Typhoid Mary (5 page)

     For his part, Soper had, once again, proven his ineptness. What Dr. Hoobler could have been expected to add to the situation is dubious. Did Soper actually expect his doctor friend to be able to take samples from Mary right then and there? Perhaps. More likely, he brought Hoobler along for reasons of personal security. Safety in numbers. He was scared, and the thought of confronting the fearsome Mary on the landing of the cheap rooming house all by himself filled him with dread.

     Notice too that Soper says he memorized his lines in preparation for the encounter, before lying in wait for her. Picture him: lying awake at night, running through the possible outcomes in his head, over and over, his palms sweating at the thought of a pissed-off two-hundred-pound Mary Mallon disemboweling him with a meat fork, that horrible dog from the apartment tearing at his groin with its hungry maw.

     When Soper described Mary later as ‘athletic’ with ‘a good figure  . . . at the height of her physical and mental faculties  . . . [a woman who] prided herself on her strength and endurance and at that time, and for many years after, never spared herself the exercise of it’, he sounds like a frightened man, a man making excuses for being physically intimidated by a woman, a man who smells the punk inside himself. Soper comforted himself with later intimations that Mary wasn’t
really
a woman anyway – certainly not a proper one:

Nothing was so distinctive about Mary as her walk, unless it was her mind. The two, her walk and mind, shared a peculiar communion. Those who knew her best said Mary not only walked more like a man than a woman, but also that her mind had a distinctly masculine character.

     It was after this incident at Breihof and Mary’s apartment that Soper finally realized his shortcomings as detective and spymaster. Frightened, frustrated, and well aware by now that he was unsuited to a late career change to professional wrestling or saloon bouncing, he did what any self-respecting bureaucrat would – particularly one with no powers of arrest and no jurisdiction in the case. He passed the buck, kicked the problem over to city officials. He raised the alarm, went straight to the commissioner of the New York City Health Department, and recommended that Mary Mallon immediately be taken into custody.

I called Mary a living human culture tube and chronic typhoid germ producer. I said she was a proved menace to the community. It was impossible to deal with her in a reasonable and peaceful way, and if the Department meant to examine her, it must be prepared to use force and plenty of it.

     Soper was pleased with himself. There is an undercurrent of almost hysterical glee in his descriptions of Mary as a menacing and infectious brute – as if by calling her dangerous and unstable he was mitigating his own failure and fears.

The Department acted favorably on my recommendation. It would get the specimens peacefully, if possible, but if this was not possible, it would get them anyway.

     But Soper was in fact disappointed with the initial, measured, official reaction. Rather than call out the National Guard and bludgeon Mary into submission as he might well have liked, the Health Department reacted at this point with remarkable restraint and sensitivity. They sent a woman doctor (still a fairly rare commodity in those days), the soon-to-be esteemed Dr. Josephine Baker, to see Mary at her place of work. They can be forgiven for not taking Soper’s warnings as seriously as he might have liked. Perhaps they recognized his unreliability on matters unconcerned with straight epidemiology, waterborne human waste, and street cleaning. They were neither impressed with Soper’s newfound identity as sleuth, nor with his unofficial standing, nor with his apparent inability to get a few samples off this Mallon person. They sent a lone woman – a qualified doctor – to the Park Avenue home where Mary was
still
, incredibly, performing her daily routines.

     Soper recounts Dr. Baker’s first encounter with the elusive cook, his tale permeated with a strong whiff of I-told-you-so:

The success of this gentle yet redoubtable warrior (Baker) was at first no greater than mine had been. Mary slammed the door in her face.

     But the next day, to his great satisfaction, Mary was finally brought down. A horse-drawn Department of Health ambulance was sent to the Park Avenue residence where Mary worked, and parked on the street directly outside. Three policemen surrounded the house, choking off possible escape routes, while Doctor Baker, accompanied by a fourth officer, rang the basement door. Mary opened it, saw who was there, and attempted to close it again, but the cop jammed a foot inside.

     The chase was on.

     Mary bolted for her kitchen and disappeared. Dr. Baker and the policeman followed in hot pursuit, but couldn’t find her. She was gone. The other servants clammed up, suddenly gone deaf and dumb. Baker and the police searched the basement, the closets, the coal bins, and the living quarters and came up with nothing.

     Gazing out the kitchen window, Dr. Baker noticed a chair leaning against a high fence separating the house from the property next door. There was snow on the ground, and hurried-looking footprints led from the house directly to the chair and disappeared at the fence. Dr. Baker and her police escort went to the next house over, on the other side of the fence, and made a thorough search inside and out. Still nothing. They continued searching for three hours, calling in yet another cop from the neighborhood for reinforcement. Again, to no avail.

     Eventually, the search party became frustrated and was about to call it a day when one of them noticed a small bit of gingham caught in the door frame of an outside water closet in the backyard of a neighboring house. Ashcans were piled against the door from the outside (suggesting the involvement of a third party). They pried open the door and found Mary Mallon inside, finally cornered.

     But Mary was not done. She would not go quietly.

     In Dr. Baker’s words:

She fought and struggled and cursed. I tried to explain to her that I only wanted the specimens and that then she could go back home. She again refused and I told the policemen to pick her up and put her in the ambulance. This we did, and the ride down to the hospital was quite a wild one.

     Baker describes Mary:

. . .  springing from her lair – fighting and cursing, both of which she could do with appalling efficiency and vigor.

     It took, in the end, five strong New York City policeman – and Dr. Baker – to subdue her.

