Robin Oliveira

by My Name Is Mary Sutter (v5)

  Chapter Twenty-four

  17th August, 1861

  My dearest Mary,

  I do not know how to write you this letter. I must tell you that our Christian died on the train on his way home from Washington City. He was ill with something in the lungs, or so Colonel Townsend thinks. It breaks my heart that neither you nor Thomas was with him when he died; Jake Miles was, but that is no comfort to me.

  We have already had the funeral, but you must come home now. I cannot suffer you in Washington any longer. I have lost both my men. I should not have to give my daughter also. And I need you, Mary, for Jenny. I am her mother, not her midwife, and I trust only you. You cannot deny me the comfort of your presence. It cannot be good for you there. I hear the worst stories of starvation and filth, and I believe nothing of what you have told me about the Union Hotel. You have been very brave, and I am proud of you, but I need you now. Jenny does, too. Please do not let your courage keep you from home. I am not blind, Mary, I know how you have been hurt. But that is nothing now. You see this, I hope; of course you do.

  I shall expect you soon; any day.

  Your loving mother,

  Amelia

  A memory of Christian surfaced, swimming slowly to consciousness. He, younger, happy, beloved, protected, flinging himself into her arms, even though she was the serious one, unlike Jenny’s easy joy. His curly hair wild in the breeze, shouting, running up State Street, impossible to collar, though Mary rarely tried, so much she loved him. Even when he left for war, his skin was still so soft that he did not yet shave, his cheeks smooth and given to smiles. Just a fever, Thomas had said.

  Beautiful boy.

  Mary had witnessed death and still, she was unprepared.

  She cried out, “Christian. Christian.”

  And dropped her mother’s letter on the bed.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  22nd August, 1861

  Dear Thomas,

  I waited and waited for you and despaired that you were lost or sick or killed. You should know that I am with child; it will come some time in December. I can tell that Mother is nervous. She wishes Mary could deliver me, though she says nothing. You do not require my forgiveness. But please tell me that you love me, for I miss you more than anything.

  We buried Christian eighteen days ago. Did you know that Christian died? Did Mary reach you? Can you see her? Mother is years older. Overnight, she has become an old woman. How I wish you were here to ease our pain.

  Bonnie Miles has come here to live with us. Mother took her in after Jake left and went no one knows where. Mother believes that Jake did something that hurt Christian, but she cannot say for certain. Bonnie is enamored of me and the baby to come. She pets over me and tries to hide her envy, but is unable to. Heartbreak scalds her face every time she looks at me. She wants a baby more than she wants anything, even her husband, who I wouldn’t want back at all.

  Your wife,

  Jenny

  Chapter Twenty-six

  In mid-August, Washington teemed with wounded from Bull Run, as Dorothea Dix had said would happen, and though the first estimates—eighteen thousand Union wounded—shriveled in the days following the battle to about fifteen hundred, Miss Dix was satisfied that there were patients enough to forever erase the word frivolous from the common vernacular as far as she was concerned.

  What concerned her now was lack. Though hundreds of women had stormed her doors, Miss Dix had found only some of the kind of woman she had been looking for, and had installed them in various hospitals across the city—the E Street Infirmary, the hospital at the Presbyterian church on New York Avenue, the Patent Office, the Treasury Building—where she remained determined that they, and they alone, prevail. But she was already losing control. In the weeks following the battle, women had besieged the doors of hospitals and rolled up their sleeves, crowding the rooms and entangling their skirts in dressings and catching nursing fever and making all kinds of trouble. Dorothea Dix ferried from hospital to hospital, segregating the true nurse from the interloper, instructing legitimate recruits to sleep on the floors if the surgeons resisted—which they often did—their rightful claim to stay, and in the process earned herself the nickname Dragon Dix.

