Fever

by Mary Beth Keane

  Alfred pointed to a step where they could sit. “For now, I like it. The boss says the horses like me. There’s not much to it, really, except brushing them and feeding them and making sure the stalls are clean. I run the ones who don’t get assigned a truck on a given day, and there are a few injured ones, but there’s not much to do for them until they heal. If they heal. I had to put one down. That was the only really bad day, and it was hard going back after that. He was hit by another truck on the corner of Madison and Fiftieth and his leg broke at the ankle. I had to go up there and shoot him.”

  Alfred put his hand on her hair and traced his finger along her hairline, around her ear, down her neck. He stopped at the collar of her blouse. “But why are we talking about me? How about you? You look well, Mary. God, it’s good to see you.”

  Mary brought his broad hand to her lips and kissed it. She studied his face. “You said I was the only one who asked whether you like it. Who else would ask? I mean, who else have you told?”

  Alfred shrugged. “What do you mean? I tell whoever asks me what I do.”

  “You seemed surprised that no one else has asked if you like it. Who would ask that, except for me?”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “Nothing.”

  “All right.”

  “I’m only saying that it’s a funny thing to say. That I’m the only person who asked that. To say it when you wouldn’t expect anyone else to ask that. Would you?”

  “Mary.”

  “Are you seeing someone?”

  He pulled his hand away. “Why would you ask that? Are you?”

  “Am I? Are you serious?”

  “There’s people out there. You’re not alone. That gardener.”

  “You’d know the lunacy of that question if you’d really read my letters. If you’d written more often—”

  “Look. No point discussing it now, Mary, is there? With you coming home?”

  “But I told you in the letters how lonely I was, how worried I was about you. If it was you out there I would have written every week. You know I would.”

  “Well, you’re a better person than I am, Mary. Isn’t that it? I’m a beast with no regard for anyone but myself, and you’re a paragon of virtue.”

  It wasn’t supposed to go like this, arguing over a past neither of them could change, criticizing each other’s choices just like they’d been doing before she was taken. She was hurt. She was very hurt. But she had to make her mind change the subject if they were going to be together again once she got home. She’d resolved to not start up on him the first time she saw him after so long, that she’d be pleasant and forgiving and that they’d start from scratch if he was willing, but as usual she found it impossible to stop. Just as her mind was warning her not to say something, her lips were already saying it. Alfred shifted on the step. He wore that expression of disdain that had made her so wild before she left, like every word she spoke was something to recoil from.

  “And you hardly ever wrote back. I didn’t know if my letters were sinking to the bottom of the river.”

  “I wrote back.”

  “A handful of times.”

  “More than that, Mary.” Alfred sighed. “What could I have done? It’s been hard for me, too, you know.”

  “Look. The last thing I want to do is argue with you. Not now. I’ll be home soon and that’s all that matters.”

  “About that. Might as well tell you now.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “Home. It isn’t on Thirty-Third Street anymore. I moved. Had to. Couldn’t afford that place without you. And a few of the women in the building got involved in the Temperance League and were driving me crazy, waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs, sliding pamphlets under the door. A few of them followed me one afternoon saying Bible verses, and when I got to Nation’s the men chewed me out for leading them there.”

  “Alfred! Why didn’t you tell me?” They’d lived in those rooms together for thirteen years. She loved the place. She imagined she’d always live there. In her letters to him she’d asked about the place, about the people in the building. Brief as they were, he’d never said anything in his letters about having trouble with the rent, so she’d assumed—hoped—he hadn’t gotten too far behind. She tried to shake off her disappointment. Home was wherever Alfred was. “So where have my letters been going?”

  “Held at the building. Driscoll keeps them for me. I collect them when I’m over that direction.” Mary didn’t know Mr. Driscoll very well, but remembered he was one of the few in the building Alfred liked talking with when they crossed paths. He’d been a florist, Mary remembered Alfred telling her, until his joints got so painful he couldn’t work anymore.

  “And where have you been staying?”

  “Orchard Street.”

  “Oh, Christ.”

  “It’s not bad. I rent my bed from a family and meals are included. There’s a son. Samuel.”

  “What’s their name?”

  “Meaney.”

  Mary wondered where her things were now—her pots and pans. Her clothes. The silver teapot that had been Aunt Kate’s. Let it go, she breathed. Let it go. She reached for every piece of information he gave her and tried to make the parts fit into a whole. Alfred coming and going on Orchard Street, sitting down for meals with a family she’d never seen, careful of himself around Samuel, heading out to the Crystal Springs stables and working a full day. She wanted to ask him about drinking, if Mrs. Meaney waited up for him, if they helped him to his bed at night and took off his socks and shoes and reminded him to wash his sheets once a week.

  “So where will I go? Later today?” Mary asked.

  “Come to the stable. I’ll be there late anyway. My room on Orchard isn’t big. And with the boy there I doubt they’ll allow you to stay. Or—”

  “Or?”

  “Or you could stay with someone until we get a place of our own again. Someone in the old building?”

