“You haven’t forgotten that the guests will arrive at six.” She narrowed her eyes as if deciding whether it really could be the same hat. A copy, perhaps? A poor imitation?
“No, I wouldn’t forget that.” Mrs. Bowen had called the office that had placed Mary to hire two additional cooks just for the afternoon, and Mary had stripped and scrubbed everything the day before. When Mary arrived at the Bowen residence three weeks earlier, the pots and pans were thick with baked-on carbon, and she spent her first week chipping it away, scrubbing them back to their original luster. While she was at it she tied a rag to the end of a broom and pulled the cobwebs from the tin ceilings. She went through a gallon of ammonia scrubbing the floor. No one knows where to find the pockets of grease in a kitchen like a cook knows, and when the other cooks arrived that afternoon, Mary saw them looking. And she saw them not finding.
Mrs. Bowen seemed satisfied, and though she still wore a curious expression, like she didn’t quite understand what she was looking at, she finally managed to tear her eyes away from the top of Mary’s head. She put her hand to her own hat for a moment, then turned to enter the house through the main entrance. Mary watched the other woman walk away, and as she felt the weight of the packages in her arms, the ache in her wrists and elbows from struggling with them for so long, on the IRT, on the streetcar, up and down stairs, across puddles and stubborn patches of ice left over in the shade of trees, the scald of the cold against her knuckles, she felt the words slipping from between her lips before she had a chance to stop them.
“I see we have the same taste,” she said to Mrs. Bowen’s back. It was a foolish thing to say, and as soon as the words were out she remembered her aunt observing once, years ago, that Mary had a twist in her that sometimes made her do and say things that she shouldn’t.
Mrs. Bowen turned. “I beg your pardon?”
“Your hat,” Mary said, nodding at the other woman’s head as if she might not know where to find her hat. “It’s identical to mine.”
“Oh,” Mrs. Bowen said, her hand reaching somewhere in the region of her ear, not touching the hat. “Similar, Mary, not identical. But I see what you mean.”
“Not the same?”
“No. Similar. Not the same.”
Mary knew that if she snuck into Mrs. Bowen’s quarters that night and switched their hats she would never in a thousand years of scrutiny have been able to tell the difference.
“My mistake.”
The servants’ entrance was just a few short steps down from the sidewalk but Mary barely made it inside before she started laughing. Bette and Frank were in the kitchen making preparations and could tell by Mary’s face she had a story to tell, so she told it, and they all had a laugh over Mrs. Bowen’s expression, which Mary did for them again and again as they unfolded the counters from their compartments and laid out the knives and waited for the additional cooks.
They laughed and laughed, and the work went quickly.
A week later, the daughter of the family declined all of her meals and told her governess that she felt poorly, and would have to do her lessons another time. By evening, her fever was so high she had to spend the whole night in the tub. One month later, Mary was taken away.
• • •
“Nonsense,” said John Cane, when Mary told him the whole story of the hat not long after she was moved to her private hut on North Brother. John had asked if she wanted to keep him company while he transferred to the ground some of the plants he’d started from seed over the winter. She was quiet, at first, content to watch him work, and then he’d asked how it was that they’d captured her, taken her to North Brother.
“It isn’t nonsense,” Mary said, raising her voice. “They chased me down like a dog. They harassed me at the Bowens’ first, then in my own rooms, then they got me one day when the Bowens were out. They had to carry me! They each took an arm or a leg and they carried me. They didn’t even give me a chance to get my things.”
“What things?” John asked. “You’ll send for them. Tell the matron.” But Mary didn’t know the matron, didn’t know what brand of woman she was. Perhaps the matron would like to get her hands on Mary’s hidden envelope, her three good blouses, her beautiful cobalt hat.
How to explain that if it wasn’t the hat specifically, it was the fact that Mary had purchased the hat, had worn it, had admired herself in it. That she was the type of woman who counted out her earnings — a full month’s worth of earnings! — and slid it in a neat stack across a counter to purchase for herself something as impractical as a beautiful hat. If she’d been the type of woman who saved her money, or gave it to someone who needed it more, a neighbor with children, perhaps, or the church, if she’d been a married woman who handed every dollar over to her husband, or better yet a married woman who didn’t have any earnings because she was taken up with the care of her own home, she’d never be in the situation she was in. She couldn’t prove it, but it was the truth nonetheless.
She’d broached the idea with Mr. O’Neill two years later when he came to see her on North Brother, but it was like trying to explain to a cook in training how to tell when a duck is done even when the juices lie, how to predict whether a soufflé will fall just by feeling the air in the room. “A hat?” Mr. O’Neill said. Then he changed the subject and she could see him dismiss it entirely.
SIX
Mary followed Mr. O’Neill by several paces as they entered the courtroom. The time was two minutes past ten o’clock.
Almost every chair was occupied when she walked down the narrow center aisle. She’d pictured benches, polished wood, the judge elevated above them on a kind of throne, but instead the cramped and musty room was filled with straight-backed chairs in uneven lines. Some reporters had turned their chairs to make a cluster with others they knew. Some people who had no involvement in the case but had been following it in the papers nudged their chairs out of line bit by bit with impatient shifting. She wanted to know if Alfred was there, but she kept her eyes fixed on the neat seams of Mr. O’Neill’s suit jacket. There was a momentary hush when those closest to the door spotted her, and a collective creak as several dozen spectators turned to see her for themselves.
Some were on her side, Mary hoped as she crossed the room and kept her focus above the heads of the witnesses. She’d seen the editorials in the paper, the people who believed she’d committed no crime and should be set free to live and work in society like everyone else. Then there were the papers that refused to use her real name even after it had become public knowledge. The Germ Woman, their headlines still read. Readers had written in to ask if breathing near Mary Mallon put a person at risk. What about touching what she touched? What about entering a room shortly after she’d left? She hoped the sympathetic were in attendance at the hearing, but all she felt as she made her way to the front of the room was the scrutiny of fifty people looking at her so closely in the muggy air that she felt handled, groped, every bit as dirty as she was accused of being.
Mr. O’Neill placed his briefcase on a scratched and dented wood table at the front of the room. The men from the Department of Health were already seated at a similar table across the aisle, and Mary made the mistake of looking at them, one by one, until her glance jumped to the row behind them, where Dr. Soper’s dark head was bent over his notes. A man in a blue uniform stepped forward and announced the arrival of Judges Erlinger and Giegerich. Mary hadn’t expected two judges, but she was relieved to see that she’d be able to keep them apart in her thoughts: Erlinger was a big man and Giegerich was no larger than a girl.