Fever

SIXTEEN

Living with Liza seemed perfect, at first. It had been years since Alfred felt what it was like to be sober and sound on his own two feet, his lungs full of air, his spine straight, his body strong. When he came home, Liza didn’t seem the least bit surprised that he’d worked all day. She didn’t make a fuss over it, like Mary used to, and with Liza he could sense no panic that he would change his mind, that the next day would see him having slipped down to the place of a man who didn’t work. He was healthy and capable and Liza didn’t watch him like Mary did. She didn’t narrow her eyes and know things the way Mary knew them, sometimes before he knew himself. When he brought her his wages, she looked at him like he’d handed her a block of solid gold, and she needed those dollars and cents. The boy ate as much as Alfred and Liza combined, and he was smart. He needed books, scratch pads, decent clothing, shoes.

But after almost ten months of the arrangement, Alfred faced what he knew all along, that Liza Meaney was not Mary Mallon, and never would be. When they made love she was dutiful and kind. She never made up an excuse, or pretended to be asleep, or told him to go fly a kite, and she looked politely away when he removed the night cap from its tin. If she’d ever seen one before she didn’t mention it, nor could he tell if she liked or disliked what they were doing. One time, to test her, he stopped abruptly, pulled away, tugged on his trousers, and told her they could do it later since she wasn’t feeling up to it, and she said that was fine, as if he’d suggested they walk north along Broadway instead of south. “Oh, well, you don’t seem fine. You seem distracted,” he said, and she didn’t argue. She just pulled her dress back over her shoulders and went about fastening the row of buttons. Another time he kept pushing, and nuzzling, and reaching under her clothes to see when she would stop him but she never stopped him, even though he knew she was tired and wanted nothing more than to sleep. He kept testing and testing and next thing he knew he was inside her with Samuel doing his homework in the next room, and only once, one single instant, when the bed creaked, did she push him away and look to the door in case Samuel might have heard.

This is how most women are, he told himself. This is how women should be, only he’d never known what a woman should be like because he’d mostly ever been with Mary, who was not a normal woman. Even the newspapers noticed it. Back when she was first captured most of the newsmen commented that she had the bearing of an Irish person, but one reporter observed that she in fact had the bearing of a man. Irish or not, he didn’t specify. It was true sometimes she stood with her legs planted wide, especially when she felt herself backed into a corner, but nothing about Mary was manly to the eye and so it must have been something else that this man had seen, a way of conducting herself, a way of glancing around a room. Fran Mosely, who saved the papers for him back then, had said she didn’t understand that one at all because who in their right mind seeing Mary’s thick mane of strawberry blond hair and slim waist would see anything other than a woman. Alfred had said, “I know what he means, I think,” and Fran had looked at him like he was the bastard she’d always suspected him to be.

Mary didn’t need the money he brought in because she had her own money, more money than he earned. He knew exactly how she felt about everything, because she told him, usually very loudly, often while banging pots and pans for emphasis. When she didn’t want him to touch her she told him to get lost, but when she did, she didn’t mind reaching for him first, coming around to his side, kissing the back of his neck and asking if he was too tired. Liza Meaney would never do that. Not in a thousand years. At first, he thought how wonderful that was. How ladylike. Liza was like a delicate bird and how much more interesting that made everything when she let him unbutton her, and how fiercely she blushed when he lifted her to sit on top of him, or whispered to her to turn around. She looked disoriented and terrified whenever he moved her to a different position, and after just a few seconds she always dove back down to the covers and to her back where she felt comfortable and safe, and he’d laugh. “Okay, okay,” he’d say, and he could see how much he’d have to show her, if she was willing to be shown, but after ten months he could see she didn’t want that. Sex for Liza Meaney would always be part of the transaction they’d agreed upon, and although she liked him, and was attracted to him — Alfred felt sure he’d be able to tell if she wasn’t — she saw sex with him the same way she saw making his breakfast, washing his clothes, having supper on the table when he got home.

They’d been engaged for six months but still weren’t married. She showed her ring to all their neighbors — a simple silver band — and maybe that’s all she’d wanted, for the world to know that she was not the kind of woman who lived with a man without a promise. At first, she said she wanted to figure a way to bring her mother from England for the ceremony, and sometimes she said she wanted to wait until the school year was over, so Samuel wouldn’t be distracted. Distracted? Alfred wanted to ask. What would be so distracting? Or for that matter, what was there to cross an ocean for? Alfred had imagined himself and Liza walking to City Hall, signing a few papers, and then going to a restaurant for supper. But he didn’t say anything, and when the weeks wore on without any letters arriving from England, without any discussion of whether they’d have a small party, he stopped worrying about it. Maybe accepting the engagement without pushing actual marriage was the small way she was asserting herself, that and making him continue with the cure, even though he felt he didn’t need it anymore.

The medicine they gave in the beginning made him sick, and he assumed that was part of it: making the patient so sick that he wouldn’t be able to hold alcohol or anything else. He was weak for two weeks, curled up in bed and vomiting into the bowl Liza gave him, and still, she came in every four hours with another dose she’d measured out into a teacup, just as the doctor had instructed. “It’s for people far worse than I am,” he’d told her when he first came back from Bellevue, where he’d gone to see what it was all about. Ads for the cure were posted all around the neighborhood, and published in big block letters in the newspapers. “I saw them. Jesus, I saw them. I’m not like that. My God, one man, he wasn’t much more than a boy, he was sweating a puddle on the floor but kept complaining of cold. I just like to have a nip now and again and if you go out and find a man who never has a nip now and then I’ll saw off my right arm.”

“You’ll go if you want to live here,” she told him simply, so he went back, and back, and soon they sent him home with directions on how to dole out the medicine and at what intervals. After a month they said he could stop taking the medicine, but to keep a supply in his old pocket flask. That he’d never had need for that flask proved he never needed the cure in the first place. It was just a matter of deciding, and he’d decided. It was a 100 percent guarantee as long as he followed the doctor’s instructions, and the doctor’s instructions were, don’t drink.

Samuel was preparing for a test that would allow him to skip two grades ahead at school and take a few courses at the community college. If he scored high enough he would go for free, except for the cost of books. They had to be very, very quiet around the flat so as not to interrupt the boy’s studies, and for the first time since he’d known her, Liza shushed him one morning when he began to ask if there was any more coffee on the stove. She shushed Alfred and cast a worried look at Samuel, who had his head bent over a mathematics book, and Alfred saw then that she’d never love him, never love any man, as much as she loved that boy.

The ice company stable did not offer overtime, and the evenings were too long between five o’clock, when his shift ended, and ten o’clock, when he went to bed. To get out of their rooms and give the boy some quiet, Alfred had started checking in with Michael Driscoll. The old man needed boards replaced on the floor, a cabinet fixed, his rotted bed carried out to the sidewalk and replaced with a new one, the plaster on the wall behind the sink touched and smoothed. “A little late for this kind of attention,” Alfred had teased the first time he went over.

“Never too late,” Driscoll had said. “I’ve my eye on a fine woman.”

“You’re joking.”

“You’ll get there. Then you’ll know. And someone else will laugh.”

Fair enough, Alfred supposed, and went on with the work he was assigned. When he finished a job, he’d let a few weeks go by and then he’d check in on the old man to see what he’d stored up for him. In the stretches when Driscoll had no work for him he hung around the stable after his shift to talk to the man who relieved him, or he walked down to the docks to watch what was being unloaded.

One evening, though he didn’t know Alfred would be stopping around, Driscoll answered the door as soon as Alfred knocked. “Well? Did you see her?” The old man asked, and looked over Alfred’s shoulder toward the empty stairwell. He coughed into his sleeve, and then rolled it up.

“Who?” Alfred asked.

“Mary. She’s out there. I was talking with her not one minute ago.”

“Mary Mallon is in this building?”

“She moved in with Mrs. Borriello a week ago. You didn’t know?” Alfred felt a tremor travel down his arms and legs, and he thought he heard a woman’s step pass in the hall. He looked hard at Driscoll’s face to make sure the old man wasn’t having him on. He’d sent a letter to her hut on North Brother a few months earlier and when she didn’t write back he figured she was still that angry with him, and had a right to be. She’d said the lawyer was optimistic. She’d said it might be only a few more months. But why would he have believed it?

“Are you serious, Driscoll?”

“I swear on my life.”

“How? When was she released? Was she looking for me? What did you talk about?”

“She was just passing through the vestibule as I was searching for my key. I said hello and so did she so then I said I was glad to see her back and she thanked me. She might still be climbing the stairs. Go on. Go after her.”

Instead, Alfred pushed past him and looked at the weeping faucet that needed to be fixed. As he took inventory of what he’d need, he felt the other man’s eyes sizing up the shape of his back, his stance, trying to read what was written there. He needed time to think. He had no idea what he’d say. Every part of his body urged him toward the door. Why was she staying with Mrs. Borriello? What was she doing now? He imagined what he’d say to her, and when he realized he couldn’t think of a place to begin, he imagined instead what she’d say to him, and knew that the first thing she’d ask was whether he was married yet to Liza Meaney, and after he said that he wasn’t, she’d ask if he was still living with her and her boy, and he’d have to say yes, and then the meeting would be over.

“I can’t come around tomorrow,” Alfred said gruffly to Driscoll once the faucet was fixed. “I’ll do the rest another time.”

“You’ll have to face her sooner or later,” Driscoll said, and Alfred had a wild impulse to shove him, to throttle him, but it passed immediately. It was himself he was angry at. No one else.

“Why do I have to?” he said, though he wanted to do more than face her. He wanted to run upstairs right that second to see her, beg her forgiveness, take her into his arms. How had it happened? How had he missed it? How could he have failed to know she was back in the city?

Alfred stayed away from 302 East Thirty-Third Street as he tried to make sense of Mary’s return. In the mornings, when he woke to Liza’s blonde curls on the pillow next to him, he thought immediately of Mary, sleeping so close to the rooms they’d shared for so many years, seemingly back in her old life except without him. “Everything all right at the stable?” Liza asked several times, and he snapped at her that it was, and tried to stay out of their rooms even more than usual. Another time she asked him if he carried his medicine with him when he went out, and he realized she thought he’d fallen off the wagon. It was true he’d gone and stood outside Nation’s Pub for the first time in months, but he hadn’t gone in, and the pull he felt from 302 East Thirty-Third was much stronger. Finally, after two weeks of turning ’round and ’round the news of Mary’s return, he finished his work at the stable and made for Driscoll’s place, to finish up the work that was there waiting for him, and to decide one way or another if he would ever go near the place again.

As he walked up Third Avenue he felt the possibility of seeing her again like a singing bird lodged in his chest, struggling to free itself. He stopped at the peanut cart on Twenty-Ninth Street to get a bag for himself and Driscoll to share, but even this was a show for her, in case she was watching, in case he should turn around and she should be standing there, half smiling, ready to say, “Well, well, well. Look who it is.”

It was the first truly bitter evening of the season, and there was no one on the stoop or in the vestibule when Alfred arrived at the building. He stood at the bottom of the silent stairwell and looked up, counting the railings to the fourth floor. When Driscoll didn’t answer his knock Alfred felt along the top of the door frame for the key that was hidden there, and let himself in. “Hello?” he called, and when he got no answer he opened the door to Driscoll’s bedroom and found him lying there, twisted up in the sheets. “Not feeling myself,” Driscoll said without looking at Alfred, and as Alfred got closer to the bed he could see that the older man was wincing, and trying to find relief from whatever was bothering him by shifting from side to side, clutching at his pillow. He coughed for several minutes. For the first time in two weeks, Alfred pushed thoughts of Mary to the side.

“What is it?” Alfred asked to the back of the man’s head, and noticed how thin Driscoll’s hair was there, how small and delicate-seeming the back of his skull was, like a smooth, hairless egg.

“Go on,” said Driscoll. “Another time.” But Alfred stood there like a boy, unsure what to do.

“I’m just feeling poorly. Come around in a few days.”

“Can I bring you something? Have you eaten?”

But Driscoll only moved closer to the wall.

“I’ll check on you tomorrow,” he said, and when Driscoll didn’t respond, Alfred left. He stood at the bottom of the stairwell for a minute, tempted to go up to see Mary, but he’d be back the next day and between now and then maybe he’d think of the perfect thing to say.

Alfred arrived home in time for a nearly silent supper with Liza and Samuel. In the morning, he decided he couldn’t go another day without seeing Mary, and once he’d decided, he had no patience for being at the stable, alone with the horses. Now that the weather was cold, the demand for ice was way down, as was the supply until the winter harvest. The trucks went out every day, but mostly to businesses, a few blocks here and there to the rich houses that didn’t care to keep their milk or butter on the window ledge like Mary had always done, and Liza did now, but preferred to serve ice in glasses to their guests, even in the winter months. Lately Alfred had felt that pinch that told him he would not last there for much longer. He would have to find something else. Ten blocks north was a stable the ice company rented to the Department of Health, and that was more interesting. On quiet afternoons Alfred walked up there with the ready excuse that he was still concerning himself with company property. When he first started at the stable he didn’t understand why the Department of Health needed so many horses. Whenever a horse got too old to haul an ice truck, or was too difficult to drive through the city, the men at his stable always said that the Department of Health would take it, and now Alfred said it too, but he didn’t know why until one day, a bright autumn afternoon, he walked the ten blocks to distract himself and when he got to the stable he saw that the large side room that used to be a dairy, back when the city had cows, had been turned into a slaughterhouse for horses. There were two horses up on slings with gashes in their necks and a glass instrument stuck in each bloody wound. Below the horses’ mighty bellies were lined up rows and rows of buckets where blood had been collected, and all around were men in white lab coats.

“Out!” one yelled when he saw Alfred. The man was crouching beside the larger of the two horses, checking the glass tube, and when he scrambled up to shoo away Alfred he slipped on a small spot of blood on the floor, knocking over a full bucket as he tried to right himself. The other men cursed and glared at Alfred. The horses, who were still alive, each turned a wild, terrified eye to Alfred, and seemed to understand that he was the only one in the room who might help them.

“Jesus Christ,” Alfred said when he got back out to the glare of the street, the flies in front of the stable door frantic with the smell of blood. He passed through the other door to the stable proper, where there were a dozen horses munching on hay as if they were out at pasture. “What are they doing?” Alfred asked the boy who was sitting on an upturned bucket in the corner, reading an old newspaper.

“Bleeding,” the boy said, and simply turned the page.

Later, when he and Samuel were elbow to elbow at the table waiting for Liza to spoon out their supper, it was Samuel who told him what he’d probably seen, that the horses were being bled for their serum, which would be used to make inoculations against disease. “Diphtheria, probably,” the boy said. “I read about that. Or Typhoid, maybe. They’re working on something.”

“Come on. Horse blood?”

“Horse serum. They inject the horse with the disease and wait for the horse to develop the means to fight it and then they take out the blood and whittle it down to the fighting parts and then they put that in an injection and give it to people. Didn’t you ever wonder what’s in the shots people get?” The boy leaned back in his chair and regarded Alfred.

Alfred was ashamed to say he had not ever wondered what was in an injection. Before seeing Dr. Oppenheimer he’d never gotten an injection in his life, and now he wondered what the doctor was putting in him. There was witchcraft in the old country, but nothing this dark, as far as Alfred could remember. Certain herbs and weeds. A way of mixing. Poultices smeared on chests, aromatic flowers ground down to powders and stirred up into tea. But this horse-blood business seemed like more sinister magic. Liza had turned from the stove to listen to her son, and now, understanding that her boy was finished explaining, she turned back to her saucepan of gravy, her cheeks spotted with pride and pleasure.

Now, the day yawning before him until it was time to sign out and walk over to Thirty-Third Street, he considered going up to the DOH stables to pass the time. Instead, he signed himself out for five o’clock, even though it was only two.

• • •

Driscoll was not better. Alfred opened the man’s door slowly, and knew immediately by the silence and the cold kitchen that he was still in bed. He found Driscoll in the same position, and when Alfred put his hand on the back of his neck it felt like a furnace, and Driscoll moaned. “Should I get you something?” Alfred asked, feeling like a big, hulking, useless thing that was too stupid to know how to help. He went to the kitchen and ran a dishcloth under cold water. He brought it back to the bed, laid it across the old man’s head, and then worried as he saw the sheets darken where the wet touched them. Driscoll shifted away. “You need help, I think,” Alfred said, more to himself than to the old man. A doctor. But he’d never called on a doctor before.

