Fever (20 page)

“Can I bring you something? Have you eaten?”

But Driscoll only moved closer to the wall.

“I’ll check on you tomorrow,” he said, and when Driscoll didn’t respond, Alfred left. He stood at the bottom of the stairwell for a minute, tempted to go up to see Mary, but he’d be back the next day and between now and then maybe he’d think of the perfect thing to say.

Alfred arrived home in time for a nearly silent supper with Liza and Samuel. In the morning, he decided he couldn’t go another day without seeing Mary, and once he’d decided, he had no patience for being at the stable, alone with the horses. Now that the weather was cold, the demand for ice was way down, as was the supply until the winter harvest. The trucks went out every day, but mostly to businesses, a few blocks here and there to the rich houses that didn’t care to keep their milk or butter on the window ledge like Mary had always done, and Liza did now, but preferred to serve ice in glasses to their guests, even in the winter months. Lately Alfred had felt that pinch that told him he would not last there for much longer. He would have to find something else. Ten blocks north was a stable the ice company rented to the Department of Health, and that was more interesting. On quiet afternoons Alfred walked up there with the ready excuse that he was still concerning himself with company property. When he first started at the stable he didn’t understand why the Department of Health needed so many horses. Whenever a horse got too old to haul an ice truck, or was too difficult to drive through the city, the men at his stable always said that the Department of Health would take it, and now Alfred said it too, but he didn’t know why until one day, a bright autumn afternoon, he walked the ten blocks to distract himself and when he got to the stable he saw that the large side room that used to be a dairy, back when the city had cows, had been turned into a slaughterhouse for horses. There were two horses up on slings with gashes in their necks and a glass instrument stuck in each bloody wound. Below the horses’ mighty bellies were lined up rows and rows of buckets where blood had been collected, and all around were men in white lab coats.

“Out!” one yelled when he saw Alfred. The man was crouching beside the larger of the two horses, checking the glass tube, and when he scrambled up to shoo away Alfred he slipped on a small spot of blood on the floor, knocking over a full bucket as he tried to right himself. The other men cursed and glared at Alfred. The horses, who were still alive, each turned a wild, terrified eye to Alfred, and seemed to understand that he was the only one in the room who might help them.

“Jesus Christ,” Alfred said when he got back out to the glare of the street, the flies in front of the stable door frantic with the smell of blood. He passed through the other door to the stable proper, where there were a dozen horses munching on hay as if they were out at pasture. “What are they doing?” Alfred asked the boy who was sitting on an upturned bucket in the corner, reading an old newspaper.

“Bleeding,” the boy said, and simply turned the page.

Later, when he and Samuel were elbow to elbow at the table waiting for Liza to spoon out their supper, it was Samuel who told him what he’d probably seen, that the horses were being bled for their serum, which would be used to make inoculations against disease. “Diphtheria, probably,” the boy said. “I read about that. Or Typhoid, maybe. They’re working on something.”

“Come on. Horse blood?”

“Horse serum. They inject the horse with the disease and wait for the horse to develop the means to fight it and then they take out the blood and whittle it down to the fighting parts and then they put that in an injection and give it to people. Didn’t you ever wonder what’s in the shots people get?” The boy leaned back in his chair and regarded Alfred.

Alfred was ashamed to say he had not ever wondered what was in an injection. Before seeing Dr. Oppenheimer he’d never gotten an injection in his life, and now he wondered what the doctor was putting in him. There was witchcraft in the old country, but nothing this dark, as far as Alfred could remember. Certain herbs and weeds. A way of mixing. Poultices smeared on chests, aromatic flowers ground down to powders and stirred up into tea. But this horse-blood business seemed like more sinister magic. Liza had turned from the stove to listen to her son, and now, understanding that her boy was finished explaining, she turned back to her saucepan of gravy, her cheeks spotted with pride and pleasure.

Now, the day yawning before him until it was time to sign out and walk over to Thirty-Third Street, he considered going up to the DOH stables to pass the time. Instead, he signed himself out for five o’clock, even though it was only two.

  •  •  •  

Driscoll was not better. Alfred opened the man’s door slowly, and knew immediately by the silence and the cold kitchen that he was still in bed. He found Driscoll in the same position, and when Alfred put his hand on the back of his neck it felt like a furnace, and Driscoll moaned. “Should I get you something?” Alfred asked, feeling like a big, hulking, useless thing that was too stupid to know how to help. He went to the kitchen and ran a dishcloth under cold water. He brought it back to the bed, laid it across the old man’s head, and then worried as he saw the sheets darken where the wet touched them. Driscoll shifted away. “You need help, I think,” Alfred said, more to himself than to the old man. A doctor. But he’d never called on a doctor before.

