Fever

TWENTY-THREE

As she walked from St. John the Apostle to Dr. Tropp’s office, Mary clutched the torn-off corner of paper the nun had given her and prayed that Alfred had given the doctor his current address. She hadn’t seen him in seventeen months. Who had visited him in all that time he spent in the hospital? Who had made sure the doctors were doing their best? Not Liza, she thought with relief. But not Mary, either. He’d been alone in this horror while she’d been oblivious, making pastry downtown.

She had never before walked the neighborhood above Columbia University, and noticed that all the hectic life and energy of Morningside Heights was muffled and then silenced in the space of half a dozen blocks. Around the university were brownstones as beautiful as those on Park Avenue, and residential buildings with elevators inside. The sidewalks were neat, the lawns trim. Clusters of rosebushes punctuated the green spaces of campus like so many bright and shining jewels. But just above that, outside Dr. Tropp’s office on 129th Street, the sidewalks were silent, the trash bins unattended for weeks. The few automobiles scattered about the neighborhood were parked in every direction, some facing west, some east, some with their wheels up on the curb. There was a pigpen by the river, and the odor hung over the surrounding blocks.

No one answered her knock when she arrived at the doctor’s office, so she let herself in and caught him dozing at his desk. “Excuse me, sir,” she said, and when she was sure he was awake and paying attention, she told him that she was Alfred Briehof’s wife, just returned from abroad, and needed Alfred’s address. She looked around. There was no secretary. No patients. After hearing her business, the doctor’s expression became one of doubt, but he turned and searched his desk for a file. “Briehof,” he muttered as he moved papers back and forth. “I saw him only once since he came back from Minnesota. I can’t remember if he gave me an address.” Finally, he singled out a file from the mess and opened it. “Ah, yes,” he said, and Mary’s heart beat faster. “It’s 545 West 125th Street.”

Mary tried to check her anticipation, and reminded herself that she had not been kind to him the last time he tried to talk to her. Maybe he would turn her away now, just as she’d turned him away seventeen months earlier. Maybe the months he’d spent out west — doing what, Mary wanted to know — had taught him that the empty spaces in his life could easily be filled, and maybe he had no interest in Mary anymore. The satchel she’d been lugging around the city since leaving the boardinghouse felt much heavier than it had that morning. She thought of Mila and the boys, and wondered if Soper had gone looking for her there. She hoped Mila could convince him that she’d really left, and then Soper would leave them alone.

When she got to the building it seemed a little like a hotel, but one where the bellhop and the doorman had abandoned their posts years ago and left the lobby to be pulled down by cobwebs on the rafters, buried by mud tracked in from the street. She scanned the list of names beside the buzzers and there it was, halfway down. She pressed the button, and just as she began to worry that it didn’t work, she heard the sound of a man’s boots coming down the stairs. It didn’t sound like the step of a sick man, an incapacitated man, a man hobbled with injury and pain. She knew he’d spotted her through the glass of the door when the boots stopped. He pushed open the door and stepped outside.

“Mary,” he said, shoving his hands deep inside his pockets and leaning back on his heels. She noted the skin of his right hand, all the way up his arm to the place where his shirt was rolled to the elbow. His shirttail was hanging out over his pants, and he wore no socks in his shoes. There were dark rings under his eyes and his hair had more gray threaded through it than she remembered. But otherwise, he was himself, and within five seconds of seeing him again she knew that there was no Liza upstairs, no woman by any other name. She sniffed the air around him, out of habit, but smelled only aftershave, soap. His hair was damp, and he hadn’t yet combed it. She tilted her head and looked closer. He had none of that wolfish quality he had when he was drinking, always moving and itching to get out, always fiddling with something in his hands. Nor did he have that look he had back in 1909, when she’d seen him at the hearing. He was not full in the face, nor was he gaunt. He was not jumpy, and yet he gave off a gentle hint of impatience. She couldn’t quite read him.

“Can I come in?” she asked and watched his face as he noted her bag, the weight of it.

“Sure,” he said, as if he’d seen her the week before. He walked ahead of her down the long hall, but waited by the bottom of the stairs for her to go up ahead of him. “Second floor,” he said. He was quiet as he followed her up the stairs, his injured hand clutching the handrail. He moved slowly, carefully. When they got to the landing he nodded toward a door to her left and she pushed it open.

“I heard about your accident,” she said once they were both inside. She held out her hand so that he would show his injured arm. The skin there was raw, melted and cooled, and she wanted to run her palm over the surface, learn the new topography. There was no hair on that arm, and his hand appeared swollen, lumpy, as if it needed to be drained. She pressed the swollen part with her fingertip.

“It’s fine now,” he said. “I was lucky.”

“I just found out,” she said, as if this would explain why she hadn’t sought him out earlier. “Then Jimmy said you might have gone out west.”

“Ah,” he said, as if it didn’t matter to him. “I was planning on sending you a letter, but then…” He trailed off, distracted by something she couldn’t see or hear. He turned to the counter, began to open and close cabinet doors. His room was not neat, she noted, but it was not dirty. His bed was unmade but the sheets appeared clean. The counter was cluttered with mugs and bowls and spoons, but all seemed washed, left there to dry. Dirty laundry was piled in a corner instead of scattered everywhere underfoot. Once she understood that he was well enough to live in the world outside the hospital, she expected a scene, she expected to have to make her case to him right away, to roll up her sleeves and peel the years back and back and back until they were exhausted, and there was nothing further to say except what was new and now, and how they’d cope with tomorrow. She expected to have to draw a boundary and show it to him. She’d prepared herself for blame and had lined up a list of grievances she’d level at him if he implied for a second that their split was her fault. Instead, he seemed to barely register her presence.

“Coffee?” he asked without looking at her. He turned over the mug on the counter and found another from within a cupboard that held only a few mismatched plates.

“You all right, Alfred?” she asked. Maybe an accident like the one he’d had changes a person. Maybe she’d been too cruel, leaving him in the vestibule that time. Maybe he’d waited for her and waited for her, and when she didn’t come back, and didn’t search for him, he’d had to shake himself loose of her for good. Maybe he’d made his own vows to himself, and her showing up now had knocked him off balance. She cast her eye quickly around the kitchen and noted a single bottle of Powers Gold on the top shelf of the cabinet, two-thirds full. She noted an empty bottle of Baby Powers next to the sink. Maybe this was a new kind of discipline. She smelled the air again, and again came up with nothing. Maybe, like a doctor, he’d learned his dosage, finally, and had become strict in measuring it out.

He saw where she was looking and picked up the small bottle, dropped it in the trash can.

“I didn’t say anything,” Mary said. He leaned against the counter. Folded his arms.

“What is it, Mary? Has something happened?”

“I’m hungry, Alfred. Will we eat? Will I make you something?”

“I’ll make it.”

