Typhoid Mary (13 page)

     By 1915, after five years on the lam, working under the names Brown, Breihof, and others, Mary Mallon was a pretty beaten-down cook. Whatever she might have thought of herself, whoever it was she once thought herself to be, had long since disappeared, supplanted by a string of aliases and a series of bad jobs. The small, clean, well-ordered kitchens she’d once enjoyed, the respect of her coworkers and clients, the love of a man, the food she’d once made, the typhoid she’d been accused of carrying – these had all faded into the grim, day-to-day requirements of slopping out sludge to an ever-changing and faceless horde. There was the job. And nothing else. Save bitterness.

     In March of 1915, there was an outbreak of typhoid fever at the Sloane Hospital for Women, a maternity hospital on Fifty-ninth Street and Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan. Twenty-five people, most of them doctors and nurses, became ill. Two persons were said to have died.

     Exactly what happened next is open to controversy. Here is what Soper would have us believe, his account of how events unfolded:

One day, Dr. Edward B. Cragin, head obstetrician and gynecologist at the Sloane Hospital  . . . telephoned me asking that I come at once to the hospital to see him about a matter of greatest importance. When I arrived there, he said that he had a typhoid epidemic of more than twenty cases on his hands. The other servants had joking nicknamed (a) cook ‘Typhoid Mary’. She was out at the moment, but would I recognize her handwriting if she really was that woman? He handed me a letter, from which I saw at once that the cook was indeed Mary Mallon, and I also identified her from his description. I advised that the Health Department be notified, and it was not long before Mary was again taken and sent to North Brother Island.

     This account, which places Dr. Soper again at the center of things (and expands his ever-growing resume of talents to now include forensic handwriting expert), reeks of methane. Soper’s insistence that he suggested that Dr. Cragin ‘notify the Health Department’ is particularly ludicrous. The concept of typhoid carriers was old news now. The tracking of cases and analysis of samples was routine. Sloane Hospital – Soper seems not to notice – employed more than a few doctors, many of whom were victims of the outbreak. To make Soper’s account even more unlikely, at the very time that the outbreak occurred a rigorous blind testing of typhoid vaccine was being conducted on doctors, nurses, and personnel at Sloane. Stool and urine samples were routinely being collected with an eye for positive results. That Soper would be contacted before the Health Department – or even considered in any official way – is absurd on its face.

     Newspaper accounts of the day do not support Soper’s version. Tests, it is said in the press, were in fact administered by a Dr. Norris L. Ogan of the Health Department. Mary Mallon,
still working
at the hospital after the outbreak was discovered, supplied stool samples, as did every other cook and servant and employee. When the results came back, revealing trace amounts of typhoid in her sample, she was soon no where to be found.

     Dr. Soper was not alone in claiming to have tracked down Mary Mallon, Public Enemy Number One. Dr. Josephine Baker claimed later to have recognized Mary in the hospital kitchen, ‘among the pots and pans’. A
New Yorker
magazine article written years later states that Dr. Baker ‘notified the police and health authorities’ and that ‘that afternoon, when Mary left the hospital, she was followed. She had wrapped up a bowl of gelatin which she had lovingly prepared with her own lethal hands, and was taking it to the home of a friend who lived in Corona.’

     Newspaper accounts, crediting Mary’s discovery to the hospital stool sample, say she was tracked ‘through friends’ after going into hiding at the Corona address – a much more credible scenario. The story of Mary, caught in the act, about to deliver a ‘lethal’ bowl of gelatin to a friend, sounds like someone trying way too hard to build suspense into a rather humdrum account. It is more than likely that Mary’s capture was the result of a friend giving her up. That’s the way most fugitives are caught.

     This didn’t prevent a Sergeant Bevins on the New York Police Department from claiming that he had, in the course of his duties, recognized by ‘her walk’ a veiled Mary Mallon walking into a Corona home, and called in reinforcements.