He could have knocked on Fran’s door, or gone up to confer with Jimmy Tiernan, but he marched on past the second-floor landing, past the third. He needed Mary. The elderly sisters who also lived on the fourth floor had their door cracked for air and Alfred knew he could stop and ask them. He’d seen Driscoll talk to them from time to time, and when one of them injured her knee Driscoll had gone up there with a baked cod on a platter because they couldn’t get out. But instead of stopping, Alfred kept going to the Borriellos’ door and drew a breath. If Mrs. Borriello answered, he’d have to speak up, speak slowly, and then everyone would hear and his whole reason for going up there would be confused. Because he was really going up there for Driscoll. And if it ended up that he and Mary would start talking again because of it, fine, as long as Driscoll improved.

The younger boy answered, and when he saw who it was his eyes went wide.

“Is Mary here?”

The boy raised a finger to Alfred and then shut the door. Alfred heard movement inside, a chair pushed back along the wood floor.

When the door opened again it was Mrs. Borriello. The boy peeked at him from behind his mother. “Yes?” she said.

“I’m looking for Mary. I understand she’s been staying here?”

“Why?”

Alfred felt himself getting annoyed. “Mr. Driscoll isn’t well, and I thought Mary would know what to do.”

“Sick?” Mrs. Borriello said.

“Yes. Since yesterday. Maybe longer. Is Mary here?”

But Mrs. Borriello was already gathering her scarf. She said something to the boy before slipping past Alfred and down the stairs to Michael Driscoll’s door. The boy regarded Alfred from the door frame. “She doesn’t get home until later.”

“Yeah? Are you in charge of her schedule?”

“No. I’m in charge of the lamp. I bring it back to the kitchen when she gets home from the laundry and we do our figures at the table while she’s eating. My brother and me, I mean. Then when she’s done I take it back to my room. My mother says it’s our lamp, not hers, but we have to let her borrow it to eat by because it’s not right to ask a person to eat in the dark when there’s a good lamp a room away.”

“She works at a laundry? Where?”

“It’s almost on Washington Square.”

“Which side? What street?”

“Mr. Briehof!” Mrs. Borriello was calling for him from the bottom of the dark stairs.

“Didn’t you used to live upstairs?” the boy asked.

Mrs. Borriello shouted again.

“He needs firewood,” the boy said. “Better go in and get some of ours. She wants me to go down to her.”

The boy ran down the stairs, shouting something to his mama all the way, and Alfred turned and put his hand on the Borriellos’ doorknob. He pushed the heavy door and listened as the bottom brushed the floor like all the doors did in 302, leaving little arcs of scratch marks as welcome mats to every room. The wood was stacked by the stove, twigs, parts of branches, bits and pieces they must have collected from around the city. Alfred went over and selected a few of the heftiest pieces. When he turned he noticed the cot, and on the cot two folded blouses. On the windowsill above the cot was a woman’s comb, a collection of hairpins, hair powder, a tub of cream. He recognized the comb and the brand of cream. He left the wood on the Borriellos’ table and sat on the edge of Mary’s bed. He didn’t dare touch the blouses—it was bad enough he’d mussed the bed—but he studied the collars for signs of her skin, some detail that might have been caught in the material. He sniffed them, then leaned over, his head between his knees, to peer under the cot, searching for some lost thing she might have given up on and which he could keep, but there was nothing except dust. He thought about leaving her a note, the long-overdue letter she’d wanted so badly when she was on North Brother, the empty tin of tobacco from his pocket that she would know was his, knowing his brand and knowing they would tell her the story later, how he’d come knocking and how he’d spent a few minutes in the flat, alone. He heard the boy’s light steps on the stairs, two at a time, so he went to smooth the quilt, but then decided, no, he’d leave it the way it was, let her imagine him sitting there, thinking about her. He gathered the wood, and by the time he had it in his arms, the boy was there with his brother, to tell him that their mother had banned them, had sent them upstairs with instructions to close their door and not to come down again. And if she wasn’t home by supper, they were to be good boys and boil themselves an egg and clean up after and go straight to bed. There was something in the building, and she didn’t want them around until they figured out what it was.

  •  •  •  

Driscoll was worse. His fever was high and he complained of pain in his back. When he coughed into his pillow he left behind spots of blood. He couldn’t hold the teacup Mrs. Borriello had filled with broth so she sat on the edge of his bed and lifted it to his mouth. “Slow,” she said. “Little sips.” At moments he seemed to feel better, but then he was again moaning and clutching at the bed as if it were just a matter of getting deeper, of burrowing himself away from his rooms into a cooler place underneath it all, where he might find some relief.

