Deadly (6 page)

Once the auto was running smoothly, Mr. Thompson wiped his bare head and his hands on his kerchief and entered behind the wheel, beside Mr. Soper. We began to drive. Everything seemed so close, riding without the top—the snorts of horses that loomed overhead, the loud explosions of gasoline carriages, the bells and clanging of trolleys, and the shouts of pedestrians into whom Mr. Thompson nearly crashed several times. We flew past everything so quickly, my head spun. I clutched the side of the carriage, trying to steady myself, and held on to my hat, afraid of what I had gotten myself into. Mr. Soper broke off his inaudible shouts to our client and turned to glance at me every now and then, I think to make sure I hadn't been hit by flying debris. I'm ashamed to say it, but secretly I prayed to be back in school, sitting beside Josephine, looking out the window at the smokestacks and thinking my own quiet thoughts. It wasn't until we crossed the grand, jammed Brooklyn Bridge and drove up through Queens and out to more rural lands that I began to enjoy the ride, and the feel of wind on my
face. I've never had reason to visit the New York countryside, and the vision of cows munching hay in the fields and the fresh smell of the reddening autumn leaves soothed me.

Mr. Soper is a very serious man, with hardly a moment to explain things to me. At Oyster Bay, on Long Island, we pulled up to a stone mansion surrounded by exotic flowers dying in their pods and ripening apple trees overlooking the water. The country seemed so serene. Mr. Soper got out with Mr. Thompson; they'd been discussing how typhoid could be carried in food, and Mr. Soper wanted to see the kitchen first. I followed them around back. That kitchen was bigger than our entire apartment! Light poured in through four windows and bounced off the shiny bottoms of the dozens of copper pots that hung against the wide brick chimney. I felt myself shifting from foot to foot, distracted by the size and blackness of the stove, the look of the real icebox, the chopping block as long as my bed.

“Pay attention, Miss Galewski, and write this information into the folio!” Mr. Soper barked at me. “Think of what Mr. Thompson is saying.”

I quickly opened the folder and gripped my pencil. It was hard to pay attention with so much to look at, but I kept my eyes down on the paper, feeling the blush crawl up my neck.

“This is our situation here,” he said. “Mr. Thompson's family and servants first became ill September fourth, write that down, specific notes, his sons fell fevered at ten o'clock on that Thursday morning after eating apples and cheese, the laundress got sick that Sunday at seven in the a.m. after breakfasting on pancakes, stay alert and keep your hand moving. This is your job,” he said.

He had heard things I missed completely. I wrote as quickly as I could, trying to keep my mind on my work.

Mr. Soper began to question Mrs. Thompson, who came into the pantry (shelves and shelves filled with cookies and breads and honey and jarred jams, all the food one could ever want). I stood behind him, feeling a bit unsteady, my mouth dry, my stomach empty. Plump Mrs. Thompson's thick yellow hair hung loose in its bun, her skin a rashy pink; clearly, she had barely recovered from the fever. But Mr. Soper questioned her thoroughly just the same.

Her voice wavered as she described how she'd begun feeling sick on a Friday night at eleven p.m. in mid-September (the twelfth, same day as her daughter Amy), after her dinner guests—the McDonnell, Graff, and Chadwell couples (no children)—had departed. (Menu: Broiled sole with asparagus tips. Caviar, chocolate mousse. French bread, butter from
a neighboring farm.) Mr. Soper asked her about the visitors, if any of them had fallen ill, or could have brought the disease into the house. She shook her head; her doctors had spoken to their acquaintances (the three couples, plus the Lyons family, Mr. Cerasano, and the neighbors, the Heightons, and their five boys). As far as they knew, her friends had neither brought nor contracted the typhoid.

As she spoke, Mr. Soper made sure I wrote names, foods, times, dates. We will follow these like breadcrumbs through the forest, he says.

Mrs. Thompson then showed us the dining room where most of the family's meals took place, and after, she walked us through the house. I followed her and Mr. Soper through the bedrooms and bathrooms, feeling odd about being in this wealthy family's home, their life so different from mine, their privacy completely revealed to us. I had to keep reminding myself that they had been struck by a terrible disease, and I was there to help find out why.

In the afternoon, we talked briefly to the eldest son, Jimmy, a boy my age, blond like his mother, long-limbed, easy with himself. He had fully healed from the sickness, though I noted the prominence of his collarbones and the greenish tinge under his cheerful blue eyes. He had gone clamming
in the bay with his brothers Ronnie and Billy all summer. They had played polo at their neighbor's to the right, the Heightons. The three boys had come down with the illness on the same day (September 4). Mr. Soper asked him to remember when exactly it struck them, and the boy said that it was in the early morning (sometime before the mailman arrived at nine). Not a Friday like Mrs. Thompson; in fact, their illness came more than a week before Mrs. Thompson's.

We left the house after our interview with the boy. Mr. Thompson and Mr. Soper didn't speak on the ride back. At the office, at the end of the day, Mr. Soper nodded to me and said, “There is a depth to this case we're not yet reaching. We will return to Oyster Bay tomorrow. We have a good deal of work ahead of us.”

All day, I felt as if things were going on somewhere above me, while I tried to climb high enough to see, to understand. Follow the food, Mr. Soper says, follow the movements of the family—but I feel like I don't know what we're looking for. I don't even know how we'll know when we've found it!

