Hearing that, Mary sat straight and said, “I ain’t no experiment; you can’t do this to me!”
“Miss Mallon, really, it’s the only way,” Dr. Baker assured her.
“I’ve got no disease!” she wailed. “Why do you people think I’m sick? Are you crazy? You’re all crazy!” She tried to yank free her bandaged hands, shouting, “I’m well! I’m well! Why doesn’t anybody believe me?”
She was hurting herself, and our presence wasn’t helping. When the nurse brought Mary her tray of food, the officers stayed with her, and the rest of us stepped from the room. Out in the hallway, we could still hear her crying.
Dr. Parks said to us, “A person who learns for the first time that they carry a contagious disease is often upset. Some won’t cooperate for days.”
“At least she’s in quarantine now,” Mr. Soper said. “At the very least, she will not be passing the typhoid to that family.”
“Give her some time to settle down,” Dr. Parks said. “We can discuss her case when we have some evidence, yes?”
I understood then that we would be leaving her there.
Dr. Parks excused himself to do his work, and Dr. Baker left, saying she had other business in the neighborhood. I went out with Mr. Soper into the cold afternoon, and I could feel an emptiness between us as we headed toward the streetcar stop, now that we had caught Mary. Besides the obvious question—does she really carry the typhoid germ?—there are still so many unknowns to her case. What is her history? Who is she, and where has she been? There looms before us the possibility that she may never give us the answers. I suppose my chief was feeling the same emptiness, for at the trolley stop, he gave me the rest of the day off.
“We shall visit her again soon,” Mr. Soper said. “We have some deep inquiry still ahead of us.”
His face looked so worn and tired, I wanted to touch his cheek and take from him his exhaustion. Instead I watched him walk away, his head bowed.
I can’t stop thinking about her piercing screams, the wild terror in her eyes when the police tackled her, the bloody cuts on her face and hands. It’s one thing to follow the course of a disease through observation and questioning. It is truly another to be out jailing human beings suspected of carrying germs. To tell the truth, the more I think about what we’ve done, the sicker I feel. The whole incident was immoral. Is this how the Department of Health and Sanitation goes about preventing disease? Do I really want to be part of such an organization? What if Mary doesn’t carry the typhoid? We have already assaulted her and imprisoned her and taken her dignity from her, treating her like a common fugitive from the law.
What will we do if we are wrong?
February 1, 1907
I am human. Despite my desire to be purely scientific, I have sympathies, revulsions, fears. But I want to be more than human, better than human—I want to be above and see all, to understand the reason for everything. I want to be pure science, pure brain, without so much feeling. Feeling clouds me. And yet I come back to the sad truth: I am human, I cannot help but feel for a woman we’ve imprisoned, a woman who carries disease and makes people ill.
Tests have revealed it: Mary Mallon carries the typhoid fever bacteria inside her.
It splits me like lightning, this definite news. There can be no doubt about her now. But the way we approached her haunts me, it bothers me to the very center of myself.
Is it right for the department to treat a human being like a contagious disease?
I’m not the only one whose feelings about this are knotted.
Despite Mr. Soper’s personal explanation of how he saved the Bowings from this epidemic, they are outraged at our department for entering and searching their home with no legal warrant, for handling their personal belongings, for frightening the servants and dirtying their floors, and for removing Mary so abruptly and imprisoning her with no apparent reason (Mary is not sick, they insist, and could not possibly be responsible for the department’s claims). They demand an apology from the mayor himself and from every single politician who controls a city office, Republican and Tammany. They want the immediate release of Mary Mallon as they say she is being held illegally. Even Mr. Briggs has tried to respond to their fury with fact, but the family has righteousness on their side and won’t have the department bullying them.
Dr. Parks gives us results over the telephone daily:
Positive.
Positive.
Positive.