  Just recently in the New York Times, a letter had criticized her. She remembered the missive in almost every detail: The people of your city are laboring under the delusion that the Sanitary Commission and Miss Dix have the charge of the hospitals here and take a very active part in their internal management. Simple truth and justice to the medical officers of the Government, make it necessary that facts should appear which however unpalatable, will rob both those parties of a great deal of their newspaper glory. The Commission and Miss Dix are simply occasional visitors to the hospitals—weeks, and even months intervening between their calls to some of them—calls which are seldom of longer duration than an hour or two. Miss Dix does not live in the hospitals, but in her comfortable house in Washington, and has never nursed a sick soldier, nor folded a shroud over a dead one since the war began. The greater part of her time is spent in writing to Governors of States and having her “Commission” copied and sent to them and to “Associations,” and instead of immediately distributing the supplies sent her for the sick, she has even now a large quantity of things sent to her as long ago as June, which are piled up in an old barn in this city—jellies spoiling and leading, and shirts and linen never unfolded—unused, while many need them. So much for Miss Dix.

  She was remembering this letter once again as she pulled up to the Union Hotel. It was true, she had never been to this hospital, but since it was so far out of the city it had been impossible for her to come here, and so out of her consideration. Only recently, after that nasty letter was published, had it occurred to her that she ought to see every hospital.

  Now, inside, the heat stifled. Even the two perfumed handkerchiefs she pressed to her nose could not smother the overwhelming fog of illness that hovered in the halls. Miss Dix was glad there was no one to see her stagger and place her hand against the wall. Perhaps it was true she did not understand what her nurses suffered; to sleep in such a place! Miss Nightingale had always said, “Suffering is my raison d’être.” Now Miss Dix expanded it to suit her vision of herself: “Suffering is my raison d’être, my medium, my métier,” which she thought more musical and now repeated to herself as she started down the hallway, fumbling for the water closet, for just as in Manhattan City, finding a place to relieve herself as she visited around Washington was nearly impossible. After several minutes, she emerged, a third handkerchief pressed to her nose, and made a note to submit a requisition for a privy to be dug in the back because the water closet was an abomination. Drawing herself together, she forged on in search of Dr. Stipp, glancing shyly into rooms full of languishing men. She found him, finally, not in a patient’s room, but emerging from a room under the stairs, his face more haggard and pale than she remembered it.

  He did not at first place the small woman hidden behind a curtain of handkerchiefs who said, “Have you dismissed Mary Sutter yet?”

  Stipp peered at the diminutive woman. “Miss Dix?”

  “I sent those new nurses to you with orders for you to dismiss Miss Sutter immediately.”

  “I never received those orders,” Stipp said. He had, in fact, read them very carefully and then torn them up and thrown them into the burn barrel.

  “She is in there?” Miss Dix nodded at the door behind him.

  “She is.”

  When Stipp had heard Mary’s cry from the third floor, he had instinctively known where she would be. He did not like to think how he had known where to find her. He marked her comings and goings as if by intuition, knew her schedule, where she was likely to be at any given time of day. Life would flow in and out at will. So much he had to guard against. Sometimes at night, he deceived himself that he could distinguish her breathing from the moans and rasps of his patients’ exhalations. Hers, an imagined metronome of calm, the imagining of
which was the only thing that allowed him to fall asleep.

  “You were alone with her in her room? Let us be clear, Dr. Stipp. You are never again to enter Miss Sutter’s or any other nurse’s room. Mr. Mack keeps me well informed of the goings-on here.”

  Stipp seized Miss Dix by the elbow. “Hush now. Mary Sutter has just received word that her brother has died,” he said.

  “Her brother, you say?”

  “Yes,” Stipp said, releasing her, shocked that he had clutched the woman.

  He suddenly regretted his indiscretion. It was a betrayal to share this news with Miss Dix, who would like nothing better now than to see Mary gone, whatever the reason, but Stipp himself was discomposed. It had been staggering to see Mary in such a state. She had been shattered, inconsolable. Something about her guilt, though he could not imagine what that could be.

