Fever by Mary Beth Keane

Fever presents a fiction account of the woman known to history as "Typhoid Mary" - Mary Mallon. The novel is divided into five parts beginning with a prologue, Habeas Corpus, Liberty, His Banner Over Me Is Love, and an Epilogue.

The Prologue has Mary remembering working at the Kirkenbauer's in the summer of 1899 - the first time typhoid struck a house while she was employed. This incident is to haunt Mary for the remainder of her life, because of the little boy, Tobias, who dies from typhoid.

In Habeas Corpus tells the story of Mary's incarceration and her attempts to secure a release from quarantine. It is 1907 and Mary tells how she is tracked down and arrested, taken first to Willard Parker Hospital where she is asked to submit to gallbladder surgery. When she refuses, Mary is sent to North Brother Island to be quarantined. Eventually she is given her own little cottage and her meals are provided for her. She must provide samples of her urine and feces.

She writes her lover, Alfred Briehof, and asks him to find a lawyer to help her. However, Alfred isn't much help to her, writing to Mary only nine times in her first year on North Brother. In 1909, Mary does eventually get a lawyer, Francis O'Neill, who manages to get a hearing for Mary. O'Neill tells Mary that she should swear before the judges that she will not cook anymore and that this will allow her to be set free.

Mary and O'Neill prepare for the hearing while life goes on for Mary on North Brother. Interspersed are flashbacks of Mary remembering a time when she purchased the exact same hat as her wealthy employer, Mrs. Bowen, the time when the wealthy tried to organize a food collective, and when little Elizabeth Bowen became ill. Other flashbacks in this part of the book include her early life in Ireland as a poor orphan living with her grandmother, her arrival in New York where she lodges with her Aunt Kate and her husband, Paddy Brown, her first jobs as a laundress, and the first time she meets Alfred. The reader also learns about Mary and Alfred's tumultuous relationship that is further strained by his alcoholism and chronic unemployment.

At the hearing Mary manages to meet with Alfred, who misses her but seems distant. Mary is sent back to North Brother and she almost gives up. Eventually Alfred comes to visit her at North Brother and tells her that he is engaged to marry another woman, Liza Meany who is a widow. This is a very low point for Mary in her life. Mary gains her freedom when a new Health Commissioner, Lederle is installed. She heads back to New York and finds employment as a laundress.

In Liberty, we learn more about Albert's life and how he tries unsuccessfully to straighten his life out. When he learns that Mary is set free he tries to see her but she won't have anything to do with him. This rejection affects Albert deeply, causing great hardship and suffering in his life.

In His Banner Over Me Is Love, Mary and Albert eventually find one another but the past cannot be rekindled. Their lives have been irreparably altered and yet the more things have changed, the more they are the same, with Mary basically supporting Albert by earning a living as a cook. This of course, has the expected result of her causing more outbreaks of typhoid and her eventual permanent incarceration.

The Epilogue sees Mary in her old age still struggling to deal with her situation and her conscience revisiting the Kirkenbauer incident and perhaps finally recognizing that she did in fact cause a child to die and that maybe she might have known this all along.

Discussion

Mary Beth Keane presents a riveting fictional account of a young Irish woman known forever to history as "Typhoid Mary". Typhoid Mary was the name (among others) given to thirty-seven year old Mary Mallon who was one of the first people known to modern medical science as a healthy carrier of disease. Mary had never had typhoid herself, but carried in her gallbladder, Salmonella typhi, the strain of bacteria known to cause typhoid. Mary admitted to rarely washing her hands after using the bathroom and when cooking. The bacteria was transmitted to others through any uncooked food Mary Mallon prepared, causing them to become sick with typhoid.

At the time Mary lived, the early 20th century, scientists were just beginning to understand the role of micro-organisms, such as bacteria, in illness. It was not known that a person could be completely healthy yet make others sick by being a carrier of harmful bacteria. This was a relatively new discovery.

Mary's trouble began in 1906 when she worked as a cook for the Warren family at Oyster Bay, a place not known to suffer from typhoid outbreaks. Six people became ill from typhoid. Warren hired Dr. George Soper, a sanitation engineer, to try to find the cause of the outbreak in his home. Soper learned that the family had hired an Irish cook three weeks prior to the outbreak and soon discovered that many other outbreaks followed the employment of this same cook. He discovered the cook was Mary Mallon, an Irish immigrant. When Soper approached Mary, asking her to give stool and urine samples, she refused to believe him, was outraged by his request and refused. Eventually, after several attempts to obtain convince Mary that she was spreading illness wherever she went, Mary was arrested and sent to North Brother Island where her stool samples tested positive for the typhoid bacteria.