Slowly, and watching him carefully all the while, she explained everything to him over a supper of fried eggs and toast, cooked by him and served to her on a dish so clean she wondered if Jimmy had warned him, somehow, that she was headed uptown to find him. He smirked for the first time when she pointed out that baking and cooking were two entirely different occupations, and looked at her over his shoulder as if to ask if she believed that, or if she hoped he would believe it, before turning back to the stove to flip the eggs, first one, then the other, and she paused her story to lift her chin and peer into the pan to see if he’d broken the yolks. When she saw the eggs had remained intact, she continued, telling him about the bakery, about Evelyn and Jacob, about throwing the plate of lemon squares when she saw Soper’s face. She lifted her chin again and told him the eggs were ready, so he slid them onto two plates, put the toast alongside, and when she pushed into the soft center with the hard corner of bread it ran in a beautiful, pure, yellow river across her plate, exactly as it should. She told him about the Triangle fire, about how strange it was that she could remember every single detail of that day better than even the first day she left North Brother for the hearing, better than the day they set her free. She could remember what she was wearing down to the undergarment, the man with the ink-stained shirt, the shirt itself, pale pinstriped blue. She remembered the Lithuanians looking up at the rumbling ceiling with fear on their faces, and then the pandemonium outside, followed by the eerie calm of the days after.

“And you?” Mary asked. “The nun said you were released in November.”

“I was,” he said, running the tip of his finger across the plate and bringing it to his mouth. “I went to Minnesota for a while, but—”

“But?” Here it was. He appeared healthy, strong, sure-footed, and of steady hands, but here it was. Drinking on the job. Chronic lateness. What would it be?

“It wasn’t for me.”

He pushed back his plate. He got up to make more coffee. “What about you? Do you mean to stay here?” She felt him looking at her bag. She’d known him since she was seventeen. A lifetime ago, and still, she was nervous.

“Yes,” Mary said. She turned in her seat to look at him. He was still for a moment, then he grabbed hold of the back of the chair where she was sitting.

“Good,” he said. “That’s very good.”

• • •

That night, as she went to the small bedroom to change into her nightgown, he came in and sat on the edge of the bed. She’d gotten heavier since he’d seen her last. He’d gotten thinner. Her arms were soft. Her belly was soft. She’d never have children now, and that was a thing that took getting used to. Women said it so easily. When I get married. When I have a child. And then to find herself a forty-three-year-old woman who would not have a child, to know that that future had arrived already, was already part of her past.

When she had her clothes folded and stacked on top of the dresser, her cream and hairbrush placed alongside, he told her he was going out for milk and bread, and she felt for the first time that day that she’d made a mistake. He was on the wagon from the looks of it, but now here he was, not even a whole day with her and he was making excuses to go out. She had a vision of herself meeting the neighbors when he came home at two in the morning, howling. So she said nothing, only lay down on her side of the bed and closed her eyes. She was startled into sitting when, not fifteen minutes later, the locks slid in the door and he was back.

“You scared me,” she said when he appeared at the bedroom door. He sat in the desk chair and brought to Mary’s mind the image of a priest listening to confession, all those years ago, all the way across the Atlantic.

“How are we going to do this, Mary?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

He reached into the desk drawer and brought out a bottle of oil. He twisted off the cap, shook some into his palm, and rubbed it up and down his bad arm, briskly, like he was trying to rub that thick skin into what it used to be. When he returned the oil to the drawer, Mary noticed other small vials, a syringe, pills scattered like seed on a lawn. She got out of bed to look closer.

Alfred took out everything to show her. “For the pain.”

“It still hurts?” Mary was surprised. The arm looked damaged, but closed over, like it had healed itself completely and had shut itself off from pain.

“Sometimes. They say I need it for maintenance.”

“Is that unusual? So long after?” Mary noticed that his good arm was covered in gooseflesh.

Alfred shrugged. “The doctor keeps giving me the prescription.” He put the vial back in the drawer and closed it. “Sometimes it’s hard to sleep, so it’s for that, too. It’s been hard to sleep since getting back to New York.” Mary knelt down beside him and took a closer look. It was like a tree trunk, thick with bark and impenetrable. Next to it, the pale white of his good arm looked vulnerable, like it would be easily broken, quick to burn.

“Is it just your arm?” she asked, and quietly, his movements sure, he opened his shirt, pulled open the right side where the fire had taken a swipe at his chest, from his collarbone to the bottom of his rib cage. It wasn’t quite as bad as his arm, but it was there. She put her palm to it and felt his heart beating underneath.

“I started letters to you but I didn’t know what to say. I was trying to think of the perfect thing so that you’d agree to see me again. And then you showed up. You just showed up.”

Before he kissed her, he gripped her at the upper arms and put his forehead to hers. She closed her eyes, and the rough stubble of his chin and cheeks brushed up against the smooth skin of her neck as he breathed there for a moment, rested his head on her shoulder. She was tired, all of a sudden, and looking back over the twenty-six years since they met it seemed as if they never stopped, only worked and fought and went up and down stairs and opened and closed windows and counted their money at the table and fought again, and went out again, and once in a while they looked at each other, and talked, and laughed, and made love without rushing up to get somewhere after. Outside, a child shrieked, a woman shouted at him to hush. Alfred’s room had grown dark, and what had seemed stark and bare to her before now seemed merely simple, spare. Notes of Alfred played around the room, his razor on the edge of the sink, his boots topsy-turvy by the door.

“I’m sorry, Mary,” he said after a while.

“I’m sorry, too.”

TWENTY-FOUR

They spent the rest of the spring catching up. Alfred was driving for the Teamsters and had been selected for training on a motor truck. When he went to work he packed his medicine with the careful attention of a doctor administering to distant patients, fearful of leaving something important behind. Gone was the man who used to send chairs flying back when he stood. When he came home from his shift he rarely went out again after, unless Mary coaxed him to the market or out for a walk. She wrote to Mila to tell her she was safe and that she was sorry if Soper had harassed her after Mary left. She wanted to know if Soper had come for her, if he’d brought police or not, but she didn’t want to send Mila her new address, just in case Soper was monitoring the mail. “Is he allowed to do that?” Alfred asked, when Mary shared her worries.

“I don’t know if he’s allowed. But I know he would if he could.”

She considered going to the Department of Health to explain what had happened, but she knew that no one at the DOH would buy her argument that cooking and baking were different, and now, looking back, Mary admitted she didn’t buy it, either. But no one had gotten sick! Surely, they would have heard rumors at the bakery if Typhoid had broken out among their customers. But Soper would have warned every person at the DOH, and no one there would take her side. The testing would resume. She’d be taken back to North Brother. No, it was not worth the risk.

Their rooms were cheaper than the ones they’d shared on Thirty-Third Street, and Alfred’s wages covered the rent, but Mary wanted to work. She didn’t have the nerve to look into restaurants or bakeries in case Soper was looking for her everywhere, so she began taking in laundry. Their building was meant for single occupants only, and once in a while when she passed a group of neighbors at the mailboxes downstairs she heard them whisper about the couple that was flagrantly flouting the rules everyone else followed. He’d been injured, people heard. Had spent a year in the hospital. Where had she been, all that time? A man’s loneliness is a thing all women understand. An injured man. A working man. What time did he have for himself? Poor thing. But her — where had she come from? What was she after? He was liked, Alfred Briehof. He kept to himself, went about his business. Her? She was standoffish, and she had ideas about herself. Now she was going around mentioning to people that she took in laundry even though she knew full well that there were two other women on the block who also took in laundry. She was never grateful, people decided. Never. A woman could bring her family’s things to any one of the washwomen on the street, and so when she made a selection it was to be expected that the washwoman chosen might offer a cup of tea. A slice of cake. She might knock fifty cents off now and again. Not Mary. She never seemed to care, and if you implied that a shirt collar had not been scrubbed as clean as one would expect, considering the price charged, she struck a wide-legged stance and her face became terrifying.