Eight days, including the weekend, and all of Mary’s tests, the blood and feces, every single one comes out positive for typhoid. And every day after he receives the call, Mr. Soper replaces the handset on its hooks and stares at it. He folds his fingers and looks at them. I can almost feel his helplessness. I sense he is evaluating difficult questions: What do we do with her now? How do we treat her? Where should we keep her?
How do we explain this to people outside the department?
We went to the hospital for a further interview with her. I was ashamed to visit her, yet I also felt compelled, as if I might be able to see something in her I didn’t see before. Dr. Parks led us to the ward where he had put her with the consumptive population, where he says she is least likely to be affected by the others who are quarantined, and they her. The sound of all those women with that special tubercular cough, wet lungs ripping, and the spit of blood after, echoed through the hall.
Mary lay on her metal bed, a woman to either side of her, the pall of misery shadowing her face so gray, I could scarcely look at her. The bandages had been removed from her hands, and she picked at her scabs constantly. I wanted to reach out and still her nervous fingers. To say something kind to her. She had lost weight and did not raise her head to look at us.
Mr. Soper tapped the hat in his hand and sighed, glancing at me with troubled eyes. I shook my head at him; neither of us had wanted things to go this way.
He sat on the chair beside Mary’s bed and spoke to her in a quiet voice. “Miss Mallon, we have come here to speak to you today because we want to explain your significance in the passage of this pervasive bacteria. You are the first person we have encountered whom we have definitely confirmed to be a healthy carrier of the typhoid germ. It’s important we trace the genesis of your disease.”
She stopped picking at her hands and smoothed her skirt against her leg. “I’ve got no disease,” she said.
Mr. Soper squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. He opened them and said, “I’m afraid the facts are clear in this case. We have determined with daily testing that you are indeed carrying the typhoid germ. Do you remember ever contracting the fever, Miss Mallon?”
“Never been sick in me life.”
“As a child, maybe?”
Mary stretched on the bed and hugged her pillow to her face.
“Even a mild case, perhaps back in your native land?”
She did not answer.
“Miss Mallon, the more we know, the better we can help you and perhaps remove the disease from you,” Mr. Soper said.
It was clear that she refused to believe the typhoid was living inside her. After a few more questions, Mr. Soper sighed; I packed up my notes and we went to see Dr. Parks.
In his office, Dr. Parks told us he was giving her Professor Herman’s Systematic Relief. A tincture of belladonna and chloride, thirteen drops in hot water six times a day, was supposed to kill the germ. He didn’t know when it would start working.
“It’s like many of these contagious diseases,” Dr. Parks said. He teetered his hand edge to edge in the air. “All we can do is wait.”
Mr. Soper nodded, his eyes cast down.
“However, we have discovered one thing about Mary,” the doctor added.
My chief looked up; I licked my pencil to write.
“The nurses learned that she came here from Ireland when she was fourteen after both her parents died. She crossed the Atlantic alone.”
“How did her parents die?” Mr. Soper asked.
The doctor shook his hea
d. “That’s it, that’s all she would say.”
Mr. Soper rubbed his fingers together, thinking. “It would help us so much if she would talk about her past,” he said.
“We can’t force her to talk,” Dr. Parks said.
Mr. Soper sighed. “No, I don’t suppose we can.”
We bid the doctor good day. As I followed Mr. Soper out of the hospital, I imagined Mary Mallon at fourteen losing both of her parents, and the terrible sadness she must have felt. Still, somehow, she managed to travel by herself to America, probably on one of those giant steamers the companies pack with as many people as will fit. A girl alone, with all those strangers pressed against her—the thought makes me cold. She must surely have gotten seasick in the middle of the ocean. Who comforted her? Did she make any friends? When she landed here, how did she find a job and a place to sleep? Maybe she started as a scullery maid in a kitchen and observed the cook, learning as she went. I pictured her, a red-haired girl hardened by her difficult circumstances, fighting for every scrap of food, nothing coming easily.
