“WHO’S GOT A match?”
Chick draws a joint from a pocket of his shorts. Gerard produces a Bic lighter.
They are lolling around in the gymnasium. Chick peeled off his T-shirt and lay it down so Karalee didn’t have to sit in the dust. She keeps checking her shorts for dirt marks, forces herself to get comfortable with the few she found so far. Filth covers everything. Karalee resorts to shallow breathing. The thick dust makes for intriguing photographs, but she hates to have any contact with it at all.
Part of the gymnasium roof has caved, revealing a shard of sky. The wooden floorboards, once lacquered, are now dull and gray. Where exposed directly to weather, they lay atop one another in buckled chaos like giant stalks of mounded straw.
When the joint comes around, Gerard by habit goes to pass it to the next person without including Karalee, but she holds up a hand. She can’t take much more of the inner trembling that results from her effort to suppress her OCD. Estela must be reading her mind. “Do it,” she urges. “It will make you feel better. It’ll take the edge off.”
Karalee has seen others smoke pot a thousand times. She pinches the joint between thumb and forefinger and brings the tip to her lips with everyone watching in awe. The smoke is hot. It tickles the back of her throat, but she manages to stifle a cough. She exhales through her nostrils to prove that she did it right and repeats the process.
“Hold in the smoke this time,” Chick instructs, smiling. She hates that look of triumph in his eyes, the look that says he got another domino to fall.
She passes the joint to Josh and, after he’s accepted it, freezes her right hand in the air and stares at it, looking for tremors. There are none. The others, watching surreptitiously as she does this, erupt in laughter, Josh choking out smoke.
When they’ve sucked the joint down to a roach, Chick snuffs it and flicks it out among the buckled floorboards. Karalee senses living things in the gym, but can’t spot any.
Gerard rocks his head around on a loose neck, like he’s following a bouncing ball. “Wow. Do you think Typhoid Mary took her exercise in here?”
“What, like in petticoats?” Estela scoffs. “It was the teens and twenties and thirties, and she was probably raised as a strict Catholic.”
“Oh, like you?” Josh says.
“Don’t be a wise guise.”
“That’s ‘wise guy.’”
Estela crinkles her nose in mock embarrassment.
Gerard brings the subject back to Mary Mallon. Collectively they draw on their study of history to piece together the early years of her life, born in 1869 to a poor family in Cookstown, Northern Ireland.
“Cookstown?” Gerard exclaims. “I didn’t know that. It’s too ironic. Were they all cooks, the people who lived there?”
Even though she feels a little silly herself, Karalee won’t accept the humor, if that’s what he intends. Maybe it’s just stoner talk. “When Mary grew up there,” she explains, “linen weaving and hat making were the big industries. Also, brick manufacturing.” She thinks of the Victorian-revival brick architecture all around them, wonders whether Mary reluctantly felt at home here in some ways.
The young Irishwoman, already fully formed at the age of fifteen, arrived in New York either on her own initiative or following a sibling.
“There’s a third possibility,” Estela says. “Maybe she was fleeing someone or something.”
“Most likely,” says Karalee, “she was just fleeing poverty.”
“The unsanitary conditions among so many of the Irish poor,” Chick says. “She must’ve been exposed to typhoid fever back home as a kid. With all that industry in her hometown, though, I wonder why she left at all. It’s not like she lived during the potato famine era. That happened earlier. By the time she came along, Cookstown had begun to thrive. Why not get a job in one of the linen factories?”
“Because it was a crappy existence,” Karalee says, “toiling away in those factories that were no better than sweatshops. They treated the women as second-class citizens, too, paid them less than men.”
“Probably because they were doing less skilled labor,” Chick says.
“Because they wouldn’t train them as they did the men,” Karalee quickly retorts. “They gave them the prep work. If they wove at all, they trained them on less complicated looms than what the men got, weaving products of lesser value. So, conveniently, they never acquired the skills that the men had. And looms were placed close together, making it more dangerous work for the women.”
“Wouldn’t it be equally dangerous for the men?” asks Josh, the expert on danger.
Karalee shakes her head. “Those long skirts the women had to wear, they could get caught in the machinery as they walked by, yanking them into the mechanism. You could get injured, maimed for life, sometimes even killed. Maybe Mary didn’t want that life. She wanted something better for herself, like all American immigrants.”
Of course she did. Karalee imagines her boarding a ship in Belfast for her steerage-class journey, no doubt her stomach fluttering with excitement and trepidation. If she was lucky, she had ten pounds sterling in her pocket. If unlucky, more like ten cents. Perhaps a small sack of bread, dried sausage, and just enough ale to sustain her for the journey.