  Mary heard her name called from the end of the alley. The break was almost up, and Mr. O’Neill wanted to go over what would happen next before they reconvened. Her guard had fallen asleep with his hat pulled down low over his eyes. She wouldn’t be foolish enough to try to escape today anyway. Not when she’d be free in a matter of hours.

  “I have to go,” Alfred said. “I’m late as it is.” They brushed the crumbs off their laps, and then he took her into his arms and hugged her, lifting her off the ground for a moment before setting her back down. “I’m sorry, Mary. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. We’ll figure it out later. When we see each other. We’ll figure it all out. I promise.” He told her the address of the stable.

  “Yes. Okay. Later.”

  “A lot has changed, Mary. You’ll see.”

  She’d been a child when she met Alfred, only seventeen, more than twenty years of her life tied to this person, no way to untangle that knot now. They’d moved into the rooms on Thirty-Third Street in the summer of 1894, when Mary was twenty-five. Aunt Kate had died of pneumonia over the winter, and Paddy Brown had gone from saying very little to saying nothing at all.

  “Kate loved Alfred,” Mary said gently to the old man on the day she told him that she’d be moving out, that she and Alfred had found a place together.

  “Kate thought he would marry you,” Paddy Brown said as he felt along the mantel for his tin of tobacco. Mary found it for him, pried it open, removed a plug, and offered it on her palm. When he got the pipe started she sat by him, and he put his hand on top of her head. “Take the things she wanted you to have,” he said after a while. It was the longest conversation they’d had in six months.

  For weeks after moving in together, after arranging the few things she’d brought from Kate’s, after going to the market and buying new bed linens to fit their new double bed, and a bright yellow tablecloth for their new kitchen table, sh
e thought she’d never rest again. What woman could rest with him so near, and even when he fell asleep she’d lie awake, contemplating the weight of his arm where it lay across her ribs, the gentle tug she felt when the stubble of his jaw got caught on her hair. When she worked, all she could think about was getting home to him, and he said it was the same for him. They talked late at night over coffee, when they went to bed, when they woke up, and when they weren’t together they stored up all the things the other would be interested in and carried those items home. Even when winter came, and the gas-meter jar was often empty, they simply crawled into bed together and piled every blanket on top and then shivered with their hands cupped over their mouths. He’d take her frozen feet and pull off the layers of stockings until they were bare and then he’d lift up his sweaters and press her feet to his warm chest. When Mary thought of those days now, she could still feel that astonished joy, that belief that no one else in the world could possibly be happier than they were.

  Alfred hugged her again, and released her again, and there was something in the hug and the release that told Mary something was not right.

  Again, Mr. O’Neill shouted her name. The guard came over and stood beside her.

  It was the time, probably. Twenty-seven months could make any two people a little awkward together, even two as close as Mary and Alfred. Also the guilt, Mary remembered. Alfred was always like a hangdog when he was guilty, and she shouldn’t have ridden him for not writing more often. Not when they were about to be happy and together again, Alfred working, eating three square meals, home at nights. Maybe leaving Thirty-Third Street was a good thing. Now they could get a new place together and truly start over.

  “I love you, Mary. I really do.”

  “All right, Alfred,” Mary said. “We’ll talk about that later.”

  “We will,” he agreed.

  Together, they walked down the alley toward Mr. O’Neill, who was pointing to his watch and frowning.

  • • •

  Everyone came back from lunch recess more overheated and red faced than when they left. A few of the reporters did not return at all, and Mary wondered if that was because they’d felt certain of the outcome, and if so, what their predictions had been. She noticed Dr. Baker sitting in the second row. The men seated beside her had their backs to her, talking to other men.

  The scientists talked about new discoveries in the world of contagious diseases, new vaccines that were in development, how it was likely that more people like Mary would be discovered, people who carried disease but never succumbed to it themselves. They used the words bacilli, serum, agglutinins: words that made Mary feel like her mouth was stuffed full of cotton that she couldn’t manage to spit away.

  Eventually, they began discussing her capture—specifically, why Dr. Soper and the Department of Health decided to take her by force. It would be one thing if this woman were an educated person, the Department of Health officials argued one by one, but Mary Mallon had no formal education, and lived with a man of low moral character, to whom she was not married. Several employers had reported that they didn’t like to cross Mary, didn’t like to demand veal when she’d planned on poultry, and that wasn’t natural, was it? What kind of cook inspires that kind of caution in an employer? Mrs. Proctor of East Seventieth Street recalled a time when she’d asked Mary to make Irish stew, assuming it would be one of her specialties, and Mary refused!

  When Bette answered the door of the Bowen residence on that cold March morning in 1907, the police officers pushed past her and spread throughout the house. “She’s not here!” Bette shouted, and the note of urgency in her voice reached Mary, who was up on the third floor. She pulled back the curtain of the nearest window to see the police truck. She heard someone running up the back stairs, and discovered that she couldn’t move. “The police are here,” Frank said the instant he appeared at the door. “I have an idea.”

