Deadly

by Julie Chibbaro

  I followed him to the other end of the hall, into the laboratory, a giant room, astonishing in its size and complication—dozens of tools and test tubes and microscopes, things I wanted to touch and look at. I could smell chemicals burning in the beakers. A good number of science fellows bent over tables, their work occupying them until I passed with Mr. Soper. As I listened to my interviewer, I felt watched. I felt aware of my face and hair, I felt light and off balance. I don’t think I’d ever been in a room with so many boys before.

  I forced myself to focus on Mr. Soper’s words.

  He stopped at a microscope and tapped it. He said, “Every living thing in the world is made up of tiny cells that are invisible to the bare eye, cells one can see only through a microscope.”

  I thought of the article I had read with Marm about Dr. Golgi and the nervous cells. I thought of the science book my father gave me.

  I felt, listening to my interviewer, as if a door opened just a crack, and I could see the edge of a new world. I wanted to ask if I could look through the bronze microscope he touched and see how we are held together. I wanted to stay in that room for the rest of the day and explore like an arctic adventurer.

  “A microscope is just one of the many tools we use,” he said. “My position at the department is head epidemiologist, and a large part of our work is investigating the causes of disease epidemics. We want to know how these things start.”

  This struck me—that there exists a person who searches for the start of disease. Not a doctor, but more like a detective, sifting through scientific evidence.

  “I’m ready, sir, to help you in any way I can,” I said.

  “Good,” he said.

  I think I saw in him a smile.

  He had to return to work; we went back to his office and he offered to pay me five dollars weekly, if hired. That is more money than I ever had—it would make our lives a good bit easier! We closed the meeting with a firm handshake. He said he’d notify me of his decision by next week. It seems I’m not the only person available to do this job, but I know I’m certainly the most interested!

  September 30, 1906

  Sometimes I get this feeling that I am unable to be sure that everyone around me is seeing the same thing as me. Perhaps it’s because I feel I’m the only girl who seems to care about things like disease and death, cells and bones. I feel as if I’m making the world up as I go. Like things aren’t real, apart from me. It’s very disorienting and a little scary to feel this way, and I’m not sure where it comes from. It’s almost as if I’m in a glass beaker alone, unable to touch the world or talk to anyone in it.

  There are days, whole days in school that I find I don’t remember. I drift along, thinking of other things, the lessons passing through my fingers, into my notepad. I come home and look at my notes and don’t recall hearing a word, no less writing any of it. Last semester was terrible. After Anushka left, I felt like a dried insect in a spiderweb, the juice drained from me. I wish there was a school for girls like me, girls interested in the invisible, the biologic, the organic. When I say the word biologic to someone like Josephine, her eyes cross a little, and her mouth gapes, and I can hear her little brain rattling around in her skull like a smooth marble.

  October 5, 1906

  I fear I did not get the job. I don’t know what happened. I’ve checked the mailbox every day; I simply never received a notice from my interviewer. I don’t want to think about it anymore, but I cannot keep my mind from wandering to it. Marm says I should go up there and inquire, as the man said he would notify me either way. But I wouldn’t be able to look into my interviewer’s aloof eyes as he rejected me in person. I can hardly believe it. He seemed so pleased with me, my questions, my skills. Every time I think about it, which I do at least a hundred times a day, my other thoughts grow pale and watery until they wash away altogether, and I think once more, I don’t believe I didn’t get the job.

  I worry that without it, I will never understand the world, and why terrible things happen to innocent people. This week, death struck again, and I could do nothing to stop it. Hilda Rothkopf over on Greene Street, a girl who was in my school a few years ahead of me, who used to be Hilda Groenig and is now married to Gerry Rothkopf, who works as a draper on the Ladies’ Mile, was with child. Marm had been watching over her the last few months; she finally came due and sent Gerry over. I was home, so I went with Marm to Greene Street, where Hilda’s water had broken and she’d entered hard labor. It seems the baby was a breech, and in Marm’s experience, the only way to really deliver a breech is to turn it around. Marm rolled up her sleeves, washed her hands and forceps, then set to work turning the baby. My heart dropped for that poor girl, her face twisted in pain. When they heard her cries, sympathetic women neighbors came calling to offer help. It took us nearly an hour to turn the baby. Finally Marm ordered Hilda to push, which she did for the better part of the night, until her baby came out. Tears blinded my eyes when I saw the blue little thing in the basin. I knew immediately that it was dead.