He could have knocked on Fran’s door, or gone up to confer with Jimmy Tiernan, but he marched on past the second-floor landing, past the third. He needed Mary. The elderly sisters who also lived on the fourth floor had their door cracked for air and Alfred knew he could stop and ask them. He’d seen Driscoll talk to them from time to time, and when one of them injured her knee Driscoll had gone up there with a baked cod on a platter because they couldn’t get out. But instead of stopping, Alfred kept going to the Borriellos’ door and drew a breath. If Mrs. Borriello answered, he’d have to speak up, speak slowly, and then everyone would hear and his whole reason for going up there would be confused. Because he was really going up there for Driscoll. And if it ended up that he and Mary would start talking again because of it, fine, as long as Driscoll improved.

The younger boy answered, and when he saw who it was his eyes went wide.

“Is Mary here?”

The boy raised a finger to Alfred and then shut the door. Alfred heard movement inside, a chair pushed back along the wood floor.

When the door opened again it was Mrs. Borriello. The boy peeked at him from behind his mother. “Yes?” she said.

“I’m looking for Mary. I understand she’s been staying here?”

“Why?”

Alfred felt himself getting annoyed. “Mr. Driscoll isn’t well, and I thought Mary would know what to do.”

“Sick?” Mrs. Borriello said.

“Yes. Since yesterday. Maybe longer. Is Mary here?”

But Mrs. Borriello was already gathering her scarf. She said something to the boy before slipping past Alfred and down the stairs to Michael Driscoll’s door. The boy regarded Alfred from the door frame. “She doesn’t get home until later.”

“Yeah? Are you in charge of her schedule?”

“No. I’m in charge of the lamp. I bring it back to the kitchen when she gets home from the laundry and we do our figures at the table while she’s eating. My brother and me, I mean. Then when she’s done I take it back to my room. My mother says it’s our lamp, not hers, but we have to let her borrow it to eat by because it’s not right to ask a person to eat in the dark when there’s a good lamp a room away.”

“She works at a laundry? Where?”

“It’s almost on Washington Square.”

“Which side? What street?”

“Mr. Briehof!” Mrs. Borriello was calling for him from the bottom of the dark stairs.

“Didn’t you used to live upstairs?” the boy asked.

Mrs. Borriello shouted again.

“He needs firewood,” the boy said. “Better go in and get some of ours. She wants me to go down to her.”

The boy ran down the stairs, shouting something to his mama all the way, and Alfred turned and put his hand on the Borriellos’ doorknob. He pushed the heavy door and listened as the bottom brushed the floor like all the doors did in 302, leaving little arcs of scratch marks as welcome mats to every room. The wood was stacked by the stove, twigs, parts of branches, bits and pieces they must have collected from around the city. Alfred went over and selected a few of the heftiest pieces. When he turned he noticed the cot, and on the cot two folded blouses. On the windowsill above the cot was a woman’s comb, a collection of hairpins, hair powder, a tub of cream. He recognized the comb and the brand of cream. He left the wood on the Borriellos’ table and sat on the edge of Mary’s bed. He didn’t dare touch the blouses — it was bad enough he’d mussed the bed — but he studied the collars for signs of her skin, some detail that might have been caught in the material. He sniffed them, then leaned over, his head between his knees, to peer under the cot, searching for some lost thing she might have given up on and which he could keep, but there was nothing except dust. He thought about leaving her a note, the long-overdue letter she’d wanted so badly when she was on North Brother, the empty tin of tobacco from his pocket that she would know was his, knowing his brand and knowing they would tell her the story later, how he’d come knocking and how he’d spent a few minutes in the flat, alone. He heard the boy’s light steps on the stairs, two at a time, so he went to smooth the quilt, but then decided, no, he’d leave it the way it was, let her imagine him sitting there, thinking about her. He gathered the wood, and by the time he had it in his arms, the boy was there with his brother, to tell him that their mother had banned them, had sent them upstairs with instructions to close their door and not to come down again. And if she wasn’t home by supper, they were to be good boys and boil themselves an egg and clean up after and go straight to bed. There was something in the building, and she didn’t want them around until they figured out what it was.

• • •

Driscoll was worse. His fever was high and he complained of pain in his back. When he coughed into his pillow he left behind spots of blood. He couldn’t hold the teacup Mrs. Borriello had filled with broth so she sat on the edge of his bed and lifted it to his mouth. “Slow,” she said. “Little sips.” At moments he seemed to feel better, but then he was again moaning and clutching at the bed as if it were just a matter of getting deeper, of burrowing himself away from his rooms into a cooler place underneath it all, where he might find some relief.

“Should I run out to get medicine? A doctor? He has a little money, you know.”

Mrs. Borriello peered at Alfred. She seemed to want to make herself into a wall between the two men.

“I mean for the doctor. I think he could pay a doctor. And I think a doctor has to see a sick person anyway, even if he can’t pay.”

“I think that’s true.”

“Because I’ve never seen something like this. Have you?”

“Yes. The blood on the pillow. The coughing with fever. I saw it one time.”

“Okay then. I’ll go.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. I’ll go up and ask Fran. She had the doctor come once. For one of the children.” He wanted to ask where Mary was, what time she’d be home.

They heard the scrape of the door being slowly pushed open. “Mama?” came a boy’s voice. Mrs. Borriello was across the room in an instant, pushing her youngest son into the hall and trying to shut the door on him. She shouted at him in Italian, but still he tried to insert the toe of his boot in the door. As they struggled, Alfred stepped out into the hall and lifted the boy under the arms.

“Go, go, go,” Mrs. Borriello shouted at both of them, and then added something in Italian.

“I’m staying with my mama,” the boy cried as Alfred carried him to the stairs.

“You have to go up,” Alfred said.

Mrs. Borriello shouted again.

“She says to tell everybody, don’t come down here. Bad enough there’s the two of us already. Three of us including me. She says she’ll kill me later. To you she says stand back from the door when you talk to Miss Fran about the doctor. Want me to do it? She says we could be breathing it now, whatever it is.”

As Alfred climbed the steps with one hand bracing the boy by the upper arm, he thought of Liza and how she’d worry but there was nothing he could do and really it would be the wrong idea to go home to her now and carry this thing to her, to Samuel. She’d understand that he had to stay in 302 until he saw this thing through. And if Mary arrived home later and the boys told her everything — how Alfred had searched for her, how he’d stayed on to help their mama, how he’d rushed down the stairs with their wood and kindling to help Mr. Driscoll — and if hearing about all that made her want to see him again, to talk only, and if talking softened her toward him enough so that she didn’t object when he touched her, then he couldn’t help that, either.

SEVENTEEN

The one doctor Fran knew of had moved uptown, but Mr. Stern from the third floor knew of a good man who made house calls. Jimmy Tiernan was elected to go to West Sixteenth to fetch him, and as he rushed down the stairs and out onto the dark sidewalk, Patricia looked after him, relieved that her man was traveling farther away from whatever poison was dwelling at Mr. Driscoll’s. First thing in the morning she was going to bring their children to her sister’s in New Jersey and stay there until this thing passed.

Jimmy Tiernan didn’t return until nearly eight o’clock in the evening. He shouted through Driscoll’s closed door that the doctor would be there shortly. Alfred and Mrs. Borriello took turns sitting with Driscoll. A few times, Alfred tried to raise the subject of Mary. When it was Mrs. Borriello’s turn to sit with Driscoll, Alfred sat in the chair in the corner of Driscoll’s bedroom. “Your son said Mary works at a laundry now?”

Mrs. Borriello glanced over at him quickly, and simply nodded.

“Does she like it? She was a laundress before, you know. When I met her.”

When Mrs. Borriello showed no indication that she’d even heard him speak, he knew that there was no point in trying. When it was his turn to sit with Driscoll he patted the old man’s head with the compress and realized he’d never before been around anyone as ill. At nine o’clock came a strong knock on the door and an unfamiliar man’s voice announcing himself as Dr. Hoffmann. Relieved, Alfred jumped up to open the door.

Dr. Hoffmann asked about Driscoll’s first symptoms, how long he’d been in the state he was in, what his health was before he came down ill. He pulled the older man up to sitting, and Driscoll fell toward the doctor’s lap like a sleeping child lifted from his crib by his mama. The doctor listened to Driscoll’s chest, took his pulse, and then told Alfred to go straight to the nearest grocer and ask them to call for an ambulance. As Alfred rushed down the hall, he heard a voice behind him.

“How is he?” Mary asked. She was standing two steps above the second-floor landing. She was wearing a dark green dress that buttoned in a double-breasted style up to her throat. She was as familiar to him as his own reflection in the mirror, and he saw clearly how silly he’d been, playacting with another woman, a woman he barely knew, and who barely knew him, when his life was here, standing on the landing above him.

“I’m to get an ambulance.”

“Well, go!”

Alfred ran. He pumped his arms and lifted his knees and dodged pedestrians who stepped before him. The faster he ran, the younger he felt, and though his errand was serious he felt buoyant: Mary was back. She would forgive him. They would make up, and he would leave Liza. He and Mary would find new rooms together; he’d get good work. He leaped over a pile of horse manure. He nodded to the wandering sausage man, who watched him pass with amazement on his face. How could he refuse marriage to her now when he had asked Liza Meaney? Maybe Mary wouldn’t want to marry him now; maybe she had no interest. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Not so long as they lived together again and came home to each other every night.

When he returned to Driscoll’s rooms, Mary had taken over Mrs. Borriello’s spot by the bed and was talking to the doctor. Mrs. Borriello sat at the table with her head in her hands.

“What is it?” Alfred asked from the frame of Driscoll’s bedroom door.

“Looks like hasty consumption,” Mary said without turning.

“They’ll take him to a sanatorium,” the doctor said. “Each of you should watch yourself for symptoms and at the first sign you should segregate yourself.”

It was nearly midnight when the ambulance took Michael Driscoll, and once the neighbors retreated from their perches on the landings where they’d watched the spectacle, Mary remembered what the nurses used to do at Riverside after tending to a patient, and instructed Alfred and Mrs. Borriello to wash their hands. Mary knew Alfred was looking at her as he leaned against the wall that divided the kitchen from the bedroom. She hardened her belly and kept her eyes from meeting his. She spoke to him as if he were anyone, someone she’d just met, not the man she’d loved since she was seventeen years old. “When you get home you should wash yourself well. Boil your clothes or throw them away.”

Now that Driscoll was at the hospital there would be no need for Alfred to come around anymore, and if he stopped coming, then this, an interval of several hours, wouldn’t mean anything and she could go back to pretending he didn’t exist. She heard him draw his breath as if to speak but then release it again.

Mrs. Borriello took Mary by the hand.

“Hold on,” Alfred said, taking two quick steps toward the door as if to block it. “Mary,” he said softly. “Can I come up to talk a minute? Or can we take a walk?”

“It’s the middle of the night!” said Mrs. Borriello.

“She can speak for herself.”

“Why?” Mary asked.

“I have to talk to you, Mary.”

“Another time maybe,” Mary said, and Mrs. Borriello followed her boarder out the door.

Upstairs, the boys asleep, Mary found Mrs. Borriello’s largest pot and filled it with water. She filled the kettle, too. Once the water was boiled, the women took off their dresses, and their underclothes, and shoved them to a corner of the kitchen. Mrs. Borriello stepped into the bath first while Mary dropped their underwhites into Mrs. Borriello’s pot and stirred them like she was checking on a stew. Then Mary bathed while Mrs. Borriello stirred, the water at such a rapid boil the pot hopped on the stove. When they were both dressed in fresh clothing, their damp hair loose around their shoulders, their undergarments drying over the sink, Mary made coffee and poured it into two cups. Mrs. Borriello yawned. The kitchen was warm, and comfortable, and Mary’s body felt clean and soft under the fresh clothes. Mrs. Borriello stretched her arms over her head and purred.

“What’s your first name?” Mary asked.

“Emilia. My family called me Mila.”

“Pretty.”

“Not many call me Mila now.”

“No.”

The clock on the mantel ticked its rhythm and Mary remembered Aunt Kate, how they’d sit in the silent kitchen until late, Kate sewing, Mary sipping tea and reading aloud from the newspaper, until it came time to go to sleep.

Mila Borriello began smoothing her fine black hair, first one side, and then the other. She pulled it away from her face and twisted it behind her head. In only her camisole, and with her cheeks still rosy from the steam of the bath and the warmth of the room, Mary could see that she was still a beautiful woman.

“How old are you?”

“I am thirty-four years old.” Mila smiled. “You thought older?”

Mary nodded. The two women regarded each other in silence.

“I was married before,” Mila said. “Before Salvatore.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Of course not. How would you know?”

Mary waited.

“His name was Alberto. Is Alberto. He’s still alive someplace, I don’t know. Last I saw him was in Naples.”

Mary felt the room seem to settle down around them. Her hand rested on the table not six inches away from Mila’s hand. She’d never invited her, Mary considered now. She’d never asked her up for tea or coffee, or knocked on her door to see if she needed anything from the market. When Mary, Fran, and Joan made a plan to go put their feet in the fountain, or walk in the park, they’d never asked if Mila Borriello felt like joining them. Alfred sometimes wondered why the Borriellos didn’t live downtown on one of the Italian streets, but mostly they didn’t think of the Borriellos at all.

“This Alberto, he was father to my oldest boy. You remember.”

The drowned boy, also Alberto. They called him Albie. Albertos become Albies in America.

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“He was not such a good man, Alberto. In some ways, yes, a decent man, he always made good wages, but in most ways, not such a good man. He loved me, and loved his boy in his way, but he was not the way a man should be. He lifted his hand to me every day and I knew he would lift his hand to my boy. Maybe he would wait until my boy got strong, but maybe not. At first I thought I could spend a little less, sit a little less, but then I saw he would do it anyway and I’m not a woman who deserves hitting. So one day he beat me with the leg of a chair and I left him. I took the boy while he was out of the house and stayed with a woman neighbor, and then I came to New York City and called myself a widow. Then I met Salvatore in America and told him all of it. Some men, they would leave a woman who told him a thing like that. Some men would side with the other man even not knowing him, even the man all the way in Naples. Not Salvatore. He believed me and trusted me and then we had our own two boys, Carmine and Anthony. He was kind to me every day of his life.”

Mila looked at Mary very seriously. “They don’t know this, Carmine and Anthony. They think Alberto was their full brother, their father’s son.”

“I understand.” Mary remembered that horrible afternoon. “I’m so sorry about Salvatore. And about Albie. We never talked about—”

“It’s fine,” Mila said, and set her mouth in that familiar way she had, a widow’s pursed lips, worried brow.

They were quiet for a long time.

“I don’t think of that day too much. Sending them out for wood. Much more I think of before we came here, when it was just the two of us, that baby with me on the ship, and how careful I was to give him the cleanest portion of the sheet, and the best of what we had at meals. You’ve never seen a baby cling the way Alberto clung to me in America when we got here first. Sometimes it’s hard to understand that that baby turned into my boy. That that baby disappeared, and turned into a boy, and then that boy disappeared. So he left me twice. Do you understand?”

“Your English is very good.”

“I don’t mean my English. I mean do you understand about having a baby and worrying sick over him and finally getting him away from a dangerous thing and then having so much good happen and then the baby grows into a handsome boy and then he is gone? One, two, three, gone. I pushed him out of me, and nursed him, and soothed him, and then one day he left here and didn’t come back. Like he was nothing and everything I felt for him was nothing and all that time we felt it was good, and strong, and special, it was really no stronger than a strand of hair snipped in two.

“A few months after the accident a man came with a document to sign, and that was it. Salvatore signed it and explained to me that there was nothing else they could do. They never found him in the river. He never washed up anyplace. Salvatore was as sad as I was, but it’s different for men. He went to work and came home and seemed the same but I knew better. We had three boys, and then we had two.”

A memory of Tobias Kirkenbauer ambled across Mary’s mind: she saw herself tying him into his pram, pushing him down to the water with a picnic of bread and cheese. What did they say to each other? What was that funny way he said her name? She recalled the tiny hairs on the doctor’s top lip when he warned her not to tell Mrs. Kirkenbauer that the boy was gone. If Mrs. Kirkenbauer had asked for him, Mary would have lied, and yet she died anyway. Though Mary had seen enough death to know what it looked like when it came, it was always a shock to see that whatever it is that animates a person can slip away so easily, like a drop of water slipped down a drain. Perhaps she found out, Mary considered. Perhaps a mother knows.

