Typhoid Mary (7 page)

     These women became an important segment of the New York City economy. They saved when everyone else seemed to be doing nothing but spending. Between 1819 and 1847, early years yet for Irish immigration, domestic women servants accounted for almost two-thirds of all savings accounts opened at the New York Bank for Savings.

     What you had, by Mary’s time, were large numbers of women who were used to standing up for themselves, who determined, to a greater degree than almost any other group of women, their own destiny, who were resourceful, having to contend with employment situations where they often bounced from one job to another. (Summers were particularly difficult. Many families ran off to Long Island and Maine for vacation. Mary Mallon’s steady employment during these times speaks well of her skills as cook.) These were tough women, unused to taking guff from anyone. Accounts of the day on the subject of stubborn and belligerent servants were legion – the stuff of popular jokes and anecdotes. Lydia Marie Child, quoted in Marie Stansell’s
City of Women
, describes an Irish domestic confronting a gentleman on the street who has ordered her summarily out of his way:

‘And indade I won’t get out of your way; I’ll get right IN your way!
’  . . .
She placed her feet apart, set her elbows akimbo, and stood as firmly as a provoked donkey.

     Stansell goes on to describe a few saltier phrases, quoting from court depositions of the time – all with Irish female defendants:

She would ‘knock her brains out’  . . . ’tear his guts out’.

     Sound familiar?

     Mary Mallon was one of
these
new women. Formed out of poverty and abuse, newly arrived in a strange land, where the Irish were, for some time, considered only slightly elevated from apes. They were ‘white niggers’, without a pot to piss in, and as women even less likely to raise themselves from their circumstances. Without family or husbands, they learned to hustle, to negotiate, to endure. They acquired marketable skills and demanded to be paid for them. It was from the early practices of avoiding marriage, working for themselves, saving money, learning, that Irish women began moving into professions like teaching and nursing. At a time when most professions were considered unsuitable for women, many began to break through.

     Their examples did not go unnoticed. The children of the rich, inspired, perhaps by their parents’ Irish help, began misbehaving.

     A news story from 1906:

RICH WELLESLEY GIRL WAITRESS IN HOTEL

She is nineteen and the daughter of Alfred E. Bosworth, a wealthy banker  . . . (she) acquired democratic ideas of life through associations with another girl who earned her college expenses during the summer by serving as a waitress in a hotel and she decided on the same course herself. While other girls were leaving for the seashore or foreign countries, Miss Bosworth, in a plain white dress  . . . had secured a position in the dining room of the Mount Pleasant House in Breton Woods.

     Or this one from the same year:

VASSAR GIRL IS REAL CINDERELLA

Preferring to work as a servant girl rather than marry the man she did not love, Katherine Gray, a Vassar graduate, and the daughter of the late Senator Asbury Gray of Virginia  . . . has been employed as a house servant.

   
‘He was old enough to be my father,’ said Miss Gray. ‘And I told Uncle so: but he insisted, and finally told me that if I did not marry the Major, I must leave the house.’ Miss Gray took the latter alternative.

     Mary Mallon was not a revolutionary. But she was part of a revolution. She wasn’t that different from hundreds of thousands of other women who’d been cut loose from one oppressive system to make her way in another. She was unluckier than most – in that she was
identified
as carrying typhoid. But like many of her peers, she was a fighter, a scrounger, a hustler, and a hater. She wanted her piece of the American Dream and was all too willing to work for it. They just wouldn’t let her. She did the best she could.

Chapter Five

The Cook’s Lament

Maybe, if some strange kercheifed man with a big, gold hoop earring had whispered out from a Hester Street storefront, ‘ Mary! There’s a hoodoo following you!’ then she would have believed it. She had to know something wasn’t right. A curse? A hex? Evil spirits?

     It was true that the sickness – ‘typhoid’ – seemed to follow her. She couldn’t argue with that. She’d seen it firsthand. She’d even stayed on at the one home – the one in Maine – to nurse those afflicted, so she’d seen it up close. She’d seen the fever and had an idea how it must have felt and knew that
she
didn’t have
that. She
was healthy as a horse.

     Sickness was everywhere. People of
her
station were always getting sick, dying. Down at the saloon where Breihof liked to drink, they had a term for it, ‘getting your elevens up’. One of the regulars – some hard-drinking old geezer – would disappear for a few weeks and then reappear, looking dissipated, the cords on the back of his neck deeper and more pronounced, the two muscles jutting straight up from the man’s collar like two
1
’s. The others at the bar would wait until he was gone or out of earshot and simply shake their heads slightly, mutter ‘Looks like so and so’s got his elevens up’ – meaning the poor bastard would be dead soon enough.

     Death and disease and starvation had been nipping at her heels from the beginning. Back in Ireland, it was the way of life, they died by the thousands, the exact cause – if ever identified – simply a postscript to the inevitable. People died in their beds. They died in the fields. They were lucky if they didn’t die in their cribs.

     Mary was born in Cookstown, County Tyrone, Ireland, in 1869. About fifteen years later, like so many of her starving countrymen, she fled to the United States, penniless, in steerage, aboard a sorry, crowded packet. They died on the boat too. She’d been watching people die her whole life, in increments. One day sick. The next? Gone. For her, life had
always
been an endless vista of suffering and struggle. She knew about epidemics. The world was
full
of them!

     From 1873 through 1875, it was influenza – swept through Europe and America like the four horsemen. In 1878, in New Orleans, the last great wave of yellow fever  . . . in 1895 it was Plymouth – typhoid this time (Was
that
her fault too?)  . . . in Jacksonville, Florida, there was yellow fever again, though not as bad as New Orleans  . . . and later, much later, there would be more: a worldwide influenza epidemic would wipe out more people than were wounded in the Great War. U.S. Army training camps would become giant sickwards, with an 80 per cent fatality rate.