And what hopes she must have had for arrival on the other end! Plenty of Irish had made the trip before her. Many New York police were Irish. The Irish were well represented among construction workers, civil servants, and politicians. They had fraternal societies of their own. A cathedral named for Ireland’s patron saint. Little could Mary predict, having arrived with no benefactors, how few prerogatives would be afforded her as a poor, uneducated Irishwoman living in New York City.
“So she goes to work as a cook?” Gerard asks.
“More likely as a washerwoman at first,” says Estela. “She had to prove herself trustworthy, then look for an opening higher up the economic chain.”
“Slaving over a hot stove. You call that up?” Josh guffaws.
“Yes. Up, I’m guessing,” says Karalee. “Oh, yes. All your studying, and haven’t you ever paused to imagine what it was like to be an uneducated single Irishwoman in turn-of-the-century New York?”
Despite the social gains made by the Irish at that time, many still looked down on them. The term “hooligan” was coined to describe the rowdiest among them—a word just coming into favor when Mary arrived. They rounded up the worst of them with paddy wagons—“Paddy” being a pejorative for the Irish.
Being a cook was probably the highest calling Mary could aspire to. And, Karalee recalls, since she consorted with a drunk—albeit a German drunk rather than an Irish one—she was the main breadwinner of her small unmarried household. The kitchen beckoned. And once she got there, she couldn’t afford to give that up, probably couldn’t conceive of doing so.
“She starts getting people sick,” Chick says, “and when the pressure becomes too great, she splits the scene. Goes and works for another wealthy family under an alias for a while until things cool off. Gets those people sick and off she goes again.”
“Poor thing,” Karalee hears herself saying, picturing Mary on the run. “No friends. No one to turn to but her drunken lover. What was his name?” No one recalls.
“How do we know he was a drunk?” Gerard asks.
“My great-grandfather found him in a bar,” Karalee says. “He bribed him with drink to betray Mary’s whereabouts. Who else but a drunk can be bribed that way?”
Chick frowns. “Betrayed, huh? You make her sound like a victim. Dozens of people suffered horribly because of her actions. Yet it sounds like you want to defend her.”
“I do not.”
“You do.” Chick rolls his eyes, shakes his head—his disappointed-professor look. “It’s like you haven’t learned how important this case was in public health. For building awareness. For showing the danger, the irresponsible behavior of known asymptomatic carriers.”
“Oh, brother! Don’t give me all that ideological crap. I heard it enough from my father.”
For long periods of time, the Sopers couldn’t get through a family dinner without reference to the great man’s accomplishments. When she was younger and simpler, Karalee thought this talk sprang from her father’s admiration of his grandfather George. Now she knows better. He has attempted his whole life to trade on the name rather than make one of his own. She pictures the stacked cartons that fill their garage: Soper Soap, Soper Soap, Soper Soper Soper Soap!
She mutters the inescapable slogan. “Soper Soap Cleans Cleanest!”
No one hears her.
“And in spite of your ancestor’s achievement,” Chick continues, “you defend Mary as the injured party. Why? Because she’s a woman?”
His tone grates on Karalee’s nerves, disrupting the pleasant high she was feeling. All at once, for the first time ever, Chick reminds her of her father. They look nothing alike, but at bottom they’re the same. They have to be right all the time, and in order to prove that rightness, they have to make someone else wrong. Damn the consequences. Never mind whom it hurts.
Josh breaks her reverie with a tap on the shoulder. “We should get going,” he says, rising to his feet. “We have a few more buildings to explore, and it will be dark soon. Equinox tomorrow.”
* * *
THEY PASS AROUND another joint as they walk. Hunger pangs begin to claw at Karalee, but there’s no cure in sight for it. She swallows hard, trying to ignore her dry throat. Not like there’s a working water fountain here. Not like they could go to the nearest bit of shoreline and dip a pail in the dirty river.
“So … wow,” Estela says as the two women straggle. “I can sort of dig it, you defending Mary.”
“I’m not defending her. Just trying to provide some perspective. These guys—”
“It’s cool.” Estela hitches along. “Because, you know, I was doing some reading not that long ago. There’s this whole perspective on Mary that some historians have started to advance. Turns out there were other carriers, a couple of guys who didn’t get nearly so rough treatment, only went briefly into quarantine, didn’t lose their freedom for life. But Soper made an example of Mary because he could. She had no standing in society.”
“Yeah, well, I’m guessing those guys didn’t violently threaten my great-grandfather when he came for them.” For the first time since early this morning, she thinks of the large barbecue fork that she put in the food cooler with the hot dogs. She wonders how one fends off a grown man with such a meager instrument.
“But I thought you’re on her side.”
“I’m not on anyone’s side, Estela! Okay?”
