My Name Is Mary Sutter Part 21

Up the hill behind him between the rows of tents, a corporal was calling, "Thomas Fall. Thomas Fall. Anyone seen Thomas Fall?" When Thomas hailed him, the corporal said, "I was told to find you. Come on."

The log guardhouse housed a desk and a guard who stepped outside when Thomas came in. Inside, two figures waited in the dim light.

"Thomas."

An upswell of joy fought to the surface, but just as quickly ebbed, though he did not understand at first why. Neither could he say, precisely, what about Mary's appearance frightened him most. In the dim light, he could make out that she was still far too thin, too serious, and that her gaze harbored pity and dread, and something of guilt, but not compa.s.sion. No. That was reserved for the man who stood beside her. Stipp. That was his name. The doctor at the hotel.

Later, Mary would not recall even saying h.e.l.lo, offering greetings, or inquiring after Thomas's health.

For so many years, she had given people bad news, and now she had an agonizing memory of delivering the truth fast and unvarnished. The baby is dead, or Your wife is dead. What arrogance she had entertained, that she had believed she knew how to say such things to people. Now, in the bleak cold of the dismal guardhouse, she said, "I've been home, Thomas."

Her voice broke as she measured her next words, telling the story she had gone over a hundred times in her mind, keeping her gaze fixed on Thomas's face.

When she was finished, Thomas sank to his knees. For a long moment, he stayed there as if in prayer, his shoulders hunched forward, his hands obscuring his face, and though his silence cut through the cold air like a scalpel, Mary's feet refused to move. Outside, the fort went about its clatter and nonsense. Through the small window, Mary glimpsed the ruined landscape through which she and Stipp had traveled, the clear-cut forest, the exposed stumps naked in devastation, the ribs and barbs of the newly constructed wooden barricades piercing the cold air, the troughs and trenches that spidered away from the fort, a corduroy road made of logs sinking into the sea of muck.

Thomas's words floated toward her, as if they too were mired in the same muddy sea.

"If you'd have gone home earlier, when Amelia wanted you to, could you have saved her?" he asked.

Jenny's face surged before Mary. If she had left even a week earlier, two, perhaps Thomas would not be asking her this. She would have been there from the start, could say now yes or no, definitively.

"I don't know," she said.

She took a step toward him, but he held up his hands.

She stood in the center of the room as the wind sliced through the c.h.i.n.ked logs and rendered the room as cold as the outdoors.

"I'm sorry-"

"Don't," Thomas said, shaking his head. "Don't."

"Bonnie is there. She is good with the baby, Thomas. She is gentle, and generous-"

"I said, don't."

Mary put her hand to the desk to steady herself. "Why didn't you go home, Thomas? You could have seen her, you could have had time with her before-"

"We all want too much, don't we?"

"I beg your pardon?" Mary said, but it was as if Thomas were echoing her nightmares, as if he had read every single thought of hers on the train ride back. She could feel Stipp behind her, straining to protect her from the truth.

"Glory, honor, ambition. What are these worth now?"

"Son," Stipp said, stepping forward, but Thomas heaved himself to his feet and walked past them, out the door into the mud, leaving the savage room open to the cold rain.

The towpath of the C&O was infinitely better maintained than the roads at this time of year, which was why Stipp had decided to return to Georgetown along its crowded path, rather than over the potholed turnpike, the way they had come earlier that morning.

Mary was seated on the carriage bench beside him, staring off over the roof of a packet boat into the steep wooded hills rising sharply from either side of the ca.n.a.l. Since leaving Fort Marcy, she had not spoken. From time to time the wagon lurched into a pothole and she was thrown against Stipp, but still she did not speak. He could hardly blame her. The scene at Fort Marcy had been unbearable. Thomas's question had ripped through Stipp's heart. Had he sounded as broken when Genevieve had died?

"Thomas was in shock," he said now. "He'll realize-"

Mary said, "I knew what would happen, I knew it as soon as Jenny said she was with child."

"You can't predict-"

"I should have gone home when Amelia wanted me to." Self-protection was no excuse. You love too little, you love too much. It was all selfishness. If only, if only.