• • •

Autumn arrived, and a cool mist settled over the city. Hanging over the side of Mary’s basket as she moved through the market were the moppy green heads of carrots, bunched and dirty. She selected potatoes — one for herself, one for Alfred — brushed dirt off their skins, guessed at the depth of the eyes and the black spots she’d carve out with the tip of her knife. Alfred was following her, looking blankly at the stalls, waiting for her to make selections. She cooked supper for herself and Alfred every night, and tried to make those meals as interesting as they could afford. When the Teamsters went on strike, Mary advertised her laundry services more widely, more urgently, and people responded. Her reputation grew. Women showed up with armloads of their husbands’ shirts and Mary stopped bothering to put away the ironing board at night. Alfred was tired now, always tired. He slept in the mornings. He slept in the afternoons. He took his medicine when he woke, and at lunch, and before dinner, and when it was time for bed. The strike ended, and the Teamsters won lunchtime wages. They won Christmas Day. Alfred went back to work.

It was a different kind of life than any they’d had before. There were days when Alfred didn’t feel well enough to drive, and had to take an extra dose of medicine, and they were together more than they were apart. Where before the small space inside their rooms might have pressed in on them, might have made them both as crazy as rabid dogs, now it calmed them. They each had their domains. Alfred stayed mostly in the bedroom, either sitting at the desk or lying on the bed, and Mary stayed mostly in the kitchen. When he came home from work he always went straight to the bedroom to rub his arm and chest with oil, administer the medicine that could be taken only by needle and syringe. When Mary looked in on him to tell him supper was ready, she usually found him curled on the bed, one hand balled under his chin, the other open, palm up, surrendered.

Sometimes he closed his eyes even while he was awake. The light bothered him, he said. Since the fire he had headaches. He had pain in his bowels. He had trouble staying warm. He felt dizzy. The medicine helped all that, but only temporarily.

One day in October 1912, he was driving a truck up to Riverdale when he fell asleep at the wheel and the truck went off the road. He was hauling brick for a stonemason, and though none of the brick was lost, and no one was injured, the company wanted to fire him. The Teamsters got him another job. It happened again — this time he was driving four thousand day-old chicks from Nyack, New York, to the Bronx — and they moved him again. Next time, they warned, he’d be getting a dispatch job. There was only so much they could do. He told them he was sure it would happen again, so they might as well find him the dispatch job, and after that, Mary noticed, he was even more distant, as if he’d lifted a hood over his head and stepped into a shadow.

• • •

On Christmas, they shared a roasted breast of goose and Mary read aloud from the newspaper. At the end of February 1913, Mary bought him a handsome gray wool overcoat to replace the ugly coat he’d bought for himself when he was in Minnesota. He wore the new one for the month and then she packed it away in mothballs for the following year. Spring came, and children appeared on the sidewalk like bulbs that had been planted in the fall and burst through the earth overnight. They shouted and shrieked and threw their balls in the street and dodged traffic and spooked horses while Alfred stood by the window and listened.

Summer came, and on a Sunday in late July Mary convinced him to go with her to the pink granite halls of Pennsylvania Station, where they purchased two tickets to Long Island and spent the day at the beach. She packed a clean sheet for sitting on the sand, a picnic lunch. They walked along the rocks, carrying their shoes, until Alfred got tired. They napped on the sheet before heading back to Manhattan. On the way back to the city, they said how amazing it was that they’d never done that before, that they would certainly do it again before the summer was over. But then the summer became rainy, and when the sun came out again Mary pointed out that train tickets were dear, and then Alfred wasn’t feeling up to it, and next thing they knew it was autumn.

The leaves fell off the trees, and then came another winter, another new year. And then, in late February 1914, Alfred came back from Dr. Tropp’s office looking ashen. He went straight to the bedroom and shut the door.

“What happened?” Mary knocked. He ignored her. When she turned the knob he was standing at the window, hands on his hips.

“Nothing,” he said. “I can’t get prescriptions from him anymore. A new law.”

Mary frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“Me, neither. He just said there’s a new law, and he can’t write maintenance prescriptions anymore. He said the government is going to check every one he writes now, and if they don’t like what they see they’ll take his license. He said from now on I’m to go downtown to a maintenance clinic on Eighth Street.”

“Well, that’s not so bad.”

“It’s a reduction clinic.”

“What does that mean? Will they give you something or won’t they?”

“They will…” Alfred trailed off. He put his finger to the glass of the window and drew a circle. Next to it he drew a square. “It’s for tapering off. For getting off the medicine entirely.”

“But does it hurt, Alfred? When the medicine wears off?”

He rubbed his arm. “I’m not sure.”

• • •

Toward the end of her life, when Mary had nothing to do except think about the things she’d done when she was still young, especially those months, when she was approaching the end of being young and beginning, finally, to be old, she wondered why she spent so much precious time trying to change things: trying to change herself and Alfred and the way they lived and what they thought and the things they had and the way they spoke to each other and the way they loved each other. Everything. Looking at the back of Alfred’s neck, she wanted him to shake off this news, assure her it would all be fine. She wanted him to forget about his medicine, shave himself, go to work, earn his paycheck, come with her to the market, talk with her. And maybe, it came to her years later, all he’d wanted from her was for her to put her hands on his shoulders, kiss him on the neck, tell him that no matter what, it would all work out in the end.

The clinic had cut him down on his very first visit and wanted him weaned entirely in a matter of six weeks. Mary went with him. It had been nearly two years since Soper had discovered her at the bakery, since she’d fled from the back door. She thought of him less and less as time wore on, and looking back at those years of dreading her check-ins, straining into a pot while a fresh-faced nurse made conversation, she wondered if she’d been insane to comply with all of it. She’d been tired, confused, scared, angry. At the clinic, the young physician ignored Alfred when he told him that it was impossible, that he couldn’t work without his medicine. The physician said that it wasn’t medicine anymore, not since his wounds had healed, that what he was now was a drug addict, not a patient. Alfred’s neck became mottled and angry, he balled his fists, but he didn’t say a word. No, he hadn’t been a patient in years. It wasn’t his fault, the physician admitted, but now that they knew more about all those drugs it was up to Alfred to get himself free of this noose that had been cast around his neck. Mary expected him to argue, to explain that his wounds still hurt at night, that he was in a different category altogether, but Alfred just set his jaw and walked out. When Mary got to the sidewalk, he was gone.

