Deadly (10 page)

There was not a mark on her skin. Even her collar was starched and brilliant white.

“With all respect, Miss Mallon, we have reason to believe
you may be involved in the carriage of typhoid without your knowing it,” Mr. Soper said.

“What do you mean, I'm involved?” she said. She spoke in a thick Irish brogue. “I ain't been sick a day in me life!”

I don't mean to poke fun at her accent by writing it this way; I simply want to test the degree to which I can accurately relate these details.

Mr. Soper asked her to think back over her work history.

“I worked for a dozen loverly families,” she said. “What about 'em?”

“The disease seems to follow you, doesn't it?” Mr. Soper asked. “Wouldn't you like to know why that is?”

She glanced quickly at her employer, who seemed impatient and upset.

“Aye, I know why 'tis,” she said. “This city's full of sickness—everywhere you look, there's people droppin' with the typhoid and the croup. 'Tain't no surprise, mister, people get sick all the time.”

Mr. Soper persisted, “Yes, but the typhoid in particular seems to follow you, ma'am. If one is not careful, disease can enter the food one prepares. Especially raw, uncooked food like peach ice cream.”

The woman stopped slicing and looked up.

Her employer interjected here: “Mary is a cleanly person and a fine cook. Of course she washes—I wouldn't hire anyone who wasn't completely scrupulous in every way. This is a waste of time! I must get back to my wife! Please, let me show you to the door.”

Mr. Soper didn't move.

Oniony tears watered Mary's eyes. She squinted them away and said to Mr. Soper in a bitter voice, “You saying I ain't clean?”

“We could solve this issue if you'd simply come to my office and give a sample of your fluids,” Mr. Soper said. His voice softened as he got more frustrated with these stubborn people.

“My what?” the cook asked just as quietly.

“Your fluids,” he repeated.

“What in the world—,” she started to protest, and my chief interrupted.

“Your fluids, such as your blood, for example, will tell us if you carry disease.”

“You want blood?” she screeched, scaring the life out of me. I feared she had completely lost her mind, shouting that way in front of the master of the house.

“Mary, please!” her employer said.

Mr. Soper said, “Your blood, yes.”

She took the knife in her hand and stabbed it into the chopping block with a high-pitched yell. “I'll give you blood!”

Her employer turned to us. “Mr. Soper, why don't you find the real reason for this typhoid, for God's sake, instead of upsetting my staff!”

Mary struggled to remove the knife.

The man waved his arms at us. “Please, I'll have to ask you to leave. I have enough problems without your wild accusations.”

“But all I ask is for one small sample.”

“If you don't leave, I'll have to complain to the department!”

Mary hollered, “Get out of here! Out! Out with your foul ideas! Go on!”

Her eyes rolled up, I could see the whites of them, and her teeth.

“Please, ma'am, it is very important that we test you—”

She screeched and yanked the knife out of the block and started coming around; Mr. Soper turned on his heel, scooting me out of that house in front of him. And that was the last we spoke to her.

A disaster. Not at all what we imagined, this woman. Not
in the least. The incident disturbed Mr. Soper profoundly. It has put a brick wall in our way. All week he muttered to himself that we must get to her, we must explain to her so she'll understand. I watch him sifting through the records, repeating to himself that we must figure a way to have her tested, or she will continue spreading the fever, and someone else will die. Maybe even that girl in the hospital. He pinches the bridge of his nose and says we must stop her.

Short of kidnapping, I don't know how he will get to her. But we must figure out a way. Mr. Soper tried patiently to explain the problem to her, but she responded so very badly. Why won't she cooperate with us? Does she honestly not believe Mr. Soper, despite the evidence that the disease follows her?

He says he can see in her eyes that she fears for her job, and that is the only thing that makes sense to me.

I
n pondering
Mary Mallon's response, I think that Mr. Soper's accusation in front of her employer must've given her a great surprise and embarrassment. But I don't think we were wrong. We simply asked her for a test of her fluids. I'm beginning to see that people in the sciences often have to think in a different realm, somewhere beyond human emotions. They must hold their feelings in a dark cave deep inside themselves and never release them. They can't be afraid of embarrassment, neither in themselves, nor others.

Yet I think it must be tremendously difficult to accept that you have a thing living in you, a disease that you can't see, or taste, or touch. One that doesn't make you ill. Perhaps it's too frightening for her to contemplate. It's not like lice you can just pluck off your skin, or a rash you can heal with cream. And it's never been proven. But this cook, if she has
any sense,
must
suspect that Mr. Soper's accusation is right.

However, as far as we know, she has not left her place of work, so perhaps she thinks his theory is complete poppycock.

The cook's reaction has given Mr. Soper pause. She is a rarity—a new discovery, really, very possible living proof of Dr. Koch's theory, the first of her kind, and Mr. Soper does not want to frighten her off. He also doesn't want her to continue working and possibly spreading the disease, so we have a special situation on our hands. I believe Mr. Soper is contemplating bringing in our superintendent, Mr. Briggs, but I don't think he is ready for that step yet. Mr. Soper says we must prove to her the danger she carries, and then this epidemic will stop.

He says we must approach the cook as if she were a rabid animal. We must corner her with care and tact, draw her in for testing. Mr. Soper is thinking of trailing her to her home, where we can talk with her in some measure of privacy. We can't approach her at the mansion again, and we don't want to alert her bureau by inquiring about her further.

I'm not sure how I feel about trailing after her. Are we really to follow her like spies? I don't remember reading any examples of this kind of detective work in my chief's records. But I must rely on Mr. Soper as my guide; he knows what is best.