Stipp could hardly bear her sorrow. He wanted to take her away, to travel on past Georgetown, across the Aqueduct Bridge, past the entire Confederate army, to the marshes and estuaries of Chesapeake Bay and the sea, where they could wade into the breakers and be taken up by a pa.s.sing ship. They would travel back to Texas, live with Lilianna. How old would the boy be now? Four? Had it been only a year since he'd seen them? It seemed a lifetime. He thought, I just won't stop. I'll keep driving and we'll forget the war and all its pain. They traveled on, pa.s.sing the slow mule teams hauling packet boats down the ca.n.a.l toward Georgetown and, as they neared the town, row houses and factories and warehouses sprouting from the treed hillside. Mary was remembering another earlier, difficult trip on a towpath in Albany with Thomas, just before he met Jenny and everything changed. She would go back in time, she thought. She would go back and change everything, if she could. Men were shouting as they unloaded and loaded barges at the warehouse doors opening onto the ca.n.a.l, the day crackling with work and the war. Above, on Bridge Street, a horsecar was struggling to turn as a train of army wagons slogged through the mud.

"Mary?" Stipp said.

She turned to look at him, her face masked and unreadable. She bore none of the fierce confidence that had driven her to hunt him down at the Union Hotel eight months ago, none of I will climb through that window.

"I'm nothing. I can't help anyone. Why did I think that I could?"

"You're just tired," Stipp said, pulling over to the side of the path to speak to her.

The mule team behind them could not get around them. The driver swore and deckhands jumped off the packet boat to slow it down so that it wouldn't drag the mules with it as it drifted forward. Behind them another packet did the same.

"Back home, afterwards-after Jenny died-my mother and I said things to each other that we've never said before. I said something I wish I'd never said. She'll never forgive me."

"That was only your grief speaking. People say things."

"I betrayed her trust."

"She trusts you."

Mary shook her head. "No. I'm arrogant and clumsy and proud. And I want things I shouldn't want."

Stipp suspected she meant Thomas, at least he hoped that's what she meant, because he needed her to want to be a surgeon. He didn't know how he could live without her. The long month of January had been a dark cave whose only light had been the possibility of Mary's return.

"You'll see. You're just tired," he said, unable to say, Want me, but Mary's blank glance confirmed the inadequacy of his reply, and he took up the reins and snapped the horses forward.

When they left the towpath, men were still leaping onto the path from more than a dozen boats, ropes blistering their hands as they dug in to hold back catastrophe.

The hotel had been bedecked with flags and sentinels, its new, official status recently proclaimed by the Surgeon General's office. Outside its doors, a good many of the convalescents were standing about, brightened by even a brief stint in the drizzly February cold. They greeted Stipp and Mary with the restless air of those with untold news.

"They're closing the hospital down."

Chapter Thirty-seven.

Circular Number 18, February the 2nd, 1862 By order of the Surgeon General, the general hospital in Georgetown in the former Union Hotel is to be closed the first day of May 1862. The premises are vermin-infested, dilapidated and crumbling, and do not meet our rising standards for military hospitals. The staff is to be divided forthwith among the hospitals at Miss Lydia's Seminary and Georgetown College. Those patients afflicted with small pox and typhoid should be directed to the Insane Asylum for isolation purposes. The building is to be razed.

The army, the circular went on to say, was going to build a new hospital right under the Capitol building on the mall, to be named Armory Square. It would be the pride of the army, the nation. It would transform medical care. It would make people forget that the Union Hotel Hospital had ever existed. There would be regulations. There would be ventilated wards and ward nurses and supervisors. Surgeons would have care over a wing each. The hospital would be advantageously situated near the Long Bridge, eliminating the torturous rides over the city's bad roads to reach the little hotel in Georgetown. Lives would be saved. Order would reign.

Their eyes met. Eight months since they had first met in this room. A lifetime. Stipp lit a lantern and the sweet smell of kerosene flooded the room.

"Don't give up hope," Stipp said. "Anything is possible yet." Trying to atone for You are only tired. Trying not to panic. He had orders to report to the surgeon general for employment as a regimental surgeon, but Mary was not listed on the government payroll, and so was now unprotected, without a post.

