Fever: A Novel

by Mary Beth Keane

  She went back to the DOH three months later—November 1911—signed the papers again, skipped the sample, and once again she walked out of the building without being stopped. In the bakery, once December arrived, they crushed bits of peppermint and sprinkled them over icing. Mary stayed in her corner of the kitchen, Evelyn in the other, and they worked in peaceful silence. Sometimes sugar burned, sometimes pots boiled over, but for the most part their movements in the kitchen were harmonious, one pushing a pan into the oven when the other pulled one out. If Mary’s timer rang while Evelyn was near the oven, she would open it and check on what was in there, and Mary did the same for her. She worked hard, stayed on her feet for ten hours straight, ate a dinner of burned corners and day-old bread, and every night she went to sleep happy.

  Another Christmas, another bitter winter. The Hudson froze and children skated on its shores. Several times Mary thought she spotted Alfred, once entering the bakery, another time loping up the avenue, but it was never Alfred, and she hoped that wherever he was he was warm and dry. Maybe he’d gone to Canada. He’d always said New York was too small for him, too cramped. Maybe he’d gone south. With so many Negroes moving north it was said that there was work down there. Or maybe he was still in New York City, back with Liza Meaney. Maybe they’d married and gone upstate. Maybe Liza had helped him back on the wagon and gone through with the marriage. Maybe they’d had a child together.

  When 1912 came Mary remembered that Alfred would have a birthday that year, having only one in every four, and calculated how many birthdays he’d had so far, and how it always seemed to soothe him, seeing February 29 on the newspaper, as if it proved that the date really did exist, and so did he. On the day after Alfred’s birthday Mary heard it said that a man had jumped from a moving airplane with the help of an enormous silk cloth that unfurled from a backpack as he floated all the way to the ground, unharmed, and it struck her that Alfred would be interested in that. It’s the kind of thing that would have kept him home for an evening, to talk about that with Mary, how man was getting more and more clever every year.

  There was no use thinking of Alfred anymore, or expecting him to appear, or feeling as if he was watching her sometimes, or thinking of things she would say to him if she ever saw him again. She’d known him more than twenty years, and late at night, when she was tucked into her cot in the Borriellos’ kitchen, the boys snoring in the room beside her, the vent rattling behind the stove, the voices of other tenants traveling up the airshaft so that she could hear their conversations as plainly as if they were sitting at the foot of her bed, she quizzed herself: do you really think Alfred is gone for good? It had been fifteen months since she’d seen or heard from him. “Yes,” she whispered to those who might hear her along the airshaft, and pulled the blankets up around her shoulders. But shrouded inside her mind, hidden so well sometimes she feared she’d never find it again, was a single flame that she cupped with her hand, and blew into, and added twig after twig to. He’ll be back, she thought, and like every night when she had trouble sleeping, once she admitted what she knew was true, her head sunk deeper into the pillow, and she finally fell asleep.

  In April, the Titanic reached Queenstown, and Mary thought of what a beautiful journey that would have been compared to her own crossing. Only five days later she’d not gotten twenty feet from her building when a newsboy shouted at her, “J. J. Astor is lost on the Titanic! As many as eighteen hundred dead!” He waved the New-York Daily Courant in her face, and she fished out coins to purchase it. People were huddled around, sharing their copies and reading bits aloud.

  “And Mrs. Astor?” a woman called.

  “Alive!” The boy shouted. “She’s being brought on the Carpathia!”

  All of New York stayed on the subject for the whole month of April. Mila said she couldn’t sleep for thinking of it, all those drowned people in the icy waters, so far from home. When the Carpathia arrived it was swarmed with those who wanted to get a look at the survivors, most of all Mrs. Astor, who stopped to let a holy man bless her pregnant belly. And when the Mackay-Bennett got to Halifax with three hundred of the bodies, Mary wondered why the survivors came to New York, but the dead did not, and what a gruesome job for the men at the docks that day.