The fresh high from the new joint has made everyone voluble again, and they can’t get off the subject of Typhoid Mary. Chick explains how unusual it was in 1907 to see incidents of typhoid fever among the economic elites, who generally had the best sanitation. That was how Soper deduced Mary’s role in the horrible deaths of upper-crust family members and their attendants. If the disease didn’t result from unsanitary conditions, he reasoned, it had to originate with a person who had less-than-sanitary habits and the ability to expose the whole family to the disease they carried. When he learned that Mary had left the Warrens’ employ rather abruptly, he thought quite rightly that he had identified the nexus.
Chick is narrating the hunt for Mary’s whereabouts when they find their way into the building with the lesser smokestack. They slow their pace as it dawns on them that they’ve entered the old morgue and crematorium.
“Now we know,” Gerard says, “why in fact there is no cemetery on the island. If you died of one of these diseases, your family didn’t get the body. At best, they got the ashes.”
A line of ovens with cast-iron doors is arrayed in front of them along one long wall. Josh says, “As ye sow, so shall ye reap.” He knocks with his knuckles on the nearest oven door—so thick, it barely issues a thud. He makes no attempt to open it, however. “Soper was a brave man.”
“Picking on a helpless woman,” Estela says.
“Sure, the weaker sex,” Josh snipes. “For cryin’ out loud, she came after him with that giant carving fork of hers. He fled, but then he tracked her down at the tenement where she lived in sin with this German cat.”
“In sin?” Karalee says. “You’re a moralist now?”
“At the time, that’s what they called it. Anyway, in the doorway to the tenement Soper tried again to convince her to do the right thing, and Mary threatened him with a big dog that her lover kept as a pet.”
“True enough.” Chick continues, “The third time he sends Sara Josephine Baker of the Health Department, along with some muscle. After hours of searching in and around the Robinson premises, they find Mary hiding in a neighboring garden.”
“In the outhouse!” Josh interjects.
Karalee’s thinking: Hole in the ground. Boys and their holes. “You’re pathetic,” she says, “grown men chortling over an outhouse.”
“Lighten up, Karalee,” Josh says. “It’s just ironic, is all, her spreading the disease with her shit and such, subsequently choosing to hide in an outhouse, of all places.”
“Like she had so many choices.”
“She may have opted to turn herself in. You know, they let her go after a few years on North Brother, on condition she never cook for anyone again. Instead, Soper found her five years later—spreading disease in the kitchen of a maternity hospital, of all things.”
“The Sloane Hospital for Women.” Karalee nods, but adds defensively, “None of the patients got sickened. Only the staff.”
“Twenty-five infected. And two died. What an upstanding citizen!”
“She couldn’t make a living as a laundress,” Karalee asserts with less conviction. Her mind feels befogged from the pot, distant from its own thoughts. Not a bad feeling, but clouding her ability to reason out where she stands. “Of course Mary Mallon made bad decisions. Of course George Soper was right to lock her away for life after her irresponsible behavior. Of course people died horrible deaths because of her actions, some robbed of life at a young age.” She squeezes her eyes shut, straining to focus. “But that isn’t everything. Let’s be grown-ups and acknowledge that life is complicated.”
A tattered monarch butterfly struggles past and settles on a vine. “Ugh,” she adds, reaching for her camera. “Why should one person get to define who anyone else is?” She snaps a few pictures, all the while thinking: Doesn’t her father want to mold her into someone else’s image the way George Soper created an image of Mary for the entire world to see? But even if her father succeeds in defining her in some way, that won’t make him right.
As they exit the crematorium, she recalls something she heard once attributed to Gandhi: What a man thinks he becomes. She wonders whether in some way George Soper thought Typhoid Mary into existence.
Karalee broods as they continue their self-guided tour, taking a turn around the old dilapidated lighthouse—its tower fallen over—and poking their heads inside a nearby boathouse, where a pair of small craft decompose in shallow water, one of them miraculously still floating but trapped behind doors to the river that have warped into barriers.
The sun hangs low in the sky. Josh checks his watch. “Now we really should get going. Only an hour or so more light.”
Gerard looks down to his own wrist. “My watch! Hell. I must’ve dropped it somewhere.”
“C’est la vie.” Chick shrugs. “Josh is right. We’d better get going.”
“My ass,” Gerard says. “That thing’s an heirloom. My grandfather, on his deathbed—”
“I know. Sold you that watch. Woody Allen.”
“Seriously. He did give it to me. We have to retrace our steps. My mother will kill me.” An idea crosses his face. “I bet I dropped it when you punched me, Chick. In that room with the gurney.” He argues that they can easily swing past the Tuberculosis Pavilion on the way back to the boat. “It’ll only take a few minutes.”
For all the talk of time and setting sun, they walk slowly, wanting to cling to the place, knowing they’ll never have a chance to return.
