Fever: A Novel

by Mary Beth Keane

“I don’t know. I’ll go up and ask Fran. She had the doctor come once. For one of the children.” He wanted to ask where Mary was, what time she’d be home.

  They heard the scrape of the door being slowly pushed open. “Mama?” came a boy’s voice. Mrs. Borriello was across the room in an instant, pushing her youngest son into the hall and trying to shut the door on him. She shouted at him in Italian, but still he tried to insert the toe of his boot in the door. As they struggled, Alfred stepped out into the hall and lifted the boy under the arms.

  “Go, go, go,” Mrs. Borriello shouted at both of them, and then added something in Italian.

  “I’m staying with my mama,” the boy cried as Alfred carried him to the stairs.

  “You have to go up,” Alfred said.

  Mrs. Borriello shouted again.

  “She says to tell everybody, don’t come down here. Bad enough there’s the two of us already. Three of us including me. She says she’ll kill me later. To you she says stand back from the door when you talk to Miss Fran about the doctor. Want me to do it? She says we could be breathing it now, whatever it is.”

  As Alfred climbed the steps with one hand bracing the boy by the upper arm, he thought of Liza and how she’d worry but there was nothing he could do and really it would be the wrong idea to go home to her now and carry this thing to her, to Samuel. She’d understand that he had to stay in 302 until he saw this thing through. And if Mary arrived home later and the boys told her everything—how Alfred had searched for her, how he’d stayed on to help their mama, how he’d rushed down the stairs with their wood and kindling to help Mr. Driscoll—and if hearing about all that made her want to see him again, to talk only, and if talking softened her toward him enough so that she didn’t object when he touched her, then he couldn’t help that, either.

  SEVENTEEN

  The one doctor Fran knew of had moved uptown, but Mr. Stern from the third floor knew of a good man who made house calls. Jimmy Tiernan was elected to go to West Sixteenth to fetch him, and as he rushed down the stairs and out onto the dark sidewalk, Patricia looked after him, relieved that her man was traveling farther away from whatever poison was dwelling at Mr. Driscoll’s. First thing in the morning she was going to bring their children to her sister’s in New Jersey and stay there until this thing passed.

  Jimmy Tiernan didn’t return until nearly eight o’clock in the evening. He shouted through Driscoll’s closed door that the doctor would be there shortly. Alfred and Mrs. Borriello took turns sitting with Driscoll. A few times, Alfred tried to raise the subject of Mary. When it was Mrs. Borriello’s turn to sit with Driscoll, Alfred sat in the chair in the corner of Driscoll’s bedroom. “Your son said Mary works at a laundry now?”

  Mrs. Borriello glanced over at him quickly, and simply nodded.

  “Does she like it? She was a laundress before, you know. When I met her.”

  When Mrs. Borriello showed no indication that she’d even heard him speak, he knew that there was no point in trying. When it was his turn to sit with Driscoll he patted the old man’s head with the compress and realized he’d never before been around anyone as ill. At nine o’clock came a strong knock on the door and an unfamiliar man’s voice announcing himself as Dr. Hoffmann. Relieved, Alfred jumped up to open the door.

  Dr. Hoffmann asked about Driscoll’s first symptoms, how long he’d been in the state he was in, what his health was before he came down ill. He pulled the older man up to sitting, and Driscoll fell toward the doctor’s lap like a sleeping child lifted from his crib by his mama. The doctor listened to Driscoll’s chest, took his pulse, and then told Alfred to go straight to the nearest grocer and ask them to call for an ambulance. As Alfred rushed down the hall, he heard a voice behind him.

  “How is he?” Mary asked. She was standing two steps above the second-floor landing. She was wearing a dark green dress that buttoned in a double-breasted style up to her throat. She was as familiar to him as his own reflection in the mirror, and he saw clearly how silly he’d been, playacting with another woman, a woman he barely knew, and who barely knew him, when his life was here, standing on the landing above him.

  “I’m to get an ambulance.”

  “Well, go!”

