My Name Is Mary Sutter Part 6

Jenny set down her coffee cup. "Mary, you have everything. Do you see? I'm a shadow. I haunt our house, I watch you go off wherever it is you go. You understand things. Women respect you. They come and ask for you." She straightened. "Thomas married me. Not you." Then she walked out of the kitchen, the door swinging in her wake.

Now, looking away to avoid having to talk to Jenny and Thomas, who stood as near one another as decorum allowed, Mary studied the crowd, thinking that she should remember it was Bonnie who truly held the capital on grief today, tucked in bed back at the Sutter house. Mary wondered, how had her brother learned such an essential thing? To be with grief, and to say nothing? Now Christian had one arm slung around Amelia's shoulders, and Amelia looked as stricken as Bonnie had that morning. Each of them losing a child, though Mary refused to believe that she wouldn't see both Christian and Thomas again.

Through the maze of people, James Blevens, his tall frame soaring a head above the others, was working his way toward her.

When he arrived, he said, "They took me as regimental surgeon," as if Mary had been anxiously waiting to hear of his appointment. They hadn't seen one another since he had brought Jake Miles to the door. Blevens had kept his promise to her, but Marsh had said, No, absolutely not. Blevens would not tell Mary about this now; he did not want to taint his good-bye with bitterness and disappointment. He was going to war, and, unreasonably, there existed the vague hope of kindness.

Mary said, "Bonnie came back to us last night. Her baby died."

"I am very sorry to hear that. How is she?"

"Grieving." Out of the corner of her eyes, Mary could see Thomas kissing Jenny. "But that is nothing to you, is it? You have your opportunity now to see what you can see. You will learn everything you want to know."

"Yes," Blevens said. "Though it is only for three months." This was all the time Lincoln wanted the volunteers for. Everyone believed that the war would be over soon. "It's likely I'll see nothing of surgery."

"Have you no family, Dr. Blevens?" Mary asked. She could not forgive him, but she noticed that he was by himself, when no one else was alone today on the quay.

"I have two brothers, but they live near Manhattan City. I haven't seen them in a long time." How was he to explain the rest? Even he himself did not understand. He had not even written Sarah to tell her of his plans. Illiterate, she took his letters to the priest, who read them to her in a pew of the dark church where they had wed. He tried to imagine what she would feel upon hearing the news, if this adventure of his would matter to her at all. But perhaps she did not even take his letters to the priest anymore. It had been a long time-six months-since a single vellum sheet in the priest's spidery handwriting had been delivered to the Staats House.

"Not even a wife? Even Thomas Fall has a wife," Mary said.

James Blevens sharpened his focus, his blue-eyed gaze darting to find the couple. She was making light of it; perhaps he had been wrong. Inscrutable in her expression, Mary did not even show envy, though he suspected it simmered alongside her well of dissatisfaction with him.

The Lady of Perth docked to make its last trip across the river, and the crowd surged, huzzahs and cheers and cries and a wild, thrilling excitement pressing all the parting together. Mary saw from the corner of her eye, though she did not want to, the deep kiss that Thomas Fall impressed upon Jenny, while Blevens and Mary met face-to-face. Mary averted her head, the only possible way to cope, for nothing would induce her to kiss a man for whom she felt only antipathy. But it did not keep her from speaking.

"You could have helped me," she said. "It would have cost you little enough in time and trouble."

"I am sorry," Blevens said, and lifted his cap, offering this lackl.u.s.ter farewell, and then the surging crowd caught him in its current and carried him away. Mary watched him go, feeling the breeze of a last door slamming shut.

Amelia was drawing Christian's wide shoulders downward, clinging to him, unable to let him go, but he unwrapped her arms from his neck, kissed her cheek, and then turned and walked away. The three men stepped onto the ferry together, James the tallest of the three, but not watched, as Christian and Thomas were, by the three women now huddled together. A hush fell on the crowd as the ferry slipped from the dock to cross the choppy river. Not one of them noticed Jake leaning against a bulkhead, a sad, sullen expression contorting his face, looking up State Street toward the Sutter home, from which he had just come.

It was Amelia, not Jenny, who needed a.s.sistance walking home, who, arriving there, fell upon her bed, pained by the futility of giving birth to a boy only to have him board a ferry for war without even a backward glance.

