“But what if they ask where? What if they ask me to describe New Jersey or Connecticut?”
“They won’t. But if they do, you go ahead and describe whatever you imagine. Be confident. They’ve probably never been there themselves.”
Mary tried to speak slowly and sound older than she was, but the woman at the agency just told her in a blank tone that they’d place her as a laundress. “Are you a worker?” the woman had asked. “A real worker?”
“I’m a worker,” Mary assured her.
“Report with clean clothes. Spotless. And keep your person clean at all times. Be respectful to the family and their guests, and for God’s sake don’t try to engage them if they don’t engage you. If one of the family enters a room that you are in, simply exit as quickly as possible. You have no opinion of politics whatsoever and in fact do not follow politics of any kind. You don’t read the newspapers. Do you understand, Miss Mallon?”
“Yes.”
The agent handed her a folded pamphlet that repeated everything she’d just said.
“Are you religious, by the way? Catholic, I imagine.”
“Catholic.”
“The family has probably already assumed you’re Catholic, or will when they meet you, but don’t mention it yourself.”
Mary didn’t know what it meant to be a laundress and hoped she could prove herself and one day be allowed to cook, but she discovered in that first situation that cook and laundress are two different tracks, and a laundress never becomes a cook any more than a cook becomes a Lady. At home, they’d washed their clothes in the river and draped them on rocks to dry. Aunt Kate washed her clothes in a basin, twisted them roughly when she pulled them out, and hung them on the clothesline that stretched across the tops of the outdoor privies to the back wall of another tenement. The night before Mary began, Aunt Kate showed her the little square ounce of Reckitt’s Blue she kept in the pantry, and explained to her about using it for the final rinse to take out any hint of yellow. Fine clothes needed more careful treatment and she warned Mary that if she encountered anything with a lace collar or cloth-covered buttons, to go over them with the sponge instead of sinking them in the tub with the rest.
The family was called Cameron, and Mary slept on a bunk in a room off the kitchen. She took her meals with the other staff. Room and board would be deducted from her wage. The woman at the agency had gone over the deductions so quickly that Mary didn’t have time to calculate until she got back to Aunt Kate’s, and together they realized there would be hardly anything left over. “But it’s good experience,” Aunt Kate said. “There’s value in that as well.” Paddy Brown made a low sound and shifted in front of the stove.
As the woman at the office predicted, the footman, Nathaniel, who’d been charged with greeting Mary and giving her a tour of the home, told her that she would be required to join in the evening prayers nightly. The mistress did not take her faith lightly and required her staff to approach Our Lord with the same seriousness.
“What if someone refuses?”
Nathaniel studied her face. “Try it,” he suggested.
The Camerons had help that cooked, help that cleaned the house, did the laundry, watched the children, taught the children, tended to the grass and pots of flowers outside. When Mary had a free moment she was supposed to help Martha, who was forever running an oiled cloth over the furniture, up and down the stairs, beginning every day where she’d ended the last and doing everything over again so that no speck of dust ever had a chance to land. The expression she wore on her face was one of combat. She was engaged in a battle that offered no respite, and even while eating lunch at the small kitchen table with the rest of the staff, she was squinting over their heads, peering into corners, and tilting her chin to see in a different light what lurked there. It was the cleanest place Mary had ever been. The newspapers Mr. Cameron left open on the table in the sitting room talked of poor ventilation and crowding in the cities, toxic odors that came from standing water and horse manure, but the Cameron home was so protected from anything like that, so unlike Aunt Kate’s or the rooms of any of the families Mary had visited on Aunt Kate’s block where there was no place to keep the garbage except piled on the curb outside where it would stink until the Department of Street Cleaning came by with their carts, where every person who walked through the door of their building tracked the mud or ash or excrement from the street up the stairs, through the halls, into their own rooms, that Mary started to feel that she was also waging a war, they all were, and Mary’s particular front was at the collars of shirts and blouses, the hems of skirts and trousers. According to the papers, the source of every disease suffered by every New Yorker could be found in a garbage pile on the Lower East Side. Mary heard the word miasma and the next time she went home she asked Aunt Kate what it meant. Ever since then she imagined the city streets seeded with invisible landmines, and the landmines were these toxic clouds, miasmas, that floated up from every dirty thing left to fester at the city’s curbs. She tried not to inhale when she made her way to and from the streetcar, or on the many occasions when the sanitation wagon skipped Aunt Kate’s block. She felt safer at the Camerons, where all day long, six days a week, she and the others led a coordinated campaign against dirt and disorder, and where the sanitation drivers never clicked their tongues at their horses to speed them past the door.
Every member of the staff had one day’s leave per week to go home, and perhaps they weren’t as careful when they were back on their own territory. One Monday morning, the Camerons’ longtime cook returned to work with the telltale bull’s neck but pretended nothing was wrong. She just slammed pots and pans and began the ritual of the water with her chin tilted toward heaven, gasping for air. Mary and the others hid her as well as they could, but Mrs. Cameron liked to come down to the kitchen once in a while to discuss the evening meal and she chose that Monday to tell the cook, in person, that the family was bored of beef roasts, and chops, too, for that matter. Could the cook come up with a trout or a flounder on a Monday?
“Oh,” Mrs. Cameron said when she saw the cook’s neck, and retreated to the hall. She put a hand up to her own throat. “You’re ill.”
The cook couldn’t speak, so her assistant — the girl who rinsed and chopped vegetables like they were criminals and her knife a weapon — spoke for her. “She’s just after telling me they have standing water in the air shaft where she lives and on Saturday when we parted she expected the water to be stinking. This morning she told me, yes, it was fierce stinking and no one in her building can keep a window to the air shaft open with the smell of it. It’ll go on until a dry stretch. So she thinks she breathed up that odor in spite of the closed windows.”