After several hearings, Mary was allowed to go free if she promised not to seek employment as a cook. She attempted to work as a laundress, but eventually returned to working as a cook and this led to her infecting more people with typhoid. In 1915, a major outbreak of typhoid at Sloane Hospital for Women resulted in Dr. Soper finally catching up with her and she was once again sent to North Brother Island where she remained for the rest of her life.

It's hard to comprehend Mary's behaviour today, but at the time, Soper's theory was very new and many people did not understand how a healthy person with no sign of disease could cause others to become ill. In addition, public health policies had no way yet of dealing with such a situation, so authorities were at a loss as to how to proceed. Mary was also well aware of the prejudices that existed at that time against immigrants, especially those from Ireland. She felt she was being unjustly targeted.

Keane does a wonderful job telling Mary's story from her perspective providing the reader with an account that is rich in detail and informative. Keane's portrayal of Mary allows us to see how she might have felt, how she might have viewed herself, and those who pursued her within the context of her own time. 

That the author did a great deal of research is evident in her writing. Keane provides vivid descriptions of life in New York City at the turn of the 20th century. It was a fetid, stinking mess, city streets full of rotting garbage, decaying horse carcasses, and overwhelmed with horse shit from the thousands of horses working the streets everyday. She also provides significant details about Mary Mallon and her life on North Brother, as well as the hearings to free Mary.

Fever attempts to give to Mary Mallon, what history has not and that is a measure of humanity. Keane encourages her reader to try to understand how Mary might have viewed her unusual situation, what she experienced as her life was turned upside down by something she didn't understand, in a time when prejudices ran strong against immigrants and those who had stepped outside of genteel society's parameters. Mary feels she is being singled out because she is a single working woman who lives with a man to whom she is not married. Mary notes how the wealthy, when looking for domestic help, don't inquire so much about their skills, but rather seem more focused on their religiosity.

"They all say they want a good cook, but what they want even more is a worthy project."

Mary did not want to be a project and was understandably humiliated and angered at such treatment.

Mary's lover, Albert Briehof was a genuinely unlikable character. Albert was a German immigrant who could not hold down a job, was an alcoholic and eventually a drug addict. He was unable to  commit to anything or anyone in life. Mary's attraction to him was both puzzling and annoying.  Her forced incarceration on North Brother ultimately destroyed their relationship, although Keane implies that it was already failing by the time she was sent to the island.

Fever will definitely appeal to fans of historical fiction and would make an excellent choice for a book club selection. There are plenty of themes and issues to explore for group discussion including the rights of patients with communicable diseases, the prejudice against Irish immigrants, the treatment of Mary Mallon, and social class distinctions in early 20th century America.

Nova ran a program called The Most Dangerous Woman in America in 2004 which was based on the book, Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public's Health by Judith Walzer Leavitt. It provides excellent background into the unusual case of Mary Mallon.

Book Details:
Fever by Mary Beth Keane
New York: Scribner 2012
306 pp.

Ashes of Roses by Mary Jane Auch

Ashes of Roses opens February 18, 1911 as Margaret Rose (Rose) Nolan along with her Ma, Da, sisters, twelve-year-old Maureen Rose and four-year-old Bridget, and her baby brother Joseph, arrive in New York harbour. They have just finished a two week journey, as steerage passengers from Cork, Ireland. 

As steerage passengers they have to disembark and the ferry to Ellis Island where they are to be examined by immigration officials. They all pass the physical and eye examination except Joseph who is diagnosed with trachoma, a contagious eye infection. This means that he cannot enter America and must return to Ireland. Since the Nolans do not have enough money for the entire family to return, Da makes the decision that he will return with Joseph and Ma and the girls will go on to stay with his brother Patrick as they planned. Da will work to earn the money to return and if Joseph's eyes are clear he will bring him to America. If not he will stay in Ireland. This decision deeply upsets Ma who doesn't want to abandon her baby and who feels they should all return to Ireland. 

Heartbroken Ma and the girls move into another area and after questioning by another examiner they are sent to the pier to meet Uncle Patrick. When Ma sees that Patrick is not there, she sneaks in behind a man and his family, pretending they are relatives. Without Patrick, they will be sent back to Ireland. While Ma doesn't know why Patrick isn't there, she has his address and intends to find him. 

After help from several policemen who are also from Ireland, Ma and the girls find Patrick's apartment and discover that he has a wife named Elsa. Living with Patrick and Elsa are her two daughters, Trudy and Hildegard, and Patrick and Elsa's son, Frederich. They learn that Patrick did not know they were coming as he never received Da's letter. While Patrick is welcoming and is happy to have them stay with his family, Elsa and her daughters are not. Patrick has done well for himself, having come to America with twenty dollars, worked on the docks before getting into politics and now a councilman for the Seventeenth Ward. His home has five rooms: a parlor, diningroom, kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bathroom with hot running water and an indoor toilet. After a strange dinner of saurekraut and black rye bread, and a bath, Rose and her family settle in. 