  Miss Dix set her shoulders and immediately swept past Stipp, entering Mary’s room without knocking and quickly shutting the door behind her, her gaze as determined as if he intended to seize her once again.

  “Wait! She’s sleeping!” Stipp said, hovering outside the door, ready to burst in, but in truth he did not know what to do. He did know that Mary would leave now. Of that he was certain. Not by what Mary had said, but he had read the letter. Anyone would go. And perhaps, Stipp thought, disclosure had not been betrayal if Miss Dix could speed Mary home to her mother. It was possible Miss Dix could do far better things for Mary than could he; with her connections, she would merely have to ask a senator to deliver Mary home in his private railcar and it would be done. What could he offer Mary now but a shoulder for her tears, and he had already done that. His chest and shoulders were damp, his two handkerchiefs knotted in a sodden lump in Mary’s fists.

  He listened, uncertain, his hand hovering over the doorknob, then turned and walked down the hallway, his footsteps heavy on the floor.

  Later, Miss Dix found Dr. Stipp in the ballroom, where twenty men still occupied straw tickings on the floor, two weeks after the battle. She was so small that picking her way across the room did not in any way disturb the recumbent men, a detail that Stipp declined to admire, though not even Mary could have accomplished such a nimble passage. When she reached his side, he refused to look up, though the knee he was bandaging was unremarkable. He was taking care not to turn and greet the dragon, who would breathe the bad news of Mary’s departure.

  “Mary will not go home,” she said.

  Stipp abandoned the knee to rise. Unconsciously, he assumed his posture of defense: chin out, hands to hips. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Mary will not go home, which I do not think is for the best, but I cannot bodily remove her, can I? She claims dedication, which is admirable, considering her bereavement. I even offered to accompany her home, but she will not leave the men here.” Miss Dix was pulling on her carriage gloves, fastening the buttons one by one.

  “Mary is staying?”

  Miss Dix finished buttoning the last button and looked up. “You rely on her, don’t you?”

  Stipp attempted a dismissive shrug, but neither the men in the room nor Miss Dix were fooled by this diffidence.

  “I will take this moment to clarify that Miss Sutter is not your charge, Dr. Stipp. She is my charge, my responsibility, as are all the nurses. I expect that you will not be hiring any more of your nurses from off the street. One is quite enough. I expect you will not be so lucky in the future.”

  She turned on her heel and picked her way out of the room, and Miss Dix thought that the writer of the New York Times letter would be pleased by her decision today. Dedication, yes, this was who she was; she might even write a letter herself to say that the writer had been quite in the wrong. If he only knew what effort it took to take care of the nurses who were sacrificing themselves for the good of the broken nation. She had handpicked every one of them, too. Why, she could use Mary as an example of the kind of young woman she had chosen, and with this thought banished any memory of Mary’s previous dismissal at her hand, a circumstance that elevated Miss Dix in her own mind to the kind of woman who did not deserve any of the criticism flung her way, for after all, just look at what she was accomplishing through the nurses she managed.

  The horses kicked up a great deal of dust on Bridge Street. Miss Dix checked her watch. It was nearly four; she was famished, done in. She would go home to rest rather than visit the Seminary Hospital. It was quite exhausting to do the work she was doing. Quite exhausting indeed. No one appreciated her. No one at all.

  That night, very late, Mary and Stipp abandoned the boil of the hotel for the weedy backyard, where the nightly terrestrial exhalation was beginning. Stipp had gone to her room with dinner, made her eat, and then brought out two chairs from the dining room. Above, the August night boasted Cassiopeia, the upstart queen, in her crooked, jagged imagining. A woman with thoughts of her own.

  They sat quietly. Stipp was recalling the way he and Lilianna used to walk to the arroyo behind the house to watch the stars fall from the sky. Lying on their backs, she would ask, Do you think we are happy? He had not wanted to tell her that happiness was the province of the young, that with each passing year you lose your hold on it, that it was as fleeting a pleasure as the falling stars. But now he was glad he had not said those things to her, because it was possible that at this moment at Mary’s side, he might actually be happy.

