Typhoid Mary (2 page)

     If Mary was part of anything, she was part of a very different movement, one forged in hunger, dislocation and social upheaval, a sea-change which pushed millions of women out of their homeland and away from their traditional roles, across the sea and into the lonely business of domestic servitude.

     I have known, at various low points in my long and checkered career, what it feels like when one’s pride in what one does – one’s love of cooking, one’s faith in one’s ability – begins to fade, and I know the kind of sloppiness that can follow. Fortunately, in my case, those days are long gone. I got a second chance. Mary never did.

     Bouncing from job to job, with lousy pay, no health insurance, no sick days, no vacation, miss one day at work and it’s back on the treadmill  . . . find another dirty, badly equipped kitchen  . . . and no hope in the world. You endure simply so that you can afford to go on enduring. The small, simple joys of a perfectly made bowl of soup, a rustic stew, a lovely piece of fish cooked just right, disappear, replaced over time by a simmering forced-down resentment, bubbling up and choked down again and again like burning reflux. The small annoyances grow large: the way the boss smacks his wet lips when he tastes the soup, the acrid cloud from the steam table, the smell of old grease, the lingering odor of lamb fat – these become the nexus of all the evils and injustices of the world.

     That you may have cooked good food in the past, worked in the homes of the rich, in great houses or great kitchens, seen the pyramids or danced naked on the moon, matters not at all. Nobody cares.

     Where once you would have turned your head to cough, you turn no longer. Wash your hands after going to the bathroom? Maybe. If you have time, you’re beyond caring. The people eating your food are abstractions now. Cough or no cough, you know they’ll be back tomorrow, maybe for the Early Bird, the All-You-Can-Eat special. Unwashed hands, an errant cigarette ash, a roasted chicken dropped on a dirty kitchen floor and retrieved on the bounce  . . . we’ve been there, you and me and Mary.

     The central question when examining the career of Mary Mallon, cook, is always, ‘Why did she go on cooking when she had every reason to believe she was spreading a possibly fatal disease?’ Many of you who’ve worked in greasy spoons, coffee shops, cafeterias, failing, not-very-good restaurants, institutional food services, know the answer already. I won’t blame you if you don’t care to admit it. But you know what the ‘three-second rule’ is. Don’t you?

     Cooks work sick. They always have. Most jobs, you don’t work, you don’t get paid. You wake up with a sniffle and a runny nose, a sore throat? You soldier on. You put in your hours. You wrap a towel around your neck and you do your best to get through. It’s a point of pride, working through pain and illness. And in the paranoid realpolitik world of the kitchen it makes a great deal of sense. If you don’t show up to work, someone else fills in for you – either an already overburdened fellow cook, who takes on additional tasks – or worse, an outsider, an interloper, a stranger who might well be considered to do a better job than you – or be less likely to call in sick in the future. When you are working in a kitchen that serves something less than haute cuisine, the likelihood increases that a strong back and the ability to endure are of the utmost importance, a chef or owner frequently passing over the superior technician for the more reliable one.

     Mary, it should be pointed out, felt fine. She was strong. She was tough. She could take it – and she was proud of her endurance. She worked, and she went on – and when after a time they told her to stop, she ignored them and went on working. One finds oneself being defined by one’s job. The job expiates us from sin; it excuses us our excesses and our lapses. That we are tired, or ill, or in extremis and yet persevere is all we have, sometimes, to sustain our image of ourselves.

     Like Mary, I’ve worked for private clients. Briefly. Had I stayed on, had my boss asked me one more time for ‘an egg-white omelette – and no butter or oil in the pan,’ I would surely have grabbed hold of his skull, squeezed until his eyeballs popped out of his head like pachinko balls. Had I worked in the homes of the rich and silly circa 1906? I would have murdered them in their beds with the nearest available blunt object. I was never tough enough to put up with what Mary put up with. I’m ‘too emotional’; I couldn’t have ‘taken the pressure’; I doubt very much I could have picked up heavy stockpots alone.

     Mary learned her trade over time, the same way most of us learn. By watching, waiting, working our way slowly up from the bottom. By repeating the same tasks over and over again. It’s a terrible thing – the worst thing, when a good cook, a proud cook goes bad. When pride and proficiency turn to bitterness and sloth. When outside forces corrupt the desire to do a job well and take pleasure in the doing. It’s an awful thing to watch. It’s awful when it happens to you.