Here is where you should have done better, the distant Mary thought as she looked back on the Mary of this moment. Here is where you should have helped him more, used all that strength inside you to shield him from whatever it was he feared. The price of the drugs had increased with the new law, and later, when Alfred told her that he wouldn’t do it, he just couldn’t do it, it was selfishness that kept her silent. She liked this Alfred. They hadn’t fought in nearly two years. They sat at the table together for three meals a day and if he nodded off, occasionally, while she was talking to him, if he spent mornings staring out the window at the empty sidewalk across the street, it seemed a small price to pay for peace.

He told her that there were other places to buy the drugs. It would cost more, especially now, but it was the way things had to be. No way, Mary should have said. And to make her point, like she would have in the old days, she should have thrown what was left of his drugs in the fire and walked out. Instead she only nodded. “Where?”

The following morning, when he woke up before she did and pulled on a clean undershirt, she didn’t ask where he was going, or what time he’d be home.

Staying silent didn’t do her any good anyway. The peace of that time was ruined despite her decision not to stand up to him. Destroyed. Heroin was cheaper than morphine now, not as closely regulated, and he’d heard about a doctor on East Ninetieth Street who was quick to prescribe heroin for serious respiratory ailments. “Do you suffer from any respiratory ailments, Mr. Briehof?” the doctor asked when Alfred went to meet with him, his thumb fluttering the pages of his prescription pad. Alfred paid the man, and from the first instant he inhaled it he could tell it wasn’t quite the same as what he’d gotten before. Morphine, too. Everything was being cut, mixed with milk sugar, baking soda. Even the laudanum was being diluted with alcohol, table syrup, juice. He measured his own dosages but it was no good. Sometimes he slept whole days away, but there was no peace in sleep anymore. He tossed and raked at his pillow, and when Mary went to him she often found he’d soaked their sheets even though she’d as likely find him shivering, clutching himself like a child. He shit himself and even when he was drinking he had the basic human sense to apologize for something so filthy. Now he shit himself and said nothing and just tried to move away from it. People who came with their arms full of laundry stopped at their threshold, drew in their breath, said they’d come back another time. The Teamsters wrote a letter to say that they could not reinstate his membership until he paid back dues.

Here is where she should have left. And here again. And if not there, then here. Here. He would have snapped out of it if she’d left, would have paid attention, but still, she stayed, and tried to make more money, and whatever she made she handed to him. The laws got stricter and the drugs got more expensive every month.

When a neighbor on the fourth floor came home from the hospital, Mary distracted herself by bringing up a quiche and a loaf of freshly baked raisin bread. When the woman was strong enough to make her way downstairs, she stopped at Mary’s door to thank her, ask if she could make another one of those quiches for a friend. “I’ll pay you, of course,” she said, and something switched on in Mary. “Sure,” she responded, and named her price, almost as much as half a day of taking in laundry. One quiche. And instead of balking, the woman seemed grateful, told Mary it was her quiche that had given her strength.

She no longer had any fear that Soper was hiding around every corner, spying on her through a crack in the door. She imagined baking out of their small oven, lining up what she made on the sill. She let it be known that she could cook and deliver dishes, and it went around that she had a talent for it. She stopped taking in laundry, and once, when Alfred was feeling well enough to keep her company in the kitchen, and cheerful enough to talk, he came up behind her and whispered that nowhere in the world was cozier than their tiny rooms when she had butter melting in a pan, when she tossed in a handful of chopped onion, diced carrots.

One evening he came home with a black eye and a busted lip, then was bad for days after that, wretching into bowls and eventually knocking over the bowls when he thrashed. Mary put on her best dress and went to see Dr. Tropp, intent on making him write a prescription like he had so many times before, but when she got to the office his sign was gone, the door locked. She went to the druggist, and he said it was impossible. His license would be taken away. There was a register now, and men came around to check his orders. The only thing for it was to go to the maintenance clinic, and when Mary explained that he’d already been, the druggist shrugged.

“But there are places,” she said to the man cooly. “There are places. You can’t expect me to believe there aren’t.”

“There are places,” the man said. “But you have to have money. And you have to have the stomach.”

“I have the stomach.”

The doctor on East Ninetieth Street had disappeared as suddenly and completely as Dr. Tropp, but they got the name of another doctor down on Spring Street. Alfred wanted to know the extent of every penny Mary had. She could tell by the way he was standing that he expected her to go wild, tell him it was none of his business. Instead, she went to the closet and together they counted everything. The pain in his stomach was too strong for him to make it downtown himself, so she put a little powder on her face and went on her own. She expected dark alleyways, locked doors, but instead she was shown a pleasant waiting room decorated with hanging plants and an oriental carpet, and after a while she was brought into a second bright, clean room, where a bearded man asked what exactly she needed. She told him what Alfred had been taking, he told her the price, and she counted out the money and slid it across the desk.

At home, her oven was always hot, and she bought more pans so that she could have things waiting while other things were cooking. She made pies, both savory and sweet. She made roasts, stews, casseroles. Word spread. She made more money, and once every two weeks — leaving out the price of their rent — she took everything she earned and went down to Spring Street to get more drugs for Alfred. When Alfred felt up to it, he sat at the table, out of her way, and watched her with the flat of his hand against the scars on his chest.

• • •

If anyone had gotten sick from what she cooked, she never heard about it, but she found herself asking, sometimes, when someone turned up whom she hadn’t seen in a while. “I hope you haven’t been feeling poorly,” she’d say, but it was always something else that had kept them away, never her food, and she thought back on North Brother, and how silly it all seemed now. People got sick, and usually got better. When they didn’t get better, it was sad, but how could they have blamed her, one woman, when the whole of New York City was teeming with disease, and doctors now said that even the hang straps on the IRT were under suspicion? Would they shut down the subways? Of course not.

A Mrs. Hughes stopped by one morning. She lived two blocks north and her son had just gotten engaged to be married. She’d heard about Mary and wanted something special to serve to her future daughter-in-law, something she could pass off as having made herself. “A custard, like they make in the old country,” the woman suggested. “I could serve it warm over sliced fruit. I’ll bring you my dishes and you could arrange it all in them and I’ll have it all home in a wink.”

Mary stopped trimming the roast she was working on and felt her stomach drop.

“I’ll make the custard,” she said. “You have the fruit ready at your place.”

“Well, if I’m paying you…”

“No,” Mary said. “Only the custard.” She had never refused anyone and it surprised her now to be refusing Mrs. Hughes.

“But why?” the woman sputtered.

“You want the custard or not?”

“No, not unless you do the fruit, too.”

“No,” Mary said, and crossed her arms. It wasn’t because what they’d told her on North Brother was true, it was just because they’d spooked her so much that her thoughts had gotten jumbled. That was all. It was criminal, what they did to her, and who could blame her if some of it had rattled her. She wanted to wash her hands and splash water on her face.

Mrs. Hughes put her hands on her hips. “I don’t understand. I was told you do all sorts of cooking. That you’re very good.”

“Look, why don’t I do a lovely baked fruit pie. That would be nicer anyway, this time of year. You bring me your pie plate and I’ll do it lovely for you and walk it over there warm before they get there.”

“But don’t you have to slice fruit anyway for a pie?”

