Typhoid Mary (12 page)

     ‘She became’, in the words of Dr. John Marr of the New York State Health Department, looking back at the case decades later, ‘a cause célèbre. She sold papers. She was a
character.
’

     While the newspaper coverage of the Mallon hearing was sympathetic – and even a little intimidating to the Health Department posse – and raised issues troubling to the judge, it did not affect the result. Someone, however, seems to have been moved by newspaper accounts: In 1910 the new health commissioner, Lederle, under pressure and clearly exasperated by the whole predicament of Mary Mallon, referring to her as ‘that unfortunate woman’, suddenly ordered her release.

     He tried to explain his unexpected action to a skeptical press:

She has been released because she has been shut up long enough to learn the precautions that she ought to take. As long as she observes them I have little fear that she will be a danger to her neighbors. The chief points that she must observe are personal cleanliness and the keeping away from the preparation of other person’s [
sic
] food
.

   
I have taken a personal interest in her case and am doing what I can for her. It seems to me that the people of this city ought to do something for her. She is a good cook and until her detention had always made a comfortable living. Now she is debarred from it, and I really do not know what she can do. I do know where she is but must decline to give any information on this point. She has promised to report to me regularly and not to take another position as a cook. I am going to do all I can to help her.

     Lederle, aware that at least fifty other carriers had been identified statewide (with none of
them
similarly incarcerated) went on to state that others were similarly infected and suggested that growing awareness of this fact had been a factor in his decision. She had not, he admitted frankly, ‘been cured’.

But she has been taught how to take care of herself. Her danger to the public was due entirely to the fact that she was a cook. She will change her vocation and will at stated intervals report to the Commissioner of Health for examination. He will at all times be appraised of her address.

     A reporter inquired as to what Mary Mallon would do now.

I do not know  . . . but I am trying to find some position for her. She ought to have a chance. She has in my opinion been hounded long enough for something that was no fault of her own. She was incarcerated for the public good and now it is up to the public to take care of her. There should surely be some reciprocity in this case.

     When reporters pressed him further, wanting to know if
any
of the treatments tried at Riverside had even decreased the generation of typhoid bacteria in Mary’s system, Lederle barked,

I can’t say that. Her safety to the public does not lie in that. It lies in the fact that she now knows how to prevent their spread and that she will change her employment. For Heaven’s sake, can’t the poor creature be given a chance in life?! An opportunity to make her living and have her past forgotten? She is to blame for nothing – and look at the life she has led!

     Mary Mallon had clearly either talked at length with Lederle, or he’d followed her case closely and read her interview with the
World
; his statement is filled with images which can only have come from her tale of mistreatment and woe. The experts had not, it appears, offered a more palatable solution to the dilemma. Mary’s bacteriological count had not responded to treatment. With O’Neill playing hardball on one side, and Mary playing a more compliant game on the other – at the very least nodding approval to the suggestions of careful hand-cleaning and an end to cooking as a career, Lederle had an out. He let her go, throwing her on the mercy of the public.

     Now, let’s be real. Nobody was going to step forward and offer Typhoid Mary a job in their hardware store or notions shop. Jobs for women, at best, were extremely limited. What, exactly, Lederle had in mind when he asked for ‘reciprocity’ and for the public to ‘take care of her’ is unknown. It is known that someone, probably the Health Department, hooked her up with a laundress job, but she thought the job beneath her.

     A few months after her release it became obvious that Mary Mallon was
still
very much upset with the people she saw as having ruined her life, and that she was unimpressed by the sympathetic Lederle’s efforts and statements on her behalf.

     In December of 1911, she announced through her attorney that she was suing the City and Doctors Park, Westmoreland, Darlington, Soper, and
Lederle
for $50,000 in damages, claiming that because of their actions she was ‘unable to follow her trade of cooking’ and that her ‘chances of making a living have been greatly reduced.’

     O’Neill made a halfhearted pass at the court of public opinion, stating, ‘If the Board of Health is going to send every cook to jail who happens to come under their designation as “germ carrier” it won’t be long before we have no cooks left and the domestic problem will be further complicated. What would the poor jokesmith do then for his stories about the cook who rules the house?’

     Mary had no chance, and her attorney knew it.

     Spite ruled.
How
aware was Mary of the reality of her condition at this point? To what degree did she believe or suspect that the doctors and the Health Department might have been right? It didn’t matter any more.

Chapter Ten

On the Lam

Mary’s lawsuit against her tormentors never came to trial. It is likely that her attorney, O’Neill, prevailed on her to drop it. The courts had found no difficulty depriving her of her freedom, and it was unlikely in the extreme that they would award her a quick fifty thousand for her pain and suffering.

     It’s not too hard to imagine how unhappy she was. After working her way up to cook, to find herself laboring as a lowly laundress must have been embittering. She had been the boss, in charge of kitchens in fine homes. Now she was just another anonymous drone, doing unskilled labor with unskilled laborers and for half the money. She’d been publicly reviled, nicknamed with an unforgettable moniker, locked up, poked, prodded, examined, interviewed, depicted in photos and illustrations, gossiped about, teased – and now was back at the bottom. Forty-one years old and a laundress in an outer borough, indistinguishable from younger, stupider, less experienced girls who might well have been just off the boat. What gets you through a soul-destroying workday in a job like that – and in such humbling, even humiliating, circumstances? Hate. Desperation. Spite. Fear. Anger. None of those are good things in a person with a potentially dangerous and infectious disease.

