Fever: A Novel

by Mary Beth Keane

  Mrs. Borriello let go a stream of Italian, and the boy protested in Italian for a few sentences, before turning and walking down the block a little, leaving the women alone.

  “I’ve been thinking about something like this,” the woman said. “I don’t like the idea of a stranger. I don’t like to put it in a newspaper.”

  “But I’m not a stranger. You saw me come and go for many years.”

  “Yes.” She stared at Mary, and Mary recalled the portrait of the Sacred Heart she’d noted that time she stood in the Borriellos’ dim kitchen after the older boy’s death, Mrs. Borriello not yet able to get out of bed. This was a religious woman, and Mary was sure she’d disapproved of Alfred and their arrangement. What woman would approve? She’d been crazy, and foolish, but what woman would have given up on him, knowing what he was like at his best? He was worth it, she wanted to say to Mrs. Borriello. And she loved him. And Christian doctrine preached forgiveness as much as it preached anything else. Underneath that scarf and those widow’s weeds was a young woman, perhaps younger than Mary. You understand, Mary wanted to say to her. I know you understand.

  “No guests,” Mrs. Borriello said. Mary’s face burned. It was no matter, Mary thought. A few weeks of living together and the other woman would see that Mary was not like that. It had just been Alfred she’d made an exception for. Only Alfred. And now Alfred was off and married and raising another man’s son.

  “Never,” Mary agreed. She shook her head emphatically from side to side so the woman would understand. She felt a flush of sweat spring up on her neck. The boy was kicking a dried horse turd along the curb and glancing over at them. “My boys stay in their bedroom. You get the cot in my room or the kitchen.”

  “Yes. Fine.”

  Mrs. Borriello named her price. It was more than at Mrs. Post’s, and it meant Mary would save nothing. Not a single dime unless she ate less, or washed her hair less often, or walked everywhere she went, or picked up another job for Sunday afternoons. If I offer less, Mary considered, she will take it. She said herself that she doesn’t want to advertise.

  “Yes,” Mary said instead. “I can do that.”

  Mrs. Borriello seemed surprised for a moment, and then happy. She waved over the boy. Mary shook the other woman’s hand, and then the boy’s. Each paid for her fruit, and they made their separate ways until the following Sunday, when Mary would move in.

  She had not given a single thought to the others in the building when she’d made the suggestion to Mrs. Borriello, but when she walked away, and realized what had just been arranged, it felt again like time was moving backward, and that no matter how hard she tried to keep her eyes pointed to the step ahead, she kept getting knocked off balance, turned around.

  She gathered her belongings from Mrs. Post’s when most of the others were out. It was only natural to feel that she was going home. Only when she saw the number hanging over the door—the dark entryway, the worn staircase beyond—did she truly understand what she’d done. At the bottom of the stairs was the same faded mural of a man on a horse, children picking fruit from trees. The plaster molding that had long ago been painted to match the wood of the banister had been chipped away further, and sat along the baseboard in small piles of dust. After so many months of avoiding the place, of swinging wide so as not to run into anyone, there she was the prodigal daughter without a thing to show for herself except for a scorch burn on her wrist, and swollen ankles, and a set of ten raw knuckles. They would laugh at her. She imagined Patricia Tiernan standing smug in her kitchen, saying what she always thought, what she always knew, while her fawning family gazed at her and nodded. She thought of the others who had never liked her, had never liked Alfred, and then how she and Alfred had thumbed their noses at what the others liked and didn’t like.

  But now she was back, alone, and for the few seconds it took her to cross the landing she thought about returning to Mrs. Post’s, or to a boardinghouse, or asking if she could stay at the laundry for a week until she could find better accommodations. Everything about the place was familiar: the sag in the center of each stair, the smell of damp rising from the basement. If she were still cooking, she could have afforded their sixth-floor rooms on her own. Who lived there now? She thought of her old bed, her table, her sink, the spices she kept in the press.

