“Mr. Soper,” I said, “I apologize for not telling you—”
“You were being very professional, Prudence, and I appreciate that.”
He still held my hand. He was so near, I could smell his sweet cologne.
“For years we did not know what had become of my father,” I said.
Mr. Soper took my other hand.
“It’s difficult to lose a loved one,” he said. “You’re a brave girl.”
His brown eyes looked into mine. The blood beat in my ears. My face burned. He released my hands just as my trolley pulled in and opened its doors. And then, I did the unthinkable. I felt he would not turn me away. I rose up and kissed him on the cheek. Then I ran up the steps without bidding him good night. On the streetcar, I could feel the roughness of his skin, the edge of his mustache on my lips. I can feel it still. I berated myself for not being able to contain my feelings.
I came home to an empty, cold house. A note from Marm told me she was at a birth. I started a fire in the stove and tried to push away the persistent question that nagged at me: What had I just done? The prospect of facing Mr. Soper suddenly frightened me.
I splashed my face with cool water from the basin. I took the badge and my chief’s precious notes and hid them inside my blotter case by the window. Then I began to scrub potatoes for stew.
At last Marm came home, blood on her skirt, a sadness hanging about her. Sensing that the birth had not gone well, I hesitated telling her of the visit. All evening I tried to think of a way to break the news. But Marm seemed too tired and sad.
I write this now, unable to sleep. Beside me, I hold the book Papa gave me—after Benny died and he left, it was the one thing that kept my hope strong, that he would come back, and I could talk to him about all that I had learned from it.
And now, to find that a disease has taken his life…
After Papa left, something in me cracked and leaked one drop at a time. With the news this stranger brought, a giant gush has broken through the crack, and all the water has poured out. Now I am left with a vast hollowness that I know not how to fill.
March 8, 1907
In all the years I waited for him, I didn’t allow myself to think he would never come back. I thought I would not survive the news of his death, but I woke in the dark and felt my own heart beating.
Yet the world around me has changed somehow. It is a world without Papa.
Unable to sleep any longer, I got up and walked to work, my toes nearly freezing in my boots. When I arrived at our building, I found that my feet, cold as they were, would not allow me to go in. I could not face my chief’s knowing eyes, the closeness of him. I walked three times around the block before the obligation of work overwhelmed me.
At the front door of our building, I felt my chief just behind me and turned.
He nodded stiffly at me and said, “Good morning, Prudence.”
“Good morning, sir,” I said.
He reached ahead of me and pulled the door open for me. I went inside; he kept pace just behind me, until we got to our office, which he unlocked. He turned the gas key, lighting the lights.
We sat at our respective desks.
I waited for him to chastise me, or to say something about my father, but he said nothing.
I organized the bottom drawer of my desk. I rearranged my pencils and quills. I changed the paper on my blotter pad and filled all my ink bottles.
He left the office for a meeting with Mr. Briggs. Around midday, he returned and stood before my desk and said my name. He held up a folio.
“I have notes of a new case,” he said. “Several children have fallen ill with the typhoid in Riverdale.”
I reached over my desk for the notes. My fingers accidentally brushed his when I took the folio. It felt like putting my hand into a flame.
“I will type them up right away, sir,” I said.
“That’s fine,” he said.
I could not wait for this day to end.
March 10, 1907
I have not yet told Marm about Papa. I’m not sure what I’m waiting for. I wished so completely for his return these past nine years, and now all I can feel is his absence.
Telling Marm would allow her the chance to begin anew, but something in me wants to hold the information to myself just a little longer. It’s as if this knowledge has brought a strange circle of fate upon me—I cannot help but think of Mary Mallon, and the fever she carries within her. I think of my father’s death by yellow fever. It seems Mary brought me to Papa somehow. To solve something, the crime of disease.
There’s one image of him that comes repeatedly to me. The day after Benny died, my father said the Kaddish in his memory. He spoke it in Hebrew, along with Rabbi Samsfield. I hear the intonations of the prayer like a whisper in my mind all the time now.
I read last night that two of Louis Pasteur’s children died of typhoid.
Marm was married to Papa for seventeen years before he left, and another nine of waiting. That is a long time to have someone in your heart.
I feel as if I’m traveling through a dark tunnel. Once I reach the other side, I will have the strength to break the news to her.
March 14, 1907
Mr. Soper is not himself with me; he places obstacles in our path, people and projects, and I wish I knew my way back into his good graces.
For the second time, Jonathan, that strange science fellow, has come to my aid. I fear that Mr. Soper may be encouraging him to make friends with me. Everyone in the department now knows that I’m studying for the medical school entrance examination—the science fellows question me when they see me in the hall, and not always in the nicest manner. This morning a boy heckled me about animal reproduction, and Jonathan came along and grabbed the boy by his neck and pushed him on. He then turned and apologized to me for his friend’s behavior. I don’t know what impression he thinks this made on me.
That wasn’t the only exchange. Later Jonathan came into the office, greeted Mr. Soper, and placed a medical journal on my desk. “You’ll find the article on page forty-nine helpful to your case,” he said, with a big, open smile. Mr. Soper and Jonathan nodded to each other as the boy left. Mr. Soper didn’t give me the article himself directly—yet he knows the difficulty I had with Jonathan.