“Man, I’m glad you brought your camera, Karalee,” says Josh. “Who’s gonna believe we were here otherwise?”
They enter the pavilion through the front door, as they did the first time, but now go straight to the room with the gurney. Sure enough, Gerard’s watch rests on the floor amid dust and debris.
“See?” He stoops and picks it up, wipes it clean on his T-shirt, and clips it to his wrist. “Thanks, guys.”
Chick lights another joint in celebration, forgetting the press of time, marking the third time in her life Karalee smoked, and all in a few hours. In the process, she has lost some of her inhibitions with respect to filth. She looks at the smudges on her shirt and shorts as if they exist in a different country, not here on her person. It’s not the end of the world, being dirty. You can always wash it off later.
When they finish smoking, they decide to take a final twirl through the pavilion, having missed several hallways the first time through. In short order, they come to a laboratory, clothed in dust, windows facing west. Motes float in amber rays of light.
Josh depresses the old-fashioned cylindrical light switch. It clicks but no lights come on. “No electricity.”
“Duhs” are said all around.
“All the more reason to get going,” Josh reminds everyone.
“Chill out, brother,” Chick urges. His eyes are red and swollen.
Estela hooks Josh’s arm with her lame one and rubs it with her good hand to reassure him.
The lab has black stone counters, sinks, and hookups for Bunsen burners. Lining the shelves are empty beakers and pipettes and other glassware, some of it broken, all of it coated in dust.
Karalee plays with a few settings on her camera, hoping to capture the light refracting into colored gems as it passes through ancient glassware.
Gerard opens a cabinet and begins poking about. Finding little of interest, he opens another door. And another. “Hey, look at this.”
He removes a black box, paint worn off at the corners, revealing the tin below. It’s about six inches long in each direction, and there’s an old paper tag on it, but the writing has faded. “Could be an M. You think this is hers?” Without waiting for an answer, he sets down the box on the island counter and lifts the latch. The box squeaks as he raises the hinged lid. There are test tubes inside, old corks stopping cloudy liquid from leaking.
“Are you insane?” Chick says. “Put that down.”
“It is down.”
“Leave it alone, dumb-ass. You don’t know what’s in there.”
Gerard holds up his hands. “Chill out, man. It’s, like, fifty years old.”
“Biological agents can persist for a long time unless something comes along to kill them. If they saved that substance—”
“Okay. You’re right.” He folds his arms and backs away from the box. They all do.
“This is creeping me out.” Josh pushes his glasses back up his nose with a pinky and presses trembling fingertips into his temples. They follow him back through the doorway, Gerard apologizing as the door swings closed behind them, not quite latching. “Can I offer some fine weed to calm the nerves? Medicinal purposes.” He lights up another joint before anyone can answer, tokes twice, passes it around.
They’re working their way out of the building now, but Chick can’t resist poking his head through one more doorway. “There’s a whole other wing this way,” he observes, proceeding straight through to only mild protests.
Everyone is high again—higher than ever. Karalee has begun to see the world through a haze. She wonders whether it’s the poor light or the effects of THC as she follows Chick through the remains of the old cafeteria.
On the back wall are three sets of swinging doors with round windows. One pair of doors is stuck open. They walk through those to the kitchen.
“Look at this,” says Chick. “I really dig checking out the infrastructure that kept this place running, don’t you?”
The kitchen is not nearly so dusty as the other rooms they’ve seen, maybe because the ceiling and walls are in better shape, not decaying so quickly. He lays his hand on things as he walks: the stainless steel worktables, the giant freestanding dough mixers, the butcher block, the enormous gas range. He freezes there. “Hmm. It’s warm.”
“Yeah, stuffy in here,” Estela says.
“No. The range. Feel it.” He moves his hand from one pot support to another and back. “This one.”
Estela uses the backs of her fingers. She frowns, puzzled.
“You feel it?” Chick persists.
“Yeah. I guess so.”
“What do you mean, you guess so?” He redirects his attention. “Karalee? Josh? You feel it?”
Karalee rests a hand on the iron spokes. The warmth, paradoxically, makes her back go clammy. She wonders if the weed is turning them paranoid. “It’s faint but real. How can that be?”
Chick twists one of the stove knobs, sniffs, twists another. Karalee doesn’t smell any gas. Neither do the others.
“It’s impossible,” Karalee says. “Must be some kind of illusion.”
“An illusion of touch?”
“Maybe an inconsistency in the material causing an aberration.”
“I like how you think. Beats my theory.”
“What’s that?”
“Ghosts.”
“Shut up.”
Chick laughs.
Gerard wanders off a few paces. He arrives at a solid door that appears to be in good working order. He pulls the handle and it opens. “Jackpot!”