Anyway, it didn’t matter anymore, Mary told herself in the morning as she rushed to rub a washcloth over her face. It didn’t matter, she repeated as she struggled to pull on thick tights under her skirt, and watched her own breath hover around her face as she grew more agitated. She knew, once again, that she hadn’t killed that boy any more than she had killed any of the other people in that great, wide, filthy, throbbing city. It would be laughable, really, if it weren’t already criminal for them to have locked her up, one woman, a cook, when every corner of America hid a pestilence just waiting to be stirred up, set free.
• • •
After six weeks at the laundry she’d made enough to rent a bed from a widow on the west side. She’d seen the ad in the paper, and instead of mailing her inquiry across town she’d walked it over and pushed it through the mail slot of the building. Although the building was not grand, Mary acknowledged when she was back on the sidewalk looking at it that it was a perfectly decent one. And with just two women in the rooms it wouldn’t be much to keep it clean and everything in its place. The widow wrote to Mary with the date that she should come and the price of the bed. It will be like living with Aunt Kate, Mary decided as she gathered her few things from the boardinghouse. It’ll be something to get used to at first but after a while it will become routine, and she’ll look forward to seeing me, and who knew? Mary might be there for the rest of the woman’s life. She’d heard plenty of cases where a boarder becomes like one of the family, and she didn’t see why it wasn’t possible in her case as well. How difficult it must be, she thought as she crossed the avenues and bent her head against the spring wind, to be an old woman in this city, to have to worry about gathering wood or coal, putting food on the table.
She walked and walked, and finally turned on Eighth Avenue for the final stretch.
“Yes?” a woman answered Mary’s knock, but a young woman, younger than Mary, with Mary’s same style of hair and a nicer blouse.
“I’m here about the bed. I wrote last week and Mrs. Post wrote back to say I should come today.”
The woman sighed, throwing up her hands. “Come in.” She moved aside with a theatrical half curtsy, and Mary stepped past her into the small kitchen. She admired the window over the sink, and the little square of stained glass that someone had hung to catch the light. Then she turned slightly and noticed a cot. That would be fine. She’d slept in plenty of kitchens. Abutting the foot of that cot, she noticed another. Then, on the other side of the kitchen, another.
“Oh, there’s more,” the woman promised, pointing to the next room. Mary peeked into a darkened bedroom and took in the larger bed pushed up against the wall, the buffer of cots all around. There was nowhere to walk. The person or people who slept in the larger bed must have to crawl over the cots to get to the door.
“But the ad,” Mary said, wanting to argue the situation into the one she’d imagined, and not the one that was.
“Look, you want to stay? Great. I’m out of here next week. You on a regular shift or a night shift?”
“Regular. Day.”
“Well, that’s working for you. The night shifts — we have two nurses here — are the real losers in this. They can’t get a wink all day with the racket she makes. She needs us here but she hates us here. You already left the other rooms you were in?”
Both women looked down at Mary’s small bag, and the other woman laughed.
Mary’s was one of the cots in the bedroom. She thought she’d gotten lucky when she saw that hers was closest to the door, but then she learned she’d been right when she imagined that the others would have to crawl across the other beds in order to get out of the room. In the middle of the night she was woken by a knee near her face, a foot flicked across her belly, the general rocking and creaking her cot made with the weight of another body trying to pass. There was a flushing indoor lavatory down the hall from their rooms, but long before Mary’s arrival, someone had made the decision that the hallway privy encouraged too much movement in the middle of the night, and so a chamber pot was set up in the corner of the bedroom farthest from the door. If she wasn’t woken by someone traveling on top of her, she woke to the sound of someone letting go a stream of urine into a ceramic pot, followed by the sound of four other women tossing violently in their sleep to shut out the noise.
She had to find something else. She thought about her old building, about Fran and Joan. Fran’s place was full up with her own family, and Joan? They would make room for her, she knew. They would sympathize. But it was their sympathy that stopped her. They had each warned her about Alfred in their different ways — Joan quietly, and Fran less so, but she had not listened. And now here she was, just a few years later, living in a boardinghouse while Alfred made a new family with a new woman. No, she wouldn’t be able to stomach it, the inevitable human need they’d have to point out that they’d been right, and she was wrong. Instead, she asked Li if he knew of anyone looking for a boarder. She told him she’d even live with a Chinese. She tried to ask the Lithuanians, but they didn’t understand her. She stopped in at all the churches, Catholic or not, between the laundry and Mrs. Post’s, to read the bulletin boards. She scoured the ads in the papers. She quietly suggested to two of the other women at Mrs. Post’s that they strike out together and find a place to themselves, but neither of them was interested, or else they didn’t believe it would be possible for three women to rent rooms together without a man to sign for them.
Then, very early one Tuesday morning, she heard her name being called.
“Mary!” a woman’s voice chased her from across the street. “Mary Mallon!”
She turned and saw Joan Graves hold out her hand to stop traffic as she rushed across the street to Mary’s side.
“I can’t believe it!” Joan said, and threw her arms around Mary.
“Joan,” Mary said simply, and let herself be hugged. She was happy to see Joan, silly Joan, talented Joan, who could sew more surely than anyone Mary had ever known.
“I heard there was a hearing, but I thought they’d taken you back to the island.”
“Oh, you heard all about it, I’m sure.”
“Well, it was in the papers. We followed it, Fran and I did. But you’re here. And look at you! I thought you were sick. Have you been sick? What are you doing now? Where are you living? Why didn’t you come see us right away?”
“I was planning to, but—”
“And what about Alfred, have you seen him? He told Fran’s Robert that he did the Oppenheimer cure.”
Mary didn’t remember Joan being so aggressive. She didn’t remember her as a piler of questions, and she was absolutely certain that the old Joan would never have brought up the cure, which was a roundabout way of bringing up the problem, and the drink, and the late nights, and Mr. Hallenan’s shouts up the stairs. The Joan Mary knew might have brought it up privately, with such subtlety that Mary wouldn’t know what she was talking about right away. Not out on the street. Not first thing after seeing her after so long.