“Everybody is trying to help. And look where all their help has landed me.” She scrutinized the back of John’s head for a moment, his sunburned neck, and then, sighing, went over to sit beside him.
“If you hadn’t bit Nancy’s head off, she would have also told you that the article says there are likely many, many more like you and this man up in Camden. It says the Department of Health already has leads on several of them from tracing local outbreaks.”
“And none of them are in quarantine.”
“Nope.”
Mary tried to ignore the reek of her body and looked over at the moon, just an impression yet, the sky still blue around it. Her muscles felt weak from lying in a prone position for so long. She leaned over to the tray John brought with him and broke off a piece of the bread.
“But I was the first so I get the prize.”
“I guess so.”
John plucked a blade of grass and stuck it in his mouth. He leaned back on his elbows and closed his eyes. “I like it out here, days like this. Feels like the country, and this island gets a good breeze compared to over there.” He lifted his chin to indicate the water, the tall buildings on the other, larger island to their west. He sat up. “Oh, before I forget, I cleared a path down on the other side, you know, by that heron’s nest you found that time? It goes all the way down to the beach and you can’t see the hospital from there if you walk down a bit and get the trees between you and it.”
Mary imagined him doing all of this, making progress through the weeds and brambles, overgrowth that had not been touched in years, maybe ever. His arms were berry brown from being outdoors. She wondered sometimes if he was strong enough for all the work he did. Perhaps it was the work that kept him strong. He must be well into his fifties, maybe more, but then Mary remembered that she was almost forty. Forty years old. Her own mother had died at thirty, her nana at fifty-eight. When had he cleared that path, with everything else he was supposed to be doing? He said the board of the hospital wanted primroses along the eastern gable, mums added to the garden. They wanted the lawns cut, the hedges kept trim, everything about the island as neat and orderly as the corridors of the hospital. Riverside was a showpiece hospital, an example to all other hospitals built to house and study contagious diseases. But John had his own way of doing things, just as Mary had her own ways of operating around a mistress who believed she knew her kitchen better than Mary did. If he was wanted for anything, a messenger could always follow the smell of his pipe, which he took out of his shirt pocket now and stuffed with tobacco. So he’d been sure, all along, that she would be back. Or maybe, it occurred to her now, he’d just been hopeful.
“Thank you, John.”
John nodded as he touched his match to the tobacco and drew it alive with short, careful puffs. “Did you see your man over there? At the hearing?”
“I did.”
“Good,” John said. “That’s good.”
• • •
She spent August and September prowling the edges of the island. Every morning started cooler than the last, and soon she had to bring her shawl for warmth. She walked without stockings on the packed sand and held her shoes in her hands as she stepped from smooth stone to smooth stone that led, if she chose to follow, out into treacherous waters. She rested on the southernmost point of the island and found South Brother, the smaller sibling of North Brother. From her point of view the other island looked green and thick and far happier without the insult of quarantine hospitals and daily death. Sometimes, if she was very still, a snowy egret came to stand by her and inspect her, its plumage so pure and beautiful that Mary wondered how it could be an inhabitant of the same place as the other living things, all of which struck Mary as filthy and tired, just as Mary was. Sometimes, with the sun behind the bird and with its plumage on display, the delicate creature glowed and felt to Mary like a sign that good things were possible.
No one ever looked for her anymore. In the beginning, if she didn’t answer the door of her cottage, and couldn’t be found in one of the flower beds close by, they’d send out a search party. “I thought I was free to roam as I please,” Mary would say, furious at yet another promise broken, and doubly angry because they always responded, “You are, of course you are,” even as they led her back by the elbow, the glass canisters clinking in their skirt pockets.
Never in her life had she had so much time. She tried to remember being a child, but even those years seemed full of responsibilities: fetching and boiling water, cleaning, baking, gardening, raking, doing her lessons by the lamp while her nana used her quick knife to separate potatoes from their jackets and pile them high on the table. The nurses never came near her now, and she wondered if that had been part of the judges’ order, the fine print she hadn’t stayed around to read, that although she had to stay within the ordered boundaries, no one was to bother her with tests and analyses, no one was to rap on her cottage door twice a week.
