My Name Is Mary Sutter (15 page)

The clerk reached for a thick ledger. “It will take a moment for me to copy them out for you.”

“It will be more efficient if you read them to me,” Mary said.

The clerk sighed and began to drone.

A few minutes later, examining her notebook outside, Mary hoped that John Hay might forgive her the use of his name. She had considered calling at the Mansion to obtain some sort of letter of introduction, but had decided that she would make her own way, though it was the desk clerk at the Willard who had said, “If it is information of that sort you are after, you could really do no better than the Surgeon General’s office,” and had provided her with a map drawn on the back of her hotel receipt.

Mary tucked the notebook into her valise. She had given up her room at the Willard; whatever was to become of her, would become of her today.

The morning was dusty and already insufferably warm. As she marched up the rise as if
to war
—thought it herself, in celebratory defiance of Miss Dix—she had no way of knowing that John Hay watched from an upstairs window of the War Department, and was marveling that the young woman had found her way so quickly, sorry that he had not been the one to help her.

Across the river at Fort Albany, a wagon train materialized from the Columbia Turnpike. Christian’s back and arms flamed as he set down his axe to watch the procession turn from the road into the unfinished fort. He’d been felling trees to create an unobstructed view to the road, and any chance to leave off for a moment was welcome. His body had grown hard with the manual labor, but he still ached, especially in his joints. The pain was worse at night, when he had only his haversack for a pillow, and even the ravishment of a night sky painted with stars could not distract him from the pangs of a body adjusting to hardship. A wagon train of supplies was a rare occurrence, although last week a train had arrived out of the blue bearing thousands of loaves of freshly baked bread. And now, it appeared, they were the recipients of new tents, if the canvas ties and fir poles were any indication. Christian flung down his axe and called to Thomas, and together they ran after the wagons and followed them through the crude stick-and-post gate of the fort.

“Four to a tent, four to a tent,” the sergeant called, and the men lined up. The sergeant had counted the canvas rolls, divided a thousand exhausted men by the amount, and come up with the crowded answer as the men lined up for the unexpected gift of shelter. In the hot sun, the prospect of tents made the men long for home and all its comforts, including liquor, the last of which they’d seen in Washington City. But not Christian. He had once tried the cheap still-gruel that passed for whiskey brewed out of Swampdoodle and had found it foul. All he really wanted was to go home, a fact he hid from nearly everyone, including Thomas. It was only June 12 and they wouldn’t be going home at least until the end of July. He had been so eager to come, but now he could barely picture his mother’s and sisters’ faces. Had he said good-bye properly? He wasn’t certain that he had.

“Bedfellows now,” Jake Miles said, having fallen in line behind them. Since coming to Washington, Jake hadn’t seemed to recognize either of them, though when Christian had first spotted him on the steamship down to Annapolis, he had thought that Jake might have. But he either hadn’t or it didn’t matter. Besides, it had been only for a moment at the Sutters’ that Christian had even seen Jake. Even so, he had avoided him.

Colonel Townsend said, “Clear out the lean-tos and pile them for firewood.”

The colonel was on horseback, patrolling the hill on which Fort Albany was rising, where three weeks before there had been only trees and scrub and wild hogs. In this endeavor, there was pride and disappointment both, but shouting about construction was not leading troops into battle. Nor could he even call this motley band of brigands troops. Men only, dignity an elusive thing when professors and drunkards both had answered Lincoln’s call.

“Mind your neighbors; five feet between tents. Dig a trench for drainage; there are no shovels, use your hands. Or a rock. Who’s on picket duty? Take up your muskets, damn it. Your tentmates will finish.” Ever reminding, a parent to grown men. Townsend sighed. It was exhausting. There was pride only in his position on horseback, saved from manual labor by his status.

Jake flung the heavy bundle onto a small rectangle of dirt and rocks that sloped from the top of the hill where they were building earthen ramparts. On either side, knots of men puzzled out poles, ties, and wooden stakes. In the making up of tents, the absence of women had never been more felt, and the men all silently decided that the male species was inadequate to the task of comfort.

“Kick away the rocks, or they’ll kill us,” Jake said, dictating to his three tentmates, who in Albany had been his betters, but not here. War was the great equalizer, and no one knew it better than Jake, who reveled in telling the city folks how to take care of themselves. He rarely shared the squirrels and rabbit that he shot, though sometimes he did in exchange for fruit. Of his future tentmates, Jake was the only one to whom living outside had not been a shock. He had grown more robust, not less, in the hills of Arlington, exhibiting none of the signs of scurvy that were beginning to plague the rest of them. His joints did not ache; his gums had not begun to bleed.

