Fever

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NEW-YORK DAILY COURANT

March 24, 1907

Cook Accused of Giving Typhoid to New York’s Prominent Families

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So Say Authorities Holding Her Prisoner

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Sanitary Engineer Alleges She Communicates the Disease to Others Although Immune Herself

(Staff) New York — The cook for a prominent Upper East Side family has been forcibly removed from her employment and quarantined in Willard Parker Hospital after sanitary engineer and medical investigator George A. Soper alleged that she has been passing Typhoid Fever through her cooking, though she manifests no signs of the disease herself. At the time of her capture she was cooking for one of the wealthiest families on Park Avenue. Dr. Soper further alleges that the daughter of the family was battling Typhoid Fever at the time the cook was apprehended, and has since succumbed to the disease.

Dr. Soper, the medical sleuth at the center of this case, put the pieces of this groundbreaking puzzle together after being called upon to investigate a Typhoid outbreak that occurred in Oyster Bay last summer. He identified the cook as an “asymptomatic carrier” of Typhoid Fever, which, in layman’s terms, is a healthy-seeming person who passes a disease along without suffering any symptoms of said disease, and most likely without any knowledge of doing so. Dr. Soper has spent several months making his case to the Department of Health, and one source reports that there are many within that organization who are skeptical about the notion of a healthy carrier, despite the evidence.

It is Dr. Soper’s belief that the woman poses a life-threatening risk to all of those who eat the food she cooks, and has been the cause of Typhoid outbreaks in almost every prominent family she’s worked for going back at least five years, likely longer. The case of this human culture tube, as some would describe her, is attended to with more secrecy than any other this reporter has encountered in his career. It can only be assumed that authorities do not want to further embarrass those families who hired her and welcomed her into their homes. In response to a question on how rare this woman is to science, one doctor who asked to remain anonymous answered: “We just don’t know.”

The woman is rumored to be of fair complexion with a buxom figure and rosy cheeks. Whether she understands the charges piled against her is a matter of concern for the DOH. “We’re talking about brand-new science,” a senior health inspector explained. “If what Dr. Soper posits is true, then she is the first healthy carrier of Typhoid Fever discovered in North America.”

The butler of the family who was the cook’s most recent employer, and who gave his name only as “Francis,” claims that the daughter’s illness and death is nothing more than a tragic coincidence. He tells us that his own wife died of the illness several years back, and so have others he’s known who never had any contact with the accused cook. He claims further that the cook was healthy and showed absolutely no sign of illness. “They took her like they would a common criminal,” he said, showing visible signs of distress. “And for what? I don’t believe what they’ve said about her.” A female eyewitness to the cook’s capture stated that “she fought with the strength of ten men, but they overpowered her.”

This incredulity, authorities say, is a matter of education, and further denials from the woman may lead to her permanent quarantine. A nurse at Willard Parker, who asked that her name be withheld, says the accused woman at the center of this case is the picture of fury. She refuses meals, declines company, and walks back and forth like a caged animal. When asked if she believes what’s been alleged about the woman, the nurse replied, “I myself don’t understand it, but I think the woman should try to listen to them. She’s not helping herself the way she is now.”

Several leading doctors believe Typhoid bacilli are manufactured in the gallbladder, and a representative from the Department of Health states that if the accused woman does not submit to surgical removal of her gallbladder within the month, she will be transferred to North Brother Island in the East River, where she will remain segregated from society for an indefinite length of time.

When asked for his opinion of the case, Mr. Robert Abbott, a criminal attorney who practices in New York City, says that her situation strikes him as somewhat similar to that of Niall E. Joseph, whom Boston authorities have isolated upon suspicion of being a leper.

ONE

Mary wasn’t arrested right away. There were warnings. Requests. It all started with an air of courtesy, as if Dr. Soper believed that if he simply notified her of the danger lurking inside her body she would excuse herself from society. And after, when he and his colleagues resorted to far-less-polite means, they said it was her fault for raising a knife instead of listening, for not doing as she was told.

On a cold morning in March 1907, the Department of Health coordinated with the New York City Police Department and decided that Mary Mallon must be brought in. Dr. Soper suggested she might surrender more easily to a woman and sent a doctor named Josephine Baker to ring the bell of the Bowen residence, where Mary was employed, with four police officers standing behind her. They had not considered that even in the face of such authority her friends would lie for her, help hide her, insist that she could not be the person they were seeking. When they finally found her, she would not come peacefully, so each officer gripped her by a limb and carried her across the snow-covered yard while the rest of the domestic staff looked on. Once the police got her into their truck she started swinging and kicking, until finally they wedged her between their stout bodies and held her as well as they could, and Dr. Baker sat on her lap. “Please, Miss Mallon,” Dr. Baker said, over and over, and after a while, “Please, Mary.”

Mary assumed they were bringing her to the police station on East Sixty-Seventh, so when the truck continued downtown in a southeasterly direction along the same route she took from the Bowens’ to the rooms she shared with Alfred on East Thirty-Third, she thought for a hopeful moment that they might be dropping her at home. They had come to teach her a lesson, she prayed, and now they would set her free. She glimpsed street signs through the small barred window as the driver turned east at Forty-Second Street. They traveled south along Third Avenue until Sixteenth Street, and then east again with such urgency that she could feel the rhythm of the horses’ sleek heads pumping. The truck stopped just before the river, at the main entrance of a building Mary didn’t recognize, at the very end of a block so desolate that she felt the first stirring of panic that no one she knew would ever find her there.

Dr. Soper was waiting at the entrance to the Willard Parker Hospital, but instead of speaking to her, he just nodded to the pair of policemen who had her braced by her elbows. Up on the sixth floor, they hurried her along the corridor to the Typhoid Wing, where more doctors were waiting in a room with a gleaming mahogany table. One of her guards indicated where she should sit, and before she could properly look around the room, Dr. Soper told her and the rest of the people present that the newest theory of disease had to do with germs and bacteria, and although Mary appeared perfectly healthy, he had good reason to believe that she was, at that very moment, manufacturing Typhoid bacilli inside her body and passing along the disease to innocent victims. He accused her of making twenty-three people sick and being the cause of at least three deaths. “Those are the cases we know of,” he said. “Who knows how many more we’ll find when we can investigate Miss Mallon’s full employment history?” In front of five other men and Dr. Baker, Dr. Soper turned to her, finally, the source of all this trouble, as if waiting for her to say something. Mary felt like her mind had dropped straight out of her head like a stone.

“George,” Dr. Baker said, “she hasn’t even been here fifteen minutes. Perhaps we could give her time to collect herself.”

“Back here in half an hour, then?” one of the other doctors asked.

“In the morning, gentlemen,” said Dr. Baker. “There is nothing that can’t wait until morning, is there?”

No, Mary thought, this mistake will be corrected by morning and I’ll be gone. I’ll walk straight home, make a pot of coffee, tell the whole story to Alfred, and never come near the Willard Parker Hospital again.

Dr. Soper tilted his head and considered Mary from across the table. “Tomorrow,” he agreed. “Fine.”

• • •

Mary’s bed was at the end of a row, in a large room that held sixteen beds, all occupied except for hers, which waited with the sheets tucked tight and the small, flat pillow placed exactly at the center of the head. Guards stood outside the entrance of the room, positioned so they could see her through the narrow pane of glass on the door. A nurse had left her alone for a moment shortly after showing her to her room, and she’d simply opened the door and walked toward the stairs, but an officer shouted at her to stop, and a passing doctor blocked her way. “I was told I could get word to someone,” she said to the officer as he marched her back. “When?” But he only shrugged, rocking back and forth from heel to toe as he eyed her, and she felt a twitch go through her body as she measured the distance to the end of the corridor.

That first night at Willard Parker, when a nurse came in to turn off the lamps, Mary lay on her cot and pressed her hands against her ears. It was a misunderstanding, surely. Everything would be sorted out in a matter of days. Alfred wouldn’t expect her home until Saturday and would have no way of knowing what had happened. Even then, he might not worry, believing she’d been asked by the Bowens to stay on through the weekend. She had only the money in her pocket and the clothes on her back. Dr. Baker had said she’d be allowed a telephone call, but who would she call? There was no telephone in the rooms she shared with Alfred. No one in their building had a telephone. She certainly couldn’t call the Bowens.

Lying on her side and facing the wall, Mary pressed her palms harder against her ears but could still hear her roommates retching, sobbing, calling for people, relatives, probably, loved ones already dead. She’d seen it all before, but not like this, not so many in a single room, fifteen nightmares twisted together, plus hers, the sixteenth, the strand that didn’t look like any of the others. Finally, she gave up on sleep and went over to the window, which looked west along Sixteenth Street. The sidewalk was dark except for the yellow glow of a single streetlamp, and she searched the darkness for another sixth-floor window, and the shape of Alfred standing at it, not even twenty blocks away. If I shout, she thought, how far away will I be heard? She tried to imagine what he was doing at that hour. He never slept well when she was not at home.

The occupant of the bed nearest the window moaned, and Mary looked down to find a girl, no more than thirteen, her long dark hair wet with sweat and stuck in tendrils around her neck. Mary gathered it together and smoothed it away from the girl’s face. She turned her pillow to the cool underside. She told her it would all be over soon — and it would, for better or for worse — and fetched her a cup of water. She did the same for the rest of them and one woman clutched Mary’s wrist, called her Anna, and begged her not to leave. “We’ll be home soon, Anna,” the sick woman assured Mary, and Mary agreed that they would.

By dawn there were new guards stationed outside her door and she was back in her own bed observing the practiced approach of the nurses as they advanced on each patient with a bucket of cold water and a stack of clean washcloths pulled behind them on a wheeled cart. Mary forgot her predicament for a few moments as she saw how the abrupt coolness of a damp cloth at the head and neck made each woman still, for a moment, as if listening for something. A cloth under each arm calmed the features of their faces, brought them hope, and at the groin brought relief to their whole bodies, and in some patients, tears.

When the nurse who was tending to Mary’s row arrived at her bed, she held up a cloth and looked at her. “You’ve no fever,” she said.

“No.”

“I’m supposed to do the compress to everyone. They didn’t say yay or nay about you.”

“I’ll tell them you did it.”

“Fine.” The nurse continued to observe her. “When did you have it?”

“Never.”

“But you’re passing it along? People catching it from you?”

“Is that what they said to you?”

“Said it to all the doctors and nursing staff.”

“It’s a lie.”

The nurse tilted her head and looked at Mary’s body from her face down to the lump under the sheet that was her feet, back up to her face.

“Well, do you want the cloth anyway? And the water? To wash yourself? I gather you’ve had an ordeal.”

“Yes.” Mary sat up in the cot. “Yes, thank you.”

The nurses repeated the routine every hour, skipping Mary after that first time. At midmorning, Soper came and perched himself on the arm of a chair that was wedged between Mary’s cot and the wall. He told her it was time for her to cooperate, that they had a great deal of work ahead of them. As he spoke his eyes kept glancing over to the nurses as they moved about the room, lifting sheets, moving knees apart. He jumped up and asked to see Mary in the hall.

“How long do you mean to keep me here?” Mary asked, refusing to move until he gave her an answer.

“Come out to the hallway, Miss Mallon,” he said.

“No,” Mary said, lying back on her pillow and pulling the sheet to her chin.

“I don’t want to have to ask for this man’s assistance,” he said, gesturing toward one of the guards. “One way or another, I must talk to you about your gallbladder.”

“One way or another, I must get word to my friends to let them know what’s happened to me.”

“Later, Miss Mallon. Very soon.”

• • •

The first time Mary had encountered Dr. Soper was in the Bowens’ kitchen, almost one month earlier. She mistook him for a guest who’d arrived too early. It was a bitter-cold day, and there were fires going in every room except for the servants’ quarters, where the small stove would stay cold until bedtime. The Bowens had the type of home where it was easy to lose oneself: large in some senses, tall and broad, with great rooms — the distant ceilings covered with paintings of different scenes from foreign places — and windows looking out onto Park Avenue. But the natural light disappeared as one retreated farther into the house, and at the rear of the residence the staff had to work by lamplight all the time.

Mary had looked up from her work — a beautiful pair of ducks whose skin she was pricking with a knife so that the fat would drain out when she roasted them — and saw a tall man clutching his hat to his chest. He had a light step, and she didn’t hear him until he was nearly on top of her. He was handsome in that way some men in New York are handsome — neat as a pin, his clothes pressed, his hair and mustache precise. He was not a man who had ever shoveled coal or hauled ice or butchered an animal. He was not a man who owned a pair of work boots. He seemed older, though she later learned that they were the very same age, their birthdays one week apart.

• • •

Toward the end of her second day at Willard Parker, she answered a few of his questions and hoped that meant he would release her. But just after breakfast on her third morning he summoned her back to the room with the mahogany table and invited five other doctors to ask her questions as well. She recognized three of them from the day of her arrival. Dr. Baker was not present. Led by Dr. Soper, they kept asking if she was absolutely certain that she’d never had Typhoid Fever, if she could recall for them every person she’d known who’d suffered a fever since her arrival in the United States twenty-four years before. “Every person I’ve known who ever had a fever? Since 1883?” Mary almost laughed. Would they be able to do it, if they were asked the same thing?

“Or in Ireland,” one of the doctors said. “Any person who had a fever as far back as you can remember.” Their records on her went back to only 1901, and Mary decided they knew enough about her life in those five and a half years. She would not give them more. “I can’t remember,” she said. Dr. Soper walked over to her chair and asked her to demonstrate how she washed her hands after visiting the lavatory. Feeling so many eyes studying her, and knowing they would just keep asking if she refused, she made a peaceful scene in her mind and walked to the sink at the back of the room with her pulse thumping in her ears. They stood closely behind her to observe, so she went slowly, rubbing the bar of soap on the backs of her hands as well as her palms, between her fingers, taking the kind of time she never did when she had to worry about getting supper on the table at an appointed hour. She dried her hands on the hand towel hanging next to the sink, and they observed this as well.

“What are we missing?” Dr. Soper wondered aloud once they’d all returned to their seats. Missing from his notes were the details, Mary knew, the small things a woman notices, the expression on a person’s face when he turns away and thinks himself unobserved. When Dr. Soper appeared in the Bowens’ kitchen that night, she’d reached up to move a length of hair that had fallen out of her bun. She’d lifted her apron to wipe the duck fat from her hands. She’d closed her fist around her pricking knife and asked if she could assist him. He had blue eyes. His face was longish, and white, his cheeks shaved so close that his face looked as smooth as her own, except for the mustache. His lips were parted in excitement. His eyes were glazed over and once they locked on her they didn’t move, just drank her in, every inch of her. He looked directly at her face, at her mouth, at her body, like he owned her, like there was no one in the world who knew her body better than he did. The knife was greasy and she couldn’t find a sure grip. “Shall I call for Mr. Bowen?” she inquired. “Shall I have someone show you back to the drawing room?” Hadn’t there been just a few days earlier an article about a Greek who’d attacked a schoolteacher inside her own home, raped her, left her to die? Bette, the laundress, had disappeared outside to the narrow breezeway at the side of the house.

Missing from Soper’s notes was the feeling in her belly when she looked up to find a stranger striding into her kitchen, to hear him demand to know if she was Mary Mallon. How disorienting it was to have a man like him — with his perfectly tailored jacket, his ivory white fingernails, his polished shoes extending from the bottom of his pants, the cuffs immaculate, as if he floated above the mud and shit that made up the streets of New York City, and never walked through it like the rest of them — use her full name and know that he was not lost, that she was the one he was looking for. He’d finally come to a stop between Mary and the stove. She could make out perspiration on his sideburns. He had high, sharp cheekbones and his face was flushed.

A creditor, she decided.

“What’s it to you?” Mary asked.

Soper stepped closer. She could smell tobacco on his skin. She tightened her grip on the knife. “My name is George Soper. I’m a sanitary engineer and have been hired by Mr. Thompson to investigate the Typhoid outbreak that occurred at his home in Oyster Bay this past summer. I’ve reason to believe you are the cause not only of that outbreak but of several outbreaks in and around New York City. You must come with me immediately, Miss Mallon. You must be tested. Can you confirm that you were employed by the Warren family last summer and that you worked for them for six weeks at the home they rented from Mr. Thompson in Oyster Bay?”

Mary couldn’t remember her first response, only her wonder at what that had to do with anything.

“Pardon?”

“You’re sick, Miss Mallon. You must be tested.”

“I’m sick?” Mary forced a laugh. “I’ve never felt better.”

“You are carrying sickness. I believe you are a Typhoid Fever carrier.”

She felt dumb and slow, like she’d been turned around and around and then been asked to walk a straight line. She leaned her hips against the counter to steady herself.

“Leave now, please,” she said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You don’t understand, Miss Mallon. It’s imperative that you come with me now for testing. I’ve alerted the lab at Willard Parker Hospital to be ready for your arrival. You must cease cooking immediately.”

He went to take her by the arm, but she held out the knife and the roasting fork together and made a swipe in his general direction. “Get out,” she hissed. Mrs. Bowen hadn’t been feeling well all day but was upstairs being dressed. Mr. Bowen was hard of hearing. Someone had let Soper into the house, surely. Someone knew he was down in the kitchen, yet no one seemed to be coming. She went for him again with the fork in the lead.

Soper stepped backward into the hall. “You must listen, Miss Mallon.”

“I’ve a mind to stab you with this fork, so you’d better get out of my kitchen.”

“It’s not your kitchen, Miss Mallon.”

Mary made another move for him and he took several steps back. He stumbled for a moment, his knuckles white where he gripped his hat’s brim. He looked at her as if he had more to say, but then retreated quickly down the hall.

A few minutes after Soper left the kitchen, Frank, the butler, appeared.

“Where were you?” Mary asked.

“Mr. Bowen was giving me instructions. Who was that? He’s just standing on the sidewalk looking at the house. I think he has a mind to come back in.”

“He had some cock-and-bull story he’ll tell them,” Mary said, laying down the knife and fork. She began to pace. They heard the sound of the doorbell.

“Leave it to me,” Frank said after a moment. Mary crouched in the hall as Frank opened the door.

“They’re not available at the moment,” Frank said when Soper asked for Mr. or Mrs. Bowen. “Would you like to leave a message?”

“I could wait.”

“I’m afraid not. A dinner party, you see.”

“A message then,” Soper grumbled as he searched his breast pocket for a note card and pen. He scribbled as much as he could fit onto the small space. “Make sure you give this to them,” Soper said, looking the older man in the eye.

Frank gave an abbreviated bow, took the note from Soper, and wished him a good night. When he had closed the door on the doctor, he walked the message to the fire and threw it in.

“Thank you,” Mary said. They watched the paper vanish until Mrs. Bowen’s bracelets jangled a warning from the top of the stairs.

• • •

Soper’s appearance in the Bowen kitchen was Mary’s first warning, but it had come coded, and Mary couldn’t decipher it. By the time she was sure Soper had left for good, and the ducks were roasted and sliced, she’d decided it was a misunderstanding, and wondered at herself for not saying more. Why had she not told him that she never had the fever, and that she was the one who’d nursed the Warrens back to health? Why had she not told him to check his facts: that the local doctor in Oyster Bay had already concluded that they’d gotten the fever from soft-shell crabs? Mary liked working for the Bowens, but if that man called again and told them his story, or if he sent them a letter by the post, and they believed him and fired her, she’d go back to the office and have them place her somewhere else. If he told that agency, she’d use another agency. If he told all the agencies, she’d go over to New Jersey, where they didn’t like to pay fees.

• • •

After a week at Willard Parker, Dr. Baker finally came to check on her. “Where were you?” asked Mary. “You said I could get word to someone.”

“And you haven’t?”

“I keep telling them, but it’s been a week.”

“I’m sorry, Mary,” Dr. Baker said, and Mary’s frustration wavered at hearing her first name. The other doctors called her Miss Mallon. “I work at a lab uptown and can’t get down here as often as I’d like.” She removed a few lined pieces of paper from the thin stack on her clipboard.

“You can…?”

“Yes,” Mary said, too grateful to be insulted. “Yes, of course.” Dr. Baker also handed over an envelope. “There should be a pen at the nurses’ station. I’ll tell them you’re permitted to use it. When you finish give it back to them and they’ll post the letter for you.”

“Thank you,” Mary said, and placed paper and envelope on her bedside table. Now that she had a means of getting in touch with Alfred, Mary wanted to consider what she’d say, how exactly to describe what had happened. They’d argued the last time they’d seen each other, but none of that mattered now. And there were practical concerns, too. Her friend Fran had asked her to make a birthday cake for her daughter and it was starting to seem like Mary would not be freed in time. She had planned to shape the cake like a daisy, with yellow and white buttercream frostings. The child would be disappointed.

“Will you walk with me?” Dr. Baker asked.

They strolled along the corridor with the guard trailing just behind. “Mary,” Dr. Baker said finally, “they’ve asked me to talk to you about surgery. About removing your gallbladder. I know Dr. Soper has already explained it, but perhaps there are questions he hasn’t answered.”

In the week since Mary had last seen Dr. Baker, there were several doctors in addition to Dr. Soper who tried to convince her to let them remove her gallbladder. Just that morning, Mary had been called to a meeting with three doctors at once. “We’ll get the best man to do the cutting,” said a doctor named Wilson, and Mary asked the three men present if they’d agree to be sliced open as well, since there was nothing in the world wrong with them either. What would New York come to if surgeons went around cutting open all the healthy people just to take a look at what was inside? They explained it to her over and over, as if she didn’t know what it was to cut a body from neck to navel, but she was a cook, for God’s sake; she once butchered a Jersey heifer with only one other person to help and when she was finished, even after draining the cow well before cutting, she was bloodied to her shoulders, and all those wet and glistening parts that made up the cow, when they were laid out on her table, would never have fit back inside that animal the way God made her had Mary decided to change her mind, put her back together, stitch her up like new. All the worse that they planned to slice her alive.

“I won’t let them open me. I’ve told them already. You can tell them, too.”

Dr. Baker regarded her in silence for a moment, and then nodded. “They’ll send you to North Brother Island. They’ll put you in quarantine.”

“They can’t. I’m not sick. I didn’t do anything wrong.” Mary thought of the paper and envelope waiting for her by her bed. No matter how Alfred was feeling, no matter what kind of week he was having, he’d hear the beating heart at the center of her message and he’d leave whatever he was doing to find her and help her figure a way out of this trouble. Once, about five years earlier, when she was miserable at a job in Riverdale, he’d shown up in her employer’s kitchen one morning to see for himself how low she was, and when she told him everything that she’d promised herself she would not tell him — that the missus had slapped a tutor and threatened to slap Mary, that the man of the house found reasons to brush up against her — Alfred did not make a scene, did not raise his voice; he only listened. And when she was finished he told her the decision was entirely up to her; he’d only come to see her face, but if he had half her talent for cooking, he’d walk out of that horrible house and find something else. “Come home with me right now,” he said, and even as she protested that she’d already mixed the batter for muffins, had already sunk a turkey breast in a bucket of brine, she felt a shiver of recklessness and knew she wanted to do exactly that. Alfred put his hands on her waist and made her look at him. “Leave it,” he said. So she left the batter to harden on the counter and walked with him to the train station. Along the way, he sang a German folk song and danced along the sidewalk to make her laugh. Miraculously, the family never told the agency, or else the message got lost, because the same agency placed her in a new situation the very next week.

She imagined Alfred storming through the main entrance of Willard Parker. If they block him at the front door, she thought, he’ll come through the back. If they lock the back door, he’ll build a tunnel, he’ll scale the walls, he’ll drop in from the sky to fend them off so that I can get home. Alfred, she thought, willing him to hear her. It was something she used to do when she began getting more jobs that took her out of town and away from him. She’d take her break on a quiet back porch and think hard on his name. She’d crawl into bed at night and extinguish every other thing in her mind except for him. Later, when she was back home, she’d tell him what she’d done, and he’d sit up taller and ask which days, exactly, what times, because there was one afternoon when he was walking through the park and had a feeling she was there, trying to tell him something.

“They can, Mary. And once you’re on North Brother it will be more difficult to…”

“To what?”

“To get back.”

“Miss Mallon,” a nurse called from behind them. “It’s time to give another sample.”

“I’ll be back in a few days,” Dr. Baker said, placing her hand lightly on Mary’s arm.

“Wait,” Mary said, and heard the panic in her own voice. “Don’t forget to tell the nurses. About the pen. About posting my letter.”

“I won’t forget.”

• • •

When Mary got back to her room, the paper and envelope were gone. She opened the small drawer next to her bed. She dropped to her knees and searched the floor. She checked under the pillow, inside the pillowcase, under the top sheet, down by the steel casters in case they’d been carried in a draft.

“Did anyone take the paper and envelope that were left here for me?” she asked, looking from cot to cot to decide which among them was healthiest, which among them would have the nerve. “They were mine and I’d like them back immediately.” Her voice was the loudest sound the women had heard since arriving at the hospital, and some of them who had not stirred in days turned to look at her.

“One of the doctors,” the girl by the window said. “He came in and put them on his clipboard when he saw you weren’t here.”

“Which?”

“Him,” the girl said, pointing.

“Miss Mallon,” Dr. Soper’s voice came from behind her, and when she turned he was backlit by the lamps of the corridor. “Did Dr. Baker speak to you about surgery?”

“Can I have my paper back?”

“Not until we’ve talked about surgery.”

My God, she thought, pressing her fingertips to her temples. Didn’t these people know when a subject was closed? Had she not made her position clear? Or did they mean to drive her insane with the same questions over and over and over? Everything in the room seemed to slide to the left. She walked quickly to the window and pushed it up. She had a birthday cake to make. She had a man who had no idea where she was. She had to find a new job. There was a quartet playing at Our Lady of the Scapular in two weeks time and her friend Joan had offered to make her a dress. The cold pushing in through the open window was a salve on her hot skin and she could hear someone whistle for a taxi. The music of a banjo floated through the air from some point north of the hospital. Passing under the light cast by the single streetlamp were a few feathery flakes of snow.

“Dr. Baker said—”

“Dr. Baker isn’t in charge here. She shouldn’t have made promises.”

Mary felt his words like a fist to her gut. She leaned out the window as far as she could. “Hello!” she cried at the street below. She waved her arms so someone might see her. She shouted again but her voice was choked, and Dr. Soper had his arm around her waist. “Help me,” she said to the other women as Soper and the guard dragged her across the room, into the hall, and then pushed her ahead of them to a private room farther down the corridor, where Dr. Soper continued to brace her from behind, and a nurse struggled to open a small vial and pass it under Mary’s nose.

“I don’t know why you always insist on making a scene, Miss Mallon,” Soper muttered in her ear as they struggled. She could feel his breath on her neck, the sharp point of his chin where it pushed into her scalp.

“Relax,” the nurse whispered. “Just relax.”

TWO

Just as Dr. Baker had warned, after two weeks of testing at the Willard Parker Hospital, Dr. Soper told Mary that since she would not agree to have her gallbladder removed, the Department of Health had no choice but to transfer her to North Brother Island. There were facilities on the island where researchers could continue testing, “in a calmer, more focused atmosphere.” She could notify her friends and family when she arrived on the island, but not before. Soper watched her every chance he got, and when he turned away Mary felt space to breathe for a moment, until he turned back. She would not beg — they had enough power over her already. Soper had forbidden anyone at Willard Parker to give her a means to contact her friends — no more promises to post messages — and Mary clung to her composure by reminding herself that Alfred must have seen the newspaper articles. A night nurse had shown Mary the article that was in the Sun, and said there were others; her capture was mentioned in almost every major paper. The papers didn’t have her real name — they referred to her only as the Germ Woman — but Alfred would figure it out. It was possible, she thought, that he’d already tried to come to her. That he’d shown up at the hospital demanding to see her, but had been turned away.

“Isn’t that a Consumption island?” Mary asked.

“Riverside is a Tuberculosis hospital, yes. But they’ve seen Typhoid, too. Diptheria. Measles. Everything.”

Mary shivered. “How long?” she asked.

“A few weeks,” Dr. Soper said. Mary told herself that she could put up with anything for a few weeks. She’d let them test her and when they got whatever it was they needed from her, the ordeal would be over, and she’d never have to see Soper again.

• • •

From the first hour of her arrival, North Brother Island seemed to Mary too flimsy for the roiling East River. It was as if a jagged corner of Manhattan had broken off and floated away before getting caught in the prehistoric rock that lurked just below the surface of the water. North Brother was a little skip of land, an oversized raft made of dirt and grass where the dying went to wait their turn. It was located just above Hell Gate, that point in the East River where half a dozen minor streams met head-on before rushing out to sea, and only a fool would dip her toe in the water there. The entirety of North Brother would barely be big enough for a respectable estate if it were anywhere but New York, but in New York, or at least in Manhattan, where even the very rich live within arm’s length of their neighbors, it was a rarity: a stretch of space that was quiet, and private, and where everyone there was meant to be there, adult men and women whose names appeared on the roster of approved persons the ferryman kept under the bench seat of his small vessel, protected from the spray.

There were no automobiles on North Brother, only a single horse, and that one old and mangy, retired from pulling a sanitation cart and donated to science. During the day, there were always a few bicycles leaning against the western gable of the hospital, the side closest to the ferry that carried the nurses and doctors back and forth from 138th Street in the Bronx, but no one ever used those bicycles to pedal around the island, and seeing them there, leaning haphazardly against the redbrick wall or lying on their sides on the grass, Mary needed no further proof that she’d been removed from the city. If she were in the city, in the real city, and not this in-between place, those bicycles would be gone inside an hour, liberated from their spots and cycled away by Lower East Side teenagers. There were few urban sounds on North Brother. No store shutters creaking open in the morning, clanging closed at night. No bells, no rumble of the El overhead, no peddlers hawking their wares, no children hopping balls, no old women shouting from upper-story windows. In their place were the sounds of tree frogs, birds, the gardener’s clippers slicing the hedges into neat squares, and everywhere, always, the sound of water lapping the shore. Everything, everyone, stayed put, at least until evening came, when the doctors hustled out to the pier to make the awkward step down into the ferry, and the night shift leaned into the slight incline of the walking path and through the hospital’s wide front door. The evening croak of a heron on the island’s eastern shore sounded to Mary like a taunt, and chilled her.

Sixteen buildings anchored North Brother, ranging in size from the main building of Riverside Hospital to the gardener’s toolshed. There was also the morgue, the chapel, the physical plant, the coal house, the doctors’ cottages, the nurses’ residences, the X-ray building, the greenhouse, and so on. The circumference of the entire island could be walked in less than three-quarters of an hour, and from any point on North Brother, unless there was a building or a tree blocking the view, one could look back and see upper Manhattan, and north of that, the invisible seam where Manhattan met the Bronx. When it rained, the current that charged over the pebbles and jagged stones of shore reminded Mary of a pack of galloping horses steaming toward the sea.

• • •

There were no Typhoid patients at Riverside on the day she arrived, so they assigned her a bed in the main Tuberculosis ward. A nurse provided her with paper and envelopes, a pen with a reservoir of ink. She wrote to Alfred what, by then, surely, he already knew, but unlike the letter she’d drafted in her mind when she was still at Willard Parker, the first letter from North Brother was matter-of-fact. No patient at Riverside Hospital was permitted to have visitors, so she counseled patience, told him it might help to pretend she’d gotten a situation too far away for her to visit — Maine, perhaps, or Massachusetts — and before he knew it she’d be home. She was angry, but had learned that anger wouldn’t get her far. “So I may not see you until Memorial Day,” she wrote. Worst-case scenario, she thought. Two whole months should be plenty of time. He’d had a difficult stretch over the winter, not working, spending far too much time at Nation’s Pub, but she decided not to mention any of that. “Remember the rent if you haven’t already.”

After listening to the hollow coughs from her fellow patients for a few days, Mary learned to predict the end: when a rattle in the chest sounded like a penny thrown into a very deep well that had gone dry. She observed that the consumptives looked like relatives: the same pall, the same dark rings under the eyes. They would stare at Mary and wonder what she was doing there. At night, she slept with the sheet over her face in case she might breathe in their disease, but after a week she stopped worrying. During the day, she couldn’t stop herself from flaunting her health, walking back and forth by the windows, asking the nurses if she could be of assistance. On sunny afternoons she took a book from the hospital library and read in the courtyard. On less temperate days she jotted down ideas for recipes so as not to lose her sense of purpose. She made sure to get outside every day, even if it was just for a few minutes, and when she got back to her cot and nodded to her neighbors, she felt the pink glow in her cheeks, the rise and fall of her chest, the power in her lungs. The confusion on their faces confirmed what she already knew: a mistake. A terrible error had been made, but would soon be corrected.

She submitted to their tests without protest and hoped that the sooner they collected all the information they needed, the faster they would let her go. She had not seen Dr. Soper since the first day she arrived on North Brother, and when she asked about it, Dr. Albertson told her that she likely wouldn’t be seeing much of Dr. Soper anymore. He might check in on her now and again, and of course her test results would be shared with him, but his part in her case was likely over. This tiny piece of good news lifted her spirits for a day.

The doctors on North Brother seemed even more greedy than those at Willard Parker to look at her body. They wanted her hands, her belly, her breasts, her hips; they wanted every wet thing that came out of her, top to bottom — but when they came to her face their eyes flicked away. Some of her interrogators weren’t doctors who had patients but different types of medical men, like Soper, who called himself an engineer but seemed to know diseases. Some of them only studied things and took notes. The questions had changed since Willard Parker. There, they wanted to know about every fever she’d ever had. Had she ever had a rash on her bosom? Now they demanded to know when she knew. You’re an intelligent woman, they said. Several of your employers said you read novels when you had time off. You must have known. How can you ask us to believe you didn’t know?

Mary tried to think of images that would block out the questions — any memory at all that would take her away from North Brother. But more often than not, thinking of Alfred and her friends made her less patient with their questions, more frantic to get home. She paced. She counted to one hundred, and when she was finished, she counted again. She closed her eyes, held her hands to her ears, and still, each question was a dripping tap, a loose shingle in the wind, a fly buzzing by her ear that she could never slap away.

