Deadly (15 page)

She screamed: “Don't touch me! I'm innocent! Maggots! Lousy cheats! Get yer hands off me! I've done nothing to you!”

I could hardly bear to watch while one copper grabbed her and clapped her wrists together, and the other locked her in cuffs. Her still screaming, “Let me go, let me go!”

Her face and hands were raw and scratched from the scuffle. The first officer hooked her under the shoulders and the second picked her straight up off the ground. They carried her, kicking and screaming, to the wagon. The officer chained her to the bench.

Mary shouted, “Fer God's sake, release me, man! Gutter snakes! Help! Somebody help me, please!”

“Let me sit with her,” Dr. Baker said, pushing aside the officers. She lifted her skirts and climbed right in back with Mary, who continued to bellow. People passing by stopped to stare.

“You quiet down now,” Dr. Baker said to Mary in a firm tone. “We will take you directly to the hospital, where you will give us a sample of your fluids. Once we have the results, we will release you.”

“Let me go! Help! Help me somebody, please!”

Mr. Soper and I boarded the wagon with the screaming woman, and the policemen sped us down to the East River, to the Detention Hospital for Contagious Diseases. By the time we got to the building, Mary had finally settled down like a beaten animal, terror and anger brewing in her red-rimmed eyes.

Dr. Baker admitted Mary for a full bacteriological examination. She was placed in a special room for testing. She wouldn't look at any of us while the officer cuffed her to a chair. She was still breathing heavily and growling to herself, her gingham apron torn, her hair loose from her bun, cheek and knuckles scratched. Anger blew from her like smoke. Looking at her made me want to cry, or turn away, or kneel at her side and explain the whole theory to her, but I stood in the corner, frozen.

Dr. Baker asked a nurse for a basin with warm water and a tray of food. She sat in front of Mary and said to her in a low tone, “We don't want to hurt you, Miss Mallon, you must
understand that. You must cooperate with us. Everything will be easier if you cooperate.”

She took hold of Mary's hands and bathed them in the warm water, Mary's body stiff in her seat, her face pinched and red.

“If you would relax, we could take off the cuffs and make you more comfortable,” Dr. Baker said. She wrapped bandages around Mary's hands and washed the cuts on her face with fresh water.

I could feel Mr. Soper studying Mary. How did he and Dr. Baker find the strength necessary to take the cook from her life the way they had? I questioned my own ability to do what they did. Did I have the stomach for such interference? And was it right? I felt as if we had broken the law. We had no warrant for her arrest, no right to raid her employer's home. Her typhoid was still speculative. Weren't we obliged to release her?

A rail-thin young man, Dr. Parks, joined us.

He looked over his glasses at Mary and asked her, “Miss Mallon, have you ever suffered from the typhoid fever?”

She stared down at her bandaged hands and didn't answer.

“Have you ever had any serious illness, pox, fever, consumption?”

She said nothing. The doctor glanced at us; Mr. Soper shook his head.

“We must take a sample of your blood now,” Dr. Parks said.

She tried to jump from the chair, the terror back in her eyes. The two officers pushed her down. Dr. Baker held her arm while Dr. Parks looked for her vein. I pried myself from the corner to help, but could only watch as the needle pierced her skin, her screams filling me with dread.

After, Dr. Parks made her swallow a green fluid laxative.

He spoke about Mary right in front of her, as if she were not there: “Since we are not certain how the disease may be produced in her body, it would be better to test her daily for a time. She's a new sort of case and needs to be observed carefully.”

Hearing that, Mary sat straight and said, “I ain't no experiment; you can't do this to me!”

“Miss Mallon, really, it's the only way,” Dr. Baker assured her.

“I've got no disease!” she wailed. “Why do you people think I'm sick? Are you crazy? You're all crazy!” She tried to yank free her bandaged hands, shouting, “I'm well! I'm well! Why doesn't anybody believe me?”

She was hurting herself, and our presence wasn't helping.
When the nurse brought Mary her tray of food, the officers stayed with her, and the rest of us stepped from the room. Out in the hallway, we could still hear her crying.

Dr. Parks said to us, “A person who learns for the first time that they carry a contagious disease is often upset. Some won't cooperate for days.”

“At least she's in quarantine now,” Mr. Soper said. “At the very least, she will not be passing the typhoid to that family.”

“Give her some time to settle down,” Dr. Parks said. “We can discuss her case when we have some evidence, yes?”

I understood then that we would be leaving her there.

Dr. Parks excused himself to do his work, and Dr. Baker left, saying she had other business in the neighborhood. I went out with Mr. Soper into the cold afternoon, and I could feel an emptiness between us as we headed toward the streetcar stop, now that we had caught Mary. Besides the obvious question—does she
really
carry the typhoid germ?—there are still so many unknowns to her case. What is her history? Who
is
she, and where has she been? There looms before us the possibility that she may never give us the answers. I suppose my chief was feeling the same emptiness, for at the trolley stop, he gave me the rest of the day off.

“We shall visit her again soon,” Mr. Soper said. “We have some deep inquiry still ahead of us.”

His face looked so worn and tired, I wanted to touch his cheek and take from him his exhaustion. Instead I watched him walk away, his head bowed.

I can't stop thinking about her piercing screams, the wild terror in her eyes when the police tackled her, the bloody cuts on her face and hands. It's one thing to follow the course of a disease through observation and questioning. It is truly another to be out jailing human beings suspected of carrying germs. To tell the truth, the more I think about what we've done, the sicker I feel. The whole incident was immoral. Is this how the Department of Health and Sanitation goes about preventing disease? Do I really want to be part of such an organization? What if Mary doesn't carry the typhoid? We have already assaulted her and imprisoned her and taken her dignity from her, treating her like a common fugitive from the law.