  In May 1912, one whole year after Mary started at the bakery, Jacob pushed open the swinging door that led to the kitchen and told her to come up front, there was a man there who wanted to see her.

  “A man?” she asked. “For me?”

  Mary’s hands shook as she returned the sifter to its spot. Evelyn halted her beating of half a dozen eggs to glance at her. “Did he ask for the baker or ask for me by name?”

  “Just come up front,” Jacob said, and Mary noticed that it was unusually quiet up front for that hour of the morning. Normally, Mary could hear the chatter of customers at the counter, making their selections, some standing there eating what they purchased straight from the paper bags, but that morning she heard nothing except the sound of waiting, and Jacob holding open the door as she went to the sink, washed her hands, dried them, unpinned her hair, and then pinned it again. If Alfred went to the building first they would have told him where to find her. The Borriello boys met her sometimes, walked home with her, and even Jacob had gotten used to seeing them there. Sometimes she sent day-olds with them at midday so they could eat them before she got home. When there were lots of day-olds she sent enough for Fran and Joan as well, and she knew that sometimes those stale pastries and cookies and slices of pie never made it to Thirty-Third Street. Sometimes those two rascals found a patch of sidewalk, set themselves up on the ground, and ate every last crumb.

  She touched her fingertips to the counter and thought of him standing out there. She would know in an instant if he was off the wagon or on. She pictured him married to Liza Meaney and decided it was best to believe that he was when she pushed out the door to face him; that way she wouldn’t be disappointed.

  But she didn’t see anyone until Jacob stepped aside and she saw a man who was not Alfred standing before the window, his hands clasped behind his back.

  “Mary Mallon,” Dr. Soper said. He didn’t step forward. He didn’t extend his hand. “I’m just after telling your boss about your history, and he’s agreed that you are to be let go.”

  Mary felt all her blood rush to her throat and a reverberation begin in her ears. She staggered, and placed one hand on the counter. His hair shone, his shoes shone, his cheeks were as smooth and bare as a baby’s bottom, and his mustache was trimmed to perfection, every single little hair. He was as she remembered him, a wax figure, a nose that could stick a pig, a pale, ineffectual weakling of a man who preyed on healthy, strong women.

  “He’s told you lies,” Mary said to Jacob, her voice a choked whisper, and then noticed the counter, where the newspaper articles about her case were lined up and labeled.

  “I can’t risk it, Mary,” Jacob said.

  “Have you had any complaints?” she demanded. “Has anyone come back to say they were made sick from what they ate here?”

  “I’ve already told him that they haven’t, but he said that doesn’t matter. If they got the fever they might not realize where they got it. We wouldn’t know.”

  Mary picked up a plate of lemon squares and flung them across the room at Soper. Soper stepped neatly to the side, then reached over and locked the entrance door.

  “What did I tell you?” he said to Jacob.

  “Please, Mary,” Jacob said. “He says we can’t sell anything until you’re gone and the kitchen scrubbed. I’m losing money every minute. If the DOH puts a notice in my window I’m done for, do you understand?”

  “Miss Mallon. Please gather your things and come with me.” Soper said. “I’m bringing you directly to Commissioner Lederle’s office.”

  Evelyn slipped through the swinging door and put her hand on Mary’s shoulder.

  “You’re making a mistake,” Evelyn said to the men. Mary felt herself sway, and Evelyn braced her harde
r. She let Evelyn guide her to the back room.

  “It’ll be fine. You’ll get something else,” Evelyn assured her as she stuffed the largest box with pastries.

  “You don’t understand,” Mary said as Evelyn dropped loaves of fresh bread into the canvas satchel Mary took back and forth every day. He’d come with news clippings, and yet no police. He’d found her by chance. He carried the clippings around in his pocket. Maybe he’d followed her. Maybe the DOH had let him see her file and he’d gone looking for that address, one digit off, a building that didn’t exist. He’d suspected, but wasn’t sure, so he sussed out the situation himself. If he’d been sure, he would have brought police. Right now, she figured, he was strongly regretting not thinking out a better plan.

