Fever: A Novel

by Mary Beth Keane

  The ice company stable did not offer overtime, and the evenings were too long between five o’clock, when his shift ended, and ten o’clock, when he went to bed. To get out of their rooms and give the boy some quiet, Alfred had started checking in with Michael Driscoll. The old man needed boards replaced on the floor, a cabinet fixed, his rotted bed carried out to the sidewalk and replaced with a new one, the plaster on the wall behind the sink touched and smoothed. “A little late for this kind of attention,” Alfred had teased the first time he went over.

  “Never too late,” Driscoll had said. “I’ve my eye on a fine woman.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “You’ll get there. Then you’ll know. And someone else will laugh.”

  Fair enough, Alfred supposed, and went on with the work he was assigned. When he finished a job, he’d let a few weeks go by and then he’d check in on the old man to see what he’d stored up for him. In the stretches when Driscoll had no work for him he hung around the stable after his shift to talk to the man who relieved him, or he walked down to the docks to watch what was being unloaded.

  One evening, though he didn’t know Alfred would be stopping around, Driscoll answered the door as soon as Alfred knocked. “Well? Did you see her?” The old man asked, and looked over Alfred’s shoulder toward the empty stairwell. He coughed into his sleeve, and then rolled it up.

  “Who?” Alfred asked.

  “Mary. She’s out there. I was talking with her not one minute ago.”

  “Mary Mallon is in this building?”

  “She moved in with Mrs. Borriello a week ago. You didn’t know?” Alfred felt a tremor travel down his arms and legs, and he thought he heard a woman’s step pass in the hall. He looked hard at Driscoll’s face to make sure the old man wasn’t having him on. He’d sent a letter to her hut on North Brother a few months earlier and when she didn’t write back he figured she was still that angry with him, and had a right to be. She’d said the lawyer was optimistic. She’d said it might be only a few more months. But why would he have believed it?

  “Are you serious, Driscoll?”

  “I swear on my life.”

  “How? When was she released? Was she looking for me? What did you talk about?”

  “She was just passing through the vestibule as I was searching for my key. I said hello and so did she so then I said I was glad to see her back and she thanked me. She might still be climbing the stairs. Go on. Go after her.”

  Instead, Alfred pushed past him and looked at the weeping faucet that needed to be fixed. As he took inventory of what he’d need, he felt the other man’s eyes sizing up the shape of his back, his stance, trying to read what was written there. He needed time to think. He had no idea what he’d say. Every part of his body urged him toward the door. Why was she staying with Mrs. Borriello? What was she doing now? He imagined what he’d say to her, and when he realized he couldn’t think of a place to begin, he imagined instead what she’d say to him, and knew that the first thing she’d ask was whether he was married yet to Liza Meaney, and after he said that he wasn’t, she’d ask if he was still living with her and her boy, and he’d have to say yes, and then the meeting would be over.

  “I can’t come around tomorrow,” Alfred said gruffly to Driscoll once the faucet was fixed. “I’ll do the rest another time.”

  “You’ll have to face her sooner or later,” Driscoll said, and Alfred had a wild impulse to shove him, to throttle him, but it passed immediately. It was himself he was angry at. No one else.

  “Why do I have to?” he said, though he wanted to do more than face her. He wanted to run upstairs right that second to see her, beg her forgiveness, take her into his arms. How had it happened? How had he missed it? How could he have failed to know she was back in the city?

  Alfred stayed away from 302 East Thirty-Third Street as he tried to make sense of Mary’s return. In the mornings, when he woke to Liza’s blonde curls on the pillow next to him, he thought immediately of Mary, sleeping so close to the rooms they’d shared for so many years, seemingly back in her old life except without him. “Everything all right at the stable?” Liza asked several times, and he snapped at her that it was, and tried to stay out of their rooms even more than usual. Another time she asked him if he carried his medicine with him when he went out, and he realized she thought he’d fallen off the wagon. It was true he’d gone and stood outside Nation’s Pub for the first time in months, but he hadn’t gone in, and the pull he felt from 302 East Thirty-Third was much stronger. Finally, after two weeks of turning ’round and ’round the news of Mary’s return, he finished his work at the stable and made for Driscoll’s place, to finish up the work that was there waiting for him, and to decide one way or another if he would ever go near the place again.