  Mary saw the solution before he said it out loud. “The Alisons,” she said. The Alison family, who lived next door to the Bowens, had recently had a piece of their fence cut open behind the homes so that their servants could travel back and forth. Mrs. Alison and the children had left for Europe a week earlier, and Mr. Alison would be at his office all day. Frank held up his hand as they listened to the brisk footsteps of the officers walking through the rooms of the floor below them. “You listen for your chance,” he said. Mary nodded and felt suddenly very cold. Her whole body was covered in a thin layer of sweat, and she began to shiver. Her coat was downstairs in the servants’ closet and there would be no time to get it. It was snowing outside.

  Only seconds later, Mary heard Frank shout from the first floor and then the rush of hard-soled shoes to the stairs. Mrs. Bowen was out shopping. Mr. Bowen was at his office downtown. It was supposed to be an ordinary Friday, a better-than-ordinary Friday, since Mary would have to cook only for the staff, and for them it would be easy: no serving, dinner together around the table in the kitchen. Clutching the doorknob for help, Mary peeked into the empty hall. She stepped out and stayed close to the wall until she got to the narrow back stairs. Down she went, silent as a cat, until she reached the back door of the house. Outside, the snow was falling faster. Feeling nothing but her own heart beating in her chest, she ran along the footpath that led over to the fence and unlatched the door that led from the Bowens’ yard to the Alisons’. When she looked back to see if anyone was watching her, she noticed her footprints in the snow. She hurried back to cover her tracks, and then, walking backward, leaned over to brush away the footprints with her hands.

  The door to the Alison kitchen was locked—the servants mostly having been let go while the family was in Europe. At the edge of the yard was a supply shed. It was a small structure, little more than a low closet with a roof, but the door was unlatched, and when she stepped inside there was just enough room among the pruning sheers, the bags of sand, and the drums of kerosene for one person to crouch and wait.

  She didn’t feel the cold at first, and considered herself well protected in the little room. But after a while she could feel the wind where it slipped in between the spaces in the planks, and her knees ached from crouching. She shifted a few bulky canisters of oil and made room to sit on the packed dirt ground. She wished she could hear what was happening on the Bowen side of the fence. Would Frank or Bette remember to get her once the police officers gave up and moved on? There was nothing to do but wait.

  • • •

  Later, Mr. O’Neill would ask her what she made of Dr. Soper’s pursuit, why she wasn’t more surprised to be hounded the way she was. “I was surprised!” Mary said. “I was shocked!”

  “But you didn’t behave like a person who was surprised and shocked,” he insisted. “You behaved like a person who expected to be pursued. Do you understand the difference? You reacted too quickly. How did you know when you looked out the window and saw the police that it was you they’d come for? That’s the problem they have with you. That’s part of the reason they don’t believe you when you claim to have had no idea you were spreading disease.”

  “I’m not spreading disease.”

  “You see? Even there. You sound like a person who’s been defending herself for years, long before anyone accused you.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning, there must have been a moment when it crossed your mind that all of this was true. The question they have is whether it occurred to you after their accusations, or before.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You do understand. Think.”

  • • •

  Alone in the silent supply shed, Mary tried to think about only nice things, normal things, what she needed from the grocer’s, what she’d cook for Alfred next time she went home, but instead she kept thinking of the officers searching for her. She thought of the people who’d been sick in Oyster Bay, and how she’d known they would make it if she worked to ke
ep the fever down. It was a fast-moving fever, that one. Doctors talked about fevers as if they were all the same, but there were fevers and there were fevers, and Mary could distinguish one from another with the touch of her hand. One day everyone was playing tennis, riding horses, and the next they complained of being dizzy. They stopped eating. The gardener vomited very near the water cistern. Mrs. Warren fainted on the porch. Mary had seen it enough times to know that Mrs. Warren and the other adults who caught it would survive. They were in pain, yes, and called out nonsense, and tossed and turned and sweated through all their sheets and vomited bile. Still, Mary had seen Typhoid Fever at its worst, she’d seen death come a few times, and in each of those times the fight was mismatched from the beginning. The Warren girl was the only real worry, the poor child, only eight years old. She didn’t have the fight in her that the others had. That was the dangerous moment, when the patients didn’t have the fight, when they just slept and stared and preferred to keep their eyes closed. When the moaning stopped. When the nonsense stopped. And that girl was so quiet to start with.

  Mary threw her whole body into beating death away from the girl. She filled the tub to the brim and reached her own hand in the water to show her what it was like to splash inside the house, over the wood of the floor, a thing that would never be allowed if everyone were healthy, and the girl seemed interested in that. Mary told her about her passage to America, and what Ireland was like. The girl would never go to Ireland. England, maybe, Mary informed her. Paris. But not Ireland. Not many went to Ireland, they just went away from it. But it was her home just like New York City was the girl’s home, and what was it the poet said? Every savage loves his native shore. And that’s when she knew the girl would survive. She leveled her eyes on Mary, and there was life behind them. “Are you a savage, Mary?”

  “I am. Like we all are.”

  And the girl considered it. “I’m not,” she said.

  “No?”

  “Absolutely not.”