Several weeks after the hearing, the middle of September 1909, Mary got a letter from Alfred. When she saw the mail carrier headed toward her cottage she figured it was just another update from Mr. O’Neill, and didn’t bother hurrying to intercept him. When she saw the handwriting on the envelope, her hands went sweaty. She studied it for a moment, and then she tore it open.
Dear Mary,
I hope they told you I tried to see you at the hotel where they kept you. I don’t know why they wouldn’t let me. I don’t remember if I told you that I thought you looked very beautiful the day that I saw you, and I’d almost forgotten, truth be told, how beautiful you are.
I’m writing now because I’d like to go up there to see you. I had hoped that you’d be free and there wouldn’t be any need but now I worry it will be even longer. Maybe another two years even. Maybe more.
I’ve inquired about the ferry and since it doesn’t go on Sundays except for the hospital people I will plan on seeing you there a week from Saturday. Maybe you can let the correct people know that I’m coming so that they don’t give me any trouble when I get there. We can take a walk or do whatever it is you do to pass time. I just want to see you.
Until then,
Alfred Briehof
There were several details about this letter Mary didn’t like. For a start, there was, “I’d almost forgotten.” Nor did she like “two years . . . Maybe more.” Most of all, she did not like the formality of his signature, “Alfred Briehof.”
TWELVE
Alfred had a pushcart once. He’d had many jobs, but the pushcart months stood out. He said he was sick of hauling coal baskets, and even more sick of emptying ash cans, and above everything sick of answering to a boss. He had had just about every type of physical employment a man could have, and his body needed a break. By his own description he was a genial person and liked to look his fellow man in the face. So he went out and rented a pushcart for twenty-five cents a day. “It’s standing, Mary,” he said. “Standing and talking. And making a living besides.” Alfred preferred to sit while talking, and preferred most of all to sit with a glass of strong liquor nearby, but Mary didn’t point out any of this. It was possible, she supposed, for him to know himself a little better than she knew him, so she swallowed her concerns and said it was a great idea. She knew the butchers of the East Side better than he did, knew which of them kept their thumbs on the scales, which stored their meat on cellar floors where the rain seeped in and sewer pipes might burst, so she helped him find a supplier. There were already three poultrymen on the street where he planned to set up, so he started out selling cuts of beef, pork, and lamb. For a quick lunch to make his cart known he offered slabs of corned beef with a side of beans, a boiled potato for an extra five cents. Mary showed him how to keep it hot, how much to put on the plate.
By the end of the very first month he learned that meat was not the thing. Fat black flies pestered him all day long, laying their eggs while doing so, and made themselves so at home on his cart that he was forced to switch to fruit. The Jewish and
Italians had the advantage with the fruit suppliers, taking all the semirot for themselves and leaving to the rest of the peddlers only the best fruit, for which the suppliers had to charge full price. Between the cost of the good fruit and the cart and the tipping of police officers and the paying off of the grocer from whom he rented sidewalk space, plus the nod to the collector and the man-of-influence, who was no more than a saloon keeper up the block, Alfred was deep in the red after only two or three more months. On top of that, since he was set up next to one of the poultrymen, the flies came anyway, and hopped from the putrid carcasses the other peddler had cast behind his cart over to Alfred’s lovely apples and pears, where they perched and laid more eggs.
Once he gave up on fruit, he switched to hot corn, and that went all right for a while, maybe three or four months. But he got bored with corn and switched to something that no one else for ten blocks thought to sell—children’s toys. Small toy boats. Wooden horses. Dolls for girls. Noisemakers. Funny hats. Toys were the best yet: Alfred opened his cart for business around nine in the morning, and closed before supper, by four. There was no worry about rot. No worry about his goods baking in the sun. Even the children left him alone except to buy what he offered. When the fruit carts got pelted with their own goods, and the fish cart got overwhelmed, overturned, and rolled down Forsyth Street, Alfred was left alone to sell for five cents what he’d purchased for three.