It’s been harder, spending days in the office with my chief. I fear his dismissal of me.
I quickly read the article the boy gave me. It illustrated how white blood cells engulf and devour any invading bacteria, and how, in a healthy body, this creates a natural immunity to sickness. I tried to speak with Mr. Soper about it, but the darkness around his brow showed me the painful doubt that he entertained about me.
“I’m glad that—that young man—gave me this to read,” I started.
My chief met my eyes for the barest of seconds. “Yes,” he said, “Jonathan. He’s quite a brilliant young science fellow; he’s always finding the most pertinent journal reports.”
This description hit me hard. I would say Dr. Pasteur is brilliant, or Dr. Mechnikov, but not that simple boy.
I asked, “Do you think this might explain how Mary can carry disease while being immune to it?”
Mr. Soper ran his finger down a column of figures distractedly. “It could,” he said.
“We have not heard back from the island doctors about Mary’s problematic gallbladder, have we?” I asked.
He looked up and sighed. “When we do, I expect it will explain a lot, Miss Galewski.”
The way he said it troubled me deeply.
Mr. Soper and I have shared so many discussions about cells and disease. He gave me my first glimpse under the microscope. He taught me how to read charts and reports, and how to write them. I am sickened with worry that he now sees me as an unserious, flighty thing. I must endure; I must make a great effort to earn back his respect.
March 15, 1907
I took out the very first red silk tablet I ever wrote in. The beginning date was January 2, 1900, two years after P
apa left us. He was not yet officially missing.
I was a different girl then. I still smelled the metal on his hands from the factory, I still heard the timbre of his voice in my chest when he spoke. I could feel his rough hair against my cheek when he kissed me. I heard him calling my name from our window, calling me and Benny inside to light the Shabbat candles.
I cried alone, reading the words of my childish self, emptying my eyes of the tears I’d held on to for all his missing years. I sobbed until my chest ached. I hugged my quilt to me like gauze to a wound for a long time, long enough to stop the bleeding.
——————
The now-famous cook Mary Mallon is a prisoner for life on a quarantine island, though she has committed no crime, has never been accused of an immoral or wicked act, and has never been a prisoner in any court. No judge has ever sentenced her. We ask, is this fair? Apparently, Miss Mallon does not think so.
“Typhoid Mary,” as the Department of Health and Sanitation has dubbed her, will finally have her day in court. Her attorney, Mr. Charles O’Neal, has served the department with a writ of habeas corpus. He states that her case for improper confinement is strong, and that if the judge is fair and reasonable, she should be a freed woman in short order. Mary Mallon has been in captivity for nearly three months, since January, when she was imprisoned for being a human culture tube for the typhoid germ.
In a letter written for the court, Miss Mallon claims, “I have never had typhoid in my life, nor do I have it now. Why should I be banished like a leper and forced to live in solitary confinement? My own doctors say I have no typhoid germs. I am an innocent human being. I have committed no crime and I am treated like an outcast—a criminal. It is unjust, outrageous, uncivilized. It seems incredible that in a Christian community a defenseless woman can be treated in this manner.”
Mary Mallon, who is physically healthy in every way, is being kept on a quarantine island just north of New York City, along with dozens of consumptives, recovering and otherwise. The department has not answered questions as to how they maintain her good health on such an island, nor when she might be released. They have appealed to eminent lawyers on the question of legality concerning Miss Mallon’s confinement, and insist a judge will see that “Typhoid Mary” is a menace to society. They claim that she should be kept contained indefinitely.
——————
March 20, 1907
It seems impossible that the newspapers could sink any lower, but they have. This illustration horrifies me, as does the name they have invented for Mary. They have taken her up as a sport—they toss around her name and her image like a tennis ball. There is nothing anyone can do to control them.
What’s worse, this article contains a good deal of fact.
It turns out that the nurses on the island have been assisting in Mary’s case, acting as messengers to bring her feces to an independent laboratory in Manhattan. Apparently, this laboratory has not found typhoid. Several weeks of independent testing on Mary’s samples have been done, and each has come out clean. I don’t understand the methods they use; Mr. Soper says the samples must be old, or the laboratory must be bad. Who knows if they are even Mary’s samples? On top of the insult of Mr. O’Neal taking us to court, Mr. Soper is doubly upset by this so-called proof that Mary’s lawyer aims to present.
We believe the Bowing family is involved in retaining such a bulldog of a lawyer, though they have managed to keep their name out of it. Instead of dragging the case through the court system, Mr. O’Neal has served the department with a writ of habeas corpus, which allows a prisoner who feels he or she is unfairly imprisoned court time with a judge. Without a jury, a judge alone will decide Mary’s case. He can do this in one day of hearing if he wants. And if he decides that the department is wrong to have captured her, he can free her immediately.
