Mary imagined him doing all of this, making progress through the weeds and brambles, overgrowth that had not been touched in years, maybe ever. His arms were berry brown from being outdoors. She wondered sometimes if he was strong enough for all the work he did. Perhaps it was the work that kept him strong. He must be well into his fifties, maybe more, but then Mary remembered that she was almost forty. Forty years old. Her own mother had died at thirty, her nana at fifty-eight. When had he cleared that path, with everything else he was supposed to be doing? He said the board of the hospital wanted primroses along the eastern gable, mums added to the garden. They wanted the lawns cut, the hedges kept trim, everything about the island as neat and orderly as the corridors of the hospital. Riverside was a showpiece hospital, an example to all other hospitals built to house and study contagious diseases. But John had his own way of doing things, just as Mary had her own ways of operating around a mistress who believed she knew her kitchen better than Mary did. If he was wanted for anything, a messenger could always follow the smell of his pipe, which he took out of his shirt pocket now and stuffed with tobacco. So he’d been sure, all along, that she would be back. Or maybe, it occurred to her now, he’d just been hopeful.
“Thank you, John.”
John nodded as he touched his match to the tobacco and drew it alive with short, careful puffs. “Did you see your man over there? At the hearing?”
“I did.”
“Good,” John said. “That’s good.”
• • •
She spent August and September prowling the edges of the island. Every morning started cooler than the last, and soon she had to bring her shawl for warmth. She walked without stockings on the packed sand and held her shoes in her hands as she stepped from smooth stone to smooth stone that led, if she chose to follow, out into treacherous waters. She rested on the southernmost point of the island and found South Brother, the smaller sibling of North Brother. From her point of view the other island looked green and thick and far happier without the insult of quarantine hospitals and daily death. Sometimes, if she was very still, a snowy egret came to stand by her and inspect her, its plumage so pure and beautiful that Mary wondered how it could be an inhabitant of the same place as the other living things, all of which struck Mary as filthy and tired, just as Mary was. Sometimes, with the sun behind the bird and with its plumage on display, the delicate creature glowed and felt to Mary like a sign that good things were possible.
No one ever looked for her anymore. In the beginning, if she didn’t answer the door of her cottage, and couldn’t be found in one of the flower beds close by, they’d send out a search party. “I thought I was free to roam as I please,” Mary would say, furious at yet another promise broken, and doubly angry because they always responded, “You are, of course you are,” even as they led her back by the elbow, the glass canisters clinking in their skirt pockets.
Never in her life had she had so much time. She tried to remember being a child, but even those years seemed full of responsibilities: fetching and boiling water, cleaning, baking, gardening, raking, doing her lessons by the lamp while her nana used her quick knife to separate potatoes from their jackets and pile them high on the table. The nurses never came near her now, and she wondered if that had been part of the judges’ order, the fine print she hadn’t stayed around to read, that although she had to stay within the ordered boundaries, no one was to bother her with tests and analyses, no one was to rap on her cottage door twice a week.
Several weeks after the hearing, the middle of September 1909, Mary got a letter from Alfred. When she saw the mail carrier headed toward her cottage she figured it was just another update from Mr. O’Neill, and didn’t bother hurrying to intercept him. When she saw the handwriting on the envelope, her hands went sweaty. She studied it for a moment, and then she tore it open.
Dear Mary,
I hope they told you I tried to see you at the hotel where they kept you. I don’t know why they wouldn’t let me. I don’t remember if I told you that I thought you looked very beautiful the day that I saw you, and I’d almost forgotten, truth be told, how beautiful you are.
I’m writing now because I’d like to go up there to see you. I had hoped that you’d be free and there wouldn’t be any need but now I worry it will be even longer. Maybe another two years even. Maybe more.
I’ve inquired about the ferry and since it doesn’t go on Sundays except for the hospital people I will plan on seeing you there a week from Saturday. Maybe you can let the correct people know that I’m coming so that they don’t give me any trouble when I get there. We can take a walk or do whatever it is you do to pass time. I just want to see you.
Until then,
Alfred Briehof
There were several details about this letter Mary didn’t like. For a start, there was, “I’d almost forgotten.” Nor did she like “two years… Maybe more.” Most of all, she did not like the formality of his signature, “Alfred Briehof.”
TWELVE
Alfred had a pushcart once. He’d had many jobs, but the pushcart months stood out. He said he was sick of hauling coal baskets, and even more sick of emptying ash cans, and above everything sick of answering to a boss. He had had just about every type of physical employment a man could have, and his body needed a break. By his own description he was a genial person and liked to look his fellow man in the face. So he went out and rented a pushcart for twenty-five cents a day. “It’s standing, Mary,” he said. “Standing and talking. And making a living besides.” Alfred preferred to sit while talking, and preferred most of all to sit with a glass of strong liquor nearby, but Mary didn’t point out any of this. It was possible, she supposed, for him to know himself a little better than she knew him, so she swallowed her concerns and said it was a great idea. She knew the butchers of the East Side better than he did, knew which of them kept their thumbs on the scales, which stored their meat on cellar floors where the rain seeped in and sewer pipes might burst, so she helped him find a supplier. There were already three poultrymen on the street where he planned to set up, so he started out selling cuts of beef, pork, and lamb. For a quick lunch to make his cart known he offered slabs of corned beef with a side of beans, a boiled potato for an extra five cents. Mary showed him how to keep it hot, how much to put on the plate.
By the end of the very first month he learned that meat was not the thing. Fat black flies pestered him all day long, laying their eggs while doing so, and made themselves so at home on his cart that he was forced to switch to fruit. The Jewish and Italians had the advantage with the fruit suppliers, taking all the semirot for themselves and leaving to the rest of the peddlers only the best fruit, for which the suppliers had to charge full price. Between the cost of the good fruit and the cart and the tipping of police officers and the paying off of the grocer from whom he rented sidewalk space, plus the nod to the collector and the man-of-influence, who was no more than a saloon keeper up the block, Alfred was deep in the red after only two or three more months. On top of that, since he was set up next to one of the poultrymen, the flies came anyway, and hopped from the putrid carcasses the other peddler had cast behind his cart over to Alfred’s lovely apples and pears, where they perched and laid more eggs.
Once he gave up on fruit, he switched to hot corn, and that went all right for a while, maybe three or four months. But he got bored with corn and switched to something that no one else for ten blocks thought to sell — children’s toys. Small toy boats. Wooden horses. Dolls for girls. Noisemakers. Funny hats. Toys were the best yet: Alfred opened his cart for business around nine in the morning, and closed before supper, by four. There was no worry about rot. No worry about his goods baking in the sun. Even the children left him alone except to buy what he offered. When the fruit carts got pelted with their own goods, and the fish cart got overwhelmed, overturned, and rolled down Forsyth Street, Alfred was left alone to sell for five cents what he’d purchased for three.