“I’m not telling you this for you to say sorry, Mary. Any decent person is sad to hear such a thing so it’s useless to say anything in response. I’m telling you this so you can see I know a little about men and about life. A woman who is married twice and has three children and gets herself to America with an infant alongside knows a little about the world and about men. You understand? You can imagine what it was like on that ship without a husband and with a boy to suckle.”

Mary waited for what she knew was coming.

“You should stay away from that Alfred.”

Mary felt the old defensiveness rise up but swallowed it back down again. “Well, anyway, he’s married.”

Mila Borriello touched Mary’s hand. “How many hours was I with him since he found Mr. Driscoll and came up here to knock on my door? In all those hours, not once does he mention his wife. The only woman he mentioned was you.”

Mary felt ashamed at the soaring she felt in her chest upon hearing this, at the familiar lightness in her bones that used to come over her when she’d hear his key in the door. Now that he’d seen her, he’d make excuses to come back, and she had to decide what she’d do when that happened. Liza Meaney will never know him like I do, she thought. Then she remembered that Liza Meaney had cured him, had convinced him to stick with a job, and for Liza Meaney he’d proposed marriage, become a stepfather. She had a vision of herself on North Brother, looking across the water at Manhattan, thinking about what he could possibly be doing that would keep him from writing to her, from trying to see her. No, she decided. No.

EIGHTEEN

On the night Driscoll was taken by ambulance, Alfred slept in the old man’s rooms. He heeded Mary’s advice and washed himself in the basin. Not wanting to sleep on the bed Driscoll had been coughing into, he found a spare blanket and made a bed on the kitchen floor. In the morning, he walked to the stable with his thoughts full of Mary, and how he could put everything right again.

As he cleaned the stalls and fed the horses, he decided he’d wait until after Samuel’s exams to tell Liza what he now knew — that he could not be with her, and certainly could not marry her. He’d wait until after Christmas. After the New Year. But when he got back to their rooms that afternoon and saw them there, mother at the sink and son at the table, and the way she warned him with a look to keep quiet, and winced when he took off his boots by the door, and followed him around, touching everything he touched to straighten it, right it, clean from it whatever invisible grime he might have carried there on his fingertips, he knew he would not be able to stay there one day longer. He returned to his boots and went out the door before she could ask where he was going.

Back on the sidewalk he headed straight into the barrage of sound — children shrieked, their mothers calling after them; the horses clopped, whinnying and snouting at anything that came near them; the carriages squeaked and rattled; the automobiles honked and sputtered as they tore down the streets, the passengers gripping the crossbars.

Alfred sank into the bright busyness of the Lower East Side. He noticed now that many of the windows had Christmas candles waiting until nightfall to be lit, and remembered that Christmas was just ten days away. The day was warm, more like October than December, and he walked in a westerly direction across Allen and Eldridge Streets, through the blocks of all Italian — Mulberry and Mott. He headed south along Lafayette, and then west again until he came to the outdoor market on Chambers, where a twelve-foot Yule tree was standing at the northwest corner, decorated with beads and tinsel. He bought a loaf of bread and a few slices of smoked trout wrapped in a newspaper. With the bread and fish tucked under his arm, he turned east again. After a few blocks, he stopped on a curb and ate his meal while a group of children kicked a ball around him. Licking his fingers, he continued toward the East River, passing the faces of a hundred tenements standing shoulder to shoulder, like a row of tight-lipped and straight-backed soldiers. The zigzagging fire escapes, chipped and rusted, marred each façade, and Alfred knew without looking that the interior hallways were similarly spoiled, the plasters cracked and crumbling, the pastoral scenes painted over and over again until every color was a shade of gray. On one block alone he passed a delicatessen, a butcher, a baker, a milliner, a tailor, and a factory that made women’s shoes. He passed a police officer who was trying to coax a dog from the street, and another officer yelling up to a man who had thrown a pile of chicken bones from his fifth-floor window. The man shouted back to the officer in German, and then pulled the curtain across. “Want me to tell you what he said?” Alfred asked the officer.

“Don’t bother,” the officer replied, and continued on.

Alfred turned and turned and turned again until before him was the Brooklyn Bridge, that shining, massive jewel suspended over the water and held there, it seemed from Alfred’s vantage, by magic, by a simple crosshatch of wire and string. He was a German, the man who thought how to do that. Alfred marveled as he stared at how the bridge seemed to take a flying leap across the tidal strait below. He recognized the gothic towers of the old world, except instead of appearing bulky and grim like they did in the Rhine country, here in America they held only promise, and the arched portals carved into them seemed to Alfred to welcome those who crossed like a collection of solemn ancestors, holding the new Americans in the palms of their hands.

He walked across the bridge and then jumped the trolley on the Brooklyn side, held tight to the bar, and after a long time hopped off at Coney Island, where, passing the Loop-the-Loop and packs of young girls pressed into circles, talking behind their hands and laughing, he remembered bringing Mary there when Aunt Kate was still alive and watching her as she danced with other girls. Even then it was a rare thing to see her so joyous, and even more rare as time went on, but it was worth the wait and even severe Mary, even worried Mary, even Mary with a cook’s slouch was worth a hundred Liza Meaneys.

• • •

It was nearly midnight when Alfred got back to Liza’s rooms, and after climbing the narrow stairs he listened at the door for a minute to discover whether she was still awake, waiting for him, or if the boy was still studying at the table. He thought about what he’d say, whether he’d hold her or if that was wrong, whether he’d tell the boy himself or let her do it. He heard nothing, and there was no light under the door.

It will come as a shock to her, Alfred knew. She might not be able to make ends meet without him. She mightn’t be able to send the boy to school. But she’ll take on another boarder. A woman would be better for her, and the neighbors would like it more. I’ll send her a letter, he decided as he turned and made his way back down to the street. It would be kinder to Liza to avoid the shame of having to watch him leave, or the temptation she might have to beg him to stay. It would be more honorable to allow her to face that on her own and then she could tell Samuel whatever she liked. Alfred would simply never return to Orchard Street at all. As for the few articles he’d left behind in her place, she could do what she liked with them.

Then he remembered he had thirty-one dollars saved in a coffee can on the top shelf of the pantry, and that stopped him as he crossed the first-floor landing. He looked up the dark stairwell and listened. After a few seconds, he shook his head and waved his hands in front of him as if he were scattering that paper money in the breeze. He stepped toward the heavy front door, believing he’d made his decision, but he thought of that money again as he placed his hand on the knob. He could see it as a stack, turned on its side and curved against the can. It smelled of coffee. What would Liza do with it? Buy books for the boy?

He climbed the stairs again. He placed the palm of his hand against the door and then turned the knob, slowly, slowly, so that the lock wouldn’t pop like a gunshot and wake her up. He pushed it open only far enough to slide his body inside and in three steps he was standing at the pantry, peering toward the top shelf. Empty. He scanned the lower shelves, the counter, the curio in the corner. The floorboard creaked as his thumb grazed the miniature collectable bell she’d gotten from Philadelphia, years and years ago from her husband, the boy’s father, dead at twenty-seven. Alfred was rooted in the still silence until he remembered the small hollow in the brick wall between the window and the curio, a little space gouged out long before his arrival and impossible to notice unless a person went looking for it. Liza had pointed it out to Samuel as a good place to keep his earnings, and Alfred went up on tiptoes now, reaching around the curio to find it in the moonlight. There was his coffee can, and next to it, a chipped sugar bowl full of the boy’s earnings. Graceful as a ballerina, he leaned down, plucked up both, and barely felt the floor under him as he slipped out the door, back to the hall, down to the street.

For the first time since taking the cure, he reached for the flask that held the medicine, and there on the dark sidewalk he tipped it into his mouth, pretended it was whiskey, and swallowed every drop. When he was finished, he waited to see if the medicine would do the trick, if it would take all that wanting away and turn it into satisfaction, into the calm easiness of sobriety as Dr. Oppenheimer had described it, the peace of needing nothing, of feeling sound in body and mind. Instead, he felt violence in his belly, and as quick as he could lean over, he vomited on himself and all over the step. He stumbled to the curb and vomited over the dog shit there. He dropped down to his hands and knees and vomited again. When he saw in the dim light of the gas lamp a policeman coming up the street with his hand on his club, he moved along as quickly as he could. He stuck close to the buildings and walked north until he came to a church with a small cemetery beyond its gates. He tried to vomit again but nothing came because there was nothing left, so he retched drily behind a headstone, wrapped his coat more tightly around his body, stumbled over to a bench, and slept.

In the morning, cold to the bone and with an aching neck, he made his way to Washington Square Park. The Borriello boy had said the laundry Mary worked at was almost on the park, but he hadn’t had a chance to tell him which side, how close “almost” was. Buttoned into the inside pocket of his coat was his thirty-one dollars, plus Samuel’s eleven. Eleven dollars was nothing compared to the dinners he’d put on their table, compared to all the pencils and books and scratch pads he’d purchased. The groceries, the new kitchen curtains, all acquired with the money he’d given her. She’d made out well, he told himself, the thick stack of money a lump on the left side of his coat.

He began searching at the park’s south end but found no laundry. There was a laundry a block from the park’s west side, but when he went in to inquire about Mary, they didn’t know who he was talking about. It was the same at the two laundries he found within a few blocks north of the park. Then, on the park’s east side, he spotted a sign and knew it must be the place. He watched a Chinese move around the front of the store, and then had a glimpse of her, passing through a back room, carrying a stack of folded clothes. Though the vomit had dried on his pants and shoes, the stench seemed as strong as it had been when fresh, and when he touched his hand to his face he knew that he needed a wash and a shave. He was hungry. He wanted to rinse his teeth. The Chinese came to the door, noticed him, and turned his back.

He needed to make himself presentable. He needed to consider what he’d say. Instead of speaking to her right then, as he’d planned, he walked to the old building and got himself into Driscoll’s rooms by the key Driscoll left over the frame of the door. He stripped in Driscoll’s kitchen and then went into the old man’s closet to find a shirt, pants, fresh socks, hurrying out of the contaminated room as quickly as he could. He found Driscoll’s blade and cream. When he was finished, and standing in the kitchen with Driscoll’s bedroom door shut tight, he made a mug of strong black coffee and sipped it beside the stove. He felt jumpy, as if being chased, as if those pursuing him were crouched outside in the street, spying on him from the upper floors of the buildings lining the avenue. He placed Driscoll’s key on the table and locked the door behind him.

• • •

He walked directly over to the laundry — it was near quitting time — but she would not see him. A Chinese looked him up and down with those inscrutable eyes and told him that she could not be disturbed. He told the man he would wait as long as he had to. He raised his voice and sent it toward the back of the shop, where the sounds of cranks and pulleys and the sudden hiss of steam went on as if he weren’t there at all. The smell of damp clothing and hot irons filled the small space, and he wondered if she smelled like that now — where before she’d smelled of fruit and fresh bread, now she might smell of starch and laundry powder. She’d heard him. He could feel it. She was listening. He told the Chinaman to call the police if he wanted to. He didn’t care. And then, not fifteen minutes later, he was back on the street again, walking into the wind that pricked his face like a hundred thousand needles, turning a shoulder to slice through the throngs hustling about with their packages tied up with string. He circled around the neighborhood for a while, and then went back to the laundry and stood outside the door.

“Mary,” he said, when she finally came out, as he knew she would, eventually. Two other women had already left, and the sign on the door said CLOSED. “I need to talk to you.”

She stayed several feet away from him on the sidewalk and wrapped her scarf around her head. “No, Alfred, I don’t think so. I think the time for talking is past.”

“I didn’t marry her, you know.”

Mary leveled a look at him. “And? What am I supposed to do? Thank you?”

“No! I only—”

“Go away, Alfred. Please. Leave me alone.”

He watched her walk away, and he waited for her to stop, look over her shoulder, think of something more to say to him. But she turned onto Greene Street and disappeared.

• • •

He needed to change his tack. He needed to find a way to explain himself. In the short term, he realized he shouldn’t have locked himself out of Driscoll’s flat. He had his stack of money but he didn’t want to waste it, so he walked over to Eighth Street, to a delicatessen where an old friend from his coal-hauling days worked slicing meat, and asked to sleep in the pallet in their supply room.

In the morning, he waited outside 302 East Thirty-Third, but he must have arrived too late and missed her. He passed by the laundry a few times to kill the hours until they closed, but didn’t catch any glimpses of her. Christmas was now only eight days away. Pale children begged from morning until night, and there was a Santa on every other block. The markets smelled of clove and cinnamon and the men hocking evergreens were asking astonishing prices for trees that by New Year’s would be brown and brittle and back on the curb.

What he needed was courage. What he needed was to figure out exactly the right thing to say. He shoved his fists deep into his coat pockets because when he set them free his arms felt out of rhythm with his body. He put up his collar. He walked faster. His flask was empty now, and he kept reminding himself to go to Oppenheimer’s office for more of the medicine, but it was like the old prayers of his childhood: his mind said the words but the words were meaningless and he barely heard them. The thought of filling it with something better came to him innocently, the first time, as he passed a pub he used to like. But as soon as the thought entered his mind it gained traction, and wouldn’t be pushed away. He tried to think instead of how he and Mary would talk, finally, and how life would go on, but every time he let his guard down there it was, an itch in his chest demanding to be scratched. He walked and walked and bought a comb for his hair and better socks for his feet, but there it was, squatting in the corner of his mind and smirking at him. If I limit myself to a dram, he considered. His groin tingled. He felt his pulse in the soles of his feet and his fingertips. If I tell the barman it’s only the one, and to not under any circumstances sell me another. If I drink it up quickly and then go on my way. If I never do it again after this.

He walked back to the pub he’d passed that morning. Quickly, quickly, he caught the barman’s eye and held up his first finger. The barman found a bottle, and Alfred nodded. The barman found a glass, set it on the bar, poured from one vessel into the other, all of which Alfred watched closely, as if trying to spot the sleight of hand in a card trick. The barman restored the bottle to the shelf and placed the glass in front of Alfred. Alfred removed his hat, swallowed it down, and returned the empty glass to the bar.

“Jeez, brother,” the man said, eyeing him. “We don’t run tabs here.”

“I have money.”

The second time, Alfred looked at the amber liquid for a moment before swallowing it in two long gulps. The polished wood of the bar stretched out to his right and curved into the shadows at the back of the room. The glasses lined up in neat rows behind the barman caught the faint sun coming through the windows. He felt nervous out there in the city, the tendons and sinews of his body mimicking the hectic pace all around him, leaving him exhausted, leaving him unable to relax, his ears always cocked like a hare waiting for the sound of approaching hounds. Here, Alfred noticed, the encroaching city stopped its march at the door, and at the center of his body the heat from those two small drams worked better than any overcoat, worked better than the warmest feather bed. The others seated at the bar were silent except for a pair of gentlemen toward the back discussing something in a whisper. There was no music playing, and the barman had not even bothered to put out the token plate of cheese. Alfred felt a familiar calm traveling outward from his belly. He had lost his mother as a boy but he knew that feeling was what a boy feels when he steps into his mother’s arms, that tenderness, that fierce compassion. He shifted in his stool to find the familiar position. He rested his chin to his fist.

He counted the days since he’d shown up for work at the stable, and wondered if he still had a job. If they fired him, maybe it would be for the better. That way when he got his fresh start with Mary he’d find something else. He ordered a beer with his whiskey. He could move furniture, maybe. He could go out and harvest ice instead of waiting in the stables for it. When the quitting hour rolled around he didn’t bother going over to the laundry, deciding instead that he’d have better luck catching her outside their old building. He didn’t bother with dinner or supper. The other men left and a new group took their places. His stack of cash was getting lighter, and sometime after supper, after the barman had cleaned the glasses and wiped down the top of the bar, he asked Alfred if he had somewhere to go. Alfred straightened up, leapt from the stool, hurried out to the street.

The laundry had been closed for several hours, so Alfred sat inside the vestibule of 302 East Thirty-Third Street for six hours before she appeared. He was leaning with his back against the wall, his legs stretched out in front of him, when he opened his eyes to find her looking down on him with a newspaper under her arm and an umbrella in her hand.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Waiting for you.”

She leaned over to sniff the air, and then like she’d been scalded she jumped, pulled her long skirt to the side, and tried to step past him to the front door.

“Wait,” he said, and quick as could be he reached for her ankle. He felt that delicate knob of bone move under his thumb as she tried to wriggle free.

