Deadly (20 page)

Marm was married to Papa for seventeen years before he left, and another nine of waiting. That is a long time to have someone in your heart.

I feel as if I'm traveling through a dark tunnel. Once I reach the other side, I will have the strength to break the news to her.

M
r. Soper
is not himself with me; he places obstacles in our path, people and projects, and I wish I knew my way back into his good graces.

For the second time, Jonathan, that strange science fellow, has come to my aid. I fear that Mr. Soper may be encouraging him to make friends with me. Everyone in the department now knows that I'm studying for the medical school entrance examination—the science fellows question me when they see me in the hall, and not always in the nicest manner. This morning a boy heckled me about animal reproduction, and Jonathan came along and grabbed the boy by his neck and pushed him on. He then turned and apologized to me for his friend's behavior. I don't know what impression he thinks this made on me.

That wasn't the only exchange. Later Jonathan came
into the office, greeted Mr. Soper, and placed a medical journal on my desk. “You'll find the article on page forty-nine helpful to your case,” he said, with a big, open smile. Mr. Soper and Jonathan nodded to each other as the boy left. Mr. Soper didn't give me the article himself directly—yet he knows the difficulty I had with Jonathan.

It's been harder, spending days in the office with my chief. I fear his dismissal of me.

I quickly read the article the boy gave me. It illustrated how white blood cells engulf and devour any invading bacteria, and how, in a healthy body, this creates a natural immunity to sickness. I tried to speak with Mr. Soper about it, but the darkness around his brow showed me the painful doubt that he entertained about me.

“I'm glad that—that young man—gave me this to read,” I started.

My chief met my eyes for the barest of seconds. “Yes,” he said, “Jonathan. He's quite a brilliant young science fellow; he's always finding the most pertinent journal reports.”

This description hit me hard. I would say Dr. Pasteur is brilliant, or Dr. Mechnikov, but not that simple boy.

I asked, “Do you think this might explain how Mary can carry disease while being immune to it?”

Mr. Soper ran his finger down a column of figures distractedly. “It could,” he said.

“We have not heard back from the island doctors about Mary's problematic gallbladder, have we?” I asked.

He looked up and sighed. “When we do, I expect it will explain a lot, Miss Galewski.”

The way he said it troubled me deeply.

Mr. Soper and I have shared so many discussions about cells and disease. He gave me my first glimpse under the microscope. He taught me how to read charts and reports, and how to write them. I am sickened with worry that he now sees me as an unserious, flighty thing. I must endure; I must make a great effort to earn back his respect.

I
took out
the very first red silk tablet I ever wrote in. The beginning date was January 2, 1900, two years after Papa left us. He was not yet officially missing.

I was a different girl then. I still smelled the metal on his hands from the factory, I still heard the timbre of his voice in my chest when he spoke. I could feel his rough hair against my cheek when he kissed me. I heard him calling my name from our window, calling me and Benny inside to light the Shabbat candles.

I cried alone, reading the words of my childish self, emptying my eyes of the tears I'd held on to for all his missing years. I sobbed until my chest ached. I hugged my quilt to me like gauze to a wound for a long time, long enough to stop the bleeding.

——————

The now-famous cook Mary Mallon is a prisoner for life on a quarantine island, though she has committed no crime, has never been accused of an immoral or wicked act, and has never been a prisoner in any court. No judge has ever sentenced her. We ask, is this fair? Apparently, Miss Mallon does not think so.

“Typhoid Mary,” as the Department of Health and Sanitation has dubbed her, will finally have her day in court. Her attorney, Mr. Charles O'Neal, has served the department with a writ of habeas corpus. He states that her case for improper confinement is strong,
and that if the judge is fair and reasonable, she should be a freed woman in short order. Mary Mallon has been in captivity for nearly three months, since January, when she was imprisoned for being a human culture tube for the typhoid germ.

In a letter written for the court, Miss Mallon claims, “I have never had typhoid in my life, nor do I have it now. Why should I be banished like a leper and forced to live in solitary confinement? My own doctors say I have no typhoid germs. I am an innocent human being. I have committed no crime and I am
treated like an outcast—a criminal. It is unjust, outrageous, uncivilized. It seems incredible that in a Christian community a defenseless woman can be treated in this manner.”

Mary Mallon, who is physically healthy in every way, is being kept on a quarantine island just north of New York City, along with dozens of consumptives, recovering and otherwise. The department has not answered questions as to how they maintain her good health on such an island, nor when she might be released. They have appealed to eminent lawyers on the question of legality concerning Miss Mallon's confinement, and insist a judge will see that “Typhoid Mary” is a menace to society. They claim that she should be kept contained indefinitely.