T
his case
is so important to me, I hate to leave in the middle, but I'm simply aching to see my dearest friend and talk to her. We've been planning this trip for nearly a year, and I decided I'll go mad if I don't see my Anushka soon, so I booked the ticket to Virginia from the twenty-fourth to the twenty-seventh with the Southern Line. Four days was all the holiday Mr. Briggs would give, and he did not do so willingly. I paid for the ticket with my own funds, which made me feel a bona fide member of the adult world.

When I imagine myself alone on a huge locomotive all the way to Virginia, I feel small and scared as a young child. When I think of traveling out of New York for the first time in my whole life, I feel big as a grown woman. Will Anushka be happy to see me after all this time? What gifts can I take
along that will remind her of our crowded city life and what she left behind? Perhaps I could bring a bottle of backfire from the motor carriages. A song from the hurdy-gurdy player? Or I could gather up the neighbors and pay Mr. Barnical two whole dollars for a photograph of all of us in front of her old tenement building. I can see Anushka looking at it, pointing out Mrs. Zanberger and the Moscowitz boys, and both of us bursting into those great gales of wonderful, loud laughter that I can feel all the way down to my toes.

I was, for a time, worried about leaving Marm as I have never done so before, and she has had enough loved ones leave her, but her first outing with her new friend Mr. Silver went so well, I think maybe she'll survive without me. Mr. Silver took her to the Metropolitan Museum, and Marm arrived home full of stories and a smile that wouldn't leave her eyes. It seems Mr. Silver has frequented the museum with paper and pencil, and spends time copying the pictures and figures, and knows the history of the masterpieces, and the Greek and Italian artifacts, and told Marm all about them. I'd be curious to see how good those drawings really are.

When I return from my trip, the three of us together will attend the New Year's celebration over at the factory near Herald Square where Mr. Silver is a cutter, and Uncle David
tailors. They will be frying fish in barrels of oil on the street, and setting off firecrackers, and dancing to an oompah band. This party will give me a chance to become better acquainted with Mr. Silver. It will give me the opportunity to thank him for his kindness to my lonely Marm, and to remind him of my father's existence, which he, like us, must never forget for a moment.

I
had
a strange and illuminating conversation with my chief while waiting in the freezing weather outside of the Fifth Avenue home where Mary Mallon works. It was our second attempt at trailing her, but she had not come out of the mansion, and I felt somehow it was below Mr. Soper's dignity to stand out in the cold for naught, so I said, “It's rather brisk for such a task, don't you think, sir?”

His gaze on the house was quite intense, as if he could make her appear with his eyes.

“I've been through far, far worse,” he said.

“I imagine you have,” I said. “You lived through a war.”

A nervous pinch started in my stomach; I wasn't sure why I had brought up the war. Maybe the cold had numbed my fear, or maybe I thought, there in the dark, that it might be a good time to dare a question about my father.

“The war, yes,” he said. “We spent long days trying to find out what made those men so ill.”

“Did you know any of the—the soldiers—personally?” I asked.

I was hoping he might connect my father's name with mine and miraculously recall the short, curly-haired, olive-skinned man who belonged to me.

“It was not a time of socializing,” Mr. Soper said. He blew his breath onto his hands to keep warm. “I was too busy with research and observation to really get to know the men,” he said.

A stab of disappointment let the air from me. We stood in silence, our eyes on the mansion.

“It's interesting when you think of war, how bacteria can also be used as a weapon,” Mr. Soper said suddenly.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Well, for instance, during the Civil War, men from the South would send men from the North blankets.”

“A gesture of truce?” I asked, not understanding.

“Quite the opposite,” he said. “The blankets had been wrapped around men who died of smallpox. They would spread the deadly disease to their enemies through those blankets.”

This story shook me—it made me angry to think of disease, and bacteria, and how dangerous those tiny organisms were to us.

“Mr. Soper,” I said, “I think I would understand this case much better if I could see, actually see what the typhoid bacteria looks like.”

I watched, even in the darkness, the muscles twitching in his jaw.

I dared to add, “Through the microscope, I mean.”

“Perhaps,” he said, “perhaps it would be a good idea for you to see them. Then you'd understand better how they pass from person to person.”

A rush of blood flowed through me. He agreed to allow me to look in the microscope! First thing tomorrow morning, I will see, I will put my eye to that bronzed lens and see what this world is made of! I shiver with anticipation, with the promise of our undertaking. I can hardly sleep, imagining what it might be like to look at real bacteria. The things I will understand, the doors that will open to me! Oh, I cannot wait!

B
right and
early this morning, we went into the laboratory (not before the science fellows arrived—I could feel every cool, male eye on me). Mr. Soper took a typhoid sample from the icebox and swabbed it on a slide and slipped it into a free scope.

Once I looked into the microscope, my idea about cells and bacteria transformed. In my mind, they had always been as inert as drawings.

Here, they were alive. Like tiny worms, dozens of them.

Before me, these restless creatures wriggled their way around the slide. They were nearly see-through, as if they were made of water. They danced and moved just like a crowd in the street, gathering and separating in their own way. Like little noodles one might swallow so easily, without knowing. I felt as if I were seeing the river's floor, or another country,
places earlier off-limits to me. It astonished and dismayed me, that those minuscule bacteria had the force to kill a person.

My eye to the microscope made me want to see more, to see deeper into the world.

I want to see a nerve cell. A sample of blood. The leaf of a plant, my fingernail, a piece of hair. I want to take the instrument home and slide the world under my lens, to examine it in a way I never have before.