Fever: A Novel

by Mary Beth Keane

  • • •

  Two weeks after the boy’s death, after seeing to his little funeral suit, Mary packed her things and walked to the train station, leaving Mr. Kirkenbauer alone to decide what to do about all those dresses, that big, infected house, all those toy boats, the wooden horses, the collection of little shoes and caps. Maybe it was the timber, people said. Where had it been shipped from? Maybe it was the slope of the land and the way the water ran off down to the river. Maybe it was the pipe leading from the indoor privy. Maybe it was all the pickled herring and pigs’ knuckles Mrs. Kirkenbauer asked her cook to buy in town. Maybe the mistress didn’t know how to run a house, being the daughter of a Philadelphia grocer and the granddaughter of a cabbage-shaver. How lucky for her, the neighbors said, to have caught the eye of Alexander Kirkenbauer. How unlucky for him.

  People said the old country was full of death, Mary’s old country and everyone else’s. The American papers would have a person believe Europe was one large sick ward, the people dying in ditches, blown over by every stiff wind. Alfred’s Germany was like her Ireland, from the sound of it: people fighting every minute to stay on the side of the living, killing one another over a bowl of rabbit stew, and praying every day that the roofs of their shelters would stay where they were. When babies were born everyone willed them to live, but there was no surprise when they died, eventually, almost all of them, including the two Mary had cared for herself, bringing them eight, nine, ten times a day to the teat of a neighbor’s goat so they could suckle what Mary’s sister couldn’t offer, having died bringing them to life, and what Mary couldn’t offer, being only fourteen at the time, and having no babies of her own. The goat let them suck, but they died anyway, first the boy, and then the girl, and that’s when Mary’s nana told her it was time for her to leave Ireland, to leave while she was able. In America, Nana said, people didn’t die so easily. It was the air, she supposed. The meat.

  But people died in America, too, Mary learned quickly. It was just a sneakier death, a crueler death, in a way, because it always seemed to come by surprise. She didn’t notice at first, but then she began to see it all around her. A meal pushed away for lack of appetite. A nap in the afternoon. A tired feeling that turned into a head cold, a rash into a ring of fire, a head cold into a fever that ravaged the person, left him beyond the reach of help. If they didn’t die of illness, they died in fires, they were run over by streetcars, drowned in the river, suffocated after slipping into a coal hill and unable to scramble back to the surface. Neighbors, strangers on the street, peddlers at the market, children, priests, landlords, ladies. They all died, and every death was brutal. So what’s a body to do? Mary thought as she stared out the train window at the Hudson and counted the minutes until she’d see Alfred again.

  But that warm, clever little boy this time. The more she instructed herself to think about other things, the more she thought of him, like lifting a black tarp to glimpse something horrible below. Glimpses were all she could manage. His face. That peculiar, angled light in the Kirkenbauer kitchen. The dead weight of him.

  Recently, when she and Alfred were talking about marriage and managing to not raise their voices, he’d asked whether she wanted a child. If she wanted to have a child, then that was different. Then they’d have to be married for the child’s sake. “But I thought you didn’t want that,” Alfred pointed out, and she realized it was probably something she’d said. Not because she didn’t think she’d love a child, or because she didn’t think she’d be a good mother. She knew she’d love their child fiercely, entirely. She’d think about him or her every minute of her life, and that was the danger. They were so fragile, and it was so long until they grew strong. She thought of her sister’s babies curled against each other in their cradle, and then the girl alone, how at only eight days old she seemed to be searching for her brother, her newborn fists closed so tight Mary believed for a day she might live. She thought of Mr. Kirkenbauer, the day he picked her up from the train, how he had no idea what was coming.

  I’m sorry I left, she’d say to Alfred, who would be surprised to see her home so soon. But she wouldn’t tell him what had happened, because how could she possibly explain to anyone about that boy, that baby? How could she begin? Thinking about him for a single second—the strong grip of his small hand, his belly, the happy swing of his leg on the chair when he bit into a piece of orange—any thought of him at all brought a roaring into her ears like she’d been plunged into the ocean with a weight tied around her foot.

  No, she decided. No. She’d go home and try to forget and do as she’d always done, which was work hard and be thankful every day for her good health, her life.

  HABEAS CORPUS

  NEW-YORK DAILY COURANT

  March 24, 1907

  Cook Accused of Giving Typhoid to New York’s Prominent Families

  _______________

  So Say Authorities Holding Her Prisoner

  _______________

  Sanitary Engineer Alleges She Communicates the Disease to Others Although Immune Herself

  (Staff) New York—The cook for a prominent Upper East Side family has been forcibly removed from her employment and quarantined in Willard Parker Hospital after sanitary engineer and medical investigator George A. Soper alleged that she has been passing Typhoid Fever through her cooking, though she manifests no signs of the disease herself. At the time of her capture she was cooking for one of the wealthiest families on Park Avenue. Dr. Soper further alleges that the daughter of the family was battling Typhoid Fever at the time the cook was apprehended, and has since succumbed to the disease.

