And if it was really true that Elizabeth Bowen died, then of course that bothered her. Of course. The girl was only a child, and deserved no badness.
EIGHT
When Mary was a child, her grandmother told her that as long as she kept the piss pot clean and her apron white, there would be no mistress who would turn up her nose at her. It was over her grandmother’s turf fire that Mary learned how to make griddle cakes and brown bread, where she first browned bacon and boiled beef, made salmon with butter and cream, eel and trout. It was her grandmother who taught her the best way to tuck the turnips and potatoes around the meat, and it was her grandmother who saved enough to buy Mary a one-way passage to America when Mary was fourteen. There would be food in America that Mary had never seen, but the rules were the same: cook it right, draw out what’s good, don’t be afraid of putting things together. Her grandmother’s sister, Kate Brown, would give Mary a place to live, help her find work in New York. “Send her,” Kate’s letter back to Mary’s grandmother had read. “I’d love to have her.”
Mary’s first impression of America when she arrived in Castle Garden in 1883 was that it wasn’t a kind place. Soon after she had steadied herself, her bag secure in her hand, she was hustled into one grim line after another, like one mangy cow in a herd. Other ships had also arrived that day and she waited and watched as the kaleidoscope of colors kept shifting: green aprons, yellow head scarves, red tassels brushing the ground, dotted ribbon pulled through belt loops to hold up short pants. The American men were the ones with the broad faces, and derby hats pulled low. She imagined a welcoming party, but instead one ugly man shoved a card in her face and another, even uglier, braced Mary’s head with his large hand and told her to hold still while he used a buttonhook to lift her left eyelid and then her right. “Trachoma,” he said. “Highly contagious.” Mary didn’t understand the first word and barely heard the others, locked as she was in a posture of fear. When he finished and announced her eyes clean, she noticed that the man wiped the hook on a towel draped over the railing before moving on to his next victim.
Paddy Brown, Aunt Kate’s husband, met Mary when she’d completed all the lines and gotten all her stamps. “Mary Mallon?” he said when she approached the only man left in the waiting area that fit his description. “Follow me.” She followed him down a flight of stairs to the sunshine outside. They passed through the gates of what seemed like fortress walls, and then she was on the outside, on the streets of New York City. They climbed aboard a trolley drawn by a pair of glum-looking horses. When they came to the end of the track, they got out and made their way on foot. Mary struggled to keep up with the old man, who with his hunched shoulders and his badger’s head kept disappearing into the crowd. “Where is this?” she asked, hoping conversation would slow his pace. “Where are we now?” He raised a callused finger and pointed roughly at a street sign that read “Thirty-Seventh Street.” Finally, as the crowds thinned, and she followed him onto Tenth Avenue, Paddy Brown loosened his stride.
“Wait here a minute,” he said just before ducking into a store with a tuft of wheat carved on the sign outside.
“How much farther?” Mary asked.
“Just two doors down.”
Mary dropped her bag to the sidewalk and tried to get a feel for what waited for her, but two doors down looked the same as every door they’d passed for the last several blocks: dark and plain. Rusted staircases stuck to the faces of every building, and from their railings hung a variety of sheets and blankets. Where home had been full of greens and blues in summer, oranges and reds in winter, New York was the same color wherever she looked: the muddy avenues, the muck-splattered carriages, the gray shingles, the faded red brick, the coal smoke that hung in the air and blurred the outlines of everything. The buildings were tall — five, six stories. When Paddy came out of the shop with a loaf of bread, she pointed at the bedding hanging above their heads and asked him why. “Too heavy for the lines,” he said.
“I see,” she said, though she didn’t see. She looked forward to Aunt Kate, and tried to comprehend that somewhere inside one of these buildings that showed their shame to the world lived her nana’s sister. She searched herself for the tug of home.
“How was the journey, anyhow?” Paddy asked then, looking at her for the first time since meeting her.
The girl in the berth below Mary’s had died when they were ten days at sea. In twenty-one days, Mary watched seven bodies slide into the sea, all wrapped in sailcloth and sewn tight. The girl was dropped on the same day as another person, a man by the size of him, and when she fell through the air between the deck and the water, her body bent at the hips, Mary wondered if they’d double-checked, if they were absolutely beyond-a-doubt sure. Someone in the crowd remarked that it was only the Grace of God that would keep the rest of them out of the water, and someone else said Amen, and Mary wondered why God would grant any of them that Grace and not those who’d already been thrown away. It wasn’t the first time Mary noticed that God had a haphazard approach to things.
“Was it very rough?” Paddy asked.
“No, it was grand,” Mary said and looked back at the garbage lining the street, the haggard people rushing about on the sidewalks.
Mary’s aunt had more welcome for her, and scolded her husband thoroughly for not carrying Mary’s bag. She’d prepared a rich lamb stew with carrots and potatoes that went cold before them because every time Mary went to put a spoonful in her mouth, Aunt Kate asked another question about a person from home. Paddy and Aunt Kate had no children and were too old to remedy that fact.
“Well, now,” Aunt Kate said when Mary had finished giving her the news and they’d taken five minutes to eat what was on their plates. “First thing is to find you good work. Then we’ll see. What can you do?”
“I can cook,” Mary told her.
“Cook what? Spuds? A bit of ham? What else can you do?”
“I want to cook.”
“Mary, love, they have stoves in America you’ve never seen the likes of.”
“I can practice on yours.”
“This!” Aunt Kate laughed. “This is nothing. This is a stone’s throw from the turf and the open fire. There are kitchens in some of these houses that have stoves wider than—” Aunt Kate stretched her arms as wide as she could to either side. “They have stoves with four burners, two ovens.”
“I can learn, can’t I?”
“That’s true, I suppose.” Kate regarded Mary with a smile. “Patience, love. It’s very good to see you.”
• • •
After giving Mary a few weeks to settle in, to get accustomed to the pace of the streets and the chaos of the pedestrians, the horses, the freight train that plowed along Eleventh Avenue and didn’t stop for anything; after showing her the spider’s web of clotheslines hidden behind the tenements, and the tub for washing; after letting Mary get used to her cot next to the kitchen table and showing her how to put coal in the stove, and empty the ashes; after taking Mary to meet yet another neighbor who wanted to know her business; and after learning that no one understood her when she spoke except for other Irish and teaching her how to enunciate, speak slowly, try to talk more like an American, Kate finally announced it was time to go to the agency and see what kind of job Mary could get for herself. Mary had just turned fifteen. Kate told her everything she should say, and made her practice at the table after Paddy had gone to bed. She had Mary sit across from her with her hands folded, and then she asked questions about the jobs she’d had in New Jersey and Connecticut. Mary was to describe how she was an accomplished cook and had cooked for families in Ireland before leaving. “You are twenty years old. Same birthday, just subtract five years from the year.”