Kirkenbauer’s curls when he passed under her hand, and the way he settled himself on her hip, his arm slung around her neck, as if he had no fear in the world as long as she was holding him. How could anyone think she didn’t notice, or that it didn’t bother her? No one in any court of law, no man in any room, knows the desperation of squinting through dim light and seeing a baby’s cheeks inflamed, feeling the hot hands, the eyes gone flat with fever. A twist came in Mary’s belly that was the beginning of a prayer. Back in 1899, when little Tobias Kirkenbauer wouldn’t open his mouth to eat, who pressed the creamy water from the boiled oats and spooned it into his mouth? I did, Mary reminded herself. And he held on longer than he would have if Mary hadn’t been there. But they didn’t know about 1899. To them, 1899 was not on the record books.

  And if it was really true that Elizabeth Bowen died, then of course that bothered her. Of course. The girl was only a child, and deserved no badness.

  EIGHT

  When Mary was a child, her grandmother told her that as long as she kept the piss pot clean and her apron white, there would be no mistress who would turn up her nose at her. It was over her grandmother’s turf fire that Mary learned how to make griddle cakes and brown bread, where she first browned bacon and boiled beef, made salmon with butter and cream, eel and trout. It was her grandmother who taught her the best way to tuck the turnips and potatoes around the meat, and it was her grandmother who saved enough to buy Mary a one-way passage to America when Mary was fourteen. There would be food in America that Mary had never seen, but the rules were the same: cook it right, draw out what’s good, don’t be afraid of putting things together. Her grandmother’s sister, Kate Brown, would give Mary a place to live, help her find work in New York. “Send her,” Kate’s letter back to Mary’s grandmother had read. “I’d love to have her.”

  Mary’s first impression of America when she arrived in Castle Garden in 1883 was that it wasn’t a kind place. Soon after she had steadied herself, her bag secure in her hand, she was hustled into one grim line after another, like one mangy cow in a herd. Other ships had also arrived that day and she waited and watched as the kaleidoscope of colors kept shifting: green aprons, yellow head scarves, red tassels brushing the ground, dotted ribbon pulled through belt loops to hold up short pants. The American men were the ones with the broad faces, and derby hats pulled low. She imagined a welcoming party, but instead one ugly man shoved a card in her face and another, even uglier, braced Mary’s head with his large hand and told her to hold still while he used a buttonhook to lift her left eyelid and then her right. “Trachoma,” he said. “Highly contagious.” Mary didn’t understand the first word and barely heard the others, locked as she was in a posture of fear. When he finished and announced her eyes clean, she noticed that the man wiped the hook on a towel draped over the railing before moving on to his next victim.

  Paddy Brown, Aunt Kate’s husband, met Mary when she’d completed all the lines and gotten all her stamps. “Mary Mallon?” he said when she approached the only man left in the waiting area that fit his description. “Follow me.” She followed him down a flight of stairs to the sunshine outside. They passed through the gates of what seemed like fortress walls, and then she was on the outside, on the streets of New York City. They climbed aboard a trolley drawn by a pair of glum-looking horses. When they came to the end of the track, they got out and made their way on foot. Mary struggled to keep up with the old man, who with his hunched shoulders and his badger’s head kept disappearing into the crowd. “Where is this?” she asked, hoping conversation would slow his pace. “Where are we now?” He raised a callused finger and pointed roughly at a street sign that read “Thirty-Seventh Street.” Finally, as the crowds thinned, and she followed him onto Tenth Avenue, Paddy Brown loosened his stride.

  “Wait here a minute,” he said just before ducking into a store with a tuft of wheat carved on the sign outside.

  “How much farther?” Mary asked.

  “Just two doors down.”

  Mary dropped her bag to the sidewalk and tried to get a feel for what waited for her, but two doors down looked the same as every door they’d passed for the last several blocks: dark and plain. Rusted staircases stuck to the faces of every building, and from their railings hung a variety of sheets and blankets. Where home had been full of greens and blues in summer, oranges and reds in winter, New York was the same color wherever she looked: the muddy avenues, the muck-splattered carriages, the gray shingles, the faded red brick, the coal smoke that hung in the air and blurred the outlines of everything. The buildings were tall—five, six stories. When Paddy came out of the shop with a loaf of bread, she pointed at the bedding hanging above their heads and asked him why. “Too heavy for the lines,” he said.

  “I see,” she said, though she didn’t see. She looked forward to Aunt Kate, and tried to comprehend that somewhere inside one of these buildings that showed their shame to the world lived her nana’s sister. She searched herself for the tug of home.

  “How was the journey, anyhow?” Paddy asked then, looking at her for the first time since meeting her.

  The girl in the berth below Mary’s had died when they were ten days at sea. In twenty-one days, Mary watched seven bodies slide into the sea, all wrapped in sailcloth and sewn tight. The girl was dropped on the same day as another person, a man by the size of him, and when she fell through the air between the deck and the water, her body bent at the hips, Mary wondered if they’d double-checked, if they were absolutely beyond-a-doubt sure. Someone in the crowd remarked that it was only the Grace of God that would keep the rest of them out of the water, and someone else said Amen, and Mary wondered why God would grant any of them that Grace and not those who’d already been thrown away. It wasn’t the first time Mary noticed that God had a haphazard approach to things.

  “Was it very rough?” Paddy asked.

  “No, it was grand,” Mary said and looked back at the garbage lining the street, the haggard people rushing about on the sidewalks.

  Mary’s aunt had more welcome for her, and scolded her husband thoroughly for not carrying Mary�
�s bag. She’d prepared a rich lamb stew with carrots and potatoes that went cold before them because every time Mary went to put a spoonful in her mouth, Aunt Kate asked another question about a person from home. Paddy and Aunt Kate had no children and were too old to remedy that fact.

  “Well, now,” Aunt Kate said when Mary had finished giving her the news and they’d taken five minutes to eat what was on their plates. “First thing is to find you good work. Then we’ll see. What can you do?”

  “I can cook,” Mary told her.

  “Cook what? Spuds? A bit of ham? What else can you do?”

  “I want to cook.”

  “Mary, love, they have stoves in America you’ve never seen the likes of.”

  “I can practice on yours.”

  “This!” Aunt Kate laughed. “This is nothing. This is a stone’s throw from the turf and the open fire. There are kitchens in some of these houses that have stoves wider than—” Aunt Kate stretched her arms as wide as she could to either side. “They have stoves with four burners, two ovens.”

  “I can learn, can’t I?”

  “That’s true, I suppose.” Kate regarded Mary with a smile. “Patience, love. It’s very good to see you.”

  • • •

  After giving Mary a few weeks to settle in, to get accustomed to the pace of the streets and the chaos of the pedestrians, the horses, the freight train that plowed along Eleventh Avenue and didn’t stop for anything; after showing her the spider’s web of clotheslines hidden behind the tenements, and the tub for washing; after letting Mary get used to her cot next to the kitchen table and showing her how to put coal in the stove, and empty the ashes; after taking Mary to meet yet another neighbor who wanted to know her business; and after learning that no one understood her when she spoke except for other Irish and teaching her how to enunciate, speak slowly, try to talk more like an American, Kate finally announced it was time to go to the agency and see what kind of job Mary could get for herself. Mary had just turned fifteen. Kate told her everything she should say, and made her practice at the table after Paddy had gone to bed. She had Mary sit across from her with her hands folded, and then she asked questions about the jobs she’d had in New Jersey and Connecticut. Mary was to describe how she was an accomplished cook and had cooked for families in Ireland before leaving. “You are twenty years old. Same birthday, just subtract five years from the year.”