  Nine months and the poor girl delivers a stillborn. Such things make me want to wail and shout at the sky! Why didn’t that baby survive? Why does death happen to one so young? Why don’t we understand the human body?

  But I am speechless, weighed down by a heavy sadness. There is no one I can talk to about the why.

  October 7, 1906

  I wrote to Anushka and told her my fears about not getting the job, and then I received a letter from her about a lamb she killed, parts of which they cured, and parts they ate for dinner. I feel like my best friend is drifting further and further away from me. Our letters seem to cross, we rarely address one another directly. Finally, today, she wrote asking if I got the job, which caused a cry of frustration in me. If only our letters could reach each other more quickly, the distance between us would not seem so far.

  I think I’m just nervous with the waiting—I’ve applied for other jobs but have heard nothing. Marm says the man still might write to me, but I’m finding that very hard to believe.

  Maybe, too, I feel jealous of Anushka’s life. She seems to be on a path of adventure and wonder, all sorts of new things happening to her, and here I am, stuck at Mrs. Browning’s School for Girls, with no prospects for decent work. Today our short, stout, overly perfumed Miss Ruben told us we should aspire to the Gibson Girl image and think of ourselves as delicate roses. Josephine and Fanny were chosen to walk on their tiptoes in front of the class, in their best refined manner. They did look beautiful on the surface, perfect like pictures. Miss Ruben said that together they looked like a stunning bouquet. “Not like you,” she said, turning to me with a dramatic wave of her hand. I sat by the window daydreaming; her attention woke me like a splash of cold water.

  “Prudence,” she said, “you don’t seem to have an ounce of fashion sense. You must loosen, soften. With your hair tied so tightly to your head, you look nothing like a rose. Instead you resemble a prickly, twiggy thistle!”

  I felt my heart turn to stone. I heard the other girls tittering. Out of all of them, she had plucked me like a weed to chastise. I wanted to be anywhere but there. I glanced out the window and imagined myself growing in a field of thistles with Anushka, whom I pictured to be the same sort of purple flower as me.

  I decided I’d rather be a thistle than a rose. Thistles are vibrant and resilient.

  I spent the rest of the day mourning the absence of my Anushka, my best friend who used to sit next to me, passing me smiles throughout our silly lessons.

  She writes to me that she hurt her shoulder shooting a rifle. A rifle! How can I answer that, when I have never touched a weapon? She writes about skinning an animal, plucking a chicken, riding a horse bareback, milking a goat with one hand. Shooting a lamb. And I fear we are becoming two completely different people who will never share a common bond again.

  But I don’t want to lose her.

  She is still the girl whose smile I think of whenever I need some cheer.

&n
bsp; October 12, 1906

  Finally, finally, finally! A miracle has happened, finally, to me! Late this week, I received notice in the mail from my interviewer that I was indeed chosen to be his assistant. He asked me to meet him at his office on Friday to talk about the job. I was so happy to see him again, to look into his serious face, I could barely contain my joy.

  I stood at his desk, my hat in hand, watching the strong muscles twitch in his jaw.

  “Miss Galewski,” he said, “before you agree to take on this work, I would like to make it clear to you that I’m not hiring you as a secretary. Instead I’m looking for someone who can come with me to disease sites and help me investigate causes.”

  His words frightened me for a moment; I told him I was not any kind of expert.

  He shook his head. “I need an assistant, a note taker who can also be a participant. I’m asking you to use your brain, not just type out the words I dictate, but help me think through the cases.”