  Dr. Soper, the medical sleuth at the center of this case, put the pieces of this groundbreaking puzzle together after being called upon to investigate a Typhoid outbreak that occurred in Oyster Bay last summer. He identified the cook as an “asymptomatic carrier” of Typhoid Fever, which, in layman’s terms, is a healthy-seeming person who passes a disease along without suffering any symptoms of said disease, and most likely without any knowledge of doing so. Dr. Soper has spent several months making his case to the Department of Health, and one source reports that there are many within that organization who are skeptical about the notion of a healthy carrier, despite the evidence.

  It is Dr. Soper’s belief that the woman poses a life-threatening risk to all of those who eat the food she cooks, and has been the cause of Typhoid outbreaks in almost every prominent family she’s worked for going back at least five years, likely longer. The case of this human culture tube, as some would describe her, is attended to with more secrecy than any other this reporter has encountered in his career. It can only be assumed that authorities do not want to further embarrass those families who hired her and welcomed her into their homes. In response to a question on how rare this woman is to science, one doctor who asked to remain anonymous answered: “We just don’t know.”

  The woman is rumored to be of fair complexion with a buxom figure and rosy cheeks. Whether she understands the charges piled against her is a matter of concern for the DOH. “We’re talking about brand-new science,” a senior health inspector explained. “If what Dr. Soper posits is true, then she is the first healthy carrier of Typhoid Fever discovered in North America.”

  The butler of the family who was the cook’s most recent employer, and who gave his name only as “Francis,” claims that the daughter’s illness and death is nothing more than a tragic coincidence. He tells us that his own wife died of the illness several years back, and so have others he’s known who never had any contact with the accused cook. He claims further that the cook was healthy and showed absolutely no sign of illness. “They took her like they would a common criminal,” he said, showing visible signs of distress. “And for what? I don’t believe what they’ve said about her.” A female eyewitness to the cook’s capture stated that “she fought with the strength of ten men, but they overpowered her.”

  This incredulity, authorities say, is a matter of education, and further denials from th
e woman may lead to her permanent quarantine. A nurse at Willard Parker, who asked that her name be withheld, says the accused woman at the center of this case is the picture of fury. She refuses meals, declines company, and walks back and forth like a caged animal. When asked if she believes what’s been alleged about the woman, the nurse replied, “I myself don’t understand it, but I think the woman should try to listen to them. She’s not helping herself the way she is now.”

  Several leading doctors believe Typhoid bacilli are manufactured in the gallbladder, and a representative from the Department of Health states that if the accused woman does not submit to surgical removal of her gallbladder within the month, she will be transferred to North Brother Island in the East River, where she will remain segregated from society for an indefinite length of time.

  When asked for his opinion of the case, Mr. Robert Abbott, a criminal attorney who practices in New York City, says that her situation strikes him as somewhat similar to that of Niall E. Joseph, whom Boston authorities have isolated upon suspicion of being a leper.

  ONE

  Mary wasn’t arrested right away. There were warnings. Requests. It all started with an air of courtesy, as if Dr. Soper believed that if he simply notified her of the danger lurking inside her body she would excuse herself from society. And after, when he and his colleagues resorted to far-less-polite means, they said it was her fault for raising a knife instead of listening, for not doing as she was told.

  On a cold morning in March 1907, the Department of Health coordinated with the New York City Police Department and decided that Mary Mallon must be brought in. Dr. Soper suggested she might surrender more easily to a woman and sent a doctor named Josephine Baker to ring the bell of the Bowen residence, where Mary was employed, with four police officers standing behind her. They had not considered that even in the face of such authority her friends would lie for her, help hide her, insist that she could not be the person they were seeking. When they finally found her, she would not come peacefully, so each officer gripped her by a limb and carried her across the snow-covered yard while the rest of the domestic staff looked on. Once the police got her into their truck she started swinging and kicking, until finally they wedged her between their stout bodies and held her as well as they could, and Dr. Baker sat on her lap. “Please, Miss Mallon,” Dr. Baker said, over and over, and after a while, “Please, Mary.”

  Mary assumed they were bringing her to the police station on East Sixty-Seventh, so when the truck continued downtown in a southeasterly direction along the same route she took from the Bowens’ to the rooms she shared with Alfred on East Thirty-Third, she thought for a hopeful moment that they might be dropping her at home. They had come to teach her a lesson, she prayed, and now they would set her free. She glimpsed street signs through the small barred window as the driver turned east at Forty-Second Street. They traveled south along Third Avenue until Sixteenth Street, and then east again with such urgency that she could feel the rhythm of the horses’ sleek heads pumping. The truck stopped just before the river, at the main entrance of a building Mary didn’t recognize, at the very end of a block so desolate that she felt the first stirring of panic that no one she knew would ever find her there.