Jake unfurled the rolled canvas across the newly cleared dirt, releasing a clutch of fir poles that clattered to the ground.

“Should’ve sent oak,” he said, shaking his head. “These won’t last four months.”

A thousand men couldn’t all know each other, and now they exchanged handshakes and names. Thomas Fall. Jake Miles. Christian Sutter. Ali Baba, and they all laughed but Jake, who didn’t understand.

“I beg your pardon. Edmund Wellon, son of the bookseller.” He was the skinniest of the four, having rarely ventured out of the stuffy confines of his father’s shop on State Street. “The tents,” he said, by way of explanation. To Jake’s still puzzled gaze, he said, “
A Thousand and One Nights
? The story of the queen who told stories to save her life?”

Jake pressed his lips together and turned away, shaking his head over what some people thought was important.

Christian said to Edmund, “You must know my sister, Mary Sutter?”

Thomas jabbed Christian’s side.

“Mary Sutter?” Jake wielded one of the poles. “Is that midwife your sister?”

“That’s right.”

No one wanted a war in the tent. By the looks of the rude structures going up all around, they would all be sleeping toe to cheek, and have to turn in unison. Edmund Wellon watched, wary now, his hands on his hips, sensing something in the air.

“You close with that doctor?” Jake asked.

James Blevens was marching by with a tent all to himself, a treasure of privacy in the public nightmare of being physician to a thousand men around the clock. He stopped and said, “At least now we won’t have to sleep in the rain.”

“Bonnie.” Jake and Christian each said her name: Jake in a kind of strangled cry, Christian with disdain, for it was not he who should have been comforting Bonnie that night, but the boy before him, now down on one knee, gripping the pole with which he had pierced the ground, tears spilling down his face.

In the six weeks that the men of the 25th Regiment had been living without women, they had seen fights, anger, laughter, bawdiness, drunkenness, challenge, affection, but not tears. What tears they shed were shed alone on picket duty, at night, when a man was free to admit that his quest for adventure had turned into a test of endurance and deprivation.

“Who is Bonnie?” Edmund Wellon asked.

Christian abbreviated the story: “My sister delivered his wife’s baby. The baby died.” He put a hand on Jake’s shoulder, taken by his grief, but Jake shrugged it off.

“She never would’ve left me if it weren’t for your sister.”

There had been no letters.

“She left you?”

“First thing I get home, I’m going to go get her.”

“Where is she?” Blevens asked.

“At the Sutters’,” Jake said with a sneer. “Because you couldn’t take care of her.”

“She is still at our house?” Christian asked.

All the remaining traces of Jake’s sorrow twisted into anger. “She wouldn’t go home when I went to say good-bye. Treated too nice, is what I think.”

Blevens said, “No one can be treated too nicely, least of all a woman who has lost a baby.”

Jake, startled again into sadness, ducked his head and gripped the tent pole as ballast.

That erecting a semblance of home could evoke such emotion.

It was like that all around, evocations of sorrow and sadness as the men received their first comfort of the war. But as Jake Miles and his uneasy tentmates untangled, pitched, and tied, and James Blevens climbed the hill to erect his own tent on the flats above, they all resolved to sleep lightly. Not because Jake had alarmed, not because his emotions had flashed recklessly between sorrow and anger, but because the dangers of childbirth had penetrated even their fraternity on the hill. Thomas thought of Jenny, James thought of Mary, and Jake and Christian thought of Bonnie, each fearful that that their love for a woman might one day bring them to their knees.

Chapter Eleven

It was past three o’clock that same afternoon that Mary sank into the shade of a single oak tree standing outside the E Street Infirmary in Judiciary Square. Named in the hope that it would house a series of courts, the square instead featured City Hall, with its heavy towers, steep chimneys, and court system hidden deep within its Gothic confines. In Judiciary Square, there were no other courts, only the infirmary and medical school, housed in a large winged building that stood between a series of rising row houses that would forever usurp the concentration of courts Pierre Charles L’Enfant had envisioned for the capital. The square was also a thoroughfare for farmers taking their product to the nearby market, and the lively plaza seemed as familiar as State Street on Market Day, except that Mary had never felt more out of place or more tired. Her hair had gone wild in the humidity, and her calico dress, right for warm weather in Albany, was far too heavy and stiff for the southern summer. The day’s heat had incinerated her resolve almost as quickly as had the Sister of Charity at the infirmary. Dressed in a hot black gown, the nun had been doppelgänger to the keeper of the door at Albany Medical College. No, they didn’t need anyone to nurse. Was she interested, however, in becoming a sister?

