Fever Read Online Free Page B

catching it from you?”
    “Is that what they said to you?”
    “Said it to all the doctors and nursing staff.”
    “It’s a lie.”
    The nurse tilted her head and looked at Mary’s body from her face down to the lump under the sheet that was her feet, back up to her face.
    “Well, do you want the cloth anyway? And the water? To wash yourself? I gather you’ve had an ordeal.”
    “Yes.” Mary sat up in the cot. “Yes, thank you.”
    The nurses repeated the routine every hour, skipping Mary after that first time. At midmorning, Soper came and perched himself on the arm of a chair that was wedged between Mary’s cot and the wall. He told her it was time for her to cooperate, that they had a great deal of work ahead of them. As he spoke his eyes kept glancing over to the nurses as they moved about the room, lifting sheets, moving knees apart. He jumped up and asked to see Mary in the hall.
    “How long do you mean to keep me here?” Mary asked, refusing to move until he gave her an answer.
    “Come out to the hallway, Miss Mallon,” he said.
    “No,” Mary said, lying back on her pillow and pulling the sheet to her chin.
    “I don’t want to have to ask for this man’s assistance,” he said, gesturing toward one of the guards. “One way or another, I must talk to you about your gallbladder.”
    “One way or another, I must get word to my friends to let them know what’s happened to me.”
    “Later, Miss Mallon. Very soon.”
      •  •  •  
     
    The first time Mary had encountered Dr. Soper was in the Bowens’ kitchen, almost one month earlier. She mistook him for a guest who’d arrived too early. It was a bitter-cold day, and there were fires going in every room except for the servants’ quarters, where the small stove would stay cold until bedtime. The Bowens had the type of home where it was easy to lose oneself: large in some senses, tall and broad, with great rooms—the distant ceilings covered with paintings of different scenes from foreign places—and windows looking out onto Park Avenue. But the natural light disappeared as one retreated farther into the house, and at the rear of the residence the staff had to work by lamplight all the time.
    Mary had looked up from her work—a beautiful pair of ducks whose skin she was pricking with a knife so that the fat would drain out when she roasted them—and saw a tall man clutching his hat to his chest. He had a light step, and she didn’t hear him until he was nearly on top of her. He was handsome in that way some men in New York are handsome—neat as a pin, his clothes pressed, his hair and mustache precise. He was not a man who had ever shoveled coal or hauled ice or butchered an animal. He was not a man who owned a pair of work boots. He seemed older, though she later learned that they were the very same age, their birthdays one week apart.
      •  •  •  
     
    Toward the end of her second day at Willard Parker, she answered a few of his questions and hoped that meant he would release her. But just after breakfast on her third morning he summoned her back to the room with the mahogany table and invited five other doctors to ask her questions as well. She recognized three of them from the day of her arrival. Dr. Baker was not present. Led by Dr. Soper, they kept asking if she was absolutely certain that she’d never had Typhoid Fever, if she could recall for them every person she’d known who’d suffered a fever since her arrival in the United States twenty-four years before. “Every person I’ve known who ever had a fever? Since 1883?” Mary almost laughed. Would they be able to do it, if they were asked the same thing?
    “Or in Ireland,” one of the doctors said. “Any person who had a fever as far back as you can remember.” Their records on her went back to only 1901, and Mary decided they knew enough about her life in those five and a half years. She would not give them more. “I can’t remember,” she said.