  She began to climb the stairs. When she got to Mrs. Borriello’s and knocked, the door opened immediately, and Mrs. Borriello took her bag and placed it under the cot, which was set up with pillows against the wall during the day to look like a small sofa. She nodded at Mary to sit. As soon as Mary pulled in her chair Mrs. Borriello served her coffee with sweet condensed milk and fresh bread with salted butter. At the center of the table she placed a bowl of fat, ripe blackberries. Mrs. Borriello sat across from her boarder and the two women ate and sipped and enjoyed the silence. It was the most delicious meal Mary had tasted since before North Brother.

  “I want to thank you—” Mary began, but discovered a blockage in her throat that the words couldn’t skirt by. There was nothing to cry about, but the pressure behind her eyes was too much, and Mrs. Borriello was beside her, rubbing her back, saying that she must be tired, why not a short nap before the boys come? Mary agreed that she’d like to lie down for a few minutes, not sleep, but just lie down, close her eyes, pray to God that things would get better for her here and not worse. “Oh, first I want to give you this,” Mary said. “Yesterday was the first of the month, so it works out nicely.” She opened her bag and removed from her wallet the price they’d agreed on, but the other woman just looked at it on the table, at the bills Mary had fanned out, at the coins piled on top.

  “Is it okay?” Mary asked. There was nothing else in her wallet if she owed more, if she’d misunderstood. She’d bought new wool tights that week, and twice in ten days, after closing the laundry with Li, she’d gone to the little counter that sold hamburger steaks until midnight. She knew she shouldn’t have done that. Once? Fine. But twice? And couldn’t the old tights have been mended?

  Then Mrs. Borriello dipped her head and covered her face with her hands. “Yes, it’s okay,” she said after a moment. When she composed herself, she told Mary that she was going to her room to lie down, too.

  • • •

  Mary knew that avoiding her old friends now would make everything worse. It would be better to seek them out immediately, try to explain to them what had happened, let them see her face. Her silence from North Brother would be easier for them to understand than why she hadn’t sought them out since her release. Joan was no obstacle—she’d already forgiven Mary by the time she’d flagged her down on the sidewalk. Little Dorothy Alice cried in the mornings and over the sound of her wailing came Joan’s soothing voice, singing about doggies, or sleigh rides, or the Kingdom of Heaven. Later, walking to work, Mary found herself humming along.

  There was Patricia Tiernan, who’d never liked Mary. Ever since Mary came back Patricia seemed shocked to see her making her way up the stairs. “Oh, hi, Mary,” Jimmy Tiernan said to her as they passed one evening, and just like in the old days Patricia appeared on the landing above them and looked as if she would choke him with her mind if she had the power.

  As for Fran, the first time Mary saw her after returning to the building, her old friend was cool. She returned Mary’s greeting, and then continued up the stairs while Mary looked after her, feeling like she’d been slapped. After a few days, Mary worked up the courage to knock on her door. “Please, Fran, can’t I come in?” It might have been the “please” that melted the frost. Fran opened the door and Mary took her usual chair while Fran hunted for something sweet for them to eat.

  “Why didn’t you come see us, Mary? I was sick when they sent you back to North Brother after the hearing. We had no idea you were released, and then Joan said she ran into you on the street. You could have stayed here. Why didn’t you just ask? You didn’t have to go to a boardinghouse. You didn’t have to go up there and pay Mrs. Borriello for a corner of
her kitchen. I don’t even understand what happened.”

  “I don’t know,” Mary said, and it was true: now that she was sitting there, looking at her old friend, she couldn’t remember why she let it go so long. “Why didn’t you come to my hearing if you were following the case? Alfred was there. And I didn’t hear from you after, either.” She could see on Fran’s face that it had never occurred to her, and Mary never expected Fran to give up an entire day sitting in a stuffy courtroom, but it was the only way to get past these small hurts—to answer with another hurt. You’ve been injured? Well, so have I.

  “I didn’t know I could have gone to the hearing. I thought it was just lawyers and reporters. And you know I’m not a good writer. Sure, Robert said he’d take down a letter for me, but you know how that goes. You could have written to me more often, too.”

