Fever: A Novel

by Mary Beth Keane

  Mrs. Hughes put her hands on her hips. “I don’t understand. I was told you do all sorts of cooking. That you’re very good.”

  “Look, why don’t I do a lovely baked fruit pie. That would be nicer anyway, this time of year. You bring me your pie plate and I’ll do it lovely for you and walk it over there warm before they get there.”

  “But don’t you have to slice fruit anyway for a pie?”

  “Yes, but—” Mary sighed. “Fine. Bring me the fruit.”

  And then one morning, Mrs. Waverly, from the third floor of their building, came down and asked if she could speak to Mary about something serious. Mary swallowed, tried to think back on every single thing she’d cooked in the previous month. She hadn’t worried so much when she was working at the bakery, but it was different there, the large kitchen, the line of customers out the door, Evelyn quietly kneading and slicing in her corner. They’d cleaned everything at night, and the equipment was always pristine when they unlocked the back door in the morning. There was ventilation at the bakery, sunlight, room to move, racks laid out specially for things to cool. Now that she was working out of her own kitchen, everything seemed cramped and every surface she touched felt sticky no matter how often she plunged a rag into hot water and wiped down the counters, the table, the cabinets, the floor. She braced herself for whatever Mrs. Waverly had come to tell her. But instead of talking about an outbreak of fever in the neighborhood, Mrs. Waverly asked Mary if she ever considered cooking in a more professional capacity.

  “If you can turn meals out of this”—she took in the tiny kitchen, the small stove—“I can’t imagine what you could do in a real kitchen.” Mary kept her mouth shut and listened. “I’m head nurse at the Sloane Maternity Hospital and the cook there just quit. The wages are excellent and I can tell you that it’s a nice place to work. Have you ever cooked on that scale? The beds are usually full, plus the doctors and nurses. Guests sometimes. I can put your name in.” The woman laughed. “I’m in charge of finding the person so the deck would be stacked.”

  Mary swallowed.

  “It sounds overwhelming, I know,” Mrs. Waverly said, “but you’d have plenty of help.”

  “It’s not that—” Mary said, placing her spoon on the counter and crossing her arms. She felt dizzy. She wanted to sit down except that she had shepherd’s pies cooling on the seats of both chairs.

  “Think about it,” Mrs. Waverly said. “If you do a good job they’ll raise you. It’s steady work. The last cook was there for years.”

  Mary touched the edge of the counter. She imagined the size of the refrigerator they’d have in a hospital. The size of the oven, the compartments for roasting, for warming, the stacks and stacks of clean white plates, the copper-bottomed pots.

  “Look, why don’t you go down and talk to the administrator. You can ask any questions. Spell your full name for me and I’ll let him know to expect you.”

  “Yes, that would be fine. Okay.”

  “Do you have paper? Mary what?”

  “Oh, it’s easy enough. Mary Brown. Like the color.”

  • • •

  The interview would have made Mary laugh if she hadn’t been so nervous. She washed the night before and again that morning, and cut her nails, and scrubbed her cuffs with baking soda and a toothbrush, and used some of Alfred’s hair tonic to smooth every strand of hair away from her face. The administrator was no cook, Mary could tell right away, and asked only whether she could turn out on that scale, not a single question on how she’d stretch ingredients, keep things simple, how she’d make it so everything would be served hot and at once. He asked for a reference, and Mary swallowed, wanted to kick herself for not expecting it. “Yes,” she said coolly. “There was Mrs. Emilia Borriello. I can write down her address. Also Mrs. Harriet . . . Mrs. Harriet Sloane.”

  “Sloane like our Sloane? Same name?”

  “Same name,” Mary said, realizing, and her heart sunk.

  “Seems like a good sign,” the man said, and wrote down her address. He printed her name on top. “You said Browne, yes?” he tilted the paper to show her.

  “No e at the end,” she said. “Brown.”