"Perhaps Miss Dix would help you. She has come around, I believe. Or what about Blevens? Surely he would take you. He would be delighted to have you, I'm sure." Tried to say it without the least bit of envy. "Or, I will write you a letter of introduction anywhere-to medical school, perhaps, or Miss Lydia's Seminary Hospital. They treat officers there. It's where Blevens would have gone after the fire if he hadn't come here. You could work there, Mary; it would not be the abyss that it has been here." Trying to keep her from breaking. "Or, perhaps, you could return home."

He would say, I love you again, but that was not what she required, no matter how much he required it. If he could retrieve those words, he would, and silence them to the end of time, just to ease her in his presence.

Mary was looking past him. She still wore the funereal hat that she had worn to Fort Marcy, her black cloak wrapped around her.

"People want to believe that we can do anything," Stipp said. "That doctors can erase pain, erase inevitability." We doctors, though she wasn't one yet and might never be. "But it isn't true."

Even Lazarus had been resurrected.

"My mother was right. I could have saved Jenny," Mary said. She was speaking now as if Stipp weren't in the room, as if she were negotiating with death itself. She looked up distractedly. The spectral shadows of the kerosene light flared against her skin, illuminating the hollows under her cheekbones.

The dinner bell clanged. All through the hotel, beds sc.r.a.ped, feet thumped to the floor. The future dead, rising to forestall.

She was slipping away, leaving the sh.o.r.es for h.e.l.l. The lantern flickered: Charon, impatient to be off. A ferry to the other side. Her eyes stared straight ahead, though what was to come was around a bend, uncertain except in certain regret. The safety rope of ambition trailed behind. Slippery; it, too, uncertain. The cruelty of war was such that coincidence, in the past nearly always a pleasant surprise, was turned to sadness: to want to become a surgeon, only to see the chance offered, then ruined before your eyes. To find your brother-in-law, only to have to tell him terrible news.

"Mary," he said. "Why did you want to be a surgeon?" You won't last. He did not want the victory; he hadn't even wanted it in the beginning. G.o.d's judgment. Or joke.

Mary opened her mouth to speak, but no sound emerged. Had it been conceit to wish to conquer death?

"It doesn't matter what I wanted," she finally said.

The light in the lantern flared and then blew out, as upstairs a door slammed.

Mary rose to take Stipp's hand, a commonplace enough gesture. She ought to touch his face, she ought to rea.s.sure him, as he had once rea.s.sured her.

At the door, she turned, her hand on the k.n.o.b.

But before he could say anything, Mary turned and went away into the dark.

Chapter Thirty-eight.

To get to Washington, Thomas had understood, you had to follow the C&O towpath southward until Georgetown, but he couldn't just walk down the towpath, because there were patrols on the lookout for invading Confederates and spies. Instead, he had to bushwhack alongside it through the underbrush, which he had started to do in the dark before dawn, after abandoning his post on the great rocks overlooking the Potomac when his fellow guard fell asleep in the deep morning chill. The forest in February in Maryland was a vast, sucking pool of mud, but Thomas slogged ever southward, keeping the ca.n.a.l in view as he fought through the endless frozen thicket rising on the hillsides along the ca.n.a.l. But by noon he was exhausted, his arms and face abraded by the brittle branches, his legs coated with freezing clay. A mile north of Georgetown, a cavalry unit met him just as he left the cover of the forest. They had been on the lookout since dawn, when they'd been alerted to a deserter leaving the Chain Bridge unguarded. They identified Thomas by the look of desolation that they'd noticed in other deserters, the ones truly desperate to get home. They marched him at gunpoint down the path, skirting with difficulty the mule teams towing barges toward the Tidewater locks where the C&O joined the Potomac River, past the Observatory and the Aqueduct Bridge, the farm kids and dogs running alongside, shouting and barking insults. They marched him right into Washington and reached the Central Guardhouse just as the sun grew pale and dropped from the sky. It had been a march of some miles, and Thomas, cold and footsore, sank onto a rectangle of s.p.a.ce on the prison floor in the large cell that held the day's acc.u.mulation of drunks and pickpockets.

Among the clangs of cell doors shutting and guards shouting, a tuneless whistle drifted over the heads of the milling men.

"Hey. Fall. Hey."