One morning, at the end of her second week on North Brother, she looked out from a fourth-floor window to see if she might spot the mail sack being transferred from the ferry and noticed a trio of men framing a small wood structure a short distance away. As soon as she saw it she knew it had something to do with her, and wanted to disown it immediately. Why go to the trouble of building something for a person who will be let go in a few weeks? No, it must be for some other purpose.

“Pardon me,” she said to a passing nurse, and pointed out the window. “Do you know what they’re building?”

“It’s your cottage,” the nurse looked confused. “Didn’t they tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“You’ll be transferred there once it’s complete. You won’t have to be here with the TB patients anymore.” She smiled gently at Mary as if this might be received as good news. Mary felt as if she’d waded into a lake of cold water and just felt the bottom drop away.

“Why? If they’re going to let me go soon?”

“Did they say that? That they’re going to let you go?”

“Yes, they did,” Mary said quietly as she felt her throat constrict and her body begin to tremble. She stumbled back to her cot and sat at the edge. She calculated back to the day they took her from the Bowen residence — nearly a month. How much more testing did they need to do? She got out a sheet of paper and again wrote to Alfred.

Dear Alfred,

In case you sent a letter in response to my last I wanted to let you know that I haven’t received it. I don’t trust anyone here and maybe you sent it but they didn’t give it to me. They are building a room for me separate from the hospital — just a hundred yards or so away. I don’t know why they would go to that trouble if they’re going to let me go soon. Will you ask around and see if anyone knows of a lawyer who might help? I hope you are getting on fine. I keep thinking that the last time I saw your face we were arguing and it doesn’t sit right that I haven’t heard from you since then. Try again to send a letter, Alfred. It will put my mind at ease.

Love,

Mary

She asked a nurse to post the letter immediately, and one week later, she got a response.

Dear Mary,

I was just sending a response to your first letter when I got your second. I saw the article in the paper and knew the Germ Woman was you since you were supposed to return for the weekend that Saturday night and never did. And also because of them mentioning Oyster Bay. I went up to the Bowens and Frank told me everything. I went straight to Willard Parker but a nurse there told me you’d already been moved to North Brother.

Tell me what I can do. I know things were not so good when we last saw each other but I’m feeling better now, no late nights, and I met a Polish man who has a connection in the water tunnels. We have to think about how to get you off that island. Billy Costello has a rowboat but said the waters around North Brother are too rough and no sane person would risk it. I didn’t believe him at first and went over to the East Side fishery but the fishmongers there all said the same thing. What do they want with you? If they really think you have Typhoid couldn’t they treat you at Willard Parker? Or St. Luke’s?

I’m going to ask around to see who knows a lawyer. Don’t worry.

Alfred

Mary read the letter three times before folding it and placing it carefully on her bedside table. It was the longest letter she’d ever gotten from him in the nearly twenty-two years that she’d known him, and thinking of him sitting down to write it made her more eager to be back home. The room they were building for her had four walls now, a roof, a door, and needed only shingles and a window. Dr. Anderson said she’d be moved in a matter of days. Alfred hadn’t mentioned anything about how he was getting by without her, whether he paid the rent for April, but he knew where she kept the spare cash in their rooms, and maybe that water-tunnel job would be a real lead, maybe he’d love it, maybe he’d find someone who knew exactly how to help her and she’d be back home by summer.

Sometimes they called it a cabin. Sometimes a cottage. A bungalow. A hut. A room. A shack. Whatever it was, they moved her there in April 1907. It was a simple ten-by-twelve-foot structure with a two-burner gas range, a kettle, a sink with running water. They gave her a small box of tea, a bowl of sugar, two teacups. She was not allowed to cook, but prepared food would be delivered from the hospital cafeteria three times a day. To pass the time between visits from medical personnel, Mary was told that she could sew for the hospital, or if she had a knack for crochet, they would provide needles and yarn. She could read. She could explore the island. Mary took all of this information blankly, and as she looked around her new home for the first time, she felt disoriented.

“And linens!” A petite nurse bustled around the small space, showing Mary a wicker basket that held fresh sheets, a towel, a washcloth. “Leave them outside your door when they need to be laundered.”

“How long?” Mary asked. How many times can a person ask the same question?

“In the main building we wash them once a week, so I’d say the same for you.”

“That’s not what I…” Mary sighed, and sat on the edge of the cot. “Will you leave me, please?”

“Almost done.” The nurse lined up a dozen glass canisters on the counter.

When she finally left, and Mary was alone for the first time since they’d captured her, she felt as if she’d left a crowded room and now approached that same room from a different door. She saw herself from a distance: the walls of her hut, the river just beyond, the chuffing of trains and trolleys crisscrossing Manhattan and the Bronx, so close she could hear the whistles. They are not letting me go. She made herself say it aloud. She’d been watching for the mail sack every day, hoping for a letter from Alfred to tell her that he’d found a lawyer, that help was coming, but maybe he already knew that they’d never let her go. Maybe that’s why he hadn’t written again: because he hadn’t known what to say. Unlike other times in her life, when she moved from laundress to cook, or when she moved in with Alfred without a single promise, North Brother felt like a place that was off the map entirely, no footprints left behind for her friends to follow and figure out where she’d gone. Sure, some knew. Those who were there for the arrest, those who helped hide her for all those hours only to be rewarded with a scene they’d talk about for the rest of their lives: a grown woman kicking, cursing, punching, dragged bodily into a police wagon. And there were the articles in the papers, but none of those said how she felt, what she thought. She was certain that word of her arrest had spread among the other cooks and laundresses and gardeners of Manhattan, but like the fast-moving currents that run deep in the ocean without disturbing the surface of the water, Mary was also certain that there were plenty who did not know. It was possible that after her arrest, after their humiliation, the Bowens had never spoken of Mary to anyone but each other. The agency wouldn’t utter a peep for fear of being dropped by other fine homes. The papers would follow her story for a while, but then they would move on, and Mary would still be in her hut, wondering how to get home.

The next morning, after fitful sleep in her new cot, Mary woke to the sound of an envelope sliding under her door. She recognized Alfred’s writing from across the room. She tore it open and stood beside the window to read it.

Dear Mary,

Are you doing all right? Have they said anything more about when you’ll be allowed home? I went up there to see if I could talk the ferryman into bringing me over for a visit but he has his instructions and they are very strict. I offered him money but he wouldn’t take it. I looked across the water to see what it’s like for you out there but it’s hard to tell.

The water tunnels were not for me. Maybe you predicted as much. I’ve been shaping for scaffolding work.

I’ve asked around about lawyers and went to see one who advertised in the paper but he didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about when I explained. Then I went back and brought the newspaper articles but he wasn’t interested. I will keep trying.

I wish I knew what to do to help. Is there anyone there you trust who can give you advice?

Alfred

“Alfred,” she said, and felt bile rising in her throat as her stomach turned. She walked out of her hut to the water’s edge. Which day was he standing over there, trying to find her? Maybe they could coordinate; in her next letter she could suggest a date and time. But as soon as she had the idea she felt sick again. To do what? To wave? To blow kisses at each other from opposite sides of Hell Gate? Pressing her fists to her mouth, she closed her eyes and tried to think of what to do.

THREE

They tried to get her to accept the schedule, to stop making so much of the twice-weekly testing of her blood, urine, and stool, the handing over of samples, the visits to the lab, the monthly physicals, the dipping of her hands in chemicals and the scrutiny of her fingernails. They needed to track her patterns, one doctor explained when she asked why twice a week was necessary. The nurses chatted with her as if this had all grown to mean nothing to her, but when they saw that she couldn’t get past it, that it was a humiliation she would never get over, no matter how long it went on, they disliked her for it. They came in pairs, and eventually stopped bothering with her, chatting only with each other. Every week, when Monday rolled around again, after coaching herself all weekend to be better, to try, to show that she was a good sport, to prove that she was trustworthy enough to be set free, they appeared at her door with their cheery faces and their glass canisters and made her livid all over again. “But what are the results?” Mary asked. “I keep submitting to these tests but I never get results.”

“Positive, I imagine,” a nurse said. “Or else why would they keep you here?”

When she posed the same question to Dr. Albertson or Dr. Goode, they said only that individual tests didn’t matter. Single weeks didn’t matter. They would share results with her as soon as they had enough data to draw firm conclusions. Patience, they counseled. Everything took time.

The only person she didn’t mind talking with was the gardener, John Cane, who had nothing to do with the testing and often left a bundle of flowers at her door. Even when her fury spread so wide it swept up everything in her path, including him, he seemed to barely take notice. He just talked and talked and talked. And when she talked, he listened. She searched the newspapers he brought for advertisements for law offices, and wrote letters asking for help. She wrote to the chief of police. She wrote to the head of the agency that had placed her at the Bowens. When the doctors and nurses continually refused to share the test results with her, she contacted an independent lab to ask if they would do private testing for her if she sent samples, and requested additional canisters from the nurses. In her next letter to Alfred she told him to go into the pantry at home, move aside the flour and the sugar, and there he’d find her bankbook. She instructed him to bring the book down to the bank on Twenty-Third Street where she had an account and arrange payment for the Ferguson Lab. “And then take the rest of it for yourself and close the account,” she instructed. “Show them this letter if they don’t believe you.” There wouldn’t be much left over, but it was something. She didn’t need money on North Brother, and she was worried about him.

• • •

Some days passed quickly and easily, and some days felt so long and empty that she couldn’t even muster the energy to find something to do. Six months went by. Ten. She wrote to Alfred every other week and tried to fill those letters with hope. She reminded him that North Brother was temporary and one day soon she’d be home and life would go on as it had before. It was important that she believe it, she knew, and just as important that he believe it. She found the determined tone of her letters echoed in his, at first, but then as the months slid by, his responses were spaced further apart. When a letter from him did arrive, the messages were so compact that she couldn’t find him in the words. After a long silence, he sent a letter in February 1908 that was barely a letter at all:

Dear Mary,

Missing you. Any news? Things are fine here.

Alfred

As always, she’d held the envelope for a moment before tearing it open. She’d studied the way he wrote her name. And then to finally give in to that pleasure, to unfold the paper after looking forward to it for so long, only to find that it was nothing, was almost worse than getting no letter. She vowed she would not write back to him, but then a few days went by and she gave in.

Dear Alfred,

I got your note. Please write more next time. You don’t know how lonely it is here and how I wonder all the time how you’re getting by. Maybe you imagine there are people around me all the time, but remember that most people on this island are very ill, and as for the doctors and nurses it’s not as if we’re friendly with one another. I’ve been knitting and trying crochet. The gardener lets me help him when there’s work, and that’s a distraction, but the ground has been frozen since December and the first tulips won’t push through until April. I’ve read every book in the hospital library. It’s only when I don’t hear from you for a long time that I worry I’ll be here forever. When I do hear from you I remember that North Brother Island is not my whole world. They don’t know what to do with me here. They can’t treat me like a sick person because I’m perfectly healthy but if they admit I’m healthy they’d have to let me go. When I ask questions I can see they look upon me as a nuisance. I don’t know what’s taking so long to figure out. Next month will be a year!

I wake up every day determined to get back home, back to our routine, and I think when I do get back home I won’t take any situation that takes me away overnight. Not for a long time, anyway.

How are you doing? Two letters ago you said you were getting regular work. Is that still the case? Any news from anyone in the building? Do they ask for me? Remember to take care of yourself. And please, Alfred, try to be better about writing.

Mary

She wanted to ask him if he was drinking, if his clothes were clean, how he was paying the rent when all of her spare money must be long gone, if he had enough money for the gas meter, but didn’t want to remind him of their fights.

On the day that marked the first anniversary of her arrival — a milestone only Mary seemed to notice — she counted his letters and stacked them on top of one another on the small table of her hut. There were nine in all. She calculated back over the year and figured she’d written to him at least twenty-five times. She noted the date stamped on each envelope: two months between the eighth and ninth letters. One month since she’d last written to him — the longest she’d gone without writing since her arrival on North Brother. That she wanted to hear from him, that she needed to see the blank space she’d left behind, was something she shouldn’t have to explain, not after how long they’d been together, how well they knew each other. She felt raw, heartbroken, frustrated. If she could see him in person for a few minutes she’d know what he was thinking, but there was no use wishing for that. She returned each letter to its envelope and placed the stack on the ledge over the sink.

She hoped he’d use her silence to think about what she needed from him and send a letter so full that the envelope would be too fat to slide under her door. Still, the weeks passed, and she heard nothing. She continued to hold out. She’d been on North Brother for almost fifteen months, and hadn’t heard from Alfred in four months. Her resentment turned to worry. Maybe he’d gotten injured on a job. Maybe he’d been evicted. He was not a violent drinker, but he’d had fights before. Maybe he’d gone to that rough beer hall he liked on Pearl Street and got pulled into a brawl. She wrote to her friend Fran to ask if she’d seen him, if he was getting on all right. Fran couldn’t read or write, so the response came back in her husband’s shaky hand, taped to a box of cookies from a bakery on Thirty-Ninth Street. The cookies were stale after the three days it took them to get to North Brother, but she ate one as she read.

Mary,

Things are the same here. We don’t see much of Alfred but he seems all right when we do. He’s not up for much conversation, but that’s Alfred. He misses you, I’m sure. When will you be home? There hasn’t been anything in the paper for a long time.

Fran

Inside, Fran had folded a cartoon from the Daily that she knew Mary liked, and even though she’d already seen it, tears pricked her eyes. So Alfred was in one piece, still making his way up and down the stairs to and from their rooms, and still no word.

• • •

“You know what your trouble is?” John Cane asked one morning when he came upon her sitting on the grass outside her hut, watching the ferry dock. “You’re not looking on the bright side.” It was October, she’d been on North Brother for eighteen months, and she’d still heard nothing from Alfred since that February letter. Her arms were brown from helping John all spring and summer, and now he asked if she wanted to help him prune back the overgrown rhododendron.

“Is that the problem?” Mary asked as she followed him along the walking path. She struggled to find the right words to ask how a person could be so completely and utterly out of tune with the unfairness he was witness to, how he could be so indifferent, and as she was forming the words he pulled off his gloves and handed them to her. He rummaged through his bag for spare gardening shears.

“I think so. You’re entirely at your leisure. You have your meals delivered.”

Mary sighed. It was useless. He was just trying to cheer her up.

“You hear from any of them lawyers you wrote to?”

“No. Not yet.”

He accepted this with a nod as he studied the bush. “Well, in the meantime,” he said, and started clipping.

A few days later, just when she’d stopped expecting it, nearly eight months since she’d heard from him last, a letter from Alfred was waiting on the floor of her hut when she returned from her walk. As always, she weighed it in the flat of her hand for a moment. She placed it on the table and looked at it while she waited for the teakettle to boil. When she finally opened it, a dozen seeds slid along the seam and she caught them in her palm.

Dear Mary,

Fran stopped me outside the building a few weeks back saying she’d had a letter from you worrying about me. I’d been telling myself it hasn’t been that long, but then I counted back. I’m sorry. I have no good reason for why I can’t seem to write as often as you’d like so I won’t try to give you an excuse. It’s not that I’m not thinking of you. You, at least, know the outlines of my day. You can picture what I do, where I go. But when I try to imagine you out there I don’t know what to picture. You tell me you’ve started knitting and gardening and that kind of thing, but it bothers me to hear you doing things you didn’t used to do before. It makes it seem like you are even farther away. I tried to get you interested in gardening, remember the window box I made for growing herbs? The seeds I’m folding into this letter are for tomato plants. I thought if they won’t let you cook then at least you can grow something you can eat and not have to get everything from the hospital kitchen.

I’m sorry I can’t be better. I miss you every day. I know all of this has been hard on you — hardest on you. But it’s been hard on me, too.

Alfred

When Mary opened her palm to look at the seeds, she realized Alfred expected her to be on North Brother for a very long time.

• • •

And then, out of the clear blue, in November 1908, she received a thick envelope from the Ferguson Lab. They had been testing the samples she’d been sending for almost nine months, and could now share with her the good news that her samples came back negative for Typhoid bacilli 100 percent of the time. They needed such a long sample period to make sure the bacilli didn’t flare with the change of seasons, or for any other reason. She read the paragraph again, and flipped quickly through the dozen pages of results they’d sent. She almost shouted her joy. Shaking, she went inside her hut to smooth back her hair and compose herself, and then, clutching the envelope, she walked quickly up the path to the hospital. The halls were oddly silent. Mary came upon one of the secretaries. “Where are they?” she asked, almost breathless.

“A meeting. They’ll be finished soon.”

“Hello, Miss Mallon,” came a voice from behind her, and when she turned she found Dr. Soper sitting in a waiting room chair, a book open on his lap. She swallowed, clutched the envelope to her breast. She turned her back to him.

“I’m waiting too. How are you feeling? You’re looking well.”

“Don’t you speak to me,” Mary said, and walked out to the hall to wait for another doctor to come by. She hadn’t seen Dr. Soper in months, and seeing him now flustered her. She read the letter from the Ferguson Lab once more.

She wasn’t in the hall for a minute when Dr. Albertson emerged from the conference room and asked if he could help her. He strolled into the office suite where Soper was waiting and she followed, not glancing toward the seating area.

“George!” he said, shaking Dr. Soper’s hand. “I’ll be right with you. Miss Mallon wants to see me.”

Dr. Albertson told her to have a seat in his office, and Mary passed to him the lab results from Ferguson.

“May I close the door?” she asked.

“Well, yes,” Dr. Albertson said, surprised.

He listened to her from beginning to end. She knew, she told him. She was no fool. She knew they were keeping her prisoner to study her for reasons they kept only to themselves, and couldn’t possibly admit to the public. Dr. Albertson just listened until she was finished.

“Mary,” he said kindly. “There is a good reason the Ferguson results came back negative. I’m going to call in Dr. Soper and he’ll help explain.”

“No!” Mary said. “He started all this. It’s made him famous, hasn’t it? What he said about me?” But it was too late. Dr. Albertson was already waving him inside.

“What’s this?” Dr. Soper asked as he entered the office and took the envelope Dr. Albertson passed to him.

“Ah,” he said simply when he was finished. “I see.”

“The samples must be tested immediately, Mary,” Dr. Albertson explained. “Or else the bacteria die. You’ve just told me that you often can’t get the sample out in the mail for a day, and then it might take three days to get to Ferguson. It’s no good. It’s not possible to test that way. And what’s more, they would know that if they really are scientists, as they claim. Have you already paid them? The results are meaningless.”

“You’re just saying that because you want to keep me here. What are your results, then? Why has no one told me the results from the lab here?”

“I can tell you, Mary, that so far, your blood and urine come back negative, but your stool comes back with a positive result roughly sixty-five percent of the time.”

“That’s not true.”

“Mary.” Dr. Albertson held up one of his hands, and Mary remembered that he’d always been kind to her. “I’m on your side, believe it or not. Don’t misunderstand — you do manufacture and carry Typhoid bacilli in your body, but I don’t think you should be held for that reason. You are not wrong when you talk about how valuable you are to our work. However, at this point we know that there are many healthy carriers out there, and it’s unfair that you should be here while the rest of them are conducting their lives.”

Dr. Soper bristled. “Or they should all be held. Or they should be taken case by case. In any event, Dr. Albertson explained it clearly, I think. These results are worthless.”

Mary looked at him and was so furious that she spat when she spoke. “You’re a liar,” she said to Dr. Soper.

Dr. Soper continued as if she hadn’t responded. “What I find interesting is that you dismiss our test results completely, give them no credence whatsoever, and yet you wholly believe these private results. So which is it, Miss Mallon? Do you believe in the science or don’t you?”

“You are a vile person.” Mary’s whole body shook as she said it.

“Mary,” Dr. Albertson offered, taking the envelope from Dr. Soper and returning it to Mary’s hands. “Why don’t you take these and think about it for a day and then come back when you have more questions? We can talk about all of this at length.” He gave her a look that said he was sorry to have called in Dr. Soper. He hadn’t understood. “I know it’s disappointing.”

“I want to see all the doctors. I want to see them right now.”

“I’m sorry. We have several new Diphtheria patients as of this morning. And Dr. Soper has come to give a lecture. Come back tomorrow morning. I’ll organize a group of doctors and we’ll all talk about this.”

“Oh, I’ll be back tomorrow. You can count on it.”

But she didn’t go back the next day, because she imagined them in wait for her, ready to punish her for taking investigative steps on her own. She was not a carrier. She had not made anyone sick. And yet, from time to time she felt a fissure in her certainty, like a reminder string wrapped around her pinkie that she’d forgotten about entirely until, at the end of a long day, she glanced down and noticed it there where she’d left it.

• • •

Though she had not yet replied to Alfred’s last letter, she decided it was time to break the silence.

Dear Alfred,

Thank you for the seeds. I have been thinking about how to respond, but right now I need your help with something important. I need you to go to the Ferguson Lab on W. 72nd Street and ask someone there to send more details on the testing they did for me. I’m going to write to them as well, but I think they need to see a person standing in front of them. Tell them that the doctors at Riverside won’t accept the results. Please, Alfred. Try to remember everything they say. Then write to me right away.

Mary

She didn’t know if the letter had reached him, if he’d been sober enough to read it, if he cared about her at all anymore, until two weeks later when the small rectangle came through the mail with Alfred’s writing on the front, saying that he’d been to the lab, not only once but twice, but no one there would talk to him about her. “What’s happening?” he wrote.

Alfred,

Thank you for trying. I had an idea that these private results would force the doctors here to set me free, but they’re ignoring them entirely. I don’t want to believe them, but there is one doctor here who seems to be on my side and he’s the one who told me the results are worthless. I feel sick thinking of all the money I gave them to do the testing. I had relaxed for a while but now I’m going to work harder to find a way out of this place. You think I’ll be here forever, but I won’t be, Alfred. I’m going to be home soon.

Mary

For a week or so she went back to old habits, waiting by the pier to watch the mailbag be carried into the hospital. And then, when she realized Alfred had resumed his silence, she armored herself against the hurt by writing more letters to lawyers, doctors, anyone who might help. Time was slipping by quickly, much more quickly than when she first arrived. Another new year arrived. Another winter turned into spring. The mailman rarely made his way down the path to her hut.

Then in June 1909, as Mary was making her way from the water’s edge in bare feet, John Cane came rushing across from the hospital with a letter in his hand. “For you,” he panted. “I told them I’d deliver it.” He watched her study the return address: O’Neill & Associates. “What is it? They said you’d want to see it right away.”

“You are so nosey,” Mary said as she slid her finger under the flap. They were right. It was a letter from a lawyer named Francis O’Neill. He’d been working on a case in Texas for the past two years, but now he was back in New York City and a letter she’d written to a colleague had been passed on to him. He wanted to meet with her. “I’ve read all the press,” he wrote, “and I’d like to hear your side. The case I was involved with in Texas was also a medical-legal issue. If your situation is as I understand it, and you have not yet secured other representation, then I am confident I can win your freedom.” He understood that she was not allowed visitors, but if she told the hospital that he was her lawyer they would have to make an exception.

Still in her bare feet and clutching the letter in her fist, she ran up to the hospital, gave the head secretary the name Francis O’Neill, and wrote back to him within a half hour asking him to come, please come.

FOUR

Mary sent her response to Mr. O’Neill on a Tuesday, and on Friday she watched an unfamiliar young man step off the ferry and steady himself for a moment before continuing up the path to the hospital. He clutched his briefcase with both hands. “Mr. O’Neill?” she asked. She was waiting in the shadow of the hospital’s western wall.

“You must be Mary,” he said, shaking her hand. She had so much to say and so many questions that she didn’t know where to begin.

“Why don’t I check in?” he said after a moment, nodding at the hospital doors. “They’ll want me to sign something.”

“I’ll wait down there,” she said, pointing to her hut.

Twenty minutes later, after a brief conversation about what was what on the island — Mr. O’Neill seemed interested in the X-ray building — she showed him inside and watched as his gaze skittered across the counter to the pile of rubbage she’d collected for John Cane. She offered him tea, but he declined. He pressed his handkerchief to his nose, and then opened his briefcase and removed a pile of papers. He had with him a copy of every newspaper article about her, plus her records from Willard Parker. She noticed he had notes attached to each item. He opened a notebook to a blank page.

“Let’s start with your arrest,” he said as he uncapped his pen.

“You mean my abduction,” she corrected him, and bit her lip. She didn’t want him to think she was unreasonable.

“Well, yes,” he agreed. “That’s probably more accurate.”

They spoke for two hours, and when he left, they had a plan. As Mr. O’Neill explained, the Department of Health may have been within their rights if they’d tested her first, and then put her in quarantine in Willard Parker following a positive result, but not the other way around. They were completely out of line to arrest her without a warrant and to test her once she was in their custody. First, he told her, she would apply for a writ of habeas corpus. There would be a hearing. He warned her that this meant her real name would be released, and asked if she needed to think about that. “No,” Mary said. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”

“The papers have been sympathetic to your side,” Mr. O’Neill said as he gathered his things. “That will help, too. Don’t be surprised if reporters come out here looking for you.”

“Will they be allowed to see me?”

“I’ll arrange it. I don’t see how the hospital can get around it.”

“And what about other visitors, could you get them to allow that, too?”

Mr. O’Neill touched her shoulder. “Try to be patient. I know it’s been a long time since you’ve seen your friends. But we have to proceed carefully, and remember, you’ll be home soon.”

“Wait,” she said as he began to leave. She had to address it now or else it would hang over her until they saw each other again. “I haven’t worked in over two years. I had a little money saved, but—”

Mr. O’Neill held up his hand. “There’s no fee.” She narrowed her eyes. He seemed decent, but no one was that decent. She decided to worry about that later, once she was free. As soon as he left, she got out a sheet of paper.

Dear Alfred,

Finally! I have news. I’ve just met with a lawyer named O’Neill and he seems certain he can get these people to let me go. There will be a hearing, I’m not sure when. Soon. I’ll send the details when it’s scheduled. I know it’s been a very long time and we have much to talk about but I miss you, Alfred. And I’m worried about you. I can’t wait to see you again. Let’s just forget these horrid two years and celebrate when we see each other soon. I am the same, I hope. Are you?

Mary

As Mr. O’Neill had predicted, within days of their habeas corpus application there was another newspaper article about her in the New York American, a long one, and for the first time, they used her real name. Her appeal was popular news in the city, and reporters began to request face-to-face interviews. The hospital allowed no more than one reporter per day.

“Write down about the closeness of this place,” she reminded each one who made the trip. “And the cot. Do you see how it cups in the middle?” The numbers used to condemn her were inconsistent: one had twenty-two sick, one dead; another had thirty sick, two dead; the third had twenty-eight sick, six dead. But none believed that was the whole story. She’d been cooking since she arrived in America in 1883, but the records that led to her discovery and capture went only as far back as 1901. “You can tell me,” each reporter said in a different way, and each made a show of putting down his paper and pencil like Mary was some kind of imbecile who didn’t know how the world worked. “When did you know?” The young man from the Herald had a vein that jumped at his temple.

“When did I know what?” she would reply, willing herself to stay calm. She offered each reporter one of the black-currant scones the hospital cook had sent down with John Cane. “I’ve never been sick a day in my life, and that’s all I have to say on the matter.”

Each reporter shrank away from the plate. “No?” she said, holding the plate aloft a few moments longer, as if the person sitting across from her might change his mind.

Ever since arriving in America, she kept her head down and she worked. She’d found Alfred, but that was no crime. They couldn’t lock her up for not being married, for demanding a good wage and getting it, for not attending any brand of church services and loving instead to spend Sundays roaming Washington Market, and then going to hear the fiddler who played on the corner of Fulton and Church Streets. She was thirty-nine years old and healthy. Did any of them realize the strength it took to lift a pot of boiling water? To knead bread for thirty minutes? To pound one of the tougher cuts of beef until it was tender and ready for her skillet? At the end of a workweek she was exhausted in her bones, in the muscles of her shoulders and her back, but still, she often walked all the way from the Bowens’ brownstone on the Upper East Side to her place farther downtown because she liked using her own steam, didn’t feel like squeezing herself into a streetcar.

“Miss Mallon,” the reporter from the Herald asked, “do you yourself believe you carry Typhoid Fever and pass it to those for whom you cook?”

She made sure to look him directly in the eyes. “No, I do not.”

“Then why has the Department of Health gone to the trouble and expense of keeping you here?”

“That’s exactly what I would like to know.”

And when it came time for each reporter to leave, she walked with him down to the dock and spoke of other things. The weather. That Frenchman’s attempts to cross the English channel in an aeroplane. The hurricane in Texas. “Where do you live?” she asked each one, coming around to it just before arriving at the dock. One was from Brooklyn. Another from Fort Lee. But the writer for the Herald lived on Twenty-Eighth Street and Third Avenue; upon hearing it Mary held her breath. Surely, living so close, he’d passed Alfred in the street, brushed up against him at the grocer, sat beside him at Nation’s Pub, maybe struck up conversation. The thought came to her that she should give this man a message to bring to Alfred, have him climb the stairs of their building and knock on the door to their rooms. But the reporter was backing away already, thanking her for her time, stepping down into the boat, and Mary felt the chance slip past her like a life ring thrown into the water and swallowed by the waves.

• • •

On the morning of the hearing, Mary wondered once again who was paying Mr. O’Neill’s legal fees. John Cane said it was possible some of the New York American’s readers had pitched in to pay for her defense since the writer took such a forgiving view. He also pointed out that sometimes Mr. Hearst got involved in cases that interested his readers. “Who named John Cane an authority on these matters?” Mary asked him. He’d been getting a little too comfortable with himself lately, standing on the single step outside the door to her cottage as he told her the hospital gossip, having a say-so on matters that didn’t concern him in the least. He brought the papers down to Mary to read out the most important passages. That he couldn’t read the sentences himself didn’t matter when it came to forming opinions on everything from the garbage strike to city taxes to Mary’s case.

“And what do you mean a forgiving view? They told the story accurately.”

“And sided with you, it seemed to me,” John said, crossing his arms and leaning against the rail as if he were born and raised on that very spot.

“Who else would they side with?” Mary demanded.

“I’m only saying,” John Cane said. “I’m only making a point.”

Mary felt nervous enough about the day ahead, and didn’t see how John Cane gave himself leave to make points when he was no more literate than a flea. All she knew was once she stepped onto the ferry later that morning, she might never return to North Brother again.

Her last letter to Alfred was brief. On a small piece of lined paper she’d written only the address of the courthouse, the date, the time, then folded it inside a copy of the article that had appeared in the New York American. Surely, when he unfolded the article and read her note, he would remember the last time they’d been down on Centre Street together — how many years ago? Eighteen? Twenty? It was late fall, the weather brisk. They were deciding what to do with the rest of their day when a page ran down the courthouse steps shouting “Verdict is in!” and then tripped, tumbling head over heels until he landed at their feet. “Well?” Alfred asked as he offered his hand and the boy let himself be pulled up. “Guilty,” the boy said as he staggered and blinked, uninjured. Mary and Alfred had walked on, laughing with heads bent so the boy wouldn’t see them, until all of a sudden Alfred pulled her into an alley, deep into a shadow, where he pressed her against a wall and put his rough hands on either side of her face and told her he loved her, that no one would ever love her as much, and she, feeling a tug in her belly like a hand clenched into a fist, could not say it back, not yet, but felt it there, inside her, waiting to be pried open.

In the beginning, Mary would meet Alfred for regular Wednesday and Saturday evenings out. One Wednesday, he told her that he wanted to live with her, and also told her that he knew she wanted to live with him. So when Saturday came, he called on her earlier than usual and said that he’d found a flat on Thirty-Third Street. Would she come see it? To decide? He’d promised the landlord they’d let him know by the end of the day. Mary went with him and they walked along Third Avenue with Alfred making his case the whole time. He’d known her so well that he’d gone up earlier that morning to place in that gray and narrow kitchen a single hothouse orchid in a red clay pot so that the first thing she would see when she pushed open the door was something beautiful that needed tending. Needed her tending. And she’d said, in halfhearted protest, because she felt herself giving in, felt that she’d given in already, “But we aren’t married,” and he’d looked at her for a long time before asking, “What has that to do with anything?”

• • •

The special ferry that would transport her over to 138th Street was due at eight o’clock in the morning. That would give her time to get across the East River and all the way downtown to the courthouse by ten o’clock. She’d been preparing for two days, scrubbing each of her three blouses and hanging them outside in the sun, brushing each of her skirts. In twenty-seven months the two white blouses had gone a bit yellow, the ruffles fallen flat. Two of the wool skirts had gone shiny at the seat and to her shame, when she had them out in the sun and could look at them more closely, she thought she could make out a separation in the worn area of each, two moons next to each other and a narrow space in between. The nurses offered her clothing from the hospital, told her to help herself before they were sent to the mainland and donated, but she didn’t want those tubercular blouses and dresses, didn’t want dead women’s hand-me-downs. Besides, she had difficulty finding blouses that weren’t tight across the bust, and how dare they, anyway, assume she’d wear any old thing they offered, no matter what state it was in, how crooked the seams, how flimsy the lining, no matter who’d worn it before her and what kind of tailoring that person had paid for, and what quality of cloth. How dare they? She was no beggar. She was a cook and had earned good wages and she wouldn’t touch any of it.

“There’s many who’d be grateful, ma’am,” one nurse commented when Mary told her to take it all away, and she realized too late that they were only trying to be kind. They retreated from Mary’s cottage like it was on fire, and a moment later she watched their work-whites fade into the shadow cast by the main building of the hospital. She told herself to shout after them that she was sorry, that they must try to understand.

• • •

The afternoon before the hearing, when she picked out the best of her blouses and the best of her skirts, she asked John Cane to fetch an iron and board from the hospital laundry. “Just give them here and I’ll tell them to do it,” he said, and held open his arms for the clothes.

“I don’t want them to do it,” Mary said slowly. “I want you to fetch me an iron and board so I can do it myself.”

“You don’t even trust them to iron a shirt?”