     Some people got sick. Some died. Maybe God decided. Who knew? Mary had felt herself lucky – as if, perhaps, someone was looking after her – as if there
were
rewards for her hard work and her sacrifices. She’d stayed single, childless. She’d kept herself up. She’d prayed. She’d tried to lead a decent life – unlike so many others of her country and profession. They said – the doctors and the engineers and the health department coppers – that dirt had something to do with it; they were always going on about washing your hands and such. But Mary knew what dirt was. She’d seen
real
filth and
she
certainly wasn’t dirty like that. Nowhere near. She kept herself
up
, her apron clean, her uniform always white and ironed. It was the weak that got sick. Then they got sicker. Then they died. It was always like that, wasn’t it? How could they say she had the fever?
She
certainly wasn’t weak. No one could say that about her. It was a point of honor how strong she was, how fit.

     And here’s this man, this miserable interloper, minding everybody’s business but his own, claiming to be a doctor (she had her suspicions) – a man who doesn’t even know her – who doesn’t know how
strong
she is, saying she’s dirty, sick, a menace to others. What did he – in his nice suit and his carefully trimmed mustache and his prissy manner –know about sickness? Poor people were always sick. That’s what the poor
did
– they got sick and died, usually in droves. The people down the street when she first came to America, the people down the hall, the crowd at Thirty-third and Third – one day they were there, the next in a box, family and friends crowded around the coffin in a tiny tenement living room. ‘Old John? You didn’t hear? He’s passed. Gone. The wake was last week. Lovely spread they laid out. Terrible thing.’ Back in Ireland? It wouldn’t have even been ‘Old’ John – it would have been, ‘Didja hear about young Johnny? His mother was in here today. Terrible thing. Terrible. Two little ones out of four  . . .’

     Who noticed
them
? No one in
this
city. Certainly not if it were Irish doing the dying. The good citizens of New York were too busy, everyone rushing about in their new automobiles, digging holes in the ground, putting up buildings so tall they were an offense to God almighty, putting on airs, dressing up, always hurrying off someplace. The upper classes? The rich? The new trash who’d suddenly come into money and liked to rub your nose into it? They didn’t care. They didn’t notice. Until one of their own goes ill. Then it’s a sodding emergency. Some privileged prat starts feeling poorly and then it’s call out the Marines, start looking for someone to blame – a hardworking, decent Irish woman, for instance.

     Before, they had said it was the water that did it. It was settled. The typhoid came from the water, they’d said. That time in Tuxedo Park? They said then it was that laundress who brought it into the house, brought it in with the washing. And who could be surprised at that? The woman had looked sick from the first! Anyone could see. Stuck out a mile.

     Why were they picking on her? Why Mary Mallon?

     Someone must have said something. Another servant more than likely. It was jealousy, plain and simple. The servants, the laundresses, they always resented her. Didn’t much like emptying out the coal from her oven. Didn’t care to do the washing up either – and did a damn pitiful job of it most times too. Mary had a skill, a talent. That made her special; it brought her a little extra. And of course, in the kitchen, she was the boss. The rest never liked that either. They didn’t like it when she upbraided them for messing with her things, pilfering the food, sticking their dirty fingers in the ice cream.

     These health officials called
her
dirty? They should have a good look at some of the dirty birds sticking their dirty paws into her food when they thought she wasn’t looking.

     What to do now? The job? That was gone. She could kiss that off. The agencies were put wise – tipped off by that meddling Dr. Soapbox. They wouldn’t be sending any work her way any time soon. Even if she got out. Not ever. References? Might as well drape herself in the skull and crossbones.

     What next? Who’d hire her?

     Now they were calling her a killer – a murderess. They didn’t exactly put it that way – not quite. But that’s what they were saying – once you got past all that silky double-talk and fake cheer. Once
that
got around, she was properly buggered. They’d said they’d keep her name a secret, but who could believe anything they said?

     She carried the sickness inside her body, they said. She spread it with her dirty hands. Who could believe such things? She’d never felt better in her life!

     If she was so sick, how come it had taken five policemen to subdue her? Could a sick person do that? Could a sick person jump out a window, climb a high fence, then wrestle five policemen to the ground and curse the lot of them?

     It was persecution, simple as that.

     It was
their
rotten lot that was sick.
They
were the ones obsessed by shit and piss and indecent things – the ones who wanted to put the knife on her, cut out her gallbladder. They wanted to know about her family, her friends. What she got up to with any gentlemen. So they could spread their lies. Nosy Parkers. More than likely they’d like to track
them
down as well, maybe lock
them
up. No trial. No judge. One day safe in her kitchen – the next, locked up in solitary confinement: white room, white bed, white sheets, white robe. Questions every day. Strangers come to gape. And more questions.

     She wasn’t going to tell them anything.

     Not a fucking word.

Chapter Six

A Good, Plain Cook

Could Mary Mallon cook? If she walked into your kitchen right now could she whip up a nice meal from available ingredients?

     The best indicator that Mary Mallon
could
cook well is her employment history. Even with an incomplete record, it’s clear that between 1900 and 1906, Mary was employed fairly steadily by well-to-do families, even during the summer months, when many domestic cooks struggled to find employment as their patrons deserted Manhattan for vacations on Long Island, Maine, and New Jersey. It’s hard to believe that Mary was what we call today a ‘ham and egger,’ a utility cook with a limited repertoire of lumbering Anglo/Irish standards and little else. The requirements of the time were demanding. Mary had a lot of competition. When she first came to the attention of authorities, the city and the country were in the middle of a foodie boom.