“Should I run out to get medicine? A doctor? He has a little money, you know.”

Mrs. Borriello peered at Alfred. She seemed to want to make herself into a wall between the two men.

“I mean for the doctor. I think he could pay a doctor. And I think a doctor has to see a sick person anyway, even if he can’t pay.”

“I think that’s true.”

“Because I’ve never seen something like this. Have you?”

“Yes. The blood on the pillow. The coughing with fever. I saw it one time.”

“Okay then. I’ll go.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. I’ll go up and ask Fran. She had the doctor come once. For one of the children.” He wanted to ask where Mary was, what time she’d be home.

They heard the scrape of the door being slowly pushed open. “Mama?” came a boy’s voice. Mrs. Borriello was across the room in an instant, pushing her youngest son into the hall and trying to shut the door on him. She shouted at him in Italian, but still he tried to insert the toe of his boot in the door. As they struggled, Alfred stepped out into the hall and lifted the boy under the arms.

“Go, go, go,” Mrs. Borriello shouted at both of them, and then added something in Italian.

“I’m staying with my mama,” the boy cried as Alfred carried him to the stairs.

“You have to go up,” Alfred said.

Mrs. Borriello shouted again.

“She says to tell everybody, don’t come down here. Bad enough there’s the two of us already. Three of us including me. She says she’ll kill me later. To you she says stand back from the door when you talk to Miss Fran about the doctor. Want me to do it? She says we could be breathing it now, whatever it is.”

As Alfred climbed the steps with one hand bracing the boy by the upper arm, he thought of Liza and how she’d worry but there was nothing he could do and really it would be the wrong idea to go home to her now and carry this thing to her, to Samuel. She’d understand that he had to stay in 302 until he saw this thing through. And if Mary arrived home later and the boys told her everything—how Alfred had searched for her, how he’d stayed on to help their mama, how he’d rushed down the stairs with their wood and kindling to help Mr. Driscoll—and if hearing about all that made her want to see him again, to talk only, and if talking softened her toward him enough so that she didn’t object when he touched her, then he couldn’t help that, either.

SEVENTEEN

The one doctor Fran knew of had moved uptown, but Mr. Stern from the third floor knew of a good man who made house calls. Jimmy Tiernan was elected to go to West Sixteenth to fetch him, and as he rushed down the stairs and out onto the dark sidewalk, Patricia looked after him, relieved that her man was traveling farther away from whatever poison was dwelling at Mr. Driscoll’s. First thing in the morning she was going to bring their children to her sister’s in New Jersey and stay there until this thing passed.

Jimmy Tiernan didn’t return until nearly eight o’clock in the evening. He shouted through Driscoll’s closed door that the doctor would be there shortly. Alfred and Mrs. Borriello took turns sitting with Driscoll. A few times, Alfred tried to raise the subject of Mary. When it was Mrs. Borriello’s turn to sit with Driscoll, Alfred sat in the chair in the corner of Driscoll’s bedroom. “Your son said Mary works at a laundry now?”

Mrs. Borriello glanced over at him quickly, and simply nodded.

“Does she like it? She was a laundress before, you know. When I met her.”

When Mrs. Borriello showed no indication that she’d even heard him speak, he knew that there was no point in trying. When it was his turn to sit with Driscoll he patted the old man’s head with the compress and realized he’d never before been around anyone as ill. At nine o’clock came a strong knock on the door and an unfamiliar man’s voice announcing himself as Dr. Hoffmann. Relieved, Alfred jumped up to open the door.

Dr. Hoffmann asked about Driscoll’s first symptoms, how long he’d been in the state he was in, what his health was before he came down ill. He pulled the older man up to sitting, and Driscoll fell toward the doctor’s lap like a sleeping child lifted from his crib by his mama. The doctor listened to Driscoll’s chest, took his pulse, and then told Alfred to go straight to the nearest grocer and ask them to call for an ambulance. As Alfred rushed down the hall, he heard a voice behind him.

“How is he?” Mary asked. She was standing two steps above the second-floor landing. She was wearing a dark green dress that buttoned in a double-breasted style up to her throat. She was as familiar to him as his own reflection in the mirror, and he saw clearly how silly he’d been, playacting with another woman, a woman he barely knew, and who barely knew him, when his life was here, standing on the landing above him.

“I’m to get an ambulance.”

“Well, go!”