     To make matters worse, her boyfriend, Breihof, became gravely ill. A heart problem became so bad that Mary arranged for him to be admitted to hospital. And once again, the medical profession gave Mary no reason to love it. They couldn’t help her man. Breihof died in the hospital. The know-it-all doctors, the same kind who’d been so sure about Mary’s condition, couldn’t save her poor man. She’d stuck with him – as he’d stuck with her. She’d forgiven him his treachery with Soper. She’d overlooked his drinking and his uselessness. She’d lived in sin with him, going outside the church, setting herself apart from others and perhaps, in her mind, from God. Now he was dead. And she was alone.

     What mattered now?

     She was worn down. And she had nothing to lose. She stopped checking in with the Health Department, and she disappeared. She began, once more, to do the one thing she knew she was good at, the one thing she could feel a measure of pride in, the thing that brought her money and a measure of respect: She cooked.

     It had to be tough. Almost all the good families in the New York area got their cooks from either of two employment agencies, Mrs. Stricker’s or Mrs. Seeley’s. Mary’s face was, by now, thanks to Soper, well known at both. The name Mallon was certainly not a selling point. Under aliases, Mary began working again – not in the fine homes of the rich, but anywhere she could.

     She drifted from job to job. Tried briefly to operate a rooming house. That didn’t work out. She worked in a restaurant, Healey’s on upper Broadway, in a sanitarium, an inn in Huntington, a big hotel in New Jersey. Anywhere they were willing to pay her to cook and weren’t too scrupulous about her part or her name. That’s one of the advantages of cooking for a living – then and now: Nobody cares where you came from.

     From being the boss of the kitchen, Mary now toiled alongside other refugees and desperadoes in the hot, cavernous kitchens of hotels, restaurants, and institutions.

     Soper claimed later that there were cases of typhoid reported at some of these jobs, though there was, he said, ‘No record of them’. He claimed that the list of afflicted included two children – and that a man for whom Mary mixed a home remedy for indigestion was later hospitalized with typhoid. ‘For five years Mary traveled about New York and its vicinity without restraint and without her identity being discovered by the authorities’, Soper wrote. ‘I was not asked to find her again, but I think I could have done so.’

     For five years Mary bounced around, the world growing up around her. While her countrymen rose up in society, grabbing their piece of the pie, assimilated into the middle class, graduated into the power structure, Mary sank unnoticed to the bottom.

     Did she know? Did she know she was spreading typhoid?

     Yes, of course, she knew. Maybe she couldn’t look at it. Or wouldn’t look at it. But she knew. She’d thought enough of the methodology of the Health Department to engage her own laboratory. She’d provided stool samples willingly enough to
them
– regardless of the negative results. There had been the implied threat of the lawsuit. And she
had
to take note by now how people seemed to get typhoid a lot when she was around. The woman
knew
. She just didn’t care. They’d taken everything from her. She had no reason to love anyone, not the doctors, not the public, not her employers, not the people for whom she now cooked.

     If you think this is an unusual attitude for a cook, you’ve never worked a busy short-order kitchen. You’ve never been in the restaurant workers’ union. Where cooks are anonymous, plenty gets lost in the sauce.

     Hostility to the customer, towards the whole world outside the kitchen doors is not unusual. It’s a tradition. There’s us and those like us – no sympathy for anyone else. This is not to say that cooks in good restaurants hate their customers and are busily hocking and spitting and folding their effluent into their food. No, no, no  . . . it’s just that cooks, who work in isolated, hot, airless spaces, under tremendous pressure, lose perspective, they lose sight of
who
they’re actually cooking for. All those bodies out there in the dining room, clamoring for food, always wanting more, more, more – the tables turning, more customers taking their places, the bottomless, gaping maw of the hungry public becomes, at times, monolithic, an abstraction. A sous-chef in a fine restaurant will spend hours preparing for service, setting up mise-en-place, conscientiously tournéeing perfectly shaped little vegetables, staggeringly beautiful garnishes, lovingly reduced sauces – finally their station is ready  . . . all crocks and bins and containers are full, sauces topped off, meat portioned and positioned for easy access. Everything is perfect. Everything is in its place. The universe – as cooks know it – is in perfect order.

     Then the customers come and ruin it.

     The attitude in less proud and conscientious kitchens is even more adversarial. One is not likely to hear a cook say, ‘Pick up that refired venison for the fine folks on table seven.’ They’re going to say, ‘Here’s the blankety-blank venison for those blankety-blanks on seven!’ The party of ten in the dining room whose order is causing the whole hot-line to shut down while the cooks struggle to arrange and garnish their plates at the same time are not individuals – they’re an immediate problem to be solved with cold-blooded and disembodied efficiency. When you’re working in a nursing home, or a sanitarium, or institution where ‘cooking’ often means dumping vast buckets of gruel into steam tables, then refilling them as they run low, the relationship between the cook – all the way down in a subcellar prep kitchen – and customer becomes even more theoretical. It only gets worse if cook and customer come face to face in such circumstances. Day after day of actually
watching
people loading their trays with food you know is barely qualified to be called slop, piling on more than any will ever eat, chawing their chow with their mouths open, looking through the hapless worker, behind the counter as if they didn’t exist, lining up and sliding their trays and loading their plates compliantly, like a herd of cud-chewing steer is, to know real hate, however unspecific and unfocused. When you’re preparing, say, Welsh rarebit for six hundred people every day, what’s a single lost Band-Aid? Who’s to know – or even care – if you accidentally sneezed in the food, forgot to wash your hands, mixed the moldy cheese and the swill milk with your bare arm up to the elbow fresh from emptying your oil pan, or unclogging the grease trap?