Fever: A Novel

by Mary Beth Keane

  “Well, do you want the cloth anyway? And the water? To wash yourself? I gather you’ve had an ordeal.”

  “Yes.” Mary sat up in the cot. “Yes, thank you.”

  The nurses repeated the routine every hour, skipping Mary after that first time. At midmorning, Soper came and perched himself on the arm of a chair that was wedged between Mary’s cot and the wall. He told her it was time for her to cooperate, that they had a great deal of work ahead of them. As he spoke his eyes kept glancing over to the nurses as they moved about the room, lifting sheets, moving knees apart. He jumped up and asked to see Mary in the hall.

  “How long do you mean to keep me here?” Mary asked, refusing to move until he gave her an answer.

  “Come out to the hallway, Miss Mallon,” he said.

  “No,” Mary said, lying back on her pillow and pulling the sheet to her chin.

  “I don’t want to have to ask for this man’s assistance,” he said, gesturing toward one of the guards. “One way or another, I must talk to you about your gallbladder.”

  “One way or another, I must get word to my friends to let them know what’s happened to me.”

  “Later, Miss Mallon. Very soon.”

  • • •

  The first time Mary had encountered Dr. Soper was in the Bowens’ kitchen, almost one month earlier. She mistook him for a guest who’d arrived too early. It was a bitter-cold day, and there were fires going in every room except for the servants’ quarters, where the small stove would stay cold until bedtime. The Bowens had the type of home where it was easy to lose oneself: large in some senses, tall and broad, with great rooms—the distant ceilings covered with paintings of different scenes from foreign places—and windows looking out onto Park Avenue. But the natural light disappeared as one retreated farther into the house, and at the rear of the residence the staff had to work by lamplight all the time.

  Mary had looked up from her work—a beautiful pair of ducks whose skin she was pricking with a knife so that the fat would drain out when she roasted them—and saw a tall man clutching his hat to his chest. He had a light step, and she didn’t hear him until he was nearly on top of her. He was handsome in that way some men in New York are handsome—neat as a pin, his clothes pressed, his hair and mustache precise. He was not a man who had ever shoveled coal or hauled ice or butchered an animal. He was not a man who owned a pair of work boots. He seemed older, though she later learned that they were the very same age, their birthdays one week apart.

  • • •

  Toward the end of her second day at Willard Parker, she answered a few of his questions and hoped that meant he would release her. But just after breakfast on her third morning he summoned her back to the room with the mahogany table and invited five other doctors to ask her questions as well. She recognized three of them from the day of her arrival. Dr. Baker was not present. Led by Dr. Soper, they kept asking if she was absolutely certain that she’d never had Typhoid Fever, if she could recall for them every person she’d known who’d suffered a fever since her arrival in the United States twenty-four years before. “Every person I’ve known who ever had a fever? Since 1883?” Mary almost laughed. Would they be able to do it, if they were asked the same thing?

  “Or in Ireland,” one of the doctors said. “Any person who had a fever as far back as you can remember.” Their records on her went back to only 1901, and Mary decided they knew enough about her life in those five and a half years. She would not give them more. “I can’t remember,” she said. Dr. Soper walked over to her chair and asked her to demonstrate how she washed her hands after visiting the lavatory. Feeling so many eyes studying her, and knowing they would just keep asking if she refused, she made a peaceful scene in her mind and walked to the sink at the back of the room with her pulse thumping in her ears. They stood closely behind her to observe, so she went slowly, rubbing the bar of soap on the backs of her hands as well as her palms, between her fingers, taking the kind of time she never did when she had to worry about getting supper on the table at an appointed hour. She dried her hands on the hand towel hanging next to the sink, and they observed this as well.