  Mary was pondering the celestial queen rising to prominence in the southern sky. Ambitious, doomed, reckless. It was unfair, Mary thought, that the stars couldn’t rearrange themselves. That a queen who dared to question the gods would be forever stuck in such an unappealing posture. All afternoon, her bed a watery grave, Mary had hardly been able to move, unable to discard the feeling that she was at fault. It breaks my heart that neither you nor Thomas was with him when he died. Thomas had come looking for her to persuade her to return home, and she, in a fit of vanity, had delayed him. You see how I am needed here. Don’t worry about me. I never mourned your loss. (Even laying claim to more accomplishment than was her due; such poverty of spirit she was capable of.) Perhaps, if Thomas would have been traveling with Christian, or if she had ignored Thomas’s assurances that Christian was fine and had gone with him to the capital, her brother would be alive now. The pain was almost more than she could bear.

  “Your mother will want you home,” Stipp said.

  “I would feel as bereft there as I do here,” Mary said. She did not think she could face Amelia and Jenny; she might break if she did. “And here I can at least do some good.”

  “Grief is meant to be shared.”

  “I have quite enough of it on my own.”

  “Who was that man who came to visit you the other day?” Stipp asked, striving for nonchalance, for equanimity.

  “No one. My sister’s husband.”

  Stipp let the contradiction go. “He wanted you to go home, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “You turned him down.”

  “I want to be a surgeon.”

  “I think you will regret not going home,” he said.

  Above Mary’s silhouette, the queen tilted crookedly on her throne.

  “I will never regret not going home.”

  “If you change your mind—”

  “I won’t.”

  “But if you find yourself—”

  “If I go, I will never come back.”

  She said the thing that would silence him, but this was the first time Mary had seemed young to Stipp. The young were always so certain they knew what was best. His heart broke for her mother, even as he gave silent thanks that Mary was going to stay.

  The night settled around them. A waning disc of moon lit Mary’s face. He had already learned that she did not want to talk about Christian anymore. I can’t, she’d said after Miss Dix left. He would give her time. He himself had not spoken of Genevieve for at least a year afterwards. To Lilianna, when she’d asked, he’d said only, She loved me. He had traveled to Texas to purge himself of that loss
; Mary had not yet even had a day.

  The crickets provided melodic comfort as, for once, time did not reign preeminent. A chance, a rare minute to breathe. Neither was aware of the other in the consoling way that friends are not; only the crickets spoke. Grief as the proof, the revelation. From Bridge Street, laughter drifted in their direction, as alien a sound as if it were descending from the sky.

  “Now you must make good on your promise,” Mary said.

  “What promise?” Stipp asked. “I never promised you a thing.”

  “You knew what I wanted when I came. And now we have help. There is no obstacle.”

  “You barely sleep.” Hedging. Appealing to fragility, which she lacked. Even this morning, with her head pressed into his shoulder, weeping, she had asked about the broken hip in room thirty-nine.

  “Teach me everything you know. I want to understand what makes the body work. I want to see what you do, how you do it. I want to hear what you think. I want to know which medicine to give for which condition. I want to change dressings, see the wounds, understand why the boys are dying, how to make them well. Not just after a battle, but all the time. Every day. At your side.” Not a request, but a repeated demand. I want more. The more being extorted skillfully on the basis of grief and the unspoken threat of her remove. It reminded him of someone, an echo from the past, but the past was so far distant that it seemed now to have nothing to do with him.

  “But who will run the beds? Who will run Mr. Mack?” he asked.

  “That protest is beneath you,” Mary said.

  “Forgive me, Mary, but after today? After all this? This is what you are thinking of?” A falling star streaked across the sky, a river of white against the dark. They both saw it. Cassiopeia shedding tears.