  As he walked up Third Avenue he felt the possibility of seeing her again like a singing bird lodged in his chest, struggling to free itself. He stopped at the peanut cart on Twenty-Ninth Street to get a bag for himself and Driscoll to share, but even this was a show for her, in case she was watching, in case he should turn around and she should be standing there, half smiling, ready to say, “Well, well, well. Look who it is.”

  It was the first truly bitter evening of the season, and there was no one on the stoop or in the vestibule when Alfred arrived at the building. He stood at the bottom of the silent stairwell and looked up, counting the railings to the fourth floor. When Driscoll didn’t answer his knock Alfred felt along the top of the door frame for the key that was hidden there, and let himself in. “Hello?” he called, and when he got no answer he opened the door to Driscoll’s bedroom and found him lying there, twisted up in the sheets. “Not feeling myself,” Driscoll said without looking at Alfred, and as Alfred got closer to the bed he could see that the older man was wincing, and trying to find relief from whatever was bothering him by shifting from side to side, clutching at his pillow. He coughed for several minutes. For the first time in two weeks, Alfred pushed thoughts of Mary to the side.

  “What is it?” Alfred asked to the back of the man’s head, and noticed how thin Driscoll’s hair was there, how small and delicate-seeming the back of his skull was, like a smooth, hairless egg.

  “Go on,” said Driscoll. “Another time.” But Alfred stood there like a boy, unsure what to do.

  “I’m just feeling poorly. Come around in a few days.”

  “Can I bring you something? Have you eaten?”

  But Driscoll only moved closer to the wall.

  “I’ll check on you tomorrow,” he said, and when Driscoll didn’t respond, Alfred left. He stood at the bottom of the stairwell for a minute, tempted to go up to see Mary, but he’d be back the next day and between now and then maybe he’d think of the perfect thing to say.

  Alfred arrived home in time for a nearly silent supper with Liza and Samuel. In the morning, he decided he couldn’t go another day without seeing Mary, and once he’d decided, he had no patience for being at the stable, alone with the horses. Now that the weather was cold, the demand for ice was way down, as was the supply until the winter harvest. The trucks went out every day, but mostly to businesses, a few blocks here and there to the rich houses that didn’t care to keep their milk or butter on the window ledge like Mary had always done, and Liza did now, but preferred to serve ice in glasses to their guests, even in the winter months. Lately Alfred had felt that pinch that told him he would not last there for much longer. He would have to find something else. Ten blocks north was a stable the ice company rented to the Department of Health, and that was more interesting. On quiet afternoons Alfred walked up there with the ready excuse that he was still concerning himself with company property. When he first started at the stable he didn’t understand why the Department of Health needed so many horses. Whenever a horse got too old to haul an ice truck, or was too difficult to drive through the city, the men at his stable always said that the Department of Health would take it, and now Alfred said it too, but he didn’t know why until one day
, a bright autumn afternoon, he walked the ten blocks to distract himself and when he got to the stable he saw that the large side room that used to be a dairy, back when the city had cows, had been turned into a slaughterhouse for horses. There were two horses up on slings with gashes in their necks and a glass instrument stuck in each bloody wound. Below the horses’ mighty bellies were lined up rows and rows of buckets where blood had been collected, and all around were men in white lab coats.

  “Out!” one yelled when he saw Alfred. The man was crouching beside the larger of the two horses, checking the glass tube, and when he scrambled up to shoo away Alfred he slipped on a small spot of blood on the floor, knocking over a full bucket as he tried to right himself. The other men cursed and glared at Alfred. The horses, who were still alive, each turned a wild, terrified eye to Alfred, and seemed to understand that he was the only one in the room who might help them.