“Yes, but—” Mary sighed. “Fine. Bring me the fruit.”

And then one morning, Mrs. Waverly, from the third floor of their building, came down and asked if she could speak to Mary about something serious. Mary swallowed, tried to think back on every single thing she’d cooked in the previous month. She hadn’t worried so much when she was working at the bakery, but it was different there, the large kitchen, the line of customers out the door, Evelyn quietly kneading and slicing in her corner. They’d cleaned everything at night, and the equipment was always pristine when they unlocked the back door in the morning. There was ventilation at the bakery, sunlight, room to move, racks laid out specially for things to cool. Now that she was working out of her own kitchen, everything seemed cramped and every surface she touched felt sticky no matter how often she plunged a rag into hot water and wiped down the counters, the table, the cabinets, the floor. She braced herself for whatever Mrs. Waverly had come to tell her. But instead of talking about an outbreak of fever in the neighborhood, Mrs. Waverly asked Mary if she ever considered cooking in a more professional capacity.

“If you can turn meals out of this”—she took in the tiny kitchen, the small stove—“I can’t imagine what you could do in a real kitchen.” Mary kept her mouth shut and listened. “I’m head nurse at the Sloane Maternity Hospital and the cook there just quit. The wages are excellent and I can tell you that it’s a nice place to work. Have you ever cooked on that scale? The beds are usually full, plus the doctors and nurses. Guests sometimes. I can put your name in.” The woman laughed. “I’m in charge of finding the person so the deck would be stacked.”

Mary swallowed.

“It sounds overwhelming, I know,” Mrs. Waverly said, “but you’d have plenty of help.”

“It’s not that—” Mary said, placing her spoon on the counter and crossing her arms. She felt dizzy. She wanted to sit down except that she had shepherd’s pies cooling on the seats of both chairs.

“Think about it,” Mrs. Waverly said. “If you do a good job they’ll raise you. It’s steady work. The last cook was there for years.”

Mary touched the edge of the counter. She imagined the size of the refrigerator they’d have in a hospital. The size of the oven, the compartments for roasting, for warming, the stacks and stacks of clean white plates, the copper-bottomed pots.

“Look, why don’t you go down and talk to the administrator. You can ask any questions. Spell your full name for me and I’ll let him know to expect you.”

“Yes, that would be fine. Okay.”

“Do you have paper? Mary what?”

“Oh, it’s easy enough. Mary Brown. Like the color.”

• • •

The interview would have made Mary laugh if she hadn’t been so nervous. She washed the night before and again that morning, and cut her nails, and scrubbed her cuffs with baking soda and a toothbrush, and used some of Alfred’s hair tonic to smooth every strand of hair away from her face. The administrator was no cook, Mary could tell right away, and asked only whether she could turn out on that scale, not a single question on how she’d stretch ingredients, keep things simple, how she’d make it so everything would be served hot and at once. He asked for a reference, and Mary swallowed, wanted to kick herself for not expecting it. “Yes,” she said coolly. “There was Mrs. Emilia Borriello. I can write down her address. Also Mrs. Harriet… Mrs. Harriet Sloane.”

“Sloane like our Sloane? Same name?”

“Same name,” Mary said, realizing, and her heart sunk.

“Seems like a good sign,” the man said, and wrote down her address. He printed her name on top. “You said Browne, yes?” he tilted the paper to show her.

“No e at the end,” she said. “Brown.”

He struck a line through the e. “Good,” he said, and shook her hand. She expected him to say that she’d hear from him once he checked out her references, but since Mrs. Waverly had recommended her, he told her she could start the following week unless she heard from them to do otherwise. On her way out she passed a room where six women in six beds were recuperating, their babies next to them in bassinets.

TWENTY-FIVE

Once Mary got used to being addressed as Mrs. Brown, she decided that the hospital was, without question, the best situation she’d ever had. She’d seen childbirth before — she was charged with holding a leg when a neighbor of Aunt Kate’s went into unexpected labor, and many times she’d waited downstairs with other staff while the mistress of a house moaned and roared until the doctor arrived with chloroform. She expected Sloane to be a chaotic place, and that she would have to weave through a dozen exhausted women as they walked the halls just as laboring women used to walk the halls of the tenements, trying to help the baby come, their fingertips brushing the wallpaper for balance. Instead, Sloane was organized. It was a clean, bright, shining place with strange contraptions in every room to help the doctors know more about the baby that was to come. The nurses made reference to Twilight Sleep and it took Mary a week to realize that they were referring to labor, which was mostly silent, and often the babies were born silent, too, which struck Mary as worrisome but didn’t seem to faze the nurses, who swaddled their limp bodies into tight little packages and propped them up on pillows for their mothers to admire. Only later, hours, sometimes days later, would the babies come out of it, and begin to whimper and cry. Those babies who were particularly cranky got a soothing syrup of codeine to quiet them.

The doctors didn’t care what she did as long as there were hot meals coming out of her kitchen. Unlike in a private home where the staff wasn’t permitted to have an opinion about anything political, at Sloane they passed the time talking about President Wilson, the income tax, the war brewing in Europe. The administrator occasionally checked in with her, but only to ask if she had what she needed in the way of equipment and help. The staff was honest, and when she sent them out to shop they came back with what she asked for — what did she care if they snuck a few things home to their own pantries? She’d done it often enough herself.

She arrived at the hospital at five in the morning, and left at five in the evening, once she was sure the staff knew how to complete the supper she’d started, and that there would be enough to go around. Always, as her final chore, she left the oats soaking in water so they’d cook up quickly in the morning.

Then, one evening, about six weeks after she started at Sloane, and with two sliced-turkey sandwiches wrapped carefully in her handbag, Mary arrived at their rooms to find Alfred on the floor next to her side of the bed, his face gray and his skin like a cold piece of cod. She shouted his name sharply as she took his hands and tried to pull him up. She dropped his hands and slapped his face. “Alfred!” she said again. She slapped him again. And then, just as she was about to run out into the hall for help, he blinked, and tried to sit up. “Get Jimmy,” he told her. “Or Mr. Hallenan. Someone strong.”

“What are you talking about?” she demanded. “We’re not on Thirty-Third Street anymore. Come on, Alfred. Stop it.”

He was quiet for a long time, and she thought he might have fallen asleep with his eyes open.

“I’m okay now, Mary. I just got confused.”

Mary let out a long sigh of relief. “You scared me.”

The next day, she didn’t want to leave him for twelve hours, and thought to ask someone from the building to look in on him while she was at work, but as she walked down the stairs she realized that although she knew her neighbors well enough to exchange pleasantries, and had done laundry or cooked a dish for many of them, she didn’t know any of them well enough to ask for a favor like that, not when they’d have a thousand questions about it, and maybe tell everyone else. No, better to leave him sleeping. There were times when he slept all day long, and she predicted this would be one of those days. He’d stay curled under the covers until she came home again, and then, if she had luck, she’d get him to eat something. She’d left bread and butter on a plate beside the bed, and next to it, a tall glass of water.