——————

I
t seems
impossible that the newspapers could sink any lower, but they have. This illustration horrifies me, as does the name they have invented for Mary. They have taken her up as a sport—they toss around her name and her image like a tennis ball. There is nothing anyone can do to control them.

What's worse, this article contains a good deal of fact.

It turns out that the nurses on the island have been assisting in Mary's case, acting as messengers to bring her feces to an independent laboratory in Manhattan. Apparently, this laboratory has
not
found typhoid. Several weeks of independent testing on Mary's samples have been done, and each has come out clean. I don't understand the methods they use; Mr. Soper says the samples must be old, or the laboratory must be bad. Who knows if they are even
Mary's samples? On top of the insult of Mr. O'Neal taking us to court, Mr. Soper is doubly upset by this so-called proof that Mary's lawyer aims to present.

We believe the Bowing family is involved in retaining such a bulldog of a lawyer, though they have managed to keep their name out of it. Instead of dragging the case through the court system, Mr. O'Neal has served the department with a writ of habeas corpus, which allows a prisoner who feels he or she is unfairly imprisoned court time with a judge. Without a jury, a judge alone will decide Mary's case. He can do this in one day of hearing if he wants. And if he decides that the department is wrong to have captured her, he can free her immediately.

In our defense, our scientists are gathering evidence for the phenomenon of a healthy carrier. They have simplified Dr. Koch's seminal text on his initial discovery of the first German who spread typhoid unknowingly through his feces. They're also translating Dr. Mechnikov's work on white blood cells and immunity, and Dr. Pasteur's study of the life of bacteria inside the human body. I've spent the past few days retyping the first of these papers, which has been an education in itself. I hope a judge will not be swayed by Mr. Bowing's influence at the mayor's office, but rather that he
will take the time to read these important papers and understand our position.

Our attorneys are discussing the legal rights of the department, and which law is stronger—a person's right to freedom, or the public's right to a healthy, protected community. There is a law (Section 1170) that states that the Board of Health and Sanitation of the City of New York may remove from the public arena
any
person sick with
any
contagious, pestilential, or infectious disease. It seems clear, yet one question stumps these smart men: Can Mary legally be defined as a person
sick
with an infectious disease?

For the next weeks until the trial, I fear we will be on pins and needles. There's been an outbreak of typhoid in Riverdale, which Mr. Soper suspects may be caused by another healthy carrier like Mary. If we can uncover another example, perhaps that will strengthen our case. It makes sense to me that Mary is not an exception, but rather part of a larger invisible problem that must be addressed.

As an experiment, Mr. Soper asked the science fellows to test several people in the department who have survived the typhoid fever. We have discovered that they do
not
carry the typhoid germ. So it proves that not everyone who has had the fever automatically falls into the category of healthy
carrier. Mr. Soper says he thinks that most people survive the fever without continuing to produce the germ. Indeed, we have not found another like Mary. Do they exist? And if so, must we test every single survivor in order to find out whether they carry the germ?

Tomorrow we are to travel to Riverdale to begin investigating the new typhoid outbreak. I'm anxious to discover the reason for this epidemic. It seems similar in some respects to the Thompson case, with clusters of people falling ill as if from a tainted source rather than a contagion.

After reading about Dr. Pasteur's work, a strange thing now happens to me when I travel with crowds of people in a public streetcar or omnibus. I see them as a myriad of undetected illnesses. Sicknesses we don't yet know, ones we can't yet diagnose. My eye picks out the weaker-looking ones, and I see the bacteria, as varied and crowded as a metropolis, living within them.

I see my future work in those people.

O
ur trips
to Riverdale have opened up a disturbing realm of inquiry for us and have added another dimension to Mary's case.

Mr. Soper and I took a train and carriage up to the Bronx to investigate. We discovered records of typhoid fever in this part of Riverdale dating as far back as November of last year. All together, the count was ninety-six people ill, thirteen dead—and news of more victims coming in every day. A horrifyingly large number of people.

We went to the hospital to visit the latest cases, hoping to get the freshest information possible. We visited seven patients. One, a girl of eight years, kept running to the toilet. Another child could barely sit up for the pain in her head. We spoke to both of their mothers and obtained useful information from them. We then moved on to a poor fellow
who was raving something about his neighbor's wife, but he was too deep into dementia and too close to death to interview. Four women had the same rose-shaped rashes that had appeared on Amy Thompson, but they were able to talk, and answered our questions about what they ate and where they shopped and who they had encountered in the past month. That, and the mothers' interviews, was enough to give us our answer.