I understood Mary suddenly, knowing that small bit of her past. I understood her bitterness and her tenaciousness and her anger.
Over supper, I spoke with Marm about the whole case. She blew on her soup, thinking. So much has changed in our lives since I started this job, and I think she wanted to be careful about advising me. After a while, she said, “It’s going to be hard for you to believe that what you’re doing is right, Prudence, because you’re a pioneer, and you don’t know what lies ahead.”
“It seems like no one knows,” I said. “No one understands why a healthy woman carries the typhoid inside her. No one knows how to help her.”
“That’s why they’re keeping her in quarantine, so they can study her,” Marm said.
I’ve thought long and hard about Marm’s answer. I’m not sure I have the strength to study Mary like a pinned insect long enough to solve her case. Even remembering the girls who died from Mary’s cooking doesn’t help when I see her on a ward full of consumptives. Dying women who cough out contagion with every breath, yet Mary is bursting with health! Couldn’t she catch their disease? What can we do to protect her? She can’t go back into the world. She can’t stay where she is. It is this place of purgatory that disturbs me.
I long to push myself above human feeling and into science. Yet I can’t see with a cold eye. I don’t know if I am fit for this life of the mind as I had once thought I was.
February 6, 1907
Last night I had a terrible nightmare. Mary had escaped from quarantine and was fleeing through the city streets, smearing disease over crowds, people falling ill in her wake as if in a plague. Somehow I spotted her and followed her to Mr. Soper’s home, a place of brilliant light. He slept peacefully in a gauzy bed. Mary stood over him with that wild, trapped look in her eyes. Suddenly he awoke, and seeing Mary, sat straight up in a fright.
She wailed, “Why are you tormenting me?” in a most wrenching voice, then she opened her mouth horribly wide, and I could see the round typhoid germs bubbling up from inside her.
She saw me and screamed: “You!”
I ran down a bright hall, the sound of Mary’s feet pounding after me. I feared for Mr. Soper, whom I had left behind. I knew he had succumbed to the fever. I was crying and calling his name, turning corners, barely dodging Mary each time. The bends and steps of the house were endless. I ran until I couldn’t breathe and then collapsed on the floor, sobbing with the little breath I had.
Mary came behind me, pleading, “Help me, girl! Don’t lock me up! Don’t put me away! I beg of you, please! Help me!”
I tried to get up, but she kept pushing me down and begging, begging without end.
I woke to find myself on the floor, my back pressed into the cold stove.
Dread sank into my bones; I felt sick. The image of her filled with typhoid germs has not left me all day. Feelings of death and helplessness, fears too deep for me to name, swell inside me. The sense of loss bleeds through me.
And what happened with Mr. Soper today makes my ache more real.
This afternoon Mr. Soper received a mysterious telephone call. I was working at my desk, transcribing his study of Mary’s case, only half listening to his replies. Expecting the report from Dr. Parks, I noticed a stiffening of my chief’s body and a lowering of his voice. I glanced furtively at him, wondering if it was the Bowing family, still so upset with our trespass. Usually Mr. Soper deals with them in a calm, short manner, but this time, color flushed his cheeks. He asked the speaker to wait a moment, and held his hand over the horn.
“Prudence,” he said, “will you please fetch me a sheaf of paper from the supply closet?”
“I have some here,” I said. I reached into my desk.
“And ink. Please go to the supply closet right now and get me a bottle of black India ink,” he said, indicating the door. “Please go.”
I rose from my desk, watching him. He wanted to take the call alone. He had never done that before. Was it a woman?
The forbidden love I kept bottled so tightly rushed into my throat, and I left the room.
Choking on jealousy, I closed the door quietly and stood just outside the glass, trying to hear what my chief was saying without seeming obvious to the fellows who passed me in the hall. I needed to find out who was on the telephone. I heard “a private matter,” and “not authorized to speak,” and “Mr. Briggs,” things that were enough to tell me it was a business call.