“Please, John,” Mary said before she closed the door. After an hour, she went out and looked at the small side door of the hospital where he usually came and went. She waited two more hours. She spotted him coming around six o’clock, but it was only to bring her dinner, and he promised to come back again. At ten o’clock that night, long after he would have taken the boat back to the mainland, Mary went outside one last time in her bare feet to see if anyone was making his or her way along the footpath, but all was silent except for the distant bell of a trolley across the river. At midnight, she boiled a small amount of water in a saucepan and did what she could with the smooth cast-iron bottom, pushing it along the sleeves of her best blouse. When she was finished, the blouse hung neatly over a chair, the skirt flat on the table like a tablecloth, she climbed into her cot. She tried to imagine something peaceful that would put her to sleep, but instead, her left eye began to twitch. She squeezed both eyes shut, but she could feel it still, the muscle fluttering against her palm where she pressed it as hard as she could. The last thought she had was of Alfred, and how she’d have to explain to him why she had to keep one hand over her left eye.

When she woke, and dressed, and made herself a cup of black tea, she opened the front door of her cottage to find John Cane placing the twelve-pound iron on her front step. “And what should I do with it now? It’ll take an hour to warm up.”

He held up his hands as if to say it wasn’t his fault. Nothing was his fault.

She wasn’t going to argue with him that day. She’d save any arguing for the judge downtown.

“You look nice anyhow,” John said, and Mary’s hand went to her throat. She wished she had a brooch. “Good luck today.”

“I mightn’t be seeing you again, John. If I don’t see you, I wish you all the best.” She clasped her hands together and nodded at him. “You were kind to me.”

“But surely they won’t let you go today, will they? They’d need to see you a few times more?”

“Mr. O’Neill said maybe today.” He also said the judge had probably made up his mind long before he stepped into the courtroom. Judges were supposed to be as cold and accurate as scales with the weight of proof added equally to each side, but Mr. O’Neill said they often stepped into the courtroom with the scales already tipped.

“Oh, I’ll see you later, Mary. I’m not worried.”

“You’re supposed to hope you won’t see me later.”

“Well, now.”

“What do you mean? It’s like wishing me bad luck. Do you wish me bad luck?”

“Not a bit! And I’ll bring a bit extra for your dinner tonight. You’ll be starved after all that traveling.”

Mary felt the twitch start up again and pressed her hand to her eye before it became too strong to stop.

• • •

For the short journey from North Brother Island to the mainland, she folded two small squares of paper over the sharp points of her collar so they wouldn’t be soiled in transit. She kept her tie — blue, flecked with black — folded in her pocket until she arrived downtown. She’d known that the journey across the East River would be choppy, and that the ferry would create its own breeze by its speed, so she’d waited to pin her hair until she was escorted onto the pier at 138th Street. “Excuse me,” she’d said to her guard, a young man, eighteen, perhaps, twenty at most, and before he could answer she strode off toward the small one-room depot and the door marked Ladies. He’d performed his duty well enough, stepping down into the boat ahead of her like any gentleman in case she should stumble, and up onto the dock when they reached the city. But he didn’t offer his arm, and during the crossing — the nose of the boat rising to meet each roll of gun gray water before falling, rising, falling, the two passengers and one crewman jostling side to side on the long bench seat — he’d kept his face turned away from hers and clutched the railing that rimmed the edge of the boat so that he wouldn’t brush against her during the passage. When she tried to speak to him, placing her face close to his so he could hear her over the sound of the slapping waves and the roar of the boat’s engine, he’d grimaced.

Once inside the narrow lavatory she took two long hairpins from her handbag and held them in her mouth as she twisted and tucked her strawberry blond hair into an arrangement at the back of her neck. The mirror she was accustomed to looking at every day since 1907 was merciless; it was placed near the single window in her cottage and faced north. This lavatory mirror was shadowed and freckled, and Mary examined her face carefully in the forgiving light. Some of the newspapers had included images of her with sharpened features. Others had drawn her fat and aged, cracking human skulls in a skillet like they were eggs, with a bosom that should have tipped her over. To herself, the morning of the hearing, she looked like she always had — pretty, but not unusually so. Clean. Efficient. Ready for work. In different clothes, and a different accent, and with hands that had not spent the better part of twenty years in scalding water, she might have been mistaken for a lady. She’d often been told she was haughty enough.

In the days leading up to the hearing, she kept telling herself there were three possibilities: Alfred would be off the wagon, too drunk to keep track of dates and time and would not come, or Alfred would sober up and get himself there. The third possibility was the worst, and it wasn’t until that moment, staring at her reflection in the lavatory mirror, that she faced it head-on: he might not want to see her. Perhaps, in twenty-seven months, he’d worked up the courage to speak to that bright thing who made up the beds at the hotel on Thirty-Fourth Street and who sometimes waited outside Nation’s Pub for her brother. “She reminds me a bit of you, at that age,” he’d told Mary once, a passing comment, an answer to her question of how his day had been. She liked when he painted a full picture of his day for her and instead of drawing himself slumped on a stool, his head filled with goose-down feathers until halfway into that first tumbler, he told her about the world outside on the street, the call of the chestnut man, the rough comments about President Roosevelt’s oldest daughter, the man dressed in a suit of newspaper.

“Ma’am?” a woman’s voice called from the other side of the door. “The man says you’re to hurry.”

Mary swung the door open. It was the woman from the ticket window; her fingertips were black with ink, her forehead smudged where she’d rubbed it. “What man?” Mary asked loud enough for her guard to hear. “That?” She laughed. How easy it would be to get away, to leap onto the streetcar and disappear, or even to pick up her skirt and run. There was no running from North Brother, but here in the city she could simply turn a corner, and another, board a trolley, and be gone. John Cane had delivered two five-dollar bills with her breakfast that morning, money sent from Mr. O’Neill for anything unexpected she might encounter on her way down to the courthouse, and Mary had folded them tightly and slipped them inside her shoe. She observed her guard. The boy was so afraid of her it might be enough to just go near him. Just by walking toward him she could back him up into the river.

• • •

The plan was that Mr. O’Neill would get his medical men to answer their medical men and after the hearing, if the judge agreed that she shouldn’t have been taken bodily from her place of employment without a chance to defend herself, then she’d be going home to Alfred that evening. Unless Alfred had offered her side of the bed to someone else.

When they finally arrived at the courthouse, Mary searched for Alfred as she followed Mr. O’Neill down the marble-floored hallway. He’d stay in the shadows, she knew, until the last moment. It was possible she’d passed him as she rushed up the steps outside. Mr. O’Neill led her to a small private room just down the hall from the courtroom, where they had a few moments of peace before they went in to present their case. When he told her it was time, she removed the two squares of paper from her collar. Mr. O’Neill had been doing a sidelong inspection of her appearance since greeting her, and now that they were alone he gave her a quick look up and down.

“Well?” she asked after a moment.

“Well nothing,” he said. “Good.”

FIVE

Mr. O’Neill warned her that the other lawyers would have rounded up as many of her old employers as they could, other house staff she’d worked with, anyone who might tell a story about her that would keep her on North Brother. Her most recent employers, Mr. and Mrs. Bowen, were unlikely to be in attendance. They would not want their name further tarnished by association, and besides, their daughter had died, it was a fact, and there was nothing they could say that would weigh more than that.

One of the last times she’d conversed with Mrs. Bowen, before Soper came looking for her, before the girl got sick, Mary had been wearing her new hat. Remembering that hat nagged her, and after more than two years of circling ’round and ’round why and how she’d gone from working and living in New York City, making a good wage, buying what she liked, to being trapped on an island, her thoughts kept returning to that hat. Where was it now? From the moment she was forced into the police wagon and taken to Willard Parker, she felt like she’d been flipping through a book to find a single sentence, running her finger along a page to find a single word, but when her mind lighted on that hat, she stopped. Her stomach sank. Sometimes one thing leads to another even if the line isn’t direct.

Some of the doctors had intimated that she was not right in her mind, that her mental state was part of the reason she could not be trusted, along with her being a woman, and being an immigrant, and being the kind of woman who lived with a man without being married. But she knew the hat had something to do with her capture in 1907, and she knew it now that her case was finally being examined, twenty-seven months later.

It was a lovely hat, cobalt blue with silk flowers and berries cascading around the brim, piled higher on one side of the crown than the other. It wasn’t one of those frothy confections meant to appear suspended over the head by magic, one of those ridiculous dollops of cream that required a morning’s worth of framing and supporting the hair that it sat upon. It was an everyday hat. A walking hat. The kind of hat where a woman could twist her hair as usual and then just place it on top, a pin here, a pin there, nothing more. The flowers weren’t simply cut out from the fabric, but labored over, each one a tiny piece of craftsmanship Mary examined in the shop before pushing her money across the counter. The shop was called Matilda’s, and she’d passed it dozens of times before the day she finally went inside. Nothing in the window had ever cried out to her until that hat, so she went in. She was extending her fingers to feel the brim when at the very same moment she remembered that her hands smelled of onions, and the shop’s mistress asked if she could be of any assistance. Mary wasn’t used to shops being so quiet, the mistress being so solicitous. She could feel the woman’s eyes on her from the moment she put her hand on the door’s handle. That first day, Mary said, “I’m in a terrible rush. I’ll have to return another time.” She let a few days go by, and then she scrubbed her hands well, rubbed her fingertips with lemon, and tried again. This time she picked the hat from its peg and held it to the light.

“It’s new,” the shop’s mistress said. “It was made in Paris.”

Mary asked how much and kept her face very still for the answer. It was an astonishing number, but she had it. She had the whole price of that hat in an envelope hidden in the frame of her bed at the Bowen residence. She was going to do it. As she walked away from the store she knew she was going to do it. Why not? She had no one to answer to but herself, and what was money for if not to be spent on a beautiful hat? On her next visit, Mary told the woman that if she discovered the craftsmanship to be less than it appeared, she would take the hat straight back and demand her money returned. The woman suggested a plain gray toque with a narrow brim and showed Mary the neat stitching as if to tell her that gray and plain might be more appropriate to a head like Mary’s than a cobalt jewel that would draw every glance. Mary ran her thumb along one of the silk petals and bought it on the spot.

When she returned to her room at the Bowen residence, she studied it in the box for the better part of an hour, those flowers, each one centered with a small piece of glass that drew the light, the blue of the petals slightly paler than the rest of the hat, the blue of the berries slightly darker. It was a beautiful thing and she loved it. It lived in its box on top of her dresser for two whole weeks before she put it on her head and wore it outside. She paired it with the chestnut dress coat she’d purchased secondhand, and she worried for it when she stepped into the weather and found the day not as fair as it had seemed from her room. She didn’t want it to get wet, or be stolen from her head by a thief. Or worse, it occurred to her as she remembered the week before, when a gentleman’s handkerchief was carried away in the wind. Mary had joined the chase for a few steps, until she predicted where it was headed, and when he caught up with it, he found it had landed on the belly of a horse that had died in the street and been left there to rot and draw flies. Mary had laughed when, out of habit, the gentleman reached for his hanky, to cover his face, but of course it was the hanky he’d been chasing in the first place.

She wore it. She stood in the small private room Mrs. Bowen had assigned to her as cook and slid one pin behind her left ear, and one behind her right. She felt its beauty like a living thing as she crossed the street, as she gathered her skirt and stepped as well as she could over the horse shit that had been pushed to the curb and left in a heap at the corner of Sixtieth Street. She felt it like a light shining over her as she made her way east to the streetcar on Third Avenue, still shining as she transferred to the IRT at Forty-Second Street. Mrs. Bowen was to have a dinner party that evening and wanted something unusual to serve to her guests — lobster, perhaps, or sweetbreads. No fowl, she instructed. No oysters. No pork. Nothing her guests might be served by their own cooks, in their own homes. Milton’s on Second Avenue had a good selection most days, and high turnover, but Mrs. Bowen didn’t trust them, and sent Mary instead all the way down to Washington Market, where she instructed Mary to witness with her own eyes the fish being pulled off the ice. It meant a morning’s journey and more work, just so Mrs. Bowen’s guests would go home and say to one another, That Lillian Bowen, she’d never serve anything as plain as a roast.

As she descended the staircase to the IRT on Forty-Second Street, she looked down for her next step with her eyes instead of bending her neck and risking the hat. She’d been on the IRT fewer than a dozen times since it had opened with great fanfare, and still found it jarring to see a train shoot out of the darkness so far underground, knowing as she stepped aboard that it would plow into the darkness on the other side. But the hat made her brave. On the train, she fixed her gaze on the doors as the rest of the world pushed in around her.

Because Mrs. Bowen had left the choice of dinner to her, she had to look at everything the market offered: twenty-five butcher stalls, all the vegetables, all the fruit, the cheese, the nine fish stalls, the smoked meat, the tripe. She sampled the coffee cake, the coffee, the dark bread, the light, the butter from Connecticut, the cheese from Virginia. She bought a nickel slice of Westphalian ham and ate it as she walked. She raised a hand to protect her hat against the flying feathers of the poultrymen, from the rough knuckle-cracking work of the butchers and the bits that flew in the air, the cartilage and marrow that made a slick circle around their stalls and forced women to walk on tiptoe until they were safely past.

She kept the hat on her head well enough, adjusting it now and again when it started to tip, and she made her way all the way back to Park and Sixtieth loaded down with packages. The other Irish at market had their hair covered in scarves. The European women from other parts wore tight braids coiled at the back of the neck, or old hats of their husbands’ pulled down over their ears. Heads had turned seeing Mary coming in that hat. Seas had parted. When she bargained and told them exactly how she wanted her packages wrapped, they knew she was a domestic, and yet that hat.

As Mary turned the last corner before the Bowen home, she caught sight of her reflection in a neighbor’s bay window and decided she was as pretty that day as she’d ever been. The coat hugged her figure — slim, back then — and her hair was shiny and clean. Her eyes were bright from the chill in the air, and her cheeks rosy from the effort of hauling her purchases. She was thirty-seven years old.

She turned onto Park to walk the half block uptown and who did she encounter in front of the residence but Mrs. Bowen herself. And what was Mrs. Bowen wearing on top of her curls? The identical twin to Mary’s beloved hat.

“Mary,” she said, her eyes fixed on Mary’s head. “I expected you ages ago.”

“I’m very sorry, madam,” Mary replied, even though Mrs. Bowen had no reason to expect her any sooner. She made a point not to look at Mrs. Bowen’s head, even though Mrs. Bowen had yet to take her eyes from Mary’s.

“You haven’t forgotten that the guests will arrive at six.” She narrowed her eyes as if deciding whether it really could be the same hat. A copy, perhaps? A poor imitation?

“No, I wouldn’t forget that.” Mrs. Bowen had called the office that had placed Mary to hire two additional cooks just for the afternoon, and Mary had stripped and scrubbed everything the day before. When Mary arrived at the Bowen residence three weeks earlier, the pots and pans were thick with baked-on carbon, and she spent her first week chipping it away, scrubbing them back to their original luster. While she was at it she tied a rag to the end of a broom and pulled the cobwebs from the tin ceilings. She went through a gallon of ammonia scrubbing the floor. No one knows where to find the pockets of grease in a kitchen like a cook knows, and when the other cooks arrived that afternoon, Mary saw them looking. And she saw them not finding.

Mrs. Bowen seemed satisfied, and though she still wore a curious expression, like she didn’t quite understand what she was looking at, she finally managed to tear her eyes away from the top of Mary’s head. She put her hand to her own hat for a moment, then turned to enter the house through the main entrance. Mary watched the other woman walk away, and as she felt the weight of the packages in her arms, the ache in her wrists and elbows from struggling with them for so long, on the IRT, on the streetcar, up and down stairs, across puddles and stubborn patches of ice left over in the shade of trees, the scald of the cold against her knuckles, she felt the words slipping from between her lips before she had a chance to stop them.

“I see we have the same taste,” she said to Mrs. Bowen’s back. It was a foolish thing to say, and as soon as the words were out she remembered her aunt observing once, years ago, that Mary had a twist in her that sometimes made her do and say things that she shouldn’t.

Mrs. Bowen turned. “I beg your pardon?”

“Your hat,” Mary said, nodding at the other woman’s head as if she might not know where to find her hat. “It’s identical to mine.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Bowen said, her hand reaching somewhere in the region of her ear, not touching the hat. “Similar, Mary, not identical. But I see what you mean.”

“Not the same?”

“No. Similar. Not the same.”

Mary knew that if she snuck into Mrs. Bowen’s quarters that night and switched their hats she would never in a thousand years of scrutiny have been able to tell the difference.

“My mistake.”

The servants’ entrance was just a few short steps down from the sidewalk but Mary barely made it inside before she started laughing. Bette and Frank were in the kitchen making preparations and could tell by Mary’s face she had a story to tell, so she told it, and they all had a laugh over Mrs. Bowen’s expression, which Mary did for them again and again as they unfolded the counters from their compartments and laid out the knives and waited for the additional cooks.

They laughed and laughed, and the work went quickly.

A week later, the daughter of the family declined all of her meals and told her governess that she felt poorly, and would have to do her lessons another time. By evening, her fever was so high she had to spend the whole night in the tub. One month later, Mary was taken away.

• • •

“Nonsense,” said John Cane, when Mary told him the whole story of the hat not long after she was moved to her private hut on North Brother. John had asked if she wanted to keep him company while he transferred to the ground some of the plants he’d started from seed over the winter. She was quiet, at first, content to watch him work, and then he’d asked how it was that they’d captured her, taken her to North Brother.

“It isn’t nonsense,” Mary said, raising her voice. “They chased me down like a dog. They harassed me at the Bowens’ first, then in my own rooms, then they got me one day when the Bowens were out. They had to carry me! They each took an arm or a leg and they carried me. They didn’t even give me a chance to get my things.”

“What things?” John asked. “You’ll send for them. Tell the matron.” But Mary didn’t know the matron, didn’t know what brand of woman she was. Perhaps the matron would like to get her hands on Mary’s hidden envelope, her three good blouses, her beautiful cobalt hat.

How to explain that if it wasn’t the hat specifically, it was the fact that Mary had purchased the hat, had worn it, had admired herself in it. That she was the type of woman who counted out her earnings — a full month’s worth of earnings! — and slid it in a neat stack across a counter to purchase for herself something as impractical as a beautiful hat. If she’d been the type of woman who saved her money, or gave it to someone who needed it more, a neighbor with children, perhaps, or the church, if she’d been a married woman who handed every dollar over to her husband, or better yet a married woman who didn’t have any earnings because she was taken up with the care of her own home, she’d never be in the situation she was in. She couldn’t prove it, but it was the truth nonetheless.

She’d broached the idea with Mr. O’Neill two years later when he came to see her on North Brother, but it was like trying to explain to a cook in training how to tell when a duck is done even when the juices lie, how to predict whether a soufflé will fall just by feeling the air in the room. “A hat?” Mr. O’Neill said. Then he changed the subject and she could see him dismiss it entirely.

SIX

Mary followed Mr. O’Neill by several paces as they entered the courtroom. The time was two minutes past ten o’clock.

Almost every chair was occupied when she walked down the narrow center aisle. She’d pictured benches, polished wood, the judge elevated above them on a kind of throne, but instead the cramped and musty room was filled with straight-backed chairs in uneven lines. Some reporters had turned their chairs to make a cluster with others they knew. Some people who had no involvement in the case but had been following it in the papers nudged their chairs out of line bit by bit with impatient shifting. She wanted to know if Alfred was there, but she kept her eyes fixed on the neat seams of Mr. O’Neill’s suit jacket. There was a momentary hush when those closest to the door spotted her, and a collective creak as several dozen spectators turned to see her for themselves.

Some were on her side, Mary hoped as she crossed the room and kept her focus above the heads of the witnesses. She’d seen the editorials in the paper, the people who believed she’d committed no crime and should be set free to live and work in society like everyone else. Then there were the papers that refused to use her real name even after it had become public knowledge. The Germ Woman, their headlines still read. Readers had written in to ask if breathing near Mary Mallon put a person at risk. What about touching what she touched? What about entering a room shortly after she’d left? She hoped the sympathetic were in attendance at the hearing, but all she felt as she made her way to the front of the room was the scrutiny of fifty people looking at her so closely in the muggy air that she felt handled, groped, every bit as dirty as she was accused of being.

Mr. O’Neill placed his briefcase on a scratched and dented wood table at the front of the room. The men from the Department of Health were already seated at a similar table across the aisle, and Mary made the mistake of looking at them, one by one, until her glance jumped to the row behind them, where Dr. Soper’s dark head was bent over his notes. A man in a blue uniform stepped forward and announced the arrival of Judges Erlinger and Giegerich. Mary hadn’t expected two judges, but she was relieved to see that she’d be able to keep them apart in her thoughts: Erlinger was a big man and Giegerich was no larger than a girl.

“All stand,” the court officer called out, and the clap of chairs being pushed back was thunderous. Mary looked toward the three large windows on the western side of the room and noted that the day had darkened, the metallic smell of rain had seeped indoors. When the people returned to their seats, there was stirred up in the room the odor of vegetables, of horse, of blood. Judge Erlinger pressed a handkerchief to his forehead and then briefly to his nose.

Mr. O’Neill cleared his throat. He began the way they’d discussed, with an account of her arrest in March of 1907. “Without a warrant,” he said, “without due process, the liberty of a perfectly healthy individual…”

Mary could see that he was nervous. He was five years younger than she, only thirty-four, but he never seemed as young to her as he did when he touched his fingertips to the edge of the battered table and stood.

“Mary Mallon has been quarantined for twenty-seven months with no one to keep her company but a gardener who delivers her meals three times a day. She has submitted to testing — urine, blood, and stool — twice a week for that entire period. The nurses who collect her samples are certainly no company, and she dreads their visits because of the anguish they cause. Her friends are not permitted to visit, despite the fact that every doctor associated with her case admits she is contagious only through cooking.”

Mr. O’Neill continued, sticking only to what was relevant, and as he spoke Mary found her thoughts drifting. For twenty-seven months she’d craved the streets of Manhattan, the chaos, the noise, haggling over the price of an orange, debating the accuracy of the butcher’s scale. She missed her work, rising before the rest of the house, removing the first shining pot from its hook, lighting the fire under it, dropping in a spoon of butter and watching it skid across the warmed bottom. She missed earning money, walking to Dicer’s on First Avenue, picking out a basket full of groceries, paying for it with clean, new bills.

She missed Alfred most of all and every morning when she woke she wondered whether he was also awake. She often caught herself thinking of him the same way she once thought of the people from home when she first got to America, all the way across the ocean, twenty-one days at sea. And then when she remembered that the East River was not the ocean, was not even as broad as the mighty Hudson, everything felt more urgent and these were the moments that made her wild, as the doctors called it. Combative. Difficult. Stubborn. Obstinant. Ignorant. Female. There were almost five million souls rushing through their days over there. She could see their chimneys and hear the sharp whistle of trains. Somewhere over there walked Alfred, and unlike those she missed from Ireland who were so far away that she’d quickly drawn a curtain across the possibility of ever seeing them again, the idea of being so close to him and not seeing him made everything worse.

If she had more courage she might have tried swimming across like the young men from the House of Refuge on Rikers tried from time to time, but then she reminded herself that most times, if the papers told the truth, those men turned back, often stopping at North Brother for a rest before doing so, or drowned. John Cane once told her that the East River was the fastest, roughest river he ever knew, especially around North Brother. At the time, she’d been on the island only a month and thought he’d been rubbing it in, reminding her that there were no options for her. But after watching those same waters for twenty-seven months, she knew he’d just been stating the truth.

• • •

Ten o’clock in the morning was not Alfred’s best hour. She thought of his long, white legs, splayed out on the starker white of their bedsheets. She thought of him standing by the window in his shorts. She thought of all the eggshells and orange peels that had probably collected in the sink for twenty-seven months, all the bottles that would need scouring. She thought of him in work clothes, making his way up the building’s stairs to their flat on the sixth floor. Who talked to him in the course of a day? Where did he take his meals? She thought of him running his hand along the curve of her back to her backside and pulling her toward him.

She missed seeing human beings other than herself and John Cane, who had a strange fascination with watching her eat what he brought for her from the hospital kitchen. The night before the hearing, when he should have been worrying about getting her that iron in time, he’d brought her two slices of beef threaded with gristle, a limp salad, a roll. “The people cooking for this hospital should be lined up before a wall and shot,” she said as she inspected the meat. John was the tiniest little sparrow’s fart of a man, but he laughed with the strength of someone full-size. She’d been asking John to bring her flour, yeast, butter, a few vanilla beans, nothing to make a proper meal, but ingredients for bread, something she could work with in the mornings when it was too early to step outside, but he just held up his hands and ignored her. She wondered what they’d told him about her, why asking for simple ingredients always prompted him to say good-bye and hurry across the green space like he was being chased.

Mary observed two flies float in through the window and then out again. The clop of horses, a large team from the sound of it, passed on the street outside and Mr. O’Neill paused for a moment; Mary heard the door at the back of the courtroom open. She heard a man’s low voice asking pardon as he tripped across knees to an empty seat. She heard the voice again, louder, and the sound of it was like a wire pulled up her spine. She felt the small hairs at the back of her neck. The stirring she heard behind her seemed to be moving closer. She felt bodies shifting. Chairs creaked. People exhaled the hot breath of annoyance.

“Sir,” Judge Giegerich said, looking at the source of the disruption while holding a hand up to Mr. O’Neill. “Is this entirely necessary? There are two seats on the aisle right in front of you.”

“I want to sit near Mary,” the man said, and Mary turned to find herself no more than three feet from Alfred, who was dressed in a gray sack suit with the jacket over his arm, and wearing polished shoes. Borrowed, Mary thought. The shirt, too. She hoped he’d give it all back in the same condition. “Hello, Mary,” Alfred said. He looked healthy, fuller in the face than he’d been when she last saw him. Eating, she hoped. Sleeping at night. Mary drew a breath, wanting to speak to him, but felt everyone in the room looking at her, the reporters poised with their pencils to paper, the others with their arms folded or their eyebrows raised. She turned back in her seat and faced the judges. Mr. O’Neill concluded his point.

“Mary,” Alfred whispered. He’d gotten the seat behind her.

Mr. O’Neill cast a sidelong glance at her, a warning not to turn around.

“You look nice.”

Mr. O’Neill turned abruptly and gave Alfred a stern look as one of the lawyers for the Department of Health launched into all the various reasons Mary Mallon must remain in quarantine.

Mary dropped her hand to her side and made a little wave beside the seat of her chair. He would see it if he knew to look for it. The flies flew in through the window again, and this time circled the room. Two more followed. A child’s voice below the window called out the names of the newspapers he was selling. There was the sound of someone running. A cart being pushed down the hall on the other side of the courtroom doors.

“How are you?” she whispered over her shoulder. Beside her Mr. O’Neill dropped his pencil and pushed his pad of paper away.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Alfred whispered back.

“You look well.”

“I’m better, Mary. Much better. Than before.”

“Good. That’s good.”

They stared at each other. Mary twisted in her seat, Alfred leaned forward on his elbows. She felt hot, reckless, and wondered what would happen if she got up out of her seat and walked out of the courtroom on Alfred’s arm. She noticed that he didn’t look nearly as uncomfortable as everyone else in the room. His hand was cool when he reached out and covered hers.

“Will there be a break?” he asked, no longer bothering to whisper.

“Mary, please,” Mr. O’Neill said.

Across the aisle, Dr. Soper coughed, and when Mary looked over at him he was looking right back at her, as if daring her to do exactly what she was tempted to do. His hair was combed back off his face and he was one of the few men in the gallery still wearing his suit jacket.

“I don’t know,” Mary said to Alfred. “I really don’t know.”

“Well, then I’ll see you after. Won’t I?”

Judge Erlinger interrupted the man from the Department of Health. “Miss Mallon, do you need to excuse yourself?”

Mr. O’Neill gave her a look that meant it was her last warning. If you leave this room, the look said, this is the last you’ll see of me. Mary felt Alfred’s hope float up behind her, wrap itself around her shoulders, and pull her toward the door. They would send guards with her, she knew. Without looking at the judges or at Soper, Mary turned and faced the front of the room.

“No, sir,” Mary said. “He’s an old friend.”

A titter went up in the gallery and Mary put her hand to her left eye.

“Go on,” the judge said to the lawyer who’d been speaking.

• • •

On the other side of the room, in the very back row, a reporter for the Examiner noted that the Germ Woman seemed upset. Was she crying? Was she scratching her face like a cat? He leaned forward in his seat, tried to get a better angle. Crying would go over. Crying made sense. He watched her bring her fingertips to her eye and then back to the table and felt his body flinch. He opened his notebook. “Germ woman tearful through proceedings, careless with bodily fluids even in court of law.”

SEVEN

Once the hearing date was set, Mr. O’Neill came to North Brother once more. They went over their strategy, and he told Mary that he wanted her to swear before the judges that she’d never cook for hire again. “It’s your best chance,” he said. They believed she was sick, that she was passing Typhoid Fever from her hands to the food she served. That she’d never been sick a day in her life was of no relevance.

“How can it be of no relevance?” Mary asked. The last ferry going back to the city was due to depart shortly, and she wanted to be clear with Mr. O’Neill on her position before she said good-bye. “How can I spread an illness that I’ve never had myself?”

“I only mean that it’s of no relevance to them. But it’s entirely relevant to our argument. It’s a new theory of disease, Mary,” Mr. O’Neill explained. “Dr. Soper—”

“Don’t talk to me about Soper,” Mary warned him. “What kind of a doctor is he anyway? I’ve been asking for two years and no one has explained it properly.”

“He’s a sanitary engineer. He—”

“A what?”

“Part of his job is to track diseases to their source. The garbage, for instance. He’s done a lot of work for the Department of Sanitation. And he’s been a consultant for the IRT since it opened. Remember when everyone was worried about breathing microscopic steel shavings? They called him. He was already making a name for himself, but finding you has made his reputation.”

“That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? So he can make his name?”

“Mary,” Mr. O’Neill sighed. “Things could be worse for you. You have a private cottage. You have the freedom to move about the island.”

“An island the size of a park. Where everyone I meet shrinks away from me.”

“It could be worse.”

“Well, yes, Mr. O’Neill. You’re absolutely correct. I could be dead, I suppose.”

• • •

Of the many witnesses called the morning of the hearing, a few surprised Mary. Most were people who worked for the Department of Health, or who worked at labs scattered across the city, and who canceled out one another with their opposing views of her case. Half thought that since Mary was a healthy person and had never shown any symptom of the disease she was accused of passing on to so many, the city had no right to imprison her. Others felt just as strongly that it was precisely because Mary showed no symptoms that she must be kept in quarantine for life. “Think of the innocent,” urged a doctor named Stamp whom Mary had never seen before. “No one will think to avoid her in the streets, no one will hesitate from inviting her into his home. Seeing her good health and her experience, what would stop her from being hired to cook in a good house? The Bowen child was only nine years old when she died of Typhoid Fever.”

Mary had hoped that Elizabeth Bowen’s death was one more thing Dr. Soper had made up, wanting to make her situation worse. It had seemed too convenient to their cause. But Mr. O’Neill confirmed it was true, and Mary supposed he had no reason to lie. And now there was an unfamiliar doctor on the stand confirming that truth. Mary remembered the quiet girl who read books and listened to her governess and preferred her bedroom and the parlor to the fresh air outside. Sometimes she came downstairs to see what Mary was making in the kitchen, and a few times Mary had let her dip her finger in a sauce, or take a stewed apple out of a pot with a spoon. One time, Elizabeth asked Mary why she wasn’t married and when Mary told her it was because she didn’t feel like it, Elizabeth said she’d marry Mary in an instant if she’d been a boy.

Then she said, “Is it really because you don’t feel like it? Or is it because you haven’t anyone to marry?”

“Aren’t you bold!” Mary said. “How would you like to pick up someone else’s socks all day long?”

Elizabeth made a face.

“Isn’t it better to earn wages?”

“Yes,” Elizabeth said, entirely convinced.

“And don’t forget,” Mary told her, “if I were a married woman, I probably wouldn’t be here making your supper.”

The first sign that Elizabeth was sick came when she wandered into the kitchen and announced that she was tired. Mary had looked carefully at the girl and thought of Tobias Kirkenbauer.

On the day Mary was taken, the girl had been upstairs, sleeping, her governess watching over her. She’d had the fever, yes, Mary remembered that well. She’d wanted to tell them the best way to help her, the best times to put her in the tub, the coolest cottons to wear next to her skin. She’d sent up a bowl of beef broth to give the girl energy, but they didn’t want to listen to her, and sent the broth back down with Frank. She wanted to see the girl for herself, but once the family called the doctor they closed the girl’s door to all of the staff except for the governess, and when the governess became ill they had the doctor tend to her as well.

One of the reporters had gotten Bette to talk, and Bette told him that Mr. and Mrs. Bowen loved throwing dinner parties more than anything else in the world, and now they were afraid that no one would ever want to come to their home again. According to Bette, Mrs. Bowen vowed that every domestic she hired from now on would be a Swede or a German, because they were more impeccable than every other race. When the reporter asked what Bette thought of Mrs. Bowen’s opinion of Germans and Swedes, Bette agreed that it was probably true. She was fired within an hour of the paper landing on Mr. Bowen’s desk.

Since the Bowens didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to even admit in court that they’d welcomed such a woman into their home, that they’d eaten her filthy food and become sick because of it, Dr. Soper interviewed their friends and neighbors instead, and once one of the reporters caught wind that Soper had been talking to the Bowens’ neighbors, so did that reporter. It was printed in the Evening Sun that the Germ Woman had too many ideas about herself, and because Mrs. Bowen didn’t tolerate her attitude, the Germ Woman infected her on purpose. The stories claimed that Mary was resistant to some of the ways of good Christian households, and purposely defied them by meeting strange men on corners.

Mr. O’Neill made a point of addressing the main rumors that were printed in the 1907 papers, because those would be the details the judges would recall. How can I be resistant to Christianity when I’m a Catholic? Mary demanded of Mr. O’Neill. Tell me that, please. And the man I met once on the corner was a stranger only to them, not to me.

Mary shared with Mr. O’Neill the observation she’d made ages ago, that all the great houses of New York City are the same. They are headed by women who should have been male, and should have been ministers, women who go down to the employment agency in their white gloves to look around like they are in a brothel, discussing terms with the madam while each whore to be hired looks on. Then when the terms are agreed upon, instead of directing the cook to the kitchen or the laundress to the laundry, every lady gives a speech about joining a Christian home.