On Sunday Ma is shocked to discover that Patrick and his family do not attend Catholic Mass, but instead the Lutheran church. Furious, she leaves the apartment and takes the girls to Mass. As the week goes on, it becomes more and more difficult for Rose, Ma and Maureen to live at Patrick's home. They are clearly resented by Elsa and her daughters. Rose overhears Elsa attempting to convince Patrick to make them leave. This leads Rose to decide to try to find work. She manages to find piece work with a man named Mr. Moscovitz who allows Rose to take home the pieces to make paper flower stems. However this leads to a violent showdown between Elsa and her daughters and Ma and Maureen. 

As a result Patrick tells Ma they must stay elsewhere and offers to pay for a place until his brother Michael returns to New York. But Ma decides she has had enough and will return to Limerick. Patrick purchases tickets in second class for the family and on Saturday morning, two weeks after arriving they leave. However, when they are at the pier, Rose refuses to leave America. She believes there are more opportunities for her in America than back in Limerick where she most likely get married. When Ma agrees to Rose staying, Maureen also wants to stay. Ma eventually agrees, gives Rose and Maureen their tickets to cash back in and boards the boat with Bridget. 

In New York City Rose and Maureen manage to find lodging with a man, Mr. Garoff and his daughter Gussela who is a seamstress at a shirtwaist factory on Washington Street. Gussie is also a prominent union organizer and is involved with the Waistmakers Local 25. Over the weekend Rose and Maureen struggle to finish the paper flower stems for Mr. Muscovitz. When Rose takes them back to Mr. Muscovitz he begins sorting through them but when she begs him to pay her, he tells her to come back later that night. This turns out to be a trick where he attempts to assault Rose, but she manages to escape. Rose tells Gussie what happened and she informs Rose that they will return in the morning to retrieve her coat and demand payment for the work she completed. Gussie comes up with an alternate plan for Rose: she will get a sewing machine for Rose to practice on and when she learns how to use it, Gussie will speak with the foreman at the shirtwaist factory. 

Within a week Rose learns how to run the sewing machine and Gussie takes her to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory where she is given a job. Rose takes her first-ever ride in an elevator and soon becomes comfortable working in the factory. She makes friends with two girls who work opposite her,  Rose Klein, and Rose Bellini. As she begins to learn the job at the factory, Rose also forms a strong bond with the two girls. But just as their life is seeming to become settled, tragedy strikes.

At the end of the workday on a Saturday, fire breaks out on the floor below.  Rose finds herself trapped on the ninth floor along with Gussie and her friends Rose Klein and Rose Bellini. With the doors locked and the lone elevator capable of only holding a small number of people, there are few choices to escape the inferno. Rose, her two friends and Gussie each make decisions that determine whether they will live or die.

Discussion

1911 markes the 100th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a tragedy that forever changed the face of factory work in the United States and other countries.  Ashes of Roses is a historical fiction novel that portrays the tragedy from the perspective of a young Irish immigrant.

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire occurred on Saturday March 25, 1911 in the garment factory that was located on the eighth throught tenth floors of the Asch building in the Greenwich Village neighbourhood. The factory, which was owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, employed around five hundred immigrant women and girls, some as young as fifteen,  in the making of shirtwaists, a fashionable women's blouse worn at the turn of the last century. Immigrant women and some men were hired because they would work for lower wages and were less likely to unionize. At this time, there were few protections for workers, and up to one hundred workers died every day on the job in 1911. At the Triangle Shirtwaist factory women had to leave the building to use the washroom as there were no facilities on site. Management began locking the exit doors to prevent the resulting work stoppage. They claimed it was to prevent theft. Shirtwaist workers worked nonstop, seven days a week for a mere six dollars a week.

The fire started near the end of the workday on Saturday in a scrap bin on the eighth floor, possibly from a discarded match or cigarette. The wooden scrap bin contained several months worth of material scraps from the cutters table above it. There was no fire alarm in the building and the factory floors with its abundance of flammable material was quickly engulfed in flames. The floors had doors, two freight elevators, two stairways, and a fire escape.  However, the door to the Washington Place stairway was locked to prevent thefts, the Greene Street stairway quickly became engulfed in the raging flames, and the two freight elevators managed to save some but were soon inoperable due to the heat.  To escape the raging fire some employees crammed onto the rickety fire escape which collapsed sending people to their deaths. The firefighter's ladders only reached to the seventh floor and so to escape, some began jumping from the windows to escape the smoke and flames. The fire was over in a half hour. Of the five hundred employees, one hundred forty-six were dead, most of them young women.  The fire would become a turning point in the fight for workers rights, leading to many changes.