  The description thrilled the words from me; I could only nod in agreement.

  He handed me a folio in which to take notes. He said, “The office has just been engaged in a typhoid fever investigation. I’ll need your services immediately. Monday at eight in the ante meridiem, we will meet at the office and ride a motor carriage out to Long Island, where a household has taken ill with the disease.”

  I thought of Marm and school and found myself unable to remind him of my half-day responsibility to attend.

  “Sir, I will be here Monday at eight,” I said.

  He explained that he’d been away on an epidemic hunt, which was why I spent the last intolerable weeks awaiting word from him. Up in Peekskill, he tested water pipes—those running into and out of houses; he traced their path all the way back to the city’s reservoir. That reservoir provides Peekskill with its drinking water. There, Mr. Soper discovered that a builder was allowing his workers to bathe and defecate in the reservoir, thus tainting the drinking water. Nearly the whole town contracted the cholera. A number of the weaker Peekskillers, due to excessive diarrhea and vomiting (I must get used to these medical words, as my interviewer uses them freely), mostly young children and elderly folks, died of dehydration.

  I didn’t show my emotion, but a part of me cringed to hear him talk of the deaths—and I questioned myself—do I really want to take on another job that includes such sorrow? When things go badly, when our mothers or babies die, a wild sadness comes over me, a feeling I can’t shake for days.

  But this job will be different. Here I’ll be taking steps to fight death.

  He dismissed me then, and I left the office charged with a sense of awe—at the job, at the man who entrusted it to me. He holds tight his mustachioed face, his moody, watchful eyes closed to me. He has a darkness about him, no doubt from witnessing so much illness, but beneath that seems to lie a great caring.

  When I arrived home, I told Marm about our meeting. She immediately objected to the work hours and the travel. I could see it striking her, the turn of her mouth changing, the pinch surfacing on her brow.

  “Don’t you have to be in school at eight in the morning?” she asked.

  When I told Marm that I’d promised to meet Mr. Soper, she said, “Prudence, the rules of your school state that you may take an afternoon position. You cannot be there in the morning. You must tell him that.” She folded her arms. “And I don’t like you going in a motor carriage with a stranger, a grown man.”

  I felt the job slipping away from me at Marm’s protests. I saw the reason for her doubts, but I want—I need—the job, so I argued with her.

  “If I were a boy—”

  “You’re not a boy! You’re a girl, in her last year of school. This is not what we agreed on!” Marm raised her voice; I don’t hear her shout often, and never at me.

  “But I want this job! More, much more than school!” I cried.

  Marm lowered her eyelids at me. She has worked for years to maintain my standing in that school. She tends to expectant mothers for months only to collect a small sum at the birthing session. Then every fall and spring, she has to pay for my school clothes and for the boots I wear. Money for books and pencils and paper. And she never complains. She thinks it’s worth it, that it’s a finer school than any of the Free Schools, and that it will lead me to a better job than hers one day.

  But I pressed on. “I don’t learn anything, Marm! Just bookkeeping, and French, and how to order a household of servants—”

  “There’s no work for girls in the sciences,” she insisted. She struck the table with the flat of her hand and said, “You absolutely cannot take that job. I will not allow it, Prudence!”

  I burst out, “If I were a boy like Benny, you would let me take it.”

  I saw her suck in her breath, as if I had hit her.

  “Marm,” I cried. “Marm, please!”

  I was sorry I had brought up Benny, but I had to make her understand.

  She stared at me, her lips pressed so hard together they turned white.

  I softened my voice. “Benny is the reason I want the job, Marm. I need to know why he died—I need to understand.”

  Marm stood so still, I was afraid she had stopped breathing.

  I asked her if we could talk to Mrs. Browning. Perhaps we could convince her to allow me to finish lessons on my own time, to remain in school. It was such a rare chance. I brought up Jacob Riis, and all the good things the Department of Health and Sanitation has done for this city.

  I clutched my hands together and waited.