She was distracted all day at the hospital. A new mother had died in the middle of the night. Sepsis, they determined, and the mood everywhere, including the kitchen, was somber. The nurses cried over the little baby girl left behind, and cried harder when the husband came and didn’t seem to know how to hold her. They took Mary’s silence as part of that sadness, and she was glad to not have any questions. It was terrible about the mother, terrible when any young person dies, but she couldn’t stop herself from thinking that they were rich, these women. The price of giving birth at Sloane was more than Mary would earn in six months, and if they had that kind of money then they also had a full staff, families to help. There were poor women all over the city dying every minute of the day, leaving two, three, four babies behind.

She wondered if Alfred had woken. She wondered if he’d seen the bread. Sometimes he felt a world better after he washed himself, and she meant to leave a bar of soap and a washcloth on the ledge to remind him. She could pretend a headache, leave early, go home to check on him. A walk would do him good, if he could manage it. Maybe they’d go out to eat that night. There was a new restaurant by the university and it might do him good to be in a busy place. The energy of the city would sweep him past the day’s trouble.

She diced and sautéed and lifted the wooden spoon to her mouth for a lick, returned it to the pan, turned the food ’round and ’round. She shook salt, pepper, chopped fresh oregano, parsley, swept it from the blade of her knife with her finger, all while thinking about Alfred. She measured cream, checked for spots on glasses, bowls, forks, spoons. She asked one of the new girls to wash everything again.

When she got home, Alfred was better but didn’t want to go anywhere, and so Mary sat in the dim kitchen by herself, her feet up on Alfred’s chair. She felt tired, and realized only when she sat down how worried she’d been. She tried to read but she caught herself going over the same sentence again and again.

The next morning, the nurses were sharp with one another. Two were out sick, one of them Mrs. Waverly, and without her calm authority the rest of them were like children left behind in a room without an adult. Mary thought of Alfred, hoped he hadn’t caught anything. Perhaps whatever was bothering him now had nothing to do with the medicine at all. Maybe he had the flu. Maybe he’d be up and better in a day or two.

That evening, he was bad again, and she could see he’d been up and around while she was at the hospital. The cutlery drawer was left hanging open. There was a glass in the sink. He was fully dressed but sleeping on their bed, and she had to say his name three times, and shake him, before he cracked his eyes to look at her. “Mary,” he said, and put his hand on her lap before falling asleep again.

More were absent the next day at the hospital, and a mother who’d been released a month before was readmitted, with her child, both of them slack with fever. More sepsis, the kitchen assistant guessed. The administrator put the sick woman in a room to herself, and then came down the hall to ask Mary if she’d mind pitching in if she had a moment. There was so much to do, and it would only be for a few days, until everyone recovered from whatever was going around and they were back to full staff again. The doctors rushed through the hallways looking stern, tired, worried. The ones who normally left when Mary did now stayed on, some stayed all night. As she was rolling supper down the hall on the dining cart, she observed three of them talking in hushed tones in a quiet corner of the passageway. One took off his glasses to rub his eyes.

She was in a patient’s room, lifting the top off a plate of braised beef, when the thought came through her like a tremor. A nurse breezed in, brushed by Mary, checked the patient’s pulse, peeked into the bassinet to check on the baby, and noticed Mary. “Oh God, not you, too,” she said, helping Mary to a chair. She held Mary’s wrist for a few moments. “Your pulse is fast.” She put the back of her hand to Mary’s head. “But you’ve no fever.”

“I’m all right,” Mary whispered. “Just tired.”

“You sure?”

“Is it sepsis?” Mary asked, trying to keep her voice steady. “Or something else?”

The young nurse sighed. “They thought sepsis at first, until so many came down with it, and now they’re thinking Typhoid.”

Mary felt her insides erupt into chaos. The nurse guided her back farther in the chair. “You should go home, Mary,”

“No, no,” she said. “I’ll be fine in a minute.”

The nurse flagged down a doctor and pointed to Mary.

“Go home, Mrs. Brown,” he told her. “If you feel well in the morning, then by all means come in, but otherwise stay home. We’ll cope without you.”

“I said I’m fine,” Mary said.

“Doctor’s orders.”

Too tired to argue, Mary gathered her things, left instructions for the woman helping out in the kitchen, and was out on the sidewalk before noon.

• • •

She should have gone straight uptown to Alfred, but she walked instead, and when she actually paid attention she noticed that she was covering dozens of blocks without noticing. She turned with the traffic, and felt herself slip into a kind of trance as she took in the storefronts, as she stepped around patches of ice, piles of horse shit that had been frozen, petrified, and would stay that way until the warm days of late March. It was February 1915, and she walked with her coat hanging open, her pale, white throat exposed to the cutting wind. She wanted to lie down and sleep but instead she kept walking, and walking, and finally, she was home.

She opened the door to their rooms at almost the same time as she did most evenings, and decided if he asked what was wrong with her, she wouldn’t tell him, wouldn’t worry him; he had enough to deal with at the moment. But when she pushed open the door and saw him in the same heap as she’d left him that morning, she almost laughed. No need to have worried. He hadn’t asked about her in weeks, not how the new situation was going, how she liked it, only when she’d get paid, when she’d get a chance to go downtown to visit that man again. She felt anger bubbling up in her belly and made no effort to quiet her movements as she filled the kettle with water, slammed it on the range to set it boiling for tea. Let him rot in there, she thought. I’m here working and worrying, and now this. Typhoid. Again. Jesus.

“Alfred,” she called sharply toward the open door of the bedroom. “Did you eat? Did you go out today?”

It felt like the old days, asking questions she already knew the answers to. She knew she was only setting herself up to pick a fight, and yet she couldn’t stop herself. What would they do now? How would he help? He had to snap out of it and get back with the Teamsters. He had to forget about his medicine entirely.

“Alfred!” she said again, slamming closed the window onto the airshaft. It was freezing in their rooms. She went into the bedroom and closed that window as well. She pulled open the curtains to let the last of the day’s dim light into the room.

“Get up,” she said, one hand on her hip, the other hand reaching down for the corner of the quilt. She had every intention of whipping it off him, yanking him to his feet, marching him around the neighborhood until he protested and gave her a little of the fight she needed if they were to keep going.

“Alfred?” she said, noticing, finally, that his face was gray, his lips tinged with blue. She dropped the edge of the quilt and touched his cheek, cold but not clammy. She dropped her face to his and felt for his breath. Run for help, she ordered herself and felt every small muscle in her body prepare to spring forward, propel her down to the sidewalk to hail a policeman, find a telephone. But all she could do was stare, and where a moment earlier her body had felt full of turmoil, now it felt perfectly still, like everything within her had paused, like a dancer who leaps and is suspended over the stage for one single second, halfway between one place and another but knowing she is on her way and will have arrived there as soon as she opens her eyes. Mary lifted the edge of the quilt and moved next to him, put her arm around his chest. As long as she stayed there, like that, as if they were sleeping, it hadn’t happened yet. As long as no one knew, and no one else came into their rooms, and they didn’t take him away. His pills were a mess, all over the desk as well as the drawer, and the needles he’d kept so clean and organized were separated, thrown here and there, mixed up with his dirty clothes, one propped inside an empty coffee mug. I should clean it all up, she thought, and realized she didn’t care.

