North Brother Island

An old man, a young woman and a helmsman pulled up at the boat ramp, slick with East River slime. The short voyage had been a little rocky, this not really being a river but a saltwater estuary of conflicting tides.

A crow’s mile from Manhattan, the ghost island was sedately fragmenting, brick-by-brick, frame-by-frame, beneath a kudzo canopy.

They say it is now a bird sanctuary, a plumaged excuse for Parks and Recreation to sit on their backsides for rolling decades debating what to do with it. Few people were allowed there, but the old man was something big in P&R, and the young woman was his granddaughter. It opened doors, even when those doors were now mouldering in the ground cover.

‘Careful,’ he warned, extending a hand to the girl. ‘Slippy.’

The girl looked around and shuddered. She could see Hell Gate Bridge in the distance. Grandpa said Rikers island was just next door. The sun was of no particular mind, feeling both humid and yet elusive. The cubist city landscape was so close, and yet here, on the sandy foreshore, it seemed immediately unattainable. Like you could be left there forever and never speak to another living soul.

There was evidence of the wading bird in the narrow strip of white sand, but beyond their webbed impress, all else was quiet.

‘There are no critters here,’ said grandpa, reading her mind. ‘Nothing an omnivore would want to eat, unless they like kudzo. Funny how a Bronx rat can’t make it across, but a Japanese creeper has no trouble at all.’

‘Yeah, funny,’ said the girl, rolling her eyes. ‘What’s in the hamper, grandpa?’ She said it so it rhymed.

‘Something your grandmother put together by way of a picnic.’

‘Here?’

‘Yes, here.’ He stopped and looked at her. ‘C’mon. Take photographs. You were always so interested in it.’

‘Not old buildings,’ she protested. ‘They give me the heebies.’

’S’posed to,’ he said equably. ‘People love this stuff, and you’re privileged to get to see it.’

‘I suppose mother’s been talking to you.’

‘She has.’

‘And what does she say?’

‘She says you’re a pain in the ass. Now come on.’

The girl stood her ground. Spoiled. Petulant. The old man sighed.

‘She hasn’t changed,’ he said. ‘You have. You don’t understand what it’s like to parent a teenager. It’s a creeping terror. You’re been smoking that stink-weed, lying in bed all day, disrespecting her and everyone else around you. You’ve lost your charms, kiddo - and you need to get ‘em back. Things can happen to people, you know? All of a sudden. You won’t want to be spending the rest of your life regretting stuff, believe me.’

Betty’s camera was a digital made to look old-school. Grandpa tutted about that, until she told him it was so much easier to post on-line this way. Through the brief exchange, she was thinking of her art assignment and how good this material would be. Her thoughts hadn’t turned that way in a long time and Grandpa, seeing the inner workings, allowed himself a brief smile.

Just a little way ahead, where the coiling roots were already hazardous, they passed a corroded trash bin, eaten away like a shark had trespassed. It was this evidence of human occupation which unsettled the nerves, whispering to an instinctive fear of abandonment.

Grandpa had brought the plans so she could get a better feel for the original layout. He also showed her a series of photos from the days when it was once a Victorian sanitarium, a quarantine island, a place for recuperating vets, and then latterly, before it closed in 1963, a home for drug-addicted children. Outside one sagging shell, where lianas broke through the rafters, a 1950s fold-up chair with a bright orange seat sat expectantly in the shade. Betty took a photo of it. She said it was haunting, thinking that some poor kid would have once sat there, maybe drenched in the sweat of withdrawal, looking towards whatever passed for home.

‘Did it work for the kids?’ she asked.

‘Nope.’

Grandpa stopped abruptly, as was his habit, as if talking and walking were not ideal companions. ‘That’s why you don’t start down that road,’ he said.

‘Here.’ Grandpa unhooked the two hard hats hanging from his backpack and adjusted the red one to fit his granddaughter. ‘Go inside,’ he said. ‘But be careful.’ She was hesitant. He told her he’d be right behind her, just like always.

‘Which building was this?’ she asked, gaping at the destruction within. Precious little was recognisable from the photos she’d just seen. Nature, she conceded, had a mulish way of reclaiming its own.

Grandpa consulted his plans.

‘Main office, I think. This island was coal-fired, so that huge chimney adjoining was to carry the smoke away. There’s another chimney, further inland, which adjoined the morgue. That’s a different kind of smoke.’

She was startled by the thought. In her adolescent mind only very old people died, and always at a sanitised remove.

‘People die, Betty. Especially in a sanitarium. Don’t shift anything,’ the old man warned. ‘Could be asbestos.’

She laughed. ‘This is a house of cards, grandpa. If I move just one thing it’s all going to come down.’

After an hour spent documenting the ruined blood-red structures, which stood out against the greenery like a kindergarten paintbox, they settled their backs against a tall, reaching tree and opened the hamper. Facing them was a rectangular building which grandpa assumed had been the main body of the sanitarium. Other smaller structures, with wraparound porches, had once been home to medical staff and their families. In its time it would have been beautiful. It would have held the damp wafer smell of the institution, but it could never have been accused of drab functionality.

Earlier they had walked across twin tennis courts, their surfaces broken up by deep and tenacious roots. They both agreed, in words unsatisfactory to the feeling, that it was somehow the saddest remnant of all. They could almost hear the revenant ghost of tennis balls sallying back and forth, the grunts of exertion and the shrieks of triumph.