  “You’re right, Fran. I don’t know why I said that. I’m sorry. It’s just that Alfred—”

  Fran leaned forward. “I knew it was Alfred. You didn’t want to run into him here.” Fran asked her if she’d seen him in the week since she moved back.

  “No,” Mary said. “Have you? Joan said he does odd jobs for Driscoll.”

  “I haven’t seen him either. Sometimes he’s here a lot in a given week, and then not for a few weeks. And I think he tries his best to avoid me and Joan.”

  Though Mary had instructed herself not to care, to try to forget about him, it was Alfred she had in her mind whenever she pushed out the building’s front door and remembered her posture, when she put a protective hand to her hair. She braced herself to see him and then when a few days went by and she didn’t see him, she realized she was disappointed.

  “So tell me everything,” Fran said. “Start from the beginning.” As their coffee went cold, Mary described Dr. Soper, what he said about her, the day they captured her, the Willard Parker Hospital, North Brother, John Cane, the nurses and their collection canisters, Mr. O’Neill, the disappointment of the hearing and then finding out about Liza Meaney, the boy, how disorienting it was to be back in New York City without being a cook, how she feared she’d never get used to it. When she finally stopped talking, Fran was quiet for a minute and then announced that she’d like to punch that Dr. Soper in the face, and Mary laughed. Never before had she thought about Soper and laughed, and it felt, for the first time, like that terrible part of her life was truly behind her. The two women talked until the clock struck midnight and when she left, Mary knew they’d be fine.

  LIBERTY

  SIXTEEN

  Living with Liza seemed perfect, at first. It had been years since Alfred felt what it was like to be sober and sound on his own two feet, his lungs full of air, his spine straight, his body strong. When he came home, Liza didn’t seem the least bit surprised that he’d worked all day. She didn’t make a fuss over it, like Mary used to, and with Liza he could sense no panic that he would change his mind, that the next day would see him having slipped down to the place of a man who didn’t work. He was healthy and capable and Liza didn’t watch him like Mary did. She didn’t narrow her eyes and know things the way Mary knew them, sometimes before he knew himself. When he brought her his wages, she looked at him like he’d handed her a block of solid gold, and she needed those dollars and cents. The boy ate as much as Alfred and Liza combined, and he was smart. He needed books, scratch pads, decent clothing, shoes.

  But after almost ten months of the arrangement, Alfred faced what he knew all along, that Liza Meaney was not Mary Mallon, and never would be. When they made love she was dutiful and kind. She never made up an excuse, or pretended to be asleep, or told him to go fly a kite, and she looked politely away when he removed the night cap from its tin. If she’d ever seen one before she didn’t mention it, nor could he tell if she liked or disliked what they were doing. One time, to test her, he stopped abruptly, pulled away, tugged on his trousers, and told her they could do it later since she wasn’t feeling up to it, and she said that was fine, as if he’d suggested they walk north along Broadway instead of south. “Oh, well, you don’t seem fine. You seem distracted,” he said, and she didn’t argue. She just pulled her dress back over her shoulders and went about fastening the row of buttons. Another time he kept pushing, and nuzzling, and reaching under her clothes to see when she would stop him but she never stopped him, even though he knew she was tired and wanted nothing more than to sleep. He kept testing and testing and next thing he knew he was inside her with Samuel doing his homework in the next room, and only once, one single instant, when the bed creaked, did she push him away and look to the door in case Samuel might have heard.

  This is how most women are, he told himself. This is how women should be, only he’d never known what a woman should be like because he’d mostly ever been with Mary, who was not a normal woman. Even the newspapers noticed it. Back when she was first captured most of the newsmen commented that she had the bearing of an Irish person, but one reporter observed that she in fact had the bearing of a man. Irish or not, he didn’t specify. It was true sometimes she stood with her legs planted wide, especially when she felt herself backed into a corner, but nothing about Mary was manly to the eye and so it must have been something else that this man had seen, a way of conducting herself, a way of glancing around a room. Fran Mosely, who saved the papers for him back then, had said she didn’t understand that one at all because who in their right mind seeing Mary’s thick mane of strawberry blond hair and slim waist would see anything other than a woman. Alfred had said, “I know what he means, I think,” and Fran had looked at him like he was the bastard she’d always suspected him to be.