     ‘I sat on her all the way to the hospital,’ said Dr. Baker.

     This episode is rife with delightful images: Fortyish Mary Mallon, leaping out a window, scaling a high fence, and concealing herself in a snow-covered privy for over three hours in the middle of a police manhunt, an unidentified accomplice helping to conceal her by stacking the trashcans against the door. Mary, in high-necked uniform, apron and skirts, duking it out with five tough, red-faced coppers – and making a damn good show of it – all the while spouting an impressive barrage of very unladylike obscenities. Mary, struggling and flopping like a decked swordfish in the back of the horse-drawn ambulance, the relatively petite Dr. Josephine Baker sitting on top of her, as it careened down the streets and around corners on the way to the hospital.

     And it’s hard to decide who to like
more
: The fearsome, determined and defiant Mary Mallon, or the feisty and unintimidated Dr. Josephine Baker.

     Dr. Baker would go on to become an important figure in New York State’s health services, specializing in the living conditions and care of children and pregnant women. Mary’s fate was decidedly less glamorous. But for a few brief moments, in the back of that ambulance, two truly remarkable women were locked in physical conflict, the pioneering woman doctor grimly following her instructions – doing a job her male counterpart had been unable to do – and an Irish immigrant woman, fighting for her life.

     Mary Mallon soon found herself a prisoner, locked away in a stark white room at the Willard Parker Hospital, regarded by Soper and others as a ‘dangerous and unreliable’ person, who ‘might try and escape if given the chance.’

     So Soper states:

The room in which she found herself was in no way an attractive or particularly comfortable one, and there was no reason why a strong, active woman of forty, feeling herself to be in perfect health, should be contented with it.

     And Mary was not.

     Her minders were Dr. Robert Wilson and Dr. William Park, the chiefs of bacteriological labs for the New York City Health Department, and they finally, after some waiting, got what they wanted in what must have been yet another humiliating moment for Mary.

     The first analyses of Mary’s stool samples revealed a ‘pure culture of typhoid’.

     She was now thoroughly and profoundly screwed.

Chapter Four

The New Woman

It sat there, it walked and talked and ate and drank, and listened and danced to music, and otherwise reveled and roamed, and bought and sold, and came and went there, all on its own splendid terms and with an encompassing material splendor, a wealth and variety of constituted picture and background, that might well feed it with the finest illusions about itself. It paraded through the halls and saloons in which art and history, in masquerading dress, muffled almost to suffocation as in the gold brocade of their pretended majesties and their conciliatory graces, stood smirking on its passage with the last cynicism of hypocrisy.

     It was the end of 1904, the beginning of 1905, and sixty-one-year-old author Henry James, touring the gold-brocaded sitting rooms and lobbies of the Waldorf Astoria, didn’t much like what he was seeing. The world was changing – most noticeably in New York – and James watched in horror as the new middle class preened and played, and went about its pleasures. James’s sensibilities, influenced by the more clearly delineated class boundaries of rural England, were offended, it seems, at being unable to distinguish wealthy professional from roù aristocrat, cash-flushed tradesman from blue-blooded remittance man, rich banker from rich wanker. He sounds even more bitter about the women he observed:

I  . . . should not have known, at the given turn, whether I was engulfed, for instance, in
the
vente de charite
of the theatrical profession, and the onset of persuasive peddling actresses, or in the annual tea party of German lady-patronesses (of I know not what)  . . .

     No surprise that Henry James would find all these working-class yobs with money offensive. He’d been having a bad time of it in general since arriving in New York. The subway had just been completed. Electric streetcars and elevated trains clogged the avenues. Horses, though still around, were on their way out and the newly mass-produced motorcar was on the way in. Buildings were going up everywhere, too big and too tall for Mr. James’s tastes. Everyone everywhere seemed to be having way too good a time and spending too much money. This was okay in upper-class circles in England – when it was just a bunch of inbred, jug-eared, chinless aristos having their bottoms whacked and running around in top hats. But in America, everyone seemed to be getting in on the act. James didn’t like it.

     American observers too, particularly male ones, were unsettled by the rapid social changes going on around them. Newspaper stories of the time took delight in the cries of moral outrage issuing from the pulpit and from social commentators, and on no subject were the shrieks of discomfort and outrage more strident than when decrying the emergence of a phenomenon referred to as the ‘new woman’.

New Woman an Abomination – She Destroys the Possibility of Being a Lover, says the Reverend W. Bruner!

     The dyspeptic reverend goes on in the text below to break down the ‘problem’ into three subgroups:

The first is the woman with children, a husband and a home, who neglects all three of them for the sake of the club, the drawing-room and the ‘Temples of Pleasure.’ The second class is that of women, single or married, who neglects her home duties to emphasize to the world ‘women’s rights’. This type is a distinct menace to society  . . . The third type is the abomination of the ‘childless wife’. She is too often seen in the well-fed, tastefully gowned and handsomely brought up dame who cannot bear the burden of looking after children, as such an occupation would interfere with her ‘own privileges’.

     Middle-class women, like everybody else, were redefining their roles in society, redefining themselves – and having too good a time doing it for the reverend’s taste. Quiet, demure, compliant women – whose sole purpose in life had previously been to get married and raise kids and run a household for their husbands, however brutish those husbands might have been, were being replaced by brainy, assertive, cigarette-smoking, self-indulgent ‘new women’, for whom the twentieth century promised new pleasures and real choices.

     Another newspaper article of the day tried to make sense of this strange and terrible trend with the help of the Hungarian historian Emil Reich, who sorted things out for his readers thusly: