My Name Is Mary Sutter (11 page)

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 lackluster 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 assistance 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 petite, 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 pass 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 assistant 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 Canal 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 canal itself had turned decidedly unpleasant. Miss Dix was no newcomer to Washington City, having passed 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 glass.”

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 petition, 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 circumspect. 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 prostitute employed as a nurse consorting with a patient in the halls of Bellevue Hospital.

Flustered, 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 circumscribed, not leaning in any way toward the nocturnal activities of some of our lesser sisterhood.”

This allusion to the sexual 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 embarrassment, 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 assembling 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 chore 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 assistants 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 pass 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 passage, 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 petite 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.