In the adjacent room, Bonnie Miles, seventeen years old, was weeping, having told her departing husband an hour ago that she never wanted to see him again. For how could she, when a man like Christian Sutter existed in the world?

Chapter Six.

Six weeks later, on a warm afternoon on June the fifth, 1861, a pet.i.te, dark-haired woman, often mistaken from afar for a child, strode three diagonal blocks down New York Avenue in Washington City. Crossing the cobbled street, Dorothea Dix dodged bands of drilling soldiers on Pennsylvania Avenue, then swept up an ill-tended slate walkway to the tall double entry doors of the president's house, where roving sentries let her pa.s.s with a nod. Presenting a letter confirming her appointment with Mr. Lincoln, she took in the tattered rugs and dingy walls that adorned the entryway of the Mansion and decided that chief among the needs of the new president was a better housekeeper. A butler disappeared down a shadowy hallway and returned with a man who introduced himself as John Hay, the a.s.sistant secretary, who had at first suggested that she join the long line of office seekers that gathered each morning in hopes of an audience with the president. But Miss Dix had insisted on an appointment instead, because her aim, as she had replied to Mr. Hay by return post, was not to become the tariff collector or postman in some distant town. Her aim, she had written, was to save the Union's men.

John Hay guided her upstairs, where the president's office faced north, overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, situated on this public side to avoid viewing the boggy southern White Lot into which, until recently, the house sewer had drained. But the open windows still let in its lingering stench, augmented by the City Ca.n.a.l that ran at the base of the property. Since the inundation of the capital by the seventy-five thousand men for whom Mr. Lincoln had sent, the ca.n.a.l itself had turned decidedly unpleasant. Miss Dix was no newcomer to Washington City, having pa.s.sed in and out for years to make pleas to the legislature, but the city's southern torpor and accompanying odors were always an unwelcome surprise. That it had been built on a swamp had only recently been made known to her. A maid had related this morsel of information as she went about netting the mirrors of Miss Dix's newly rented town house. "For the blackflies," the girl had said ominously, tucking a fold under the edge of a mirror. "They like to lay their eggs on the gla.s.s."

Miss Dix had heard Mr. Lincoln described as rough, but when he strode into the room the word elegance came to mind. It was not his shocking height that gave her that impression. Rather, it was that taking charge of his long limbs and torso seemed to demand a great deal of his attention; this self-consciousness communicated a kind of solemnity. Despite the heat this afternoon, he wore a black suit with a long jacket, and his tie, though knotted, dangled loosely. She had the impression that he had not slept, though whether that was due to the deep set of his eyes or the sigh that escaped him, she could not be certain. He took her small hand in his enormous one and apologized for the heat and the distinctive scent.

"I must move to a better part of town," he said, a mischievous grin breaking out on his face. She came barely to his chest, and this, combined with the sense that she was on a mission of more gravity than any she had ever undertaken, made her feel almost as shy as she usually led men to believe she was. Demureness was a helpful weapon, she had discovered, and it was a practice she had nearly perfected. She allowed the president to guide her to an armchair far away from the windows and smiled a faint but grateful thanks. The president folded himself into a large chair that barely contained his frame and said, "It is an honor to meet you. I've heard extraordinary things about your work with prison reform and the insane."

"Thank you," Miss Dix said. She had learned over the years to say nothing more when people offered compliments. She found it counterproductive to retrace old victories when her interest lay in accomplishing new ones. Politicians especially were most extravagant with their praise, and always after the fact, but it was generally a feint to forestall any new proposition, which she always had ready and which would always require work on their part.

"You've read the notes I sent you?" she asked.

Lincoln's expression gave away nothing, but by the firm set of his shoulders she feared she was about to be patronized.

"Your suggestions are well-intended," the president said. "But I am worried that your newest pet.i.tion, while both ambitious and admirable, is unnecessary. My generals tell me we have surgeons enough to take care of any needs. And, frankly, they are concerned that women in the hospitals will be"-he broke off for a moment and then found the word she was certain he thought was least offensive-"distracting."

