Robin Oliveira

by My Name Is Mary Sutter (v5)

  Inside the hospital, James Blevens scanned the rows of beds as was his habit, as unconscious to him as his ever-present need to flex his fingers, looking for Mary Sutter. When he saw her, it took a moment to believe it was she. Her dress was torn and bloodstained, her skin tanned and freckled; in her hair were twigs and leaves. Her expression was newly broken. She looked as if she’d been wandering in the woods for days.

  She looked up and discovered him. He flexed and unflexed his fingers, wondering what he meant to her.

  She came toward him and said, “James.”

  No one paid them any mind. Outside, limbs were being piled; what was a public embrace?

  In the end, every wounded man had made it onto the trains, every one, except those who had died and had been buried in shallow, unmarked trenches. For four full days, Mary had coolly stood at the railcars and made choices, had trod the impossible line. Had tried to reconcile need with mercy. Just before they left on the last train, Stipp had stopped at Mary’s car and gazed wordlessly up at her before turning away to prowl the grounds around the station, calling out to the hills to ascertain whether or not anyone else remained before he stepped onto the engineer’s car as the train lurched forward, the station burning behind them to keep the Confederates from salvaging anything. Mary hadn’t seen Stipp since. She told herself that the men who had died and been buried beside the station in long trenches would have died anyway, comforting herself like she had comforted the mothers of stillborns. As she had comforted Bonnie. As she had been unable to comfort Amelia.

  When she was finished telling James the story, he said, “Extraordinary.”

  “Not so extraordinary. There was another woman there, too. Clara Barton. She brought supplies. Jams and jellies. She was feeding everyone. She was of far more use than I.”

  “I think it is as Stipp said,” James said. He was being careful, for he had never seen Mary so vulnerable. “There wasn’t room for everyone.”

  “But in the end there was.”

  James waited before he said, “You are not provident, Mary. There was nothing else you could have done.”

  At some point, they had made it out of the hospital and were standing up against the building, sheltered under the eaves. Observing them from around the corner, Jake Miles suddenly placed the man’s long, beak-like face, the sharp gaze, the thin frame. That man was the doctor who’d taken his Bonnie to those Sutters, that woman there who had made a mess of things and cost him his baby and his wife. Tears welled up in his eyes as he remembered how the first night Bonnie had come home, his little boy had clung to his finger while Bonnie had slept, and how Bonnie had waked up and looked at him like that Miss Sutter was looking at that doctor now, as if there were such a thing as hope in the world. For the first time in months, Jake thought of Christian Sutter, how he had poured liquor down his throat, how it had seemed the right thing to do, how he had suffered when he’d gone back to the corner of the train to find Christian as lifeless as the baby Bonnie had carted all the way back to the Sutter house.

  James looked up and saw the pale boy peering at them. It took a moment to place him, for he had not thought of him for more than a year. “Jake?”

  Jake wiped his tearstained face with the back of his arm and spun away from his perch on a pile of bricks. “Everything is spoiled, you hear me? Everything.”

  Mary turned and took in the sight of Jake Miles. His face was flushed, his eyes bright and feverish.

  “That Christian shoulda never done what he did,” Jake shouted.

  “But Christian is dead,” James said. It seemed brutal to say it in front of Mary, but maybe the boy didn’t know. For a moment James considered telling Jake that Jenny had died, too, in order to forever settle in Jake’s mind the debt he thought the Sutters owed him, but the boy whirled away around the corner of the building and disappeared.

  Mary turned pale and closed her eyes. “He’s right. Everything is spoiled.”

  James wanted to say that everything wasn’t spoiled; that one day they would learn something from all of this that would change medicine forever. But for now, he didn’t say anything.

  For days and days, Mary had been living on courage, but now she could feel it draining away from her. And here was James Blevens, solicitude, like a caress, emanating from his concerned face. “Take me home,” she said.

  He startled, for he had thought it would have taken days to persuade her to go home.

  “To Albany?” he asked.

  “No. My rooms.”

  The tenement in Swampdoodle resembled nothing of Dove Street. James Blevens tapped the driver and said, “This can’t be it.”

  “It is,” Mary said, descending nimbly from the carriage, surprising James, because she had rested on his shoulder all the way here in the hack, rousing only to say, turn here, turn there. James paid the driver, jumped from the carriage, and took Mary by the elbow, letting her guide him up to a musty room that might rent on the quay in Albany by the hour. Or something in Five Points. The memory brought him up short. He had not thought of Sarah in months.

  If Amelia could see this, he thought.

  Mary sat on her bed and did not move, and he understood that she would lie down in her dirty clothes and sleep if he did not help her. She did not resist when he undid her buttons, helped her to ease her dress around her shoulders. He had touched women as a physician, and he summoned that detachment now, and the self-control allowed the intimacy. He lifted a blanket from the bed and held it up, and she rose, her back to him, and dropped the dress in a heap to the floor and slid the straps of her camisole and her underwear to the floor also. When she was done removing her undergarments, she sank onto the bed and slid under a sheet and James laid the blanket over her.