  He struck a line through the e. “Good,” he said, and shook her hand. She expected him to say that she’d hear from him once he checked out her references, but since Mrs. Waverly had recommended her, he told her she could start the following week unless she heard from them to do otherwise. On her way out she passed a room where six women in six beds were recuperating, their babies next to them in bassinets.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Once Mary got used to being addressed as Mrs. Brown, she decided that the hospital was, without question, the best situation she’d ever had. She’d seen childbirth before—she was charged with holding a leg when a neighbor of Aunt Kate’s went into unexpected labor, and many times she’d waited downstairs with other staff while the mistress of a house moaned and roared until the doctor arrived with chloroform. She expected Sloane to be a chaotic place, and that she would have to weave through a dozen exhausted women as they walked the halls just as laboring women used to walk the halls of the tenements, trying to help the baby come, their fingertips brushing the wallpaper for balance. Instead, Sloane was organized. It was a clean, bright, shining place with strange contraptions in every room to help the doctors know more about the baby that was to come. The nurses made reference to Twilight Sleep and it took Mary a week to realize that they were referring to labor, which was mostly silent, and often the babies were born silent, too, which struck Mary as worrisome but didn’t seem to faze the nurses, who swaddled their limp bodies into tight little packages and propped them up on pillows for their mothers to admire. Only later, hours, sometimes days later, would the babies come out of it, and begin to whimper and cry. Those babies who were particularly cranky got a soothing syrup of codeine to quiet them.

  The doctors didn’t care what she did as long as there were hot meals coming out of her kitchen. Unlike in a private home where the staff wasn’t permitted to have an opinion about anything political, at Sloane they passed the time talking about President Wilson, the income tax, the war brewing in Europe. The administrator occasionally checked in with her, but only to ask if she had what she needed in the way of equipment and help. The staff was honest, and when she sent them out to shop they came back with what she asked for—what did she care if they snuck a few things home to their own pantries? She’d done it often enough herself.

  She arrived at the hospital at five in the morning, and left at five in the evening, once she was sure the staff knew how to complete the supper she’d started, and that there would be enough to go around. Always, as her final chore, she left the oats soaking in water so they’d cook up quickly in the morning.

  Then, one evening, about six weeks after she started at Sloane, and with two sliced-turkey sandwiches wrapped carefully in her handbag, Mary arrived at their rooms to find Alfred on the floor next to her side of the bed, his face gray and his skin like a cold piece of cod. She shouted his name sharply as she took his hands and tried to pull him up. She dropped his hands and slapped his face. “Alfred!” she said again. She slapped him again. And then, just as she was about to run out into the hall for help, he blinked, and tried to sit up. “Get Jimmy,” he told her. “Or Mr. Hallenan. Someone strong.”

  “What are you talking about?” she demanded. “We’re not on Thirty-Third Street anymore. Come on, Alfred. Stop it.”

  He was quiet for a long time, and she thought he might have fallen asleep with his eyes open.

  “I’m okay now, Mary. I just got confused.”

  Mary let out a long sigh of relief. “You scared me.”

  The next day, she didn’t want to leave him for twelve hours, and thought to ask someone from the building to look in on him while she was at work, but as she walked down the stairs she realized that although she knew her neighbors well enough to exchange pleasantries, and had done laundry or cooked a dish for many of them, she didn’
t know any of them well enough to ask for a favor like that, not when they’d have a thousand questions about it, and maybe tell everyone else. No, better to leave him sleeping. There were times when he slept all day long, and she predicted this would be one of those days. He’d stay curled under the covers until she came home again, and then, if she had luck, she’d get him to eat something. She’d left bread and butter on a plate beside the bed, and next to it, a tall glass of water.

  She was distracted all day at the hospital. A new mother had died in the middle of the night. Sepsis, they determined, and the mood everywhere, including the kitchen, was somber. The nurses cried over the little baby girl left behind, and cried harder when the husband came and didn’t seem to know how to hold her. They took Mary’s silence as part of that sadness, and she was glad to not have any questions. It was terrible about the mother, terrible when any young person dies, but she couldn’t stop herself from thinking that they were rich, these women. The price of giving birth at Sloane was more than Mary would earn in six months, and if they had that kind of money then they also had a full staff, families to help. There were poor women all over the city dying every minute of the day, leaving two, three, four babies behind.