  “Jesus Christ,” Alfred said when he got back out to the glare of the street, the flies in front of the stable door frantic with the smell of blood. He passed through the other door to the stable proper, where there were a dozen horses munching on hay as if they were out at pasture. “What are they doing?” Alfred asked the boy who was sitting on an upturned bucket in the corner, reading an old newspaper.

  “Bleeding,” the boy said, and simply turned the page.

  Later, when he and Samuel were elbow to elbow at the table waiting for Liza to spoon out their supper, it was Samuel who told him what he’d probably seen, that the horses were being bled for their serum, which would be used to make inoculations against disease. “Diphtheria, probably,” the boy said. “I read about that. Or Typhoid, maybe. They’re working on something.”

  “Come on. Horse blood?”

  “Horse serum. They inject the horse with the disease and wait for the horse to develop the means to fight it and then they take out the blood and whittle it down to the fighting parts and then they put that in an injection and give it to people. Didn’t you ever wonder what’s in the shots people get?” The boy leaned back in his chair and regarded Alfred.

  Alfred was ashamed to say he had not ever wondered what was in an injection. Before seeing Dr. Oppenheimer he’d never gotten an injection in his life, and now he wondered what the doctor was putting in him. There was witchcraft in the old country, but nothing this dark, as far as Alfred could remember. Certain herbs and weeds. A way of mixing. Poultices smeared on chests, aromatic flowers ground down to powders and stirred up into tea. But this horse-blood business seemed like more sinister magic. Liza had turned from the stove to listen to her son, and now, understanding that her boy was finished explaining, she turned back to her saucepan of gravy, her cheeks spotted with pride and pleasure.

  Now, the day yawning before him until it was time to sign out and walk over to Thirty-Third Street, he considered going up to the DOH stables to pass the time. Instead, he signed himself out for five o’clock, even though it was only two.

  • • •

  Driscoll was not better. Alfred opened the man’s door slowly, and knew immediately by the silence and the cold kitchen that he was still in bed. He found Driscoll in the same position, and when Alfred put his hand on the back of his neck it felt like a furnace, and Driscoll moaned. “Should I get you something?” Alfred asked, feeling like a big, hulking, useless thing that was too stupid to know how to help. He went to the kitchen and ran a dishcloth under cold water. He brought it back to the bed, laid it across the old man’s head, and then worried as he saw the sheets darken where the wet touched them. Driscoll shifted away. “You need help, I think,” Alfred said, more to himself than to the old man. A doctor. But he’d never called on a doctor before.

  He could have knocked on Fran’s door, or gone up to confer with Jimmy Tiernan, but he marched on past the second-floor landing, past the third. He needed Mary. The elderly sisters who also lived on the fourth floor had their door cracked for air and Alfred knew he could stop and ask them. He’d seen Driscoll talk to them from time to time, and when one of them injured her knee Driscoll had gone up there with a baked cod on a platter because they couldn’t get out. But instead of stopping, Alfred kept going to the Borriellos’ door and drew a breath. If Mrs. Borriello answered, he’d have to speak up, speak slowly, and then everyone would hear and his whole reason for going up there would be confused. Because he was really going up there for Driscoll. And if it ended up that he and Mary would start talking again because of it, fine, as long as Driscoll improved.

  The younger boy answered, and when he saw who it was his eyes went wide.

  “Is Mary here?”

  The boy raised a finger to Alfred and then shut the door. Alfred heard movement inside, a chair pushed back along the wood floor.

  When the door opened again it was Mrs. Borriello. The boy peeked at him from behind his mother. “Yes?” she said.

  “I’m looking for Mary. I understand she’s been staying here?”

  “Why?”

  Alfred felt himself getting annoyed. “Mr. Driscoll isn’t well, and I thought Mary would know what to do.”