Alfred ran. He pumped his arms and lifted his knees and dodged pedestrians who stepped before him. The faster he ran, the younger he felt, and though his errand was serious he felt buoyant: Mary was back. She would forgive him. They would make up, and he would leave Liza. He and Mary would find new rooms together; he’d get good work. He leaped over a pile of horse manure. He nodded to the wandering sausage man, who watched him pass with amazement on his face. How could he refuse marriage to her now when he had asked Liza Meaney? Maybe Mary wouldn’t want to marry him now; maybe she had no interest. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. Not so long as they lived together again and came home to each other every night.

When he returned to Driscoll’s rooms, Mary had taken over Mrs. Borriello’s spot by the bed and was talking to the doctor. Mrs. Borriello sat at the table with her head in her hands.

“What is it?” Alfred asked from the frame of Driscoll’s bedroom door.

“Looks like hasty consumption,” Mary said without turning.

“They’ll take him to a sanatorium,” the doctor said. “Each of you should watch yourself for symptoms and at the first sign you should segregate yourself.”

It was nearly midnight when the ambulance took Michael Driscoll, and once the neighbors retreated from their perches on the landings where they’d watched the spectacle, Mary remembered what the nurses used to do at Riverside after tending to a patient, and instructed Alfred and Mrs. Borriello to wash their hands. Mary knew Alfred was looking at her as he leaned against the wall that divided the kitchen from the bedroom. She hardened her belly and kept her eyes from meeting his. She spoke to him as if he were anyone, someone she’d just met, not the man she’d loved since she was seventeen years old. “When you get home you should wash yourself well. Boil your clothes or throw them away.”

Now that Driscoll was at the hospital there would be no need for Alfred to come around anymore, and if he stopped coming, then this, an interval of several hours, wouldn’t mean anything and she could go back to pretending he didn’t exist. She heard him draw his breath as if to speak but then release it again.

Mrs. Borriello took Mary by the hand.

“Hold on,” Alfred said, taking two quick steps toward the door as if to block it. “Mary,” he said softly. “Can I come up to talk a minute? Or can we take a walk?”

“It’s the middle of the night!” said Mrs. Borriello.

“She can speak for herself.”

“Why?” Mary asked.

“I have to talk to you, Mary.”

“Another time maybe,” Mary said, and Mrs. Borriello followed her boarder out the door.

Upstairs, the boys asleep, Mary found Mrs. Borriello’s largest pot and filled it with water. She filled the kettle, too. Once the water was boiled, the women took off their dresses, and their underclothes, and shoved them to a corner of the kitchen. Mrs. Borriello stepped into the bath first while Mary dropped their underwhites into Mrs. Borriello’s pot and stirred them like she was checking on a stew. Then Mary bathed while Mrs. Borriello stirred, the water at such a rapid boil the pot hopped on the stove. When they were both dressed in fresh clothing, their damp hair loose around their shoulders, their undergarments drying over the sink, Mary made coffee and poured it into two cups. Mrs. Borriello yawned. The kitchen was warm, and comfortable, and Mary’s body felt clean and soft under the fresh clothes. Mrs. Borriello stretched her arms over her head and purred.

“What’s your first name?” Mary asked.

“Emilia. My family called me Mila.”

“Pretty.”

“Not many call me Mila now.”

“No.”

The clock on the mantel ticked its rhythm and Mary remembered Aunt Kate, how they’d sit in the silent kitchen until late, Kate sewing, Mary sipping tea and reading aloud from the newspaper, until it came time to go to sleep.

Mila Borriello began smoothing her fine black hair, first one side, and then the other. She pulled it away from her face and twisted it behind her head. In only her camisole, and with her cheeks still rosy from the steam of the bath and the warmth of the room, Mary could see that she was still a beautiful woman.

“How old are you?”

“I am thirty-four years old.” Mila smiled. “You thought older?”

Mary nodded. The two women regarded each other in silence.

“I was married before,” Mila said. “Before Salvatore.”

“I didn’t know that.”

“Of course not. How would you know?”

Mary waited.

“His name was Alberto. Is Alberto. He’s still alive someplace, I don’t know. Last I saw him was in Naples.”

Mary felt the room seem to settle down around them. Her hand rested on the table not six inches away from Mila’s hand. She’d never invited her, Mary considered now. She’d never asked her up for tea or coffee, or knocked on her door to see if she needed anything from the market. When Mary, Fran, and Joan made a plan to go put their feet in the fountain, or walk in the park, they’d never asked if Mila Borriello felt like joining them. Alfred sometimes wondered why the Borriellos didn’t live downtown on one of the Italian streets, but mostly they didn’t think of the Borriellos at all.