  Dr. Soper was waiting at the entrance to the Willard Parker Hospital, but instead of speaking to her, he just nodded to the pair of policemen who had her braced by her elbows. Up on the sixth floor, they hurried her along the corridor to the Typhoid Wing, where more doctors were waiting in a room with a gleaming mahogany table. One of her guards indicated where she should sit, and before she could properly look around the room, Dr. Soper told her and the rest of the people present that the newest theory of disease had to do with germs and bacteria, and although Mary appeared perfectly healthy, he had good reason to believe that she was, at that very moment, manufacturing Typhoid bacilli inside her body and passing along the disease to innocent victims. He accused her of making twenty-three people sick and being the cause of at least three deaths. “Those are the cases we know of,” he said. “Who knows how many more we’ll find when we can investigate Miss Mallon’s full employment history?” In front of five other men and Dr. Baker, Dr. Soper turned to her, finally, the source of all this trouble, as if waiting for her to say something. Mary felt like her mind had dropped straight out of her head like a stone.

  “George,” Dr. Baker said, “she hasn’t even been here fifteen minutes. Perhaps we could give her time to collect herself.”

  “Back here in half an hour, then?” one of the other doctors asked.

  “In the morning, gentlemen,” said Dr. Baker. “There is nothing that can’t wait until morning, is there?”

  No, Mary thought, this mistake will be corrected by morning and I’ll be gone. I’ll walk straight home, make a pot of coffee, tell the whole story to Alfred, and never come near the Willard Parker Hospital again.

  Dr. Soper tilted his head and considered Mary from across the table. “Tomorrow,” he agreed. “Fine.”

  • • •

  Mary’s bed was at the end of a row, in a large room that held sixteen beds, all occupied except for hers, which waited with the sheets tucked tight and the small, flat pillow placed exactly at the center of the head. Guards stood outside the entrance of the room, positioned so they could see her through the narrow pane of glass on the door. A nurse had left her alone for a moment shortly after showing her to her room, and she’d simply opened the door and walked toward the stairs, but an officer shouted at her to stop, and a passing doctor blocked her way. “I was told I could get word to someone,” she said to the officer as he marched her back. “When?” But he only shrugged, rocking back and forth from heel to toe as he eyed her, and she felt a twitch go through her body as she measured the distance to the end of the corridor.

  That first night at Willard Parker, when a nurse came in to turn off the lamps, Mary lay on her cot and pressed her hands against her ears. It was a misunderstanding, surely. Everything would be sorted out in a matter of days. Alfred wouldn’t expect her home until Saturday and would have no way of knowing what had happened. Even then, he might not worry, believing she’d been asked by the Bowens to stay on through the weekend. She had only the money in her pocket and the clothes on her back. Dr. Baker had said she’d be allowed a telephone call, but who would she call? There was no telephone in the rooms she shared with Alfred. No one in their building had a telephone. She certainly couldn’t call the Bowens.

  Lying on her side and facing the wall, Mary pressed her palms harder against her ears but could still hear her roommates retching, sobbing, calling for people, relatives, probably, loved ones already dead. She’d seen it all before, but not like this, not so many in a single room, fifteen nightmares twisted together, plus hers, the sixteenth, the strand that didn’t look like any of the others. Finally, she gave up on sleep and went over to the window, which looked west along Sixteenth Street. The sidewalk was dark except for the yellow glow of a single streetlamp, and she searched the darkness for another sixth-floor window, and the shape of Alfred standing at it, not even twenty blocks away. If I shout, she thought, how far away will I be heard? She tried to imagine what he was doing at that hour. He never slept well when she was not at home.

  The occupant of the bed nearest the window moaned, and Mary looked down to find a girl, no more than thirteen, her long dark hair wet with sweat and stuck in tendrils around her neck. Mary gathered it together and smoothed it away from the girl’s face. She turned her pillow to the cool underside. She told her it would all be over soon—and it would, for better or for worse—and fetched her a cup of water. She did the same for the rest of them and one woman clutched Mary’s wrist, called her Anna, and begged her not to leave. “We’ll be home soon, Anna,” the sick woman assured Mary, and Mary agreed that they would.

  By dawn there were new guards stationed outside her door and she was back in her own bed observing the practiced approach of the nurses as they advanced on each patient with a bucket of cold wa
ter and a stack of clean washcloths pulled behind them on a wheeled cart. Mary forgot her predicament for a few moments as she saw how the abrupt coolness of a damp cloth at the head and neck made each woman still, for a moment, as if listening for something. A cloth under each arm calmed the features of their faces, brought them hope, and at the groin brought relief to their whole bodies, and in some patients, tears.

  When the nurse who was tending to Mary’s row arrived at her bed, she held up a cloth and looked at her. “You’ve no fever,” she said.

  “No.”

  “I’m supposed to do the compress to everyone. They didn’t say yay or nay about you.”

  “I’ll tell them you did it.”

  “Fine.” The nurse continued to observe her. “When did you have it?”

  “Never.”

  “But you’re passing it along? People catching it from you?”

  “Is that what they said to you?”

  “Said it to all the doctors and nursing staff.”

  “It’s a lie.”

  The nurse tilted her head and looked at Mary’s body from her face down to the lump under the sheet that was her feet, back up to her face.