  Alfred ran. He pumped his arms and lifted his knees and dodged pedestrians who stepped before him. The faster he ran, the younger he felt, and though his errand was serious he felt buoyant: Mary was back. She would forgive him. They would make up, and he would leave Liza. He and Mary would find new rooms together; he’d get good work. He leaped over a pile of horse manure. He nodded to the wandering sausage man, who watched him pass with amazement on his face. How could he refuse marriage to her now when he had asked Liza Meaney? Maybe Mary wouldn’t want to marry him now; maybe she had no interest. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Not so long as they lived together again and came home to each other every night.

  When he returned to Driscoll’s rooms, Mary had taken over Mrs. Borriello’s spot by the bed and was talking to the doctor. Mrs. Borriello sat at the table with her head in her hands.

  “What is it?” Alfred asked from the frame of Driscoll’s bedroom door.

  “Looks like hasty consumption,” Mary said without turning.

  “They’ll take him to a sanatorium,” the doctor said. “Each of you should watch yourself for symptoms and at the first sign you should segregate yourself.”

  It was nearly midnight when the ambulance took Michael Driscoll, and once the neighbors retreated from their perches on the landings where they’d watched the spectacle, Mary remembered what the nurses used to do at Riverside after tending to a patient, and instructed Alfred and Mrs. Borriello to wash their hands. Mary knew Alfred was looking at her as he leaned against the wall that divided the kitchen from the bedroom. She hardened her belly and kept her eyes from meeting his. She spoke to him as if he were anyone, someone she’d just met, not the man she’d loved since she was seventeen years old. “When you get home you should wash yourself well. Boil your clothes or throw them away.”

  Now that Driscoll was at the hospital there would be no need for Alfred to come around anymore, and if he stopped coming, then this, an interval of several hours, wouldn’t mean anything and she could go back to pretending he didn’t exist. She heard him draw his breath as if to speak but then release it again.

  Mrs. Borriello took Mary by the hand.

  “Hold on,” Alfred said, taking two quick steps toward the door as if to block it. “Mary,” he said softly. “Can I come up to talk a minute? Or can we take a walk?”

  “It’s the middle of the night!” said Mrs. Borriello.

  “She can speak for herself.”

  “Why?” Mary asked.

  “I have to talk to you, Mary.”

  “Another time maybe,” Mary said, and Mrs. Borriello followed her boarder out the door.

  Upstairs, the boys asleep, Mary found Mrs. Borriello’s largest pot and filled it with water. She filled the kettle, too. Once the water was boiled, the women took off their dresses, and their underclothes, and shoved them to a corner of the kitchen. Mrs. Borriello stepped into the bath first while Mary dropped their underwhites into Mrs. Borriello’s pot and stirred them like she was checking on a stew. Then Mary bathed while Mrs. Borriello stirred, the water at such a rapid boil the pot hopped on the stove. When they were both dressed in fresh clothing, their damp hair loose around their shoulders, their undergarments drying over the sink, Mary made coffee and poured it into two cups. Mrs. Borriello yawned. The kitchen was warm, and comfortable, and Mary’s body felt clean and soft under the fresh clothes. Mrs. Borriello stretched her arms over her head and purred.

  “What’s your first name?” Mary asked.

  “Emilia. My family called me Mila.”

  “Pretty.”

  “Not many call me Mila now.”

  “No.”

  The clock on the mantel ticked its rhythm and Mary remembered Aunt Kate, how they’d sit in the silent kitchen until late, Kate sewing, Ma
ry sipping tea and reading aloud from the newspaper, until it came time to go to sleep.

  Mila Borriello began smoothing her fine black hair, first one side, and then the other. She pulled it away from her face and twisted it behind her head. In only her camisole, and with her cheeks still rosy from the steam of the bath and the warmth of the room, Mary could see that she was still a beautiful woman.

  “How old are you?”

  “I am thirty-four years old.” Mila smiled. “You thought older?”

  Mary nodded. The two women regarded each other in silence.

  “I was married before,” Mila said. “Before Salvatore.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Of course not. How would you know?”

  Mary waited.

  “His name was Alberto. Is Alberto. He’s still alive someplace, I don’t know. Last I saw him was in Naples.”

