“Will there be a break?” he asked, no longer bothering to whisper.
“Mary, please,” Mr. O’Neill said.
Across the aisle, Dr. Soper coughed, and when Mary looked over at him he was looking right back at her, as if daring her to do exactly what she was tempted to do. His hair was combed back off his face and he was one of the few men in the gallery still wearing his suit jacket.
“I don’t know,” Mary said to Alfred. “I really don’t know.”
“Well, then I’ll see you after. Won’t I?”
Judge Erlinger interrupted the man from the Department of Health. “Miss Mallon, do you need to excuse yourself?”
Mr. O’Neill gave her a look that meant it was her last warning. If you leave this room, the look said, this is the last you’ll see of me. Mary felt Alfred’s hope float up behind her, wrap itself around her shoulders, and pull her toward the door. They would send guards with her, she knew. Without looking at the judges or at Soper, Mary turned and faced the front of the room.
“No, sir,” Mary said. “He’s an old friend.”
A titter went up in the gallery and Mary put her hand to her left eye.
“Go on,” the judge said to the lawyer who’d been speaking.
• • •
On the other side of the room, in the very back row, a reporter for the Examiner noted that the Germ Woman seemed upset. Was she crying? Was she scratching her face like a cat? He leaned forward in his seat, tried to get a better angle. Crying would go over. Crying made sense. He watched her bring her fingertips to her eye and then back to the table and felt his body flinch. He opened his notebook. “Germ woman tearful through proceedings, careless with bodily fluids even in court of law.”
SEVEN
Once the hearing date was set, Mr. O’Neill came to North Brother once more. They went over their strategy, and he told Mary that he wanted her to swear before the judges that she’d never cook for hire again. “It’s your best chance,” he said. They believed she was sick, that she was passing Typhoid Fever from her hands to the food she served. That she’d never been sick a day in her life was of no relevance.
“How can it be of no relevance?” Mary asked. The last ferry going back to the city was due to depart shortly, and she wanted to be clear with Mr. O’Neill on her position before she said good-bye. “How can I spread an illness that I’ve never had myself?”
“I only mean that it’s of no relevance to them. But it’s entirely relevant to our argument. It’s a new theory of disease, Mary,” Mr. O’Neill explained. “Dr. Soper—”
“Don’t talk to me about Soper,” Mary warned him. “What kind of a doctor is he anyway? I’ve been asking for two years and no one has explained it properly.”
“He’s a sanitary engineer. He—”
“A what?”
“Part of his job is to track diseases to their source. The garbage, for instance. He’s done a lot of work for the Department of Sanitation. And he’s been a consultant for the IRT since it opened. Remember when everyone was worried about breathing microscopic steel shavings? They called him. He was already making a name for himself, but finding you has made his reputation.”
“That’s why I’m here, isn’t it? So he can make his name?”
“Mary,” Mr. O’Neill sighed. “Things could be worse for you. You have a private cottage. You have the freedom to move about the island.”
“An island the size of a park. Where everyone I meet shrinks away from me.”
“It could be worse.”
“Well, yes, Mr. O’Neill. You’re absolutely correct. I could be dead, I suppose.”
• • •
Of the many witnesses called the morning of the hearing, a few surprised Mary. Most were people who worked for the Department of Health, or who worked at labs scattered across the city, and who canceled out one another with their opposing views of her case. Half thought that since Mary was a healthy person and had never shown any symptom of the disease she was accused of passing on to so many, the city had no right to imprison her. Others felt just as strongly that it was precisely because Mary showed no symptoms that she must be kept in quarantine for life. “Think of the innocent,” urged a doctor named Stamp whom Mary had never seen before. “No one will think to avoid her in the streets, no one will hesitate from inviting her into his home. Seeing her good health and her experience, what would stop her from being hired to cook in a good house? The Bowen child was only nine years old when she died of Typhoid Fever.”
Mary had hoped that Elizabeth Bowen’s death was one more thing Dr. Soper had made up, wanting to make her situation worse. It had seemed too convenient to their cause. But Mr. O’Neill confirmed it was true, and Mary supposed he had no reason to lie. And now there was an unfamiliar doctor on the stand confirming that truth. Mary remembered the quiet girl who read books and listened to her governess and preferred her bedroom and the parlor to the fresh air outside. Sometimes she came downstairs to see what Mary was making in the kitchen, and a few times Mary had let her dip her finger in a sauce, or take a stewed apple out of a pot with a spoon. One time, Elizabeth asked Mary why she wasn’t married and when Mary told her it was because she didn’t feel like it, Elizabeth said she’d marry Mary in an instant if she’d been a boy.
Then she said, “Is it really because you don’t feel like it? Or is it because you haven’t anyone to marry?”
“Aren’t you bold!” Mary said. “How would you like to pick up someone else’s socks all day long?”
Elizabeth made a face.
“Isn’t it better to earn wages?”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said, entirely convinced.
“And don’t forget,” Mary told her, “if I were a married woman, I probably wouldn’t be here making your supper.”
The first sign that Elizabeth was sick came when she wandered into the kitchen and announced that she was tired. Mary had looked carefully at the girl and thought of Tobias Kirkenbauer.
On the day Mary was taken, the girl had been upstairs, sleeping, her governess watching over her. She’d had the fever, yes, Mary remembered that well. She’d wanted to tell them the best way to help her, the best times to put her in the tub, the coolest cottons to wear next to her skin. She’d sent up a bowl of beef broth to give the girl energy, but they didn’t want to listen to her, and sent the broth back down with Frank. She wanted to see the girl for herself, but once the family called the doctor they closed the girl’s door to all of the staff except for the governess, and when the governess became ill they had the doctor tend to her as well.
One of the reporters had gotten Bette to talk, and Bette told him that Mr. and Mrs. Bowen loved throwing dinner parties more than anything else in the world, and now they were afraid that no one would ever want to come to their home again. According to Bette, Mrs. Bowen vowed that every domestic she hired from now on would be a Swede or a German, because they were more impeccable than every other race. When the reporter asked what Bette thought of Mrs. Bowen’s opinion of Germans and Swedes, Bette agreed that it was probably true. She was fired within an hour of the paper landing on Mr. Bowen’s desk.
Since the Bowens didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to even admit in court that they’d welcomed such a woman into their home, that they’d eaten her filthy food and become sick because of it, Dr. Soper interviewed their friends and neighbors instead, and once one of the reporters caught wind that Soper had been talking to the Bowens’ neighbors, so did that reporter. It was printed in the Evening Sun that the Germ Woman had too many ideas about herself, and because Mrs. Bowen didn’t tolerate her attitude, the Germ Woman infected her on purpose. The stories claimed that Mary was resistant to some of the ways of good Christian households, and purposely defied them by meeting strange men on corners.