“This Alberto, he was father to my oldest boy. You remember.”

The drowned boy, also Alberto. They called him Albie. Albertos become Albies in America.

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“He was not such a good man, Alberto. In some ways, yes, a decent man, he always made good wages, but in most ways, not such a good man. He loved me, and loved his boy in his way, but he was not the way a man should be. He lifted his hand to me every day and I knew he would lift his hand to my boy. Maybe he would wait until my boy got strong, but maybe not. At first I thought I could spend a little less, sit a little less, but then I saw he would do it anyway and I’m not a woman who deserves hitting. So one day he beat me with the leg of a chair and I left him. I took the boy while he was out of the house and stayed with a woman neighbor, and then I came to New York City and called myself a widow. Then I met Salvatore in America and told him all of it. Some men, they would leave a woman who told him a thing like that. Some men would side with the other man even not knowing him, even the man all the way in Naples. Not Salvatore. He believed me and trusted me and then we had our own two boys, Carmine and Anthony. He was kind to me every day of his life.”

Mila looked at Mary very seriously. “They don’t know this, Carmine and Anthony. They think Alberto was their full brother, their father’s son.”

“I understand.” Mary remembered that horrible afternoon. “I’m so sorry about Salvatore. And about Albie. We never talked about—”

“It’s fine,” Mila said, and set her mouth in that familiar way she had, a widow’s pursed lips, worried brow.

They were quiet for a long time.

“I don’t think of that day too much. Sending them out for wood. Much more I think of before we came here, when it was just the two of us, that baby with me on the ship, and how careful I was to give him the cleanest portion of the sheet, and the best of what we had at meals. You’ve never seen a baby cling the way Alberto clung to me in America when we got here first. Sometimes it’s hard to understand that that baby turned into my boy. That that baby disappeared, and turned into a boy, and then that boy disappeared. So he left me twice. Do you understand?”

“Your English is very good.”

“I don’t mean my English. I mean do you understand about having a baby and worrying sick over him and finally getting him away from a dangerous thing and then having so much good happen and then the baby grows into a handsome boy and then he is gone? One, two, three, gone. I pushed him out of me, and nursed him, and soothed him, and then one day he left here and didn’t come back. Like he was nothing and everything I felt for him was nothing and all that time we felt it was good, and strong, and special, it was really no stronger than a strand of hair snipped in two.

“A few months after the accident a man came with a document to sign, and that was it. Salvatore signed it and explained to me that there was nothing else they could do. They never found him in the river. He never washed up anyplace. Salvatore was as sad as I was, but it’s different for men. He went to work and came home and seemed the same but I knew better. We had three boys, and then we had two.”

A memory of Tobias Kirkenbauer ambled across Mary’s mind: she saw herself tying him into his pram, pushing him down to the water with a picnic of bread and cheese. What did they say to each other? What was that funny way he said her name? She recalled the tiny hairs on the doctor’s top lip when he warned her not to tell Mrs. Kirkenbauer that the boy was gone. If Mrs. Kirkenbauer had asked for him, Mary would have lied, and yet she died anyway. Though Mary had seen enough death to know what it looked like when it came, it was always a shock to see that whatever it is that animates a person can slip away so easily, like a drop of water slipped down a drain. Perhaps she found out, Mary considered. Perhaps a mother knows.

“I’m not telling you this for you to say sorry, Mary. Any decent person is sad to hear such a thing so it’s useless to say anything in response. I’m telling you this so you can see I know a little about men and about life. A woman who is married twice and has three children and gets herself to America with an infant alongside knows a little about the world and about men. You understand? You can imagine what it was like on that ship without a husband and with a boy to suckle.”

Mary waited for what she knew was coming.

“You should stay away from that Alfred.”

Mary felt the old defensiveness rise up but swallowed it back down again. “Well, anyway, he’s married.”

Mila Borriello touched Mary’s hand. “How many hours was I with him since he found Mr. Driscoll and came up here to knock on my door? In all those hours, not once does he mention his wife. The only woman he mentioned was you.”

Mary felt ashamed at the soaring she felt in her chest upon hearing this, at the familiar lightness in her bones that used to come over her when she’d hear his key in the door. Now that he’d seen her, he’d make excuses to come back, and she had to decide what she’d do when that happened. Liza Meaney will never know him like I do, she thought. Then she remembered that Liza Meaney had cured him, had convinced him to stick with a job, and for Liza Meaney he’d proposed marriage, become a stepfather. She had a vision of herself on North Brother, looking across the water at Manhattan, thinking about what he could possibly be doing that would keep him from writing to her, from trying to see her. No, she decided. No.