  “Go now, this way, so you won’t have to face him,” Evelyn counseled. “I’ll stall him.”

  Mary had taken one step out the door to the alley when she thought to explain to Evelyn what had happened. How would she put it? With only a few seconds, how to make her understand?

  “I used to cook for a family uptown, and they said—”

  “Oh, I followed your case,” Evelyn said, pushing her out with more force. “I recognized you on the first day.”

  Mary gaped at the woman, and Evelyn shrugged. “You didn’t lie. You told your name. Go on now, Mary. Good luck.”

  Clutching the box of pastries and with her bag of bread pinned under her arm, Mary ran down the alley and out onto the avenue.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Mila watched in silence as Mary swept her powders and creams from the sill. In the twenty months that she’d lived there, Mary was careful to keep her things within the space she’d been allotted: under her cot, the windowsill, a shelf in the pantry, one drawer in Mila’s dresser. “Where will you go?” Mila asked as Mary shoved her belongings in her old velvet satchel.

  “I don’t know,” Mary said as she looked around for the boys’ scratch pads. But when she found them and touched the tip of the pencil to the paper, she realized she didn’t know what to say. She drew a picture of a bird, and below it, two stick-figure boys holding hands.

  “What will you do?” Mary asked as she picked up her satchel and placed it at the door.

  “What will you do? You write to tell me where you land,” she said, and Mary swore that she would. “And you’ll come back, won’t you? After everything has settled down?”

  “Yes, yes. Of course.”

  “Why don’t you go down and stay with Fran for a while? If they knock I’ll tell them I haven’t seen you.”

  Mary imagined Soper showing up with an army of policemen behind him. She imagined them staking out the entrance of the building, kicking down doors, throwing back bedclothes, and peering into closets.

  “I’m sorry. I just have to go.”

  She had been rushing since she left the bakery and felt breathless, faster than everything moving around her. She passed Fran’s floor without slowing, passed Joan’s door, glanced down the hall toward Driscoll’s old rooms, where a young man had been living for a year, and when she burst out onto the sidewalk she bent her head and walked north for no reason except that there were fewer people in that direction, and she’d be able to walk faster. She hopped onto the trolley on Thirty-Sixth Street, and held on as it turned, then came to an abrupt stop to let a dog cross the track, and again a half block later to let people on. She exited at the rear and hoisted her bag over her shoulder.

  There had been no trace of Alfred since she left him behind in the vestibule that early winter morning almost a year and a half earlier, and she considered going to Nation’s to find out if they’d seen him, but when she got her chance she kept going, past the bright blue door, past his other favorite spots. She arrived at Grand Central Terminal, where she dodged the trolleys approaching from every direction, and entered the building. Once inside, she followed the ramps up and around until she came to the main waiting area, the ceiling so distant it might as well have been the sky, and found an empty space on one of the long benches lined up before the timetable.

  Every person who passed her was on his or her way someplace. Those seated looked up at the board once in a while, then at the clock, then back down at their hands to wait a few minutes longer. The announcer made a boarding call for Scarsdale, for Poughkeepsie. From behind her they called for Philadelphia. The best dressed waited in a separate area for the Twentieth Century Limited to Chicago. She scanned the boards for a train to Dobbs Ferry, and then watched closely as the people who wanted that train stood up, checked behind them for forgotten items, hurried off. The announcer made another boarding call. Another. Mary moved her bag from her lap to the floor by her feet and felt her back bend to the curve in the wood. She touched her fingertips to her closed eyelids and felt a tingle in her nose, the sob that had been brewing there all day rise up like a wave lifts itself from the rest of the ocean, rushes forth, spreads itself on shore.

  “Madam?” a man tapped her on the shoulder. He wore a uniform: a jacket and matching cap. “Would you like to wait in the women’s parlor? Do you know where it is?”