  “Sick?” Mrs. Borriello said.

  “Yes. Since yesterday. Maybe longer. Is Mary here?”

  But Mrs. Borriello was already gathering her scarf. She said something to the boy before slipping past Alfred and down the stairs to Michael Driscoll’s door. The boy regarded Alfred from the door frame. “She doesn’t get home until later.”

  “Yeah? Are you in charge of her schedule?”

  “No. I’m in charge of the lamp. I bring it back to the kitchen when she gets home from the laundry and we do our figures at the table while she’s eating. My brother and me, I mean. Then when she’s done I take it back to my room. My mother says it’s our lamp, not hers, but we have to let her borrow it to eat by because it’s not right to ask a person to eat in the dark when there’s a good lamp a room away.”

  “She works at a laundry? Where?”

  “It’s almost on Washington Square.”

  “Which side? What street?”

  “Mr. Briehof!” Mrs. Borriello was calling for him from the bottom of the dark stairs.

  “Didn’t you used to live upstairs?” the boy asked.

  Mrs. Borriello shouted again.

  “He needs firewood,” the boy said. “Better go in and get some of ours. She wants me to go down to her.”

  The boy ran down the stairs, shouting something to his mama all the way, and Alfred turned and put his hand on the Borriellos’ doorknob. He pushed the heavy door and listened as the bottom brushed the floor like all the doors did in 302, leaving little arcs of scratch marks as welcome mats to every room. The wood was stacked by the stove, twigs, parts of branches, bits and pieces they must have collected from around the city. Alfred went over and selected a few of the heftiest pieces. When he turned he noticed the cot, and on the cot two folded blouses. On the windowsill above the cot was a woman’s comb, a collection of hairpins, hair powder, a tub of cream. He recognized the comb and the brand of cream. He left the wood on the Borriellos’ table and sat on the edge of Mary’s bed. He didn’t dare touch the blouses—it was bad enough he’d mussed the bed—but he studied the collars for signs of her skin, some detail that might have been caught in the material. He sniffed them, then leaned over, his head between his knees, to peer under the cot, searching for some lost thing she might have given up on and which he could keep, but there was nothing except dust. He thought about leaving her a note, the long-overdue letter she’d wanted so badly when she was on North Brother, the empty tin of tobacco from his pocket that she would know was his, knowing his brand and knowing they would tell her the story later, how he’d come knocking and how he’d spent a few minutes in the flat, alone. He heard the boy’s light steps on the stairs, two at a time, so he went to smooth the quilt, but then decided, no, he’d leave it the way it was, let her imagine him sitting there, thinking about her. He gathered the wood, and by the time he had it in his arms, the boy was there with his brother, to
tell him that their mother had banned them, had sent them upstairs with instructions to close their door and not to come down again. And if she wasn’t home by supper, they were to be good boys and boil themselves an egg and clean up after and go straight to bed. There was something in the building, and she didn’t want them around until they figured out what it was.

  • • •

  Driscoll was worse. His fever was high and he complained of pain in his back. When he coughed into his pillow he left behind spots of blood. He couldn’t hold the teacup Mrs. Borriello had filled with broth so she sat on the edge of his bed and lifted it to his mouth. “Slow,” she said. “Little sips.” At moments he seemed to feel better, but then he was again moaning and clutching at the bed as if it were just a matter of getting deeper, of burrowing himself away from his rooms into a cooler place underneath it all, where he might find some relief.

  “Should I run out to get medicine? A doctor? He has a little money, you know.”

  Mrs. Borriello peered at Alfred. She seemed to want to make herself into a wall between the two men.

  “I mean for the doctor. I think he could pay a doctor. And I think a doctor has to see a sick person anyway, even if he can’t pay.”

  “I think that’s true.”

  “Because I’ve never seen something like this. Have you?”

  “Yes. The blood on the pillow. The coughing with fever. I saw it one time.”

  “Okay then. I’ll go.”

  “Where?”