“Meaning?”
“Meaning, there must have been a moment when it crossed your mind that all of this was true. The question they have is whether it occurred to you after their accusations, or before.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You do understand. Think.”
• • •
Alone in the silent supply shed, Mary tried to think about only nice things, normal things, what she needed from the grocer’s, what she’d cook for Alfred next time she went home, but instead she kept thinking of the officers searching for her. She thought of the people who’d been sick in Oyster Bay, and how she’d known they would make it if she worked to keep the fever down. It was a fast-moving fever, that one. Doctors talked about fevers as if they were all the same, but there were fevers and there were fevers, and Mary could distinguish one from another with the touch of her hand. One day everyone was playing tennis, riding horses, and the next they complained of being dizzy. They stopped eating. The gardener vomited very near the water cistern. Mrs. Warren fainted on the porch. Mary had seen it enough times to know that Mrs. Warren and the other adults who caught it would survive. They were in pain, yes, and called out nonsense, and tossed and turned and sweated through all their sheets and vomited bile. Still, Mary had seen Typhoid Fever at its worst, she’d seen death come a few times, and in each of those times the fight was mismatched from the beginning. The Warren girl was the only real worry, the poor child, only eight years old. She didn’t have the fight in her that the others had. That was the dangerous moment, when the patients didn’t have the fight, when they just slept and stared and preferred to keep their eyes closed. When the moaning stopped. When the nonsense stopped. And that girl was so quiet to start with.
Mary threw her whole body into beating death away from the girl. She filled the tub to the brim and reached her own hand in the water to show her what it was like to splash inside the house, over the wood of the floor, a thing that would never be allowed if everyone were healthy, and the girl seemed interested in that. Mary told her about her passage to America, and what Ireland was like. The girl would never go to Ireland. England, maybe, Mary informed her. Paris. But not Ireland. Not many went to Ireland, they just went away from it. But it was her home just like New York City was the girl’s home, and what was it the poet said? Every savage loves his native shore. And that’s when she knew the girl would survive. She leveled her eyes on Mary, and there was life behind them. “Are you a savage, Mary?”
“I am. Like we all are.”
And the girl considered it. “I’m not,” she said.
“No?”
“Absolutely not.”
So the Warren girl survived, and everyone else in the Warren house survived and they still wanted her.
That’s part of what was so worrying about the Bowen girl, that they wouldn’t let her anywhere near. If she could only just see her, but even now, with the police searching the house for her, Mary was sure the girl’s nurse had not so much as stepped out into the hall to see what was going on. When they knocked on the door to pass in ice and fresh linens, the nurse blocked their view of the girl’s bed with her body, accepted what was given, and shut the door again.
Then she thought of the boy, the Kirkenbauer baby, only two years old. Just two. Barely two. Crouched in the Alisons’ storage shed, her hands stinging with the cold, she tried everything to keep him out. She hummed songs. She recited poetry. After returning home from the Kirkenbauers’ back in 1899, she didn’t even look for another situation for a whole month. She made sandwiches and sold them to the men who worked at the lumberyard on Twenty-First Street. When they handed over their coins and she handed over the sandwiches, they were perfect strangers to her, and she decided that was what she wanted: to cook for people but not to know them at all. She didn’t want to see people when they woke up in the morning. She didn’t want their children hugging her legs and learning her name.
Mary waited in the shed for what felt like hours. She was hungry. She was stiff and cold and worried about getting sick. Who would cook for the Bowens if she got sick? She unwound a long piece of burlap from around the garden equipment stored on a shelf behind her and wrapped it around her shoulders. She hugged her knees to her chest and exhaled hot breath on her fingers. At one point she thought she heard Bette calling her, so she opened the door and saw a policeman’s hat moving along the other side of the fence. She tried not to think about time, and whether she’d be there all night, whether she should risk running alongside the Alisons’ house and out to the sidewalk and away downtown. In one moment she felt sure they’d give up, go home, and never come for her again, and in another moment she knew they’d be waiting for her on Thirty-Third Street. They’d be waiting for her everywhere she went.
After what felt like several hours of almost perfect stillness, she heard the creak of the fence door swinging open, the crunch of footsteps in the snow. Frank, she prayed. Come to tell her the coast was clear. She heard footsteps pass her little shed, the shadow of a man darkening the slim spaces of sky between the wood slats. A person was standing at the shed, facing it. Mary could feel the stranger sizing up the little structure, the perfect hiding place. “Mary Mallon,” a man called out. The world was thin, brittle, frozen solid, and the man’s voice threatened to crack everything open, smash all the lovely icicles hanging from branches. She pressed her lips together and closed her eyes. More steps approached to join the person already at the shed. A woman’s voice, efficient, fed up, stood out from the others.
“She’s in there,” the woman said, as if it should have been obvious to everyone, and in one last surge of hope Mary imagined her pointing her finger away from the storage shed to the trees, to the clouds.
“Mary Mallon,” a man said again, and it was the tone in his voice that told Mary it was over. He really did know she was in there, and he’d give her a moment to decide to come out before he went in and got her.
Someone pulled the lever that opened the door, and four men and one woman leaned in to look at her. Mary’s hips and knees felt like a kitchen scissors gone to rust.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Mary said as she worked to ignore the searing pain in her joints. “Leave me alone.”
“Mary Mallon,” one officer said. “You are under arrest. You have—”
She shoved him. She put her head down and threw out her arms and shoved him. When another officer approached, she kicked, and next thing she knew one was trying to pin her arms, while another had gotten her around her waist. She felt one at her ankles. She reached out and grabbed a handful of the woman’s hair. The snow in the Alisons’ backyard was churned up, and Mary felt the wet of her skirt through her thick wool stockings. One of the men caught her left arm, and when he did he twisted it around behind her back. When she turned to knee him, another officer grabbed her right arm. They lifted her, carried her across the Alisons’ small yard to the narrow path that ran beside the Bowens’ house. She tried to kick, to buck, to twist in their arms, raising her knees in the air and then letting fly with every bit of strength she had left, but she was stiff from sitting in the cold for so many hours, and her movements felt clumsy, poorly aimed. One of the officers was telling her to be quiet, relax, that she was only making everything worse for herself, and next to all of this buzzed Dr. Baker, who rushed up to the door of the truck and pulled it open so that the men could shove Mary inside.
• • •
Dr. Baker walked to the front of the courtroom. It was the pattern of the day; one description of Mary in a given moment was not good enough. They had to get two, three, four people up there to say the same thing. One of the police officers had already had his turn and had told them all about it, said Mary was an animal, worse than an animal because even the wildest animal can be coaxed, usually. There was no coaxing Mary that day. No reasoning with her. She was like no other person he’d arrested in his life. He had scratch marks on his arms and neck for days after.