This is my symphony

Fever (NetGalley)
Mary Beth Keane
release date: March 2013

 Mary Mallon, the main character in Mary Beth Keane’s soon-to-be-released novel,  is known to most of us as Typhoid Mary, thought to be the first asymptomatic carrier of typhoid fever in the United States. Mary left a wake of illness and death as she moved from family to family, serving in wealthy New York households. Eventually, health department worker Dr. George Soper (a “sanitation engineer”–how ominous does that sound?) follows the patterns of outbreaks and convinces the City she must be arrested and housed in a TB hospital outside the city on the East River. [Adding a bit of real-life drama to my reading of Fever, I finished the novel while recovering from being a participant in the Great Flu Epidemic of 2013. I had my own literal fever and the accompanying fears of spreading what is a nasty, nasty bug.]

Mary Mallon was, at times, willful and outspoken. Those qualities served her well as she quickly made her way in service from laundress to head cook at a young age, but worked against her when she defied convention and social customs. She lived with her companion Alfred without being married; she lied her way into her first job as cook. And her violent outbursts when captured were the thing of headlines: “‘Typhoid Mary’ Most Harmless and Yet the Most Dangerous Woman in America”. 

Known also as Germ Woman, Mary was held two times on North Brother Island. During her first isolation she sought legal help and won release on the condition that she never cook for hire again. Unfortunately, the joy of cooking proved too hard to resist and Mary found a job as cook at a maternity hospital and a New York bakery where she worked under the name Mary Brown.  Caught again, Mary was housed in a small clapboard cottage  until her death at age sixty-nine. 

Keane created a sympathetic character in Mary: she was smart and headstrong. I was puzzled, however, that one so intelligent could be so obstinate: Mary repeatedly denied to her jailers, the public, and herself that she was a carrier, saying, “I’ve never been sick a day in my life.” I also felt the integrity of the novel was shaken by the addition of Alfred’s own “fevers” in the last few chapters–his fever for Mary, alcohol, and finally heroin. That might have been the author’s attempt to create a grand sweep of a novel, but story was always Mary’s–and she was grand enough to carry it on her own. 

Mary Coin (NetGalley)
Marissa Silver
Release date: March 7, 2013

“We never really knew [Grandfather],” Isaac says. 
“Some people don’t want to be known,” Walker says.
“That’s stupid,” Alice says. “Everyone wants to be known. Otherwise it’s just fucking depressing.”
Of course, she is right. Everyone wants to be known. Perhaps the ones who conceal themselves most of all. The question is: Who is foolhardy enough to go in search of them? 

Mary Coin is one writer’s attempt at searching for the woman behind Dorthea Lange’s iconic photograph from the Dust Bowl era: the mother,suspicious and weary; the children, shy and shameful; a baby at her breast. Although the actual subject of the photograph has been identified as Florence Owens Thompson, Marissa Silver renamed the woman Mary Coin and created a past  for her from the black and white image so many of us know.

Mary Coin and her husband made their way from a small farm in Oklahoma to California in search of a better life. And for a time, life was as good as might be expected for uneducated laborers during the 1930s–they had a company house and love enough to go around their six children. A mill fire set the young family onto the road again until husband Toby’s death of TB demanded that Mary, ever indomitable,  pick cotton and vegetables and citrus fruit–anything to keep her family going.

Two other lives intersected Mary’s–that of historian Walker Dodge, grandson of a man who once hired Mary Coin, and photographer Vera Dare, Silver’s stand-in for Lange. Both stories looked at family secrets, missed opportunities, and flawed fathers and mothers through the revealing lens that is time. I’m not certain how essential Vera Dare’s story was to the novel, other than her life as a mother was shadowed by some of the same issues that darkened Mary Coin’s life. Walker Dodge had a more direct connection with Mary Dare, and he only came to know her through newspaper clippings, letters, and his grandfather’s accounting records.

