“But surely they won’t let you go today, will they? They’d need to see you a few times more?”
“Mr. O’Neill said maybe today.” He also said the judge had probably made up his mind long before he stepped into the courtroom. Judges were supposed to be as cold and accurate as scales with the weight of proof added equally to each side, but Mr. O’Neill said they often stepped into the courtroom with the scales already tipped.
“Oh, I’ll see you later, Mary. I’m not worried.”
“You’re supposed to hope you won’t see me later.”
“Well, now.”
“What do you mean? It’s like wishing me bad luck. Do you wish me bad luck?”
“Not a bit! And I’ll bring a bit extra for your dinner tonight. You’ll be starved after all that traveling.”
Mary felt the twitch start up again and pressed her hand to her eye before it became too strong to stop.
• • •
For the short journey from North Brother Island to the mainland, she folded two small squares of paper over the sharp points of her collar so they wouldn’t be soiled in transit. She kept her tie — blue, flecked with black — folded in her pocket until she arrived downtown. She’d known that the journey across the East River would be choppy, and that the ferry would create its own breeze by its speed, so she’d waited to pin her hair until she was escorted onto the pier at 138th Street. “Excuse me,” she’d said to her guard, a young man, eighteen, perhaps, twenty at most, and before he could answer she strode off toward the small one-room depot and the door marked Ladies. He’d performed his duty well enough, stepping down into the boat ahead of her like any gentleman in case she should stumble, and up onto the dock when they reached the city. But he didn’t offer his arm, and during the crossing — the nose of the boat rising to meet each roll of gun gray water before falling, rising, falling, the two passengers and one crewman jostling side to side on the long bench seat — he’d kept his face turned away from hers and clutched the railing that rimmed the edge of the boat so that he wouldn’t brush against her during the passage. When she tried to speak to him, placing her face close to his so he could hear her over the sound of the slapping waves and the roar of the boat’s engine, he’d grimaced.
Once inside the narrow lavatory she took two long hairpins from her handbag and held them in her mouth as she twisted and tucked her strawberry blond hair into an arrangement at the back of her neck. The mirror she was accustomed to looking at every day since 1907 was merciless; it was placed near the single window in her cottage and faced north. This lavatory mirror was shadowed and freckled, and Mary examined her face carefully in the forgiving light. Some of the newspapers had included images of her with sharpened features. Others had drawn her fat and aged, cracking human skulls in a skillet like they were eggs, with a bosom that should have tipped her over. To herself, the morning of the hearing, she looked like she always had — pretty, but not unusually so. Clean. Efficient. Ready for work. In different clothes, and a different accent, and with hands that had not spent the better part of twenty years in scalding water, she might have been mistaken for a lady. She’d often been told she was haughty enough.
In the days leading up to the hearing, she kept telling herself there were three possibilities: Alfred would be off the wagon, too drunk to keep track of dates and time and would not come, or Alfred would sober up and get himself there. The third possibility was the worst, and it wasn’t until that moment, staring at her reflection in the lavatory mirror, that she faced it head-on: he might not want to see her. Perhaps, in twenty-seven months, he’d worked up the courage to speak to that bright thing who made up the beds at the hotel on Thirty-Fourth Street and who sometimes waited outside Nation’s Pub for her brother. “She reminds me a bit of you, at that age,” he’d told Mary once, a passing comment, an answer to her question of how his day had been. She liked when he painted a full picture of his day for her and instead of drawing himself slumped on a stool, his head filled with goose-down feathers until halfway into that first tumbler, he told her about the world outside on the street, the call of the chestnut man, the rough comments about President Roosevelt’s oldest daughter, the man dressed in a suit of newspaper.
“Ma’am?” a woman’s voice called from the other side of the door. “The man says you’re to hurry.”
Mary swung the door open. It was the woman from the ticket window; her fingertips were black with ink, her forehead smudged where she’d rubbed it. “What man?” Mary asked loud enough for her guard to hear. “That?” She laughed. How easy it would be to get away, to leap onto the streetcar and disappear, or even to pick up her skirt and run. There was no running from North Brother, but here in the city she could simply turn a corner, and another, board a trolley, and be gone. John Cane had delivered two five-dollar bills with her breakfast that morning, money sent from Mr. O’Neill for anything unexpected she might encounter on her way down to the courthouse, and Mary had folded them tightly and slipped them inside her shoe. She observed her guard. The boy was so afraid of her it might be enough to just go near him. Just by walking toward him she could back him up into the river.
• • •
The plan was that Mr. O’Neill would get his medical men to answer their medical men and after the hearing, if the judge agreed that she shouldn’t have been taken bodily from her place of employment without a chance to defend herself, then she’d be going home to Alfred that evening. Unless Alfred had offered her side of the bed to someone else.
When they finally arrived at the courthouse, Mary searched for Alfred as she followed Mr. O’Neill down the marble-floored hallway. He’d stay in the shadows, she knew, until the last moment. It was possible she’d passed him as she rushed up the steps outside. Mr. O’Neill led her to a small private room just down the hall from the courtroom, where they had a few moments of peace before they went in to present their case. When he told her it was time, she removed the two squares of paper from her collar. Mr. O’Neill had been doing a sidelong inspection of her appearance since greeting her, and now that they were alone he gave her a quick look up and down.
“Well?” she asked after a moment.
“Well nothing,” he said. “Good.”
FIVE
Mr. O’Neill warned her that the other lawyers would have rounded up as many of her old employers as they could, other house staff she’d worked with, anyone who might tell a story about her that would keep her on North Brother. Her most recent employers, Mr. and Mrs. Bowen, were unlikely to be in attendance. They would not want their name further tarnished by association, and besides, their daughter had died, it was a fact, and there was nothing they could say that would weigh more than that.
One of the last times she’d conversed with Mrs. Bowen, before Soper came looking for her, before the girl got sick, Mary had been wearing her new hat. Remembering that hat nagged her, and after more than two years of circling ’round and ’round why and how she’d gone from working and living in New York City, making a good wage, buying what she liked, to being trapped on an island, her thoughts kept returning to that hat. Where was it now? From the moment she was forced into the police wagon and taken to Willard Parker, she felt like she’d been flipping through a book to find a single sentence, running her finger along a page to find a single word, but when her mind lighted on that hat, she stopped. Her stomach sank. Sometimes one thing leads to another even if the line isn’t direct.
Some of the doctors had intimated that she was not right in her mind, that her mental state was part of the reason she could not be trusted, along with her being a woman, and being an immigrant, and being the kind of woman who lived with a man without being married. But she knew the hat had something to do with her capture in 1907, and she knew it now that her case was finally being examined, twenty-seven months later.