“The first thing they ask is whether I’m churchgoing. You’d think it would be something to do with cooking, but no, they want to know whether I get myself to a church on Sundays. Do you think the right answer is ‘Yes’?” Mary asked Mr. O’Neill, who listened and waited without showing any indication of what he thought. “Well, it isn’t. Experience taught me that the better answer is ‘No.’ This gives the lady a chance to instruct a new hire on the beneficence of Our Lord. They all say they want a good cook, but what they want even more is a worthy project.”

“What has this to do with anything?” Mr. O’Neill asked. “We were talking about rumors we’ll need to address one by one when we’re in front of the judges.”

“What does it—? It has everything to do with everything we’ve been talking about! Don’t you see? They—”

“Yes?”

Mary thought to tell him again about the hat, but remembered she’d long since given up on making that point. “Look, if you don’t see, you don’t see. I wasn’t a project for them. I refused to be. I was there to cook as well as I could — and I was damn good at it — but at thirty-seven I was past the project stage.” She went along with it in previous employments, but that time, with Mrs. Bowen, a mood took her. The first time Mrs. Bowen brought up Our Lord, Mary laughed, and said He hadn’t made it downtown in years.

“Oh, Mary,” Mrs. Bowen had said.

There was also the imbroglio about the food cooperatives just a few days after confronting Mrs. Bowen with the twin to her own hat. Mrs. Bowen found Mary in the kitchen to tell her that she and a few of the other ladies had decided to organize their cooks into groups on a trial basis. Together, the cooks would learn the new French methods and more exotic cuisines that she and the other ladies would decide on.

“The idea is to be together,” Mrs. Bowen said, “and learn from one another, and it would be a help to you, wouldn’t it, having other cooks to work alongside instead of just being here by yourself?”

Mary went to the church hall on Sixty-Fourth Street to meet the other cooks, and saw that there were only two others. They had the whole place to themselves and their conversation echoed in the vastness of the empty, wood-paneled room; it bounced off the many droplets of glass hanging from the chandelier. The back room of this hall featured a state-of-the-art kitchen that sat empty most nights of the week except for Saturdays, when the church held socials for its parishioners. The kitchen had ceramic double-pot sinks, a zinc-lined icebox, plenty of work space. The three cooks were charged with making a meal for six families. It was to be like that just on Mondays and Tuesdays, for a start. One of the cooks, Clare, seemed to know more than the other two and informed Mary that when they finished up Mary was supposed to deliver a meal to the Compton family on Sixty-First Street on her way back to the Bowens’. They were to follow Clare’s direction because she had more training in the French method than the other two.

“So I’m now cook for the Bowens and the Comptons?”

“I don’t think we’re meant to see it that way,” said Ida, the third cook. “I think we’re to see it as the three of us cooking enough of a meal to do for six families. Not you have these two, or you your two, and so on. You see?”

“And where are the cooks for the other families?” Mary didn’t see. She usually considered herself the brightest in any group, but the Bowen girl had been feeling poorly and she was distracted by it. Again and again she’d tried to get up to the girl’s room, and again and again she was barred. No one had yet mentioned the word Typhoid.

“The other cooks were scaled back,” said Clare. “Told they are needed only Wednesday on.”

“So,” Mary said, like she was waking up from a dream, “we cook here as a group and deliver the food to all these families. That way six families get fed for the price of three cooks instead of six cooks.”

The three looked at one another.

“For the purpose of saving money?” Mary said. It didn’t seem like the right answer, but there couldn’t be any other.

“There’s something like this happening on the West Side,” Ida said. “I have a friend. Her employer calls it a cooks’ cooperative. It’s cheaper for them, and she says that the idea is that after a while we won’t work for one particular family anymore. We’ll be asked to leave our rooms. Then we’ll have to get rooms elsewhere and commute to the place we are to cook just like any other day cook or common laborer.”

“We won’t do this,” Mary said to the other cooks. And that night, for the first and last time in her life, Mary intentionally ruined good food, and talked the other two into doing the same. They overcooked the tenderloins. They boiled the asparagus until it was stringy mush. They withheld salt from the potatoes and put it on the cobblers instead.

“I hope it turned out well,” Mary said to Mr. and Mrs. Bowen when she served them later. “I’m not used to having to transport my dishes. It’s best, you see, straight from the oven to the table.”

“Could you not choose a dish, Mary, that would support being transported?” Mr. Bowen asked, as he probed the meat with the tine of his fork.

“Of course,” Mary said, bowing her head. “We could limit ourselves to just a few dishes that we know would work.”

“Limit?” Mrs. Bowen asked, and pushed her plate away.

• • •

Once Elizabeth got sick, and they realized it was Typhoid Fever, there was no more mention of cooking in the church hall, or of cooking at all for that matter. Mary made bread and a thin soup that would keep, and spent most of her hours hauling ice up the stairs and the empty bucket back down — the only helpful thing they would allow her to do. They kept the block in the kitchen sink and Mary put Frank to work charging at it with a butcher knife until it came to pieces, little ones to suck, larger ones to serve as floes in the tubs upstairs where the family bathed, and the single tub downstairs where the servants took turns. There was an ice shortage in 1907, and ice was very dear, but Mary ordered blocks on credit and hoped they wouldn’t ask for a settlement of their books before the girl recovered.

• • •

In their first interview, Mr. O’Neill asked Mary why death didn’t bother her, why she didn’t notice it following her everywhere she went. Mary didn’t even know where to look for a starting point. After so many months on North Brother, so many years since setting foot in Dobbs Ferry, Mary could still feel the silk of Tobias Kirkenbauer’s curls when he passed under her hand, and the way he settled himself on her hip, his arm slung around her neck, as if he had no fear in the world as long as she was holding him. How could anyone think she didn’t notice, or that it didn’t bother her? No one in any court of law, no man in any room, knows the desperation of squinting through dim light and seeing a baby’s cheeks inflamed, feeling the hot hands, the eyes gone flat with fever. A twist came in Mary’s belly that was the beginning of a prayer. Back in 1899, when little Tobias Kirkenbauer wouldn’t open his mouth to eat, who pressed the creamy water from the boiled oats and spooned it into his mouth? I did, Mary reminded herself. And he held on longer than he would have if Mary hadn’t been there. But they didn’t know about 1899. To them, 1899 was not on the record books.

And if it was really true that Elizabeth Bowen died, then of course that bothered her. Of course. The girl was only a child, and deserved no badness.

EIGHT

When Mary was a child, her grandmother told her that as long as she kept the piss pot clean and her apron white, there would be no mistress who would turn up her nose at her. It was over her grandmother’s turf fire that Mary learned how to make griddle cakes and brown bread, where she first browned bacon and boiled beef, made salmon with butter and cream, eel and trout. It was her grandmother who taught her the best way to tuck the turnips and potatoes around the meat, and it was her grandmother who saved enough to buy Mary a one-way passage to America when Mary was fourteen. There would be food in America that Mary had never seen, but the rules were the same: cook it right, draw out what’s good, don’t be afraid of putting things together. Her grandmother’s sister, Kate Brown, would give Mary a place to live, help her find work in New York. “Send her,” Kate’s letter back to Mary’s grandmother had read. “I’d love to have her.”

Mary’s first impression of America when she arrived in Castle Garden in 1883 was that it wasn’t a kind place. Soon after she had steadied herself, her bag secure in her hand, she was hustled into one grim line after another, like one mangy cow in a herd. Other ships had also arrived that day and she waited and watched as the kaleidoscope of colors kept shifting: green aprons, yellow head scarves, red tassels brushing the ground, dotted ribbon pulled through belt loops to hold up short pants. The American men were the ones with the broad faces, and derby hats pulled low. She imagined a welcoming party, but instead one ugly man shoved a card in her face and another, even uglier, braced Mary’s head with his large hand and told her to hold still while he used a buttonhook to lift her left eyelid and then her right. “Trachoma,” he said. “Highly contagious.” Mary didn’t understand the first word and barely heard the others, locked as she was in a posture of fear. When he finished and announced her eyes clean, she noticed that the man wiped the hook on a towel draped over the railing before moving on to his next victim.

Paddy Brown, Aunt Kate’s husband, met Mary when she’d completed all the lines and gotten all her stamps. “Mary Mallon?” he said when she approached the only man left in the waiting area that fit his description. “Follow me.” She followed him down a flight of stairs to the sunshine outside. They passed through the gates of what seemed like fortress walls, and then she was on the outside, on the streets of New York City. They climbed aboard a trolley drawn by a pair of glum-looking horses. When they came to the end of the track, they got out and made their way on foot. Mary struggled to keep up with the old man, who with his hunched shoulders and his badger’s head kept disappearing into the crowd. “Where is this?” she asked, hoping conversation would slow his pace. “Where are we now?” He raised a callused finger and pointed roughly at a street sign that read “Thirty-Seventh Street.” Finally, as the crowds thinned, and she followed him onto Tenth Avenue, Paddy Brown loosened his stride.

“Wait here a minute,” he said just before ducking into a store with a tuft of wheat carved on the sign outside.

“How much farther?” Mary asked.

“Just two doors down.”

Mary dropped her bag to the sidewalk and tried to get a feel for what waited for her, but two doors down looked the same as every door they’d passed for the last several blocks: dark and plain. Rusted staircases stuck to the faces of every building, and from their railings hung a variety of sheets and blankets. Where home had been full of greens and blues in summer, oranges and reds in winter, New York was the same color wherever she looked: the muddy avenues, the muck-splattered carriages, the gray shingles, the faded red brick, the coal smoke that hung in the air and blurred the outlines of everything. The buildings were tall — five, six stories. When Paddy came out of the shop with a loaf of bread, she pointed at the bedding hanging above their heads and asked him why. “Too heavy for the lines,” he said.

“I see,” she said, though she didn’t see. She looked forward to Aunt Kate, and tried to comprehend that somewhere inside one of these buildings that showed their shame to the world lived her nana’s sister. She searched herself for the tug of home.

“How was the journey, anyhow?” Paddy asked then, looking at her for the first time since meeting her.

The girl in the berth below Mary’s had died when they were ten days at sea. In twenty-one days, Mary watched seven bodies slide into the sea, all wrapped in sailcloth and sewn tight. The girl was dropped on the same day as another person, a man by the size of him, and when she fell through the air between the deck and the water, her body bent at the hips, Mary wondered if they’d double-checked, if they were absolutely beyond-a-doubt sure. Someone in the crowd remarked that it was only the Grace of God that would keep the rest of them out of the water, and someone else said Amen, and Mary wondered why God would grant any of them that Grace and not those who’d already been thrown away. It wasn’t the first time Mary noticed that God had a haphazard approach to things.

“Was it very rough?” Paddy asked.

“No, it was grand,” Mary said and looked back at the garbage lining the street, the haggard people rushing about on the sidewalks.

Mary’s aunt had more welcome for her, and scolded her husband thoroughly for not carrying Mary’s bag. She’d prepared a rich lamb stew with carrots and potatoes that went cold before them because every time Mary went to put a spoonful in her mouth, Aunt Kate asked another question about a person from home. Paddy and Aunt Kate had no children and were too old to remedy that fact.

“Well, now,” Aunt Kate said when Mary had finished giving her the news and they’d taken five minutes to eat what was on their plates. “First thing is to find you good work. Then we’ll see. What can you do?”

“I can cook,” Mary told her.

“Cook what? Spuds? A bit of ham? What else can you do?”

“I want to cook.”

“Mary, love, they have stoves in America you’ve never seen the likes of.”

“I can practice on yours.”

“This!” Aunt Kate laughed. “This is nothing. This is a stone’s throw from the turf and the open fire. There are kitchens in some of these houses that have stoves wider than—” Aunt Kate stretched her arms as wide as she could to either side. “They have stoves with four burners, two ovens.”

“I can learn, can’t I?”

“That’s true, I suppose.” Kate regarded Mary with a smile. “Patience, love. It’s very good to see you.”

• • •

After giving Mary a few weeks to settle in, to get accustomed to the pace of the streets and the chaos of the pedestrians, the horses, the freight train that plowed along Eleventh Avenue and didn’t stop for anything; after showing her the spider’s web of clotheslines hidden behind the tenements, and the tub for washing; after letting Mary get used to her cot next to the kitchen table and showing her how to put coal in the stove, and empty the ashes; after taking Mary to meet yet another neighbor who wanted to know her business; and after learning that no one understood her when she spoke except for other Irish and teaching her how to enunciate, speak slowly, try to talk more like an American, Kate finally announced it was time to go to the agency and see what kind of job Mary could get for herself. Mary had just turned fifteen. Kate told her everything she should say, and made her practice at the table after Paddy had gone to bed. She had Mary sit across from her with her hands folded, and then she asked questions about the jobs she’d had in New Jersey and Connecticut. Mary was to describe how she was an accomplished cook and had cooked for families in Ireland before leaving. “You are twenty years old. Same birthday, just subtract five years from the year.”

“But what if they ask where? What if they ask me to describe New Jersey or Connecticut?”

“They won’t. But if they do, you go ahead and describe whatever you imagine. Be confident. They’ve probably never been there themselves.”

Mary tried to speak slowly and sound older than she was, but the woman at the agency just told her in a blank tone that they’d place her as a laundress. “Are you a worker?” the woman had asked. “A real worker?”

“I’m a worker,” Mary assured her.

“Report with clean clothes. Spotless. And keep your person clean at all times. Be respectful to the family and their guests, and for God’s sake don’t try to engage them if they don’t engage you. If one of the family enters a room that you are in, simply exit as quickly as possible. You have no opinion of politics whatsoever and in fact do not follow politics of any kind. You don’t read the newspapers. Do you understand, Miss Mallon?”

“Yes.”

The agent handed her a folded pamphlet that repeated everything she’d just said.

“Are you religious, by the way? Catholic, I imagine.”

“Catholic.”

“The family has probably already assumed you’re Catholic, or will when they meet you, but don’t mention it yourself.”

Mary didn’t know what it meant to be a laundress and hoped she could prove herself and one day be allowed to cook, but she discovered in that first situation that cook and laundress are two different tracks, and a laundress never becomes a cook any more than a cook becomes a Lady. At home, they’d washed their clothes in the river and draped them on rocks to dry. Aunt Kate washed her clothes in a basin, twisted them roughly when she pulled them out, and hung them on the clothesline that stretched across the tops of the outdoor privies to the back wall of another tenement. The night before Mary began, Aunt Kate showed her the little square ounce of Reckitt’s Blue she kept in the pantry, and explained to her about using it for the final rinse to take out any hint of yellow. Fine clothes needed more careful treatment and she warned Mary that if she encountered anything with a lace collar or cloth-covered buttons, to go over them with the sponge instead of sinking them in the tub with the rest.

The family was called Cameron, and Mary slept on a bunk in a room off the kitchen. She took her meals with the other staff. Room and board would be deducted from her wage. The woman at the agency had gone over the deductions so quickly that Mary didn’t have time to calculate until she got back to Aunt Kate’s, and together they realized there would be hardly anything left over. “But it’s good experience,” Aunt Kate said. “There’s value in that as well.” Paddy Brown made a low sound and shifted in front of the stove.

As the woman at the office predicted, the footman, Nathaniel, who’d been charged with greeting Mary and giving her a tour of the home, told her that she would be required to join in the evening prayers nightly. The mistress did not take her faith lightly and required her staff to approach Our Lord with the same seriousness.

“What if someone refuses?”

Nathaniel studied her face. “Try it,” he suggested.

The Camerons had help that cooked, help that cleaned the house, did the laundry, watched the children, taught the children, tended to the grass and pots of flowers outside. When Mary had a free moment she was supposed to help Martha, who was forever running an oiled cloth over the furniture, up and down the stairs, beginning every day where she’d ended the last and doing everything over again so that no speck of dust ever had a chance to land. The expression she wore on her face was one of combat. She was engaged in a battle that offered no respite, and even while eating lunch at the small kitchen table with the rest of the staff, she was squinting over their heads, peering into corners, and tilting her chin to see in a different light what lurked there. It was the cleanest place Mary had ever been. The newspapers Mr. Cameron left open on the table in the sitting room talked of poor ventilation and crowding in the cities, toxic odors that came from standing water and horse manure, but the Cameron home was so protected from anything like that, so unlike Aunt Kate’s or the rooms of any of the families Mary had visited on Aunt Kate’s block where there was no place to keep the garbage except piled on the curb outside where it would stink until the Department of Street Cleaning came by with their carts, where every person who walked through the door of their building tracked the mud or ash or excrement from the street up the stairs, through the halls, into their own rooms, that Mary started to feel that she was also waging a war, they all were, and Mary’s particular front was at the collars of shirts and blouses, the hems of skirts and trousers. According to the papers, the source of every disease suffered by every New Yorker could be found in a garbage pile on the Lower East Side. Mary heard the word miasma and the next time she went home she asked Aunt Kate what it meant. Ever since then she imagined the city streets seeded with invisible landmines, and the landmines were these toxic clouds, miasmas, that floated up from every dirty thing left to fester at the city’s curbs. She tried not to inhale when she made her way to and from the streetcar, or on the many occasions when the sanitation wagon skipped Aunt Kate’s block. She felt safer at the Camerons, where all day long, six days a week, she and the others led a coordinated campaign against dirt and disorder, and where the sanitation drivers never clicked their tongues at their horses to speed them past the door.

Every member of the staff had one day’s leave per week to go home, and perhaps they weren’t as careful when they were back on their own territory. One Monday morning, the Camerons’ longtime cook returned to work with the telltale bull’s neck but pretended nothing was wrong. She just slammed pots and pans and began the ritual of the water with her chin tilted toward heaven, gasping for air. Mary and the others hid her as well as they could, but Mrs. Cameron liked to come down to the kitchen once in a while to discuss the evening meal and she chose that Monday to tell the cook, in person, that the family was bored of beef roasts, and chops, too, for that matter. Could the cook come up with a trout or a flounder on a Monday?

“Oh,” Mrs. Cameron said when she saw the cook’s neck, and retreated to the hall. She put a hand up to her own throat. “You’re ill.”

The cook couldn’t speak, so her assistant — the girl who rinsed and chopped vegetables like they were criminals and her knife a weapon — spoke for her. “She’s just after telling me they have standing water in the air shaft where she lives and on Saturday when we parted she expected the water to be stinking. This morning she told me, yes, it was fierce stinking and no one in her building can keep a window to the air shaft open with the smell of it. It’ll go on until a dry stretch. So she thinks she breathed up that odor in spite of the closed windows.”

Just that morning, on her way from Tenth Avenue, Mary had to hold her breath as the trolley rolled by a horse stable, where on Sunday nights the men who cleaned the stalls pushed out all the horse shit and old hay. Next to the stable was Weiss’s bakery, and before dawn on Monday mornings the Weisses splashed out all the old milk that hadn’t sold the week before. They threw it over the shit pushed out by the neighboring stable. As the sun rose, the milk soured and infected the air. Often, they tossed old eggs, too, and the carcasses of chickens, and crates, boxes, papers, packaging, overflowing ash cans. The eggs bothered Mary most of all, and every time she passed on a Monday, she wondered why they didn’t put them in a cake. Or give them to someone who needed them. The waste of it made her never want to buy anything there.

“Why can’t she speak for herself?”

“Oh, she can,” the assistant said meekly, but the cook sat down on a stool and put her head in her hands.

“You’re dismissed,” Mrs. Cameron said, taking another step backward. “Please go home and tend to yourself. Be in touch with the agency when you’re better.”

The cook showed no signs of moving as the assistant fetched her shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders. “You have money?” the girl asked, then looked around. “Could we pitch in for a fare?” Along with Mary, there were two others of the house staff present. Mary slid her hand into her apron pocket and closed her fist around the dime and five pennies resting there. Mr. Cameron always left a tip when she starched his shirts, and it was a game to find it. Sometimes he left it in one of his shoes, twisted into a hanky and tied off with a string. Sometimes in the pocket of one of the shirts. Sometimes he came upon Mary while she was working, sneaked up behind, and dropped it into her apron pocket. Mary would jump at the sudden tug of the money and he’d be there behind her, smiling. It was something, Mary understood, she wasn’t to tell the others.

Everyone put coins on the counter. Mary’s quick fingers separated out three pennies and she added hers to the lot.

“Well,” the assistant said when she came back. Mary could tell she’d already elevated herself to head cook. “I’ll need to go to the fish market. One of you will need to start—”

“Pardon me,” Nathaniel said, breathless from running down the stairs. “Missus says you’re to go, too. And that if any of the rest of you feel ill, you should do the right thing and excuse yourself.”

“Me?” the assistant asked. “But I feel fine!”

Nathaniel shrugged. “And the rest of us are to take fifteen minutes to scrub the kitchen again.”

After the scouring, Mr. Cameron appeared in the kitchen and asked who could cook a meal until the office sent over another woman.

“I can,” Mary said, taking a silent survey of the fruit and vegetables on the counter, the cheese and milk she’d seen in the icebox. Mr. Cameron ignored her.

Martha could not change positions and was off limits. “Jane?” he asked the children’s tutor, but she said she’d never cooked a thing in her life.

“I can cook,” Mary said again.

Mr. Cameron frowned. “Mary, then.”

And so Mary took off her laundering whites and put on the cook’s apron instead. After that first meal — baked whitefish with leeks and tomatoes, and a vanilla cake for dessert — Mr. Cameron teased that they would cancel their request to the agency for a replacement cook and instead ask for a replacement laundress. He took on the habit of having his morning coffee in the kitchen before heading out to work, and then, after one morning when Mrs. Cameron came looking for him and demanded to know what exactly he thought he was doing, he stopped. And Mary was left alone. A week later, the new cook arrived, and Mary was sent back to the pile of muslins and linens that had been waiting for her. I will leave this position, she decided. I will go to a new agency and tell them a history as cook, and they will believe me. And if they don’t believe me, I’ll go to another agency. She took out her small brush, her square of starch. She rubbed the dry patches on her hands.

NINE

There were times, over on North Brother, with John Cane staring at the way she spread jam over a piece of toast and bit off the corner, when Mary felt like none of it was real. Even two years on, the doctors still spoke to her like she was a child, and she tried to find new ways of reminding them that she’d served food to people who once dined with the president of the United States of America. And after tasting what she’d prepared, they looked up from their plates to study her more closely, knowing she was not entirely what she seemed. Beneath the plain attire and the cook’s hands, behind the thick Irish accent and the working-class posture of exhaustion, they saw something else: a level of taste, an understanding of what those seated at the table were really after — a challenge to the palate, a meal to be enjoyed and not just consumed.

Mary wanted Mr. O’Neill to know that there were some doctors who had an unhealthy obsession with her bathroom habits, far beyond the scope of the case. “They’d watch me go, if I let them,” she told him. Two years earlier she wouldn’t even have been able to say that much, wouldn’t have even been able to make a glancing reference to “going.” They could make all the insinuations and comments they wanted about Alfred, and the rooms they shared, why they weren’t married, what kind of woman this made her. None of it bothered her as much as the discussion of her bathroom habits. Shortly before Mary met Mr. O’Neill, one of the nurses who came to collect her samples joked that she envied Mary. “You’ve got your cottage on the water, free rein of the island, no balance to be paid to the grocer, no child hanging off you, no husband to face at night, no younger brothers to put through school. There’s more than a few who’d trade with you.” The nurse said this as Mary placed on the floor the usual glass canister that contained her sample, mixed in a solution that looked like water. The nurse handed her a second canister for her urine. Mary usually tried to shroud the contents of the canisters with paper or a napkin, wrapping them separately at first and then together, like a package that needed a bow, and doing so allowed her to pretend for a moment that what was happening was not really happening. But that day, because of the nurse’s comment, Mary shoved the jars in the other woman’s direction without wrapping them, pushed them into her hands so roughly that the nurse fumbled, almost dropped them. The contents sloshed inside.

“Careful, Miss,” the woman said.

“I’d say the same to you,” Mary answered.

The doctors admitted that more than a third of the time Mary’s samples came back showing no Typhoid bacilli whatsoever. And her urine came back negative 100 percent of the time. When Mr. O’Neill asked about past pressure they’d put on Mary to submit to gallbladder surgery, they conceded that they no longer believed her gallbladder was to blame. Her intestines, perhaps. Her stomach. They weren’t sure.

“Good thing you were stubborn about surgery,” Mr. O’Neill said to Mary later. “It would have been for nothing.” Mary had occasionally wondered why no one had mentioned her gallbladder in a long time, and now she wanted to go up to the hospital and demand an apology. They were animals. They would have risked her life for sport.

“Let it go,” Mr. O’Neill said. “We’ll address all of it at the right time.”

He said that it was essential that they humanize her at the hearing. “Make me into a human?” Mary asked, confused.

“Well, yes. What I mean is, we have to paint your story so that anyone, no matter what their station, will sympathize. And better yet, make them afraid that they could end up like you.”

“So in acting for me they’re really acting for themselves.”

“Exactly. So. What were your feelings when you were told you were being brought to North Brother? Were you aware of the Tuberculosis hospital here?”

“My feelings?”

“Were you afraid? Did you even know of North Brother? Where exactly it was, for example?”

“Of course,” Mary said, looking at him steadily. “Of course I knew where it was. Doesn’t every person in this city know?”

Mr. O’Neill seemed about to say something but changed his mind.

“You think I don’t follow a newspaper, Mr. O’Neill? Even the illiterate in this city know exactly where North Brother is. There’s more to getting news than reading it in the paper. There’s talking, too, isn’t there? Or did you assume we don’t talk about the same topics you talk about? Wasn’t the General Slocum disaster only five years ago?”

She did not admit to Mr. O’Neill that she’d never heard of North Brother before June 1904, when the General Slocum burned. But forever after, she thought of those people whenever an errand brought her near Kleindeutschland, little Germany, where most of the people on the General Slocum that day were from. More than one thousand people had burned to death or drowned, and Mary thought of that number when she looked out over the East River now — men, women, children all bobbing in the rough water, pushed back and forth and under. A story went around in the weeks after the tragedy that the manufacturer of the life preservers had slipped in iron bars to make the weight minimums, that the captain and crew had abandoned the ship and its passengers and taken a tug from North Brother back to Manhattan, refusing to look at those in the water who cried out for their help. Inmates from the House of Refuge on Rikers swam into the water to help people, and then swam back to their prison that night.

Mary often went down to the spot where survivors had stumbled ashore, sometimes imagining that she’d been on board, that she’d been one of the women who jumped into the river and made it to North Brother, and when she wasn’t looking — occupied, perhaps, by the sound of her own breathing, distracted by her gratitude for her life, her back turned, her ears closed — she’d been left behind and forgotten.

• • •

The hearing would not be a quick one; that much was clear within an hour. As the sun rose higher and heated the odors of the room, Mary felt weaker. She watched sweat run down the sides of Mr. O’Neill’s face. Judge Erlinger’s eyes had begun to close. One doctor, instead of answering anything specific about her case, lectured exclusively on the bleeding of horses, and how it was no longer necessary to bleed a horse to death in order to obtain the maximum amount of serum to make vaccines. “Take Diphtheria, for example,” he went on. “There have been several cases where the horse’s reaction is so strong that death came too quickly, and the glass cannulae used to collect the blood were broken in the horse’s fall and destroyed.”

A murmur went up among the other doctors. Mary leaned over and asked Mr. O’Neill why they were talking about horses.

“The best thing,” the man went on, “is to always bleed from the carotid vein, and not the jugular. The jugular will weaken the horse too quickly, and in most cases results in less blood collected. But even more important, the use of supports must”—he banged his fist on the chair for emphasis—“become standard practice across the labs. A large male horse can be suspended with two stout ropes, one passing behind the forelegs and one in front of the hind legs. Once the support is in place, the cannula should be inserted into the artery. By this method it’s possible to obtain five usable gallons from a single horse.”

“And where do you stand on the Mallon case?” the DOH lawyer urged the doctor.

“In terms of Typhoid, I think the answer lies in widespread milk pasteurization, cleaner water, better education on personal hygiene. Typhoid is entirely preventable.”

“Should she be let back into society or not?”

“I—” the doctor faltered, looked over at Mary. “It’s my opinion… that she should not.”

One Department of Health official asked the judges to consider what exactly motivated Mary to take the job uptown at the Bowen residence in the first place. Did she harbor a resentment of some sort against the upper classes? Did she resent the Bowens in particular? Perhaps because of the food cooperative Mrs. Bowen had attempted to organize? Without waiting for answers, the official then sat back as if he’d just put the final piece in the puzzle.

“I worked for the Bowens because of what they paid me,” Mary whispered urgently to Mr. O’Neill, who bellowed an objection. It was illogical, Mr. O’Neill pointed out. A woman can’t be accused of lacking the ability to comprehend her affliction at one moment, and then accused of wielding it like a weapon the next.

“And why did her employment with the Warrens end in Oyster Bay? Why did she not continue to work for them once they returned to the city?”

“Because it was a temporary job,” Mary whispered to Mr. O’Neill, but he shushed her. He’d asked her the same question during their preparation meeting and already knew the answer. The Warren job was never meant to be permanent. Their regular cook was to resume her position in Manhattan once they returned from Oyster Bay.

Mary studied the judges’ faces and saw doubt.

• • •

She got home from Oyster Bay on a Friday in September 1906. It was a beautiful day, and better still because she had a pocket full of money that had been pushed into her hand from a grateful Mr. Warren. Little Margaret Warren would play again, would beg ice cream off another cook, would grow up and marry and do all the things a girl should do. Her sister, her mother, the two maids, and the gardener would also live. All the family except for Mr. Warren had already returned to Manhattan, and Mary had left two of the maids drinking cold watermelon soup on the back patio. They’d hugged her good-bye together, squeezing her between them and saying again what a shock each of them got when she pushed them into an icy bath, clothes and all. They blessed her, thanked her, said they knew they wouldn’t have their lives if it hadn’t been for her.

She’d gotten to the station in plenty of time to catch an earlier train, but she’d written her plans to Alfred the previous week, and wanted to stay with the schedule she’d sent in case he planned on meeting her. So she sat on a bench in breezy Oyster Bay and watched a train pull in and then pull away. When she got to Grand Central Station she waited on a bench again with her bag on her lap to give Alfred a chance to find her.

After thirty minutes she pushed through the grand doors onto Forty-Second Street and began walking home. Something had come up, she decided. He didn’t have time to send word. He probably had a perfectly good reason for not showing up. Because it was a Friday, every rusted fire escape in their neighborhood would be weighted down with damp cottons and thin wools in every muted shade of white, gray, brown, from Patricia Wright’s careful calico to the yellowed squares of muslin Mr. Hallenan used to strain his coffee. Where twenty years earlier this had shamed her, now she took comfort in the sight and knew she was closer to home. A few tenants had gotten hold of the new roundabout lines that could be extended out a window into the sky without needing to be anchored on another building or another fire escape.

The rooms Mary shared with Alfred were on the sixth floor, at the very top of the stairs. Unlike the narrow tenements of the Lower East Side, 302 East Thirty-Third was a broad building that held within the yellow brick of its exterior walls thirty-six flats. There was a central staircase wide enough for three bodies to climb the stairs side by side, and from this central stair branched two halls that reached north and south, three flats per hall, six per floor. The sixth floor saw the highest turnover, and some of the rooms stayed empty for weeks at a time. Anyone with rooms on the top floor aimed to get lower as soon as possible, but Mary liked the sixth floor. Their rooms always seemed to get better light than those on lower floors and Mary liked standing at the sink and looking out over lower rooftops. When lying in their bed she could turn her head toward the window and see nothing but blue sky.

When Mary arrived home that Friday in September, she opened the door to their rooms and was hit by the odor of linen that needed washing, rotting banana peels on the counter, the single window shut tight. The letter she’d sent to tell Alfred what time her train was due was open on the table, and she could see that he’d made an effort to flatten the folds. He might have gotten work. It happened that way sometimes: no prospects on the horizon and next thing someone comes looking for him with a tip about a company looking for a driver, or need for a man who could shovel coal.

Mary set about stripping their bed and washing the linens, but when she had everything soaking in the tub, she couldn’t find any soap. She decided to run down to the grocer. Not wanting to break one of the new paper bills Mr. Warren had given her, she went to the jam jar of coins they kept by the stove for the gas meter. But there was no jam jar, no coins, and after seven weeks of missing him, of hoping he was getting on, Mary was as furious as she’d been the day she left. Sometimes — and staring at the empty space where the jam jar used to live was one of these times — Mary felt she’d tripped into a space beyond fury, a place where all of this was so astonishing that perhaps she was the one who was wrong. She took a deep breath and went over the facts: I told him to not dare touch the gas money. Do not dare, I said to him. And he looked at me like he wouldn’t dream of it. His look said: the nerve of you to say that to me. I told him I’d send word when I was due home and if he could have the rooms straightened a bit. After a seven-week job I don’t want to walk into a pigsty. He was insulted. And now Mary stood in the middle of the kitchen and contemplated the naked bed in the next room, the dirty plates and mugs on the sideboard. She could walk out the door with the same bag she’d just hauled from Oyster Bay, and leave him to manage the sopping bedsheets. She smiled. That would be a surprise to him.

But if he’s working, Mary reminded herself, he might have needed those coins to make himself presentable. Unpeeling one bill from the thick fold in her pocket and leaving the rest hidden in the closet, she went down to the street to buy a cake of soap. She hoped that by the time she came back, washed the sheets, and hung them on the fire escape, Alfred would be home.

But the dinner hour came and went, and still, Alfred did not return. She went down to visit with Fran.

“And how’s Alfred?” Fran asked. “Glad to have you back?”

“Oh sure,” Mary had said, avoiding her friend’s eye. “Of course he is.” Mary knew for a fact that Fran’s Robert came home for lunch on any day when he could take the full hour.

When five o’clock arrived, Mary wrapped her shawl around her shoulders and went out to look for him.

For several blocks around their building, quitting time found the streets thick with men: men rushing for streetcars, men leaning against buildings and in door frames. As Mary crossed over Thirty-Third Street she observed that even the horses were wild at quitting time. Several water wagons were heading in a line toward the stables on First, and each horse that passed bent its long muscular neck and turned a vein-threaded eye toward Mary.