“Let me go,” she said with that fierce look she got whenever she was angry. He let go. “What do you want? Why are you here? I wish you’d keep away from me.”

“Didn’t you hear me say I’m not married? I didn’t marry her.”

Mary gave one of those quick breathy laughs he knew marked the point when she was about to lose her temper completely. He stood and stepped back until he was against the wall. He’d forgotten what she could be like. He’d forgotten everything. She held her pointing finger one inch from his nose.

“You stay away from me, do you understand? Don’t come to the laundry. Don’t come to this building. Don’t look for me on the street.”

“You don’t mean it. I know you don’t mean it.” He thought of her stooping over him in the early mornings. He thought of her pushing his clothes into the tub, and wringing them, and shaking them out in two deft snaps before hanging them by the stove. He thought of the soft swing of her breasts while she worked, and the swell of her bare white hip in the morning, and the way she was careful about her hands, always rubbing the fingertips in lemon to take away the odor, and how he wanted to kiss those hands now and tell her that she could not send him away. Sometimes, not often, but sometimes, she would listen to a story he told her, about the bar, about some person he’d met there, and if the story was funny she’d laugh. She’d drop what she was doing, sink into her side of the bed, and laugh. Sometimes, not often, she would ignore the dawn light that insisted it was time to wake up, and instead she’d roll over toward him, throw her arm over his chest, make a nest in the crook of his arm. Even when she was upstate, or in New Jersey, or across town at a situation that didn’t permit journeys home, he never felt alone knowing she would be coming back to him.

She made a small choked sound now, a sound he’d heard out of her only once or twice since she was seventeen. She drew a deep breath, and when she looked at him again she had composed herself.

“Please,” she said, and he felt sobered.

“But Mary, I know it would be different now. I haven’t—”

Mary moved forward quickly as if she was going to hit him, all that rage simmering just below the features of her face, leaving a mottle of her cheeks, a man’s rage, as they’d noted in the newspapers, an animal’s rage, an immigrant’s rage, something that required four, five, six generations to be properly bred out. But it was only a flicker, and when he blinked she had already drawn herself back, closed her eyes, and then, after a beat, descended the front steps to the sidewalk. “I mean it, Alfred,” she said, and next thing she was gone.

He roamed the city to clear his head, pausing only on park benches and barstools. He spent that night stretched on the long seat of a Model T parked under a tree on Fifty-Seventh Street, the owner’s blanket pulled up to his chin, and then spent the next day at Nation’s Pub. When the car was gone the next evening he found another. He went on this way for a few days, until he remembered the ice company stable, and how warm it would be there with all the animals lined up in their rows, the doors and windows shut tight. Since it was now just a few days until Christmas, there would be no one there except the poor soul who got elected to come by to feed the animals, shake out fresh straw.

The stable was empty. Alfred scrambled through a window that stayed closed all winter but was never locked. Inside, staggering now with exhaustion, he pushed bunches of hay together on the dirt floor, found a spare horse blanket. He’d tell whoever came that he was back on a shift, that he was meant to be there. They would believe him.

He slept for hours, and when he woke it was deep darkness, the horses breathing gently, the one closest to him snorting, as if asking Alfred if he’d awoken, if he was all right now. He sat, pulled his stiff knees to his chest. Mary would come around. She had to. If she didn’t, Alfred considered, then there was not a single person in New York City, not a single person in the world, who cared what happened to him.

Alfred stretched, went into the back room in search of food, and instead found half a bottle of John Powers. Solemn in the face of such good luck, he picked it up as carefully as he might a baby, and brought it tenderly back to the spot where he’d slept. He slid to the ground. He pulled a blanket across his knees. Closing his eyes, he uncorked the bottle and drew a long, ravenous mouthful.

Some time later, he wasn’t sure how long, he noticed the sky outside was gray and he couldn’t decide if that meant day was turning into evening, or night into morning. He placed the empty bottle on the windowsill. He made his way to the back room again, where a simple straight-back chair loomed before him, and behind, the horses made threatening noises with their throats and stamped their feet. It was darker now, and he found a lamp, found a bottle of oil, found a match. Had Christmas come yet? Was it now? He removed the glass and the wick holder and poured in the oil from the plain, unmarked canister in the corner of the room, cursing as some dripped onto the seat of the chair. He twisted off the blackened top of the wick with his fingertips. He shook out a wooden match and struck once, twice. The match broke. He dropped it on the ground, kicked it, shook out another. This time, he heard that small suck of surrounding air, and when the light was born, Alfred held it for a moment before touching it to the tip of the wick.

• • •

Later, looking back at the moment when the flame met the cloth of the wick, he would see it so clearly that he would wonder if he’d been more sober than he realized. He couldn’t recall the weather outside, or the state of his clothing, or the color of that horse blanket, or the last meal he had put in his belly, but he could remember that flame, and the white of that wick. It was as if his mind had taken a photograph that he was able to study only later, the position of the can, the direction of the spout, the odor of the oil. He touched the flame to the wick and swore later that he knew just before it happened, an instant before, a heartbeat before, a space of time so small it would have been impossible to measure. He knew as he was doing it, as he watched the orange meet the white, and one hair to the other side and he would have known before; he would have stopped. He touched the flame to the wick and the room exploded.

NINETEEN

And just like that he was gone. I wanted him to leave, Mary reminded herself. I asked him to. All he did was listen. Christmas came and she gave the Borriello boys a set of checkers to share. They had bought her pins for her hair, and as they talked, and ate, and admired the Christmas tree they’d decorated with strings of popcorn, Mary expected him to knock on the door, beg to see her. Why hadn’t he married Liza? Did she kick him out when he came home stewed or did he need a drink only when he saw Mary? At the laundry, the Lithuanians gasped when she told Li to tell Chu that she wouldn’t be wrangle woman anymore. She’d had enough. She would wash. She would do her turns at the front of the store. But no more ironing on a Sunday half-day either. And on top of that she wanted a raise.

“He won’t do it,” Li warned. “Irena and Rasa have been here five years. No increase. Not for you, either.”

“Well then, Irena and Rasa deserve a raise, too,” she said. “What would you do if all of us left you at once? How much business would he lose training three at the same time? More than three, since together we do the work of five. There’s striking and organizing going on all over this city. Why not us?” Even outside of the laundry she felt the world back away from her lately, grant her passage in a way it didn’t do for others. When she walked into shops and pushed her goods across the counter, people shrank further within their overcoats. She argued prices to the penny. She inspected packages for dents, fruit for bruises, meat for dark spots, clothing for loose threads, and brought everything to the attention of the grocer or the butcher or the shop assistant. She bought a pair of shoes and brought them back two days later to say there was a wobble in the left heel. “There’s no wobble,” the man said without touching the shoe, without even putting down the polish rag he was holding. Looking at the haughty expression on his face, he a cobbler with black fingertips, his vest hanging open and missing a button, Mary felt as if time slowed down. She took the shoe out of her bag and dropped it to the counter with a clatter. She felt the eyes of every other person in the shop. “There is a wobble, and I want my money back.”

“Did you wear them?” the man asked as he inspected the sole, and she said of course she wore them. How in the world would she know about the wobble if she hadn’t worn them? The clock ticked. She could hear the soft grunts of a second man stretching leather in the back room, the rhythmic punch of the sewing machine. The man at the counter pointed to a sign: No Returns on Worn Shoes. She nodded at him and then, raising her voice, announced: “This place sells broken shoes and refuses refunds.” She went to the shop door, pushed it open, and repeated it to a group of women passing by. A man browsing the selection inside the door slipped by her and hurried down the street. She picked up the sign on the women’s side of the display window.

“This says Comfort Shoes. Is that meant to be a joke?”

“What’s your story, lady?” the man asked, his hands on his hips.

“I spent my money here thinking I’d gotten something for it. I’ll stand here for a month if I have to, telling people about this place, and about the crookery that goes on here.” She crossed her arms and looked at the man until finally, releasing a single loud sigh, he opened the cash drawer and returned her money.

One day in January, she saw a cook she recognized leaving from the side door of a restaurant, and the thought of that woman basting and chopping and sautéing in there felt to Mary like a hand closed over her throat. For the first time in all those months of her new life she didn’t return to the laundry after her lunch break. Only at home, at Mila Borriello’s table, did she feel some peace. She watched the boys do their figures. She took the scrub brush from her friend and helped her wash the floor.

Jimmy Tiernan came upstairs and knocked one evening when his Patricia was out. Mila and the boys were also out. “Come in,” Mary said, pointing at an empty chair.

“Nah,” Jimmy said, and leaned against the jamb of the door. “I was just wondering if you’ve seen Alfred.”

Mary turned to the counter and made herself busy with the coffeepot, measuring out spoonfuls and cups of water. “No. Why?”

“Well, a little while back I told him about a job starting up — you know, the new skyscraper being built down across from City Hall. He seemed interested, said he was getting bored at the stable, and told me to get him on. Then I don’t hear nothing from him. Not a peep. I told the boss I had a guy I wanted to get on but he can’t hold it much longer.”

Mary turned and leaned against the counter. “I haven’t seen him, Jimmy. I don’t know.”

“Well, where is he?”

“I said I don’t know.”

“Okay, okay,” Jimmy held up his hands. “I just wondered because I tried that address down on Orchard and the lady acted like she didn’t know who I was talking about. He hasn’t been around there, either.”

Mary brought her fingertips to her temples and rubbed. “You know how he is. You tried at Nation’s?”

“Yeah, I tried Nation’s. They haven’t seen him, neither. Tommy says he came in like a king a little before Christmas but they haven’t seen him since.”

Mary put her hand on the door. Inch by inch she moved it, and inch by inch Jimmy Tiernan retreated back into the hall.

“Well, if you see him, Mary, tell him thanks for nothing because I went out on a limb here, you know?”

Mary shut the door and Jimmy shouted from the other side. “But tell him check in with me anyway, will ya, Mary? When you see him? Tell him I’m not mad! Just wondering is all.”

Mary curled up on her cot and closed her eyes.

• • •

One Sunday in February 1911, an Irishwoman named Mrs. O’Malley, whom Mary knew a little and who lived in the building across the street, came looking for her to help with a hog her husband had won in a round of cards up on 102nd Street. Drunk and cocky, the husband had shown up at home with the two-hundred-pound beast on a tether, and could not explain to his wife’s satisfaction how he’d gotten the animal so far downtown. She told Mary that he presented the hog to her like he was giving her a basket full of money, or a room full of red roses, something beautiful or practical that she should appreciate, but instead it had been up to her to guard the animal where it now lived in the alley behind their tenement, tied to a piece of fence beside the common privy. He’d been there almost a week.

“And now I guess it’s time to do something with him,” Mary said.

“It is,” Mrs. O’Malley said. “And I’m useless.”

There was no sense asking if she’d consulted with a butcher, because Mary knew, if the tables were turned, she wouldn’t have sought out a butcher, either. He would charge more than the pig was worth, and keep the best parts for himself.

“I’ve a good mind to turn him out and pretend it never happened, because where in God’s name will I store the meat, but every time I go to do it, it nags me that someone else will get him. I’d rather keep some of the meat and give the rest away. My neighbors will pay me something for it.” The woman clasped her hands together. “I’d be very grateful to you.”

It was not cooking, it was butchering. All the cooking would be done by those lucky ones who got a part. Still, Mary hesitated. She rubbed her eyes. She tried to think about it clearly while also wondering if she was still strong enough to butcher a full-grown hog.

“Show him to me,” she said finally, and Mrs. O’Malley clapped once before grabbing Mary’s hand and thanking her.

Full of purpose now, Mrs. O’Malley led Mary down the stairs, across the avenue, in through her building’s front door, out through the back door, and down four rickety wooden steps. There in the frost-bitten and muddy yard was the hog, rooting at the base of the fence. Mary crouched beside him, put her hand on his back. At least it’s winter, she thought. They wouldn’t have to worry about flies. She took off a glove and tested the dexterity of her fingers in the cold. The animal grunted and stamped. The fog of his breath rose up to meet Mary’s throat and she felt the same suspicion she always did when she was around animals, that they knew their fate, that they were born knowing it, that they were wiser than any human gave them credit for. She felt tenderness for him.

“What floor are you on?”

“Fifth.” Mrs. O’Malley turned and pointed up to a distant window.

“We’ll do it here,” Mary said, without taking her eyes from the hog. “I have good knives at my place, but you find me a long, thin one for sticking him. Get me a saw if you can find one. A hammer. As many clean buckets as you can manage. Twine. I’m going to search out a few bits of wood to raise him up. When we have everything I’ll need boiling water. A lot of it, and quickly. When you’ve gathered everything and put on the water, go around and ask the neighbors who wants some of the meat. Tell a few of them to come down to help us turn him. Then come straight back to me.”

By the time Mrs. O’Malley returned, Mary had led the hog to a shaded patch of clean-looking grass in the farthest corner of the yard. Mrs. O’Malley handed over the hammer and the knives Mary had instructed her to bring, and the four buckets she’d scrubbed — three borrowed, one her own — and when she was ready, when both women had removed their coats and gloves and hung them carefully on the fence, Mary told Mrs. O’Malley to get up on the pig’s back and brace him for the blow. It had been eight or ten years, at least, but her aim was still perfect, and the animal fell heavily.

“Now,” Mary said, grabbing him by his massive head and using every drop of strength in her body to stick him. As she pressed the knife deeper, Mrs. O’Malley held the first bucket against him to catch what she could. Mary’s heart pounded and she felt the heat from her body form a barrier against the cold of the day. Both women looked troubled as they watched so much of the sweet blood run into the grass, under the fence, down the gentle dirt slope toward the privy.

“Did you put on water?” Mary asked, and Mrs. O’Malley jumped up, ran into the building and up five flights of stairs. When she came back a few minutes later she was holding a pot full of boiling water, and poured it over the animal from head to hoof. “I’ve another,” she said, breathless, when the pot was empty, and came down a moment later with a second pot. Mary went to work with the blade of her knife, removing the hair.

An hour later, Mary ran her hand gently over the pink skin to feel for an errant hair, and felt something move inside her as she looked at the animal, its blank eyes staring at an old metal bucket. He was a pathetic creature, had probably had a miserable life, and here he was. Mary pushed the knife into the pig’s belly, feeling with her fingers that the intestines were still intact. She pulled out the guts and tossed them toward the second bucket. Moving back up toward the head, she felt the hem of her skirt heavy with blood. She twisted and pulled the hog’s head free, and dropped it in the third bucket.

“I’ll take that for my trouble,” Mary said. Smelling the inside of that body was like smelling Ireland again, and she remembered being a girl, bringing the cow’s stomach and intestines to the river, and the chill that ran through her to see the eels shoot out from under rocks the very same instant, it seemed, as the first drop of filth hit the water.

By the time Mary arrived at the heart, the neighbors had begun to line up with their pots and bowls. Mila was there, and both boys, each with a vessel to carry a part home.

Late that night, much later than her usual bedtime hour, after deciding that her clothes could not be saved, she scrubbed her body in the tub, pressed her knuckles into her aching arms, cleaned underneath her fingernails, and noted that she felt wide-awake. Mrs. O’Malley had pressed money into her hand, and Mary had taken it, but it wouldn’t have mattered to her if she’d gotten nothing. All day long, and even now so many hours after helping Mrs. O’Malley wrap up those bits and pieces she wanted to keep for herself, Mary felt like someone had finally turned on a proper light after living for so long in a dim room. She smiled at the snout peeking up over the rim of Mila’s largest pot.

• • •

“You haven’t seen him yet?” Jimmy Tiernan called from across the street one early morning in March. Mary pretended she didn’t hear. He caught her again coming into the building a few days later. “I think it’s the strangest thing,” he commented, as if he and Mary were a pair of abandoned children, together in their hurt. She tried to let it in one ear and out the other, but once again, she began looking for Alfred when she stepped out of the building in the mornings. Michael Driscoll had not survived and several of them from the building had gone to the funeral Mass, but Alfred did not show. The first anniversary of her release from North Brother came and went without anyone noticing, and by herself she took the IRT uptown, walked over to the river, and stared across. She had never looked up John Cane. They’d never taken their walk together in Central Park.

She’d felt less patience at the laundry ever since butchering the pig. What she’d told herself to accept, what she’d tried to face as permanent, could not continue. She was not a laundress and she never would be. It was no different from being on North Brother, looking out over the churning water at the life she was missing on the other shore.