The windows in the sanitarium block were broken. All the windows were broken elsewhere, but during the dappled pause beneath the tree canopy, Betty wondered aloud why that should be so.

‘Could be birds,’ said grandpa, but he doubted they were that stupid: to avoid the brick walls only to smash through the windows. ‘Illegal visitors, more likely,’ he said. The mention of human activity reminded him about the game wall. ’It’s just a poured concrete piece of whimsy the kids could smash their balls against.’

Betty smirked. Grandpa told her to grow up. ‘It’s got graffiti on it,’ he said. ‘Kids come here to do what they do, although how they get here is lost on me. Daddy’s rowboat, I suppose. Dangerous anyways.’

‘We need to find that wall,’ she said. ‘It'll look good for my project. Urban art in the wilderness ..’

Grandpa raised his eyebrows and smiled some more.

Here the birdsong was louder, though it bore a muffled quality lacking in the city types. Of course, nothing to stop them sitting in Manhattan trees, but this was home, the fledgling’s backstory, a place never out of sight or mind. They were waiting for crumbs, and the young woman and the old man obliged them.

They tripped over undergrowth and stood just feet away from the damp course of the building. ‘How many people do you think died here?’ she mused.

‘Countless,’ said grandpa. ‘And don’t forget the General Slocum in 1904. A pleasure steamer that burst into flames and finally sank just by the beach out front. 1,400 German-Americans going for a picnic on Long Island, God bless ‘em. Over a thousand souls died, women in long skirts, men in woollen suits, children, very few of them able to swim. Most of them washed ashore here, right where we moored. Seen photographs where they’re all lined up like a canning factory. It remains the biggest maritime disaster in US history, but people only talk of Titanic. They don’t remember this at all. No Astors or Guggenheims on board, I guess.’

‘I’ll do my research,’ she said, taking his arm. Her cheeks had bloomed roses. At this moment, in this strange and complicated place, there was scant evidence of the unholy wretch her mother complained of.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘But I’m not done with you yet.’

‘I’m always nice to you,’ she said.

‘Uh huh! Betty, children are always nice to their grandparents. They can smell the inheritance through the mothballs.’

They took a step back and walked a little deeper, where they found the wall with the graffiti tags. After a few shots, and varied studied angles, Betty considered herself done, mindful of her grandpa’s slowing steps and occasional breathlessness. And it occurred to her, a tugging revelation, that she was also thinking of someone else, of the boatman, waiting on the sand strip beneath the rotting gantry. Did he bring sandwiches?

They made one more entry on their return, to a building with kitchen equipment in-situ, disguised beneath layers of guano. A canteen area where ailing people and later, troubled kids, perhaps took their meals.

‘Talking of kitchens,’ said grandpa, as they linked arms on their way to the shore. ‘Ever heard of Typhoid Mary?’

‘Of course,’ she told him. ‘Everyone has, especially now she’s a Marvel villain.’

‘I have no idea what you’re talking about,’ he grumbled, ‘but this is where she died.’

The girl stopped short and pursed her pearly lips. ‘Nooooo!’ Eyes wide.

‘Spent 26 of her 69 years incarcerated here.’

‘Poor woman,’ the girl said. ‘It wasn’t her fault.’

Grandpa held her back. He waved at the boatman, who seemed happy enough playing poker on his phone.

‘At first,’ he said, ‘it wasn’t Mary Mallon’s fault. She was asymptomatic, someone who must have contracted typhoid but didn’t feel a damned thing. It took an intrepid city official to track her down as the source. She went at him with a kitchen utensil when he asked her for a sample of her faeces. Hell of an Irish temper on her, by all accounts.’

‘In 1907 they rounded up some city enforcement types to pin her down and quarantine her here. She was furious the whole time. Wouldn’t accept that she was a typhoid carrier and that, as a consequence, she would have to be careful what she did and how she went about it. Three years later they let her out on the strict proviso that she could no longer be a cook. Told her that hundreds of people had suffered by her actions, and some had died.’

‘What happened after that?’

‘This is when Mary comes to deserve her bad reputation. After her release she did a spell in a launderette, but soon grew tired of that and went back to cooking, knowing what she knew. Other people started getting ill, and in 1915 she was re-incarcerated when they found her working in the kitchens of a maternity hospital. Plenty of people got sick and one nurse died. So straight back here she came, and they never let her out again. She had her chance and she blew it. However harsh that seems nowadays, she got what she deserved at the time. She knew she was a danger, and she ignored it. Thought everyone else was wrong, despite all the evidence to the contrary.’

‘Is this some lesson for me, grandpa?’

‘Yep. None of the other superspreaders were locked up like Mary because they did as they were told. Only she was. And she was locked up mostly because she was reckless, ignorant and lacked charm. Charm is what gets you through life, Betty, and you start with your own mother because, if you don’t, everything else is a sham. She doesn’t deserve your piquant brand of shit.’

***

The boat took its time fighting against the currents, but kept a steady course towards Barretta Point Park. To any bird circling overhead, aiming home from its day in the city, the scene below was tranquil. Just an old man with a young woman, leaning against his shoulder and smiling, with the air of a chastened sinner, against the stiffening breeze.