When Mary looked back on the best days with Alfred, leaving out the early days, when they were both so young and had nothing in the world to do but spend their days off taking walks or sipping coffee, the time that Alfred spent as a toy vendor was the happiest in their entire history. Mary remembered visiting him on his corner, the way he was with the children who approached him, drawing them in with his promise of shining train cars and paper birds. Even the ones who showed up with only a penny could buy a sweet. It was a good time, and it lasted longer than Mary expected. One whole year: October 1904 to October 1905. And then, about the time the weather turned cold, he began arriving home in a quiet mood. He pushed his food around his plate. Where once he would say that it was a great life, he took to saying it was a good enough life, for the time being.
“Maybe you want your own store?” Mary suggested. It was not impossible. With a few more years of saving, the right rent, and the right location, maybe it could happen. 1905 had been a very good year for Mary. She’d worked continuously, and on her days off she’d taken side jobs cooking for Ladies’ Luncheons.
But Alfred was shocked at the suggestion. “My own store? What I want is fewer toys in my life, Mary, not more. These kids”—he put his head in his hands—“you wouldn’t believe the noise they make. I caught one putting a handful of sweets in his pocket without paying, and when I made him turn his pockets inside out he said he had paid when I know very well he hadn’t. I would’ve thrashed the kid if his father hadn’t been standing right there, grinning, probably telling the boy what to do. They’re worse than the flies.”
He began sleeping late, opening his cart at noon, leaving at two. On the same short block as Alfred’s cart were twenty-four others, all packed in tightly against one another. Most were food peddlers, and Alfred claimed that under their carts was a year’s worth of garbage. Mary didn’t see why this was so upsetting to him all of a sudden, when it had been like that all along. Unlike other neighborhoods, where the garbage piles were removed regularly by the Department of Sanitation, the rubbish on the Lower East Side was packed four or five inches deep all along the block, and there was no skirting it. Each day’s new garbage got trampled underfoot by the crowds, and when the city sweepers came with their wispy brooms on Tuesday mornings it was like using a teaspoon to empty beaches of sand.
“But it’s getting to winter now. Winter always smells better than summer.”
Alfred could not be convinced.
When the first snowfall came he didn’t bother going to his cart at all, and instead checked with the Department of Street Cleaning to see if they needed an extra man on their snow-removal crew. The DSC took him on, gave him a crisp white uniform with matching hat, and out he went to pick up his cart, broom, and shovel with all the other white wings. Colonel Waring, New York City’s latest street-cleaning commissioner, referred to the white wings as his army, and Mary supposed it was an army of sorts, an army fighting against the enemy garbage, which was as powerful and intimidating as any foreign invader. But in February 1906, after a record-breaking snowfall, and after the DSC had to go upstate to Otisville to draft seventy-five additional men from the sanatorium to help clear the snow, they told Alfred to turn in his uniform.
“What did you do?” Mary asked when she found out. It was a habit she couldn’t seem to shake, asking questions she’d never get answers to. “They’re desperate for men. They’re advertising everywhere. And in the middle of that they let you go?”
When she could see he wasn’t going to answer, she followed him down the stairs to the street, stuck to him as he rounded corner after corner, trying to shake her. Finally, he turned around.
“Will you let it go, Mary?”
“No. I don’t understand. You have to tell me.”
“It’s—I don’t know. It’s not a real goddamn army, but they seem to think it is. It’s freezing outside. Every man’s gloves are soaked through by lunch. So I had to keep warm.”
And Mary knew exactly what had happened. He’d gone to work with his flask, kept it in his pocket or his boot, and had sipped himself to warmth while he was working. And one day, he’d sipped too much.