And then one warm Saturday afternoon in late March, when she was working the cash register and insisting to a gentleman that they’d done their absolute best with the ink stain on his shirt pocket but that it simply could not be removed, she stopped to sniff the air. The gentleman also sniffed, and followed his nose to the door. For the first time in more than a year, the Lithuanians put down their garments, dried their hands, and came to the front of the store. Everyone heard the alarm bell sound next door.

“What is it?” Mary asked. From somewhere over their heads came a sound like thunder that grew louder every second until one of the street doors of the Asch Building swung open and people, mostly young women, began to run out to the street. Leaving the gentleman’s shirt on the counter and clutching the key to the register in her fist, Mary left her post, walked out to Washington Place, around the corner to Greene Street, and when she saw the crowds looking up she also looked up, and saw what appeared to be a heap of clothes falling from an upper-floor window. Saving their materials, Mary thought, but she wondered at the moaning from the crowd as another bundle was sent down. A man fainted and the people beside him barely noticed. Mary moved closer to the outer fringe of the crowd. The fire truck’s siren could be heard in the distance, moving closer. Coins rained from above along with the bundles of clothing, and Mary wondered that no one was reaching for them. No one was moving except for one woman who was wailing and thrashing and calling out for God, and Mary worked her way closer, excusing herself and pushing forward through the police officers who did nothing, the gentlemen and ladies, the bakers from across the street, the passersby, a pair of children who were looking up with open mouths. Finally, when Mary got through the crowd, she saw that the bundles had legs and arms and faces, many of which had been singed black. She looked up and saw framed in a ninth-floor window a trio of girls holding hands. The girl on the left was swatting her hair, which had caught fire, and all three were shouting something that no one on the sidewalk could understand. They jumped at the same time, and two of the three held hands until they hit the sidewalk. The third, the one with the burning hair, covered her face with her hands and as she fell her body became piked, her head almost touching her knees, like children do sometimes when they are jumping off rocks into water and want to impress one another. It took Mary a second to understand that there was no water, this was no game. These girls were jumping to their deaths, and far above their heads the crowd could glimpse a man’s arm as he helped them to the ledge as easily as he might have assisted them up the boarding step of the trolley. Two more followed. Then two more. They jumped from other windows as well, in singles, and pairs, and groups of three. The man who had come into the laundry with the ink-stained shirt shouted at them to wait, please wait, the fire trucks were coming and they would be saved. Wait! he commanded, even after they were already falling.

Finally, a fire truck arrived, and then another. The crowd made way for them. The trucks pulled up close to the building, the firemen unwound their hoses, stretched their ladders up, up, up as high as they would go, and after looking hard at those folded-up ladders, and looking again at the distance to the eighth, ninth, tenth floors, Mary dropped to a crouch and prayed.

“They’re not going to reach,” a nearby man’s voice said. “By God, they’re too short by three stories.” The collective moan grew louder and louder and swallowed everything. Two more jumped. Then another. Another. When they hit the ground it was as loud as an automobile crashing into a wall. Through the forest of legs at the base of the Asch Building, Mary could make out the back of a woman’s head on the sidewalk, the careful braid threaded through her curls.

• • •

The laundry was closed for a week as the bodies were lined up in makeshift coffins on the sidewalk, and families tried to identify their loved ones by a watch or locket, by a pattern of stitches on a stocking, a particular ribbon in the hair. The line went on and on, hundreds of bewildered people in their mourning clothes, while the charred and broken bodies waited to be claimed in the crisp, late March sun. In the days after the fire it seemed to Mary that everyone in the city, from the Upper West Side to the quays of Lower Manhattan, moved about in grief. Papers were sold. Cafés were open. But the world went silent. In another week or so the accusations would begin. Why was the exit door locked? Why hadn’t the alarm sounded on the upper floors? But in those first few days, when people spoke, it was of one subject only. All those girls. All those beautiful girls.

TWENTY

“How could I go back?” Mary asked her caseworker at the Department of Health. It was a busy place, and among the clicking of heels on the polished wood floor, the scrape of chairs, the racket of a ringing telephone, and the blusterous arguments spilling out from behind half-open office doors, Mary had to raise her voice to be heard. It was the end of May 1911, and Mary had been checking in with them every three months, as required. The first time she’d checked in, the whole office seemed to halt when she announced her name. Every man or woman behind a desk paused to watch her approach. They’d glanced at one another as she took a seat in the waiting area, and when her name was called their eyes followed her across the room. Now, at her fourth visit, a different caseworker each time, they barely noticed her, and most didn’t look up from the stacks of paperwork on their desks. The staccato music of struck typewriter keys, the zip and ding of carriages returned, never ceased. The office was sinking under all the paperwork — file drawers left open, envelopes, writing pads, stationery, ribbons of ink loosened from spools and piled on chairs, on windowsills, heaped in corners. She wondered if she could talk them into letting her check in every six months instead of every three. She debated telling them about quitting the laundry, but there was nothing to feel guilty about, and if she was as free as they claimed she was, then there was nothing they could do to her for it.

“I couldn’t possibly go back. You don’t know what it was like that day.”

“Ah,” the man said, looking again at the address. “I see.” Everyone had an opinion about the Triangle Waist Company tragedy, but relatively few, considering the size of the city, had been there to witness it. “Go home now,” Mary had said to a pair of boys who had stopped to watch. They reminded her of the Borriello boys. But they didn’t move, only stared up at the burning Asch Building like everyone else, until Mary took the smaller one by the shoulders, turned him around, put her forehead against his, and shouted “Go home! Do you hear me? Go home!” He blinked at her, and then, taking the older boy’s hand, they ran away together.

The man riffled through some papers. “How have you been making ends meet since leaving the laundry?”

None of your business, Mary wanted to shout, but instead she counted to ten. “The woman I board with takes in lacework for a milliner. She’s been showing me how.”

“But no cooking, correct? I see here that that is the agreement you came to when you left custody. You understand that?”

Mary could tell by the change in his face, the sudden light, that he had not realized until that moment who she was. Her file said Mary Mallon, but she could guess what he was thinking: Typhoid Mary.

“It says here that you risk infecting others if you cook for them.”

“I know what it says.”

He closed the file, pushed back from his desk.

“It will take a while to get you a position at another laundry,” the man said. He brought his hands together and regarded her for a moment. “Have you considered factory work?”

“Factory work?” Mary blinked, thought of herself among the throngs of women who waited outside the glassworks or the clocks manufacturer for the starting bell. They had to ask permission to use the lav. They had to punch in and out with time cards. At night, when they left, they had to be patted down in case they’d pocketed the small parts, just like the girls in the Triangle fire had been checked for scraps of silk and velvet.

“Do you realize I’ve cooked for the Blackhouses? For the Gillespies? I’ve cooked for Henry and Adelaide Frick and several of their friends.” She crossed her arms. “I won’t be working in any factory.”

“You’re not in a position to be haughty, Miss Mallon. We’re not an employment agency, so we have to assign someone the job of getting new work for you. I just don’t have the time. Truthfully, you might have better luck going through an agency. They might know of vacancies at private homes.”

Mary wondered how old he was. If he still went home to his mama for supper.

“I’ve been finding work since I was born. Put that in your file. I don’t need any help from you, and I certainly don’t need to be helped into another situation as wrangler.”

The man sighed. “Fine. Whenever you get something make sure to stop again and let us know the details.”

“I look forward to it.” She slammed his office door on her way out.

For the first time since leaving North Brother more than a year earlier, Mary felt unobserved as she made her way down the avenue. The man had forgotten to send her for a sample, and she smiled, quickening her step in case he might remember and run after her. Why had she never considered quitting before, finding something with better terms? She stopped in on the fishmonger on First Avenue and bought a pound of mussels. She stopped again for white wine, parsley, butter, a pair of shallots, a loaf of bread. It would be a treat for Mila, supper ready when she came home, and lately she’d been doing more and more of the cooking, and Mila had agreed that she could take the price of the groceries out of her board. No one had ever said anything about cooking for herself, or cooking for friends without being paid for it, but still, before she cooked for them the first time she reminded Mila of what Dr. Soper had said about her, why she’d spent almost three years on North Brother. She loved cooking, and would like to help, but if Mila didn’t want her boys to eat what she made she would understand.

“Did you have the fever?” Mila asked.

“No,” Mary said. The truth. More truth: “They say that doesn’t matter.”

“How could it not matter? And you cooked for Alfred? When you were living here before? And for other people?”

“Yes. Of course. It’s how I made my living.”

“Well then, you cook. I trust you.”

Mary made that first pot of stew with the boys in mind, and hummed as she chopped the carrots and the celery. Only when it came time to ladle it into bowls did she feel something nagging her, a sharp chill that started behind her neck and traveled down her back. She hesitated, but they were already lusting after the bits of tender meat, the steam rising up to their cheeks as the snow floated down the airshaft. They reached for their bowls and she handed them over, and after, for several weeks after, even after telling herself it was fine, it was completely fine, they’d gotten into her head, was all, they’d made her nervous of herself without true cause, she found herself observing them for signs of illness, and wondered if this was a sign of her guilt, a sign of admitting that she knew something that she could not face. But they never did get sick, not even a head cold, so she kept cooking for them: shepherd’s pies and roasts and coq au vin, quiche with bacon and leeks, and she felt both happier than she’d felt since 1907, and angry once more that she’d signed the paper promising to never cook for hire again.

“So what will you get?” Mila asked that evening when they finished supper, the blue-black shells in a pile at the center of the table. “You’re still not allowed to cook?”

“No.” She’d been wondering since leaving the DOH if baking counted as cooking or if it was a different category altogether. She thought of the dairyman upstate who was allowed to stay on and supervise his dairy. There was a bakery looking for help not five blocks away. “Ah,” Mila said. “And they would know, I suppose.”

Mary nodded.

“How would they know?”

Mary didn’t know how they would ever find out, but she had signed the paper. They would return her to North Brother if she lied to them and was caught.

“Do you think baking counts as cooking? Or is it a separate category?”

Mila considered the question very seriously.

“Baking is a different thing. And anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know about either one.”

“That’s what I think, too,” Mary said.

The next morning, she walked to the bakery that had advertised for help. The man who managed the place showed her their equipment, explained how many rolls, buns, cakes, and pies they made and sold daily. There was a front counter where people could come in and order from what was displayed behind the glass, but most of the business was in the large orders that went directly to grocers nearby. He quizzed Mary about her experience, and then, leaving her alone in the kitchen with the other baker, instructed her to make something that showed them what level of skill she had.

“Where’s the cocoa?” Mary asked, opening and closing cabinet doors, pulling and pushing drawers. “Do you have a double boiler?” The other baker, an older woman named Evelyn, pointed to a corner of the counter. She stayed silent but watched closely as Mary gathered ingredients. Mary saw her looking from the corner of her eye as she folded and poured and whipped and mixed. When the timer dinged, Evelyn dropped the pretense and turned from her work to watch Mary remove the soufflés from the oven.

“Wait. They might fall still.”

“They won’t fall,” Mary said, and they didn’t. The manager took her name without showing any sign of recognition, and told her to report first thing in the morning. Mondays were mostly rolls and buns, Fridays mostly cakes and pies, in between was a free-for-all — from cranberry-nut bread to fried dough to custom cakes decorated with sugar flowers. He sent her home with two-day-old apple strudel, and she held the box flat in her palm all the way, thinking of what the boys would say when she showed them, thinking how they’d rush through their dinners with their eyes on the oil-dotted box.

• • •

What will I say? She demanded of herself three months later, the next time she walked up to the DOH office where she’d once again sign next to her name, her residence, her place of work. It was August now, and they were baking with blackberries and apricots. She brushed flour from her sleeves and the front of her dress. She washed her hands thoroughly, and loosened the pins that kept her hair in a severe bun while she was mixing and beating and pouring. She told them at the bakery that she had to bring an ill neighbor to the hospital, and Jacob, the manager, told her to be back in one hour. One day, when she got the courage, she might march Mila and the Borriello boys to the DOH headquarters to say that she’d cooked for them, and they had survived, but then they’d just say what they always said, which was that it didn’t matter. Some people were immune. Some people had protection built in to them already. And sometimes she wasn’t infectious. Maybe she’d write to Mr. O’Neill about helping her get back to cooking. But not today, not yet, and when the man asked her where she’d found employment since her last visit, she was about to tell him, getting ready her argument that baking and cooking were entirely different occupations, when instead, she heard herself say that she worked in a shop, as an assistant.

“What kind of shop?” the man asked.

Mary brought forth her thickest brogue. “Oh, one of them kinds of shops that sells nice things to rich people. Pretty-looking things.”

As he scrutinized her, she tried to look and feel as blank as possible — a middle-aged woman with a thickening waist, poor posture, ugly shoes. She blinked. She scratched behind her ear.

“Trinkets?” he asked. “What sort of pretty things?”

“I dunno. Colorful things. I don’t see much of the selling as I work in a room at the back.”

It was all true, in a way. All true if you slanted it a bit, made the colors run together.

A girl came in with a stack of files and placed them on his desk. He sighed, pushed the pile to the side, and then scribbled “shop assistant” in Mary’s file and handed it to her. “Put the address,” he said. She took the pen from him and held it in the air for a moment as her mind raced and she realized she was about to write the real address. She changed the street number by one digit. An honest mistake, she could say later. I wasn’t entirely sure. She signed. He signed. Then he summoned the secretary and told her to lead Mary down to the basement to give her sample. Mary knew her own way to the small room, but she was escorted anyway, and once there a nurse made conversation about the weather, about Vinie Wray being shot outside the stage door of the Hippodrome, about the Sanitation Department’s new plan to remove garbage at midnight, about a shipping company owned by J. P. Morgan announcing that it was building the world’s first unsinkable ship, while Mary squatted over a bright white bucket and prayed to God for something to happen so that she could be on her way.

“Do you want me to get the bulb and syringe?” The nurse asked.

“No, I do not,” Mary said. “I want you to leave me alone.”

“Can’t do that, ma’am.” She tapped Mary’s file.

From her left Mary heard the traffic of the hallway on the other side of the locked door, and on her right the sounds of the street floated in the screened window. The nurse closed her eyes and leaned against the wall.

“Stuffy in here,” she said. “Feel anything?”

“I’m not doing this,” Mary said, pulling up her underthings, straightening her skirt.

The nurse took a step forward. “It hasn’t been thirty minutes. Look, why don’t we take a break and try again in a while. You don’t want to have to come back tomorrow, do you? Can I bring you a glass of water?”

“You can drown yourself in the river if you like,” Mary said as she walked across the room and opened the door. “I’m leaving.”

Twenty minutes later she was cracking eggs into a ceramic bowl.

She didn’t go back the next day, or the next week. She expected them to look for her, but they didn’t. Summer ended, and in the autumn she and Evelyn baked with pumpkin, nutmeg, clove. Sometimes, when Jacob said that a customer had requested fresh peaches or sliced strawberries placed on their cake or pie, she thought back to what they told her on North Brother about heating food until all the germs would die away. “Do you know what a germ is?” they’d asked her, like she was a child sitting for an examination. Only later, back in her hut, facedown on her cot, the rush of Hell Gate just twenty-five yards from her gable, would she try to make sense of what they told her about invisible microbes that floated in the air, that traveled up the nose and into the mouth. So many years later, it still sounded like a fairy tale meant for children, a little world too small for the human eye to see, or like religion, in that they were asking her to believe such a thing existed without giving her a chance to look at it, hold it, understand it.

Standing there at her station, so far from North Brother, with the quiet of the kitchen, the familiar shape of Evelyn’s bent neck, the light from the window shining over her work, the sound of bells jangling on the door up front and then the different bell of the register drawer opening and closing, the rhythmic beat of her spoon against the bowl as she worked it ’round and ’round and ’round the batter, she felt peaceful. She straightened slices of pear. Using her fingertips, she arranged blueberries into a neat semicircle, and then strawberries alongside. Quick as a blink she swiped her finger into the ice-cream bowl to see if it needed more sugar. She licked quickly from the mixing spoon and then, without thinking, plunged it back into the bowl. She made a sheet cake that would serve forty with fresh whipped cream between the layers. The layers slid a bit while she was anchoring them. She touched them into place. Touched them again. Pushed the cream to the edges with her thumb. At the end of the day, when she washed all the stickiness from her hands, she recalled all those moments of touching but she couldn’t see how one small movement, one nudge, one lick, something all cooks do, all bakers, all mothers and grandmothers who had to see if a thing was finished, if it tasted right and good, how something so inconsequential, something she barely noticed herself doing, could mean anything.