In front of him squatted Jake Miles in a tattered Union shirt, coat, and cap. The war was a war of brothers, acquaintances, enemies. A quick whiff of Jake's breath told Thomas all he needed to know.

Take care of Christian. That was the last thing he had said to Jake at the Capitol before he had gone in search of Mary.

Thomas lunged.

He was in such a rage that he did not hear the shouts of his fellow prisoners, the warnings of the guards, did not feel Jake's drunken slaps about his head. Then someone hit him in the back of the head with a rifle b.u.t.t, and he was dragged off to one of the single cells and thrown onto the floor. He spent the night sleepless and hungry, swatting at mice and roaches. In the morning, he lined up with the rest to be examined by the judge advocate, who listened stone-faced to Thomas's story.

"And where did you think you were you going, Fall?" he asked when Thomas had finished.

"Home, sir."

The judge ordered him returned to his regiment. By two o'clock that afternoon, Thomas was back at Fort Marcy standing on a barrel in the middle of the fort near the bomb-proof for everyone to see. That night, he was allowed to return to his tent, where he collapsed from exhaustion and finally, wretchedly, began to cry.

Grief, the third casualty of war.

The next morning, Stipp stood at the door to Mary's room. Pinned to the pillow was a note.

Dr. Stipp, The ledgers are in the cabinet in the dining room. Under the pillow is the key to the supply cabinet; keep it from Mr. Mack, he would have it if he could. The nurses all require direction, especially Monique, who charms but is occasionally careless with dressing changes. The stick for unclogging the water closet is in the bas.e.m.e.nt, behind the stairs. Extra bluing for the linens can be had from Jacob Harlow, the egg man; he is cagier than he looks, so bargain hard.

Yours, Mary Sutter

Chapter Thirty-nine.

James Blevens judged Charles Tripler, the medical director of the Army of the Potomac, to be in his mid-fifties. He was a balding, mustachioed man, whose years in the army told of decades in the sun, but he was nonetheless energetic and argumentative. His widely read Manual of the Medical Officer of the Army of the United States had been written after his service in both the Seminole Wars and the Mexican War, and he was considered to be the most experienced and knowledgeable pract.i.tioner among all the surgeons in the halved army, North or South. Now he was leaning forward in front of the fireplace in his parlor, talking eagerly.

"Egad, man, you want me to choose between microscopes and ambulances? You must be joking. Though that terrible excuse of a surgeon general Finley designed a rattletrap of a beast; did you ever see anyone survive an ambulance ride for the better?"

"Not at Bull Run, no," Blevens answered.

"You were there? d.a.m.n it all, I wish I'd have been. I miss war. I'd have court-martialed Finley on the basis of the ambulance fiasco alone. The b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

"A microscope is equally, if not more, important than-"

"You cannot be serious. More important than evacuation of the wounded from the field? How are you going to explain that to the mothers whose sons are left behind?"

A gla.s.s of whiskey warming in his hand, James Blevens said that of course there would be no way to explain it.

It had been difficult to hunt down the peripatetic Tripler. To be sitting now, finally, in Tripler's well-appointed rooms on New York Avenue in the middle of February was the result of November, Blevens knew, the fire having done the hard work of garnering him an appointment with the revered doctor. His hands had healed well enough, though they were still stiff, and while Tripler was welcoming, the energetic man was swinging his top leg rather agitatedly over the other. Snow was falling all over the city; Blevens had struggled through the drifts from the Patent Office Hospital, where he had gone to work soon after Christmas. He was in charge of the typhoid that was ravaging the troops; so far, nearly a thousand cases had been reported. He suspected that was the disease now sickening Mr. Lincoln's sons, though Dr. Stone, the Lincolns' family physician, had proclaimed their illness to be bilious fever.

"I cannot condone your request for a microscope when I cannot buy a four-wheeled ambulance to save my soul," Tripler said. "Or even get the men to clean out their camps, though making them take quinine in whiskey has certainly made all the difference on fevers. Sick call is nothing now. Did you know the Sanitary Commission is supplying the army with quinine until we can produce enough for everyone?"

"I've observed in the stools of all my patients afflicted with diarrhea some small bacteria, which may be contributing in some way-"