     However they got there, it came down to this: Sergeant Bevins, his lieutenant, Belton, another police sergeant, named Coneally, and ‘various interested parties,’ including Dr. Westmoreland (no mention of Soper or Baker), surrounded the Corona house. Sergeant Coneally rang the front doorbell. No answer. He rang again. No response. A ladder was found and Sergeant Coneally climbed to a window on the second floor and stuck his head into a dark room. A bulldog barked, provoking a fast retreat. The intrepid cop came down the ladder, found some meat with which to distract the intimidating pooch. Up the ladder again, followed by Bevins and others. They heard the sounds of doors being shut, one after another, and they followed.

     In a bathroom, they found her. Typhoid Mary Mallon, crouching on the tile floor. She didn’t struggle. She gave up without a fight. It was the end of the road.

     She had known it was coming. She had had to know. Working at Sloane, in Manhattan, amongst doctors – some of whom were in the middle of extensive typhoid vaccine trials – was an insane risk, a desperate venture. The other cooks had even teased her, called her ‘Typhoid Mary’ – never dreaming she actually was. It was only a joke, yes, but one would picture an earlier, more energetic Mary Mallon taking that as a cue to leave. When she’d heard – as she must have – that the kitchen staff would be tested, she hadn’t run. She had supplied a sample. Knowing the possible result, she hadn’t bugged out for the sticks, avoided her usual haunts, or called a lawyer. She’d halfheartedly hidden in a bathroom when they came – and when confronted, had given up without a peep.

     She was older now. And broken. Three years of imprisonment, living a convict’s rules: eating when they told her to eat, sleeping when they told her to sleep, followed by five years in the culinary hinterlands, scrounging a living in bottom-rung jobs, one-lung rooming houses, taking orders from God knows what kind of despotic taskmasters. Those private homes where she might briefly have found employ, were most certainly not of the caliber she’d once enjoyed. To cook in the lower rungs of domestic service was not the same. The number of other servants were necessarily fewer. Cooking functions would be combined with the less glamorous tasks of laundry, cleaning, and scullery. The food would not have been as good, the masters less lovely, less generous. Who knows what she must have endured, what boorish and despotic bosses, flaky housemistresses, whining, inept servant girls, speaking to her with rudeness and contempt. She was tired. She was old. And she was guilty.

     It’s a measure of how little she cared about herself or anybody else that she would risk infecting pregnant women and newborn children with typhoid. It was  . . . well  . . . indefensible. Even taking a small chance that she could infect an infant or nursing mother with typhoid was contemptuous and contemptible. That she clearly couldn’t even be bothered to wash her hands carefully after going to the bathroom – an easy measure, the least she could have done even if she was teeming with typhoid – speaks volumes about how far she had fallen and how little she cared.

     Soper, in a smug but relatively sympathetic (for him) examination of subsequent events, says:

Mary was now about 48 years of age and a good deal heavier than she was when she slipped through a kitchen full of servants, jumped a back fence, and put up a fight with strong, young policemen. She was as strong as ever, but had lost something of that remarkable energy and activity which had characterized her young days and urged her forward undaunted. In those eight years since she was first arrested, she had learned what it was to yield to other wills than her own and to know pain. In the last five years, although she had been free, there had been times when she had found it hard to fight her battles unaided.

   
On North Brother Island the City offered her a comfortable place to live – a place where she could cook and sleep and read to her heart’s content. Her old age was provided for. There was a good hospital with doctors nearby. She knew by experience that the people on the island would be kind to her.

     However she might have felt about it, it was back to the island for Mary Mallon.

     It was over. She’d done a terrible thing – and she knew it. No newspapers would be writing friendly pieces about her plight now. The babies and pregnant women she’d risked infecting at Sloane made that unlikely in the extreme. O’Neill was dead – not that he’d ever helped all that much. Breihof was long gone. And there was, maybe, the relief of knowing it was all over. Like the murder suspect who falls asleep in the interrogation room (a famously known indicator of guilt), she went limp, gave in, let all wash over her, turned her fate over to the warders. No more hope – but no more worries. Her life of toil was over. No more scrounging, no more hustling, no more fear. The worst, finally, had happened. She was now, really and truly, away for life.