She went back to the DOH three months later — November 1911—signed the papers again, skipped the sample, and once again she walked out of the building without being stopped. In the bakery, once December arrived, they crushed bits of peppermint and sprinkled them over icing. Mary stayed in her corner of the kitchen, Evelyn in the other, and they worked in peaceful silence. Sometimes sugar burned, sometimes pots boiled over, but for the most part their movements in the kitchen were harmonious, one pushing a pan into the oven when the other pulled one out. If Mary’s timer rang while Evelyn was near the oven, she would open it and check on what was in there, and Mary did the same for her. She worked hard, stayed on her feet for ten hours straight, ate a dinner of burned corners and day-old bread, and every night she went to sleep happy.

Another Christmas, another bitter winter. The Hudson froze and children skated on its shores. Several times Mary thought she spotted Alfred, once entering the bakery, another time loping up the avenue, but it was never Alfred, and she hoped that wherever he was he was warm and dry. Maybe he’d gone to Canada. He’d always said New York was too small for him, too cramped. Maybe he’d gone south. With so many Negroes moving north it was said that there was work down there. Or maybe he was still in New York City, back with Liza Meaney. Maybe they’d married and gone upstate. Maybe Liza had helped him back on the wagon and gone through with the marriage. Maybe they’d had a child together.

When 1912 came Mary remembered that Alfred would have a birthday that year, having only one in every four, and calculated how many birthdays he’d had so far, and how it always seemed to soothe him, seeing February 29 on the newspaper, as if it proved that the date really did exist, and so did he. On the day after Alfred’s birthday Mary heard it said that a man had jumped from a moving airplane with the help of an enormous silk cloth that unfurled from a backpack as he floated all the way to the ground, unharmed, and it struck her that Alfred would be interested in that. It’s the kind of thing that would have kept him home for an evening, to talk about that with Mary, how man was getting more and more clever every year.

There was no use thinking of Alfred anymore, or expecting him to appear, or feeling as if he was watching her sometimes, or thinking of things she would say to him if she ever saw him again. She’d known him more than twenty years, and late at night, when she was tucked into her cot in the Borriellos’ kitchen, the boys snoring in the room beside her, the vent rattling behind the stove, the voices of other tenants traveling up the airshaft so that she could hear their conversations as plainly as if they were sitting at the foot of her bed, she quizzed herself: do you really think Alfred is gone for good? It had been fifteen months since she’d seen or heard from him. “Yes,” she whispered to those who might hear her along the airshaft, and pulled the blankets up around her shoulders. But shrouded inside her mind, hidden so well sometimes she feared she’d never find it again, was a single flame that she cupped with her hand, and blew into, and added twig after twig to. He’ll be back, she thought, and like every night when she had trouble sleeping, once she admitted what she knew was true, her head sunk deeper into the pillow, and she finally fell asleep.

In April, the Titanic reached Queenstown, and Mary thought of what a beautiful journey that would have been compared to her own crossing. Only five days later she’d not gotten twenty feet from her building when a newsboy shouted at her, “J. J. Astor is lost on the Titanic! As many as eighteen hundred dead!” He waved the New-York Daily Courant in her face, and she fished out coins to purchase it. People were huddled around, sharing their copies and reading bits aloud.

“And Mrs. Astor?” a woman called.

“Alive!” The boy shouted. “She’s being brought on the Carpathia!”

All of New York stayed on the subject for the whole month of April. Mila said she couldn’t sleep for thinking of it, all those drowned people in the icy waters, so far from home. When the Carpathia arrived it was swarmed with those who wanted to get a look at the survivors, most of all Mrs. Astor, who stopped to let a holy man bless her pregnant belly. And when the Mackay-Bennett got to Halifax with three hundred of the bodies, Mary wondered why the survivors came to New York, but the dead did not, and what a gruesome job for the men at the docks that day.

In May 1912, one whole year after Mary started at the bakery, Jacob pushed open the swinging door that led to the kitchen and told her to come up front, there was a man there who wanted to see her.

“A man?” she asked. “For me?”

Mary’s hands shook as she returned the sifter to its spot. Evelyn halted her beating of half a dozen eggs to glance at her. “Did he ask for the baker or ask for me by name?”

“Just come up front,” Jacob said, and Mary noticed that it was unusually quiet up front for that hour of the morning. Normally, Mary could hear the chatter of customers at the counter, making their selections, some standing there eating what they purchased straight from the paper bags, but that morning she heard nothing except the sound of waiting, and Jacob holding open the door as she went to the sink, washed her hands, dried them, unpinned her hair, and then pinned it again. If Alfred went to the building first they would have told him where to find her. The Borriello boys met her sometimes, walked home with her, and even Jacob had gotten used to seeing them there. Sometimes she sent day-olds with them at midday so they could eat them before she got home. When there were lots of day-olds she sent enough for Fran and Joan as well, and she knew that sometimes those stale pastries and cookies and slices of pie never made it to Thirty-Third Street. Sometimes those two rascals found a patch of sidewalk, set themselves up on the ground, and ate every last crumb.

She touched her fingertips to the counter and thought of him standing out there. She would know in an instant if he was off the wagon or on. She pictured him married to Liza Meaney and decided it was best to believe that he was when she pushed out the door to face him; that way she wouldn’t be disappointed.

But she didn’t see anyone until Jacob stepped aside and she saw a man who was not Alfred standing before the window, his hands clasped behind his back.

“Mary Mallon,” Dr. Soper said. He didn’t step forward. He didn’t extend his hand. “I’m just after telling your boss about your history, and he’s agreed that you are to be let go.”

Mary felt all her blood rush to her throat and a reverberation begin in her ears. She staggered, and placed one hand on the counter. His hair shone, his shoes shone, his cheeks were as smooth and bare as a baby’s bottom, and his mustache was trimmed to perfection, every single little hair. He was as she remembered him, a wax figure, a nose that could stick a pig, a pale, ineffectual weakling of a man who preyed on healthy, strong women.

“He’s told you lies,” Mary said to Jacob, her voice a choked whisper, and then noticed the counter, where the newspaper articles about her case were lined up and labeled.

“I can’t risk it, Mary,” Jacob said.

“Have you had any complaints?” she demanded. “Has anyone come back to say they were made sick from what they ate here?”

“I’ve already told him that they haven’t, but he said that doesn’t matter. If they got the fever they might not realize where they got it. We wouldn’t know.”

Mary picked up a plate of lemon squares and flung them across the room at Soper. Soper stepped neatly to the side, then reached over and locked the entrance door.

“What did I tell you?” he said to Jacob.

“Please, Mary,” Jacob said. “He says we can’t sell anything until you’re gone and the kitchen scrubbed. I’m losing money every minute. If the DOH puts a notice in my window I’m done for, do you understand?”

“Miss Mallon. Please gather your things and come with me.” Soper said. “I’m bringing you directly to Commissioner Lederle’s office.”

Evelyn slipped through the swinging door and put her hand on Mary’s shoulder.

“You’re making a mistake,” Evelyn said to the men. Mary felt herself sway, and Evelyn braced her harder. She let Evelyn guide her to the back room.

“It’ll be fine. You’ll get something else,” Evelyn assured her as she stuffed the largest box with pastries.

“You don’t understand,” Mary said as Evelyn dropped loaves of fresh bread into the canvas satchel Mary took back and forth every day. He’d come with news clippings, and yet no police. He’d found her by chance. He carried the clippings around in his pocket. Maybe he’d followed her. Maybe the DOH had let him see her file and he’d gone looking for that address, one digit off, a building that didn’t exist. He’d suspected, but wasn’t sure, so he sussed out the situation himself. If he’d been sure, he would have brought police. Right now, she figured, he was strongly regretting not thinking out a better plan.

“Go now, this way, so you won’t have to face him,” Evelyn counseled. “I’ll stall him.”

Mary had taken one step out the door to the alley when she thought to explain to Evelyn what had happened. How would she put it? With only a few seconds, how to make her understand?

“I used to cook for a family uptown, and they said—”

“Oh, I followed your case,” Evelyn said, pushing her out with more force. “I recognized you on the first day.”

Mary gaped at the woman, and Evelyn shrugged. “You didn’t lie. You told your name. Go on now, Mary. Good luck.”

Clutching the box of pastries and with her bag of bread pinned under her arm, Mary ran down the alley and out onto the avenue.

TWENTY-ONE

Mila watched in silence as Mary swept her powders and creams from the sill. In the twenty months that she’d lived there, Mary was careful to keep her things within the space she’d been allotted: under her cot, the windowsill, a shelf in the pantry, one drawer in Mila’s dresser. “Where will you go?” Mila asked as Mary shoved her belongings in her old velvet satchel.

“I don’t know,” Mary said as she looked around for the boys’ scratch pads. But when she found them and touched the tip of the pencil to the paper, she realized she didn’t know what to say. She drew a picture of a bird, and below it, two stick-figure boys holding hands.

“What will you do?” Mary asked as she picked up her satchel and placed it at the door.

“What will you do? You write to tell me where you land,” she said, and Mary swore that she would. “And you’ll come back, won’t you? After everything has settled down?”

“Yes, yes. Of course.”

“Why don’t you go down and stay with Fran for a while? If they knock I’ll tell them I haven’t seen you.”

Mary imagined Soper showing up with an army of policemen behind him. She imagined them staking out the entrance of the building, kicking down doors, throwing back bedclothes, and peering into closets.

“I’m sorry. I just have to go.”

She had been rushing since she left the bakery and felt breathless, faster than everything moving around her. She passed Fran’s floor without slowing, passed Joan’s door, glanced down the hall toward Driscoll’s old rooms, where a young man had been living for a year, and when she burst out onto the sidewalk she bent her head and walked north for no reason except that there were fewer people in that direction, and she’d be able to walk faster. She hopped onto the trolley on Thirty-Sixth Street, and held on as it turned, then came to an abrupt stop to let a dog cross the track, and again a half block later to let people on. She exited at the rear and hoisted her bag over her shoulder.

There had been no trace of Alfred since she left him behind in the vestibule that early winter morning almost a year and a half earlier, and she considered going to Nation’s to find out if they’d seen him, but when she got her chance she kept going, past the bright blue door, past his other favorite spots. She arrived at Grand Central Terminal, where she dodged the trolleys approaching from every direction, and entered the building. Once inside, she followed the ramps up and around until she came to the main waiting area, the ceiling so distant it might as well have been the sky, and found an empty space on one of the long benches lined up before the timetable.

Every person who passed her was on his or her way someplace. Those seated looked up at the board once in a while, then at the clock, then back down at their hands to wait a few minutes longer. The announcer made a boarding call for Scarsdale, for Poughkeepsie. From behind her they called for Philadelphia. The best dressed waited in a separate area for the Twentieth Century Limited to Chicago. She scanned the boards for a train to Dobbs Ferry, and then watched closely as the people who wanted that train stood up, checked behind them for forgotten items, hurried off. The announcer made another boarding call. Another. Mary moved her bag from her lap to the floor by her feet and felt her back bend to the curve in the wood. She touched her fingertips to her closed eyelids and felt a tingle in her nose, the sob that had been brewing there all day rise up like a wave lifts itself from the rest of the ocean, rushes forth, spreads itself on shore.

“Madam?” a man tapped her on the shoulder. He wore a uniform: a jacket and matching cap. “Would you like to wait in the women’s parlor? Do you know where it is?”

Mary thought he meant the lav, so when he led her to a large oak door and knocked twice, and then told the woman who answered that Mary just needed to rest, and should not be charged the twenty-five-cent fee, she felt afraid that he’d misunderstood something about her, and when they found her out, there would be trouble. But he encouraged her forward, and the woman who opened the door led her first through a small room where women’s light spring coats were hung, and then into a larger room, finished in quartered oak, a Persian-style rug covering the floor. She pointed out one of several rocking chairs. “Thank you,” she said to the woman, and the woman gave Mary a small curtsy as she backed away. Mary registered the small round vanity mirrors placed here and there, the full-length mirrors by the changing rooms. Though it was set up like a lounge in a private home, every step of a woman’s toilet was available for sale, and adjoining the oak-paneled room was a fingernail manicuring room, a shoe polisher, a hairstylist, a seamstress. There was an area where a woman could change from traveling clothes to evening clothes, and women in blue uniforms bustled about to help them. One approached Mary, reached for her bag, but Mary clutched it closer, and the woman went away.

She could have stayed in that warm and gleaming room for a month, but they wouldn’t have let her, and so what was the point of staying for even an hour if she knew she’d have to leave again, eventually, and had nowhere to go. She studied a painting on the wall — a river, a field of flowers — and remembered her promise to John Cane that she’d look him up, go walking with him one day. She could go to him, she knew. She could meet the ferry and when he got off she could approach him, tell him what had happened, ask if she could stay with him for a while, and he would let her. She’d have to listen to him, and he might pretend at first that he wouldn’t let her, but he would, in the end. She knew he would. Or he might know of someone who needed a boarder. There was a brother, too, she remembered, something wrong with him, but nothing she couldn’t handle, she was sure, just until she got on her feet. She would be kind to him.

But when she left the ladies’ parlor and made for the uptown IRT, she paused only for a second at the top of the steps before she walked on, walked east, back to the boardinghouse where she’d stayed before finding her cot at Mrs. Post’s. If the woman remembered her she made no sign, and as she was led up the back stairs she knew before they stopped at a door that it would be the same room she’d slept in back in 1910. “Breakfast at seven,” the woman said, and when Mary shut the door and dropped the latch, she collapsed onto the narrow bed and slept.

Breakfast was two rows of glum faces spooning porridge into their mouths, chewing, swallowing. Mary pushed away her plate. When she stepped out into the sun a dozen pigeons clucked and flew off as one. Along with the loose gray-black spots they left on the sidewalk were feathers, old milk cartons, a box of cracker meal broken open and left now to be blown around in the breeze.

With her bag slung over her shoulder, she walked for an hour. West, mostly, but also south. She stopped to stuff paper into the heel of her shoe. Her shoulder ached. At ten she stopped at a park, took off her shoes, and walked on the grass behind the benches while she ate a pear. When there was not a single bit of flesh left on the fruit, she picked up her bag and continued south, until she came to City Hall, and across from City Hall, the almost-complete skyscraper where Jimmy Tiernan spent his days hanging dozens of stories above the sidewalk, guiding terra-cotta panels into place. The pyramid at the top made the whole thing feel like a cathedral, Mary thought, as she tipped her head back and gazed up.

“Jimmy,” she called out when she saw him coming almost two hours later, one set of hunched shoulders among so many. There was a ring of yellow sweat at his throat.

“Mary,” he said, and stepped away from the pack. His lunch pail was small in his large hand.

“Can I talk to you a second?”

“What’s happened?” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Did Patricia send you?”

“No,” Mary said, and hesitated. The other men were watching them. They were lined up now against a wall, some squatting, some standing, some sitting, spread legged. They pulled sandwiches and thermoses from the depths of their pockets and ate. She turned her back to them, so she could see only Jimmy.

“I wondered, um, if you ever found out where Alfred went.”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t you remember looking for him last year? When there was a job here for him?”

“Sure. But did he disappear again?”

Mary blinked up at him. “What do you mean? Did you find him after that?”

“You mean you didn’t know?”

“Know what? I haven’t seen him.”

Jimmy took her by the elbow and led her over to the steps of City Hall.

“There was an accident, Mary. A fire. A lamp exploded in his hands and he got badly burned. He was in Willard Parker for months, and then at a hospital for burned people up in Harlem.”

Mary shook her head. “What are you talking about?”

“I found out only because I got so curious I went over to the stable one afternoon to see if they’d seen him. They said it happened right there, at the stable, just before Christmas in 1910.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Then when he got out of the burn place he came down here looking for me, looking for work, I guess, but there wasn’t nothing to give him. So I says to him, ‘Briehof, what you should do is head west to one of the middle states. Good work there. Make yourself a little house.’ And I swear to God, Mary, I think he did it. I think he just went and did it, just like that. Crazy as a loon, that guy. You didn’t seem to want to talk about him so I told Patricia to tell you. I know you two don’t get on so well but I figured she’d told you or told Fran to tell you and you ladies had talked about it and decided what to think about it. And then I figured he’d write to you. He asked about you, you know.”

“No. No, Patricia didn’t tell me.”

Jimmy picked up his sandwich, and offered half to Mary. She took it gratefully.

“Where’s the hospital?”