  He removed his coat and hat and searched under the dresser for her bath basin. In the alley, he pumped brackish water. He ran the wet washcloth over her scratched arms, her smudged face, down the length of her back. He untangled her hair as she slept, painstakingly removing twigs and broken leaves, exercise for his stiff fingers. The window opened to the alley, and the shrieks and bellows of Swampdoodle bounced off the narrow passageway.

  It was the sixth of September. Mary had said she’d left on the thirtieth with all those volunteer nurses. Four days out in the field, and then three at the hospital. She might sleep forever, he thought.

  And she did sleep through James’s coming and going, the clatter of the kettle on the stove and the putting away of the coffee and bread and butter he had purchased for her. The day passed into evening and then into night, and he slept next to the open window in the one chair, his feet stretched before him like a steel gate, guarding Mary from the world.

  Chapter Forty-six

  That evening, Saturday the sixth of September, Abraham Lincoln climbed toward the roof on the spiral iron stairway he had discovered behind a door in an attic room. Through unfinished walls shrouded with spider webs, he could hear the occasional crash of china drifting up from the East Room. After the week’s terrible news, it astounded him that people still attended the regular Saturday night levee, though in the crush the guests’ uncertain gaze had followed him more closely than usual on his round of handshaking and salutations. He usually enjoyed these public opinion baths, but tonight he had not wanted to hear the shouted questions, proffered opinions, and clinging entreaties about Lee’s whereabouts.

  With each ascending stair, Lincoln’s heart thundered against his chest wall. He had learned not to panic when his heart betrayed him like this. It calmed usually, over time, though his wife always took fright when he had to pause to catch his breath.

  Sometimes he thought his heart might burst, it beat so hard.

  Two more steps and he was out the door, taking great, gulping breaths of the muggy stench of Washington. Bent over, his hands to his knees, he willed his racing heart to slow, imagining that if it did not, he might die up here and no one would find him for days. Unlike the divided country, or George McClellan even, his heart began finally
to obey, and as a faint northerly breeze began to bestow tepid relief, Lincoln straightened, removed his coat, his tie, and loosened the buttons of his shirt.

  No doubt Hay would soon be searching the East Room for him. Or Mary, or Tad, racing between the silk ball gowns and worsted pants legs of the guests to impart him some welcome piece of distraction from the social hoohah.

  The problem with being president, Lincoln decided, was that he was rarely ever alone when he needed to be, except in the deep hours of the night, and even then the house echoed with the ghost of Willie. Even up here, he couldn’t be certain that he wouldn’t once again imagine that Willie was beside him. Lately he had found himself talking to his dead son. The other day, when his pants leg had grazed the arm of a chair, he’d even turned to snatch Willie up in his arms the way he used to.

  Before.

  Lincoln leaned now against the parapet and gazed westward toward the half-built Washington Monument barely visible against the Arlington Heights, the fort campfires flickering like yellow stars above the moat of the Potomac. Perhaps Mary was right, perhaps the dead did try to communicate from the grave. Her cadre of spiritualists had certainly convinced her, and she derived comfort from their tales, poor woman, though he simply could not tolerate the sitting around of tables and the holding of hands in the dark. What his money sometimes went to. But still, perhaps. Above the clatter of carriage traffic, he strained now to see if he could hear Willie’s high prattle, but it was just the lowing of the army cattle grazing on the mall, the raucous banging of a tavern piano from nearby Murder Bay, and the party noises floating up from the East Room.

  Ghosts. Or not.

  Lincoln peered through the dying evening light at the vulnerable city in his care. Why shouldn’t his family share in the general grief? Willie, in Mary’s mind, had been more than enough to pay. And if he commanded his grown son Robert to leave Harvard and enter the army, he was certain Mary would imprison the boy in his room to prevent his going. Somewhere out there in the gloaming was a Rebel army intent upon conquering Washington. There had been skirmishes at Fairfax and Falls Church. Closer even than Manassas. For a moment, Lincoln allowed himself to imagine the worst: a surrender, the handing over of the Mansion’s keys, the Union irretrievably sundered. It was this that had sent him wheezing up the stairway away from the spying eyes of the nervous party guests.

  This, and the need to entertain a single, unadulterated moment of despair: What if he failed?

  Almost a year and a half had passed since the war had started. Since this most recent debacle at Bull Run, Lee was marching north, primed either to circle back and attack Washington or to press even farther northward, perhaps even to seize Philadelphia or New York. The maneuver would destroy the country forever, a country built on principle and purpose. It was bruising to think that he might preside over the country’s bloody cessation, and then immediately he was conscious of the vanity. The personal vainglory of worrying about how he might be perceived. What history would be written of the destroyed democratic experiment of a young, unsustainable country would be brief in the annals of time, his part a mere whisper. The failure not his alone. But still, what Lee and Jefferson Davis didn’t understand was that to destroy a union founded on freedom was to declare all of humanity’s endeavors foolhardy.

  To fail at this would be to fail at God’s work.