But the poison had been released in me.
Love flooded my chest and ached in my stomach. I hurried down the hall to the supply closet, gulping back the fear that I had lost him. My hands shook as I unlocked the door. I stood looking at the shelves of paper and pens, inks and blotters, white stars of light dancing before my eyes. I worked so hard to hide my love from him, to remember Anushka’s three rules, but underneath everything I did, during every moment of the day, it was there. The power of it, now released, nearly overcame me. I drank down air, trying to fit my feeling back into the small, secret box where it belonged.
But it wouldn’t go.
It’s like walking to the center of a bridge and looking out over a long, wide river and trying to fit that vastness into a small box. I had managed it somehow before.
Now it just won’t go.
February 8, 1907
I sit in the office every day with my chief, all my nerve cells exposed, sensitive to his every move and word. I wish I could talk to someone about these emotions, to free myself from them somehow. My letters to Anushka no longer seem like enough. I need to talk to another girl, to hear her advice, but there is no one. My mind wanders to Marm, but I cannot speak to her about this poisoned side of me. I think of Dr. Baker; inside me, I find a lingering anger at her for treating Mary Mallon so poorly. Still, I wonder how she has managed her own feelings. I wonder if being in a man’s profession has made her cold and forceful. Could I ever learn to be like that?
February 10, 1907
I visited Dr. Baker today. On my lunch break, I excused myself from the office and slipped upstairs, to the fourth floor, to talk to her. I felt I needed some answers. Not about Mr. Soper, but about myself. Answers only she could give me.
The fourth floor is a long hall, rooms with glass doors on either side. Girls fill delivery baskets with cream and eggs at one table; at another, white-dressed nurses tend to infants with dirty faces, rag-clad mothers hovering nearby. On the wall, a sign reads, HELP A CHILD, GIVE TO THE NEEDY.
At the far end of the hall, Dr. Baker sat in an office, her name stenciled across the clear glass door. Seeing her, I felt what I might become one day, a woman with her own office in a world of medicine. Then I caught the distress in her eyes. Across the desk from her a dandy twirled his hat with one hand and brandished a cigar with the other. I couldn’t hear their words through the closed door, but I worried for her and revealed my presence through the window. Her face brightened when she saw me, and she nodded and waved as if s
he’d been waiting for me. She excused herself to the man, got up, and opened the door for me.
“Come in, please come in, Prudence,” she said, ushering me in. She said to the man, “Yes, so, that’s really all I can tell you now.”
He stood slowly, looking suspiciously from her to me. “I’ll hear back from you soon?” he asked.
“Oh, quite soon,” she said.
Words seemed to gather in his mouth, but none came out. He turned and left the office.
Dr. Baker sighed and returned to her desk. “Please, sit,” she said to me.
The chair was still warm from the man. I slid to the edge and folded my hands, nearly overcome by the cheap cologne and cigar stink in the air.
Dr. Baker touched her curls, took off her spectacles, and wiped them clean. Her bare face surprised me, the thin skin around her eyes, the weakness of her vision. I did not think she contained such frailty. I wanted to ask about the man, but it was not my place. Returning her glasses to her nose, it was as if her strength had returned. She looked at me expectantly and asked how she could help me.
“I want to talk to you about—about school,” I said.
“Ah,” she said, and smiled. “It would do my heart good to have you join the women’s cause.”
I didn’t know what she meant by the cause. Perhaps she was talking about the suffragettes. I’ve seen them march in the streets in order to gain the vote and women’s rights. Their voices are loud, and with their arms hooked together in protest, they don’t seem afraid of anything. Marm also calls them pioneers, setting the way for other women to follow.
“How old are you, Prudence?” Dr. Baker asked.
“I’m almost seventeen.”
“And where do you attend school now?”
“Ma’am, I left to take this job,” I said.
She picked up the ink pen on her desk and tapped the end of it against her blotter. It was as if something in her moved away from me.
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