Chapter Eleven

Life Without

In March 1915, Mary Mallon was returned to North Brother Island. She would live there until she died – twenty-three years later. This time, she didn’t fight it. She returned to her one-room bungalow and watched, begrudgingly but resignedly, as the world passed her by. Until the end, she refused to admit to others that she had in any way caused typhoid. She never discussed it – or allowed it to be discussed in her presence. Even with friends, she was close mouthed to the end – about her past, about her friends, about her personal life. Seemingly resigned to her fate, she kept herself busy sewing, crocheting, and by some accounts, baking cakes which she sold to other women on the island. Presumably, any bacteria she might have spread would be eliminated during the cooking process – but it seems an extraordinary leap of faith on the part of her customers.

     She reacquainted herself with a nurse at Riverside, an Adelaide Offspring, and there were others who were kind to her and with whom she socialized. Offspring, judging from the amount Mary eventually left her in her will, was Mary’s closest friend. They were seen walking and talking together many times – though what they discussed and the nature of their relationship remains unknown. Riverside Hospital, while it may have been remote – and the circumstances of her admission uncongenial – was, by standards of the time, an island of compassion. As a TB facility at a time when little could be done for those suffering from the disease, it employed doctors who were used to offering sympathy and kindness in place of as yet undiscovered medication. Dr. John Cahill, who ran the hospital during this final period of Mary Mallon’s life, was remembered by his son, Dr. Kevin Cahill, as saying, ‘What did you do before there were drugs? Before there were antibiotics?  . . . You learned to sit on the bedside and hold the hand  . . . every once in a while you gave the person a hug.’

     Emma Goldberg Sherman, a bacteriologist, described for the BBC, getting off the boat at Riverside for the first time: ‘This is heaven  . . . it’s delightful  . . . otherworldly  . . . unlike New York City.’ She’d landed a job at another facility, but an anti-Semitic boss put the brakes on her employment there, telling her the position ‘had been filled’. Riverside Hospital, on the other hand, was delighted to have her. Sherman talked for the cameras about what happened when she first came ashore at North Brother Island:

I walked into that building and climbed the stairs, a huge empty room with lots of tables standing around  . . . and a huge woman in there who kind of terrified me with her hair unkempt pulled back in a tight knot and a huge lab coat which enfolded her despite her size at least double to the floor – filthy as hell with all kinds of stuff on it.

   
And they told me this was Mary Mallon.

     Sherman, who worked with her for some time and seems to have been a sympathetic acquaintance – if not a friend –was clearly repulsed by Mallon’s personal hygiene. She is not ambiguous in relating her first impression that Mary was horrifyingly sloppy and unclean. Perhaps Mary’s relative size and rather imposing appearance gave her pause. The small Sherman appears in a rare photograph with Mary, and Mary
,
much older and larger now than in earlier depictions, does tower over the bacteriologist. In the photo Mary’s hair is shown pulled back so tightly it looks like a man’s, her skin wattled under a thick neck, fists balled under the too-long sleeves of a voluminous lab coat. She is squinting through clear glasses, her mouth drooping slightly on one side – either from, as Judith Leavitt postulates, an early minor stroke, or from her bad teeth (which she would not allow hospital dentists to look at). In the picture she appears big, scary, sexless and  . . . proud. Her back is stiff, her arms are at her sides, and while that may not be a real smile on her face, it is not a look of displeasure. Mary is posing for the camera in her work clothes – with her colleague – and she looks glad to be working. Says Sherman uncharitably:

She centrifuged urine  . . . Though what she saw when she looked through the microscope I don’t know  . . . She knew nothing. Absolutely nothing. I think she contaminated everything she touched  . . . When it came to washing the bottles  . . . well  . . . what the hell.