  Lincoln began to march back and forth along the parapet, the city noises turning hushed and expectant, as if at any moment Lee was going to charge down Pennsylvania Avenue and claim the Mansion for the Confederacy.

  Mary’s comfort had been that God was taking care of Willie, that it was only their own inability to perceive Willie’s attempts to reach them that kept him from them. Some days, Lincoln thought her view insane, and other days felt himself insane for his inability to see God’s hand in all of this, and even to believe that God existed.

  What would it mean, then, to fail at the work of a being whose existence you doubted?

  Lincoln supposed that his failure would mean that he, too, would no longer exist.

  He would love to see Willie again.

  Enough.

  He turned violently and toppled against the parapet, catching himself with his free hand, then righting himself, tugging at his clothes, fighting for breath as his heart once again galloped out of control.

  If he allowed himself to lose his mind, as he already feared Mary had lost hers, then he would be of no use to anyone.

  God’s work, then, and whether God existed or not, he would act as if He did, on faith, for he could deduce no other reason in the end for man’s existence. He would die one day. Sooner rather than later, a failure or maybe a hero, perhaps a victim of his own quavering heart, perhaps a result of his insistence that men see their hypocrisy for what it was. Something, then, to warrant the last year and a half of misery. Something good to come of all of this, the very least of which, if he were successful, would be an unsundered union.

  But it was not just this that drove him. There was a certain decency that had to be imposed. A righting of wrongs. Yes, just as he had shut down the Maryland legislature, so would he shut down slavery.

  The language had already come to him. His other idea—forming a colony in Africa or the Indies to which any freed American slave or black man could migrate—had proved unacceptable to the abolitionists who were demanding political equality for the black man. It had not been his intention to liberate, but now? Now it was. The tone of the final document would have to be firm, the intent indisputable. Already he had read one draft to a portion of his cabinet, but now he had decided that nothing less than complete authority would do. After all, this was armed rebellion. Not even the innumerable dead had quelled the Rebels’ intransigence. And now they were marching nearby, perhaps even approaching the city’s ring of forts. At any moment, Rebel muskets might flash in the night and the last battle might begin, leaving a proclamation he might never get to make unfinished on his desk.

  Oh, to fail as grandly as that.

  His heart beat more slowly now, though Lincoln could not understand why. A country’s imminent failure should rouse even the stars to fainting.

  To emancipate. He shut his eyes and lifted his face to the night. To effect such a change. To enact with impunity. He supposed Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee wanted the same, believed the insistence that they remain in a union in which they were unhappy an encroachment upon their own personal freedom.

  Lincoln simply could not understand a man who could not see his own fallibility. Irony lost in the blind pursuit of cacophonous righteousness. I wish to be free, but you may not be free. What he hated most was that they could not see the inherent cruelty in their economy. Their slaves’ skin might be black, but it was not as black as the souls who might enslave them.

  Contradiction the rule of the land. Right and wrong were as interchangeable these days, it seemed, as the winds, and yet here was one concrete thing he could achieve, would achieve before the end, whenever that came.

  What purpose death? What purpose any of it?

  Lincoln allowed himself this last moment of melancholy before banishing the remnants of the despair he had indulged, and then he slowly descended through the torrid heat of the attic rooms, entering once again the unnumbered circle of hell reserved for the doggedly hopeful.

  On Monday, September the eighth, Lincoln turned to his secretary of war, Edwin Stanton, and said, “Exactly where do you think the Rebels might go after Frederick?”

  North of the city, the guns at Fort Stevens were pounding away, practicing in case the Rebels, who had crossed the Potomac at Leesburg, Virginia, on Thursday and were heading north toward Frederick, Maryland, and its stores of Federal ammunition, were to instead turn back to take Washington.

  Stanton cleared his throat and tried to compose himself. He was furious. He thought he had sealed McClellan’s dismissal, had in fact come today hoping to hear from Lincoln that the indictment he had written with the attorney general had once
and for all rid the nation of that timorous little man, but instead the decision that Lincoln had made on September second was holding. George McClellan was again in charge, and in fact had been given leave under General Halleck to do all that was necessary to defend Washington. They were right back where they had been in March, with McClellan all but running the Army of the Potomac—though in the last month he had defied Halleck’s orders again and again. In truth, after Pope’s abominable performance at Bull Run, it was hard to imagine any Union general less trustworthy than Pope. Next to him, McClellan appeared to be as fearless an invader as Genghis Khan. But McClellan? With Stonewall Jackson and Lee running unfettered through Maryland? Stanton wished the war was still on established Southern ground, not the shifting sands of the state of Maryland, whose legislature Lincoln had recently reduced by half when it was discovered that a good portion of its number were traitorous. Those members were now in prison. If there was one thing Stanton admired about Lincoln, it was his willingness to hatchet any rebellion in the ambivalent state just to the north. These were instincts to trust, but McClellan was nothing but trouble.

  “It’s difficult to say where they’ll go,” Stanton said, staunching his wish to rail against McClellan. “If the Rebels do take Frederick, then perhaps they’ll head northward. The governor of Pennsylvania has called for militia. They are arming themselves.”