The president was wrong about there being surgeons enough, but Miss Dix did not yet want him to know how much she knew. First she had to address his primary concern. And in it, he was being circ.u.mspect. So far in her life, the words indelicate, hysterical, meddlesome, obstructive, uncooperative , immodest, indecent, and the worst, superfluous had been flung at her in both the press and in person, usually as she embarked on some new endeavor. And somehow, her latest plan, spoken of only to her closest friends and outlined in detail by letter to the president, had been made quasi-public. She had not been in the city five days when a senator visited her town house to say that her reputation for admirable social reform would be reversed should she continue to pursue this inane idea of nursing. "Do you think," he had said, "that any mothers in the country will let their boys enlist if they are going to be exposed to women of that sort?"

"And what sort is that?" Miss Dix had asked, though she knew very well what the senator meant. After all, she herself had once witnessed a prost.i.tute employed as a nurse consorting with a patient in the halls of Bellevue Hospital.

Fl.u.s.tered, the senator had leaned forward in his chair. "I apologize for my directness, but no doubt you have seen enough in your lifetime, Miss Dix, that neither of us needs to outline what indecencies could occur should women's presence in army hospitals be condoned. Do not sully your reputation by pursuing this."

"My reputation, Senator, will be sullied if I do nothing."

Armored now by that inauspicious welcome, Miss Dix folded her hands across her lap and said to the president, "My nurses will not be distracting," letting his euphemism roll off her tongue. "They will be at all times modest and circ.u.mscribed, not leaning in any way toward the nocturnal activities of some of our lesser sisterhood."

This allusion to the s.e.xual was perhaps too much for the president's comfort. He nodded and took another tack, which was the usual strategy of men unprepared to do battle with her.

"But won't you be complicating things? More people than are necessary for the job?"

In addition to embarra.s.sment, the president's voice betrayed an air of weariness. Thousands of men were now encamped in the Capitol building and on its grounds. Already, boys hailing from isolated farms and small towns were falling sick with mumps and measles, victims of overcrowding. It was the unwritten rule of a.s.sembling armies that a third of their population would be lost to disease within the first month. Most had arrived with nothing, not even arms. And they were a hungry lot. They'd taken to slaughtering the cattle penned beneath the stunted Washington Monument when they weren't parading up and down Pennsylvania Avenue. The ch.o.r.e of managing an untrained army of volunteer militia was turning out to be a far greater task than even Mr. Lincoln had expected, with unforeseen repercussions and consequences. In his eyes, Miss Dix knew, she was one of these repercussions.

"Your generals tell you there are surgeons enough. Have they told you how many surgeons they have?" Miss Dix asked.

Lincoln shifted in his seat. "Not specifically, no."

"Twenty-seven. And only seventy-one a.s.sistants for the regular army of thirteen thousand men. And now you have an additional seventy-five thousand volunteers. Did you know that in our recent conflict with Mexico, ten men fell ill for every one injured? And in the Crimea, Miss Nightingale discovered that in one month, 2,761 soldiers had died of contagious diseases, while only eighty-three died from their wounds?

"The sick of our army are languishing even now on the floors of churches and government buildings. There are not enough proper hospitals and the war has not even yet begun. Have you considered where the wounded will go? How they will be fed? How they will bathe? Who will care for them? Do you really think that twenty-seven surgeons will be able to handle everything? Do you think they will bother with bedding? Do you think they will even have enough medicine?"

Miss Dix leaned forward. "Mr. Lincoln, I am your ally. If the war ends in one battle, then you will have no need of me. But if the war does not, if it goes on, if it becomes anything like what happened in the Crimea, then you will see our conversation today as one of the most auspicious of your career."

Mr. Lincoln fell silent. Looking into the future was his greatest skill. It was hers, too, and together they regarded it in both its forms: disastrous and more optimistic. Each seemed possible, though outside a lively band was leading an unruly swarm of soldiers down the street, as if to highlight the city's uneven and unbalanced preparations for war.

The president waited until the last strains of the music died away. "My compliments, Miss Dix. It would appear that you are a politician."

Now that she had a receptive audience, Miss Dix described Miss Nightingale's outline of the hospital conditions during the Crimean War, her reforms, and the nurses who had enacted them, explaining exactly how a nursing force could change everything.