  Mary didn’t need the money he brought in because she had her own money, more money than he earned. He knew exactly how she felt about everything, because she told him, usually very loudly, often while banging pots and pans for emphasis. When she didn’t want him to touch her she told him to get lost, but when she did, she didn’t mind reaching for him first, coming around to his side, kissing the back of his neck and asking if he was too tired. Liza Meaney would never do that. Not in a thousand years. At first, he thought how wonderful that was. How ladylike. Liza was like a delicate bird and how much more interesting that made everything when she let him unbutton her, and how fiercely she blushed when he lifted her to sit on top of him, or whispered to her to turn around. She looked disoriented and terrified whenever he moved her to a different position, and after just a few seconds she always dove back down to the covers and to her back where she felt comfortable and safe, and he’d laugh. “Okay, okay,” he’d say, and he could see how much he’d have to show her, if she was willing to be shown, but after ten months he could see she didn’t want that. Sex for Liza Meaney would always be part of the transaction they’d agreed upon, and although she liked him, and was attracted to him—Alfred felt sure he’d be able to tell if she wasn’t—she saw sex with him the same way she saw making his breakfast, washing his clothes, having supper on the table when he got home.

  They’d been engaged for six months but still weren’t married. She showed her ring to all their neighbors—a simple silver band—and maybe that’s all she’d wanted, for the world to know that she was not the kind of woman who lived with a man without a promise. At first, she said she wanted to figure a way to bring her mother from England for the ceremony, and sometimes she said she wanted to wait until the school year was over, so Samuel wouldn’t be distracted. Distracted? Alfred wanted to ask. What would be so distracting? Or for that matter, what was there to cross an ocean for? Alfred had imagined himself and Liza walking to City Hall, signing a few papers, and then going to a restaurant for supper. But he didn’t say anything, and when the weeks wore on without any letters arriving from England, without any discussion of whether they’d have a small party, he stopped worrying about it. Maybe accepting the engagement without pushing actual marriage was the small way she was asserting herself, that and making him continue with the cure, even though he felt he didn’t need it anymore.

  The
medicine they gave in the beginning made him sick, and he assumed that was part of it: making the patient so sick that he wouldn’t be able to hold alcohol or anything else. He was weak for two weeks, curled up in bed and vomiting into the bowl Liza gave him, and still, she came in every four hours with another dose she’d measured out into a teacup, just as the doctor had instructed. “It’s for people far worse than I am,” he’d told her when he first came back from Bellevue, where he’d gone to see what it was all about. Ads for the cure were posted all around the neighborhood, and published in big block letters in the newspapers. “I saw them. Jesus, I saw them. I’m not like that. My God, one man, he wasn’t much more than a boy, he was sweating a puddle on the floor but kept complaining of cold. I just like to have a nip now and again and if you go out and find a man who never has a nip now and then I’ll saw off my right arm.”

  “You’ll go if you want to live here,” she told him simply, so he went back, and back, and soon they sent him home with directions on how to dole out the medicine and at what intervals. After a month they said he could stop taking the medicine, but to keep a supply in his old pocket flask. That he’d never had need for that flask proved he never needed the cure in the first place. It was just a matter of deciding, and he’d decided. It was a 100 percent guarantee as long as he followed the doctor’s instructions, and the doctor’s instructions were, don’t drink.

  Samuel was preparing for a test that would allow him to skip two grades ahead at school and take a few courses at the community college. If he scored high enough he would go for free, except for the cost of books. They had to be very, very quiet around the flat so as not to interrupt the boy’s studies, and for the first time since he’d known her, Liza shushed him one morning when he began to ask if there was any more coffee on the stove. She shushed Alfred and cast a worried look at Samuel, who had his head bent over a mathematics book, and Alfred saw then that she’d never love him, never love any man, as much as she loved that boy.