Mary Coin was a satisfying read and thought-provoking at the same time, although perhaps attempted too much plot-wise in 330 pages. One of my favorite scenes is when an elderly Mary Coin attends an exhibit of Dare’s work in San Francisco where the photograph is displayed, and listens to the comments of the people around her: “Mary saw her reflection in the glass. There they were. Two women named Mary Coin. If they met on the street in the high heat of a summer’s afternoon, they would be polite in the old-fashioned way to show they meant each other no harm. ‘Hello,’  they would say in passing. ‘My, but isn’t it a wretched day.'”

Quite coincidentally I finished the book after a marathon session scrapbooking my family photos for the past few years. As I backed photos with coordinating colors, added borders and embellishments, and carefully captioned each page, I wondered if anyone would stumble upon these books long after my own children were gone. Would they recognize the joy, pain, and confusion on the people smiling into the sun, clowning with family, sitting down to holiday meals? Or would they recognize that “It is a photograph, an alchemy of fact and invention that produces something recognizable as the truth. But it is not the truth.”  And would they try to seek anything out about those lives on the page? Because “everyone wants to be known. Perhaps the ones who conceal themselves most of all.”

Caleb’s Crossing
Geraldine Brooks

Caleb was a hero, there is no doubt of it. He ventured forth from one world to another with an explorer’s courage, armored by the hope that he could serve his people. He stood shoulder to shoulder with the most learned of his day, ready to take his place as a man of affairs. He won the respect of those who had been swift to dismiss him. 

Strong-willed and intelligent, Bethia Mayfield often chaffed against the rules that bound her. Learning Latin and Greek second-hand as her minister father taught brother Makepeace, Bethia longed for more but was scolded by her father when she revealed her literacy: “…why do you strive so hard to quit the place in which God has set you? … women are not made like men. You risk addling your brain by thinking on scholarly matters.” The reader knows from the first pages that this is a woman sure to have no end of trouble.

But not only was Bethia quick-witted, she was also open-hearted towards the Indian people that lived in settlements throughout the island, even developing a secret friendship with young Cheeshahteaumauk, or Caleb, as she renamed him. For a few short years as children they shared the beauty of the island–and learned about each others’ foreign worlds. At the same time, Bethia’s missionary father makes inroads with the Wampanoag, bringing them Western “civilization” with its Puritan religion and lifestyle.

But life in Great Harbor on the island of Martha’s Vineyard was spare and loss was a close companion. In the space of little more than a year, Bethia lost her beloved baby sister as well as both father and mother. Orphaned and without prospects, Bethia is indentured so that Makepeace can attend  prep school in the hopes he will one day attend Harvard. Caleb, who as a teen had become her father’s protege, followed, hoping to be one of the first native young men to be admitted to Harvard’s Indian School.

One of my reader friends remarked that while she like the book, she wanted more of Caleb’s story, and the title is a bit misleading, for this is clearly Bethia’s story. Caleb only figures as a background character after the first section of the novel and he is always seen through Bethia’s eyes. So is the title a reference to Caleb’s crossing into New England society? Or his crossing over in death which figures so prominently at the novel’s end?

I loved that Brooks demanded her reader follow the language of Bethia’s time: salvages, rather than savages; bever, rather than lunch; chirurgical, rather than surgical. I was a bit disappointed that the author’s view of the Wampanoag shaman was so one-sided, focusing only on his dark medicine and making him the novel’s boogeyman. For all of her ability to present the dark and light sides of both English and Indian culture, Brooks fell a bit short here, especially since Bethia apparently understood and accepted the shaman’s power for Good.  Bethia’s last thoughts of Caleb open to a wider world:
“I do not know which home welcomed him, at the end. Whichever is was–the celestial English heaven of seraphim, cherubin, and ophanim, or Kietan’s warm and fertile place away in the southwest, I believe that his song was powerful enough for Joel to hear and to follow him there.”

A beautiful look at what unites rather than divides us humans, race, religion, and culture aside.