"But why can't you just pa.s.s this information along and let the generals sort it out?" the president asked.

Miss Dix paused, trying to appear as if she hadn't already planned what she would say if Mr. Lincoln suggested this. "Perhaps the generals would appreciate this burden being lifted from them?" she asked mildly, as if the thought had only recently occurred to her.

Mr. Lincoln's manner now lost all its courtliness. She recognized this invisible pa.s.sage, for all of the men with whom she engaged in conversation crossed it at some point. There came a time when she was no longer a pet.i.te woman that courtesy demanded they hear out; instead, she became the woman who might actually save them.

"We have one remaining problem," he said. "What will you say to the skeptics, Miss Dix? Those who would worry about the delicacy of the situation you are proposing?"

She produced the circular she had composed after her meeting with the senator, the one she planned to have published in all the major newspapers across the country.

After another half hour, Dorothea Dix was in possession of three things: Mr. Lincoln's blessing, a written order to see Secretary of War Cameron, whose responsibility it would be to appoint her Female Superintendent of Army Nurses, and the troubling sense that despite her intentions, she had generated more worries for the president than she had allayed. As she said good-bye, she finally settled on the reason for her concern. She pitied him. Not because he had taken on a thankless job. That impetus she was entirely familiar with. No, she pitied him because he seemed to possess an endless capacity for grief.

Chapter Seven.

Circular Number 1 Hospitals are being established for the care of the soldiers of the Union Army who will sacrifice themselves for the good of the Union. We are in search of ladies to serve in them in the tradition of Florence Nightingale in her recent successful work caring for British soldiers in the Crimea.

No young ladies should be sent at all, but some who are sober, earnest, self-sacrificing, and self-sustained; who can bear the presence of suffering and exercise entire self-control of speech and manner; who can be calm, gentle, quiet, active, and steadfast in duty. No woman under thirty years need apply to serve in government hospitals. All nurses are required to be very plain-looking women. Their dresses must be brown or black, with no bows, no curls, no jewelry, and no hoop skirts.

If any willing lady should meet the above requirements, please send references directly to me at the corner of New York Avenue and Fourteenth Street in Washington City.

Miss Dorothea Dix Female Superintendent of Army Nurses That Mary Sutter would read the circular was inevitable. The daily perusal of the newspaper for information of the 25th Regiment had become a ritual for her, in search of rea.s.surance. The paper had progressively reported that the 25th had traveled via steamer and landed at Annapolis, thereby avoiding the city of Baltimore and the fate of the Sixth Ma.s.sachusetts, who had been set upon in that city by Southern sympathizers while marching from one railway depot to another. Four soldiers were killed and not a few civilians. Rebels had also sabotaged the railroad that ran south from Annapolis into Washington, but undaunted, the Sixth Ma.s.sachusetts had gone to Annapolis and marched from there along the rail lines, repairing them as they went. The 25th had followed, becoming among the first troops to enter Washington. They set up camp near the unfinished Capitol building, absent its crowning dome, and then took over Caspari's Guest House on A Street, sleeping in its rooms and stable and backyard and fouling the neighborhood round about. On May 24, however, they had decamped from the city of Washington, whose citizens had been at first thrilled and then appalled by the surfeit of so many rowdy volunteers for their safety, and had invaded Virginia, where they were now chopping down trees to build a fort.

So far, the war was quiescent. Rarely a shot fired. Only Colonel Ellsworth from East Albany, a member of the Fire Zouaves, had suffered, shot and killed by an inflamed hotel owner after Ellsworth had removed a Rebel flag from an Alexandria hotel the night of the Virginia invasion. Ellsworth's war had been extravagantly personal; Abraham Lincoln was his friend. In death there was glory, but for the 25th only drudgery, throwing up fireworks and fortifications along the ridgeline on the Potomac River.

"You're not thinking of going, are you?" Jenny asked, after Mary had read the circular out loud by the fire, laid it on the table, and looked around at Amelia, Jenny, and Bonnie gathered in the parlor before dinner. The windows were open to the last of the sweet June air. Soon the heat of July would sour Albany's peculiar drafts and perpetual odors beyond tolerance and the windows would have to be shut.

Jenny did not see the possibilities.