Once she crossed Thirty-Fourth Street, she could see the blue door of Nation’s Pub on the next block, the flag above, the pair of potted plants that welcomed patrons inside. She walked by the wide door without slowing her pace, granting herself only a small sideward glance as if the place meant nothing to her, no more than any other business that lined the avenue. The late-summer afternoon brought a cool breeze, and Mary pulled the sleeves of her sweater over her hands. Her knuckles felt like two rows of rough stones.

When Mary passed Nation’s again, she took a better look. The window next to the door was clouded, but yes, she thought she saw him, slumped at the end of the bar. Yes, that was the posture he would have after so long sitting. She had no plan except to pass by and confirm that he was there, that he was safe, that he wasn’t in any trouble. Once she found him, she planned on going back to their rooms to wait. Or to pack her things and leave. Or to go about her business and sleep, pretending there was no Alfred, and that she was obligated to no one but herself.

But on her third pass, the bright blue door swung open, and a man stepped out. Mary looked past the open door at the man she thought was Alfred — a blond man, she saw now, heavyset, his nose a bit like Alfred’s, yes, but nothing else. Then the door slammed shut. He’s told them about me, Mary supposed. Our arrangement. Might have said how much it suits him. Might have had a laugh about it. He was cruel when he drank, but then when he drank more he was kind again. It all depended on the dose, and sometimes Mary hoped that if he had to drink at all that he would drink past cruelty and into the Alfred she loved, the one who loved her and told her that he would never have lived so long without her, and my God, she was beautiful. Did she know? Why didn’t he tell her all the time? Just one or two drinks past kind Alfred was helpless Alfred, and this was the Alfred she feared she’d meet later on that night. There was no arguing with helpless Alfred, no high horse to ride out into the city streets and away from him. Helpless Alfred would get home around three or four in the morning and would call for her from the bottom of the stairs. One by one, doors would open from the first floor to the sixth. He’d sit on the very first step, head in his hands, and shout for her without pause, and when every person who had a door onto the stairs woke up from his shouting, they’d shout for her, too.

“Where were you?” he’d ask when she finally ran down the six flights. She used to bother with tying her robe, but not anymore. “Why didn’t you hear me?”

“I was all the way upstairs,” she’d say in a whisper, hoping to shush him. “I was asleep. I didn’t hear you.”

“Jesus Christ, Mary,” Mr. Hallenan on the first floor would say. “Where the hell were you? Why didn’t you hear him?” Mr. Hallenan didn’t care who in the world saw the graying hair on his belly.

Then Alfred would put an arm around her shoulder, his other hand on the railing, and she’d haul him up the six flights. In their rooms, she’d take off his shoes, his stinking socks, his pants and shorts. Sometimes he’d realize he was naked and he’d cry: long ugly sobs full of phlegm that shocked and embarrassed her every time. Sometimes, when she was lucky, he just sank into their bed and went to sleep. The worst nights, even worse than when they fought or when she had to strip him, were the nights when she finally got him upstairs and he sat by the window for an hour or so, looking at the quiet below, before staggering to his feet and going out again. More than any other kind of night, those were the ones that drove her to the agency to ask for another situation, one that would keep her away full-time, somewhere far away, where the train back to their rooms would be too long, too expensive for a day’s journey. It was a night when he came back home only to go out again that had driven her to Oyster Bay.

Standing outside Nation’s Pub, she tried to think of what else she could do to pass the time and stop herself from wanting to see him, but it was no good. She needed to know what he’d made of his weeks away from her. And she needed to know how he was faring. A body could not hold up long against such an assault, and all summer long, before leaving for Oyster Bay, she’d observed him becoming weaker, his pants drooping around his hips, his broad chest narrowing inside his shirt. His face had taken on a gray-green tinge, and the skin at his neck had loosened, become slack.

“Sometimes I think about when we met,” she’d said to him on that early-August morning when they last fought. Even in a weakened state he was no fool and knew the ultimate point she was driving at. Once upon a time, not so long ago, he’d worked, he’d been strong, he’d been handsome. Years ago, she had an employer who held back two weeks’ wages because he thought she was in league with a tutor who’d stolen jewelry from his wife, and Alfred had gone directly over to that grand, glossy black door on West Eighteenth Street, the entrance the family and their guests used, and put the man straight. When Alfred came back and handed over her wages, Mary was so relieved that she sobbed into her hands like the kind of woman she considered her opposite.

“What could you have said to him that I didn’t already say?” she’d asked, looking at the bills fanned out on the table.

“Nothing,” Alfred had said, and then grinned. “I guess I had a different way of putting it.”

She’d been over the story before, hoping to shame him into seeing the difference between now and then, hoping to light the fire that would drive him back to the way he was. On that morning in August, the day she left for Oyster Bay, Alfred wouldn’t even humor her.

“Leave then, why don’t you, if you’re so disgusted. Go on.”

Mary knew women were supposed to be the softer sex, a species so warm and nurturing that God granted them the gift of bearing children, caring for them, looking after a home, nursing the sick to health. But sometimes Alfred made her so angry that all the warmth went out of her body and instead her thoughts became murderous, if she managed to have thoughts at all.

Mary pushed open the door to Nation’s and took one step inside. One man glanced up and then nudged the man next to him, who nudged the next man, and so on. There was a plate of crackers, cheese squares, and a few slices of bread on a table near the back, and Mary’s quick eye told her they’d been out since morning; the cheese had gone hard at the edges. The man behind the bar tucked his apron into his belt and came around. “I’m sorry, but—”

“I’m looking for Alfred Briehof. Have you seen him? He hasn’t been home.”

“Jesus,” one of the men at the bar muttered. “Briehof has a home?”

“Are you…?”

“I’m his—”

“You’re Mary.”

“I am.”

“He left a while ago. Did you check with the chestnut man on Thirtieth Street?”

“Was he…” Mary hoped he wouldn’t make her say it. “All right?”

The bartender shrugged. “He was all right, I guess.”

Mary tried to decide what to do.

“I think you should go home,” the bartender said as if hearing her thoughts. “He had that mopey look that means he’s homeward bound.”

What do you know about his looks, Mary wanted to ask. I’ll kill him, she vowed. I’ll stand behind the door and get him before he even enters the room. Fran had killed a man in Jersey City a few years back. Robert was on nights at the time and the man had broken into their rooms, was standing at the foot of her bed, and she’d grabbed her husband’s spare gun from under the pillow — the one he’d left for her for exactly that sort of crisis — and shot him dead.

“Thank you,” Mary said to the bartender, and left.

What Alfred did when Mary was away was never clear to her. She wanted to ask Jimmy Tiernan, who lived on the third floor and went to Nation’s himself sometimes, but whenever she thought she had her chance, Patricia Tiernan appeared over his shoulder and gave her the daggers. Fran didn’t have a door on the stairs and claimed to never hear Alfred on the nights he howled. Joan had a mind the size of a thimble, and all that thimble contained were thoughts of future babies she’d have with her husband. Once, when Joan mentioned that they’d been married going on six years and hoping all that time, Mary had snapped, “My God, Joan, do you need the formula written down for you? Do you know what goes in to making a baby?” But as she watched Joan close her eyes against her question, keeping one long, delicate finger on the lid of the coffeepot, Mary realized Joan would never have a baby. “I’ve heard it takes a long time for some women,” she offered by way of apology. Joan must have forgiven her because she continued to wave Mary inside whenever she caught her passing.

It was useless to ask Alfred himself, because according to him he never drank more than he could handle, and when Mary was gone he never drank at all; he only worked or tried to get work. The longest she’d been gone without returning home was three months, but even on the jobs where she was close enough to get home for the odd Sunday, one day was not enough to see what was happening. Who helped him up the stairs when he called and called but never got any answer? Not Mr. Hallenan, who hated both Alfred and Mary. Not Jimmy Tiernan, who wouldn’t be allowed out. Maybe he got up the stairs himself. Or maybe he slept wherever he landed. Or maybe he told the truth, that when Mary was gone he didn’t drink at all. Maybe that behavior was something he saved for her, a punishment, perhaps, for always leaving.

• • •

In some of the homes where Mary had worked, the families had pots and pans by the dozen, sinks with two chambers, iceboxes that could keep a hock of ham frozen for a whole summer. In the rooms she and Alfred shared, they had one skillet, one tall stockpot for boiling, and one small saucepan. But those three vessels were enough for two, enough for the sort of meals Alfred liked most.

That evening, in case he would return, Mary walked downtown from Nation’s door and then east, to the butcher on Second Avenue that stayed open until six. When she finally got there and smelled the raw meat combined with the sawdust on the floor and the fresh herbs on the counter for those who liked to take home their cuts already seasoned, she knew that he would come home.

Back in her own silent kitchen, she cleared off the cluttered table and used it to prep. She filled the pot with water. She rubbed the small pork tenderloin she’d purchased half-price with plenty of salt and pepper, a bit of nutmeg she grated, a pinch of cinnamon, a dash of sugar, a teaspoon’s worth of onion powder she measured with her cupped hand.

After a while, she heard noise on the stairs, steps on the fifth-floor landing. She opened the door and waited.

“Mary,” he said, and stopped climbing two steps from the top. He clutched the railing.

“Are you all right?” she asked. Not seeing him for a long time and then seeing him again was a famine and a feast her body knew the rhythms of better than her mind. The light was dim, and Alfred, with his dark hair and eyes, his dark clothes, threatened to fade into the paneling, the deep wines and forest greens of the cheap wallpaper the building’s owner had pasted up so many years ago. Mary couldn’t stop herself from walking over to him. She couldn’t stop herself from holding out her hand. He was every bit as handsome as he’d been when she was seventeen and he twenty-two. He was every bit as strong.

“I’m all right,” he said, taking her hand between his and drawing it closer for a kiss.

“I made supper,” she said to him, tugging him gently up the last two steps until he was standing in front of her.

He put his hands on either side of her head and then cupped her face. He clutched her shoulders and pulled her to his chest.

“Thank you, Mary. I’m very glad.”

• • •

Things stayed good between them for two weeks, and then like a balloon with the tiniest puncture, they started to sink. He came home later. He wouldn’t touch what she cooked. Instead of talking with her in the mornings, he rolled over and stared at the wall until she left to spend the day cooking down at a firehouse social, or a church hall, or a company picnic, or one of the other day jobs she’d arranged by grasping at connections, following up on every rumor, showing up at doors with her knives folded neatly in her bag to say that she heard there was need of a cook.

September, October, November: they moved around their rooms keeping furniture between them. Once, just before Christmas, they’d been about to pass each other on the stairs when Mr. Hallenan stepped out on the landing and said the missus had kicked him out. Alfred and Mary had looked immediately to each other and laughed, she facing up the stairs, he facing down. They’d laughed together at Mr. Hallenan’s expense, and for one instant they stepped outside of that particular moment in time.

Sometimes, very late at night, he told her he knew that all the cruel things she said to him were the truth, and it was easy to talk to him then, to pile on more and more because in those moods he would just accept it, tell her she was right, absolutely right. But during the day, whenever she caught him sober, and worked up the courage and energy to face this thing that was eating away at them, she’d take a breath to speak and before she uttered one single syllable he’d already be cringing, closing his eyes, looking away, bracing himself for the volley that would follow, and it was that cringe, before she’d even said a word, like she wasn’t even allowed to speak, like she wasn’t even allowed to raise the slightest objection to the way he was living his life, the way he winced before she’d even fully turned from the counter, that had driven her to the office to find a situation that would keep her away from him. She told Mr. Haskell, who ran the agency, that a regular day off to come home didn’t matter to her. She was willing to go as far as Connecticut. She’d go up to Tuxedo if they paid her enough, and gave her a private room.

“There is one family that just got in touch yesterday,” Mr. Haskell said as he went through her file. “Bowen is their name.” He looked up to gauge whether the name rang a bell. “There are cooks in front of you, but you have Priority in Placement.” Priority in Placement was a phrase she’d seen on her employment file and scribbled on the envelope where her employers gave the agency honest reviews of her work, her person, how she fit with the family, how open she was to suggestion, how she got on with the other staff. That she had this designation made her lucky, Mr. Haskell wanted her to understand, but she still had to be careful. The Warrens might take that same house in Oyster Bay next summer, and the summer after. Did Mary know how many cooks in New York City would love to spend the summer in Oyster Bay? Did Mary know that President Roosevelt had a home there?

How could Mary not know it? Every head in town was swiveled toward the ugly brown mansion. Mary gathered that not all of the Warrens’ guests had voted for the man, but by God were they happy to be eating and sleeping and swimming so near.

“There was sickness in the Warren family over the summer,” Mr. Haskell said after reading the letter Mary had carried for him all the way from Oyster Bay. “Typhoid. You didn’t get it?”

“No.”

“Ever had it?”

“No.”

“And you stayed on to help nurse those who got it.” He glanced at the letter again as if to double-check what was written there.

“What else could I do? I’ve been near it before and never got it. I helped nurse the Draytons. Remember the Draytons?”

Mr. Haskell frowned, and Mary felt a clutch of panic. Had she gotten the Drayton job through the agency? She couldn’t remember.

“I’m sure the Warrens appreciated it very much.” Mr. Haskell leaned back in his chair. “Did they give you a bonus?”

“They kept paying me the wage we’d agreed on for August, so I got three additional weeks.”

“And no more?”

“No more.”

The more was given in cash and had been deposited in her bank account weeks earlier.

Mr. Haskell regarded her for a moment. “Report to the Bowen residence by noon on Monday,” he said.

TEN

Someone had propped open the doors and the ceiling fans were humming, but none of it made a bit of difference in the sweltering courtroom. Mary heard the creak of Alfred’s chair behind her, and was about to turn when Mr. O’Neill scribbled a word onto his pad and pushed it toward her: “Soper.” She looked up to find the guard crossing the room toward him, and one of the other lawyers announcing his full name. “Do not react,” Mr. O’Neill had warned her during their preparations. “Show that you are paying attention, but be respectful.” Soper stood from his chair as neatly and silently as a paper removed from an envelope and unfolded along the seams.

How had he figured it out? Everyone wanted to know. And, oh, how he loved to tell the story. Mary imagined him perfecting that calm remove in front of a mirror at home. How? It was simple. One merely had to be brilliant and determined. She wanted to point out that the story had been in all the newspapers — surely everyone sitting in the room already knew it — but no, they would give the doctor a platform, and they’d all have to sit through it again. She felt her stomach clench as he sat back in the chair and crossed one leg over the other. Mary closed her eyes, counted to ten.

“Dr. Soper,” the other lawyer said after listing Soper’s credentials, “please explain to us the events leading up to your investigation in Oyster Bay, and your conclusion that Mary Mallon was at the root of the outbreak that struck the Warren family in the summer of 1906.”

Soper relaxed further, placed his hands neatly atop his knees. He was so well rehearsed that Mary wondered if he even had to pay attention to what he was saying.

“I was busy with the subway sanitation problems, but there was something about this case that pushed me on the train to Oyster Bay to have a look. I got there in the second week of January 1907, and I’ll admit that I was no more clever than the other investigators Mr. Thompson hired, at first. Like them, I initially thought the family might have gotten Typhoid after eating soft-shell crabs, and then I thought perhaps it was the water. I dropped blue dye in the commode and then waited to see if the drinking water ran blue. It didn’t. I swabbed the tank but found no typhus bacilli. I stayed for three days and interviewed shopkeepers in town, a police officer, the postman who delivered mail to the Warrens the previous summer. Except for a governess and a music teacher the Warrens had brought with them from Manhattan, they’d hired all local staff, and I went to their homes and asked them to recall everything they could from the week the illness broke out, who among the household had gotten sick and when. Finally, the stable hand, a man named Jack, mentioned in passing at the conclusion of our interview that he didn’t think any of the sick would have made it if it hadn’t been for Mary. I double-checked the notes the other inspectors had forwarded to me, but none mentioned a servant named Mary. The only cook on my list was a woman named Bernadette Doyle. When I pressed Jack, he said that Mrs. Doyle left at the end of July. Her daughter was expecting a baby that came early. So the Warrens sent for another cook. Mary got there on the third day of August.

“I was calm as I made a note, and then checked it against the first sign of fever: August eighteenth. You can imagine how exciting this was.”

The lawyer nodded that he could imagine, and glanced toward the judges.

“I wanted to make absolutely certain,” Soper continued. “ ‘Are you sure about the date?’ I asked Jack.

“ ‘Sure I’m sure,’ Jack said. ‘The day she came was my birthday. She made the best peach ice cream I’ve ever had, and she was nice to look at.’ These were Jack’s words, you understand. He told me that this cook named Mary stayed on to look after everyone who had come down with the fever. Not until they had all recovered did Mary return home. At that point it was mid-September.

“After that,” Soper said, “it was so simple, a child could have figured it out.” He described returning to Manhattan and contacting the agency the Warrens had used to find Mary. He had them send a list of all the other families Mary cooked for through the agency, in addition to the residence where she was currently employed.

“One by one the families got back to me reporting Typhoid outbreaks within a few weeks of Mary’s arrival. I assembled the data, and one afternoon in late February, I went over to the Bowen residence and rang the bell. I was willing at that point to believe it wasn’t her fault — as you know, there are still many doctors who cannot accept the theory of a healthy carrier — and I was prepared to explain it to her. I had not expected to be spoken to so rudely and threatened with a knife. I left a note for Mr. Bowen, but when I passed again several days later, I was shocked to see Mary’s head disappear into the servants’ entrance.”

“And what have you since learned about that note?”

“That the Bowens never received it.”

Mary could still see the flick of Frank’s wrist as he threw the note into the flames. The Bowens had fired him several weeks after Mary’s capture, and she hadn’t heard anything about him since. Fired for helping her, she considered once again and felt the guilt of that press up against her. Fired for knowing her. For being her friend.

“When did you next attempt to speak to Miss Mallon?” the lawyer asked.

“A week or so later, at the building where she lives on Thirty-Third Street.” Mary noticed that the courtroom seemed to darken around the edges of her vision, and she felt herself pull away. She felt all over again the shock of arriving home after a week’s work, just getting settled, hearing the knock on the door, and seeing Alfred open it to find Dr. Soper. “It’s very important that I speak with you,” he’d said, ignoring Alfred entirely and taking a slight step forward as if he’d been invited inside.

She sipped from the glass of water Mr. O’Neill nudged toward her.

“And?” the lawyer pushed.

Dr. Soper glanced in her direction so quickly that Mary wondered if she had imagined it. He smoothed the lapel of his jacket.

“And I was unsuccessful. Neither she nor her companion would listen. It’s possible that the first time I met Miss Mallon I was too abrupt, too scientific about the problem. I’ll grant that. I had a sense of urgency when I went to see her at the Bowen residence, and perhaps I didn’t consider her feelings. When I visited her at her own rooms, I tried a different tack. When she saw it was me at her door, she shouted, ‘What do you want with me?’ So I asked her very calmly, ‘Haven’t you noticed that disease and death follow you wherever you go?’ ”

He was telling the truth about what he’d said, but Mary remembered his tone, and it wasn’t calm. It was an accusation. Still standing at the door, Alfred had looked back and forth between them, and then stepped away. She remembered shouting, but not what she’d said. She remembered that he seemed to grow more calm as she got more upset.

“And what was her response?”

“Anger, as far as I could tell. Once again, she came after me with a knife.”

A knife with a blade so dull it could barely cut butter, Mary thought. She’d wanted to argue with him that day, but she couldn’t make sense of what he was saying, couldn’t get past the jolt of seeing him again. Disease and death didn’t follow her any more than they followed anyone else. People had been dying her whole life. First her father, in a fire. Then her mother, of a cough. Then, a few years later, her brother, then her other brother, then her sister in childbirth, then her sister’s two babies, and then her beloved nana while Mary was en route to America. Had they had fevers? She supposed they had, but she couldn’t remember, and anyway, those sicknesses that kill a person always come with fever, and in Ireland they didn’t name their fevers. People became sick. They died. She never heard the word Typhoid until she came to America.

“Was this the first time you learned that she had a companion?” The attorney checked his notes. “Mr. Alfred Briehof?”

“Yes.”

“And what can you tell us about that?”

“When I first arrived at the address the agency had provided to me, I saw Mary outside on the stoop, presumably having just arrived home. I was about to announce myself, but a man approached and embraced her. On the street. I assumed she was engaged to be married, but I’ve since discovered that she is not. It was Mr. Briehof who answered my knock when I tried to speak to her at the door to their rooms not ten minutes later.”

“Can you describe their rooms from what little you saw?”

“Mr. Briehof appeared disheveled. I noted dirty dishes on the press, and there was an odor of overripe fruit.”

The attorney continued. “Please describe to us what you did after failing for a second time to convince Miss Mallon that she must come in for testing.”

“I leaned more heavily on the Department of Health and the NYPD to take action because I knew I would need their help. After finally persuading them, we came up with a plan. We enlisted a female doctor to help, hoping Mary would be more willing to cooperate with a female, but that was not the case.”

“And that doctor was Josephine Baker, correct?”

“Yes.”

Mary scanned the people on the other side of the room, but didn’t see Dr. Baker among them.

• • •

Judge Erlinger called for a lunch recess at noon. Mr. O’Neill suggested they eat together, but Mary wanted to spend the three-quarters of an hour with Alfred. Mr. O’Neill started to protest that they had items to go over, but then he relented. “I have to send a guard,” he said. Mary found Alfred leaning against the back wall of the courtroom, watching her approach. She felt the damp wrinkles in her clothes as she moved closer to him, a rumpled sack of laundry that should be pushed into a basin and wrung out to dry. Her hair had collapsed; she could feel it bobbing at the back of her neck. She was nervous.

Alfred took her hand and squeezed it once before leading her into the hall and down the steps outside to the corner, where a man with a pushcart was selling ham sandwiches. The guard stayed a few paces behind. What was it that was different about him? He pulled off his collar and unbuttoned his shirt. He pulled off the shirt’s cuffs, rolled up the sleeves, and threw the collar and cuffs in the bushes. Without them, Mary saw that the shirt was worn so thin it was little more than gauze, the outline of his undershirt obvious in the sun. He moved his hand to her waist. She had decided that she wouldn’t let him kiss her until she’d said her piece, but now that the moment had arrived, she decided she could spend the rest of her life saying her piece. She hadn’t seen him in so long, and here he was, looking and smelling and moving like Alfred. She waited, but he only touched her cheek.

“I have only half an hour myself,” Alfred said.

“Work?” She doubted it — what job would allow him to show up after noon? — but it was a day for letting things go, for keeping peace. She wanted him to look forward to her release, not dread it.

Alfred nodded. “It started as a day-to-day thing, but they’ve not said anything about stopping, so I keep showing up and they keep paying me. It’s going on six months now.”

“What is it?”

“The ice trucks. Or rather, the ice company stable. They let me drive the truck last week when a man was out, but that was just for the week.”

“Do you like it?”

Alfred laughed. “You know you’re the only person who’s asked that?”

“I know if you don’t like it you won’t keep going.”

Alfred pointed to a step where they could sit. “For now, I like it. The boss says the horses like me. There’s not much to it, really, except brushing them and feeding them and making sure the stalls are clean. I run the ones who don’t get assigned a truck on a given day, and there are a few injured ones, but there’s not much to do for them until they heal. If they heal. I had to put one down. That was the only really bad day, and it was hard going back after that. He was hit by another truck on the corner of Madison and Fiftieth and his leg broke at the ankle. I had to go up there and shoot him.”

Alfred put his hand on her hair and traced his finger along her hairline, around her ear, down her neck. He stopped at the collar of her blouse. “But why are we talking about me? How about you? You look well, Mary. God, it’s good to see you.”

Mary brought his broad hand to her lips and kissed it. She studied his face. “You said I was the only one who asked whether you like it. Who else would ask? I mean, who else have you told?”

Alfred shrugged. “What do you mean? I tell whoever asks me what I do.”

“You seemed surprised that no one else has asked if you like it. Who would ask that, except for me?”

“What are you getting at?”

“Nothing.”

“All right.”

“I’m only saying that it’s a funny thing to say. That I’m the only person who asked that. To say it when you wouldn’t expect anyone else to ask that. Would you?”

“Mary.”

“Are you seeing someone?”

He pulled his hand away. “Why would you ask that? Are you?”

“Am I? Are you serious?”

“There’s people out there. You’re not alone. That gardener.”

“You’d know the lunacy of that question if you’d really read my letters. If you’d written more often—”

“Look. No point discussing it now, Mary, is there? With you coming home?”

“But I told you in the letters how lonely I was, how worried I was about you. If it was you out there I would have written every week. You know I would.”

“Well, you’re a better person than I am, Mary. Isn’t that it? I’m a beast with no regard for anyone but myself, and you’re a paragon of virtue.”

It wasn’t supposed to go like this, arguing over a past neither of them could change, criticizing each other’s choices just like they’d been doing before she was taken. She was hurt. She was very hurt. But she had to make her mind change the subject if they were going to be together again once she got home. She’d resolved to not start up on him the first time she saw him after so long, that she’d be pleasant and forgiving and that they’d start from scratch if he was willing, but as usual she found it impossible to stop. Just as her mind was warning her not to say something, her lips were already saying it. Alfred shifted on the step. He wore that expression of disdain that had made her so wild before she left, like every word she spoke was something to recoil from.

“And you hardly ever wrote back. I didn’t know if my letters were sinking to the bottom of the river.”

“I wrote back.”

“A handful of times.”

“More than that, Mary.” Alfred sighed. “What could I have done? It’s been hard for me, too, you know.”

“Look. The last thing I want to do is argue with you. Not now. I’ll be home soon and that’s all that matters.”

“About that. Might as well tell you now.”

“Tell me what?”

“Home. It isn’t on Thirty-Third Street anymore. I moved. Had to. Couldn’t afford that place without you. And a few of the women in the building got involved in the Temperance League and were driving me crazy, waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs, sliding pamphlets under the door. A few of them followed me one afternoon saying Bible verses, and when I got to Nation’s the men chewed me out for leading them there.”

“Alfred! Why didn’t you tell me?” They’d lived in those rooms together for thirteen years. She loved the place. She imagined she’d always live there. In her letters to him she’d asked about the place, about the people in the building. Brief as they were, he’d never said anything in his letters about having trouble with the rent, so she’d assumed — hoped — he hadn’t gotten too far behind. She tried to shake off her disappointment. Home was wherever Alfred was. “So where have my letters been going?”

“Held at the building. Driscoll keeps them for me. I collect them when I’m over that direction.” Mary didn’t know Mr. Driscoll very well, but remembered he was one of the few in the building Alfred liked talking with when they crossed paths. He’d been a florist, Mary remembered Alfred telling her, until his joints got so painful he couldn’t work anymore.

“And where have you been staying?”

“Orchard Street.”

“Oh, Christ.”

“It’s not bad. I rent my bed from a family and meals are included. There’s a son. Samuel.”

“What’s their name?”

“Meaney.”

Mary wondered where her things were now — her pots and pans. Her clothes. The silver teapot that had been Aunt Kate’s. Let it go, she breathed. Let it go. She reached for every piece of information he gave her and tried to make the parts fit into a whole. Alfred coming and going on Orchard Street, sitting down for meals with a family she’d never seen, careful of himself around Samuel, heading out to the Crystal Springs stables and working a full day. She wanted to ask him about drinking, if Mrs. Meaney waited up for him, if they helped him to his bed at night and took off his socks and shoes and reminded him to wash his sheets once a week.

“So where will I go? Later today?” Mary asked.

“Come to the stable. I’ll be there late anyway. My room on Orchard isn’t big. And with the boy there I doubt they’ll allow you to stay. Or—”

“Or?”

“Or you could stay with someone until we get a place of our own again. Someone in the old building?”

Mary heard her name called from the end of the alley. The break was almost up, and Mr. O’Neill wanted to go over what would happen next before they reconvened. Her guard had fallen asleep with his hat pulled down low over his eyes. She wouldn’t be foolish enough to try to escape today anyway. Not when she’d be free in a matter of hours.

“I have to go,” Alfred said. “I’m late as it is.” They brushed the crumbs off their laps, and then he took her into his arms and hugged her, lifting her off the ground for a moment before setting her back down. “I’m sorry, Mary. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. We’ll figure it out later. When we see each other. We’ll figure it all out. I promise.” He told her the address of the stable.

“Yes. Okay. Later.”

“A lot has changed, Mary. You’ll see.”

She’d been a child when she met Alfred, only seventeen, more than twenty years of her life tied to this person, no way to untangle that knot now. They’d moved into the rooms on Thirty-Third Street in the summer of 1894, when Mary was twenty-five. Aunt Kate had died of pneumonia over the winter, and Paddy Brown had gone from saying very little to saying nothing at all.

“Kate loved Alfred,” Mary said gently to the old man on the day she told him that she’d be moving out, that she and Alfred had found a place together.

“Kate thought he would marry you,” Paddy Brown said as he felt along the mantel for his tin of tobacco. Mary found it for him, pried it open, removed a plug, and offered it on her palm. When he got the pipe started she sat by him, and he put his hand on top of her head. “Take the things she wanted you to have,” he said after a while. It was the longest conversation they’d had in six months.

For weeks after moving in together, after arranging the few things she’d brought from Kate’s, after going to the market and buying new bed linens to fit their new double bed, and a bright yellow tablecloth for their new kitchen table, she thought she’d never rest again. What woman could rest with him so near, and even when he fell asleep she’d lie awake, contemplating the weight of his arm where it lay across her ribs, the gentle tug she felt when the stubble of his jaw got caught on her hair. When she worked, all she could think about was getting home to him, and he said it was the same for him. They talked late at night over coffee, when they went to bed, when they woke up, and when they weren’t together they stored up all the things the other would be interested in and carried those items home. Even when winter came, and the gas-meter jar was often empty, they simply crawled into bed together and piled every blanket on top and then shivered with their hands cupped over their mouths. He’d take her frozen feet and pull off the layers of stockings until they were bare and then he’d lift up his sweaters and press her feet to his warm chest. When Mary thought of those days now, she could still feel that astonished joy, that belief that no one else in the world could possibly be happier than they were.

Alfred hugged her again, and released her again, and there was something in the hug and the release that told Mary something was not right.

Again, Mr. O’Neill shouted her name. The guard came over and stood beside her.

It was the time, probably. Twenty-seven months could make any two people a little awkward together, even two as close as Mary and Alfred. Also the guilt, Mary remembered. Alfred was always like a hangdog when he was guilty, and she shouldn’t have ridden him for not writing more often. Not when they were about to be happy and together again, Alfred working, eating three square meals, home at nights. Maybe leaving Thirty-Third Street was a good thing. Now they could get a new place together and truly start over.

“I love you, Mary. I really do.”

“All right, Alfred,” Mary said. “We’ll talk about that later.”

“We will,” he agreed.

Together, they walked down the alley toward Mr. O’Neill, who was pointing to his watch and frowning.

• • •

Everyone came back from lunch recess more overheated and red faced than when they left. A few of the reporters did not return at all, and Mary wondered if that was because they’d felt certain of the outcome, and if so, what their predictions had been. She noticed Dr. Baker sitting in the second row. The men seated beside her had their backs to her, talking to other men.

The scientists talked about new discoveries in the world of contagious diseases, new vaccines that were in development, how it was likely that more people like Mary would be discovered, people who carried disease but never succumbed to it themselves. They used the words bacilli, serum, agglutinins: words that made Mary feel like her mouth was stuffed full of cotton that she couldn’t manage to spit away.

Eventually, they began discussing her capture — specifically, why Dr. Soper and the Department of Health decided to take her by force. It would be one thing if this woman were an educated person, the Department of Health officials argued one by one, but Mary Mallon had no formal education, and lived with a man of low moral character, to whom she was not married. Several employers had reported that they didn’t like to cross Mary, didn’t like to demand veal when she’d planned on poultry, and that wasn’t natural, was it? What kind of cook inspires that kind of caution in an employer? Mrs. Proctor of East Seventieth Street recalled a time when she’d asked Mary to make Irish stew, assuming it would be one of her specialties, and Mary refused!

When Bette answered the door of the Bowen residence on that cold March morning in 1907, the police officers pushed past her and spread throughout the house. “She’s not here!” Bette shouted, and the note of urgency in her voice reached Mary, who was up on the third floor. She pulled back the curtain of the nearest window to see the police truck. She heard someone running up the back stairs, and discovered that she couldn’t move. “The police are here,” Frank said the instant he appeared at the door. “I have an idea.”

Mary saw the solution before he said it out loud. “The Alisons,” she said. The Alison family, who lived next door to the Bowens, had recently had a piece of their fence cut open behind the homes so that their servants could travel back and forth. Mrs. Alison and the children had left for Europe a week earlier, and Mr. Alison would be at his office all day. Frank held up his hand as they listened to the brisk footsteps of the officers walking through the rooms of the floor below them. “You listen for your chance,” he said. Mary nodded and felt suddenly very cold. Her whole body was covered in a thin layer of sweat, and she began to shiver. Her coat was downstairs in the servants’ closet and there would be no time to get it. It was snowing outside.

Only seconds later, Mary heard Frank shout from the first floor and then the rush of hard-soled shoes to the stairs. Mrs. Bowen was out shopping. Mr. Bowen was at his office downtown. It was supposed to be an ordinary Friday, a better-than-ordinary Friday, since Mary would have to cook only for the staff, and for them it would be easy: no serving, dinner together around the table in the kitchen. Clutching the doorknob for help, Mary peeked into the empty hall. She stepped out and stayed close to the wall until she got to the narrow back stairs. Down she went, silent as a cat, until she reached the back door of the house. Outside, the snow was falling faster. Feeling nothing but her own heart beating in her chest, she ran along the footpath that led over to the fence and unlatched the door that led from the Bowens’ yard to the Alisons’. When she looked back to see if anyone was watching her, she noticed her footprints in the snow. She hurried back to cover her tracks, and then, walking backward, leaned over to brush away the footprints with her hands.

The door to the Alison kitchen was locked — the servants mostly having been let go while the family was in Europe. At the edge of the yard was a supply shed. It was a small structure, little more than a low closet with a roof, but the door was unlatched, and when she stepped inside there was just enough room among the pruning sheers, the bags of sand, and the drums of kerosene for one person to crouch and wait.