  Mary felt the room seem to settle down around them. Her hand rested on the table not six inches away from Mila’s hand. She’d never invited her, Mary considered now. She’d never asked her up for tea or coffee, or knocked on her door to see if she needed anything from the market. When Mary, Fran, and Joan made a plan to go put their feet in the fountain, or walk in the park, they’d never asked if Mila Borriello felt like joining them. Alfred sometimes wondered why the Borriellos didn’t live downtown on one of the Italian streets, but mostly they didn’t think of the Borriellos at all.

  “This Alberto, he was father to my oldest boy. You remember.”

  The drowned boy, also Alberto. They called him Albie. Albertos become Albies in America.

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “He was not such a good man, Alberto. In some ways, yes, a decent man, he always made good wages, but in most ways, not such a good man. He loved me, and loved his boy in his way, but he was not the way a man should be. He lifted his hand to me every day and I knew he would lift his hand to my boy. Maybe he would wait until my boy got strong, but maybe not. At first I thought I could spend a little less, sit a little less, but then I saw he would do it anyway and I’m not a woman who deserves hitting. So one day he beat me with the leg of a chair and I left him. I took the boy while he was out of the house and stayed with a woman neighbor, and then I came to New York City and called myself a widow. Then I met Salvatore in America and told him all of it. Some men, they would leave a woman who told him a thing like that. Some men would side with the other man even not knowing him, even the man all the way in Naples. Not Salvatore. He believed me and trusted me and then we had our own two boys, Carmine and Anthony. He was kind to me every day of his life.”

  Mila looked at Mary very seriously. “They don’t know this, Carmine and Anthony. They think Alberto was their full brother, their father’s son.”

  “I understand.” Mary remembered that horrible afternoon. “I’m so sorry about Salvatore. And about Albie. We never talked about—”

  “It’s fine,” Mila said, and set her mouth in that familiar way she had, a widow’s pursed lips, worried brow.

  They were quiet for a long time.

  “I don’t think of that day too much. Sending them out for wood. Much more I think of before we came here, when it was just the two of us, that baby with me on the ship, and how careful I was to give him the cleanest portion of the sheet, and the best of what we had at meals. You’ve never seen a baby cling the way Alberto clung to me in America when we got here first. Sometimes it’s hard to understand that that baby turned into my boy. That that baby disappeared, and turned into a boy, and then that boy disappeared. So he left me twice. Do you understand?”

  “Your English is very good.”

  “I don’t mean my English. I mean do you understand about having a baby and worrying sick over him and finally getting him away from a dangerous thing and then having so much good happen and then the baby grows into a handsome boy and then he is gone? One, two, three, gone. I pushed him out of me, and nursed him, and soothed him, and then one day he left here and didn’t come back. Like he was nothing and everything I felt for him was nothing and all that time we felt it was good, and strong, and special, it was really no stronger than a strand of hair snipped in two.

  “A few months after the accident a man came with a document to sign, and that was it. Salvatore signed it and explained to me that there was nothing else they could do. They never found him in the river. He never washed up anyplace. Salvatore was as sad as I was, but it’s different for men. He went to work and came home and seemed the same but I knew better. We had three boys, and then we had two.”

  A memory of Tobias Kirkenbauer ambled across Mary’s mind: she saw herself tying him into his pram, pushing him down to the water with a picnic of bread and cheese. What did they say to each other? What was that funny way he said her name? She recalled the tiny hairs on the doctor’s top lip when he warned her not to tell Mrs. Kirkenbauer that the boy was gone. If Mrs. Kirkenbauer had asked for him, Mary would have lied, and yet she died anyway. Though Mary had seen enough death to know what it looked like when it came, it was always a shock to see that whatever it is that animates a person can slip away so easily, like a drop of water slipped down a drain. Perhaps she found out, Mary considered. Perhaps a mother knows.

  “I’m not telling you this for you to say sorry, Mary. Any decent person is sad to hear such a thing so it’s useless to say anything in response. I’m telling you this so you can see I know a little about men and about life. A woman who is married twice and has three children and gets herself to America with an infant alongside knows a little about the world and about men. You understand? You can imagine what it was like on that ship without a husband and with a boy to suckle.”

  Mary waited for what she knew was coming.

  “You should stay away from that Alfred.”

  Mary felt the old defensiveness rise up but swallowed it back down again. “Well, anyway, he’s married.”

