Mr. O’Neill made a point of addressing the main rumors that were printed in the 1907 papers, because those would be the details the judges would recall. How can I be resistant to Christianity when I’m a Catholic? Mary demanded of Mr. O’Neill. Tell me that, please. And the man I met once on the corner was a stranger only to them, not to me.
Mary shared with Mr. O’Neill the observation she’d made ages ago, that all the great houses of New York City are the same. They are headed by women who should have been male, and should have been ministers, women who go down to the employment agency in their white gloves to look around like they are in a brothel, discussing terms with the madam while each whore to be hired looks on. Then when the terms are agreed upon, instead of directing the cook to the kitchen or the laundress to the laundry, every lady gives a speech about joining a Christian home.
“The first thing they ask is whether I’m churchgoing. You’d think it would be something to do with cooking, but no, they want to know whether I get myself to a church on Sundays. Do you think the right answer is ‘Yes’?” Mary asked Mr. O’Neill, who listened and waited without showing any indication of what he thought. “Well, it isn’t. Experience taught me that the better answer is ‘No.’ This gives the lady a chance to instruct a new hire on the beneficence of Our Lord. They all say they want a good cook, but what they want even more is a worthy project.”
“What has this to do with anything?” Mr. O’Neill asked. “We were talking about rumors we’ll need to address one by one when we’re in front of the judges.”
“What does it—? It has everything to do with everything we’ve been talking about! Don’t you see? They—”
“Yes?”
Mary thought to tell him again about the hat, but remembered she’d long since given up on making that point. “Look, if you don’t see, you don’t see. I wasn’t a project for them. I refused to be. I was there to cook as well as I could — and I was damn good at it — but at thirty-seven I was past the project stage.” She went along with it in previous employments, but that time, with Mrs. Bowen, a mood took her. The first time Mrs. Bowen brought up Our Lord, Mary laughed, and said He hadn’t made it downtown in years.
“Oh, Mary,” Mrs. Bowen had said.
There was also the imbroglio about the food cooperatives just a few days after confronting Mrs. Bowen with the twin to her own hat. Mrs. Bowen found Mary in the kitchen to tell her that she and a few of the other ladies had decided to organize their cooks into groups on a trial basis. Together, the cooks would learn the new French methods and more exotic cuisines that she and the other ladies would decide on.
“The idea is to be together,” Mrs. Bowen said, “and learn from one another, and it would be a help to you, wouldn’t it, having other cooks to work alongside instead of just being here by yourself?”
Mary went to the church hall on Sixty-Fourth Street to meet the other cooks, and saw that there were only two others. They had the whole place to themselves and their conversation echoed in the vastness of the empty, wood-paneled room; it bounced off the many droplets of glass hanging from the chandelier. The back room of this hall featured a state-of-the-art kitchen that sat empty most nights of the week except for Saturdays, when the church held socials for its parishioners. The kitchen had ceramic double-pot sinks, a zinc-lined icebox, plenty of work space. The three cooks were charged with making a meal for six families. It was to be like that just on Mondays and Tuesdays, for a start. One of the cooks, Clare, seemed to know more than the other two and informed Mary that when they finished up Mary was supposed to deliver a meal to the Compton family on Sixty-First Street on her way back to the Bowens’. They were to follow Clare’s direction because she had more training in the French method than the other two.
“So I’m now cook for the Bowens and the Comptons?”
“I don’t think we’re meant to see it that way,” said Ida, the third cook. “I think we’re to see it as the three of us cooking enough of a meal to do for six families. Not you have these two, or you your two, and so on. You see?”
“And where are the cooks for the other families?” Mary didn’t see. She usually considered herself the brightest in any group, but the Bowen girl had been feeling poorly and she was distracted by it. Again and again she’d tried to get up to the girl’s room, and again and again she was barred. No one had yet mentioned the word Typhoid.
“The other cooks were scaled back,” said Clare. “Told they are needed only Wednesday on.”
“So,” Mary said, like she was waking up from a dream, “we cook here as a group and deliver the food to all these families. That way six families get fed for the price of three cooks instead of six cooks.”
The three looked at one another.
“For the purpose of saving money?” Mary said. It didn’t seem like the right answer, but there couldn’t be any other.
“There’s something like this happening on the West Side,” Ida said. “I have a friend. Her employer calls it a cooks’ cooperative. It’s cheaper for them, and she says that the idea is that after a while we won’t work for one particular family anymore. We’ll be asked to leave our rooms. Then we’ll have to get rooms elsewhere and commute to the place we are to cook just like any other day cook or common laborer.”
“We won’t do this,” Mary said to the other cooks. And that night, for the first and last time in her life, Mary intentionally ruined good food, and talked the other two into doing the same. They overcooked the tenderloins. They boiled the asparagus until it was stringy mush. They withheld salt from the potatoes and put it on the cobblers instead.
“I hope it turned out well,” Mary said to Mr. and Mrs. Bowen when she served them later. “I’m not used to having to transport my dishes. It’s best, you see, straight from the oven to the table.”
“Could you not choose a dish, Mary, that would support being transported?” Mr. Bowen asked, as he probed the meat with the tine of his fork.
“Of course,” Mary said, bowing her head. “We could limit ourselves to just a few dishes that we know would work.”
“Limit?” Mrs. Bowen asked, and pushed her plate away.
• • •
Once Elizabeth got sick, and they realized it was Typhoid Fever, there was no more mention of cooking in the church hall, or of cooking at all for that matter. Mary made bread and a thin soup that would keep, and spent most of her hours hauling ice up the stairs and the empty bucket back down — the only helpful thing they would allow her to do. They kept the block in the kitchen sink and Mary put Frank to work charging at it with a butcher knife until it came to pieces, little ones to suck, larger ones to serve as floes in the tubs upstairs where the family bathed, and the single tub downstairs where the servants took turns. There was an ice shortage in 1907, and ice was very dear, but Mary ordered blocks on credit and hoped they wouldn’t ask for a settlement of their books before the girl recovered.
• • •
In their first interview, Mr. O’Neill asked Mary why death didn’t bother her, why she didn’t notice it following her everywhere she went. Mary didn’t even know where to look for a starting point. After so many months on North Brother, so many years since setting foot in Dobbs Ferry, Mary could still feel the silk of Tobias Kirkenbauer’s curls when he passed under her hand, and the way he settled himself on her hip, his arm slung around her neck, as if he had no fear in the world as long as she was holding him. How could anyone think she didn’t notice, or that it didn’t bother her? No one in any court of law, no man in any room, knows the desperation of squinting through dim light and seeing a baby’s cheeks inflamed, feeling the hot hands, the eyes gone flat with fever. A twist came in Mary’s belly that was the beginning of a prayer. Back in 1899, when little Tobias Kirkenbauer wouldn’t open his mouth to eat, who pressed the creamy water from the boiled oats and spooned it into his mouth? I did, Mary reminded herself. And he held on longer than he would have if Mary hadn’t been there. But they didn’t know about 1899. To them, 1899 was not on the record books.