  “What are we missing?” Dr. Soper wondered aloud once they’d all returned to their seats. Missing from his notes were the details, Mary knew, the small things a woman notices, the expression on a person’s face when he turns away and thinks himself unobserved. When Dr. Soper appeared in the Bowens’ kitchen that night, she’d reached up to move a length of hair that had fallen out of her bun. She’d lifted her apron to wipe the duck fat from her hands. She’d closed her fist around her pricking knife and asked if she could assist him. He had blue eyes. His face was longish, and white, his cheeks shaved so close that his face looked as smooth as her own, except for the mustache. His lips were parted in excitement. His eyes were glazed over and once they locked on her they didn’t move, just drank her in, every inch of her. He looked directly at her face, at her mouth, at her body, like he owned her, like there was no one in the world who knew her body better than he did. The knife was greasy and she couldn’t find a sure grip. “Shall I call for Mr. Bowen?” she inquired. “Shall I have someone show you back to the drawing room?” Hadn’t there been just a few days earlier an article about a Greek who’d attacked a schoolteacher inside her own home, raped her, left her to die? Bette, the laundress, had disappeared outside to the narrow breezeway at the side of the house.

  Missing from Soper’s notes was the feeling in her belly when she looked up to find a stranger striding into her kitchen, to hear him demand to know if she was Mary Mallon. How disorienting it was to have a man like him—with his perfectly tailored jacket, his ivory white fingernails, his polished shoes extending from the bottom of his pants, the cuffs immaculate, as if he floated above the mud and shit that made up the streets of New York City, and never walked through it like the rest of them—use her full name and know that he was not lost, that she was the one he was looking for. He’d finally come to a stop between Mary and the stove. She could make out perspiration on his sideburns. He had high, sharp cheekbones and his face was flushed.

  A creditor, she decided.

  “What’s it to you?” Mary asked.

  Soper stepped closer. She could smell tobacco on his skin. She tightened her grip on the knife. “My name is George Soper. I’m a sanitary engineer and have been hired by Mr. Thompson to investigate the Typhoid outbreak that occurred at his home in Oyster Bay this past summer. I’ve reason to believe you are the cause not only of that outbreak but of several outbreaks in and around New York City. You must come with me immediately, Miss Mallon. You must be tested. Can you confirm that you were employed by the Warren family last summer and that you worked for them for six weeks at the home they rented from Mr. Thompson in Oyster Bay?”

  Mary couldn’t remember her first response, only her wonder at what that had to do with anything.

  “Pardon?”

  “You’re sick, Miss Mallon. You must be tested.”

  “I’m sick?” Mary forced a laugh. “I’ve never felt better.”

  “You are carrying sickness. I believe you are a Typhoid Fever carrier.”

  She felt dumb and slow, like she’d been turned around and around and then been asked to walk a straight line. She leaned her hips against the counter to steady herself.

  “Leave now, please,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You don’t understand, Miss Mallon. It’s imperative that you come with me now for testing. I’ve alerted the lab at Willard Parker Hospital to be ready for your arrival. You must cease cooking immediately.”

  He went to take her by the arm, but she held out the knife and the roasting fork together and made a swipe in his general direction. “Get out,” she hissed. Mrs. Bowen hadn’t been feeling well all day but was upstairs being dressed. Mr. Bowen was hard of hearing. Someone had let Soper into the house, surely. Someone knew he was down in the kitchen, yet no one seemed to be coming. She went for him again with
the fork in the lead.

  Soper stepped backward into the hall. “You must listen, Miss Mallon.”

  “I’ve a mind to stab you with this fork, so you’d better get out of my kitchen.”

  “It’s not your kitchen, Miss Mallon.”

  Mary made another move for him and he took several steps back. He stumbled for a moment, his knuckles white where he gripped his hat’s brim. He looked at her as if he had more to say, but then retreated quickly down the hall.

  A few minutes after Soper left the kitchen, Frank, the butler, appeared.

  “Where were you?” Mary asked.

  “Mr. Bowen was giving me instructions. Who was that? He’s just standing on the sidewalk looking at the house. I think he has a mind to come back in.”

  “He had some cock-and-bull story he’ll tell them,” Mary said, laying down the knife and fork. She began to pace. They heard the sound of the doorbell.

  “Leave it to me,” Frank said after a moment. Mary crouched in the hall as Frank opened the door.

  “They’re not available at the moment,” Frank said when Soper asked for Mr. or Mrs. Bowen. “Would you like to leave a message?”

  “I could wait.”