  Mary thought he meant the lav, so when he led her to a large oak door and knocked twice, and then told the woman who answered that Mary just needed to rest, and should not be charged the twenty-five-cent fee, she felt afraid that he’d misunderstood something about her, and when they found her out, there would be trouble. But he encouraged her forward, and the woman who opened the door led her first through a small room where women’s light spring coats were hung, and then into a larger room, finished in quartered oak, a Persian-style rug covering the floor. She pointed out one of several rocking chairs. “Thank you,” she said to the woman, and the woman gave Mary a small curtsy as she backed away. Mary registered the small round vanity mirrors placed here and there, the full-length mirrors by the changing rooms. Though it was set up like a lounge in a private home, every step of a woman’s toilet was available for sale, and adjoining the oak-paneled room was a fingernail manicuring room, a shoe polisher, a hairstylist, a seamstress. There was an area where a woman could change from traveling clothes to evening clothes, and women in blue uniforms bustled about to help them. One approached Mary, reached for her bag, but Mary clutched it closer, and the woman went away.

  She could have stayed in that warm and gleaming room for a month, but they wouldn’t have let her, and so what was the point of staying for even an hour if she knew she’d have to leave again, eventually, and had nowhere to go. She studied a painting on the wall—a river, a field of flowers—and remembered her promise to John Cane that she’d look him up, go walking with him one day. She could go to him, she knew. She could meet the ferry and when he got off she could approach him, tell him what had happened, ask if she could stay with him for a while, and he would let her. She’d have to listen to him, and he might pretend at first that he wouldn’t let her, but he would, in the end. She knew he would. Or he might know of someone who needed a boarder. There was a brother, too, she remembered, something wrong with him, but nothing she couldn’t handle, she was sure, just until she got on her feet. She would be kind to him.

  But when she left the ladies’ parlor and made for the uptown IRT, she paused only for a second at the top of the steps before she walked on, walked east, back to the boardinghouse where she’d stayed before finding her cot at Mrs. Post’s. If the woman remembered her she made no sign, and as she was led up the back stairs she knew before they stopped at a door that it would be the same room she’d slept in back in 1910. “Breakfast at seven,” the woman said, and when Mary shut the door and dropped the latch, she collapsed onto the narrow bed and slept.

  Breakfast was two rows of glum faces spooning porridge into their mouths, chewing, swallowing. Mary pushed away her plate. When she stepped out into the sun a dozen pigeons clucked and flew off as one. Along with the loose gray-black spots they left on the sidewalk were feathers, old milk cartons, a box of cracker meal broken open and left now to be blown around in the breeze.

 
With her bag slung over her shoulder, she walked for an hour. West, mostly, but also south. She stopped to stuff paper into the heel of her shoe. Her shoulder ached. At ten she stopped at a park, took off her shoes, and walked on the grass behind the benches while she ate a pear. When there was not a single bit of flesh left on the fruit, she picked up her bag and continued south, until she came to City Hall, and across from City Hall, the almost-complete skyscraper where Jimmy Tiernan spent his days hanging dozens of stories above the sidewalk, guiding terra-cotta panels into place. The pyramid at the top made the whole thing feel like a cathedral, Mary thought, as she tipped her head back and gazed up.

  “Jimmy,” she called out when she saw him coming almost two hours later, one set of hunched shoulders among so many. There was a ring of yellow sweat at his throat.

  “Mary,” he said, and stepped away from the pack. His lunch pail was small in his large hand.

  “Can I talk to you a second?”

  “What’s happened?” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Did Patricia send you?”

  “No,” Mary said, and hesitated. The other men were watching them. They were lined up now against a wall, some squatting, some standing, some sitting, spread legged. They pulled sandwiches and thermoses from the depths of their pockets and ate. She turned her back to them, so she could see only Jimmy.

  “I wondered, um, if you ever found out where Alfred went.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you remember looking for him last year? When there was a job here for him?”

  “Sure. But did he disappear again?”

  Mary blinked up at him. “What do you mean? Did you find him after that?”

  “You mean you didn’t know?”

  “Know what? I haven’t seen him.”

  Jimmy took her by the elbow and led her over to the steps of City Hall.