Mary Keane - Fever

“It’s just for now,” Mr. O’Neill said. “We’ll keep working. Look, their own experts said there are others like you, that—”

“Others like me? Do you believe I’m giving out the fever?”

“I think it’s irrelevant, Mary. I’ve tried not to think about it too much, but yes, the lab work is sound in my view, and two-thirds of the time it comes back positive.”

“Their labs! Run by their people! I’m telling you, it’s Soper. He’s—”

“Mary, calm down. Please. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you are perfectly safe to be around as long as you are not cooking, and they can’t go locking up healthy people whenever they feel like it. There has to be a better solution.”

Mary absorbed Mr. O’Neill’s calm response and remembered that for him, and for everyone else in the courtroom, the hearing was no more than a handful of days, a set of hours, an errand, an item on a list. For Mary, it was her entire life. After this, Mary made herself understand, all of them can go home to their families, meet someone for a picnic, take a trip to the ocean if they want. Each person here has complete freedom, except for me.

When she thought about going back, the long automobile journey uptown, the ferry crossing to North Brother, it all seemed inevitable, and all the other possibilities she’d imagined — being with Alfred, getting new rooms together, finding work — were just dreams behind locked doors.

“The judges said you can have visitors now,” Mr. O’Neill offered by way of consolation. “You can write to your friends and let them know.”

Mary stood on her tiptoes so that she was almost his height and felt tempted to spit at him, to walk up to the judges and spit at them as well. As for Soper, she felt her hands turn to fists. Their experts had worried that she had a violent streak — what proper woman would raise a knife to a man of status? — and perhaps they were right. Who among her friends, after not seeing her for more than two years, would put aside their work to spend half a day traveling all that way uptown, all the way across Hell Gate, to sip a cup of tea in her cramped kitchen for thirty minutes?

And how would Alfred react to this news? She was glad he was absent.

• • •

John Cane was there to meet her ferry and tell her all the news since she left. The she-cat who skulked in the vegetable garden had birthed a litter of kittens, and all the babies had been taken home by nurses except for one. Did Mary want it? For company? The hydrangea by the south wall were fully bloomed in the heat, even though he didn’t expect that for several more weeks since last year they hadn’t blossomed until August. Did Mary remember? Did she remember planting the rusted nails with him? Well it worked, that trick, and now they’ve flowered a deep periwinkle blue. He went on and on, as if she’d been gone for a year and not just a handful of days. The moment she opened the door to her cottage it was as if she’d gone out only for a walk, and everything — the courtroom, the judges, Dr. Soper, the hotel — seemed like a hallucination, like she’d never left, like she’d never seen Alfred at all. He’d tried to see her at the hotel the first evening, but they told him to see her over at the courthouse. He never did. Working, she supposed. He could have left a note with the clerk at the courthouse or one of the guards at the hotel. Even if they had to read it before handing it over, she’d like to have had a note from him. But there was no note, no visit, and now she was back on North Brother with John Cane buzzing in her ear.

She went over to her desk and removed a sheet of paper. She sat for a while, not sure of what to say. After a few minutes, she picked up the pen.

Alfred,

You’ve heard by now that I was taken back to North Brother. Mr. O’Neill said he is going to keep trying. I’m not sure what to think — I’m just so tired. I barely saw you at all.

I’m allowed to have visitors now. I would love for you to visit me here, Alfred. It’s not ideal, but at least it’s something. I’ll wait to hear from you.

Mary

She addressed the letter to the stable instead of Thirty-Third Street, and left it poking out from under her doormat on the step where the mailman would notice it. Then she closed the door of her cottage and curled up on her cot. Her body smelled ripe. Her best blouse would be ruined for good. It was so very hot. The walls so close. Late at night, when she was sure no one would see her, she carried the heavy chamber pot outside, emptied it in the river, and returned immediately to bed. In the early mornings she heard the foghorn of the lighthouse behind the hospital. She listened to the rhythmic tap and scrape of the bricklayer’s instruments as he pointed the brick of the new walkway that connected the hospital to the outbuildings. She heard John and his gardening shears slicing through the green, and she heard someone leave meals on her step three times a day. After a few days she decided that was the way it would be from now on. She’d stay in her hut and if they needed her, let them break the door down. If they wanted her samples or wanted to draw blood, by God they’d have to drug her and get ten men to hold her. No more. After several days — her head felt light from lack of food, her teeth thick and soft, and under her arms itched for a scalding washcloth rubbed with strong soap — John pounded on her door and warned her that he’d brought a nurse and they were going to enter without an invitation if she refused to come outside. Finally, as threatened, he opened the door, and the smell of fresh-cut grass turned her stomach.

“My God,” he said, turning his face toward the fresh air of outdoors and drawing a deep breath. “Are you suffocating yourself?”

“Get out.”

“I’ve brought Nancy,” he informed her, as if she knew who in the world Nancy was. As if she cared. “Tell her,” John urged the girl. The nurses got younger every season.

Nancy looked at him and then at Mary.

“Tell her,” he said again, nodding toward her hand. Mary noticed the girl was holding a newspaper.

“There’s a dairyman,” Nancy said. “In Camden. Upstate.”

Mary waited. The girl whispered something to John, but he couldn’t hear her. Mary promised that she’d kill them both with a single shot if they didn’t get out.

“They say she gets mad if…”

“If what?” John asked.

“Yes, if what?” Mary asked.

The girl took a step backward. “If anyone says anything about her having the fever.”

Mary sat up in her cot.

“Don’t worry about that,” John assured Nancy. “Just keep going.”

“There’s a dairyman in Camden who’s passing the fever through the milk.”

Mary sat up straighter. “What do you mean?”

John took over. “She’s just after reading it to me. He’s a dairyman. Had the fever forty years ago and hasn’t been sick a day since. There were outbreaks of Typhoid wherever his milk was sent, at groceries and markets all over New York City, and now they’ve traced it to him. Got lots of people sick with it. They’re saying maybe hundreds. More than—”

“More than what?”

“More than they claim you made sick. A lot more.”

“Where are they sending him? Not here, I guess. Camden is all the way up near Syracuse, isn’t it?”

“That’s just it. They’re not sending him anywhere.”

“What do you mean?”

“Because he’s the head of his household and has a family, they’ve decided it would be too much of a hardship to put him in quarantine, so he can stay exactly where he is, as long as he promises to never have anything to do with milk production. So he has his sons running it and he’s bossing them.”