“West 127th, I think. Maybe 128th. Between Broadway and Amsterdam.”

“Maybe they know where he went. Maybe they have an address.”

“I doubt it, Mary. When he came to see me it was November. Six months ago. And then if he headed west…”

How could he have traveled so far away without telling her? How could he have been so badly hurt without her knowing? They sat in silence, looking up at the top of the skyscraper. “Fifty-five stories,” Jimmy said. “You believe that?”

Mary could just make out the shape of a man on one of the beams near the top.

“But he was all right? Recovered? How bad was he burned?”

“Pretty bad. But he was better when I saw him.”

“Why didn’t Patricia tell me? You should have double-checked, Jimmy. You should have known Patricia wouldn’t tell me. I have a good mind to go up there and tell her what I think of her.”

Jimmy sighed. “Don’t take it up the wrong way, Mary, please. We have enough trouble.”

• • •

The burn hospital was newer than the buildings surrounding it, the stonework not yet blackened. She expected something like Willard Parker, or like Riverside, but it was a modest building, four stories, no sign of its purpose except for a small placard over the door with simple letters: St. John the Apostle Burn Recovery Hospital of Morningside Heights. There were trees lining the street and a group of young girls clustered around a toy pram. Mary rang the bell, and the door was answered by a nun dressed entirely in white. The nun ushered her into the small, marble-floored reception area. The halls were silent, and Mary glanced quickly up the stairs, at a large, stained-glass window on the landing between the first and second floors. Aside from Central Park, where it was possible to hear birds and crickets in summer, and aside from North Brother, it was the quietest place Mary had ever visited in Manhattan.

“I’m looking for a patient named Alfred Briehof,” Mary said to the nun in a whisper. The sound of a bed being rolled on casters echoed from an upper floor. “I know he’s been released, but I wondered if you had an address for him.”

“Briehof,” the nun said. “Excuse me.”

Bending her head so that Mary could not see the expression below her habit, the nun turned to a desk and pulled open a lower drawer. She ran her fingers across the names at the top of the files. Forward and back her fingers crawled. She closed the drawer and opened another, ran her fingers again.

“Briehof,” she announced, pulling a file out of the drawer. “Released,” she said once she’d looked it over. “Let’s see here. Yes, back in November. Pardon me. What is your relationship?” She glanced at Mary’s bag, which she’d placed on a bench in the waiting area.

Mary cleared her throat. “I’m his sister. Just found out about the accident. I’m visiting New York and this is the last place I have for him.”

“I see,” the nun turned back to the file and Mary prayed that it didn’t note anywhere that he was German. She considered what she’d say if the nun asked Mary to explain how brother and sister could have different accents.

“He signed himself out.”

“Is there a new address?”

“No. I’m sorry.”

Mary sighed. “Was he very bad?” The nun tipped the file so that it would flap open again.

“Hard to say,” she said after a moment of reading. “He was here for several months. That’s a long time. On the other hand, he’s alive. He left.”

“Yes,” Mary whispered. It was true. “Does it say anything about him going out west? To find work?”

The nurse shook her head. “No, but if he left the area that would explain why he missed his follow-up appointments. Patients with his injuries usually come in to get new prescriptions once a month.” Mary thought of all the states he’d ever mentioned wanting to see. How would she find him now?

A piece of paper slid out of the file and onto the floor.

“Wait,” the nun said. She read the sheet that had fallen. “I see. He stopped in just a few weeks ago with a few complaints. You were right. He’d been in Minnesota for a few months, but he returned just a few weeks ago and the doctor gave him new prescriptions. It references that he lives on 125th Street, but it doesn’t say East or West or any building number.”

The nun turned the paper over to check the back. “I suppose you could try the doctor’s office. Explain that you’re his sister.” The nun took a pencil from her pocket and scribbled the doctor’s address on a corner of the paper and then tore the corner off.

“Thank you.”

“I assume you already tried his next of kin?”

“Who?”

“His wife. I imagine she knows where he is. Though seeing her address now I wonder why he isn’t living with her. Perhaps their situation changed due to his injury.”

“His wife?” Mary tried to control her expression. “It’s been several years since I’ve seen my brother.”

“Well, he listed a wife when he was admitted,” the nun glanced down. “A Mary Mallon of East Thirty-Third Street.”

TWENTY-TWO

When Alfred woke, he was on his back, a pillow tucked under his head, another under his arm. A small, square window. A distant ceiling. A closed door. He shifted his leg and gasped at the pain it brought. Part of his body was covered with gauze. There was a lamp on the table beside his bed and he tried to turn toward it. He lifted his right arm and felt a brilliant heat light up inside his body and blossom forward, pushing out from his muscle and bone.

When he opened his eyes again there was a nurse looking at him from behind a clipboard. He opened and closed his eyes several times. Sometimes it was light in the room, sometimes dark. Sometimes a man was watching him, sometimes a woman, usually no one at all. In the background there were sounds: shoes scuffing a linoleum floor, people talking in low voices, the squeaking wheels of a rolling cart. But instead of interrupting the silence, the atmosphere of total stillness, of nothingness, that sensation of floating through an in-between place, the noises only emphasized the void, drew attention to it, and after every small bump or rattle the world seemed even quieter than before.

Several times a day, from somewhere so near his body he knew he could reach out and touch it if he could make his body work, was the delicate tink of glass, and the unmistakable flick of a finger, once, twice, and then a pinprick, usually in the crook of his elbow, sometimes in his forearm, occasionally the back of his hand. After a moment — one, two, three — he felt a small quiver at his center, pressure on his chest and head that lasted just long enough for him to begin feeling panic, and then peace, as if someone had warmed a blanket by the stove and pulled it up over him, tucked it in at his shoulders and turned out the light. It was a feeling like being born, a baby tucking chin to chest and pushing into that dark tunnel, or the lead weight used to plumb a depth, and the prize was reaching that destination, finding the depth, and sometimes he felt the sea rocking under his bed. He heard the sound of the ocean. He heard his mother’s voice, took in the smell of the Alps, German grass under his feet, German air. Then, as if he’d taken one giant leap across a continent and ocean, he was in New York, a mountain of coal behind him, Mary on the other side of a gate, Mary stirring a pot with her back to the room, Mary unpinning her hair and shaking it loose. He spoke to his father. He spoke to his brother. He laughed with Mary as they danced in Coney Island, in Hoboken, in Manhattan. He whisked her across the gleaming black-and-white floor of his hospital room. He was seven years old and there were thin slices of pine strapped to his feet. He was fifteen and strong, dodging a policeman on Mercer. He was forty and tired, but summoning the strength to get up and start again.

Eventually, there were things he knew, and so somebody must have told him, though he couldn’t think of who or when. Time stretched and stretched until it snapped: an hour felt like a week, and then a week felt like a day. He knew it was the new year, but then the nurse put a hand on Alfred’s cheek and told him it was the Ides of March. March already. Almost spring. He was in a hospital. He’d been badly burned. There was some question about whether he’d use his right arm again: everything below the elbow had been destroyed almost to the muscle. His upper chest on that side was in better shape, but there was still a risk of infection. Had he spoken to them? They asked him questions sometimes, and waited for answers. How do you feel? What exactly happened? Don’t you know how lucky you are?

They fed him. They washed his body. Catholic? He’d nodded, yes, he guessed he probably was, but had he ever been baptized? He’d been to Mass a few times, with Mary and her aunt Kate. A priest came to offer the Eucharist one Sunday and he opened his mouth to accept it. After, he had bad dreams about them finding out and putting him on the street, but he continued to accept it, Sunday after Sunday, and eventually he looked forward to the priest’s visit, the knobby hand he always placed on Alfred’s head before leaving. On Easter Sunday they brought him lamb with mint jelly and fed him in forkfuls small enough for a child. On the Fourth of July they told him to look toward his window, where he could see flashes of blue, pink, bright white sparklers rising up and landing somewhere nearby. He could hear birds, and then, after a few weeks, the birds disappeared. Spring and summer had come and left again.

They told him he was getting better. He had no infection. He’d be able to use his arm one day though it would not be pleasant to look at. His nerves had been badly burned and yes, that was bad news, but on the other hand it meant he wouldn’t feel pain there anymore. He was being moved. It would be uncomfortable but they’d give him something for it.

The burn hospital was uptown, they’d told him. It was a charity hospital, run by nuns, all of whom had vowed to live in service to St. John the Apostle. They didn’t expect anything in return. A donation, perhaps, whatever he could spare. It was in a quiet neighborhood. Quieter than this? He’d asked, and they laughed. “Something for the journey,” the nurse had said, and he closed his eyes to listen for the tink, tink of the little glass vial.

There were trees outside his window at St. John’s. Their shadows swayed on his wall when the wind blew. The nuns wanted him to walk more, to do laps around the hallway. They wanted him to practice lifting a teacup, gripping a fork, washing himself. He complained of itching all over his body. He vomited. He didn’t like it there. He wanted to go back to Willard Parker. They gave him his medicine by tablet — two round white pills three times a day that he placed on his tongue and tipped back into his throat before the nun could pass him a cup of water. The pills helped, eventually, but not like the needle. The needle sent him floating from the very instant it punctured his skin. Syringes were expensive, a nurse explained, and they were a charity hospital. They had to use what they were given: morphine, opium, codeine, cocaine, heroin. Tablets, tinctures, salts for sniffing. It was all the same, all for managing pain. They wanted to be a bit careful about the morphine, they told him. In the past, they’d noticed several patients had difficulty weaning after they were healed. Several doctors suggested cocaine or heroin instead. They usually brought him a tincture of opium after supper, and he swallowed every bitter drop, but he couldn’t sleep in so much silence. The groaning of the trees kept him up all night. It was too cold at St. John’s, and when it wasn’t too cold it was too warm. He was getting worse.

“You are not getting worse,” a nun informed him in a subdued voice. “You have healed wonderfully. It’s been more than ten months since the accident.” He wanted to take her by the shoulders and shake her. Didn’t they realize the extent of his injuries? Even when he finally slept it was not restful, and only when he began howling through the night, waking the other patients, did a harried doctor appear with a needle and syringe. After, he was serene. He slept. They added the nightly injection to his bedtime routine.

He spent afternoons trying to make his way around the corridors and he wondered at his old self, how he always seemed to be on his way somewhere, itching to get free of whatever room he was in. Now, even with so little to do, the days passed quickly and sweetly. He walked. He rested. He considered the shadows on the wall. He closed his eyes and listened. He returned to his room for his medicine and noted that he never had to even look at a clock. His body told him when it was time, and sure enough, usually within a minute of returning to his room, resting at the edge of his bed, someone would appear with a white cup, and he took anything they gave him as he anticipated the after-supper hour when the doctor would appear with the syringe.

In November, they told him he was ready, that he should start planning. Was there a job to get back to? Someone to contact? Crystal Springs had given him a settlement of one hundred dollars, which by some miracle the hospital hadn’t taken from him. He left twenty-five dollars to the nuns. On the morning of his discharge they shaved him, cut his hair, gave him a suit of clothes, a hat, shoes, a small container of tablets for the pain. A doctor named Tropp who kept hours at the hospital, and had his own office nearby, would prescribe something else if the tablets didn’t do the job. If he ran out of medicine and Dr. Tropp was unavailable, he should go to a pharmacy and ask for something. Any druggist would give him a tincture of opium or a small dose of heroin until the doctor could see him.

When he got outside to the street for the first time in eleven months, he walked immediately to Dr. Tropp’s office. He told the doctor that the nuns had given him pills, but that at night he needed something stronger. Just as he’d hoped, Dr. Tropp asked if he was familiar with administering medicine by needle. “Of course,” Alfred said. Once Alfred had paid, the doctor handed over a small bag containing a single glass syringe, two needles, several vials of liquid morphine, a prescription for more. Back on the sidewalk, Alfred placed the bag carefully in his jacket pocket. He climbed the long staircase to the El platform and protected his pocket as the train pulled in and the other riders pushed against him. His arm was ugly but worked just fine. He could grasp a fork, turn a knob. Sometimes it ached and felt tired. They had shown him exercises to make the muscle stronger, but he found the medicine was the best to help that feeling of lopsidedness, of tightness on one side and looseness on the other. The medicine was an equalizer and made his whole body the same, his thoughts peaceful and quiet and the days kind. His chest was taut, like the skin there had shrunk, but the medicine helped that, too. With the medicine he felt at ease, and he moved along the paper-strewn streets in an even rhythm, throwing one foot loosely in front of the other, feeling the momentum of his arms swinging by his side. Even his head felt perched perfectly at the top of his neck. At Thirty-Fourth Street he climbed the stairs to the street, walked south one block, and then across, all the way east, until he spotted the old building. He halted, brushed his pocket to make sure nothing had been damaged. He moved a little closer, and then sat down on a stoop.

Was she still at the same laundry? Still staying with Mila? It wasn’t long before he saw her, walking up Third Avenue from the opposite direction, a young boy on either side of her. They were talking, competing for her attention, and she was serious with them though Alfred could see that whatever they were saying, she was happy. She was holding a box. She placed her hand on the head of the shorter boy, and he took the box from her. The two boys ran ahead and she shouted something after them. She touched her collar, the back of her hair. She looked young. Nowhere was that put-upon expression she used to wear, that hard look she got when she moved around him in their rooms, running a rag across the counter, closing her mind to the fact that he was there. If he washed a pan he should have scoured it. If he put away the sugar, she found some he’d spilled on the floor. He was useless. He was lazy. He was a drunk. He didn’t love her. He didn’t know the half of what she did for him.

“Alfred,” she used to say, more softly than she ever spoke when he was sober. “You have to stop this.”

She quickened her step, and Alfred walked out to the middle of the sidewalk. She was directly across the street now. If she turned her head, she’d see him there. Do it now, he told himself. Now. But he just watched her, and then she was gone, disappeared into the building and up the stairs.

• • •

Driscoll was dead, the Lower East Side was off-limits in case he would run into Liza, so Alfred paid the bartender to sleep on a cot in the back room of Nation’s for a night. He had no desire to have a drink, and again wondered at his old self. The next morning, he went downtown to talk to Jimmy Tiernan. Jimmy knew someone who knew someone who’d gotten work in Minnesota, clearing land, and who said it was the best work he’d ever had in his life. Hard work, but good work. Clean air. No punch card. No boss breaking balls every minute. Jimmy wanted to go there himself, but Patricia would never agree to it. They could build a log house — three, four, five rooms, however many they wanted. They could clear land and sell the timber. They could keep livestock. Plant crops. But the farthest Patricia would go was Queens. He laughed. “But you,” he said to Alfred, “what’s stopping you? Go in the spring, when the weather isn’t so bad.”

It had been raining in New York for two weeks. Steady, gray, wet rain that made the city wilt. In Minnesota, in the winter, Jimmy said it gets too cold to rain. The air would freeze the damp hairs inside a man’s nose, but at least the sky was blue and big.

A train left Grand Central Terminal for Chicago twice a week. From Chicago Alfred could switch to a train headed for Minneapolis. From Minneapolis he’d just have to find his way as the days took him. It was difficult imagining there were cities so far away, cities with their own riverfronts and barges and garbage and odors. It was sobering to think of traveling so far, at such speed, and still covering only half of America. New York was not like the rest of America, not even close. Anyone who read a paper knew that. In Minnesota every farm had good water, a creek slicing through, rich earth, plentiful grazing. The people ate only white bread and meat, every day. The trees grew up straight and grazed the sky. There were people who set up their homes and didn’t see other families for all of winter, which in Minnesota lasted a full six months. In New York, there was no way to escape other people, acquaintances and strangers — they brushed by him every minute of every day, begging for coins, asking that balances be paid. They bumped him in the street without apologizing. They smelled of their kitchens, their cabbage and beets and smoked meats and spices brought all the way from the old country, sewn into the linings of cuffs and pockets. They grabbed the best of the fruit at the market and grazed his toes with their automobiles or their wagon wheels as he crossed the street. Minnesota wasn’t the only option. There were other places: Wisconsin. Wyoming. New Mexico and Arizona were said to be hot year-round, and if a man went walking in the desert he’d be tanned like leather inside an hour. There were Indians in the middle country. New York had places with Indian names but no Indians anymore. They’d all gone west.