After that he stopped trying to get work altogether and instead went out early in the morning to sit in Nation’s Pub all day long. Mary let it go for a few weeks, reminding herself that men were like cats that needed to lick their wounds for a good long time before going to battle again. And then she stopped letting it go. When he got up and dressed she asked him a dozen times where he was headed and when he finally told her what she already knew, she couldn’t stop herself from flying down the stairs of the building after him, telling him that he’d better wake up, pay attention, life was not something to be frittered away on a barstool, and if he wanted a woman who would mollycoddle such a man he’d better look elsewhere. Alfred had always been a drinker. Since the very first day. But he’d been a drinker like all men were drinkers, a constant slow-paced drinker who walked the ledge easily, and in fact got through the day with more work behind him with the help of a little nip now and again. There was a time when no one could shovel coal like Alfred. No one could lead a pack of horses. No one could lift a piano. And what harm if during a job the men passed a flask and had a laugh and kept going, shoulder to the wheel? But what Alfred had done was work his way to the limit of the ledge to peek at what was below. He edged and edged and finally, inevitably, he tumbled forward.
The moments he came out of it were brief, and slipped by Mary like a breeze on a humid afternoon. One day, he was sound enough to fix the plaster by their window, and even repainted the whole wall. Another time, after Mary mentioned only once that they needed a new mattress, he went out and got one and carried it up six flights on his back. He put it on the bed, made up the sheets, and carried the old mattress down to the curb before Mary came home. “Surprise!” he said, after encouraging her to go lie down and rest after such a long day. She didn’t check her emergency envelope in the closet. She didn’t care. He’d heard her, and acted, and she would not ask a single question and ruin it. Another time, after not coming home for twenty-four hours, he arrived sober, and shaven, and told Mary he was going to take her out for a steak dinner. They’d go to Dolan’s, and after, they’d walk down to Germantown and go to a beer hall. Instead of asking him where he’d been, she suggested they skip Dolan’s and bring their dinner with them to the beer hall so he’d have more time there, more time for him to speak German with his countrymen, and more time for Mary to listen to that choked language coming out of him. He never spoke German at home. He’d never taught her a single wo
rd, and sometimes she wondered if that was the key, if that was the thing that hung between them, and if she were only able to understand him in his first language, she’d be able to understand him completely, and they’d be happy, and everything would make sense.
And then he disappeared again for a few days. Twice, Mary spotted him rounding corners in their neighborhood, and worse, heard him mentioned by the neighbors. “When I talked to Alfred yesterday,” one or another of them would say—and Mary would not be able to hear the rest over the blood that rushed to her head. “I can’t live like this,” she said when he came home next, but he just smiled, and hugged her, and told her he missed her, and pulled her toward him until they were hip to hip, and how did he smell so clean when he’d been on a bender? Where did he go wash himself before coming home? More and more she found herself unable to get past that wall of questions. She couldn’t kick sand over that inferno of fury that had started inside her with just one piece of kindling, and then grown with another, then another. When he pulled her toward their bed, she could no longer force her mind to think only of the warm cave of his body, even though she knew things were always better when she did put everything else aside and let him lift her and move her, let him be the Alfred she loved most.
The Fourth of July 1906 saw good Alfred, sober Alfred. He enlisted two other men on the block to go up to East Harlem with him, and together they bought two crates of fireworks, and told as many as they ran into that they would be setting them off at midnight, in the middle of Third Avenue. He referred to it as the annual tradition, though Mary could think of only one other time when he’d ever organized a fireworks show. Down on the street, when midnight came, he’d yelled at everyone to stay the hell back so that no one would get killed. Just as he was about to light the first match he remembered the Borriellos, and their three young boys, and how they wouldn’t want to miss it. “Run up, will you, Mary? See if they’re awake.” He was standing in the middle of the street with a match. Mary and everyone else knew the Borriellos would be awake because who in the city could sleep on such a night? It was the kind of summer night when even the thinnest cotton sheet felt as heavy and stifling as a rough wool blanket. People had taken their pillows to the roofs, to the fire escapes. It was the first unbearable night in a stretch that would last until August, and most of the men had come down in their undershirts. They were all sweating and panting and waiting for the sky to be illuminated.
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