Neither did Amelia.

The four women had risen, the tea things abandoned. Bonnie, their permanent guest-until, at least, Christian returned home to claim his room-was thinking not about Mary going, but about how soon Jake might be coming to reclaim her.

"It will be drudgery," Amelia said.

"No less than what Christian and Thomas are suffering. If I am in Washington, I could see them." Mary thought of Washington as she thought of Albany, a city of ready transportation, of ease, the prospect of calling on a friend no difficulty at all. The work of an afternoon. She did not yet comprehend the vastness of the capital, or its provincial, unwieldy, and besieged condition. "And think of what I will learn. Oh, Mother, it's an opportunity."

In the intervening month and a half since the 25th had left, Mary had delivered five babies. Only one delivery had proved mildly challenging, while the others had proceeded benignly. The thrill of learning she had experienced in becoming a midwife had been replaced of necessity by the more quotidian habit of vigilance, and though she was always on the lookout for the disasters of childbirth-the rare inverted uterus, a developing maternal seizure, a placenta that refused to detach, and of course, the more common event of maternal hemorrhage-day-to-day midwifery now held only the slightest appeal for her. The truth was that you had to know very little to deliver a baby. Babies mostly delivered themselves. Only rarely did the process take on the need for extraordinary skill and urgency; as a practice, the procedure had become routine, almost dull.

"An opportunity," Mary said again, "that I do not want to miss."

"You won't defeat me on this. I won't allow it." Amelia was staking her position. Having a daughter like Mary had been both boon and travail: she was excellent company when engaged, sharp of mind, quick with insight, but a formidable antagonist when crossed.

Mary said, "James Blevens is not the only one who knows an opportunity when he sees it."

"But you cannot become a surgeon by going to Washington to be a nurse." Sometimes Amelia worried that Mary was too much like her, too willing to follow responsibility through. She shuddered, remembering that evening long ago, when she had returned to the house when Nathaniel had left for Buffalo and had found the girls in their beds. She was glad now that they had been too young to remember it, that Mary could not use it now to goad her into acquiescing.

"I cannot become one by staying home, either."

Across the country that night, other mothers were saying, Think of the deprivation. Think of the scandal. Consider the danger.

From her quiet corner, Bonnie was suffering envy. Her mother had died when she was very young. That is how she had come to be married so young to Jake Miles. Her father had forced the match; he had not wanted her anymore. And here was Mary, wanting to leave, when she had everything that anyone could ever want.

"Do not mistake me," Amelia said. "I do not think you are overreaching, Mary. But you will not find satisfaction in Washington. You will only be discouraged and beaten down. And besides, you are not thirty years old. This Miss Dix won't accept you." Amelia had already lost Christian to the war, and she did not want to sacrifice Mary too. Besides, Mary had no idea what she might be facing. Amelia had no idea, either, but she did have fear. Mary's ambition and curiosity was not worth the price of venturing into the unknown. She had always wanted too much.

Amelia's opposition was unprecedented. "Help me, Jenny?" Mary asked.

But Jenny hoped the war would never begin. It had been weeks and weeks now since the 25th had left, and to her great relief, nothing terrible had yet occurred. "They will all be home very soon. And you will have exhausted yourself for nothing," she said.

Mary perceived the caution, but also the abandonment.

"Don't look at me like that," Jenny said. "Incuriosity is not a crime."

"Neither is curiosity."

"I'm sorry," Jenny said, touching Mary's wrist. Then she let go and sat down quickly on her chair.

Mary reached her hand across the divide and took Jenny's elbow; Jenny had turned a peculiar shade and had lifted her hand to her mouth.

"Jenny?"

Amelia knelt at her daughter's side. Bonnie, Jenny's twin in ignorance, stepped backwards to better allow the Sutter women she admired to administer care.

Jenny was not dramatic; there was no wish to divert attention. Of this, Mary was certain, even as Jenny broke free and rushed down the hallway.

The unmistakable sound of retching came from the open door of the water closet.

"I'm sorry," Jenny gasped from the closet's confines. "I don't know what the matter is."

A cold rag was fetched, hair was held back. Mary loosened Jenny's corset, and it was this untwining of the cords, with its implication of intimacy, that caused both midwives to look at one another and say at the same time, "When was your last monthly, Jenny?"

