“So in acting for me they’re really acting for themselves.”
“Exactly. So. What were your feelings when you were told you were being brought to North Brother? Were you aware of the Tuberculosis hospital here?”
“My feelings?”
“Were you afraid? Did you even know of North Brother? Where exactly it was, for example?”
“Of course,” Mary said, looking at him steadily. “Of course I knew where it was. Doesn’t every person in this city know?”
Mr. O’Neill seemed about to say something but changed his mind.
“You think I don’t follow a newspaper, Mr. O’Neill? Even the illiterate in this city know exactly where North Brother is. There’s more to getting news than reading it in the paper. There’s talking, too, isn’t there? Or did you assume we don’t talk about the same topics you talk about? Wasn’t the General Slocum disaster only five years ago?”
She did not admit to Mr. O’Neill that she’d never heard of North Brother before June 1904, when the General Slocum burned. But forever after, she thought of those people whenever an errand brought her near Kleindeutschland, little Germany, where most of the people on the General Slocum that day were from. More than one thousand people had burned to death or drowned, and Mary thought of that number when she looked out over the East River now — men, women, children all bobbing in the rough water, pushed back and forth and under. A story went around in the weeks after the tragedy that the manufacturer of the life preservers had slipped in iron bars to make the weight minimums, that the captain and crew had abandoned the ship and its passengers and taken a tug from North Brother back to Manhattan, refusing to look at those in the water who cried out for their help. Inmates from the House of Refuge on Rikers swam into the water to help people, and then swam back to their prison that night.
Mary often went down to the spot where survivors had stumbled ashore, sometimes imagining that she’d been on board, that she’d been one of the women who jumped into the river and made it to North Brother, and when she wasn’t looking — occupied, perhaps, by the sound of her own breathing, distracted by her gratitude for her life, her back turned, her ears closed — she’d been left behind and forgotten.
• • •
The hearing would not be a quick one; that much was clear within an hour. As the sun rose higher and heated the odors of the room, Mary felt weaker. She watched sweat run down the sides of Mr. O’Neill’s face. Judge Erlinger’s eyes had begun to close. One doctor, instead of answering anything specific about her case, lectured exclusively on the bleeding of horses, and how it was no longer necessary to bleed a horse to death in order to obtain the maximum amount of serum to make vaccines. “Take Diphtheria, for example,” he went on. “There have been several cases where the horse’s reaction is so strong that death came too quickly, and the glass cannulae used to collect the blood were broken in the horse’s fall and destroyed.”
A murmur went up among the other doctors. Mary leaned over and asked Mr. O’Neill why they were talking about horses.
“The best thing,” the man went on, “is to always bleed from the carotid vein, and not the jugular. The jugular will weaken the horse too quickly, and in most cases results in less blood collected. But even more important, the use of supports must”—he banged his fist on the chair for emphasis—“become standard practice across the labs. A large male horse can be suspended with two stout ropes, one passing behind the forelegs and one in front of the hind legs. Once the support is in place, the cannula should be inserted into the artery. By this method it’s possible to obtain five usable gallons from a single horse.”
“And where do you stand on the Mallon case?” the DOH lawyer urged the doctor.
“In terms of Typhoid, I think the answer lies in widespread milk pasteurization, cleaner water, better education on personal hygiene. Typhoid is entirely preventable.”
“Should she be let back into society or not?”
“I—” the doctor faltered, looked over at Mary. “It’s my opinion… that she should not.”
One Department of Health official asked the judges to consider what exactly motivated Mary to take the job uptown at the Bowen residence in the first place. Did she harbor a resentment of some sort against the upper classes? Did she resent the Bowens in particular? Perhaps because of the food cooperative Mrs. Bowen had attempted to organize? Without waiting for answers, the official then sat back as if he’d just put the final piece in the puzzle.
“I worked for the Bowens because of what they paid me,” Mary whispered urgently to Mr. O’Neill, who bellowed an objection. It was illogical, Mr. O’Neill pointed out. A woman can’t be accused of lacking the ability to comprehend her affliction at one moment, and then accused of wielding it like a weapon the next.
“And why did her employment with the Warrens end in Oyster Bay? Why did she not continue to work for them once they returned to the city?”
“Because it was a temporary job,” Mary whispered to Mr. O’Neill, but he shushed her. He’d asked her the same question during their preparation meeting and already knew the answer. The Warren job was never meant to be permanent. Their regular cook was to resume her position in Manhattan once they returned from Oyster Bay.
Mary studied the judges’ faces and saw doubt.
• • •
She got home from Oyster Bay on a Friday in September 1906. It was a beautiful day, and better still because she had a pocket full of money that had been pushed into her hand from a grateful Mr. Warren. Little Margaret Warren would play again, would beg ice cream off another cook, would grow up and marry and do all the things a girl should do. Her sister, her mother, the two maids, and the gardener would also live. All the family except for Mr. Warren had already returned to Manhattan, and Mary had left two of the maids drinking cold watermelon soup on the back patio. They’d hugged her good-bye together, squeezing her between them and saying again what a shock each of them got when she pushed them into an icy bath, clothes and all. They blessed her, thanked her, said they knew they wouldn’t have their lives if it hadn’t been for her.
She’d gotten to the station in plenty of time to catch an earlier train, but she’d written her plans to Alfred the previous week, and wanted to stay with the schedule she’d sent in case he planned on meeting her. So she sat on a bench in breezy Oyster Bay and watched a train pull in and then pull away. When she got to Grand Central Station she waited on a bench again with her bag on her lap to give Alfred a chance to find her.
After thirty minutes she pushed through the grand doors onto Forty-Second Street and began walking home. Something had come up, she decided. He didn’t have time to send word. He probably had a perfectly good reason for not showing up. Because it was a Friday, every rusted fire escape in their neighborhood would be weighted down with damp cottons and thin wools in every muted shade of white, gray, brown, from Patricia Wright’s careful calico to the yellowed squares of muslin Mr. Hallenan used to strain his coffee. Where twenty years earlier this had shamed her, now she took comfort in the sight and knew she was closer to home. A few tenants had gotten hold of the new roundabout lines that could be extended out a window into the sky without needing to be anchored on another building or another fire escape.
The rooms Mary shared with Alfred were on the sixth floor, at the very top of the stairs. Unlike the narrow tenements of the Lower East Side, 302 East Thirty-Third was a broad building that held within the yellow brick of its exterior walls thirty-six flats. There was a central staircase wide enough for three bodies to climb the stairs side by side, and from this central stair branched two halls that reached north and south, three flats per hall, six per floor. The sixth floor saw the highest turnover, and some of the rooms stayed empty for weeks at a time. Anyone with rooms on the top floor aimed to get lower as soon as possible, but Mary liked the sixth floor. Their rooms always seemed to get better light than those on lower floors and Mary liked standing at the sink and looking out over lower rooftops. When lying in their bed she could turn her head toward the window and see nothing but blue sky.