Just that morning, on her way from Tenth Avenue, Mary had to hold her breath as the trolley rolled by a horse stable, where on Sunday nights the men who cleaned the stalls pushed out all the horse shit and old hay. Next to the stable was Weiss’s bakery, and before dawn on Monday mornings the Weisses splashed out all the old milk that hadn’t sold the week before. They threw it over the shit pushed out by the neighboring stable. As the sun rose, the milk soured and infected the air. Often, they tossed old eggs, too, and the carcasses of chickens, and crates, boxes, papers, packaging, overflowing ash cans. The eggs bothered Mary most of all, and every time she passed on a Monday, she wondered why they didn’t put them in a cake. Or give them to someone who needed them. The waste of it made her never want to buy anything there.
“Why can’t she speak for herself?”
“Oh, she can,” the assistant said meekly, but the cook sat down on a stool and put her head in her hands.
“You’re dismissed,” Mrs. Cameron said, taking another step backward. “Please go home and tend to yourself. Be in touch with the agency when you’re better.”
The cook showed no signs of moving as the assistant fetched her shawl and wrapped it around her shoulders. “You have money?” the girl asked, then looked around. “Could we pitch in for a fare?” Along with Mary, there were two others of the house staff present. Mary slid her hand into her apron pocket and closed her fist around the dime and five pennies resting there. Mr. Cameron always left a tip when she starched his shirts, and it was a game to find it. Sometimes he left it in one of his shoes, twisted into a hanky and tied off with a string. Sometimes in the pocket of one of the shirts. Sometimes he came upon Mary while she was working, sneaked up behind, and dropped it into her apron pocket. Mary would jump at the sudden tug of the money and he’d be there behind her, smiling. It was something, Mary understood, she wasn’t to tell the others.
Everyone put coins on the counter. Mary’s quick fingers separated out three pennies and she added hers to the lot.
“Well,” the assistant said when she came back. Mary could tell she’d already elevated herself to head cook. “I’ll need to go to the fish market. One of you will need to start—”
“Pardon me,” Nathaniel said, breathless from running down the stairs. “Missus says you’re to go, too. And that if any of the rest of you feel ill, you should do the right thing and excuse yourself.”
“Me?” the assistant asked. “But I feel fine!”
Nathaniel shrugged. “And the rest of us are to take fifteen minutes to scrub the kitchen again.”
After the scouring, Mr. Cameron appeared in the kitchen and asked who could cook a meal until the office sent over another woman.
“I can,” Mary said, taking a silent survey of the fruit and vegetables on the counter, the cheese and milk she’d seen in the icebox. Mr. Cameron ignored her.
Martha could not change positions and was off limits. “Jane?” he asked the children’s tutor, but she said she’d never cooked a thing in her life.
“I can cook,” Mary said again.
Mr. Cameron frowned. “Mary, then.”
And so Mary took off her laundering whites and put on the cook’s apron instead. After that first meal — baked whitefish with leeks and tomatoes, and a vanilla cake for dessert — Mr. Cameron teased that they would cancel their request to the agency for a replacement cook and instead ask for a replacement laundress. He took on the habit of having his morning coffee in the kitchen before heading out to work, and then, after one morning when Mrs. Cameron came looking for him and demanded to know what exactly he thought he was doing, he stopped. And Mary was left alone. A week later, the new cook arrived, and Mary was sent back to the pile of muslins and linens that had been waiting for her. I will leave this position, she decided. I will go to a new agency and tell them a history as cook, and they will believe me. And if they don’t believe me, I’ll go to another agency. She took out her small brush, her square of starch. She rubbed the dry patches on her hands.
NINE
There were times, over on North Brother, with John Cane staring at the way she spread jam over a piece of toast and bit off the corner, when Mary felt like none of it was real. Even two years on, the doctors still spoke to her like she was a child, and she tried to find new ways of reminding them that she’d served food to people who once dined with the president of the United States of America. And after tasting what she’d prepared, they looked up from their plates to study her more closely, knowing she was not entirely what she seemed. Beneath the plain attire and the cook’s hands, behind the thick Irish accent and the working-class posture of exhaustion, they saw something else: a level of taste, an understanding of what those seated at the table were really after — a challenge to the palate, a meal to be enjoyed and not just consumed.
Mary wanted Mr. O’Neill to know that there were some doctors who had an unhealthy obsession with her bathroom habits, far beyond the scope of the case. “They’d watch me go, if I let them,” she told him. Two years earlier she wouldn’t even have been able to say that much, wouldn’t have even been able to make a glancing reference to “going.” They could make all the insinuations and comments they wanted about Alfred, and the rooms they shared, why they weren’t married, what kind of woman this made her. None of it bothered her as much as the discussion of her bathroom habits. Shortly before Mary met Mr. O’Neill, one of the nurses who came to collect her samples joked that she envied Mary. “You’ve got your cottage on the water, free rein of the island, no balance to be paid to the grocer, no child hanging off you, no husband to face at night, no younger brothers to put through school. There’s more than a few who’d trade with you.” The nurse said this as Mary placed on the floor the usual glass canister that contained her sample, mixed in a solution that looked like water. The nurse handed her a second canister for her urine. Mary usually tried to shroud the contents of the canisters with paper or a napkin, wrapping them separately at first and then together, like a package that needed a bow, and doing so allowed her to pretend for a moment that what was happening was not really happening. But that day, because of the nurse’s comment, Mary shoved the jars in the other woman’s direction without wrapping them, pushed them into her hands so roughly that the nurse fumbled, almost dropped them. The contents sloshed inside.
“Careful, Miss,” the woman said.
“I’d say the same to you,” Mary answered.
The doctors admitted that more than a third of the time Mary’s samples came back showing no Typhoid bacilli whatsoever. And her urine came back negative 100 percent of the time. When Mr. O’Neill asked about past pressure they’d put on Mary to submit to gallbladder surgery, they conceded that they no longer believed her gallbladder was to blame. Her intestines, perhaps. Her stomach. They weren’t sure.
“Good thing you were stubborn about surgery,” Mr. O’Neill said to Mary later. “It would have been for nothing.” Mary had occasionally wondered why no one had mentioned her gallbladder in a long time, and now she wanted to go up to the hospital and demand an apology. They were animals. They would have risked her life for sport.
“Let it go,” Mr. O’Neill said. “We’ll address all of it at the right time.”
He said that it was essential that they humanize her at the hearing. “Make me into a human?” Mary asked, confused.
“Well, yes. What I mean is, we have to paint your story so that anyone, no matter what their station, will sympathize. And better yet, make them afraid that they could end up like you.”