“There’s Typhoid at the hospital,” she said, looking at the ceiling, worried that she was already forgetting what it felt like to hug him when he was warm, and feeling her heart throb when she thought she felt pressure back. But he didn’t say anything, and there was no pressure back, and after a few minutes, she walked to the grocer’s to call for help.

TWENTY-SIX

The doctor on the telephone told Mary that he’d come directly after supper, and true to his word, he buzzed around eight o’clock. After checking Alfred and confirming what Mary had told him when they spoke, he glanced around the room. “Is that his layout?” he asked, looking over at the open drawer, the pills and vials. Mary nodded and then pulled the covers up to Alfred’s chest, tucked them tightly all around. She still half-expected him to open his eyes. She kept thinking she saw him flinch. She stared at his blank face. She thought of the babies swaddled at the hospital, how contented they were when their blankets were wrapped tight.

“And you?” the doctor asked. He was younger than she by a decade, and reminded her of Mr. O’Neill, a young man dressed up in his father’s work clothes.

“What about me?”

“Do you take any of that stuff?” he walked over to the desk, pushed some of the pills around.

“Get away from that,” Mary said. She pushed the drawer shut.

The doctor shrugged. “The coroner will be by shortly,” he said just before he left.

She should be more upset, she decided, but discovered she was too tired to muster up the energy. It was difficult to understand that they would take him away, and that would be the last she’d see of him. Typhoid at the hospital. One was connected to the other — she felt as sure of that as she’d been sure that wearing a hat identical to Mrs. Bowen’s was what had sent her to North Brother. If she’d brought Typhoid to the hospital, to those new mothers, to those babies, then it was as they said, she’d brought it to the other places, too. She’d killed Tobias Kirkenbauer. A cold breeze rattled the panes of the window, and she looked down at Alfred again. She ran through their years together to think of who should be notified. Back and forth she went, and could come up with only half a dozen names. Among them, Liza Meaney. Her son. Fran. Joan. Jimmy Tiernan. Better not say anything at all, she decided, than have a funeral and face so few people, all impatient to get back to their lives. She opened the desk drawer again and rooted around for a pen and paper so she could list the things she had to do, and then as soon as the tip of the pen touched the paper she thought about how strange she was being, and how she’d better look at him again because it would be the last time. She turned to study him and realized that she didn’t know what she was looking for. More than his coloring, which made him seem more unfamiliar to her with every passing quarter hour, it was the fact that he hadn’t moved at all that upset her. Not a single finger, not a hair, not a cough or gasp or growl.

What had Mr. Kirkenbauer done when his wife died? He’d embraced her — lifted her from the bed and held her close to his broad chest. He’d cried big, hot tears and didn’t care who saw. He’d kissed the top of her head and told her he loved her. In the total silence of their rooms Mary put the tip of her finger to Alfred’s hand, the familiar row of knuckles. She examined the jagged fingernails. She studied his blank face. Where did a person go? She wished she knew. She said her good-bye in silence. I don’t think I understand what’s happened yet, but when I do, I will miss you. And I’m sorry.

The coroner came at eleven o’clock, with his teenage son to assist him. She signed the paper he placed on the table. “Right here, Mrs. Briehof,” he said. “And here.” She didn’t bother correcting him, and signed “Mary Briehof” because it was easy, and then they would go away. They got Alfred onto a stretcher, and as they moved into the hall, the boy walking backward, the father forward, she heard the man say quietly to his son that this is what happened to druggies, he saw it all the time. The son said something Mary couldn’t make out, and she tried to ignore the sound of them struggling on the stairs, tried to turn away from the image of his body shifting, sliding. The coroner had given her a contact name and address for the next morning, where she’d have to go to make arrangements, and she folded it over and over until it was as small as a pebble. Then she shoved it deep in her pocket.

It was impossible to sleep that night, and a little before dawn, still wearing the clothes she’d worn the day before, Mary went down to the sidewalk to clear her head. She walked west, to the Hudson, and crouched on the river’s sloped bank to watch a small barge approach from the north. She wondered how long until it didn’t feel as if he were at home, waiting for her. How long until the space he’d made began to narrow and close and until she wondered what it had been like to ever have known him, and to be known by him. Even in those months when they lost track of each other she knew he was out there somewhere, a dot on a map, and she could pass the time wondering if he was thinking of her, and if the dot that was him and the dot that was her were moving closer together without either of them realizing. A woman and child walked by and nodded to her. They can’t tell by looking at me, she thought, staring after them as they ambled up the embankment and back up to the street. Seems like something they should be able to tell by looking at me.

She hadn’t considered going to the hospital that day, but when the sun had fully risen it seemed better that she work, at least for a few hours, and besides, it already seemed like such a long, long time had passed. In the light of morning she remembered that it might not be Typhoid that was going around the hospital. Not every fever was Typhoid Fever, and the nurse hadn’t been sure. And even if it was Typhoid, it mightn’t have anything to do with her. She was only one person, and there were so many in and out of the hospital every day, from deliverymen to proud grandmothers. Who knew what invisible infestations they swept in with them when they came? She thought of the Borriello boys, and how they’d eaten anything she made for them and never got sick. She’d never made Alfred sick. Fran. Aunt Kate. She thought back on all the families she’d worked for. It was a coincidence. A strange coincidence, but still. What could she have done differently? What would they have done differently if they were in her shoes? She thought of the dairyman up in Camden and imagined him skimming the cream from his milk, walking his property with his grandchildren.

Staring across the broad Hudson at New Jersey, she also wondered whether it was possible for a person to know something and not know something at the same time. She wondered whether it was possible to know a truth, and then quickly unknow it, bricking up that portal of knowledge until every pinpoint of light was covered over. When she thought back on the hot blur of days that marked her hearing, way back in 1909, and all the things they’d said about her — that she had no friends, that she didn’t keep a clean kitchen — she felt that animal fight rise up in her again. They blamed her because she was opinionated, and Irish, and unmarried, and didn’t bow to them. She walked quickly to the water to kick stones. The wind on her face felt cleansing, and she closed her eyes to it. And yet, and yet, and yet. As if crouched behind a small door that didn’t draw attention to itself, a different truth sat. And now, as she considered how cold the river water was at that moment, how quickly it would numb the limbs of a swimmer, she closed her eyes and looked at that door, nondescript as it was, unadorned, just sitting, waiting to be opened.

• • •

She’d tell the administrator about Alfred so he’d be prepared when she asked for time off for the funeral. She might tell a few among the kitchen staff. Maybe she’d go over to the old building and tell Jimmy in person, stop in for a talk with Fran or Mila. It had been too long.

And anyway, if she didn’t go to the hospital they might find it strange, and start looking into Mary Brown’s history as a cook.

When she got to the hospital, she nodded to the doorman as usual but found herself studying his face for signs of exhaustion, signs that the fever was on its way. When she got to her floor, she opened the door to disconcerting silence, and continued down the hall passing empty rooms, not a single nurse. The recovery rooms were similarly empty, not only of patients, but also of beds. Only when she approached the kitchen did she hear the ebb and flow of voices in conversation. As she passed the doctors’ lounge, Dr. Henshaw was standing in the frame of the door, watching her pass. She said good morning, but he didn’t reply.