What will we do if we are wrong?

I
am human.
Despite my desire to be purely scientific, I have sympathies, revulsions, fears. But I want to be
more than
human,
better than
human—I want to be above and see all, to understand the reason for everything. I want to be pure science, pure brain, without so much feeling. Feeling clouds me. And yet I come back to the sad truth: I am human, I cannot help but feel for a woman we've imprisoned, a woman who carries disease and makes people ill.

Tests have revealed it: Mary Mallon carries the typhoid fever bacteria inside her.

It splits me like lightning, this definite news. There can be no doubt about her now. But the way we approached her haunts me, it bothers me to the very center of myself.

Is it right for the department to treat a human being like a contagious disease?

I'm not the only one whose feelings about this are knotted.

Despite Mr. Soper's personal explanation of how he saved the Bowings from this epidemic, they are outraged at our department for entering and searching their home with no legal warrant, for handling their personal belongings, for frightening the servants and dirtying their floors, and for removing Mary so abruptly and imprisoning her with no apparent reason (Mary is not sick, they insist, and could not possibly be responsible for the department's claims). They demand an apology from the mayor himself and from every single politician who controls a city office, Republican and Tammany. They want the immediate release of Mary Mallon as they say she is being held illegally. Even Mr. Briggs has tried to respond to their fury with fact, but the family has righteousness on their side and won't have the department bullying them.

Dr. Parks gives us results over the telephone daily:

Positive.

Positive.

Positive.

Eight days, including the weekend, and all of Mary's tests, the blood and feces, every single one comes out positive
for typhoid. And every day after he receives the call, Mr. Soper replaces the handset on its hooks and stares at it. He folds his fingers and looks at them. I can almost feel his helplessness. I sense he is evaluating difficult questions: What do we do with her now? How do we treat her? Where should we keep her?

How do we explain this to people outside the department?

We went to the hospital for a further interview with her. I was ashamed to visit her, yet I also felt compelled, as if I might be able to see something in her I didn't see before. Dr. Parks led us to the ward where he had put her with the consumptive population, where he says she is least likely to be affected by the others who are quarantined, and they her. The sound of all those women with that special tubercular cough, wet lungs ripping, and the spit of blood after, echoed through the hall.

Mary lay on her metal bed, a woman to either side of
her, the pall of misery shadowing her face so gray, I could scarcely look at her. The bandages had been removed from her hands, and she picked at her scabs constantly. I wanted to reach out and still her nervous fingers. To say something kind to her. She had lost weight and did not raise her head to look at us.

Mr. Soper tapped the hat in his hand and sighed, glancing at me with troubled eyes. I shook my head at him; neither of us had wanted things to go this way.

He sat on the chair beside Mary's bed and spoke to her in a quiet voice. “Miss Mallon, we have come here to speak to you today because we want to explain your significance in the passage of this pervasive bacteria. You are the first person we have encountered whom we have definitely confirmed to be a healthy carrier of the typhoid germ. It's important we trace the genesis of your disease.”

She stopped picking at her hands and smoothed her skirt against her leg. “I've got no disease,” she said.

Mr. Soper squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. He opened them and said, “I'm afraid the facts are clear in this case. We have determined with daily testing that you are indeed carrying the typhoid germ. Do you remember ever contracting the fever, Miss Mallon?”

“Never been sick in me life.”

“As a child, maybe?”

Mary stretched on the bed and hugged her pillow to her face.

“Even a mild case, perhaps back in your native land?”

She did not answer.

“Miss Mallon, the more we know, the better we can help you and perhaps remove the disease from you,” Mr. Soper said.

It was clear that she refused to believe the typhoid was living inside her. After a few more questions, Mr. Soper sighed; I packed up my notes and we went to see Dr. Parks.

In his office, Dr. Parks told us he was giving her Professor Herman's Systematic Relief. A tincture of belladonna and chloride, thirteen drops in hot water six times a day, was supposed to kill the germ. He didn't know when it would start working.

“It's like many of these contagious diseases,” Dr. Parks said. He teetered his hand edge to edge in the air. “All we can do is wait.”

Mr. Soper nodded, his eyes cast down.

“However, we have discovered one thing about Mary,” the doctor added.

My chief looked up; I licked my pencil to write.

“The nurses learned that she came here from Ireland when she was fourteen after both her parents died. She crossed the Atlantic alone.”

“How did her parents die?” Mr. Soper asked.

The doctor shook his head. “That's it, that's all she would say.”

Mr. Soper rubbed his fingers together, thinking. “It would help us so much if she would talk about her past,” he said.

“We can't force her to talk,” Dr. Parks said.

Mr. Soper sighed. “No, I don't suppose we can.”

We bid the doctor good day. As I followed Mr. Soper out of the hospital, I imagined Mary Mallon at fourteen losing both of her parents, and the terrible sadness she must have felt. Still, somehow, she managed to travel by herself to America, probably on one of those giant steamers the companies pack with as many people as will fit. A girl alone, with all those strangers pressed against her—the thought makes me cold. She must surely have gotten seasick in the middle of the ocean. Who comforted her? Did she make any friends? When she landed here, how did she find a job and a place to sleep? Maybe she started as a scullery maid in a kitchen and observed the cook, learning as she went. I pictured her,
a red-haired girl hardened by her difficult circumstances, fighting for every scrap of food, nothing coming easily.