She didn’t feel the cold at first, and considered herself well protected in the little room. But after a while she could feel the wind where it slipped in between the spaces in the planks, and her knees ached from crouching. She shifted a few bulky canisters of oil and made room to sit on the packed dirt ground. She wished she could hear what was happening on the Bowen side of the fence. Would Frank or Bette remember to get her once the police officers gave up and moved on? There was nothing to do but wait.

• • •

Later, Mr. O’Neill would ask her what she made of Dr. Soper’s pursuit, why she wasn’t more surprised to be hounded the way she was. “I was surprised!” Mary said. “I was shocked!”

“But you didn’t behave like a person who was surprised and shocked,” he insisted. “You behaved like a person who expected to be pursued. Do you understand the difference? You reacted too quickly. How did you know when you looked out the window and saw the police that it was you they’d come for? That’s the problem they have with you. That’s part of the reason they don’t believe you when you claim to have had no idea you were spreading disease.”

“I’m not spreading disease.”

“You see? Even there. You sound like a person who’s been defending herself for years, long before anyone accused you.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning, there must have been a moment when it crossed your mind that all of this was true. The question they have is whether it occurred to you after their accusations, or before.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You do understand. Think.”

• • •

Alone in the silent supply shed, Mary tried to think about only nice things, normal things, what she needed from the grocer’s, what she’d cook for Alfred next time she went home, but instead she kept thinking of the officers searching for her. She thought of the people who’d been sick in Oyster Bay, and how she’d known they would make it if she worked to keep the fever down. It was a fast-moving fever, that one. Doctors talked about fevers as if they were all the same, but there were fevers and there were fevers, and Mary could distinguish one from another with the touch of her hand. One day everyone was playing tennis, riding horses, and the next they complained of being dizzy. They stopped eating. The gardener vomited very near the water cistern. Mrs. Warren fainted on the porch. Mary had seen it enough times to know that Mrs. Warren and the other adults who caught it would survive. They were in pain, yes, and called out nonsense, and tossed and turned and sweated through all their sheets and vomited bile. Still, Mary had seen Typhoid Fever at its worst, she’d seen death come a few times, and in each of those times the fight was mismatched from the beginning. The Warren girl was the only real worry, the poor child, only eight years old. She didn’t have the fight in her that the others had. That was the dangerous moment, when the patients didn’t have the fight, when they just slept and stared and preferred to keep their eyes closed. When the moaning stopped. When the nonsense stopped. And that girl was so quiet to start with.

Mary threw her whole body into beating death away from the girl. She filled the tub to the brim and reached her own hand in the water to show her what it was like to splash inside the house, over the wood of the floor, a thing that would never be allowed if everyone were healthy, and the girl seemed interested in that. Mary told her about her passage to America, and what Ireland was like. The girl would never go to Ireland. England, maybe, Mary informed her. Paris. But not Ireland. Not many went to Ireland, they just went away from it. But it was her home just like New York City was the girl’s home, and what was it the poet said? Every savage loves his native shore. And that’s when she knew the girl would survive. She leveled her eyes on Mary, and there was life behind them. “Are you a savage, Mary?”

“I am. Like we all are.”

And the girl considered it. “I’m not,” she said.

“No?”

“Absolutely not.”

So the Warren girl survived, and everyone else in the Warren house survived and they still wanted her.

That’s part of what was so worrying about the Bowen girl, that they wouldn’t let her anywhere near. If she could only just see her, but even now, with the police searching the house for her, Mary was sure the girl’s nurse had not so much as stepped out into the hall to see what was going on. When they knocked on the door to pass in ice and fresh linens, the nurse blocked their view of the girl’s bed with her body, accepted what was given, and shut the door again.

Then she thought of the boy, the Kirkenbauer baby, only two years old. Just two. Barely two. Crouched in the Alisons’ storage shed, her hands stinging with the cold, she tried everything to keep him out. She hummed songs. She recited poetry. After returning home from the Kirkenbauers’ back in 1899, she didn’t even look for another situation for a whole month. She made sandwiches and sold them to the men who worked at the lumberyard on Twenty-First Street. When they handed over their coins and she handed over the sandwiches, they were perfect strangers to her, and she decided that was what she wanted: to cook for people but not to know them at all. She didn’t want to see people when they woke up in the morning. She didn’t want their children hugging her legs and learning her name.

Mary waited in the shed for what felt like hours. She was hungry. She was stiff and cold and worried about getting sick. Who would cook for the Bowens if she got sick? She unwound a long piece of burlap from around the garden equipment stored on a shelf behind her and wrapped it around her shoulders. She hugged her knees to her chest and exhaled hot breath on her fingers. At one point she thought she heard Bette calling her, so she opened the door and saw a policeman’s hat moving along the other side of the fence. She tried not to think about time, and whether she’d be there all night, whether she should risk running alongside the Alisons’ house and out to the sidewalk and away downtown. In one moment she felt sure they’d give up, go home, and never come for her again, and in another moment she knew they’d be waiting for her on Thirty-Third Street. They’d be waiting for her everywhere she went.

After what felt like several hours of almost perfect stillness, she heard the creak of the fence door swinging open, the crunch of footsteps in the snow. Frank, she prayed. Come to tell her the coast was clear. She heard footsteps pass her little shed, the shadow of a man darkening the slim spaces of sky between the wood slats. A person was standing at the shed, facing it. Mary could feel the stranger sizing up the little structure, the perfect hiding place. “Mary Mallon,” a man called out. The world was thin, brittle, frozen solid, and the man’s voice threatened to crack everything open, smash all the lovely icicles hanging from branches. She pressed her lips together and closed her eyes. More steps approached to join the person already at the shed. A woman’s voice, efficient, fed up, stood out from the others.

“She’s in there,” the woman said, as if it should have been obvious to everyone, and in one last surge of hope Mary imagined her pointing her finger away from the storage shed to the trees, to the clouds.

“Mary Mallon,” a man said again, and it was the tone in his voice that told Mary it was over. He really did know she was in there, and he’d give her a moment to decide to come out before he went in and got her.

Someone pulled the lever that opened the door, and four men and one woman leaned in to look at her. Mary’s hips and knees felt like a kitchen scissors gone to rust.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Mary said as she worked to ignore the searing pain in her joints. “Leave me alone.”

“Mary Mallon,” one officer said. “You are under arrest. You have—”

She shoved him. She put her head down and threw out her arms and shoved him. When another officer approached, she kicked, and next thing she knew one was trying to pin her arms, while another had gotten her around her waist. She felt one at her ankles. She reached out and grabbed a handful of the woman’s hair. The snow in the Alisons’ backyard was churned up, and Mary felt the wet of her skirt through her thick wool stockings. One of the men caught her left arm, and when he did he twisted it around behind her back. When she turned to knee him, another officer grabbed her right arm. They lifted her, carried her across the Alisons’ small yard to the narrow path that ran beside the Bowens’ house. She tried to kick, to buck, to twist in their arms, raising her knees in the air and then letting fly with every bit of strength she had left, but she was stiff from sitting in the cold for so many hours, and her movements felt clumsy, poorly aimed. One of the officers was telling her to be quiet, relax, that she was only making everything worse for herself, and next to all of this buzzed Dr. Baker, who rushed up to the door of the truck and pulled it open so that the men could shove Mary inside.

• • •

Dr. Baker walked to the front of the courtroom. It was the pattern of the day; one description of Mary in a given moment was not good enough. They had to get two, three, four people up there to say the same thing. One of the police officers had already had his turn and had told them all about it, said Mary was an animal, worse than an animal because even the wildest animal can be coaxed, usually. There was no coaxing Mary that day. No reasoning with her. She was like no other person he’d arrested in his life. He had scratch marks on his arms and neck for days after.

As Mary observed the plain-looking woman turn to the judge before taking her seat, she knew it would look worse that she’d attacked a woman, and Dr. Baker was a smaller woman than Mary, and a woman of the class that allows women to become doctors.

But Dr. Baker surprised her. She admitted that she’d had to sit on Mary during the ride to the Willard Parker Hospital, but other than that she said simply that Mary had seemed frightened, and that the others had covered for her. “As anyone would expect them to,” she added, “being Miss Mallon’s friends.” No one else had said anything about her having friends.

“Dr. Baker, did you find her to be unreasonable?”

Dr. Baker hesitated. “We didn’t try to reason with her. When she went missing we focused on finding her, and when we found her we simply forced her into the truck. So I couldn’t comment on that. Other than two brief conversations we had when she was still being held at Willard Parker, I’ve never spoken to Mary Mallon at any length.”

“Wouldn’t you agree that a woman who hides in a shed for so many hours to avoid arrest has a guilty conscience?”

Again, Dr. Baker hesitated. “I would say that person doesn’t want to be arrested, guilty or not guilty. And I would say that none of us here would like to be arrested.” Dr. Baker stared out across the heads of all the witnesses in the gallery, her hands folded neatly in her lap. The attorney asking the questions searched through several sheets of paper and then pushed them aside and turned to Dr. Baker without notes.

“Dr. Baker, as a resident of New York City and as a medical doctor, would you feel comfortable letting Mary reenter society? Allowing her to leave North Brother Island and return to her former life?”

Dr. Baker frowned. She remained silent for a long time, and in the gallery the spectators wondered if she’d heard the question. Finally, she spoke. “It’s my opinion that Mary Mallon does not understand the medical threat she is to those around her. However, neither do many of the medical personnel who’ve become acquainted with her case in these past two and a half years. I can say only that I don’t think Miss Mallon should be allowed to cook. All the medical doctors in this room have admitted that she is a healthy person. What happens when more healthy carriers are discovered? Do we send them all to North Brother?”

Mr. O’Neill smiled in his seat. The other attorney frowned. “Dr. Baker,” the other attorney asked, “is it possible that you have particular sympathy for Miss Mallon because she is a female?”

Dr. Baker tilted her head and considered. “Perhaps.”

ELEVEN

In the end it took several more days for the judges to decide what to do with her. Instead of sending her all the way back to North Brother for the night, they put her in a hotel with guards posted outside her room, and on the morning of the second day, ten minutes were wasted in arguing over who would foot the bill for such a luxury. The City of New York? Which department? One of the DOH representatives shouted, “That woman is expensive enough as it is.”

She spent three nights in the hotel all told, and except for the fact that her bed was made every afternoon when she came back from the hearing, it wasn’t that different from North Brother. The hotel laundry wouldn’t lend her an iron, so she gave in and sent her skirt and blouse downstairs for them to clean, which they did, in plenty of time for each morning’s proceedings. The mousy girl who brought up her clothes on the morning of the fourth day said, “Good luck to you, Missus. We hope they let you go,” and Mary imagined a whole staff of women standing behind her, rooting for her, waiting to hear what would happen.

And then, back in the oppressive courtroom, at ten o’clock in the morning of July 31, 1909, Judge Erlinger stared out across the heads of every man and woman in the room and announced that Mary Mallon’s release would be a hazard to every New Yorker and could not be justified. She would be returned to North Brother Island immediately.

Mary heard the words as a kick to the gut and gripped the table to steady herself. “What does it mean?” she demanded of Mr. O’Neill. Everyone in the room seemed to have woken up. Some of the reporters jumped from their seats to shout questions at the judge, at the collection of experts, at Mr. O’Neill, at Mary.

“It’s just for now,” Mr. O’Neill said. “We’ll keep working. Look, their own experts said there are others like you, that—”

“Others like me? Do you believe I’m giving out the fever?”

“I think it’s irrelevant, Mary. I’ve tried not to think about it too much, but yes, the lab work is sound in my view, and two-thirds of the time it comes back positive.”

“Their labs! Run by their people! I’m telling you, it’s Soper. He’s—”

“Mary, calm down. Please. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are perfectly safe to be around as long as you are not cooking, and they can’t go locking up healthy people whenever they feel like it. There has to be a better solution.”

Mary absorbed Mr. O’Neill’s calm response and remembered that for him, and for everyone else in the courtroom, the hearing was no more than a handful of days, a set of hours, an errand, an item on a list. For Mary, it was her entire life. After this, Mary made herself understand, all of them can go home to their families, meet someone for a picnic, take a trip to the ocean if they want. Each person here has complete freedom, except for me.

When she thought about going back, the long automobile journey uptown, the ferry crossing to North Brother, it all seemed inevitable, and all the other possibilities she’d imagined — being with Alfred, getting new rooms together, finding work — were just dreams behind locked doors.

“The judges said you can have visitors now,” Mr. O’Neill offered by way of consolation. “You can write to your friends and let them know.”

Mary stood on her tiptoes so that she was almost his height and felt tempted to spit at him, to walk up to the judges and spit at them as well. As for Soper, she felt her hands turn to fists. Their experts had worried that she had a violent streak — what proper woman would raise a knife to a man of status? — and perhaps they were right. Who among her friends, after not seeing her for more than two years, would put aside their work to spend half a day traveling all that way uptown, all the way across Hell Gate, to sip a cup of tea in her cramped kitchen for thirty minutes?

And how would Alfred react to this news? She was glad he was absent.

• • •

John Cane was there to meet her ferry and tell her all the news since she left. The she-cat who skulked in the vegetable garden had birthed a litter of kittens, and all the babies had been taken home by nurses except for one. Did Mary want it? For company? The hydrangea by the south wall were fully bloomed in the heat, even though he didn’t expect that for several more weeks since last year they hadn’t blossomed until August. Did Mary remember? Did she remember planting the rusted nails with him? Well it worked, that trick, and now they’ve flowered a deep periwinkle blue. He went on and on, as if she’d been gone for a year and not just a handful of days. The moment she opened the door to her cottage it was as if she’d gone out only for a walk, and everything — the courtroom, the judges, Dr. Soper, the hotel — seemed like a hallucination, like she’d never left, like she’d never seen Alfred at all. He’d tried to see her at the hotel the first evening, but they told him to see her over at the courthouse. He never did. Working, she supposed. He could have left a note with the clerk at the courthouse or one of the guards at the hotel. Even if they had to read it before handing it over, she’d like to have had a note from him. But there was no note, no visit, and now she was back on North Brother with John Cane buzzing in her ear.

She went over to her desk and removed a sheet of paper. She sat for a while, not sure of what to say. After a few minutes, she picked up the pen.

Alfred,

You’ve heard by now that I was taken back to North Brother. Mr. O’Neill said he is going to keep trying. I’m not sure what to think — I’m just so tired. I barely saw you at all.

I’m allowed to have visitors now. I would love for you to visit me here, Alfred. It’s not ideal, but at least it’s something. I’ll wait to hear from you.

Mary

She addressed the letter to the stable instead of Thirty-Third Street, and left it poking out from under her doormat on the step where the mailman would notice it. Then she closed the door of her cottage and curled up on her cot. Her body smelled ripe. Her best blouse would be ruined for good. It was so very hot. The walls so close. Late at night, when she was sure no one would see her, she carried the heavy chamber pot outside, emptied it in the river, and returned immediately to bed. In the early mornings she heard the foghorn of the lighthouse behind the hospital. She listened to the rhythmic tap and scrape of the bricklayer’s instruments as he pointed the brick of the new walkway that connected the hospital to the outbuildings. She heard John and his gardening shears slicing through the green, and she heard someone leave meals on her step three times a day. After a few days she decided that was the way it would be from now on. She’d stay in her hut and if they needed her, let them break the door down. If they wanted her samples or wanted to draw blood, by God they’d have to drug her and get ten men to hold her. No more. After several days — her head felt light from lack of food, her teeth thick and soft, and under her arms itched for a scalding washcloth rubbed with strong soap — John pounded on her door and warned her that he’d brought a nurse and they were going to enter without an invitation if she refused to come outside. Finally, as threatened, he opened the door, and the smell of fresh-cut grass turned her stomach.

“My God,” he said, turning his face toward the fresh air of outdoors and drawing a deep breath. “Are you suffocating yourself?”

“Get out.”

“I’ve brought Nancy,” he informed her, as if she knew who in the world Nancy was. As if she cared. “Tell her,” John urged the girl. The nurses got younger every season.

Nancy looked at him and then at Mary.

“Tell her,” he said again, nodding toward her hand. Mary noticed the girl was holding a newspaper.

“There’s a dairyman,” Nancy said. “In Camden. Upstate.”

Mary waited. The girl whispered something to John, but he couldn’t hear her. Mary promised that she’d kill them both with a single shot if they didn’t get out.

“They say she gets mad if…”

“If what?” John asked.

“Yes, if what?” Mary asked.

The girl took a step backward. “If anyone says anything about her having the fever.”

Mary sat up in her cot.

“Don’t worry about that,” John assured Nancy. “Just keep going.”

“There’s a dairyman in Camden who’s passing the fever through the milk.”

Mary sat up straighter. “What do you mean?”

John took over. “She’s just after reading it to me. He’s a dairyman. Had the fever forty years ago and hasn’t been sick a day since. There were outbreaks of Typhoid wherever his milk was sent, at groceries and markets all over New York City, and now they’ve traced it to him. Got lots of people sick with it. They’re saying maybe hundreds. More than—”

“More than what?”

“More than they claim you made sick. A lot more.”

“Where are they sending him? Not here, I guess. Camden is all the way up near Syracuse, isn’t it?”

“That’s just it. They’re not sending him anywhere.”

“What do you mean?”

“Because he’s the head of his household and has a family, they’ve decided it would be too much of a hardship to put him in quarantine, so he can stay exactly where he is, as long as he promises to never have anything to do with milk production. So he has his sons running it and he’s bossing them.”

“You mean they’re isolating him somewhere in Camden. Somewhere he can be near his family.”

“No, Mary. I mean they’re letting him stay in his own damn house. You understand? With his wife. With his dogs and his sons and his grandchildren. Not a thing has happened to this man except being told not to go near the milk that’s distributed for sale. As for the family’s milk he can do as he pleases. None of them have ever had Typhoid, so your Dr. Soper believes they must be immune.”

“Soper? Soper went up there?” Mary tried to make sense of what she’d just been told. “Hundreds, you said? Hundreds? They say I infected twenty-three.” It was one of the rare times she’d said it out loud.

Nancy piped up. “I think, if I may, that you’re considered, more of a… well, a special case? There’s a bit on you at the end here.” She held out the folded newspaper for Mary to take. “This man knew he had Typhoid forty years ago. He remembers it well. You claim to have never had it at all. So.”

“I claim?” Mary said. She advanced toward the girl with her arm stretched out for the paper, which the girl handed over before backing away. “You can go now, please, and tell the other nurses not to bother coming down here with any more glass canisters for collecting or they won’t like what I do with those canisters when they get here. I’m finished with all that. You understand?”

“I understand.”

When the girl had left, John announced that he was going to sit on the step outside where the air flowed a little easier. “She was trying to help, Mary,” he remarked over his shoulder. “She didn’t have to tell me about that article, but she did. She said she thought you should know.”

“Everybody is trying to help. And look where all their help has landed me.” She scrutinized the back of John’s head for a moment, his sunburned neck, and then, sighing, went over to sit beside him.

“If you hadn’t bit Nancy’s head off, she would have also told you that the article says there are likely many, many more like you and this man up in Camden. It says the Department of Health already has leads on several of them from tracing local outbreaks.”

“And none of them are in quarantine.”

“Nope.”

Mary tried to ignore the reek of her body and looked over at the moon, just an impression yet, the sky still blue around it. Her muscles felt weak from lying in a prone position for so long. She leaned over to the tray John brought with him and broke off a piece of the bread.

“But I was the first so I get the prize.”

“I guess so.”

John plucked a blade of grass and stuck it in his mouth. He leaned back on his elbows and closed his eyes. “I like it out here, days like this. Feels like the country, and this island gets a good breeze compared to over there.” He lifted his chin to indicate the water, the tall buildings on the other, larger island to their west. He sat up. “Oh, before I forget, I cleared a path down on the other side, you know, by that heron’s nest you found that time? It goes all the way down to the beach and you can’t see the hospital from there if you walk down a bit and get the trees between you and it.”

Mary imagined him doing all of this, making progress through the weeds and brambles, overgrowth that had not been touched in years, maybe ever. His arms were berry brown from being outdoors. She wondered sometimes if he was strong enough for all the work he did. Perhaps it was the work that kept him strong. He must be well into his fifties, maybe more, but then Mary remembered that she was almost forty. Forty years old. Her own mother had died at thirty, her nana at fifty-eight. When had he cleared that path, with everything else he was supposed to be doing? He said the board of the hospital wanted primroses along the eastern gable, mums added to the garden. They wanted the lawns cut, the hedges kept trim, everything about the island as neat and orderly as the corridors of the hospital. Riverside was a showpiece hospital, an example to all other hospitals built to house and study contagious diseases. But John had his own way of doing things, just as Mary had her own ways of operating around a mistress who believed she knew her kitchen better than Mary did. If he was wanted for anything, a messenger could always follow the smell of his pipe, which he took out of his shirt pocket now and stuffed with tobacco. So he’d been sure, all along, that she would be back. Or maybe, it occurred to her now, he’d just been hopeful.

“Thank you, John.”

John nodded as he touched his match to the tobacco and drew it alive with short, careful puffs. “Did you see your man over there? At the hearing?”

“I did.”

“Good,” John said. “That’s good.”

• • •

She spent August and September prowling the edges of the island. Every morning started cooler than the last, and soon she had to bring her shawl for warmth. She walked without stockings on the packed sand and held her shoes in her hands as she stepped from smooth stone to smooth stone that led, if she chose to follow, out into treacherous waters. She rested on the southernmost point of the island and found South Brother, the smaller sibling of North Brother. From her point of view the other island looked green and thick and far happier without the insult of quarantine hospitals and daily death. Sometimes, if she was very still, a snowy egret came to stand by her and inspect her, its plumage so pure and beautiful that Mary wondered how it could be an inhabitant of the same place as the other living things, all of which struck Mary as filthy and tired, just as Mary was. Sometimes, with the sun behind the bird and with its plumage on display, the delicate creature glowed and felt to Mary like a sign that good things were possible.

No one ever looked for her anymore. In the beginning, if she didn’t answer the door of her cottage, and couldn’t be found in one of the flower beds close by, they’d send out a search party. “I thought I was free to roam as I please,” Mary would say, furious at yet another promise broken, and doubly angry because they always responded, “You are, of course you are,” even as they led her back by the elbow, the glass canisters clinking in their skirt pockets.

Never in her life had she had so much time. She tried to remember being a child, but even those years seemed full of responsibilities: fetching and boiling water, cleaning, baking, gardening, raking, doing her lessons by the lamp while her nana used her quick knife to separate potatoes from their jackets and pile them high on the table. The nurses never came near her now, and she wondered if that had been part of the judges’ order, the fine print she hadn’t stayed around to read, that although she had to stay within the ordered boundaries, no one was to bother her with tests and analyses, no one was to rap on her cottage door twice a week.

Several weeks after the hearing, the middle of September 1909, Mary got a letter from Alfred. When she saw the mail carrier headed toward her cottage she figured it was just another update from Mr. O’Neill, and didn’t bother hurrying to intercept him. When she saw the handwriting on the envelope, her hands went sweaty. She studied it for a moment, and then she tore it open.

Dear Mary,

I hope they told you I tried to see you at the hotel where they kept you. I don’t know why they wouldn’t let me. I don’t remember if I told you that I thought you looked very beautiful the day that I saw you, and I’d almost forgotten, truth be told, how beautiful you are.

I’m writing now because I’d like to go up there to see you. I had hoped that you’d be free and there wouldn’t be any need but now I worry it will be even longer. Maybe another two years even. Maybe more.

I’ve inquired about the ferry and since it doesn’t go on Sundays except for the hospital people I will plan on seeing you there a week from Saturday. Maybe you can let the correct people know that I’m coming so that they don’t give me any trouble when I get there. We can take a walk or do whatever it is you do to pass time. I just want to see you.

Until then,

Alfred Briehof

There were several details about this letter Mary didn’t like. For a start, there was, “I’d almost forgotten.” Nor did she like “two years… Maybe more.” Most of all, she did not like the formality of his signature, “Alfred Briehof.”

TWELVE

Alfred had a pushcart once. He’d had many jobs, but the pushcart months stood out. He said he was sick of hauling coal baskets, and even more sick of emptying ash cans, and above everything sick of answering to a boss. He had had just about every type of physical employment a man could have, and his body needed a break. By his own description he was a genial person and liked to look his fellow man in the face. So he went out and rented a pushcart for twenty-five cents a day. “It’s standing, Mary,” he said. “Standing and talking. And making a living besides.” Alfred preferred to sit while talking, and preferred most of all to sit with a glass of strong liquor nearby, but Mary didn’t point out any of this. It was possible, she supposed, for him to know himself a little better than she knew him, so she swallowed her concerns and said it was a great idea. She knew the butchers of the East Side better than he did, knew which of them kept their thumbs on the scales, which stored their meat on cellar floors where the rain seeped in and sewer pipes might burst, so she helped him find a supplier. There were already three poultrymen on the street where he planned to set up, so he started out selling cuts of beef, pork, and lamb. For a quick lunch to make his cart known he offered slabs of corned beef with a side of beans, a boiled potato for an extra five cents. Mary showed him how to keep it hot, how much to put on the plate.

By the end of the very first month he learned that meat was not the thing. Fat black flies pestered him all day long, laying their eggs while doing so, and made themselves so at home on his cart that he was forced to switch to fruit. The Jewish and Italians had the advantage with the fruit suppliers, taking all the semirot for themselves and leaving to the rest of the peddlers only the best fruit, for which the suppliers had to charge full price. Between the cost of the good fruit and the cart and the tipping of police officers and the paying off of the grocer from whom he rented sidewalk space, plus the nod to the collector and the man-of-influence, who was no more than a saloon keeper up the block, Alfred was deep in the red after only two or three more months. On top of that, since he was set up next to one of the poultrymen, the flies came anyway, and hopped from the putrid carcasses the other peddler had cast behind his cart over to Alfred’s lovely apples and pears, where they perched and laid more eggs.

Once he gave up on fruit, he switched to hot corn, and that went all right for a while, maybe three or four months. But he got bored with corn and switched to something that no one else for ten blocks thought to sell — children’s toys. Small toy boats. Wooden horses. Dolls for girls. Noisemakers. Funny hats. Toys were the best yet: Alfred opened his cart for business around nine in the morning, and closed before supper, by four. There was no worry about rot. No worry about his goods baking in the sun. Even the children left him alone except to buy what he offered. When the fruit carts got pelted with their own goods, and the fish cart got overwhelmed, overturned, and rolled down Forsyth Street, Alfred was left alone to sell for five cents what he’d purchased for three.

When Mary looked back on the best days with Alfred, leaving out the early days, when they were both so young and had nothing in the world to do but spend their days off taking walks or sipping coffee, the time that Alfred spent as a toy vendor was the happiest in their entire history. Mary remembered visiting him on his corner, the way he was with the children who approached him, drawing them in with his promise of shining train cars and paper birds. Even the ones who showed up with only a penny could buy a sweet. It was a good time, and it lasted longer than Mary expected. One whole year: October 1904 to October 1905. And then, about the time the weather turned cold, he began arriving home in a quiet mood. He pushed his food around his plate. Where once he would say that it was a great life, he took to saying it was a good enough life, for the time being.

“Maybe you want your own store?” Mary suggested. It was not impossible. With a few more years of saving, the right rent, and the right location, maybe it could happen. 1905 had been a very good year for Mary. She’d worked continuously, and on her days off she’d taken side jobs cooking for Ladies’ Luncheons.

But Alfred was shocked at the suggestion. “My own store? What I want is fewer toys in my life, Mary, not more. These kids”—he put his head in his hands—“you wouldn’t believe the noise they make. I caught one putting a handful of sweets in his pocket without paying, and when I made him turn his pockets inside out he said he had paid when I know very well he hadn’t. I would’ve thrashed the kid if his father hadn’t been standing right there, grinning, probably telling the boy what to do. They’re worse than the flies.”

He began sleeping late, opening his cart at noon, leaving at two. On the same short block as Alfred’s cart were twenty-four others, all packed in tightly against one another. Most were food peddlers, and Alfred claimed that under their carts was a year’s worth of garbage. Mary didn’t see why this was so upsetting to him all of a sudden, when it had been like that all along. Unlike other neighborhoods, where the garbage piles were removed regularly by the Department of Sanitation, the rubbish on the Lower East Side was packed four or five inches deep all along the block, and there was no skirting it. Each day’s new garbage got trampled underfoot by the crowds, and when the city sweepers came with their wispy brooms on Tuesday mornings it was like using a teaspoon to empty beaches of sand.

“But it’s getting to winter now. Winter always smells better than summer.”

Alfred could not be convinced.

When the first snowfall came he didn’t bother going to his cart at all, and instead checked with the Department of Street Cleaning to see if they needed an extra man on their snow-removal crew. The DSC took him on, gave him a crisp white uniform with matching hat, and out he went to pick up his cart, broom, and shovel with all the other white wings. Colonel Waring, New York City’s latest street-cleaning commissioner, referred to the white wings as his army, and Mary supposed it was an army of sorts, an army fighting against the enemy garbage, which was as powerful and intimidating as any foreign invader. But in February 1906, after a record-breaking snowfall, and after the DSC had to go upstate to Otisville to draft seventy-five additional men from the sanatorium to help clear the snow, they told Alfred to turn in his uniform.

“What did you do?” Mary asked when she found out. It was a habit she couldn’t seem to shake, asking questions she’d never get answers to. “They’re desperate for men. They’re advertising everywhere. And in the middle of that they let you go?”

When she could see he wasn’t going to answer, she followed him down the stairs to the street, stuck to him as he rounded corner after corner, trying to shake her. Finally, he turned around.

“Will you let it go, Mary?”

“No. I don’t understand. You have to tell me.”

“It’s — I don’t know. It’s not a real goddamn army, but they seem to think it is. It’s freezing outside. Every man’s gloves are soaked through by lunch. So I had to keep warm.”

And Mary knew exactly what had happened. He’d gone to work with his flask, kept it in his pocket or his boot, and had sipped himself to warmth while he was working. And one day, he’d sipped too much.

After that he stopped trying to get work altogether and instead went out early in the morning to sit in Nation’s Pub all day long. Mary let it go for a few weeks, reminding herself that men were like cats that needed to lick their wounds for a good long time before going to battle again. And then she stopped letting it go. When he got up and dressed she asked him a dozen times where he was headed and when he finally told her what she already knew, she couldn’t stop herself from flying down the stairs of the building after him, telling him that he’d better wake up, pay attention, life was not something to be frittered away on a barstool, and if he wanted a woman who would mollycoddle such a man he’d better look elsewhere. Alfred had always been a drinker. Since the very first day. But he’d been a drinker like all men were drinkers, a constant slow-paced drinker who walked the ledge easily, and in fact got through the day with more work behind him with the help of a little nip now and again. There was a time when no one could shovel coal like Alfred. No one could lead a pack of horses. No one could lift a piano. And what harm if during a job the men passed a flask and had a laugh and kept going, shoulder to the wheel? But what Alfred had done was work his way to the limit of the ledge to peek at what was below. He edged and edged and finally, inevitably, he tumbled forward.

The moments he came out of it were brief, and slipped by Mary like a breeze on a humid afternoon. One day, he was sound enough to fix the plaster by their window, and even repainted the whole wall. Another time, after Mary mentioned only once that they needed a new mattress, he went out and got one and carried it up six flights on his back. He put it on the bed, made up the sheets, and carried the old mattress down to the curb before Mary came home. “Surprise!” he said, after encouraging her to go lie down and rest after such a long day. She didn’t check her emergency envelope in the closet. She didn’t care. He’d heard her, and acted, and she would not ask a single question and ruin it. Another time, after not coming home for twenty-four hours, he arrived sober, and shaven, and told Mary he was going to take her out for a steak dinner. They’d go to Dolan’s, and after, they’d walk down to Germantown and go to a beer hall. Instead of asking him where he’d been, she suggested they skip Dolan’s and bring their dinner with them to the beer hall so he’d have more time there, more time for him to speak German with his countrymen, and more time for Mary to listen to that choked language coming out of him. He never spoke German at home. He’d never taught her a single word, and sometimes she wondered if that was the key, if that was the thing that hung between them, and if she were only able to understand him in his first language, she’d be able to understand him completely, and they’d be happy, and everything would make sense.

And then he disappeared again for a few days. Twice, Mary spotted him rounding corners in their neighborhood, and worse, heard him mentioned by the neighbors. “When I talked to Alfred yesterday,” one or another of them would say — and Mary would not be able to hear the rest over the blood that rushed to her head. “I can’t live like this,” she said when he came home next, but he just smiled, and hugged her, and told her he missed her, and pulled her toward him until they were hip to hip, and how did he smell so clean when he’d been on a bender? Where did he go wash himself before coming home? More and more she found herself unable to get past that wall of questions. She couldn’t kick sand over that inferno of fury that had started inside her with just one piece of kindling, and then grown with another, then another. When he pulled her toward their bed, she could no longer force her mind to think only of the warm cave of his body, even though she knew things were always better when she did put everything else aside and let him lift her and move her, let him be the Alfred she loved most.

The Fourth of July 1906 saw good Alfred, sober Alfred. He enlisted two other men on the block to go up to East Harlem with him, and together they bought two crates of fireworks, and told as many as they ran into that they would be setting them off at midnight, in the middle of Third Avenue. He referred to it as the annual tradition, though Mary could think of only one other time when he’d ever organized a fireworks show. Down on the street, when midnight came, he’d yelled at everyone to stay the hell back so that no one would get killed. Just as he was about to light the first match he remembered the Borriellos, and their three young boys, and how they wouldn’t want to miss it. “Run up, will you, Mary? See if they’re awake.” He was standing in the middle of the street with a match. Mary and everyone else knew the Borriellos would be awake because who in the city could sleep on such a night? It was the kind of summer night when even the thinnest cotton sheet felt as heavy and stifling as a rough wool blanket. People had taken their pillows to the roofs, to the fire escapes. It was the first unbearable night in a stretch that would last until August, and most of the men had come down in their undershirts. They were all sweating and panting and waiting for the sky to be illuminated.