T
he typhoid
that spread through the household ended its course by the beginning of this month. I understand now the nature of epidemiology, and Mr. Soper's work: If we don't find out how this fever started, it could resurface, and pass like a plague through water or food or some other means, into the neighborhood. That would be disastrous.

We've gone back to the house each day this week, collecting evidence, building the information we have about this large household. With each visit, I learned more about their lives—Mr. Soper says we must especially focus on the foods they eat, an amount that seems enough to feed everyone on my street.

We interviewed the two maids, the laundress, the gardener, and the butler, all of whom became ill on a Saturday
(September 6), the same week as the boys. Mr. Soper asked each of them to recall what they ate in the last month, and I jotted everything in the folio. It's a most difficult task trying to get eleven people to remember thirty days of eggs and bacon and grits, baked breads and muffins, cheese sandwiches and tomatoes and apples and plums, steaks and potatoes and salads and chops and spaghettis and sauces, desserts and snacks, especially when they don't all join together for each meal, and the servants graze like cows, it seems. My lists are so complex, they'll have to be cross-referenced and indexed like a book. I spent the week working on charts and graphs to order the types of foods together, with headings of Dairy and Meat and Vegetable and so on, but I'm not even halfway through.

I cannot help but wonder what it would be like to have so much food to eat, whenever one wanted to eat it. With an icebox and a pantry, all sorts of things seem possible.

I took notes of the household's movements and developed charts of People Visited, Places Traveled, and Visitors to Home. I feel a little like a spy, writing down who this family goes to meet, and who comes to visit. I think of the social circles Mrs. Browning always had us aspire to—and wonder what she would think of me writing down the eating and visiting habits of the rich.

Mr. Soper inspected the house and collected water from the well, and scrapings from the taps. We took samples of lamb, beef, chicken, and milk, and peaches, apples, bananas, and greens from the kitchen. Out in the backyard, he took a shovel and dug down deep until we reached the smell of sewage, which was the septic field for the house's toilets. He shoveled up samples and bottled them, handing the odiferous tubes to me without worrying about offending my female senses. He put me in charge of labeling and stacking these bottled samples in their wooden holders, and I have to say, I felt a certain joy rolling up my sleeves and performing this dirty work alongside him. We brought the samples back to the laboratory to test for disease, and we now await the results.

I found out that Mr. Thompson does not own this mansion—he only rents it from a rich merchant for the summer; he's terribly nervous that the merchant is going to blame him for the disease, especially if we don't find the cause. Worst of all, the family is trapped on Long Island and cannot return to their townhouse in the city, as their landlord will not take them if they carry the fever. The children cannot return to school until they are all completely well.

I think the hardest hit by all this was little Amy Thompson, who just came out of Nassau Hospital. A shy child of seven, her long brown hair tied up in a bow, she is neat and polite, normal-seeming, until one looks at her face. It seems a fever rash had broken out over her neck and chin, and she could not let it alone. The itch plagued her, and she scratched and picked and left such awful sores that have not healed properly, patchy scars that will stay with her all her life. In a family portrait on the mantelpiece, I saw that Amy had been a beautiful girl with a bold smile.

I fear the fever has taken her beauty and that easy personality away from her.

M
r. Soper
and I went to the laboratory where the science fellows studied our samples through their microscopes, and again I felt that strange sensation of being aware of my face and body. It got worse when one of the boys leaned over and whispered as I passed, “Want to look through my microscope?” I felt as if all eyes in the room turned then, and were waiting for me to answer. I stood frozen while I searched my mind for a reply. Mr. Soper didn't hear the boy's words, but sensing his attention on me, snapped at the fellow, “Mind your work, Jonathan!” and the boy lowered his eyes. He had foppish hair and a patch of fur on his chin, looking rather like a he-goat, including the smile on his face. I'm not accustomed to such boldness.

I don't think I have ever known a girl like me who was so very awkward with boys. Even Anushka once had an
outing with a feller—Jim McAvoy—though that turned bad when she tried to explain to him her father's idea about the commune and living in nature. Poor Jim had never met a girl who understood such ideas, and never came calling for her again. That gave us both a lesson—don't talk about ideas with boys. Maybe Anushka will have another chance—just yesterday, she wrote of being sweet on a feller named Randall. She met him on the Columbus Day hayride, but she didn't say whether he knew of her feelings or if she's still a secret admirer. She's a girl of mystery when it comes to love. I wrote back, asking what exactly he looks like, and if she's spoken to him in any meaningful manner. I asked her to write the whole love story out for me, dialogue and all. I told her to make it good, as I'd commit her lines to memory, and use them for my own next time a boy tries to speak to me.

Mr. Soper and I took the results of our sample tests to his office to study them. As he rifled through the pages, I did wonder aloud what the world might look like through a microscope, but Mr. Soper did not take my hint. Instead he handed over a section of the laboratory results for me to type out, stained sheets of tables and charts with breakdowns of the samples, all poorly handwritten, with columns and diagrams that I found difficult to understand. Mr. Soper
showed me which rows to follow. “We are looking for a positive identification,” he said, “something that tells us that the typhoid disease might live in any of the foodstuffs or organic matter we collected.”