Mary Keane - Fever

She hoped he’d use her silence to think about what she needed from him and send a letter so full that the envelope would be too fat to slide under her door. Still, the weeks passed, and she heard nothing. She continued to hold out. She’d been on North Brother for almost fifteen months, and hadn’t heard from Alfred in four months. Her resentment turned to worry. Maybe he’d gotten injured on a job. Maybe he’d been evicted. He was not a violent drinker, but he’d had fights before. Maybe he’d gone to that rough beer hall he liked on Pearl Street and got pulled into a brawl. She wrote to her friend Fran to ask if she’d seen him, if he was getting on all right. Fran couldn’t read or write, so the response came back in her husband’s shaky hand, taped to a box of cookies from a bakery on Thirty-Ninth Street. The cookies were stale after the three days it took them to get to North Brother, but she ate one as she read.

Mary,

Things are the same here. We don’t see much of Alfred but he seems all right when we do. He’s not up for much conversation, but that’s Alfred. He misses you, I’m sure. When will you be home? There hasn’t been anything in the paper for a long time.

Fran

Inside, Fran had folded a cartoon from the Daily that she knew Mary liked, and even though she’d already seen it, tears pricked her eyes. So Alfred was in one piece, still making his way up and down the stairs to and from their rooms, and still no word.

• • •

“You know what your trouble is?” John Cane asked one morning when he came upon her sitting on the grass outside her hut, watching the ferry dock. “You’re not looking on the bright side.” It was October, she’d been on North Brother for eighteen months, and she’d still heard nothing from Alfred since that February letter. Her arms were brown from helping John all spring and summer, and now he asked if she wanted to help him prune back the overgrown rhododendron.

“Is that the problem?” Mary asked as she followed him along the walking path. She struggled to find the right words to ask how a person could be so completely and utterly out of tune with the unfairness he was witness to, how he could be so indifferent, and as she was forming the words he pulled off his gloves and handed them to her. He rummaged through his bag for spare gardening shears.

“I think so. You’re entirely at your leisure. You have your meals delivered.”

Mary sighed. It was useless. He was just trying to cheer her up.

“You hear from any of them lawyers you wrote to?”

“No. Not yet.”

He accepted this with a nod as he studied the bush. “Well, in the meantime,” he said, and started clipping.

A few days later, just when she’d stopped expecting it, nearly eight months since she’d heard from him last, a letter from Alfred was waiting on the floor of her hut when she returned from her walk. As always, she weighed it in the flat of her hand for a moment. She placed it on the table and looked at it while she waited for the teakettle to boil. When she finally opened it, a dozen seeds slid along the seam and she caught them in her palm.

Dear Mary,

Fran stopped me outside the building a few weeks back saying she’d had a letter from you worrying about me. I’d been telling myself it hasn’t been that long, but then I counted back. I’m sorry. I have no good reason for why I can’t seem to write as often as you’d like so I won’t try to give you an excuse. It’s not that I’m not thinking of you. You, at least, know the outlines of my day. You can picture what I do, where I go. But when I try to imagine you out there I don’t know what to picture. You tell me you’ve started knitting and gardening and that kind of thing, but it bothers me to hear you doing things you didn’t used to do before. It makes it seem like you are even farther away. I tried to get you interested in gardening, remember the window box I made for growing herbs? The seeds I’m folding into this letter are for tomato plants. I thought if they won’t let you cook then at least you can grow something you can eat and not have to get everything from the hospital kitchen.

I’m sorry I can’t be better. I miss you every day. I know all of this has been hard on you — hardest on you. But it’s been hard on me, too.

Alfred

When Mary opened her palm to look at the seeds, she realized Alfred expected her to be on North Brother for a very long time.

• • •

And then, out of the clear blue, in November 1908, she received a thick envelope from the Ferguson Lab. They had been testing the samples she’d been sending for almost nine months, and could now share with her the good news that her samples came back negative for Typhoid bacilli 100 percent of the time. They needed such a long sample period to make sure the bacilli didn’t flare with the change of seasons, or for any other reason. She read the paragraph again, and flipped quickly through the dozen pages of results they’d sent. She almost shouted her joy. Shaking, she went inside her hut to smooth back her hair and compose herself, and then, clutching the envelope, she walked quickly up the path to the hospital. The halls were oddly silent. Mary came upon one of the secretaries. “Where are they?” she asked, almost breathless.

“A meeting. They’ll be finished soon.”

“Hello, Miss Mallon,” came a voice from behind her, and when she turned she found Dr. Soper sitting in a waiting room chair, a book open on his lap. She swallowed, clutched the envelope to her breast. She turned her back to him.

“I’m waiting too. How are you feeling? You’re looking well.”

“Don’t you speak to me,” Mary said, and walked out to the hall to wait for another doctor to come by. She hadn’t seen Dr. Soper in months, and seeing him now flustered her. She read the letter from the Ferguson Lab once more.

She wasn’t in the hall for a minute when Dr. Albertson emerged from the conference room and asked if he could help her. He strolled into the office suite where Soper was waiting and she followed, not glancing toward the seating area.

“George!” he said, shaking Dr. Soper’s hand. “I’ll be right with you. Miss Mallon wants to see me.”

Dr. Albertson told her to have a seat in his office, and Mary passed to him the lab results from Ferguson.

“May I close the door?” she asked.

“Well, yes,” Dr. Albertson said, surprised.

He listened to her from beginning to end. She knew, she told him. She was no fool. She knew they were keeping her prisoner to study her for reasons they kept only to themselves, and couldn’t possibly admit to the public. Dr. Albertson just listened until she was finished.

“Mary,” he said kindly. “There is a good reason the Ferguson results came back negative. I’m going to call in Dr. Soper and he’ll help explain.”

“No!” Mary said. “ He started all this. It’s made him famous, hasn’t it? What he said about me?” But it was too late. Dr. Albertson was already waving him inside.

“What’s this?” Dr. Soper asked as he entered the office and took the envelope Dr. Albertson passed to him.

“Ah,” he said simply when he was finished. “I see.”

“The samples must be tested immediately, Mary,” Dr. Albertson explained. “Or else the bacteria die. You’ve just told me that you often can’t get the sample out in the mail for a day, and then it might take three days to get to Ferguson. It’s no good. It’s not possible to test that way. And what’s more, they would know that if they really are scientists, as they claim. Have you already paid them? The results are meaningless.”

“You’re just saying that because you want to keep me here. What are your results, then? Why has no one told me the results from the lab here?”