Mary ran up and pounded on the Borriellos’ door. “The boys,” she said to Mrs. Borriello, who answered by cracking the door half an inch. “Do they want to come down to the street to see? It’ll just be a few minutes. I’ll keep an eye on them.” There was a pause, and Mary thought the door would be shut, but instead it opened wider and two boys stumbled out and raced past Mary in their bare feet. The baby, the three-year-old, struggled to keep up with his brothers. “They worry I’ll change my mind,” said Mrs. Borriello, smiling.

“And you? And Mr. Borriello?” Mary said. “Will you come down?”

“I’ll watch from the window. My husband is on nights.”

“Make sure you watch,” Mary said as she turned and rushed after the boys. “I’ll bring them right up after.”

More people had gathered by the time Mary returned to the street. A ring of children formed an inside circle, closest to Alfred, and behind the children was a larger ring of adults. Mary recognized people she’d seen come and go at the Second Avenue grocer. She recognized a boy and his father from Twenty-Eighth Street. Alfred hollered at all of them to move back, farther, farther, and finally, when he felt everyone was far enough away, he crouched over the box of cylindrical packages, little circles and rockets with their fuses hanging out like tails, and made a selection. Before Mary could tell him to be careful he’d struck the match against a stone and staggered backward, holding up his arms as if the people who waited were a pack of animals who might stampede.

“What happened?” the older Borriello boy said as the crowd watched the small flame travel up the fuse of the first rocket and then fizzle out.

“A dud,” another boy shouted. “Try another!”

Alfred selected another, but the same thing happened. A few of the men stepped forward to confer, and the crowd started getting restless, moving in different directions.

“All right,” Alfred called after a moment. “Problem solved.” Again, he told everyone to move back, again he told everyone to beware, and on the third try, when he touched the match to the fuse, the little ball of fire ate the thin rope in an instant, and the rocket flew with a wild shriek into the sky, above the tenements of Third Avenue, arcing west for a moment before exploding red, white, and blue high over their heads, seeming to cover the whole island of Manhattan. The audience was transfixed, their faces lit, the kids openmouthed, and for the next half hour, until the very last sparkler had died, Mary was proud of him, that he’d done this for all of them, and she remembered why she loved him.

He was good for three weeks after that. He wasn’t working, but he stayed away from the bars, and sometimes made supper, and bought the newspaper for Mary, and went for long walks. When the message came that she had to go to Oyster Bay sooner than planned because the regular cook’s grandchild had come early, he acted as if she were lying, as if she had made it up to get away from him. So he disappeared, and when he finally came home just in time to say good-bye, she slipped past him and down to the street. She didn’t want to look at him. She didn’t want to hear herself say all the things she knew she’d have to say.

The remainder of his toy stock — a set of two play cups and saucers for girls, a china cat with one blue eye and one brown, marbles, a checker set, nearly a dozen toy soldiers without the faces painted on — all of it had been sitting in a box in the corner of their bedroom for the past six months. Before leaving for Oyster Bay, Mary left the whole crate outside the door of the Borriello family.

• • •

Looking back from the quiet of North Brother, her bare feet covered in wet sand and with an egret for company, the water lapping at the fallen hem of her skirt, it all seemed like a very long time ago, far longer than just a couple of years. Fighting with Alfred, that hot spring and summer of 1906, up and down the stairs of their building with sweat running in streams between her breasts, it all seemed like a fever that had now broken, and like so many of the patients she’d nursed, now she was on the other side, amazed that her skin was cool to the touch, bewildered by the stark blankness of everything without that heat to color it, without those swings from joy to rage. At the center of everything, like a selection of notes played at a lower register while the rest of the song sways and dives around it, was the fact that she loved him. She’d loved him since she was seventeen, and even when she wanted to take her skillet and swing it at him, even that time when she did take her skillet and swing it at him, she loved him. Everything would be easier if she didn’t.

• • •

On the evening before Alfred’s visit, Mary dragged the tub from a cobwebbed corner of her hut and out to the middle of the room. She ran a damp cloth along the inside to pick up any dust, and then she poured in kettle after kettle of boiling water until it was halfway full. She usually went up to the hospital when she wanted a bath — they had tubs there with running hot and cold water — but she didn’t want to be seen or questioned or rushed. She readied her soap, her tooth powder, her washcloth, her shampoo, and when she stepped in and lowered herself, the water rushed for the edges and sloshed over the brim. It ran in streams toward the door.

Mary washed. She pinched her nose and dipped her head under the surface and then rubbed the shampoo into her scalp with her fingertips. She dunked again to rinse. She soaped her neck, her long arms, her legs by lifting one out above the water in a straight line and then the other. She stood up, quickly, and soaped her breasts, her belly, her hips, between her legs, and plunged back into the exquisite warmth of the water and wondered why she didn’t perform the same ritual more often.

She soaked, and thought about what attitude she should take when she greeted him. It was unforgiveable, how little he’d been in touch. If it were Alfred who’d been locked up, she would have sent him the things he missed the most. She would have tried to see him even if they told her there were no visitors allowed. But it wasn’t Alfred who’d been taken away, and what was the point of saying how she would have been, and how he should have been, and marching out the long list of grievances when he was coming, finally, tomorrow? Maybe he was turning over a new leaf. Aunt Kate, before she died, said he was a rogue, but the charmingest, handsomest rogue she’d ever seen in her life, and Mary knew she liked him, because whenever he stopped up for her, Aunt Kate made him sit into a plate of stew, and if they had it, a dram of whiskey. Later, Aunt Kate would go around her rooms pointing out pieces Mary could have when she married. Her mantel clock. Her lace-fringed pillows. “And if I’m gone,” she said, “I’ve written it all down for Paddy. ‘On Mary’s wedding day,’ I wrote, and a list of things to be yours.”

Mary pulled a clean dressing gown over her head, removed a mason jar from the shelf, and emptied the tub jar by jar until it was light enough to push to the door, where she tipped it. She listened to the water rush down the single stair, onto the grass, into John Cane’s pansies and snapdragons. He would not have to water in the morning.

She went about brushing and separating her hair. She had no curlers, so she twisted each section around her finger and then pinned it against her scalp. She had only a dozen pins, and her hair was thick and long, so twice she’d run out and had to start over again with a better sense of proportion. He would probably notice right away the pains she’d taken. He knew her well enough now to know she didn’t wake up with curls. Or maybe he’d never noticed.

She counted the years since they met: almost twenty-five. Two years fewer than she’d been in America. She was employed by the Mott family the first time she saw him, and even though she was washwoman she also worked a little in the scullery as assistant to the cook. It was the agreement they’d come to at the office. If she was ever to be hired as head cook, she had to have experience. She’d left her work trimming beans when she heard the bell ring. Where was the maid? She wiped her hands, and as she came down the hall she could make out the outline of a man’s arm and hip in the thin strip of glass inlaid in the thick oak. Other than the bell, the house was completely silent. There were no guests expected that day.

“I’ve brought the coal,” the man said when she opened the door. His barrel sat on the step beside him, and his clothes were covered in coal dust. He had a smudge on his forehead that blended with his coal black hair.

“This is the front door,” she said to him in a fierce whisper, quickly stepping outside and shutting the door behind her. “Do you deliver through the front door at other homes?” She glanced back to peer through the strip of glass to see if anyone was coming.

“I usually deliver to businesses,” he said. “I’m covering.” He didn’t seem to notice Mary’s response and made no move to lift his barrel and move along. He crossed his arms and leaned against the iron banister that led up the three wide steps to the door.

“So what are you then? Nanny?”

“No,” Mary said. He had high cheekbones that reminded her of a wolf. He also had a masculine jaw, a throat flecked with black stubble. On the first floor of Aunt Kate’s building lived a sixteen-year-old boy who always seemed to be hopping a ball on the street when Mary entered or exited the building, and once in a while he came up to knock on their door. Mary had no more interest in him than she did in any other boy in Hell’s Kitchen. He was someone to talk to when there was nothing to do, but when he tried to kiss her inside the first-floor vestibule, Mary had dodged him and then laughed. Now he hopped his ball outside another building.

“Washwoman?”

Mary nodded, and clutched her hands behind her back. He seemed to Mary to be at least twenty-five, and as they each waited for the other to speak she noticed the gentle flutter at his neck.

“Alfred,” he said, extending his hand. Mary shook it quickly and then looked at the black dust he’d left behind on it. “And you’re Mary.”

“How did you know?”

“All the Irish girls are named Mary. Every single one. Swear to God.”

“Ah,” Mary said, her glance falling again on the flutter at his neck. She wanted to put her thumb there, feel the beating of his blood. The horse he’d left on the street seemed an angry animal. He was pitching forward and back, stamping with impatience, and the hill of coal in the cart was sliding, a few hard lumps hitting the road. Perhaps the horse knew its master had knocked on the wrong door. It was March, late in the winter for a delivery of coal, but the family had almost run out and feared the cold nights that late March and even April might bring.

“Aren’t you gonna tell me not to swear to God?”

“What?” Mary said and felt as if she had to shake herself awake. “What are you?” She thought she detected an accent in certain words, but she couldn’t pin it down.

“All American,” he said, and opened his arms wide. Every time he moved, a fine layer of black dust drifted down to the step where they were standing. He lowered his arms. “German. But I’ve been here since I was six.”

“And how old are you now?”

“You ask a lot of questions.” He seemed amused. “Twenty-two. You?”

“Seventeen.”

He looked at Mary that day, bright green eyes rimmed with lashes as black as the coal in his bin, and for a few seconds Mary no longer cared if someone came up the hall and spotted them through the glass. His work shirt was unbuttoned at the very top, and underneath, the neck of his undershirt had gone black with soot. When he took off his clothes at the end of the day, there would be parts of him that could not be scrubbed clean, and other parts that were pure white.

“Which door is it, then?”

Mary pointed to the servants’ entrance, which also served for house deliveries, especially deliveries of dirty things, like coal, or things that might drip, or have an odor, or in general any type of thing that the family would prefer not to know about. Just inside the servants’ door was the chute where any coal man would know to send the black stones down to the cellar.

“They like to know their beds are warm, their underwear clean, but they don’t like to know how it gets that way.”

Alfred raised an eyebrow. “That’s cheeky.”

Mary didn’t know why she’d said it out loud, but now that she had she couldn’t disown it. She hadn’t expected a reprimand, especially not from a man who’d left a trail of coal that someone else would have to sweep away. Not even sweep, Mary corrected herself, remembering how coal dust smeared and spread further when wiped. She’d probably have to fill a bucket and drag it out there to splash the dust away. The work that would be, and in this cold. Mary was tired of having wet, cold hands in wet, cold weather.

“It was cheeky of you to ring this bell,” Mary said. “Use your head. Does any family take a coal delivery through the front door?”

Alfred shrugged, but Mary noticed the skin around his collar become mottled. “I told you I’m covering.”

Mary leaned over the rail and again pointed out the lower door, almost around the side of the house but not quite. As she leaned, he also leaned, to see what she was seeing, and Mary felt the rough cloth of his work shirt against the thin cotton at her back. She sensed the body within, solid and strong. “There,” she said, and when she looked back at him over her shoulder he wasn’t looking toward the door at all. Mary worried about the lamb’s blood she’d wiped on her apron, about Mr. Mott’s twelve dress shirts that had to be soaked, rinsed, dried, pressed, and hung, and about him, this grown man, who even on a cold, wet day seemed to give off warmth like a flagstone in summer, long after the sun goes down.

Still with that half smile, he took both handles of the coal bin, heaved it up with a forward thrust of the hips, and made his way to the far door.

“I’ll see ya, Miss,” he said. Inside, with the doors closed tight, Mary listened to hard knots of anthracite slide along the metal throat of the chute, the crunch of his large tin scoop driven into the pile again and again.

• • •

Saturday morning was overcast, and the skies threatened to storm. When she woke and smelled rain in the air she told herself not to be disappointed if he didn’t come. The ferries wouldn’t run if the waters were too rough, and it wouldn’t be his fault. But when she went outside to see if she could spot the dock through the fog, everything seemed to be running as usual. John Cane stepped out of the mist and onto the path just before Mary, with a covered plate in his hand.

“Everything all right?” he inquired, peering at her unusual hairstyle.

“Fine.” She took the plate, peeked under the lid, and sighed. After two and a half years she was getting to the point where she would mug someone for a good plate of eggs and rashers. “Are the ferries operating on time?”

“They are,” John said, putting one foot. “Why? Expecting someone? That lawyer?”

“You are the nosiest person I ever knew in my life.”

“Your man?”

“I don’t put it that way, but yes.”

“What kind of name is Alfred anyway? What’s his surname?”

“Briehof. It’s German.”

“What part of Germany?”

“John, do you have any work to do today? Are you paid to work, or just to visit?”

“I just like to know things is all.”

“Doesn’t everyone? But not everyone thinks it’s right to ask.”

“Not everyone. That’s true. Take you for example. You’ve hardly asked me a single thing.”

“Okay, tell me something about yourself.”

But John just shrugged and walked back up to the hospital.

• • •

Mary saw him before the ferry docked. She saw his dark head swaying with the rhythm of the water. She watched him leap from the boat to the pier without the assistance of the handrail. She watched him say something to the ferry’s captain, and then both men wheeled around to face Mary’s bungalow. She lifted her arm and waved.

They walked toward each other. He leaned in to kiss her when they met on the path, but she told him to wait, not yet, she’d say when. He looked so good, and so young, and so healthy. His teeth were clean and white. His neck was shaved close without a single nick. He was tall. He moved with the ease of a man who was well fed, and well washed, and had full use of his lungs and got physical exercise every day. So this is how she appeared to the patients of the hospital. This was the light they were looking at when they sat, wrapped in blankets and propped up on hospital benches and stared at her, struggling to recall what being fully alive was like. Mary and Alfred, they weren’t as young as they once were, but they weren’t so bad, not so bad at all. She pointed out the hospital building, the chapel, the coal house, the male dormitory, the morgue, the nurses’ quarters, the physicians’ quarters, the lighthouse, the female dormitory, the stable, the sheds, and her own little shack, which she promised to show him later. She led him down the path that John Cane had cleared for her, down to the beach and her snowy egret. They found a damp log to sit on, and she pointed out the Bronx to their left, and to their right South Brother and Rikers. To their far right was Astoria, and behind them, of course, was Manhattan. She asked him if North Brother was as he had pictured it.

“No,” he said. “There’s more here than I thought. It’s like its own little village. And yet…”

“What?”

“It’s still empty. Where is everyone?”

“They’re patients. Most of them will die here. Or they work here, and they go home at night.”

Mary waited for him to kiss her again, but the moment seemed to have passed. He seemed darker now, caught up in thoughts of his own, and she worried that he regretted coming, that he’d come up with an excuse to leave.

“How are things at the ice company?”

He didn’t seem to hear her. “What’s to stop you from getting on the ferry one day and going over? Disappearing? Couldn’t you work under another name?”

“The guards, for a start. The ferry captain. It’s always the same man, and he knows me.”

“You could hide. You could wait for a moment when he’s not looking and then hide on the boat, under the bench, and then sneak off on the other end when he’s occupied with something.”

“You saw the size of the boat. And they run it only if there’s people to take it. Do you think it would work?”

Alfred was silent, brooding over something.

“Besides, I don’t want to work under another name. I haven’t done a thing wrong. I should be allowed to work under my own name. Mr. O’Neill says he’s making progress, and…”

“Mary—”

“… there are men who’ve done the same as I’m accused of and they’re walking free—”

“I have to tell you something.”

Alfred walked to the water’s edge, picked up a stone, and threw it.

So this was it, Mary thought, this, whatever this was, this was the thing that had driven him uptown and across Hell Gate to see her. He kept his back to her, and she remained silent. She would not make it easier by drawing it out of him.

“I wanted to tell you when you were kept at that hotel, but then they wouldn’t let me see you, and I didn’t want to tell you during the hearing because I was afraid you’d make a scene and hurt your case, so this is better, really, this way, alone here. I think it’s best anyway.”

“Why would I make a scene?” Whatever it was, she would not make a scene in this spot, the only peaceful place she’d discovered on the entire island.

“You’ve been gone for more than two years now…”

Mary put her hands to her head and her chin to her knees. She knew it. She damned well knew it. She knew it, and she didn’t know she knew it.

“… and most of the papers say they’re never letting you off this island.”

Mary stood up from the log, brushed off the back of her skirt, and headed up the path. He took a few quick steps after her and caught her arm.

“Like I told you, I couldn’t afford the Thirty-Third Street rooms, so I took a bed at the Meaneys’.”

“Oh, yes! The happy Meaneys and their son Samuel, for whom you like to set a good example.”

“For whom Mrs. Meaney forced me to set a good example. After a week there she said I could stay on only if I stopped drinking.”

“And yet you’re still there.”

“I did the Oppenheimer Treatment. I’m still doing it. Her husband did it and it worked for him and she thought it might work for me.”

“It’s bogus. Everyone knows it’s bogus. They take your money and you drink the quinine until you’re so sick you can’t take a sip of anything, and then the cure is telling you not to drink. Then the day you stop the quinine it doesn’t work anymore. The husband is still not drinking?”

“The husband is dead.”

Mary squatted on the path, touched her fingertips to the ground to steady herself. That was it. She almost smiled. She’d felt it between them when she saw him in New York, but she couldn’t put a name on it. Now she could. Alfred remained standing.

“How long dead?”

“About five years now.”

Mary felt her stomach lurch. “You said the Meaneys might let me stay with you there until we found our own place. You said you’d ask. When you spoke of them you said ‘They’ and implied a mister and a missus.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“I”—Alfred leaned against a tree—“I just thought I’d explain it all later, away from all those people. Or I thought maybe I’d leave the Meaneys that afternoon once you got free and we’d get our own place again. I hadn’t decided. I was still deciding. Liza is not as strong as you are. I’d have to be very careful about it.”

“And now you’ve decided.”

“I wasn’t given a choice! Those judges decided! What am I to do, Mary? Live like a monk for the rest of my life? You know I love you. And as God is my witness, to this day I’ve never met anyone like you, but I thought there were things we understood about each other. And there’s the boy. He’s a good boy, a smart boy. He—”

Mary held up her hand. “I don’t care one fiddle about that boy, or about delicate Liza.” She itched to slap him, but it would hurt him more if she didn’t care. She felt her lungs heaving, her blood moving just under the surface of her skin, but instead of taking a stick and beating him, instead of unleashing the long string of words that had lined up, she simply walked away. At the top of the path, at the point where John had to get on his knees with his scythe and clear the brambles and thorns, she turned around.

“I have only one question, and I want you to tell me the truth.” She would not cry. She would not let her voice waver. “I begged you to stop drinking. I hauled you up all those stairs. I gave you money when you couldn’t work. I shaved you. I cut your hair. Do you know how good things would have been if you hadn’t been drinking? Remember how good those stretches were when you didn’t drink? Do you remember?”

“I remember. Of course I remember.” He stepped toward her, and she stepped back.

“So why, when Liza Meaney asked, did you march yourself straight to the doctor’s office for the Oppenheimer cure?” Mary felt the pin curls loosen from the bun where she’d gathered them. She felt how lank and pathetic each tendril was that hung about her face.

“I don’t know. I do know that I love you, Mary. As much as always. And I could never love her like I love you.”

“You can love her as much as you like, Alfred.”

“Wait.” Alfred grabbed her elbow, and she spun, turned on him ready to fight if he came any closer. “There’s one more thing.”

“What’s that?

“And just know before I tell you that it’s because of the boy. He’s still young, and it’s only—”

Mary laughed. She tipped back her head and laughed. She laughed at the birds, at the tops of the trees, at the waves, at the furious, roiling Hell Gate, at the sound of the foghorn in the distance, at the thought of John Cane hurrying with her plate, at the doctors, at the nurses, at their needles, their test tubes, their glass collection canisters. She laughed at her own stupidity, and at the stupidity of all the fools working and living and breathing over in Manhattan. She laughed at herself, for ever having been sorry to have left it.

“You’ve asked her to marry you.”

“And she’s said yes.”

• • •

After he left, after she watched the ferry pull away from the dock and churn west, Mary went back to her spot by the water. Her snowy egret had not shown itself while Alfred was there, and stayed hidden now. She hugged her knees, feeling the hollow place that laugh had bubbled forth from earlier. If there was something funny in what he’d told her, she could no longer see it.

After a while, she realized it was getting dark, and it had started to rain again. The loose sand that met with the tree line was pressed down by the drops, and then it was pouring, the drops hitting the river so hard that the surface of the water jumped and frothed, and she hoped if his ferry had not reached the other side yet that it would fill up with this angry weather and sink. And then she hoped it wouldn’t.

Late, long after the supper hour, long after the island had gone dark, she saw electric torches approaching from the small wooded divide that separated her from the hospital. She heard voices on John’s path.

Two nurses approached her and put their umbrellas together to cover her as they walked her back. “What are you thinking, Mary?” the one asked. “What are you doing?”

The other said, “You’ll make yourself sick.”

THIRTEEN

“How are you doing, Mary?” Mr. O’Neill asked.

It was the fourth day of February 1910, their second face-to-face meeting since the disappointment of the hearing the previous summer. It was unseasonably warm, and instead of meeting in Mary’s bungalow, or in one of the meeting rooms of the hospital, Mr. O’Neill suggested they sit at one of the new picnic tables at the Tuberculosis Pavilion and take in the fresh air. So far, Mary had not seen anyone else use the new tables, and said so to Mr. O’Neill. “Even better,” he said. “We’ll be first.” He wanted her to be outside when he told her the news. He wanted her to be able to whoop and shout and dance. He wanted her to be able to celebrate in full view of all those hospital windows looking down on them from above, all those eyes behind the windows, observing, trying to guess what was going on. Hers was the longest case he’d ever worked on, and at home, over the weekend, his wife had already invited their friends to open bottles of champagne and toast him.

Of all the women he’d ever encountered in his life, Francis O’Neill decided that Mary Mallon was the hardest to read. Last time he’d come to see her, just before Christmas, he told her that there was hope for her case, more hope than ever before. A new health commissioner was to be installed early in 1910, and he’d already gone on record with his sympathy for Mary’s plight. “It’s likely he’ll release you once he takes office,” Mr. O’Neill told Mary. He imagined this would be a Christmas gift to her, a baton of hope that she could carry through the holidays, but the news didn’t seem to register at all. A few of the doctors at the hospital mentioned that she seemed to have mellowed since the summer. Where she’d always seemed to take great pains to appear neat and presentable, to tell Mr. O’Neill her opinion on all matters, related to her case or not, she now seemed subdued, worn down. Her hair was unclean and falling out of her bun. Her collar drooped. Her lips were so chapped that he could see where they’d cracked, and bled, and dried, and broken open again.

“I guess we’ll see,” was all Mary said then, and instead seemed more interested in the food he’d brought for her, all wrapped in parcel packages like Christmas presents. Smoked ham, cheese, candied walnuts, chocolate-covered cherries, Christmas cookies. She opened the walnuts for them to share during that meeting, but he didn’t want to put his fingers in the box where her fingers had been, so he told her that walnuts didn’t agree with his stomach. “Shall I open the cherries?” But he said no, he’d eaten just before leaving the city, and she’d leveled a look at him as if to say she’d heard that one before.

Back then, he’d attributed her mood to the general lowness some people feel around Christmas, and reminded himself that it was hard enough to be alone at the holidays, and even harder for her. But now, on a fine February day with every promise of spring in the air, he’d come to see her with more news, and she didn’t seem any more interested than before.

“Health Commissioner Lederle has been installed,” he said once they were seated.

“Who?”

“The new commissioner I mentioned when we last met.”

“Yes. Yes, of course.”

“And one of the things we’ve been talking about — not just he and I but many medical people — is how many carriers there are, Mary. It’s become clear now that there must be hundreds of them. Thousands. Your case is not so special after all, and that’s a good thing.”

Mary frowned and picked at a splinter of wood in the tabletop.

“Mary”—he waited until she looked at him—“he’s decided to release you. The paperwork has already gone through. You will be off this island and back home by the end of the week.”

He brought her a present to go with the news. It was his wife’s idea, and when he agreed, she’d gone straight out to get for Mary, whom she’d never met, something colorful and beautiful, something any woman would be proud to wear. “Men don’t understand about having nice things to wear,” she said, and he told her to go to the same shops she visited, spend the same as she would spend on herself. He took it out now, and pushed it across the table toward her. She laid the package on her lap, but only played with the string.

“What do you mean about my case being not so special? That means they still believe I gave the fever to all those people.”

“Well… yes.”

They’d been on this case together long enough to be frank. She was every bit as intelligent as she insisted she was. “It is true, you know,” he said. “You are a carrier. It’s difficult to accept, but you must have had time to think about it over these three years. The point is that it’s not your fault.”

“But I cooked for so many people who never got sick. I cooked for hundreds of people over the years. And only twenty-three, I don’t—”

“That’s part of it, too. The way it comes and goes. And some people are immune. That’s one of the reasons they’ve kept you here, to study your patterns, but it’s not your responsibility to provide them with the data they need, and Lederle agrees. They can’t lock up everyone who carries the fever. The best alternative right now is to let you go on the condition that you will never cook for hire again. You are no harm to anyone unless you are cooking.”

Mary sighed. Of course. It was what he’d been urging her to volunteer since the very beginning, to quit cooking, to give up one life and sign on for another.

“The commissioner has objected to your confinement since day one, and through his own contacts he’s already gotten you work at a laundry. It’s on Washington Place, right by the park.”

Mary did a few quick calculations in her head. She’d have to stay in a boardinghouse at first, and then she’d have to get a room to share. A laundry. A laundress. Time was moving backward.

“And you’ll have to check in with the Department of Health every three months, so they can keep track of you, take your samples and all that. You’re not the only one. They’re doing that with all the carriers they know about so they can more easily locate the source of an outbreak if one occurs.”

“For how long? The checking in, I mean?”

“For the rest of your life,” Mr. O’Neill said. “Or until they find a cure. Or until vaccination becomes routine.”

“For the rest of my life,” Mary repeated. “What if I move?”

“You’ll have to let the DOH know, and then you’ll register wherever you end up. Are you thinking of leaving New York?”

“No.” She wasn’t, and didn’t even know why she’d asked. “What about Soper? Will I have to see him again?”

“No,” Mr. O’Neill said. He leaned closer to Mary as if they were old friends catching up. “I hear he’s trying to peddle a memoir and is having no luck.”

Mr. O’Neill’s smile disappeared when he saw Mary’s face. Mary hated that man more than she hated any person she’d ever known in her life.

“Just open the present, Mary.” He tapped the box.

She untied the ribbon, folded back the tissue paper, and discovered the most beautiful emerald green shawl she’d ever seen. Along the edges were birds stitched in royal blue. She wrapped it around her shoulders and pictured how it must look against the red in her hair. She remembered her beloved blue hat with the silk flowers. Where had it ended up? She imagined it hanging in George Soper’s office, a memento of his life’s work.

Mr. O’Neill waited for her to speak, and she knew he wanted her to say more, to jump up and down and be happy, but she couldn’t speak because she didn’t trust her tongue to contain its acid, and it was not his fault if he didn’t understand the difference between a cook and a laundress. She’d make a third of what she was making before, probably less. Her knuckles would itch and crack and bleed and cramp and when she became an old woman her hands wouldn’t work at all anymore, and she’d have to get neighbors to come upstairs and open jars, twist doorknobs. It would be like Mr. O’Neill having to leave his position as attorney and go work instead as the bicycle messenger who brought paperwork back and forth between the law offices and the courthouse all day.

But she closed her eyes and took a breath and decided to sweep away every disappointment, to look instead at what he was offering. She remembered how scared she’d been in Queenstown, waiting for that ship to lower its gangway, and again in Castle Garden, where no one understood her brogue and a stranger had hooked her by the eyelid and peered at her like he would an interesting fish. She’d been scared when she met Alfred, and again when Aunt Kate died. She’d been scared before, she’d be scared again. She’d be fine.

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s really lovely. Tell your wife thank you, too.”

“I will.”

• • •

The next morning, she opened the door of her hut to find her newspaper had been opened and refolded so that an article from the city section was on top. “Typhoid Mary to Be Released by Week’s End” the headline read.

“Typhoid Mary,” she whispered as she reached for the paper. Unlike the other names they’d given her — most often the Germ Woman, a title that seemed and felt anonymous, something she could easily disown — Typhoid Mary had a ring to it, and as she studied the boldface type of the paper in her hand she felt it settle on her. She felt it stick.

Word spread quickly around the island. The nurses came in pairs and groups of three to say good-bye. Maybe they had more sympathy than she’d credited, Mary considered as they bade her best wishes and good luck. Maybe she’d been kinder than she thought. Even Dr. Albertson made his way down the path one afternoon. “Good luck to you, Mary,” he said, and continued on his way for a walk.

John Cane avoided her. One morning, when it snowed, he cleared her step while she was in the hospital signing forms, and she could see by the footprints he left that he was avoiding the path. “John!” she called to him another morning. She was walking from the lighthouse and he was over by the nurses’ dormitory, shaking salt on the narrow road. But he didn’t hear her, or wouldn’t listen, and by the time she arrived at the place where he’d been standing, he was nowhere in sight.

Finally, on Thursday afternoon, she caught him walking near her door. “John!” she called out from her step. She waved him over. He seemed to hesitate, but then turned onto the path that led to her hut.

“Are you avoiding me?” she asked, smiling, hoping to disarm him. She didn’t want to leave him angry with her, and she didn’t want to leave without him accepting that he had no reason to be angry.

“Nope.”

“Do you know I’m leaving tomorrow?”

“I heard something about that.”

“Well, aren’t you going to say good-bye?”

“I was going to wait.” He stamped his boots and left treads of snow outside her door. “You still have another day. Don’t get ahead of yourself.”

“John—”

“Besides, it’s like you said, those people are tricky and they might change their minds at the last minute, and then won’t we all feel a bit silly for having said good-bye?”

“They won’t change their minds. It’s all signed and sealed. I have a job waiting for me.”

“Well, good. That’s good.”

Mary understood what was eating him, but there was no possible way to say it. After he’d pinned her for not asking him any personal questions, she’d made sure to pose a few, now and again, in light conversation, and over the months she’d learned that he had no wife, no children, and lived on East Ninety-Eighth Street with his younger brother, who was bigger and stronger than John, but who was not right in his mind, and could not hold a job because he was prone to fits so violent that he’d once bitten clear through his own tongue. This brother tried to care for John like a wife, doing the cleaning, the shopping, the cooking, but he was not a wife, not nearly a wife, and Mary also understood without ever needing to ask the question that what John wanted his whole life long was a real wife, and he had not given up.

“I want to tell you something,” John said, and Mary cursed herself for letting it come to this. “I want to tell you that I don’t think things are so bad here on North Brother. I think it’s a pretty spot and your bungalow is sound, if a little on the damp side, but show me a building that isn’t. And I think you have to admit you’ve had pretty good company when you’ve sought it. You’ve had someone to talk to, is what I mean. Would you agree?”

“I agree completely.”

“But you still want to leave.”

“Yes.”

“Well, then I want to tell you something else. That Alfred who came here that time. Your man. Yes, I know you said he’s not your man anymore, and yes I know you didn’t put it like that, but I can put two and two together, and what I want to say is that Alfred is not a good character. I don’t mean because of what the papers said about the way you lived, or any of that. I just mean man to man, I can tell a good one from a bad one, and I don’t trust that one to stay away from you once you’re over there again. Remember I said that, and remember that he didn’t have the patience to wait for you while you were here, like any other man would. Like a few other men I can think of would have done without a doubt. And now look where his impatience got him. Don’t forget that, Mary, once he comes around.”

“I won’t forget,” Mary promised, and all the humor she’d felt a moment earlier, all the warmth toward her friend, disappeared, and instead she felt her stomach tighten, her head fill up with electric sparks.

“Well, I had to say it,” John said, and now, his burden lifted, he seemed like the old John, at home with himself and with the door frame of Mary’s bungalow. “And maybe we can visit sometime, over there, and I can tell you the news of North Brother. We can go for a walk or something.”

“John.” She stepped forward and hugged him, and felt where the top of his head met with her ear. She couldn’t help it, she felt it was like hugging a child, a solid, muscular child, but still a child, a child’s narrow shoulders, a child’s way of clinging to her when he wants comfort, and she couldn’t muster up a single morsel of attraction toward him. “Let’s do that.”

FOURTEEN

When Mary was seventeen but passing herself off as twenty-five or twenty-six, turning from the sidewalk and pushing the heavy wrought-iron gate that led to the front door of a house like the Warrens had rented in Oyster Bay, or the Bowens had on Park Avenue, would have made her body a hard knot of dread. It was worse when the woman of the house was young, newly married, maybe only eighteen or twenty herself. Girls of twenty know by instinct who is at least their own age and who is younger, and Mary would compensate by marching into the kitchen with authority, maybe even a little disdain. She’d thicken her accent like a gravy on the stove and hope that would explain to them why she seemed so young. A cultural difference, Mary could see the young mistress thinking. This is the way Irish are, I suppose. Once, when she arrived to cook for the Hill family on Riverside Drive, the mistress had taken one look at her and told her outright that she didn’t believe Mary’s age or experience. Mary had just turned eighteen, and had slowly been getting jobs the agency didn’t know about. Aunt Kate would hear about something from a friend, or Mary would answer an ad in the newspaper. In addition to a home so large that it could have housed a dozen families, the Hills had three carriages, six horses, and a pair of Shetland ponies for the children, who were not yet old enough to ride them. Mrs. Hill told Mary to be on her way.

“I only look young,” Mary insisted, feeling as she said it exactly what she was: a skinny child who hadn’t eaten a proper meal since her last employment. “You’ll get no one else out here today. I might as well make dinner before I go.”

Mrs. Hill hesitated. “I am hungry,” she admitted, and patted her considerable belly. “Only porridge this morning.”

After showing Mary to the kitchen, Mrs. Hill left her alone to create something wonderful out of the bland bits and pieces that had been left behind by the previous cook and the pale chicken carcass the porter had been sent out to fetch that morning. Mary found flour, butter, eggs, raisins, rosemary, three old apples she knocked on and then tested for juice with her front teeth. An hour later she brought Mr. and Mrs. Hill, along with their two children, plates of walnut and raisin chicken salad, with fresh bread and baked apples on the side. She stayed at the Hills’ until her true age was exposed by a porter who’d overlapped with her at a job in Brooklyn Heights. For the next few months Mary had to go back to washing and ironing, giving her the feeling that life was just one long, narrow road, with no turns, no peaks or valleys.