  Marm said, finally, “We will go see Mrs. Browning privately, and hear what she says. But you must listen to her verdict. If she does not agree, you must stay in school.”

  I hugged my own waist and held in my reply; Marm turned away from me and started supper, and we spoke no more of it.

  We have a meeting with Mrs. Browning this evening in her parlor.

  I can’t help it; I feel angry at Marm. She was the one who taught me about the body and illness, she encouraged me to use my brain, she showed me how to pry into scientific matters, to be curious, always. Now she wants me to be a bookkeeper—why? Most offices hire girls as typists the same way they would buy a vase for flowers; doesn’t Marm want me to be smarter than that? My interviewer goes that one step further, he asks me to get my brain involved. It is unusual, I agree, but its very strangeness is what makes it so special.

  I feel as if Marm has dropped me from a tall tower, as if she is no longer beside me. I can’t find a foothold as to what is right. Take the job and possibly have to leave school, or not take the job and be miserable for the rest of my life. I wish I didn’t have to choose between school and work.

  October 13, 1906

  I took the job, I’m leaving school. I feel as if something inside me has broken, a cord attaching me to a familiar world. I don’t know if it’s the right thing. So many of our neighborhood girls forgo school to earn money for their families. I hear the Feldman sisters tromping up the stairs and creaking into bed at all hours of the night and have always felt secretly grateful I wasn’t in their position. I know I’ve been held in special esteem by our neighbors, the way Marm has been able to keep me in school. They all thought I would go far, and now I don’t know what they’ll think.

  I must do my best with this job, learn all I can and make something of myself. Maybe I could one day be like Florence Nightingale, a heroic nurse healing the wounded. But she was born into an upper-class English family and could afford to attend the best schools. A future in science seems like such an impossible dream involving faraway, expensive schools that certainly would not accept a lower-class American Jewish girl.

  The meeting at Mrs. Browning’s has shown me the shabbiness of my own life.

  I got that feeling the moment her maid brought us into her parlor. I have never been in such an extravagant home. Hanging from the walls were tiger and lion heads, teeth bared, eyes glaring. Between two elephant tusks hung photographs of Mr. Browning with a group of hunt
ers on a safari in Africa. Another large photo showed Mrs. Browning being hefted in a conveyance by several men, long peacock feathers decorating her hat.

  Marm sat at the edge of a finely upholstered chair, and I slipped onto the hard surface of a carved wooden bench. Crystal lamps shimmered on the side tables, lace curtains covered the windows. My teacher’s home seemed to perfectly follow the rules of decorative furnishings we’d studied in the Ladies’ Home Journal. Even down to the obese Persian cat that lay on the Oriental carpet, swishing its tail, watching us with careful eyes.

  Marm played with her purse, popping it and snapping it. I sat with my hat in hand and stared at the painting of Mary and Jesus on the far wall. I felt Mrs. Browning had us wait those several minutes in order to fully absorb her providence.

  Finally she came in, followed by her butler, with tea. How strange it felt to be served by a real butler. He poured and left us and Mrs. Browning chattered with Marm for a few minutes about what a good student I am, always attentive and so on. Marm looked so out of place. Her usually rosy cheeks were the color of waxed beans, her mouth curved downward. She was unhappy with me for wanting to leave school; she was not comfortable in this woman’s house, forced into the position of having to barter for me. It made me angry to read all this in her face.

  “It’s very lovely to speak with you, Mrs. Galewski, but you must remind me what brought your visit,” Mrs. Browning said.

  Marm cleared her throat and said, “It seems Prudence has managed to find a sort of job. She would be working at the New York City Department of Health and Sanitation, assisting a sanitary engineer.”

  My bright teacher turned to me, nose wrinkled, her perfectly plucked brows furrowed. She said, “A sanitary engineer? Why would you want to assist such a person, Prudence?”

  The question felt like a pin through my stomach. She had rarely spoken directly to me before, except to tell me how pretty I’d be if only I put my hair in curls and wore a ribbon in my collar.