He told Jimmy it was a good idea. He didn’t need to think about it. He’d go. He’d build a house there, way out in the country, and send for Mary. One way or another, he’d convince her to give him another chance, to join him out west where they could truly start over again. He hated thinking about the last time they’d spoken, that morning in the vestibule of the old building, the sight he must have been after so many days drinking, sleeping here and there. And the look on her face that told him how serious she was, how desperate she was to make him go away. When he spoke to her next he’d have something to show for himself. A plan. She’d see how sorry he was.

“Now?” Jimmy had asked. “Wait until Christmas. Wait until the New Year.”

“Now,” Alfred said.

He bought an honest ticket to Chicago, and an honest meal aboard the train, but for the switch between Chicago and Minneapolis he slipped onto the train and into the tiny lav until the train started moving. When he finally opened the door an attendant saw him and was about to shout when Alfred held up his hand and then with the other hand reached deep into his pocket. A dollar would shut him up, and was still less than the price of a ticket. Feeling tired, and beginning to worry that it was a terrible idea to venture so far from New York, Alfred stepped back into the lav and with one foot bracing the door, and the other on the ledge of the commode, he removed a needle from his jacket pocket, wiped it on his shirt, attached it to the delicate syringe, and pushed it into one of the small vials of morphine. He drew the plunger back as the train leaned into a turn. For the rest of the journey the young man ignored him as Alfred slept across two seats at the rear of the car, and when he wasn’t sleeping he stared out the window at the trees, which grew taller and stronger the closer he got to Minnesota. He pictured the trees in New York, imagined them gasping for air, fighting for space.

Once in Minneapolis he found the riverfront and got a job loading sacks of flour as big as a man for the Gold Medal Factory. The boardinghouse he found was cleaner than any he’d seen in New York, the people less threatening. They all looked at Alfred with some curiosity and after a few days he realized he was the one they thought of when they locked their doors. The worst of his arm was visible only during the inside hours, when the men worked so hard they started steaming, and Alfred rolled up the cuffs of his shirt. The nuns had given him a bad haircut and he hadn’t shaved since Harlem. He needed to clean his clothes. He needed to find a doctor and a druggist. Seeing the bruises on his arm, and on the other arm, the deformed skin, a man on his shift suggested a place on Hennepin Avenue that would help him. A smoking lounge, the man called it, and Alfred went there expecting it to be run by a Chinese, but like everything else in Minneapolis it was run by a white — a lean man, once blond, with a beard and a caftan tied around the middle with a rope. The man had come to Minneapolis from San Francisco and greeted Alfred as though he might be a long-lost brother from the opposite coast. “They’re different here,” the man informed Alfred. He instructed him on how to hold the pipe, and waved a hand toward the chairs scattered around the eerie silence of the room. Alfred didn’t respond, so the man returned to the front room, and no one spoke to Alfred.

He chose a rocking chair by the window, which faced the Mississippi and a little island in the middle of the river. He thought of Mary and her hut. When he closed his eyes he saw her pacing, looking out across the water toward him. He wondered if she’d gone looking for him since the accident. He assumed Jimmy Tiernan had told her what happened, and he knew he should send her a letter. He hadn’t had a drink since Christmas 1910. He would tell her that. Or maybe it would be better to wait until he’d been north, seen what it had to offer, seen what kind of life they could make there.

After two weeks he began asking for work up north, clearing land. The men he spoke with told tales of snow that reached the tops of trees, air so cold it would freeze a man’s pecker in under three seconds if he went out to take a leak. The fish froze in the rivers. Birds that didn’t go south dropped from the trees like stones and woke up again in the spring melt to fly away. He’d have to drag his food out there and back. He’d have to pack enough for four months, at least, maybe five. He’d have to be strict about what he ate so he wouldn’t run out. “Cover up that arm when you go looking for work,” a man advised him. “No one will want to see that coming.”

“It’s ugly but it’s fine,” Alfred said, looking at the skin of his right arm. It reminded him of candle wax, melted, lopsided, dips and ridges where the wax ran free. He couldn’t feel anything on the surface of that arm, and so sometimes he had to look down at it to see if his shirt sleeve was rolled up or down. Sometimes he dug his fingernails in, hard, but all he felt was pressure on the bone.

“No, I mean that,” the man said, taking hold of Alfred’s good arm and holding it to the light. “What are you going to do about that?”

Alfred pulled his arm away and, quick as a gasp, had the other man’s arm twisted behind his back. “Don’t touch me,” he growled. The man didn’t speak to him again.

Hauling flour was exhausting work, and at night, he slept from the moment his head touched the pillow to the moment the sun reached his face. He heard of a clinic alongside Lake Harriet where the doctors understood about pain management, and gave out prescriptions for those who could pay for it. Alfred showed his injuries to a Dr. Karlson and explained his plan to go to the North Country after Christmas and work up there until spring. Dr. Karlson wrote a prescription for a winter’s worth of tablets and four large bottles of tincture, plus additional morphine, two more needles, another syringe. Alfred paid for all of it, and noted that he was going north just in time. The drugs were cheap — a vial of morphine was cheaper than a bottle of whiskey — but still, his stack of money was growing lighter every day. The doctor told Alfred to try to limit his intake or he might have stomach trouble, difficulty getting going in the morning, problems sustaining energy throughout the day. Stay out of the dens, he warned Alfred. The smoking opium was mostly smuggled, and who knew what went into it. Stick to the prescription stuff, the stuff that had been checked out by the Board of Health. He took the tincture in the mornings and felt it travel his body as he ate his breakfast. The pills he kept in his pocket. The needles he saved for night. The itch that always began a few minutes after waking subsided by the time he began his walk to the riverfront, and everything seemed at arm’s-length, as if he were looking at someone else’s life. Before, in New York, he was so much a part of his own life that it nearly drowned him, but now, it was as if he floated alongside himself, and when something wasn’t quite right, he could simply lean over and make an adjustment.

At the boardinghouse, Christmas was acknowledged with bread pudding, a round of carols, and mulled wine. A French Canadian named Luc, part Indian, sold him an overcoat from the Hudson Bay Company. From a consignment store he bought heavy blanket trousers and a shoe pack, and the patient clerk showed him how to ease them on over two pairs of socks. If he did it right, the man swore, his feet would stay warm and dry. He bought two pairs of thick wool socks, two shirts, two vests, a fur cap.

In mid-January, Luc told him about a pair of brothers who’d purchased several acres on the cheap, and needed a pair of good axmen. “Are you handy with an ax?”

“Sure,” Alfred said.

“I’ll bet you are,” Luc said, but told him to meet him in a few days. When the day came, Alfred showed up wearing all the clothes he owned to find Luc had organized everything they would need onto two toboggans. When Alfred tugged his he guessed it weighed three hundred pounds. They had cornmeal, flour, lard, butter, a variety of smoked fish, ham, rice, molasses, axes, matches, picks, spades, hoes, sugar, guns, powder, and shot. Alfred had a season’s worth of medicine buttoned into his interior pockets, and could hear the faint rattle of the tablets as he moved. Luc had arranged for a wagon to carry them to the crossroads nearest to the brothers’ camp, and then they went the last twelve miles on foot, their toboggans sliding so easily along the crust of ice on the top layer of snow that they left no tracks.

They came upon the brothers after four hours of walking. Gustaf and Eric had made their camp on the edge of a pine grove, against a fallen tree trunk almost six feet thick. When they saw Luc and Alfred they stopped their work and walked over to pull the toboggans the rest of the way. The camp was as clever as Luc had described — poles cut neatly and laid sloping from the snow to the top of the tree trunk, topped with layers of spruce boughs and covered over by a rubber blanket. The brothers had banked the snow on the back and sides of this little structure, and built a fire in front. Each man had two blankets, and there was a pot slung over the fire.

It was a clean place, as sterile as white cotton, and Alfred felt his lungs growing stronger, his body becoming cleaner. Luc showed him how to wield the ax, how to bend the saw, and he got faster at it every day. Gustaf and Eric saw his burns and didn’t question him when he administered his medicine at night, nor in the morning when he washed the pills down with black coffee. His body worked like a machine and there was peace in the sweating, the breathing, the aching at night that was so completely different from the ache of his hips after lying in a hospital bed for almost a year. He ate more in one sitting than he used to eat in New York over an entire day. The older of the brothers commented that Alfred was getting stronger, and Alfred knew it was true. He held one side of the saw and Luc or one of the Swedes held the other, and where it used to take fifty passes to cut through a trunk, now it took a dozen, sometimes less. Back and forth, back and forth, the teeth of the saw bit deeper into the pale interior of the trunk and he’d feel his heart throbbing when the Swede pulled for the last time, held up his hand to watch the tree fall. They dragged the timber to the river where, in the spring, they’d trade it for meat and fresh fruit.

The sun went down early, before four o’clock, but the moon was so big and the stars so bright that Alfred realized nighttime meant something else that far north. There was no wind, nothing to stir the trees, and everything was so still and silent inside the warm cocoon of his woolen knits and oilcloth that he forgot the temperature. Minnesota was something to experience, and Alfred thought of Mary, how she’d have liked to see the sky so clear. The tent was as warm as any house, and Alfred wondered at his old self, always searching the corners of his pockets for a coin to put in the gas meter, how every person in New York was a slave to what he earned. Out in the cold wilderness, he’d have no need of money until the spring. He wanted to tell Mary about it. He wanted her to see.

Then one morning after Luc headed off to the crossroads on an errand to trade timber for a stump extractor, and as the brothers were halfway through a trunk as thick as a man laid on his side, they could see that the tree was leaning in the wrong direction and beginning to tip. They shouted to each other in their own language and quickly, foolishly, Gustaf, the older brother, threw his hands up and put his shoulder to the bark as it began to fall. From across the cleared space, a distance of seventy-five yards or so, Alfred watched in dumb silence. He saw Gustaf make a sudden move, and then the tree was down, and Eric was shouting. Alfred stared for a second longer and then realized Eric was shouting at him.

Gustaf was unconscious when they carried him into their shelter, and when they opened his shirt they could see right away that his shoulder was dislocated. “He’s alive, thank God,” Eric said, and Alfred nodded. It was true, but what did that matter now, when they were in the middle of nowhere with an injured man. Luc was not due back for several days and neither Alfred nor Eric had any idea what to do.

“Should we try to get it back into place?” Eric asked.

“I don’t know,” Alfred said.

Eric took hold of his older brother’s arm, and after dipping his head for a moment and drawing his breath, he placed a knee on his older brother’s chest to keep him still, and tried to shove the arm back into the socket. He tried again, roaring as he did so. Now Gustaf was awake and also roaring. Eric tried again. Again. He tore off his brother’s shirt to get a better grip. He gave his brother a spoon to clamp between his teeth. As Alfred held Gustaf’s legs, it occurred to him that they’d want his medicine. He’d told them it was for pain, and Gustaf’s pain was clearly worse than his own. He’d have to give it. If he didn’t give it they’d take it from him. They were peaceful men but they were brothers and they’d sooner kill him than have one of themselves harmed. He calculated how much was left from the clinic that overlooked Lake Harriet. He’d been disciplined about his dosage, treating himself to extra only a handful of times, and then only when the air was so cold and the skin over his wounds grew so tight that he was afraid it would crack open again.

He offered before they could ask, and they took it gratefully. Days went by. A week. Luc had not yet returned, and Eric wondered out loud if he should go to the crossroads himself, or send Alfred. Alfred understood the dilemma: with just three of them at camp, and Gustaf too injured to move, the one left behind would have to put caring for Gustaf above all things, and only Eric would do that. On the other hand, electing Alfred to go to the crossroads meant trusting a virtual stranger to do what he’d been asked to do, to find help, send it back to the woods to the brothers. The brothers didn’t trust him, Alfred saw now. Eric took and took Alfred’s medicine for his brother, and when Alfred suggested that he’d given enough, that he had to save some for himself, Eric looked at him so coldly that Alfred knew his first instinct had been correct. Better to keep giving than be killed. His dreams grew terrifying and he found he couldn’t sleep at all. His body hurt. He became nauseated. There were no odors in the North Country except pine and cold. The inside of his nose felt raw and he imagined a frozen path from his nostrils to his lungs.

He woke up one night to Eric shaking him awake. “What’s wrong with you?” he asked and Alfred realized he’d been shouting, thrashing. There was no sympathy in the question, only accusation. It wasn’t Alfred’s fault that Gustaf had miscalculated the tree. The Swedes talked all day long and sang songs, and where before their red faces had seemed so merry now they seemed to Alfred to be part of their selfishness. They were monsters, the two of them. Who but a monster would choose to live so far from civilization, would dig a hole in the snow and call it a place to live? There were strange animals in the North Country, tracks he didn’t recognize, and he knew they were all gathered somewhere deep in the shadows of the pines, waiting to see what he would do.

He would always be the odd man out, even if he handed over every single drop, every pill. Gustaf didn’t seem to be getting worse, but he wasn’t getting better, either, and now when Eric gave him more of Alfred’s medicine, Alfred felt his blood rise. He doesn’t need it, he said, and Eric looked at Alfred like he’d stepped out naked from behind a curtain. Alfred took bigger and bigger doses at night, and again in the morning so that he could get his share before the Swedes took everything. No more trees were cut. Where before the days had been full of the sounds of work — cutting, cracking, splintering, chopping — now the days were as still and silent as night except for the occasional sound of the skillet on the fire, the pop and crackle of bacon meeting the hot pan, Eric’s boots crunching the top layer of snow outside their tent flap, and finally, ten days after the accident, the sound of cracking on the river, like a volley of gunshots every few minutes, a racket unlike any Alfred had heard in his life.

“You have to go to the crossroads,” Eric told him one morning, two weeks after the accident. “Luc should have been back days ago. Send him back and bring help as well.” He put his hand on his brother’s head. “I think there’s something broken inside. Not just the shoulder. A few bones maybe. I don’t know.”

“I’m not sure I remember the way. Did we pass one other clearing or two? Can I take the compass?”

Eric looked at him with disgust. “You are not an axman,” he said bitterly as he shoved the compass to Alfred’s chest. “Leave that medicine for my brother’s pain.” He put his hand on the barrel of one of the shotguns that was lying on its side by Gustaf’s head. They kept it loaded in case of passing deer.

Alfred fished out one bottle of pills and gave it over easily, knowing he’d be back in the city soon.

“And the rest,” Eric said, using the shotgun to tap Alfred’s other pocket. Alfred closed his fingers around his last vial of morphine and the second bottle of bills. “I need it to get back. I can’t walk all that way and pull my things without it. I need it for rest. I don’t—”

Before Alfred could catch his breath he was on his back, and the Swede’s knee on his neck. He reached down with his good arm, found the bottle and vial, and pushed both into Eric’s face.

When he got to the crossroads he found Luc sitting between two men in the only public house for fifteen miles. All three glanced at Alfred as if they’d been expecting him. Alfred told Luc about the accident, told him about Gustaf’s injuries, but Luc nodded off while he was speaking. So Alfred returned to the crossroads to look for something to carry him back to the city.

• • •

It was April, and spring had already arrived in Minneapolis. The stink of his body was strong now that he was back where women wore tailored spring coats and the men were neatly shaved. The smoking lounge was shut down. At the boardinghouse he asked about work so he could pay his way back to Chicago and then to New York, but no one knew of anything. He went to the clinic on Lake Harriet and bought more medicine with the last of his money. It was a mistake, this place, all its foreign cleanliness. The shops closed early. The food was bland. All anyone talked about was his next meal, the weather, going hunting on the weekend. He had to get home as soon as possible. Thank God he hadn’t talked Mary into coming to this place.

He walked down to the stockyards, and then over to the train station, where several cargo cars were being coupled on the main track. When the railway man went inside the station house, Alfred walked along the track, peering into the dark cars. In one he sniffed corn. In another, buckwheat. In a third car he looked left and right and then noticed from within the darkness a pair of eyes. He felt a chill, and stepped back. “Get away,” a disembodied voice growled. “Or get out of sight.” Alfred climbed up and quickly moved to a shadowed corner. “Where is it going?” he whispered. “East?” As his eyes adjusted, he saw that the man was really a boy, fifteen or sixteen at most. Another voice said, “Boston.”

“Hold on, buddy,” the second voice said. “Are you sick?”

“No.”

“If you’re sick, we’re not getting help. You understand? We’ll bury you in this shit and leave you here.”

“I’m not sick.”

“You look kinda sick.”

“If you get us caught, I’ll kill you dead,” the first voice assured him as Alfred leaned into his bed of yellow peas. After a while, he heard the lock thrown in place on the other side of the door and the train began to rock toward the Atlantic.