  “I’m afraid not. A dinner party, you see.”

  “A message then,” Soper grumbled as he searched his breast pocket for a note card and pen. He scribbled as much as he could fit onto the small space. “Make sure you give this to them,” Soper said, looking the older man in the eye.

  Frank gave an abbreviated bow, took the note from Soper, and wished him a good night. When he had closed the door on the doctor, he walked the message to the fire and threw it in.

  “Thank you,” Mary said. They watched the paper vanish until Mrs. Bowen’s bracelets jangled a warning from the top of the stairs.

  • • •

  Soper’s appearance in the Bowen kitchen was Mary’s first warning, but it had come coded, and Mary couldn’t decipher it. By the time she was sure Soper had left for good, and the ducks were roasted and sliced, she’d decided it was a misunderstanding, and wondered at herself for not saying more. Why had she not told him that she never had the fever, and that she was the one who’d nursed the Warrens back to health? Why had she not told him to check his facts: that the local doctor in Oyster Bay had already concluded that they’d gotten the fever from soft-shell crabs? Mary liked working for the Bowens, but if that man called again and told them his story, or if he sent them a letter by the post, and they believed him and fired her, she’d go back to the office and have them place her somewhere else. If he told that agency, she’d use another agency. If he told all the agencies, she’d go over to New Jersey, where they didn’t like to pay fees.

  • • •

  After a week at Willard Parker, Dr. Baker finally came to check on her. “Where were you?” asked Mary. “You said I could get word to someone.”

  “And you haven’t?”

  “I keep telling them, but it’s been a week.”

  “I’m sorry, Mary,” Dr. Baker said, and Mary’s frustration wavered at hearing her first name. The other doctors called her Miss Mallon. “I work at a lab uptown and can’t get down here as often as I’d like.” She removed a few lined pieces of paper from the thin stack on her clipboard.

  “You can . . . ?”

  “Yes,” Mary said, too grateful to be insulted. “Yes, of course.” Dr. Baker also handed over an envelope. “There should be a pen at the nurses’ station. I’ll tell them you’re permitted to use it. When you finish give it back to them and they’ll post the letter for you.”

  “Thank you,” Mary said, and placed paper and envelope on her bedside table. Now that she had a means of getting in touch with Alfred, Mary wanted to consider what she’d say, how exactly to describe what had happened. They’d argued the last time they’d seen each other, but none of that mattered now. And there were practical concerns, too. Her friend Fran had asked her to make a birthday cake for her daughter and it was starting to seem like Mary would not be freed in time. She had planned to shape the cake like a daisy, with yellow and white buttercream frostings. The child would be disappointed.

  “Will you walk with me?” Dr. Baker asked.

  They strolled along the corridor with the guard trailing just behind. “Mary,” Dr. Baker said finally, “they’ve asked me to talk to you about surgery. About removing your gallbladder. I know Dr. Soper has already explained it, but perhaps there are questions he hasn’t answered.”

  In the week since Mary had last seen Dr. Baker, there were several doctors in addition to Dr. Soper who tried to convince her to let them remove her gallbladder. Just that morning, Mary had been called to a meeting with three doctors at once. “We’ll get the best man to do the cutting,” said a doctor named Wilson, and Mary asked the three men present if they’d agree to be sliced open as well, since there was nothing in the world wrong with them either. What would New York come to if surgeons went around cutting open all the healthy people just to take a look at what was inside? They explained it to her over and over, as if she didn’t know what it was to cut a body from neck to navel, but she was a cook, for God’s sake; she once butchered a Jersey heifer with only one other person to help and when she was finished, even after draining the cow well before cutting, she was bloodied to her shoulders, and all those wet and glistening parts that made up the cow, when they were laid out on her table, would never have fit back inside that animal the way God made her had Mary decided to change her mind, put her back together, stitch her up like new. All the worse that they planned to slice her alive.

  “I won’t let them open me. I’ve told them already. You can tell them, too.”

  Dr. Baker regarded her in silence for a moment, and then nodded. “They’ll send you to North Brother Island. They’ll put you in quarantine.”

