Robin Oliveira

by My Name Is Mary Sutter (v5)

  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, embarrassed exhalation of recognition.

  At the dinner table, Jenny sipped broth. An assumption 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 assumed 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 anticipation 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 circumstance 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 prostitutes 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.

  They mostly tried to find food and wondered why the army had sent them out of the city without even a thought to their nourishment. They ate what they could gather from the nearby farms or foraged from the hills, the best being the hogs that wandered through the newly cleared forests, confused, easily caught. The men urinated and defecated in camp and failed to build sinks. They drank from the streams that the neighboring fort used as its privy. They did not wash. They slept without blankets upon the impervious Virginia clay. When it rained, tributaries of mud coursed through the camp, bringing with it a plague of enteric disease that rendered James Blevens, miserably, a privy constable.

  The doctor was seldom agitated, except when the lack of sanitation infuriated him. He hurtled through the camp, surly at the state of the streets and his need to monitor them, ordering men to pour lime into the privy trenches and to shovel dirt upon garbage piles humming with flies.

  On a day in early June, a Sanitary Commission officer visited the camp. Lincoln had called the group, formed by women but led by Frederick Law Olmsted, the fifth wheel to the coach and complained that the army already had a medical department. Nonetheless, he appointed them “to inquire into the subjects of diet, clothing, cooks, camping grounds, in fact everything connected with the prevention of disease among volunteer soldiers not accustomed to the rigid regulations of the regular troops.” This was now read to James by the inspector, who peered over the top of his glasses with a seriousness that he clearly felt befitted the gravity of his dull tedium. James had stopped listening.

  They sat on chairs at the door to Colonel Townsend’s shack, the most palatial of all the camp abodes—shanties built from scrap branches and bark—as the usual uproar of shouts and swearing and fights careened up and down the mostly orderly lines of lean-tos.

  Are the men required to bathe under the eye of an officer? “Yes.”

  James refused to observe the men bathing. He thought the sanitary officer could detect this lie, though the man continued to read questions from his form in a measured, nonjudgmental fashion, writing down the answers with a thick-nibbed pen that he dipped into a bottle of ink set precariously on the ground.

  If so, how often each man? “Regularly.” (Another lie.)

  Does each man (as a rule) wash his head, neck, and feet once a day?

  James gazed mournfully at the heat rising in dust clouds off the baked Virginia clay. Spring in Virginia was an oven compared to Albany. “Undoubtedly.”

  Are the men infected with vermin? “Yes.”

  If so, has any application been made to remove them? “Yes.”

  The inspector did not ask if James had been successful. No one had been successful. Carbolic acid, turpentine, nothing worked. Fort Albany was, in fact, an encampment of lice in which men were allowed to live.

  Do the men void urine within their own camp? “Yes.”

  (Bland, noncommittal gaze from the officer. What had he seen in other camps?)

  At night? “Yes.”

  In the day? “Yes.”

  There was the crack of an axe against a tree. More Virginia trees falling to the Federals, all that the men of Albany had been able to conquer of Rebel territory. In their single distinguishing moment, two of their regiment on picket duty in May at the Long Bridge had arrested a Rebel sneaking across to Washington City, but other than that, soldiering for the men of the 25th Regiment had consisted of construction and endurance. It was, however, a matter of pride to the regiment that their fortification, one of a dozen forts of earthen walls and ramparts on the Arlington Heights, guarded the Columbia Turnpike, the main road that led to Washington City, two miles away.

  On and on the sanitary officer read: Does each soldier have a pair of trousers? Do they as a whole take pride in their camp? Do you observe odors of decay within the camp? Does the surgeon make a daily inspection of the camp, with respect to cleanliness? How many paces from the body of the camp is the privy? Is the privy trench provided with a sitting rail?

  James had dug a private privy nearby in the disappearing woods. He had gone there the other morning only to discover the forest had been clear-cut the previous day.

  Is any officer required to examine and taste the food of the men before it is served at any meal, or is this done generally by the captains or other officers, either by order or voluntarily?

  James Blevens’s skin had been burned red by his long days outside, his lips blistered and his neck rendered crimson. He had lost, he estimated, perhaps a dozen pounds. He was a picture of the life they were all leading. Soldiers were starving. When they did get rations, most often it was beans and flour, which they fashioned into cakes they fried in lard rendered from the hogs they shot.

  “The officers test only the potatoes and caviar. For the rest the men are on their own, although we do serve high tea at four with crumpets and scones.”

  (Small twitch of left eye, barely distinguishable.)

  Is there a regimental band?

  Memories of Tweddle Hall surfaced. An orchestra. And once, Jenny Lind, her voice soaring above the crepe and crinolines of the beautiful women in attendance. James Blevens had not seen a woman in a month and a half.

  “No, no band.”

  The inspector wrinkled his nose. “You do understand the necessity of amusements for the men?”

  James said that there was nothing amusing about necessity.

  Is there much intoxication?

  “Some.” James thrice had taken up pen and paper to write to Washington, then abandoned the prospect. Who would he tell? Released from the spell of decency, nearly every soldier had at least dabbled in the general revelry of the most untamed troops: liquor purchased from privateers who had set up shop in shacks just off the fort’s grounds; women obtained from the shanties of Swampdoodle, the quagmire village of lawlessness adjacent to the Capitol. Already he had seen three cases of gonorrhea.

  What are the prevailing diseases? (Pen into mouth while awaiting answer to question. Nothing unsanitary about that.)

  “Malaria. Typhoid.”

  James held two sick calls each day: one at seven in the morning, after drill, and the other at seven in the evening. So far, he had seen measles, mumps, scarlet fever, colds, bronchitis, and pneumonia. He had sent men to hospital with icterus, constipation, but mostly with diarrhea. The entire decamped city of Albany was ill with it. In fact, the entire Union army was. He often wondered whether anybody would ever suffer anything requiring surgery, a
nd if they did, what he would do. He had nothing beside the instruments he had brought with him. Not plaster, morphia, gauze, ether, chloroform, nor charcoal either; the paucity alarmed. But nary a shot had been fired during their tenure. His idle instruments daily mocked him from inside their wooden case.

  Is there a moderate supply of medicines?

  “I believe I just answered that.”

  Are the men required to regularly wash their underclothing?

  A bout of raucous laughter from a nearby fire. Dinner today appeared to be griddlecakes.

  “Perhaps by their mothers.”

  (A stern and altogether earnest gaze.) “Dr. Blevens, you are their mother in absentia.”

  “I am in desperate peril if I am now a woman. They are in scarce supply.”

  The inspector shifted on his seat. He could be a preacher from the depth of his blush.

  “There are 180 questions on this form and I still have to get to Fort Runyon today.”

  “From time to time I do observe the men nude, swishing their clothes in the stream that runs at the base of the hill. You understand, I do not encourage it, as it is the same stream from which we get our drinking water.” Dr. Blevens took unreasoned pleasure from the expression on the inspector’s face, as the inspector had, in fact, quenched his thirst at that very stream upon his arrival that morning.

  (An intake of breath.) Is there a regimental library?

  “I did try to have the contents of the Library of Congress transported here for our use, but I was unsuccessful.”

  “Now you are just being sarcastic.”

  “Who wrote this form?”

  (Deep sigh.) Are the common military signs of discipline punctiliously enforced or practiced, as the salute between men and officers?

  “You do understand that two months ago these men were plowing fields?”

  “I will take that as a no.”

  The inspector took the rest of James’s comments as a no also, except when he asked the final question: Does the surgeon understand that he is responsible for all conditions of the camp or regiment unfavorable to health, unless he has warned the commanding officer of them?