     It’s what happened to the cook, Mary Mallon.

     Try not to hold it against her.

Chapter One

There’s Something About Mary

It was August 27, 1906, when at the rented summer home of Charles Henry Warren and family in Oyster Bay, Long Island, the Warrens’ young daughter became ill with what was diagnosed as typhoid fever. The same week, five more persons began showing symptoms: Mrs. Warren, a second daughter, two maids, and the gardener. The relatively affluent town of Oyster Bay had never had an outbreak of typhoid before. A popular vacation spot for wealthy urban New Yorkers, it was best known for hosting President Theodore Roosevelt during the summer. The house the Warrens had taken for the season stood on high ground, overlooking the bay, and the circumstances of its occupants were impeccable – a wealthy banker, his family and their servants, living in fairly luxurious style.

     The Warren family were not the type of people thought likely to contract typhoid – an illness widely associated with poverty and filth. Charles Warren was the president of the Lincoln Bank. They were the sort of folks who could afford to rent a nice big summer home on affluent Long Island (as well as hire a cook, servants, and gardener to keep things tidy). Rich people just didn’t get typhoid – especially in Oyster Bay – and predictably, there was concern in the area that the town would become a less desirable resort should it be seen as teeming with the disease.

     George Thompson, the owner of the house, was particularly worried, concerned that no well-to-do New Yorkers would be of a mind to rent his home the following season if it was associated with disease. The house was very large, and expensive to run. Thompson himself, though the owner of four other homes, could not afford to live there. If the house lay vacant, it would mean disaster. Desperate, he called in experts to track down the source of the contagion, hoping it came from outside the property and eager for someone to prove it.

     Drinking water was analyzed. The single indoor toilet, the cesspool, manure pit, and outhouse were all examined and ultimately rejected as the possible source of infection.

     Dairy products were inspected.

     An old woman who lived on the beach was considered a likely suspect. She had offered the family clams for sale, and these were scrutinized minutely, but no one else in the town who had eaten shellfish from the same source had fallen ill.

     Thompson, unsatisfied with the inconclusive results from local health authorities on the scene and from his hired experts, reached out to friends in New York City, looking for someone, anyone, to help him with his embarrassing problem.

     Salvation didn’t exactly ride in on a white horse. Nor was Dr. George Soper hero material exactly. Dr. Soper was not even in fact a medical doctor. He was a sanitary engineer – as one newspaper described him: ‘a doctor to sick cities.’

     Called into the fray, he took the train out to Oyster Bay from the city and set immediately to work. After reviewing the findings of the first medical men on the scene, as well as those of earlier experts who had scrutinized the drinking water, trash and sewage, he began questioning members of the household, inquiring about visitors, ultimately receiving a comprehensive list going back an impressive ten years. To the best of his ability, Soper examined the medical histories of each of these individuals, eventually ruling all of them out as possible sources.

     This was frustrating. Things usually went pretty quickly in cases like this. Feces in the water supply, contaminated milk, a sickly visitor, and case closed. Not so at the Thompson house. Soper began to ‘walk the cat backward’ in search of an answer.

     Typhoid’s incubation period was known to be ten to fourteen days long, so he focused on a time on or before August 20. Soper was intrigued by the news that on the fourth of the month, the Warrens had seen fit to change cooks. More significantly, the new cook, a Mary Mallon, was now missing, having left without notice or explanation some three weeks after the sickness began.

     A missing cook! It was the kind of lead that criminal investigators find almost
too
easy,
too
good to be true; evidence of a kind that prosecutors like to present to jurors as indicating ‘guilty knowledge’, the kind of red flag that Miss Marple or Hercule Poirot would disregard automatically as being just too obvious. Look at it: A murder or some other felony is committed in a household or place of business, and someone who
used to be
there is suddenly
no longer
there. It doesn’t take an investigative mastermind to deduce who to go looking for first. It was circumstantial evidence of the most provocative kind, and Soper was well acquainted with the old saw about circumstantial evidence: ‘It’s like finding a goldfish in your milk. It doesn’t prove anything – but it’s mighty suspicious’.