  She wondered if Alfred had woken. She wondered if he’d seen the bread. Sometimes he felt a world better after he washed himself, and she meant to leave a bar of soap and a washcloth on the ledge to remind him. She could pretend a headache, leave early, go home to check on him. A walk would do him good, if he could manage it. Maybe they’d go out to eat that night. There was a new restaurant by the university and it might do him good to be in a busy place. The energy of the city would sweep him past the day’s trouble.

  She diced and sautéed and lifted the wooden spoon to her mouth for a lick, returned it to the pan, turned the food ’round and ’round. She shook salt, pepper, chopped fresh oregano, parsley, swept it from the blade of her knife with her finger, all while thinking about Alfred. She measured cream, checked for spots on glasses, bowls, forks, spoons. She asked one of the new girls to wash everything again.

  When she got home, Alfred was better but didn’t want to go anywhere, and so Mary sat in the dim kitchen by herself, her feet up on Alfred’s chair. She felt tired, and realized only when she sat down how worried she’d been. She tried to read but she caught herself going over the same sentence again and again.

  The next morning, the nurses were sharp with one another. Two were out sick, one of them Mrs. Waverly, and without her calm authority the rest of them were like children left behind in a room without an adult. Mary thought of Alfred, hoped he hadn’t caught anything. Perhaps whatever was bothering him now had nothing to do with the medicine at all. Maybe he had the flu. Maybe he’d be up and better in a day or two.

  That evening, he was bad again, and she could see he’d been up and around while she was at the hospital. The cutlery drawer was left hanging open. There was a glass in the sink. He was fully dressed but sleeping on their bed, and she had to say his name three times, and shake him, before he cracked his eyes to look at her. “Mary,” he said, and put his hand on her lap before falling asleep again.

  More were absent the next day at the hospital, and a mother who’d been released a month before was readmitted, with her child, both of them slack with fever. More sepsis, the kitchen assistant guessed. The administrator put the sick woman in a room to herself, and then came down the hall to ask Mary if she’d mind pitching in if she had a moment. There was so much to do, and it would only be for a few days, until everyone recovered from whatever was going around and they were back to full staff again. The doctors rushed through the hallways looking stern, tired, worried. The ones who normally left when Mary did now stayed on, some stayed all night. As she was rolling supper down the hall on the dining cart, she observed three of them talking in hushed tones in a quiet corner of the passageway. One took off his glasses to rub his eyes.

  She was in a patient’s room, lifting the top off a plate of braised beef, when the thought came through her like a tremor. A nurse breezed in, brushed by Mary, checked the patient’s pulse, peeked into the bassinet to check on the baby, and noticed Mary. “Oh God, not you, too,” she said, helping Mary to a chair. She held Mary’s wrist for a few moments. “Your pulse is fast.” She put the back of her hand to Mary’s head. “But you’ve no fever.”

  “I’m all right,” Mary whispered. “Just tired.”

  “You sure?”

  “Is it sepsis?” Mary asked, trying to keep her voice steady. “Or something else?”

  The young nurse sighed. “They thought sepsis at first, until so many came down with it, and now they’re thinking Typhoid.”

  Mary felt her insides erupt into chaos. The nurse guided her back farther in the chair. “You should go home, Mary,”

  “No, no,” she said. “I’ll be fine in a minute.”

  The nurse flagged down a doctor and pointed to Mary.

  “Go home, Mrs. Brown,” he told her. “If you feel well in the morning, then by all means come in, but otherwise stay home. We’ll cope without you.”

  “I said I’m fine,” Mary said.

  “Doctor’s orders.”

  Too tired to argue, Mary gathered her things, left instructions for the woman helping out in the kitchen, and was out on the sidewalk before noon.