“I can’t take it,” she used to say to Aunt Kate when she’d go home.

“You’ll take it,” Aunt Kate assured her. “You’ll take it like everyone else.”

• • •

She’d been repeating the words to herself since stepping onto the ferry: You are no longer a cook. You are a laundress. You signed the papers. Better to be a laundress in New York City than a cook trapped in a bungalow on an island of death.

The boardinghouse where she’d slept since Friday night served decent-enough food, to Mary’s surprise, but she didn’t like the company. Men slept on a different floor than the women, but they all took their meals together, and there was too much eyeing and gawking for Mary to be able to enjoy her plate. To the one wall-eyed man who kept breathing in her direction, and then whispered that he liked the look of her, she’d stated plainly that she’d make him sorry if he ever came near her. He’d laughed, the food he’d just eaten a pulp on his exposed tongue, but she’d stared at him without changing her expression. He snapped his mouth closed and turned back to his beef and barley.

When Mary walked into the laundry on that Monday morning in February 1910, she felt flat, tired, and hungry, as if all those years between hurrying after Paddy Brown in Castle Garden and that moment, pushing open the door to a Chinese laundry, were no more than a matter of weeks, and she was no older now than she’d been then. The laundry was on Washington Place and Greene Street, directly next to the taller Asch Building, and on Mary’s first day the entrance was blocked by a lake of icy slush so deep she had to hitch up her skirt to stride through it. It was a busy street, full of students from New York University and women working at the factories up and down the block.

The laundry was open to customers every day except for Sundays, and the washers, too, had the day off. But those who ironed and hung had to show up for at least four or five hours on Sundays in order to press and fold or hang what had been washed the day before. It was a small operation — a front room to welcome customers; a middle room where Chu, the owner, slept; and a back room where all the washing and pressing took place alongside a little kitchen and sitting area that they were allowed to use for thirty minutes out of every day. Chu did not speak to Mary, but directed all his instructions to another Chinese man named Li, and Li translated all Chu’s instructions for Mary. Here is where you stand, he told her. Here is how you wring. Here is how you shake out, how you hang, how you feel for dampness. In certain fabrics it was preferable to iron before completely dry; in others the garment must absolutely be bone-dry before touching with a hot iron or else the iron would stick, and the garment would burn, and Mary would be out of a day’s wages. The irons must be kept hot, but not so hot that they would scorch, and they must be kept clean. Mary would find, Li warned, that by the end of the day the irons would feel heavier, and Mary would be slower to move them, and so she should be on guard for this always. Everyone was to take turns up front if Chu was not available, or if he couldn’t make himself understood, or if the customer did not want to speak to a Chinese.

Li gave her the main instructions for handling the customers: No one, under any circumstances, could pick up laundry without a ticket unless Chu gave his explicit permission. Mary should not be surprised if people came in asking for clothes that had never existed, and then demanding compensation for those imaginary clothes. She must never concede. If she thought she was being swindled, she should stop and get help. Keep the cash drawer locked. And finally, because Mary spoke English, she’d be asked to serve as interpreter from time to time.

“But you speak English,” she said, interrupting him.

“You are white. They won’t try so many tricks with you. My father was born here, and me as well, but I still have a Chinese face.”

“But not as Chinese as Chu,” Mary said, before she’d stopped to think that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to have him know she’d been studying his unusual face.

Li regarded her with an expression she couldn’t read. “My mother was white. And my father’s mother. There are only two dozen Chinese women in all of New York City. Three dozen at the absolute most.” His face was very grave, and Mary knew that whether it was true or not, he believed it. Then when she thought about it, she realized she couldn’t remember ever seeing a Chinese woman. Not in the markets. Not on the streets. Not in the tenements. Nowhere.

“You are Irish, we know, and we hope that doesn’t cause trouble for us. The Irish cause trouble for the Chinese more than any other. You being here is a favor because Commissioner Lederle vouched for you.”

Mary didn’t know what to say to that, so she didn’t say anything.

“How do you know him, by the way? Did you work for his family?”

“No, I don’t know him,” Mary said quickly.

“Yes. Well,” Li said, and then told her to get to work. “He brings his shirts here from time to time.”

The work was as tedious as Mary remembered, with none of the magic that came with cooking. Where she needed only her knife and a pan of hot butter to turn a few ordinary, ugly spuds into something wonderful, the laundry offered no real transformations. The two Lithuanian women remained hunchbacked over their tubs of water all day long, their bodies angled to get strength in their arms where there wasn’t any left. They had red faces, and Mary supposed it was the physical effort of their work, and from keeping their noses so close to the hot water and its broth of chemicals made to strip the clothes of odor, of any evidence of the bodies that had worn them. After twenty minutes of instruction on the box, Mary was made the mangle woman. Li stood at the head of the contraption, a flat box about three feet long and ten inches high, and showed her how to wrap bed linens or tablecloths around the pins below, and then how to push the wheel on top to make the box roll over these large, flat items that didn’t need detailing or shape. Later, when she was done with the items that needed mangling, she could be boss of the irons, sanding and polishing the ones that had cooled. Amid all of this labor, this orchestra of pushing and pulling and wrestling with waterlogged fabrics, walked Chu, who gave Mary stern looks and clicked his tongue.

On Mary’s second day, she arrived at the laundry at the appointed time, but an hour into her work realized she’d been expecting something different that day, some slight deviation from the day before. By the third and fourth days she realized that there would never be any deviation. She arrived. Hung her coat. Pushed up her sleeves. Began to work. At precisely the noon hour she stopped to eat an apple and a wedge of cheese, while the Lithuanians sat across the table from her and made a picnic of black bread and dumplings stuffed with some kind of minced meat that Mary wanted to take apart with her fork and examine. They spoke in their own language and didn’t bother with Mary at all. At half noon she was back mangling, rolling the large, flat board over florals and plaids, linens and thin cottons. In the afternoons she marked time by the sudden surge of girls that spilled onto the sidewalk as the shift changed at the shirtwaist factory next door. The ones arriving called out greetings to one another as they hurried to the entrance. The ones leaving for the day stood in groups of three and four on the sidewalk outside the laundry and talked of their plans. Once in a while one of them would hold out her hand for the others to admire a new engagement ring. Listening to them, Mary felt apart from everything around her, as if someone had gotten hold of her and was warning her to stay quiet as she watched the hours and days of her life unfold, someone else playing the lead.

You’ll take it, she heard her aunt Kate say. You’ll take it like everyone else.

In the evenings, even though it was late and dark, and even though she didn’t like walking to the boardinghouse at night because the block was almost abandoned, Mary roamed the city and tried to look forward to summer, when there would still be a little light left in the day once her work was over. She drew a large square in her mind and avoided every point between Twenty-Fifth and Thirty-Eighth Streets, and between Second Avenue and Park, in case she would run into someone she knew. Not that it mattered, she reminded herself, with Alfred all the way downtown. After so many years together, even avoiding the place where they’d lived, reminders of him stood on other corners, other blocks. Between the two of them, they’d worked or walked every neighborhood.

At night, in her narrow single room, the light from the lamp not strong enough to read by, Mary lay on her back and remembered she was still young. She was working. She was luckier than most. She was not a woman who felt loneliness. She was not a woman who got weepy or complained. She was not, had never been, and wouldn’t become one now. And then, as sometimes happened when the hour got late, and there wasn’t enough to occupy her, and she couldn’t sleep, and her whole body felt full up with a question in need of an answer though she couldn’t think of exactly what the question might be, she thought of him, the other him, that baby, that boy, dead now for eleven years. She imagined Mr. Kirkenbauer remarried, with other children, another wife, another new house. Did anyone ever visit that boy? He’d been thriving when she met him. He’d been growing, and running, and learning his words, and accepting everything he was taught with joy. And then Mary had arrived for a job and he was dead within five weeks. That one, that baby, more than any of the ones on Dr. Soper’s list, more than even her sister’s twins who’d seemed like little more than empty vessels from the very start, more than any of the ones they accused her of harming, Tobias Kirkenbauer bothered her most.

If it was her fault, like they said it was. If she was to blame. If she was a walking, breathing germ, a death sentence. If it was her arrival that had killed him. Her letting him eat off her spoon. Her kissing him and squeezing him. If he really did die because of her, then she asked Jesus for Mercy. She didn’t mean to, she told God. She didn’t know. Late at night, long after the other boarders were most likely asleep in their beds, she wondered about all those lab tests that came back positive, and all those lectures they gave to her about Typhoid bacilli and hot soup versus cold salad, and what heating at high temperatures does to food, and where germs like to grow and thrive, and how, in all likelihood, it was her ice creams and puddings that were to blame. She thought back to the ship that brought her to America, and all those bodies that had been dropped into the gray ocean, a trail of heavy, sewn-up sacks she could follow back home, if she ever chose to leave America one day.

Anyway, it didn’t matter anymore, Mary told herself in the morning as she rushed to rub a washcloth over her face. It didn’t matter, she repeated as she struggled to pull on thick tights under her skirt, and watched her own breath hover around her face as she grew more agitated. She knew, once again, that she hadn’t killed that boy any more than she had killed any of the other people in that great, wide, filthy, throbbing city. It would be laughable, really, if it weren’t already criminal for them to have locked her up, one woman, a cook, when every corner of America hid a pestilence just waiting to be stirred up, set free.

• • •

After six weeks at the laundry she’d made enough to rent a bed from a widow on the west side. She’d seen the ad in the paper, and instead of mailing her inquiry across town she’d walked it over and pushed it through the mail slot of the building. Although the building was not grand, Mary acknowledged when she was back on the sidewalk looking at it that it was a perfectly decent one. And with just two women in the rooms it wouldn’t be much to keep it clean and everything in its place. The widow wrote to Mary with the date that she should come and the price of the bed. It will be like living with Aunt Kate, Mary decided as she gathered her few things from the boardinghouse. It’ll be something to get used to at first but after a while it will become routine, and she’ll look forward to seeing me, and who knew? Mary might be there for the rest of the woman’s life. She’d heard plenty of cases where a boarder becomes like one of the family, and she didn’t see why it wasn’t possible in her case as well. How difficult it must be, she thought as she crossed the avenues and bent her head against the spring wind, to be an old woman in this city, to have to worry about gathering wood or coal, putting food on the table.

She walked and walked, and finally turned on Eighth Avenue for the final stretch.

“Yes?” a woman answered Mary’s knock, but a young woman, younger than Mary, with Mary’s same style of hair and a nicer blouse.

“I’m here about the bed. I wrote last week and Mrs. Post wrote back to say I should come today.”

The woman sighed, throwing up her hands. “Come in.” She moved aside with a theatrical half curtsy, and Mary stepped past her into the small kitchen. She admired the window over the sink, and the little square of stained glass that someone had hung to catch the light. Then she turned slightly and noticed a cot. That would be fine. She’d slept in plenty of kitchens. Abutting the foot of that cot, she noticed another. Then, on the other side of the kitchen, another.

“Oh, there’s more,” the woman promised, pointing to the next room. Mary peeked into a darkened bedroom and took in the larger bed pushed up against the wall, the buffer of cots all around. There was nowhere to walk. The person or people who slept in the larger bed must have to crawl over the cots to get to the door.

“But the ad,” Mary said, wanting to argue the situation into the one she’d imagined, and not the one that was.

“Look, you want to stay? Great. I’m out of here next week. You on a regular shift or a night shift?”

“Regular. Day.”

“Well, that’s working for you. The night shifts — we have two nurses here — are the real losers in this. They can’t get a wink all day with the racket she makes. She needs us here but she hates us here. You already left the other rooms you were in?”

Both women looked down at Mary’s small bag, and the other woman laughed.

Mary’s was one of the cots in the bedroom. She thought she’d gotten lucky when she saw that hers was closest to the door, but then she learned she’d been right when she imagined that the others would have to crawl across the other beds in order to get out of the room. In the middle of the night she was woken by a knee near her face, a foot flicked across her belly, the general rocking and creaking her cot made with the weight of another body trying to pass. There was a flushing indoor lavatory down the hall from their rooms, but long before Mary’s arrival, someone had made the decision that the hallway privy encouraged too much movement in the middle of the night, and so a chamber pot was set up in the corner of the bedroom farthest from the door. If she wasn’t woken by someone traveling on top of her, she woke to the sound of someone letting go a stream of urine into a ceramic pot, followed by the sound of four other women tossing violently in their sleep to shut out the noise.

She had to find something else. She thought about her old building, about Fran and Joan. Fran’s place was full up with her own family, and Joan? They would make room for her, she knew. They would sympathize. But it was their sympathy that stopped her. They had each warned her about Alfred in their different ways — Joan quietly, and Fran less so, but she had not listened. And now here she was, just a few years later, living in a boardinghouse while Alfred made a new family with a new woman. No, she wouldn’t be able to stomach it, the inevitable human need they’d have to point out that they’d been right, and she was wrong. Instead, she asked Li if he knew of anyone looking for a boarder. She told him she’d even live with a Chinese. She tried to ask the Lithuanians, but they didn’t understand her. She stopped in at all the churches, Catholic or not, between the laundry and Mrs. Post’s, to read the bulletin boards. She scoured the ads in the papers. She quietly suggested to two of the other women at Mrs. Post’s that they strike out together and find a place to themselves, but neither of them was interested, or else they didn’t believe it would be possible for three women to rent rooms together without a man to sign for them.

Then, very early one Tuesday morning, she heard her name being called.

“Mary!” a woman’s voice chased her from across the street. “Mary Mallon!”

She turned and saw Joan Graves hold out her hand to stop traffic as she rushed across the street to Mary’s side.

“I can’t believe it!” Joan said, and threw her arms around Mary.

“Joan,” Mary said simply, and let herself be hugged. She was happy to see Joan, silly Joan, talented Joan, who could sew more surely than anyone Mary had ever known.

“I heard there was a hearing, but I thought they’d taken you back to the island.”

“Oh, you heard all about it, I’m sure.”

“Well, it was in the papers. We followed it, Fran and I did. But you’re here. And look at you! I thought you were sick. Have you been sick? What are you doing now? Where are you living? Why didn’t you come see us right away?”

“I was planning to, but—”

“And what about Alfred, have you seen him? He told Fran’s Robert that he did the Oppenheimer cure.”

Mary didn’t remember Joan being so aggressive. She didn’t remember her as a piler of questions, and she was absolutely certain that the old Joan would never have brought up the cure, which was a roundabout way of bringing up the problem, and the drink, and the late nights, and Mr. Hallenan’s shouts up the stairs. The Joan Mary knew might have brought it up privately, with such subtlety that Mary wouldn’t know what she was talking about right away. Not out on the street. Not first thing after seeing her after so long.

“Where did you see Alfred?” She might as well ask rather than be distracted by wondering all day long.

“In the building. He does odd jobs for Mr. Driscoll now and again after he finishes up at the stable. You haven’t seen him?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry, Mary. I heard about… his new place. I don’t know why I asked that.”

Mary wanted to ask several questions at once: Did he seem happy? What did they talk about? But she didn’t ask anything. No, she was not interested. She would not beg for information. She would not ask for Joan’s husband, and all of their neighbors, just so at the end of that long list she could ask discreetly about Alfred. She wouldn’t do it.

“I’m late, Joan. It was great seeing you.”

“But you haven’t seen me! Mary, you must come by! Will you come for supper one night? On Sunday? When were you released?”

Mary was already sidestepping toward the laundry, which she could see was open and accepting customers. Let them fire her, she thought. Let them try. She’d march straight up to Lederle’s office and ask him for the money from his wallet. She’d wait in the street outside Soper’s office and mug him as he made his way home.

“I’m not sure I can, Joan. I’ll let you know.”

“Yes, let me know. If not this Sunday, then next Sunday.”

“I’ll let you know.” Mary had turned now, was walking away.

“Oh, and Mary!” Joan called after her. “Mary! I almost forgot!” Mary steeled herself. She’d met Alfred’s Liza. She’d met precious Samuel. Mary wanted to take her scarf and stuff it in Joan’s mouth.

“We have a baby girl now. She’s eleven months. You have to see her. She’s the sweetest thing, and—”

Mary stopped. “You had a baby? You’re kidding me.”

“I’m not kidding,” Joan laughed. “You were right. Sometimes it does take a long time. Will you come by, Mary? To meet her?”

“I can’t believe it.” Mary looked around as if the baby might be hiding in an alley, peeking out at them.

Joan laughed. “Fran is minding her. She lets me get out by myself for an hour.”

It was Mary’s turn to laugh. “Fran! I thought she said she was done with babies once she got her last one in school. She once told me she’d push Robert straight out the window if he said he wanted to have another.”

“You know Fran. She was the first one cooing into the bassinet when she was born.”

“What’s her name?”

“Dorothy Alice.” Even saying the child’s name, Mary saw, cast a glow of joy on Joan’s face. All the impatience Mary felt just a few minutes previous was gone, and now she hugged her friend, told her that she was happy for her. Joan would be a good mother, and if the child had half the heart Joan had she’d be a kind person. For the first time since leaving North Brother, Mary forgot why she hadn’t seen her friends in so long, and wanted to go straight over to the old building to tease Fran. Joan would make a pot of coffee and the three of them would gab away the morning. Who cared about Alfred? Not her. If she passed him in the hall she wouldn’t even turn to look at him.

As the moment began to pass, Joan frowned. “And you’re not sick, right, Mary? You don’t look sick. What they said about you and those people you cooked for? It’s not true, is it? That’s why they let you out?”

Mary sighed. “They only ever said it was the people I cooked for who got sick.”

“And that wasn’t true?”

“Well, a few got sick. A handful really, out of how many I’ve cooked for. But it was a coincidence. It was a — well, it wasn’t fair anyway. There’s a dairyman upstate—”

“I knew it. I said to myself, our Mary has no disease, the way you used to work so hard and run up and down those stairs. So you’ll come and meet the baby, won’t you?”

And as Mary heard herself promise that she would, she knew it was true. She wanted to see Joan’s baby. She wanted to see Fran. Even Patricia Tiernan would be a familiar face, and what had she craved those three years on North Brother but a familiar face? What had she wanted most but to talk to someone who knew things about her that had nothing to do with Soper or Typhoid or even cooking. And they were her friends. They would understand that she didn’t want to talk about Alfred, that there was nothing to say. Never in all the years they’d known one another did either Joan or Fran say a word about their not being married, only concerns about his health, and how hard she worked, and if, perhaps, she didn’t sometimes wish she had a man who took care of her and not the other way around. But there hadn’t been judgment, not really. And she had to hope there would be no judgment now, either, after the humiliation of his leaving her, marrying someone else.

FIFTEEN

She worked. After two months at the laundry Li told her that they’d been worried about taking her on as a favor, but that she was as fine a worker as any Chinese, as any person Li had ever known. He told her that Chu was also very pleased. The Lithuanian women acknowledged her more often, nodding and giving her brief smiles before turning back to their stew of cottons and wools.

In the window of the corner grocer she found an ad for a woman boarder. The building was on Thirty-First Street and Second Avenue, and she decided not to care that it was so close to the old building, but when she went over there she saw that it was little better than Mrs. Post’s. There were cots everywhere, and a pair of exhausted-looking women sitting at a table without talking to each other while she got the ten-second tour and a rundown of the rules. There had to be something better, but it was impossible to really look, with only half a day off every week, and the long hours of the weekdays. She pursued another ad she’d seen in the newspaper, but when she got there nothing seemed right — the large living area, the high ceilings, the separate kitchen, the man who emerged quietly from one of the three bedrooms and held a hushed discussion in the corner with the widow who’d answered the door at Mary’s knock. The man skulked by Mary and ran down the stairs of the building without saying good-bye or good day to anyone, not even the women lounging on the silk sofa like cats stretched out in the sun. Mary realized where she was just as the young widow came over to her and asked her to take down her hair, reaching, as she said it, for Mary’s pins. Mary held tight to the banister as she made her way back down to the street.

She searched for a month. Six weeks. Two months. The weather grew warmer, the rooms at Mrs. Post’s closer. The nightly foot to the face or the belly was growing familiar, and that worried Mary more. She refused to grow accustomed to living that way. There had to be people who were honest and needed someone like Mary to help. June passed. July. Two of the women at Mrs. Post’s left, and with the breathing space those two empty cots offered, Mary decided to wait a few weeks, to spend her Sunday afternoons doing something else for a change, walking in the park, taking herself out for a sandwich. A few weeks turned into the entire summer. Then, at the end of September, as she was walking north along Third Avenue near Thirty-Sixth Street, she ran into Mrs. Borriello and one of her sons at the produce cart that traveled around the neighborhood.

“I remember you,” the son said before anyone had said hello. “Mama,” he turned. “She used to live in the building. Wasn’t she—”

Mrs. Borriello hushed the boy by touching him lightly on the shoulder. She spoke in Italian. “She says hello, how are you doing?” the boy said. “She said she is glad to see you.”

“I’m happy to see you,” Mrs. Borriello said in accented English.

Mary smiled at Mrs. Borriello, who had aged since Mary saw her last. “How are you?” she asked the boy. Carmine, she recalled. And the youngest one was Anthony. She calculated the oldest brother to be dead four years now. How well she remembered that afternoon, the hush that fell over the building when the news went up and down that the boy, sent by his mother to gather wood by the bulkhead on Twenty-Eighth Street, had been reaching for a piece of driftwood when he slipped into the river and was swept away. It came out later that Carmine, who’d gone along with his older brother, had run along the riverbank looking for help and came to a group of laborers having a break up on the pier. “Please!” he begged them. “My brother!” But all they did was look where the boy was pointing, and after a minute, as they all watched the boy drift farther away, and as they took their lunches from their pockets, one of the men offered the boy half a sandwich for strength before he went home to tell his mother. Mary wondered now if they ever fished the boy’s body from the river.

“How is Anthony?” Mary asked.

“He’s doing good.” The boy looked at Mary, and then down at his hands, and then back at Mary. She wanted to touch his face. “Hey, ah, did you hear about my father? That he died?”

“No,” Mary said. She put her hand on Mrs. Borriello’s arm. “I’m sorry to hear about your husband. How? He was a young man.”

Mrs. Borriello pulled her scarf tighter around her hair. “A freak thing,” the boy said. “He was down framing a new building on Broadway and Broome, and they said he had the harness on to do a little welding job up on the beam, and then a strong wind came and he lost his footing and the harness broke. And he fell. It was the fourth-story floor beam.”

How many times had the boy heard the story, Mary wondered, to be able to tell it so matter-of-factly? What could he understand about beams and framing and the building of buildings? He was probably about ten years old now, but he seemed to Mary both older and younger. Older with his swagger and his way of speaking for his mama, but younger when she examined his soft face, his long eyelashes, the way, underneath everything he said, he seemed to look at each of the women and ask, Did I say it right? Is that really what happened to my papa? Just a beam and a broken harness and a gust of wind? And before that my brother? Is it really possible that he was there beside me one moment and swept away the next? That there was nothing tying him more closely to his life? Or my papa to his?

“Your poor mother,” Mary said in a whisper as she examined Mrs. Borriello’s dark brown scarf that blended with her dark brown hair, her drawn face, her quick hands passing over one grapefruit and then another until she found one she liked.

Mary leaned slightly toward the boy, wanting to hug him. “When?”

“Almost a year.”

“One year in October,” Mrs. Borriello added, also looking at her son. All three were quiet as the shoppers rushed around them and the produce man kept glancing at them and at their pockets to make sure they hadn’t stuffed them without paying.

“Hey,” the boy said. “I remember the fireworks that time. Remember?”

“I do,” Mary said, taking him by the shoulders and pulling him toward her. I am lucky, she thought. When I think I am unlucky I must remember that I am lucky. I am blessed. The boy let himself be hugged, and then politely pulled away.

The woman said something in Italian, and the boy tried to signal his mother with his eyes that he didn’t want to translate. “She says you have also had sadness,” he said finally. “But your sadness is a blessing in disguise, maybe. Maybe not, but maybe. That man was not a good one, and Our Lord works in mysterious ways.” The boy added on his own, “He comes in sometimes. He seems different now.”

“You might be right,” Mary said, placing her hand on the woman’s arm again to say good-bye. She began to turn away, to wish them a good day and best of luck, when a thought came to her. “Carmine,” she said.

The boy waited.

“Does your mother have a boarder?”

“A boarder?”

“Someone who lives with you and pays a little of the rent.”

“No.” He looked at his mother, who was scrutinizing Mary. Mary got the feeling that she understood everything. She wanted to ask how they were making ends meet, but she knew that would be intruding too far. How to put it? She turned to Mrs. Borriello and spoke to her directly.

Mrs. Borriello waited, and Mary felt she was already preparing a phrase to turn Mary down. “I have a regular job, six and a half days a week, and I earn decent wages, though not as good as I did before. Before the island. You understand? When I was a cook. This job is in a laundry but the pay is regular. I could live with you, Mrs. Borriello, and help out with the rent and around the rooms. I am neat, and the boys already know me. I would—”

Mrs. Borriello let go a stream of Italian, and the boy protested in Italian for a few sentences, before turning and walking down the block a little, leaving the women alone.

“I’ve been thinking about something like this,” the woman said. “I don’t like the idea of a stranger. I don’t like to put it in a newspaper.”

“But I’m not a stranger. You saw me come and go for many years.”

“Yes.” She stared at Mary, and Mary recalled the portrait of the Sacred Heart she’d noted that time she stood in the Borriellos’ dim kitchen after the older boy’s death, Mrs. Borriello not yet able to get out of bed. This was a religious woman, and Mary was sure she’d disapproved of Alfred and their arrangement. What woman would approve? She’d been crazy, and foolish, but what woman would have given up on him, knowing what he was like at his best? He was worth it, she wanted to say to Mrs. Borriello. And she loved him. And Christian doctrine preached forgiveness as much as it preached anything else. Underneath that scarf and those widow’s weeds was a young woman, perhaps younger than Mary. You understand, Mary wanted to say to her. I know you understand.

“No guests,” Mrs. Borriello said. Mary’s face burned. It was no matter, Mary thought. A few weeks of living together and the other woman would see that Mary was not like that. It had just been Alfred she’d made an exception for. Only Alfred. And now Alfred was off and married and raising another man’s son.

“Never,” Mary agreed. She shook her head emphatically from side to side so the woman would understand. She felt a flush of sweat spring up on her neck. The boy was kicking a dried horse turd along the curb and glancing over at them. “My boys stay in their bedroom. You get the cot in my room or the kitchen.”

“Yes. Fine.”

Mrs. Borriello named her price. It was more than at Mrs. Post’s, and it meant Mary would save nothing. Not a single dime unless she ate less, or washed her hair less often, or walked everywhere she went, or picked up another job for Sunday afternoons. If I offer less, Mary considered, she will take it. She said herself that she doesn’t want to advertise.

“Yes,” Mary said instead. “I can do that.”

Mrs. Borriello seemed surprised for a moment, and then happy. She waved over the boy. Mary shook the other woman’s hand, and then the boy’s. Each paid for her fruit, and they made their separate ways until the following Sunday, when Mary would move in.

She had not given a single thought to the others in the building when she’d made the suggestion to Mrs. Borriello, but when she walked away, and realized what had just been arranged, it felt again like time was moving backward, and that no matter how hard she tried to keep her eyes pointed to the step ahead, she kept getting knocked off balance, turned around.

She gathered her belongings from Mrs. Post’s when most of the others were out. It was only natural to feel that she was going home. Only when she saw the number hanging over the door — the dark entryway, the worn staircase beyond — did she truly understand what she’d done. At the bottom of the stairs was the same faded mural of a man on a horse, children picking fruit from trees. The plaster molding that had long ago been painted to match the wood of the banister had been chipped away further, and sat along the baseboard in small piles of dust. After so many months of avoiding the place, of swinging wide so as not to run into anyone, there she was the prodigal daughter without a thing to show for herself except for a scorch burn on her wrist, and swollen ankles, and a set of ten raw knuckles. They would laugh at her. She imagined Patricia Tiernan standing smug in her kitchen, saying what she always thought, what she always knew, while her fawning family gazed at her and nodded. She thought of the others who had never liked her, had never liked Alfred, and then how she and Alfred had thumbed their noses at what the others liked and didn’t like.

But now she was back, alone, and for the few seconds it took her to cross the landing she thought about returning to Mrs. Post’s, or to a boardinghouse, or asking if she could stay at the laundry for a week until she could find better accommodations. Everything about the place was familiar: the sag in the center of each stair, the smell of damp rising from the basement. If she were still cooking, she could have afforded their sixth-floor rooms on her own. Who lived there now? She thought of her old bed, her table, her sink, the spices she kept in the press.

She began to climb the stairs. When she got to Mrs. Borriello’s and knocked, the door opened immediately, and Mrs. Borriello took her bag and placed it under the cot, which was set up with pillows against the wall during the day to look like a small sofa. She nodded at Mary to sit. As soon as Mary pulled in her chair Mrs. Borriello served her coffee with sweet condensed milk and fresh bread with salted butter. At the center of the table she placed a bowl of fat, ripe blackberries. Mrs. Borriello sat across from her boarder and the two women ate and sipped and enjoyed the silence. It was the most delicious meal Mary had tasted since before North Brother.

“I want to thank you—” Mary began, but discovered a blockage in her throat that the words couldn’t skirt by. There was nothing to cry about, but the pressure behind her eyes was too much, and Mrs. Borriello was beside her, rubbing her back, saying that she must be tired, why not a short nap before the boys come? Mary agreed that she’d like to lie down for a few minutes, not sleep, but just lie down, close her eyes, pray to God that things would get better for her here and not worse. “Oh, first I want to give you this,” Mary said. “Yesterday was the first of the month, so it works out nicely.” She opened her bag and removed from her wallet the price they’d agreed on, but the other woman just looked at it on the table, at the bills Mary had fanned out, at the coins piled on top.

“Is it okay?” Mary asked. There was nothing else in her wallet if she owed more, if she’d misunderstood. She’d bought new wool tights that week, and twice in ten days, after closing the laundry with Li, she’d gone to the little counter that sold hamburger steaks until midnight. She knew she shouldn’t have done that. Once? Fine. But twice? And couldn’t the old tights have been mended?

Then Mrs. Borriello dipped her head and covered her face with her hands. “Yes, it’s okay,” she said after a moment. When she composed herself, she told Mary that she was going to her room to lie down, too.

• • •

Mary knew that avoiding her old friends now would make everything worse. It would be better to seek them out immediately, try to explain to them what had happened, let them see her face. Her silence from North Brother would be easier for them to understand than why she hadn’t sought them out since her release. Joan was no obstacle — she’d already forgiven Mary by the time she’d flagged her down on the sidewalk. Little Dorothy Alice cried in the mornings and over the sound of her wailing came Joan’s soothing voice, singing about doggies, or sleigh rides, or the Kingdom of Heaven. Later, walking to work, Mary found herself humming along.

There was Patricia Tiernan, who’d never liked Mary. Ever since Mary came back Patricia seemed shocked to see her making her way up the stairs. “Oh, hi, Mary,” Jimmy Tiernan said to her as they passed one evening, and just like in the old days Patricia appeared on the landing above them and looked as if she would choke him with her mind if she had the power.

As for Fran, the first time Mary saw her after returning to the building, her old friend was cool. She returned Mary’s greeting, and then continued up the stairs while Mary looked after her, feeling like she’d been slapped. After a few days, Mary worked up the courage to knock on her door. “Please, Fran, can’t I come in?” It might have been the “please” that melted the frost. Fran opened the door and Mary took her usual chair while Fran hunted for something sweet for them to eat.

“Why didn’t you come see us, Mary? I was sick when they sent you back to North Brother after the hearing. We had no idea you were released, and then Joan said she ran into you on the street. You could have stayed here. Why didn’t you just ask? You didn’t have to go to a boardinghouse. You didn’t have to go up there and pay Mrs. Borriello for a corner of her kitchen. I don’t even understand what happened.”

“I don’t know,” Mary said, and it was true: now that she was sitting there, looking at her old friend, she couldn’t remember why she let it go so long. “Why didn’t you come to my hearing if you were following the case? Alfred was there. And I didn’t hear from you after, either.” She could see on Fran’s face that it had never occurred to her, and Mary never expected Fran to give up an entire day sitting in a stuffy courtroom, but it was the only way to get past these small hurts — to answer with another hurt. You’ve been injured? Well, so have I.

“I didn’t know I could have gone to the hearing. I thought it was just lawyers and reporters. And you know I’m not a good writer. Sure, Robert said he’d take down a letter for me, but you know how that goes. You could have written to me more often, too.”

“You’re right, Fran. I don’t know why I said that. I’m sorry. It’s just that Alfred—”

Fran leaned forward. “I knew it was Alfred. You didn’t want to run into him here.” Fran asked her if she’d seen him in the week since she moved back.

“No,” Mary said. “Have you? Joan said he does odd jobs for Driscoll.”

“I haven’t seen him either. Sometimes he’s here a lot in a given week, and then not for a few weeks. And I think he tries his best to avoid me and Joan.”

Though Mary had instructed herself not to care, to try to forget about him, it was Alfred she had in her mind whenever she pushed out the building’s front door and remembered her posture, when she put a protective hand to her hair. She braced herself to see him and then when a few days went by and she didn’t see him, she realized she was disappointed.

“So tell me everything,” Fran said. “Start from the beginning.” As their coffee went cold, Mary described Dr. Soper, what he said about her, the day they captured her, the Willard Parker Hospital, North Brother, John Cane, the nurses and their collection canisters, Mr. O’Neill, the disappointment of the hearing and then finding out about Liza Meaney, the boy, how disorienting it was to be back in New York City without being a cook, how she feared she’d never get used to it. When she finally stopped talking, Fran was quiet for a minute and then announced that she’d like to punch that Dr. Soper in the face, and Mary laughed. Never before had she thought about Soper and laughed, and it felt, for the first time, like that terrible part of her life was truly behind her. The two women talked until the clock struck midnight and when she left, Mary knew they’d be fine.