Fly away, she told herself as she took another step, and then another, toward the voices in the kitchen. Do it now. Moving down the hall was like walking through water, and she felt both light and heavy at the same time. Fly out now into the brittle winter air and don’t look back. She glanced over her shoulder at the stair door. To her right was the bank of elevators, but it was as if they had her on a tether and now they were shortening the chain, wrapping it around the broadest part of their hands to draw her closer, and closer, until they had her where they wanted her.

Finally, she arrived at the kitchen. She was lifting her bag from her shoulder and toward the usual hook when, at the same moment, she noticed Soper standing not five feet away. Next to him was the head doctor and behind them were two men Mary didn’t recognize. The mood in the room was one of calm patience, as if they’d been waiting for her all night and now that she’d arrived they could check off that final item on their long list of things to do. One of the unfamiliar men moved to the doorway through which Mary had just entered.

“Mary Mallon,” Dr. Soper said without moving. He looked so pleased to see her that Mary wondered for a second if he could be there on other business. But no, she saw when he exchanged glances with one of the unfamiliar men; Mary had confirmed something that he’d suspected, that he’d suggested to the other men standing around, also waiting, and he was pleased to have his suspicion proven true. They spread out, almost imperceptibly, to fill the corners of the room. She went ahead and hung her coat alongside her bag as she did every morning, and then without looking at any of them she walked over to the stove and checked on the oats. She opened the icebox and made note of the fresh eggs and cream. Then she sat on the single stool, the one they used for peeling, put her hands over her face, and cried.

TWENTY-SEVEN

She gave them no trouble. She listened and nodded and only once remembered her bag, still hanging on the hook at the hospital. When Dr. Soper gave her his hand to step down into the boat that would ferry them across Hell Gate, she placed her hand in his and then took her seat. In the series of questions there were one or two about Alfred, and Mary said only that he was deceased, not that he’d died the day before, or that there was a burial to arrange, or that it was still so new that she didn’t know what to make of it except that now that she was back on North Brother, at an actual, physical distance away from him, from their rooms, from their life, she seemed to be able to see it better — like backing away from a picture to take in the whole scene and not just the image at the center.

Her bungalow had not been occupied in the five years since she last saw it, and they were kind enough to air it for half a morning while she answered the doctors’ questions in the main hospital. It wasn’t like the first time around, where she fought and argued, and the tenor of their questions changed accordingly. Now she gave them the answers they sought right away, and they seemed grateful to her. She’d been asked to check in, and she hadn’t. She’d been asked not to cook, and she did. She knew the terms of her release and she violated them with full knowledge. She nodded. She wondered if her egret was still living on the island somewhere, if John Cane was still commuting daily. “You put lives at risk,” one of the doctors informed her, and she saw that they worried about getting through to her, that she mightn’t understand why they’d taken her again. “Before, it was carelessness. This time, it’s criminal.”

“I know that,” she said, and when she said it she realized she wasn’t just being agreeable; she did know. And that it had been a risk worth taking was something they would never be able to understand.

“And using a false name is an admission of guilt. Do you agree?” Mary nodded that she did, but again, there were so many things that were difficult to explain, things she didn’t even understand herself. It was possible to live in such a way as to keep one’s back to the things that were not convenient. People got Typhoid Fever when she cooked for them, and in some cases, those people died. But more often than not they did not get sick, and she was a remarkable cook, and wasn’t it possible that those people were going to die anyway? If our lives are determined before we are born, then what could she have done about it? And if every person who is born will die, and if every person will rise again, and come together again, and if our time on earth is only a handful of seconds compared to the infinity of life after, then wasn’t her crime very small? No greater than the crime of the East River that drowned Alberto Borriello? She’d taken a risk, but living was itself a risk, and most people agreed it was a risk worth taking.

And then she thought of the Kirkenbauer boy, his limp arm cast around her neck, his hot cheek against hers, and she felt a dead weight on her chest. She would not argue for herself. She would not fight them. If they decided to put chains on her ankles and drop her into the river, she would not object.

But they didn’t want to throw her into the river. They simply wanted her to stay on North Brother, and as soon as she opened the door of her bungalow and leaned against the range to look about the room, she realized that finding herself back on North Brother was surprising only in that it wasn’t entirely unpleasant. The ten-foot-by-twelve-foot room was so familiar to her, every fold in the dusty curtain, every creak in the floor, that within a few seconds she was astonished to think that just a short time ago she’d never expected to see it again. Every part of life feels strange, and every part of life feels inevitable. The mattress on her cot was rotted through, so they brought her another. She slept peacefully the first night, and in the morning John Cane left a sweet bun and a cup of coffee outside her door. When she saw him later, she’d ask him to let the coroner know that something had come up, but to use the little money she’d put aside for rent to buy Alfred a new shirt and tie, and to put him in a decent casket. “Tell him to take Alfred to St. Raymond’s in the Bronx,” she’d tell John Cane, and if the coroner didn’t do any of this, if the coroner just took her money and buried Alfred in his undershirt in one of the city plots, she supposed she’d never know. She took one further step back: and if John Cane never went to the coroner, if he felt too tired to spend time tracking down a stranger about a man he’d never liked as a favor for a friend who hadn’t reached out to him in five years, she supposed she’d never know that, either.

She was not as special as she’d been the first time around. In five years they’d discovered more healthy carriers, though the rest of them were allowed to live out their lives with family, at home. The papers that had taken up her cause in 1909 got word of her story again, but now cast her as villain. Jealous of young women who could still have children, and driven insane by an abusive and drug-addicted companion, she’d purposely gotten work at the hospital to infect those new mothers and kill their babies, was how one newspaper put it. Twenty-five people had contracted Typhoid Fever at Sloane Maternity Hospital. Two people had died. Mary read the article, and then she read it again, and both times had to catch her breath. She read it for a third time and then she folded it, left it on her front step, and decided she wouldn’t read the paper again until her capture was no longer in the news.

John Cane came for a visit on her third day back, and though she felt him glancing sideways at her while she was looking away, he wouldn’t meet her eye. So she talked a while but then drifted into silence, and as they sat, shivering, on the front step of her hut she saw the old retired horse in the distance, wearing a tartan blanket and looking across the water. “I thought he’d be dead by now,” Mary said after a bit, and John Cane stood, clapped his hands, yelled at the horse to get on.

“Dead!” John Cane said as he clapped his hands a few more times to warm them, as he reached for his toes and the sky and back again. “He wouldn’t leave North Brother for all the fresh hay in the kingdom.” He looked at her, finally. “And I don’t blame him. Life can be good here.”

“Okay, John.” Mary said. “Okay.” And across the dark blue water, a whistle sounded and a dozen or so strangers took a step back on the platform as the train they waited for pulled in. Mary stayed on the step just long enough to watch John Cane walk up the path and through the main door of the hospital. And then she went inside.