     He went over the facts of the case as they had presented themselves to him. Here he had an unexplained outbreak of typhoid in an area where no typhoid of any kind had been previously. The home was immaculate, clean from top to bottom. All other possible sources of infection had been examined and ruled out. The only new element introduced into the household had been a cook. The cook handled food, which all the afflicted members of the household had eaten. The disease broke out, and the cook was now gone. Had she left under different circumstances, say, the disappearance of a diamond necklace, the cops – or any investigator – would have been looking very hard in her direction.

     Soper got a description of the suspect: a woman of about forty, tall, with a buxom build, blond hair, blue eyes, and a firm mouth and jaw. It was remarked that she was ‘a pretty good cook’, though she was observed by some interviewees in retrospect as being ‘not particularly clean’ in her work habits and ‘difficult to talk to’.

     Writing later, Soper describes what he did next:

First, I went to the employment agency where I was given the missing cook’s former places of employment and the different people who had furnished her with references. Working from agency to agency I came in possession of little fragments of her history for ten years. What do you suppose I found out? That in every household in which she had worked in the last ten years there had been an outbreak of typhoid fever. Mind you, there wasn’t a single exception.

   
The question that confronted me now was: Where is she?

   
Following her trail backward to cases in 1904, I found she had worked at the home of Henry Gilsey at Sands Point, Long Island, where four of seven servants suddenly got the disease. Going back still further, I found that five weeks after Mary had gone to cook at the summer home of J. Coleman Drayton at Dark Harbor, Maine, in 1902, seven out of nine persons in the house contracted typhoid, and so did a trained nurse and a woman who came to the house to work by the day. There had been an outbreak of the disease in New York in 1901, and I had reason to believe that Mary was behind this. In 1904, Tuxedo Park, the fashionable summer resort, was stricken  . . . and (I) discovered she had cooked there in that time.

     Soper now uncovered ‘other episodes’, as he called them. Provocatively, there was a two-year period for which there were no records available at all for Ms. Mallon’s employment – the period between the Gilsey family incident and Mary’s arrival in Oyster Bay.

     The two-year blank was tantalizing to Soper. Where had Mary been? Who had she been cooking for? She must have been cooking somewhere  . . . The sanitary engineer’s mind teemed with disturbing images. He no doubt pictured the cook stirring soup in some unknown and very busy cellar kitchen, barehanded, unknowing, infecting untold multitudes of solid citizens with potentially deadly bacilli.

     Dr. Soper’s breathless, self-serving, yet ultimately unreliable accounts to newspapers give a sense of how excited he was, how exhilarated by the thrill of the chase and the tantalizing prospect of being onto something really important. At first he had anticipated a case that might last only a few weeks – a little sea air, a few bowls of steamers, some resolution, and back to the city – but now he found himself further drawn into a quest which had already occupied him for a full four months. The Warrens were long gone – back home with the other summer renters. The weather had turned colder, the house now stood empty.

     But George Soper was still on the case, sensing that with Mary Mallon’s help, he was about to make medical history.

     First of all, he realized the typhoid outbreaks associated with Mary Mallon were unusual in that they seemed to afflict the clean, well-kept houses of the affluent. While the ‘filth theory’ of contagion – which stated that filth, in and of itself, was the cause of disease – had been recently supplanted by the specific identification of disease-causing microbes, there was still a general sense that epidemics were closely associated with dirty living conditions and with marginal, impoverished people who lived in close, unsanitary circumstances. Many
still
held this notion, including some in the scientific community, where papers continued to be published in 1906 stating that typhoid rose up out of ‘sewer gasses: and the ‘miasma’. Society, for good reason, had been congratulating itself on such sensible collective widespread improvements as clean, feces-free drinking water, carefully monitored dairy products, more effective waste disposal, and new kitchen design and equipment which allowed more sanitary food handling. Congress had passed, in 1906, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and major food processors like Heinz and Kellogg’s made ‘purity’ of food products a selling point. Sick people and people who were thought likely to be infected – such as immigrants – were routinely detained and quarantined to avoid the possible spread of contagion. This particular situation, the situation of Mary Mallon, however, indicated something new and different. No one in the Warren household had been sick with typhoid prior to the outbreak – nor had anyone, from what Soper could discern, been in contact with anyone actively ill with the disease. To Soper’s excitement, he now found himself confronted by what looked to be a ‘carrier’, a seemingly healthy individual who caused others to become ill.