  Mila Borriello touched Mary’s hand. “How many hours was I with him since he found Mr. Driscoll and came up here to knock on my door? In all those hours, not once does he mention his wife. The only woman he mentioned was you.”

  Mary felt ashamed at the soaring she felt in her chest upon hearing this, at the familiar lightness in her bones that used to come over her when she’d hear his key in the door. Now that he’d seen her, he’d make excuses to come back, and she had to decide what she’d do when that happened. Liza Meaney will never know him like I do, she thought. Then she remembered that Liza Meaney had cured him, had convinced him to stick with a job, and for Liza Meaney he’d proposed marriage, become a stepfather. She had a vision of herself on North Brother, looking across the water at Manhattan, thinking about what he could possibly be doing that would keep him from writing to her, from trying to see her. No, she decided. No.

  EIGHTEEN

  On the night Driscoll was taken by ambulance, Alfred slept in the old man’s rooms. He heeded Mary’s advice and washed himself in the basin. Not wanting to sleep on the bed Driscoll had been coughing into, he found a spare blanket and made a bed on the kitchen floor. In the morning, he walked to the stable with his thoughts full of Mary, and how he could put everything right again.

  As he cleaned the stalls and fed the horses, he decided he’d wait until after Samuel’s exams to tell Liza what he now knew—that he could not be with her, and certainly could not marry her. He’d wait until after Christmas. After the New Year. But when he got back to their rooms that afternoon and saw them there, mother at the sink and son at the table, and the way she warned him with a look to keep quiet, and winced when he took off his boots by the door, and followed him around, touching everything he touched to straighten it, right it, clean from it whatever invisible grime he might have carried there on his fingertips, he knew he would not be able to stay there one day longer. He returned to his boots and went out the door before she could ask where he was going.

  Back on the sidewalk he headed straight into the barrage of sound—children shrieked, their
mothers calling after them; the horses clopped, whinnying and snouting at anything that came near them; the carriages squeaked and rattled; the automobiles honked and sputtered as they tore down the streets, the passengers gripping the crossbars.

  Alfred sank into the bright busyness of the Lower East Side. He noticed now that many of the windows had Christmas candles waiting until nightfall to be lit, and remembered that Christmas was just ten days away. The day was warm, more like October than December, and he walked in a westerly direction across Allen and Eldridge Streets, through the blocks of all Italian—Mulberry and Mott. He headed south along Lafayette, and then west again until he came to the outdoor market on Chambers, where a twelve-foot Yule tree was standing at the northwest corner, decorated with beads and tinsel. He bought a loaf of bread and a few slices of smoked trout wrapped in a newspaper. With the bread and fish tucked under his arm, he turned east again. After a few blocks, he stopped on a curb and ate his meal while a group of children kicked a ball around him. Licking his fingers, he continued toward the East River, passing the faces of a hundred tenements standing shoulder to shoulder, like a row of tight-lipped and straight-backed soldiers. The zigzagging fire escapes, chipped and rusted, marred each façade, and Alfred knew without looking that the interior hallways were similarly spoiled, the plasters cracked and crumbling, the pastoral scenes painted over and over again until every color was a shade of gray. On one block alone he passed a delicatessen, a butcher, a baker, a milliner, a tailor, and a factory that made women’s shoes. He passed a police officer who was trying to coax a dog from the street, and another officer yelling up to a man who had thrown a pile of chicken bones from his fifth-floor window. The man shouted back to the officer in German, and then pulled the curtain across. “Want me to tell you what he said?” Alfred asked the officer.

  “Don’t bother,” the officer replied, and continued on.

  Alfred turned and turned and turned again until before him was the Brooklyn Bridge, that shining, massive jewel suspended over the water and held there, it seemed from Alfred’s vantage, by magic, by a simple crosshatch of wire and string. He was a German, the man who thought how to do that. Alfred marveled as he stared at how the bridge seemed to take a flying leap across the tidal strait below. He recognized the gothic towers of the old world, except instead of appearing bulky and grim like they did in the Rhine country, here in America they held only promise, and the arched portals carved into them seemed to Alfred to welcome those who crossed like a collection of solemn ancestors, holding the new Americans in the palms of their hands.