  “They can’t. I’m not sick. I didn’t do anything wrong.” Mary thought of the paper and envelope waiting for her by her bed. No matter how Alfred was feeling, no matter what kind of week he was having, he’d hear the beating heart at the center of her message and he’d leave whatever he was doing to find her and help her figure a way out of this trouble. Once, about five years earlier, when she was miserable at a job in Riverdale, he’d shown up in her employer’s kitchen one morning to see for himself how low she was, and when she told him everything that she’d promised herself she would not tell him—that the missus had slapped a tutor and threatened to slap Mary, that the man of the house found reasons to brush up against her—Alfred did not make a scene, did not raise his voice; he only listened. And when she was finished he told her the decision was entirely up to her; he’d only come to see her face, but if he had half her talent for cooking, he’d walk out of that horrible house and find something else. “Come home with me right now,” he said, and even as she protested that she’d already mixed the batter for muffins, had already sunk a turkey breast in a bucket of brine, she felt a shiver of recklessness and knew she wanted to do exactly that. Alfred put his hands on her waist and made her look at him. “Leave it,” he said. So she left the batter to harden on the counter and walked with him to the train station. Along the way, he sang a German folk song and danced along the sidewalk to make her laugh. Miraculously, the family never told the agency, or else the message got lost, because the same agency placed her in a new situation the very next week.

  She imagined Alfred storming through the main entrance of Willard Parker. If they block him at the front door, she thought, he’ll come through the back. If they lock the back door, he’ll build a tunnel, he’ll scale the walls, he’ll drop in from the sky to fend them off so that I can get home. Alfred, she thought, willing him to hear her. It was something she used to do when she began getting more jobs that took her out of town and away from him. She’d take her break on a quiet back porch and think hard on his name. She’d crawl into bed at night and extinguish every other thing in her mind except for him. Later, when she was back home, she’d tell him what she’d done, and he’d sit
up taller and ask which days, exactly, what times, because there was one afternoon when he was walking through the park and had a feeling she was there, trying to tell him something.

  “They can, Mary. And once you’re on North Brother it will be more difficult to . . .”

  “To what?”

  “To get back.”

  “Miss Mallon,” a nurse called from behind them. “It’s time to give another sample.”

  “I’ll be back in a few days,” Dr. Baker said, placing her hand lightly on Mary’s arm.

  “Wait,” Mary said, and heard the panic in her own voice. “Don’t forget to tell the nurses. About the pen. About posting my letter.”

  “I won’t forget.”

  • • •

  When Mary got back to her room, the paper and envelope were gone. She opened the small drawer next to her bed. She dropped to her knees and searched the floor. She checked under the pillow, inside the pillowcase, under the top sheet, down by the steel casters in case they’d been carried in a draft.

  “Did anyone take the paper and envelope that were left here for me?” she asked, looking from cot to cot to decide which among them was healthiest, which among them would have the nerve. “They were mine and I’d like them back immediately.” Her voice was the loudest sound the women had heard since arriving at the hospital, and some of them who had not stirred in days turned to look at her.

  “One of the doctors,” the girl by the window said. “He came in and put them on his clipboard when he saw you weren’t here.”

  “Which?”

  “Him,” the girl said, pointing.

  “Miss Mallon,” Dr. Soper’s voice came from behind her, and when she turned he was backlit by the lamps of the corridor. “Did Dr. Baker speak to you about surgery?”

  “Can I have my paper back?”

  “Not until we’ve talked about surgery.”

  My God, she thought, pressing her fingertips to her temples. Didn’t these people know when a subject was closed? Had she not made her position clear? Or did they mean to drive her insane with the same questions over and over and over? Everything in the room seemed to slide to the left. She walked quickly to the window and pushed it up. She had a birthday cake to make. She had a man who had no idea where she was. She had to find a new job. There was a quartet playing at Our Lady of the Scapular in two weeks time and her friend Joan had offered to make her a dress. The cold pushing in through the open window was a salve on her hot skin and she could hear someone whistle for a taxi. The music of a banjo floated through the air from some point north of the hospital. Passing under the light cast by the single streetlamp were a few feathery flakes of snow.