No further dark thoughts were allowed to enter Ruth’s head, for the door to the cottage finally opened and the woman sought by Ruth St. Croix, intrepid female reporter of the stouthearted Nellie Bly stripe, stood before her, engaging Ruth with weary blue eyes that looked her visitor up and down in naked assessment.
“Welcome to North Brother Island,” said the woman, the bounce and lilt of her native brogue having been modified by years of service to non-Gaelic American families. “How do you like me wee cottage prison? Will you add bars to the windows in your description of it? Will you tell your readers that I eat watery gruel to tug at their heartstrings? I give you permission to color me circumstances here as miserably as you may wish. Do come in. Mind the stair.”
The woman stepped back and held the door open as if daring Ruth to enter. Ruth accepted the invitation and stepped inside. The front room was dark, curtains drawn over most of its windows. Yet even in shadow, the woman appeared to be comfortably dressed in accordance with her situation, simply but tastefully and crisply arrayed, and smelling to Ruth as if her frock had been freshly laundered.
“Please sit down,” said Ruth’s circumstantial hostess. “I do get the pleasure of a guest now and again, but they generally don’t enter me cell.” With a conspiratorial whisper: “They like to come and peer and gawk at me through the windows — like I’m some monkey in a cage. Do you see me the same way, Miss St. Croix? Do you find me to be akin to some animal in a zoo?”
“Well, of course not,” said Ruth, glancing about the little sitting room. Though sparsely furnished, the space had a warmth and snugness to it that put Ruth at some ease.
After offering her visitor a seat upon the room’s small sofa, the woman sat down in an armchair with a large and elaborately stitched lace antimacassar draped over the top and a profusion of doilies imbricating the arms. She had not put her blond hair up, and so it cascaded negligently over her shoulders, framing a youthful face, though Ruth knew the woman to be past forty. Perhaps her plumpness enhanced the semblance of youth. “So what do you want to know? I suppose you already know the reason they’ve put me on this island of ghosts.”
Ruth produced her stenographer’s pad and pencil from her bag. “Why do you call North Brother’s Island an ‘island of ghosts’?”
“Because of all of them what died here not five years ago. Do you not remember the General Slocum fire?”
Ruth nodded. “Yet I had forgotten that it was near here that the steamship went down.”
“Abide upon this wretched island for more than a few hours and you’ll hear the voices, too. Them shrill, panicked cries of the littlest babbies — you’ll find these the hardest to bear. They laid most of the bodies right upon the bank not so very far from this cottage. ’Tis the worst sort of cruelty to put a person like me upon a ghost island like this. I do not deserve to be haunted so.”
“There are those who say that you are fully deserving of such a fate.”
The woman glared at her guest.
Ruth had been forewarned of her interviewee’s famous temper. Lighter observations than Ruth’s had been known to throw her into a raving frenzy; still, Ruth had chosen words that were deliberately, daringly provocative. “Did you come to hear my own side of things and the very good reasons for my release,” said the woman, with obvious restraint, “or are you no better than all them others — the ones what bollocks and abuses me for sport?”
Ruth clasped her hands together and leaned forward upon her chair. “No, Miss Mallon, that certainly isn’t the purpose of my visit. But there are questions that I feel I must ask. Your lawsuit against the city which demands your immediate release under habeas corpus proceedings — is there to be a ruling soon?”
“Very soon says Mr. O’Neill.”
“Mr. O’Neill is your lawyer?”
Nodding: “But even if I lose, I intend to throw myself upon the mercy of me captors. I’ll agree to everything they ask of me, I will.”
“Meaning that, to begin with, you will no longer seek employment as a cook. That you will no longer infect others with the typhoid bacillus.”
The woman known the world over by the unkind moniker Typhoid Mary lowered her eyes in contemplative silence. Then she raised them to impale Ruth with a contemptuous glower. “I have never been sick with typhoid — not a single day in me entire life.”
“But you have been tested and, still and all, the typhoid germ does live inside you. It resides within your gall bladder, does it not? Was it not the case that you could remain free forever if you would but submit to an operation that would have removed the diseased organ?”
“An operation that most assuredly would have killed me. And I am not ready to die. Miss St. Croix, have you come here to plead for my release through your magazine? For this was what I understood you to mean from your letter. Or were you letting on for personal benefit — that you should meet me and then go and write about me just as all them others have written? If this be the case, then I must ask you to leave my home immediately, but I should like to strike you first for having wasted me time.” Mary grinned. “On second thought: join me for lunch. A cold salad, I think. For it is me cold collations, they say, which appear to be the deadliest.”
Checking her desire to rise and flee, Ruth collected herself and then calmly replied, “May I know why it is, Miss Mallon, that even though you don’t believe yourself to be a silent carrier of typhoid fever, you’ve never engaged in those sanitary practices that could only have absolved you from all suspicion?”
“You mean why did I never wash me hands after attending to my business in the w.c.?”
“Frankly, madam, yes.”
Mary thought for a moment while chewing upon her bottom lip. Then she shrugged and said, “Because it is not in my nature, I suppose. And for that reason I never took up the habit.”
“I see.”
“Of course, I suppose that it shouldn’t have been such a terrible inconvenience for me to have done it.”
“No, I should think not.”
The two women regarded one another for a brief, silent moment. Then Mary said, “Miss St. Croix, I have no friends.”
Ruth nodded. “Yes, I have heard this.”
“I am a pariah.”
“With only a dog for company.”
Mary nodded. “I have a dog who doesn’t care if I wash me hands or not.”
“Yes.”
Then suddenly, in spite of Ruth St. Croix’s assiduous efforts to meet with Typhoid Mary and in spite of that previous desire on Ruth’s part, given her humanitarian heart, to do good by this poor, lonely, hygienically uneducated woman, there remained nothing else to be asked or said. And so Ruth St. Croix stood, preparatory to taking her leave.
“Well,” said Ruth in a vocal haw.
“Quite well,” responded Typhoid Mary with an ironic smile.
As Ruth placed her hand upon the doorknob, regretful that she had not worn gloves that morning, a chill came over the formerly intrepid reporter and she felt herself in that moment surrounded by all the ghosts who resided on North Brother Island in the middle of the East River. But these were not the ghosts of the General Slocum tragedy. They were specters born of an Irish immigrant’s ignorance of germs. And Ruth knew that once the woman was eventually released, she would in no time give sufficient cause for re-incarceration, hand-washing not being a component in her squalid nature.
The winds were even stronger during Ruth’s return trip to Manhattan Island. Despite being affixed to her hair with multiple hatpins, Ruth’s hat — an understatement of peacock plumage — was rudely seized from her head and sent flying in a gust that nearly pushed the rest of her over the gunwales and into the roiling brown river.