  • • •

  She should have gone straight uptown to Alfred, but she walked instead, and when she actually paid attention she noticed that she was covering dozens of blocks without noticing. She turned with the traffic, and felt herself slip into a kind of trance as she took in the storefronts, as she stepped around patches of ice, piles of horse shit that had been frozen, petrified, and would stay that way until the warm days of late March. It was February 1915, and she walked with her coat hanging open, her pale, white throat exposed to the cutting wind. She wanted to lie down and sleep but instead she kept walking, and walking, and finally, she was home.

  She opened the door to their rooms at almost the same time as she did most evenings, and decided if he asked what was wrong with her, she wouldn’t tell him, wouldn’t worry him; he had enough to deal with at the moment. But when she pushed open the door and saw him in the same heap as she’d left him that morning, she almost laughed. No need to have worried. He hadn’t asked about her in weeks, not how the new situation was going, how she liked it, only when she’d get paid, when she’d get a chance to go downtown to visit that man again. She felt anger bubbling up in her belly and made no effort to quiet her movements as she filled the kettle with water, slammed it on the range to set it boiling for tea. Let him rot in there, she thought. I’m here working and worrying, and now this. Typhoid. Again. Jesus.

  “Alfred,” she called sharply toward the open door of the bedroom. “Did you eat? Did you go out today?”

  It felt like the old days, asking questions she already knew the answers to. She knew she was only setting herself up to pick a fight, and yet she couldn’t stop herself. What would they do now? How would he help? He had to snap out of it and get back with the Teamsters. He had to forget about his medicine entirely.

  “Alfred!” she said again, slamming closed the window onto the airshaft. It was freezing in their rooms. She went into the bedroom and closed that window as well. She pulled open the curtains to let the last of the day’s dim light into the room.

  “Get up,” she said, one hand on her hip, the other hand reaching down for the corner of the quilt. She had every intention of whipping it off him, yanking him to his feet, marching him around the neighborhood until he protested and gave her a little of the fight she needed if they were to keep going.

  “Alfred?” she said, noticing, finally, that his face was gray, his lips tinged with blue. She dropped the edge of the quilt and touched his cheek, cold but not clammy. She dropped her face to his and felt for his breath. Run for help, she ordered herself and felt every small muscle in her body prepare to spring forward, propel her down to the sidewalk to hail a policeman, find a
telephone. But all she could do was stare, and where a moment earlier her body had felt full of turmoil, now it felt perfectly still, like everything within her had paused, like a dancer who leaps and is suspended over the stage for one single second, halfway between one place and another but knowing she is on her way and will have arrived there as soon as she opens her eyes. Mary lifted the edge of the quilt and moved next to him, put her arm around his chest. As long as she stayed there, like that, as if they were sleeping, it hadn’t happened yet. As long as no one knew, and no one else came into their rooms, and they didn’t take him away. His pills were a mess, all over the desk as well as the drawer, and the needles he’d kept so clean and organized were separated, thrown here and there, mixed up with his dirty clothes, one propped inside an empty coffee mug. I should clean it all up, she thought, and realized she didn’t care.

  “There’s Typhoid at the hospital,” she said, looking at the ceiling, worried that she was already forgetting what it felt like to hug him when he was warm, and feeling her heart throb when she thought she felt pressure back. But he didn’t say anything, and there was no pressure back, and after a few minutes, she walked to the grocer’s to call for help.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The doctor on the telephone told Mary that he’d come directly after supper, and true to his word, he buzzed around eight o’clock. After checking Alfred and confirming what Mary had told him when they spoke, he glanced around the room. “Is that his layout?” he asked, looking over at the open drawer, the pills and vials. Mary nodded and then pulled the covers up to Alfred’s chest, tucked them tightly all around. She still half-expected him to open his eyes. She kept thinking she saw him flinch. She stared at his blank face. She thought of the babies swaddled at the hospital, how contented they were when their blankets were wrapped tight.