In our defense, our scientists are gathering evidence for the phenomenon of a healthy carrier. They have simplified Dr. Koch’s seminal text on his initial discovery of the first German who spread typhoid unknowingly through his feces. They’re also translating Dr. Mechnikov’s work on white blood cells and immunity, and Dr. Pasteur’s study of the life of bacteria inside the human body. I’ve spent the past few days retyping the first of these papers, which has been an education in itself. I hope a judge will not be swayed by Mr. Bowing’s influence at the mayor’s office, but rather that he will take the time to read these important papers and understand our position.
Our attorneys are discussing the legal rights of the department, and which law is stronger—a person’s right to freedom, or the public’s right to a healthy, protected community. There is a law (Section 1170) that states that the Board of Health and Sanitation of the City of New York may remove from the public arena any person sick with any contagious, pestilential, or infectious disease. It seems clear, yet one question stumps these smart men: Can Mary legally be defined as a person sick with an infectious disease?
For the next weeks until the trial, I fear we will be on pins and needles. There’s been an outbreak of typhoid in Riverdale, which Mr. Soper suspects may be caused by another healthy carrier like Mary. If we can uncover another example, perhaps that will strengthen our case. It makes sense to me that Mary is not an exception, but rather part of a larger invisible problem that must be addressed.
As an experiment, Mr. Soper asked the science fellows to test several people in the department who have survived the typhoid fever. We have discovered that they do not carry the typhoid germ. So it proves that not everyone who has had the fever automatically falls into the category of healthy carrier. Mr. Soper says he thinks that most people survive the fever without continuing to produce the germ. Indeed, we have not found another like Mary. Do they exist? And if so, must we test every single survivor in order to find out whether they carry the germ?
Tomorrow we are to travel to Riverdale to begin investigating the new typhoid outbreak. I’m anxious to discover the reason for this epidemic. It seems similar in some respects to the Thompson case, with clusters of people falling ill as if from a tainted source rather than a contagion.
After reading about Dr. Pasteur’s work, a strange thing now happens to me when I travel with crowds of people in a public streetcar or omnibus. I see them as a myriad of undetected illnesses. Sicknesses we don’t yet know, ones we can’t yet diagnose. My eye picks out the weaker-looking ones, and I see the bacteria, as varied and crowded as a metropolis, living within them.
I see my future work in those people.
March 30, 1907
Our trips to Riverdale have opened up a disturbing realm of inquiry for us and have added another dimension to Mary’s case.
Mr. Soper and I took a train and carriage up to the Bronx to investigate. We discovered records of typhoid fever in this part of Riverdale dating as far back as November of last year. All together, the count was ninety-six people ill, thirteen dead—and news of more victims coming in every day. A horrifyingly large number of people.
We went to the hospital to visit the latest cases, hoping to get the freshest information possible. We visited seven patients. One, a girl of eight years, kept running to the toilet. Another child could barely sit up for the pain in her head. We spoke to both of their mothers and obtained useful information from them. We then moved on to a poor fellow who was raving something about his neighbor’s wife, but he was too deep into dementia and too close to death to interview. Four women had the same rose-shaped rashes that had appeared on Amy Thompson, but they were able to talk, and answered our questions about what they ate and where they shopped and who they had encountered in the past month. That, and the mothers’ interviews, was enough to give us our answer.
All the victims had bought their milk, butter, and cream at Kinley’s Farm. We wasted no time in going over there and took several samples to be tested. All of the milk was clean, as was the cream, but a batch of the butter turned out to be positive for the typhoid.
We returned to the farm, bringing wit
h us Dr. Baker and Jonathan so we could test the farmer and several of his farmhands on the spot. The doctor convinced them of the quotidian nature of the test and drew blood from each person, and the boy performed the Widal blood serum test on the samples. All of them came out negative except Mr. Kinley’s.
The man is rife with typhoid germs.
Imagine our surprise to find a second healthy carrier, and so quickly! Though Mr. Kinley doesn’t do the milking on a regular basis, occasionally he pitches in. But he is the only one who forms the butter into slabs, and he does this with his bare hands. This is how he transmits the fever.
Mr. Kinley had heard about Mary Mallon, who he referred to as Typhoid Mary, which unfortunately I hear very often now. He laughed about the filthy Irish—until he understood the results of his own Widal test. Mr. Soper pointed out the epidemic in Riverdale. Mr. Kinley denied that he was to blame for it; his fury made me fear things would turn ugly. Dr. Baker firmly reminded him of the police intervention in Miss Mallon’s case, and the farmer reluctantly agreed to accompany us back to the Detention Hospital, where he remains in quarantine.
This is a very disquieting discovery. I don’t think anyone had truly envisioned another healthy carrier would exist, except Mr. Soper, who seemed to know it all along. There has been a great outcry that Mr. Kinley was not simply tested and released, but is now being held in detention. There have been many letters to the papers, and his wife is very upset. The reporters scream that soon we will have every other healthy New Yorker in quarantine, and for no good reason. No member of the press has bothered to travel to the Memorial Hospital in Riverdale to visit those children and men and women who burn with fever and clutch at their bellies in pain thanks to the salmonella typhi bacteria that Mr. Kinley unknowingly passed to them. If they did, they would see the truth. They would see the reason we keep him from the public. They wouldn’t defend the germ over the man.
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