Historical fiction succeeds if the author is able to portray the period accurately through the setting and the characters. Author Mary Jane Auch suceeds in Ashes of Roses with her incorporation of historical detail and her crafting of believable characters. The author became interested in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire after watching the PBS documentary, New York. Auch writes in her Author's Note that she initially believed the workers in the factory were mainly Irish but soon discovered that was not the case. Although most of the workers in the factory were Russian, Polish, and Italian, she did find the name of an Irish woman and decided to continue with the main character as a young Irish immigrant. 

Auch offers readers an interesting portrayal of life in early twentieth century New York City: a bustling metropolis with immigrants like Ros" e's Uncle Patrick who arrived with little and through hard work have made a comfortable life for themselves, to those newly arrived struggling in sweatshops and factories to earn enough to live. Through the character of Gussie Garoff, young readers are introduced to the efforts of workers to obtain better pay and safer working conditions. Gussie explains to Rose and her sister how two years before, hundreds of girls in New York, Rochester and Philadephia went on strike to fight for their rights, how she was beaten and thrown into jail by the police and how she was not allowed to see a doctor for her broken arm. Gussie is referring to the general strike of 1909. From the AFL-CIO website the strike is described as follows: "The next morning, throughout New York's garment district, more than 15,000 shirtwaist makers walked out. They demanded a 20 percent pay raise, a 52-hour work week and extra pay for overtime."  The following day "...more than 20,000 workers from 500 factories had walked out. " While smaller factories had agreed to the demands, the owners of the Triangle factory along with those of the twenty largest factories formed an association to resist in every way possible, the workers' demands. Strkers were arrested by the police and jailed and/or fined by the courts. The strike was finally resolved in 1910.

The tragedy at the Triangle factory is foreshadowed in several ways in the novel. While they are staying at their Uncle Patrick's apartment, Rose and Maureen spend some time talking outside on the fire escape. Rose explains to her younger sister that it is used if the inside stairs are on fire. When Maureen notes that the stairs do not go all the way to the ground, Rose surmises that a person must jump. Maureen states she could never jump but Rose counters, "Ye'd be amazed how much courage you'd have with flames lickin' at yer arse..."  In fact this is exactly what Rose experiences during the Triange factory fire but her fear of jumping and seeing that the firemen cannot save those who do, leads her to find another way to escape. 

When Rose Nolan begins her first day at work in the Triangle factory, Gussie explains to her some of the policies in the factory that will ultimately determine who survives and who dies in the fire. Rose notes that the elevators take only a few people at a time and move slowly and learns that at closing the workers are made to walk down the stairs. Another girl warns Rose not be late because "They lock the doors at eight sharp and don't open them again until noon..."  Rose is shocked to see how crowded the ninth floor is: "The entire room was filled with long tables placed close together, with a double row of sewin' machines stretchin' from end to end of each one... The tables were so close to each other, it was difficult to squeeze past when two girls were seated back to back."   The crowded conditions mean there is no clear and easy path out to the doors which are locked during the day to prevent theft and the elevator which was is never in service at the end of each shift. 

Auch does an excellent job portraying life for the young shirtwaist factory workers who dress stylishly and have fun going to the nickelodeon. The novel also offers a realistic description of the fire that conveys both the terror of the victims and the pain and loss of the families of the workers who died in the fire. An interesting aspect to the novel is Rose's description of the New York City's wealthy and elite coming to view the aftermath of the tragedy and the bodies. In Washington Square, Rose, Maureen and Jacob watch as a procession of stage buses bring people in to view the scene. "Their open tops were filled with young couples laughin' and chattin' as they went to view the tragedy. The women were dressed to the nines, with bright feathered and flowered hats. They were doin' this as a lark--just a little entertainment for a Sunday mornin'..." This deeply angers Rose who decides to confront several people. However, historians note that both wealthy and immigrant poor were motivated by the horror to work together, although their goals were somewhat different. 

In sixteen-year-old Rose Nolan, an Irish Catholic immigrant, Auch has crafted and determined, intelligent and quick thinking heroine. Although Rose loses her best friends and Gussie in the fire, she remains determined to stay in America, but this time to work in a union shop that will look after her rights. It is clear the tragedy has changed her and her sister Maureen forever.

The title, Ashes of Roses has several meanings. The colour of the dress Rose wears to work on the day of the tragedy is called "ashes of roses" a sort of rose gray taffeta. During her escape from the Triangle building, she tears her dress and that piece of fabric shows up in the items used to identify the dead. Rose who goes to look for her sister and friends among the dead, is horrified to see a scrap of her dress. Secondly, one of the most common names of the young women who died in the tragedy was Rose. So the fire indeed contained the ashes of (many) Roses, among others.

Told in the voice of 16 year old Rose Nolan, Ashes of Roses is an engaging account of a tragedy that forever changed America. It will appeal to teens who love historical fiction.

Book Details:
Ashes of Roses by Mary Jane Auch.
New York: Laurel Leaf              2004
256 pp.