On Jenny's part, there was a display of confusion and then a long, embarra.s.sed exhalation of recognition.

At the dinner table, Jenny sipped broth. An a.s.sumption of victory prevailed on the part of Amelia, who, both delighted and paralyzed at the news that her less hardy daughter would be facing the perils of labor by the end of the year, was failing to remember that Mary had a mind of her own. She considered the subject of Mary's leaving forgotten. It was the same at dinner tables all over the country that night. Mothers a.s.sumed that having put their feet down, their daughters would comply, while daughters, pretending to have listened, made secret plans. The topic of new babies was also general conversation around the country. January of 1862, when Jenny was due, would be the busiest month for midwives in ten years. Farewell babies, they would be called. Three months later, in April, there would be another round of newborns nine months after Lincoln called for yet another hundred thousand men.

It was not that Amelia was insensitive to Bonnie or Mary, though the news had a differing effect on each of them. Bonnie was determined not to spoil Amelia's or Jenny's delight, because women went on having children, didn't they? What did it matter that her arms ached from emptiness, that yesterday she had had to stop herself from sweeping a baby from its carriage? She might one day have a baby that lived; it was this hope that sustained her. Mary was aware of everything; the queasy happiness of her sister, the cautious antic.i.p.ation of her mother, the generous restraint of their guest, but mostly she was aware that the Argus carried on its front page a listing of the arrival and departure times of both the trains and the Hudson River day boats. She excused herself to make certain that the maids had not thrown out the paper in a flurry of efficiency.

Very early the next morning, a hired hack pulled to a stop on Quay Street. From it climbed a young woman carrying a hastily packed valise. She walked briskly along the granite sidewalk, steering her formidable frame past the closed storefronts of dry grocers and brothels toward the wharf, where at a booth, a young man sold her a ticket for two dollars. The young woman walked through the gate and down the slanted gangplank to the deck of the steamer Mary Powell. Though it was six a.m., a band was playing on the deck, a circ.u.mstance that the brothel dwellers along the quay had long despaired of. The woman took a seat on a bench at the prow as the ship's horn blasted three times and steam roared from the two stacks in the center of the boat. Crewmen uncoiled thick ropes and threw them onto the deck. The paddle churned and the boat backed away, the reversed engines blowing coal smoke, fouling the morning air. The engines reversed again and the ship steered away from the dock and maneuvered around a ferry and a river schooner laden with lumber. Out in the channel, the ship's boards vibrated with the thrum of the engines. A rising breeze played with the loose ends of the woman's hair as the black river water slipped underneath the sharp prow.

The young woman imagined her mother finding the note she had left behind.

In her valise, she carried forty dollars, three dresses, and her stethoscope. In only six hours' time, she would be dropped at the docks in Manhattan.

Chapter Eight.

A few weeks earlier, when the 25th Regiment had abandoned Caspari's Guest House to march west under a full moon along the filthy streets bordering the southern perimeter of the capital, they left behind the liquor they had managed to find on every street corner, the prost.i.tutes in Swampdoodle, the daily drilling, the press of men, the unfinished Capitol dome, the stunted Washington Monument, and the doomed cows who grazed in the vast pastures that lay between. They did not know what drudgery lay ahead of them, though when they dropped their haversacks and took up axes to fell the tall, bowed firs of Arlington Heights, they soon understood. The men who had come to fight, who had been roused to enlist in granges and community halls to take back the Union from the infidels, instead chopped wood and shoveled dirt to build redoubts. It was raw work. They suffered blisters, chiggers, mosquitoes, and then the cutting began in earnest. In ever-widening circles, trees fell. Soon they could see southward across the Rebel hills and northward to the capital they were protecting. The 25th named the piece of earth they were clearing Fort Albany, since it was their hard work that was accomplishing the task and since they missed home so much. The Albany men were not alone. From the Long Bridge in the south to the Chain Bridge far to the north, barricades made up of Virginia fir and clay blighted the landscape, hewn by men from Connecticut and Ohio and Pennsylvania, all of them dreaming of home. They posted pickets and rotated night duty, but it was difficult to equate what they were doing with soldiering.