As Mary observed the plain-looking woman turn to the judge before taking her seat, she knew it would look worse that she’d attacked a woman, and Dr. Baker was a smaller woman than Mary, and a woman of the class that allows women to become doctors.
But Dr. Baker surprised her. She admitted that she’d had to sit on Mary during the ride to the Willard Parker Hospital, but other than that she said simply that Mary had seemed frightened, and that the others had covered for her. “As anyone would expect them to,” she added, “being Miss Mallon’s friends.” No one else had said anything about her having friends.
“Dr. Baker, did you find her to be unreasonable?”
Dr. Baker hesitated. “We didn’t try to reason with her. When she went missing we focused on finding her, and when we found her we simply forced her into the truck. So I couldn’t comment on that. Other than two brief conversations we had when she was still being held at Willard Parker, I’ve never spoken to Mary Mallon at any length.”
“Wouldn’t you agree that a woman who hides in a shed for so many hours to avoid arrest has a guilty conscience?”
Again, Dr. Baker hesitated. “I would say that person doesn’t want to be arrested, guilty or not guilty. And I would say that none of us here would like to be arrested.” Dr. Baker stared out across the heads of all the witnesses in the gallery, her hands folded neatly in her lap. The attorney asking the questions searched through several sheets of paper and then pushed them aside and turned to Dr. Baker without notes.
“Dr. Baker, as a resident of New York City and as a medical doctor, would you feel comfortable letting Mary reenter society? Allowing her to leave North Brother Island and return to her former life?”
Dr. Baker frowned. She remained silent for a long time, and in the gallery the spectators wondered if she’d heard the question. Finally, she spoke. “It’s my opinion that Mary Mallon does not understand the medical threat she is to those around her. However, neither do many of the medical personnel who’ve become acquainted with her case in these past two and a half years. I can say only that I don’t think Miss Mallon should be allowed to cook. All the medical doctors in this room have admitted that she is a healthy person. What happens when more healthy carriers are discovered? Do we send them all to North Brother?”
Mr. O’Neill smiled in his seat. The other attorney frowned. “Dr. Baker,” the other attorney asked, “is it possible that you have particular sympathy for Miss Mallon because she is a female?”
Dr. Baker tilted her head and considered. “Perhaps.”
ELEVEN
In the end it took several more days for the judges to decide what to do with her. Instead of sending her all the way back to North Brother for the night, they put her in a hotel with guards posted outside her room, and on the morning of the second day, ten minutes were wasted in arguing over who would foot the bill for such a luxury. The City of New York? Which department? One of the DOH representatives shouted, “That woman is expensive enough as it is.”
She spent three nights in the hotel all told, and except for the fact that her bed was made every afternoon when she came back from the hearing, it wasn’t that different from North Brother. The hotel laundry wouldn’t lend her an iron, so she gave in and sent her skirt and blouse downstairs for them to clean, which they did, in plenty of time for each morning’s proceedings. The mousy girl who brought up her clothes on the morning of the fourth day said, “Good luck to you, Missus. We hope they let you go,” and Mary imagined a whole staff of women standing behind her, rooting for her, waiting to hear what would happen.
And then, back in the oppressive courtroom, at ten o’clock in the morning of July 31, 1909, Judge Erlinger stared out across the heads of every man and woman in the room and announced that Mary Mallon’s release would be a hazard to every New Yorker and could not be justified. She would be returned to North Brother Island immediately.
Mary heard the words as a kick to the gut and gripped the table to steady herself. “What does it mean?” she demanded of Mr. O’Neill. Everyone in the room seemed to have woken up. Some of the reporters jumped from their seats to shout questions at the judge, at the collection of experts, at Mr. O’Neill, at Mary.
“It’s just for now,” Mr. O’Neill said. “We’ll keep working. Look, their own experts said there are others like you, that—”
“Others like me? Do you believe I’m giving out the fever?”
“I think it’s irrelevant, Mary. I’ve tried not to think about it too much, but yes, the lab work is sound in my view, and two-thirds of the time it comes back positive.”
“Their labs! Run by their people! I’m telling you, it’s Soper. He’s—”
“Mary, calm down. Please. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are perfectly safe to be around as long as you are not cooking, and they can’t go locking up healthy people whenever they feel like it. There has to be a better solution.”
Mary absorbed Mr. O’Neill’s calm response and remembered that for him, and for everyone else in the courtroom, the hearing was no more than a handful of days, a set of hours, an errand, an item on a list. For Mary, it was her entire life. After this, Mary made herself understand, all of them can go home to their families, meet someone for a picnic, take a trip to the ocean if they want. Each person here has complete freedom, except for me.
When she thought about going back, the long automobile journey uptown, the ferry crossing to North Brother, it all seemed inevitable, and all the other possibilities she’d imagined — being with Alfred, getting new rooms together, finding work — were just dreams behind locked doors.
“The judges said you can have visitors now,” Mr. O’Neill offered by way of consolation. “You can write to your friends and let them know.”
Mary stood on her tiptoes so that she was almost his height and felt tempted to spit at him, to walk up to the judges and spit at them as well. As for Soper, she felt her hands turn to fists. Their experts had worried that she had a violent streak — what proper woman would raise a knife to a man of status? — and perhaps they were right. Who among her friends, after not seeing her for more than two years, would put aside their work to spend half a day traveling all that way uptown, all the way across Hell Gate, to sip a cup of tea in her cramped kitchen for thirty minutes?
And how would Alfred react to this news? She was glad he was absent.
• • •
John Cane was there to meet her ferry and tell her all the news since she left. The she-cat who skulked in the vegetable garden had birthed a litter of kittens, and all the babies had been taken home by nurses except for one. Did Mary want it? For company? The hydrangea by the south wall were fully bloomed in the heat, even though he didn’t expect that for several more weeks since last year they hadn’t blossomed until August. Did Mary remember? Did she remember planting the rusted nails with him? Well it worked, that trick, and now they’ve flowered a deep periwinkle blue. He went on and on, as if she’d been gone for a year and not just a handful of days. The moment she opened the door to her cottage it was as if she’d gone out only for a walk, and everything — the courtroom, the judges, Dr. Soper, the hotel — seemed like a hallucination, like she’d never left, like she’d never seen Alfred at all. He’d tried to see her at the hotel the first evening, but they told him to see her over at the courthouse. He never did. Working, she supposed. He could have left a note with the clerk at the courthouse or one of the guards at the hotel. Even if they had to read it before handing it over, she’d like to have had a note from him. But there was no note, no visit, and now she was back on North Brother with John Cane buzzing in her ear.