After leaving the Surgeon General’s office that morning with her list, Mary had hired a hack for the day, first visiting the Patent Office, which had become an overflow hospital to house the flood of sick soldiers. Invalids lay on pallets of straw on the floor between inventions and displays. There were small piston engines arrayed under glass, great winged contraptions hanging from the ceiling, drawings of apparatuses for sawing the skins off calves, smoke-consuming furnaces, and even more devices that crowded the large, echoing rooms. To find someone in charge, Mary climbed two staircases of cool echoing marble. Near a display of blueprints for mousetraps, a surgeon shrugged off her plea.

“Nurses? I have no need. The men take care of themselves, mostly.”

“I could help. I am a midwife.”

The surgeon, a thin, freckled man who had introduced himself as Major Edwards, said, “But no one here is going to have a baby.”

From the Patent Office, she traveled to the Capitol, where invalids housed in the basement furnace room languished on cots fashioned from canvas. The answer there was also
No
. At the New York Presbyterian Church, where plywood lay across the pews, the ladies of the sanctuary asked, already knowing the answer,
Was she a member of the church? You must be a member of the church
.

An invisible fence surrounded
the war
.

The earth was turning, carrying her with it. At the medical college, she had even asked the sister whether they took female students now that the rest of their classes had left for the war. She had learned this after overhearing a sister complain of all the work. No, came the answer, they did not.

A man appeared at the door of the infirmary, speaking to the refusing sister. He had a leathered, permanently sunburned face and a beard of tight, graying coils. His voice carried in the airless doldrums.

“Surely, one of you could come, even if just during the day. You could return here at night.”

“I’m sorry, but that’s impossible. Our work is here.”

He turned and walked with caged ferocity toward a run-down cart, which he handled poorly in the traffic.

The last hospital on Mary’s list was the Union Hotel.

Her driver crossed the flat city and clattered over a bridge and climbed the hill to the village of Georgetown. A bustling place, it was full of people, even at this hot hour. Genteel homes lined the narrow street, but soon gave way to commerce. The driver stopped opposite a tobacco warehouse that occupied the whole of a block.

“Here?” Mary asked.

All day, the driver had been solicitous, asking whether or not she was well and whether she needed to stop for refreshment. Now he surveyed the dilapidated building from which hung a sign declaring it to be the Union Hotel. Rows of small windows were crookedly set or broken. It was unpainted, three stories, ill configured, added on to, subtracted from, ramshackle, severe, looking more like a prison than a hotel.

“You cannot go in there,” he said.

“I’ve been inside worse places,” Mary said, though she hadn’t. Once, she had been called to a tenement on the quay, where a hurly-burly girl was having a baby, but even there the façade had invited, and the stairs, though narrow, had given way to a room of some comfort. Mary felt herself sway in the humidity. A knot of laughing Union soldiers passed by, heading down a side street toward a canal. Like the Erie, Mary thought, and grasped at this as a sign. She opened her purse. “How much do I owe you?”

“Twenty cents.”

The price made her realize the extent of her mistake of the day before, the wide grin of the cab driver.
Extra for the tour.

“Are you sure?” the hack driver asked, and when she nodded, turned and clattered down the cobbles toward Washington. She could tell by the hunch of his shoulders that he did not think her wise to have sent him away.

The rough door lacked a bell. She summoned memories of success: she had delivered three sets of twins; had driven ten miles in the rain one night to a house where a shrieking mother cried for six hours before she was delivered of a baby the size of a fist; had managed to survive her sister’s marrying Thomas Fall.

Inside, the fetid air overwhelmed. A single gas flame flared in a broken sconce, revealing, as her eyes adjusted, that it had been a long time since the walls had seen paint, as long, it seemed, as the room had been cleaned. Barren rectangles remained behind where pictures had recently been removed. Save the brass railing circling the abandoned reception desk, no ornament of the hotel’s faded utility remained. Dust sifted from creaking floorboards above. Across the narrow rectangle of lobby, a set of narrow stairs rose to a blind turn at the landing.

She made for these.

A second floor crouched between a third and the first. Low ceilinged, claustral, darker even than James Blevens’s surgery that day in April, the hallway angled through the series of squat additions that made up the Union Hotel. Dull brass room numbers marked the open doors of rooms, where men in various states of undress flung bony legs from under sheets. Listless, they barely noticed her as she passed. The smell of illness, stronger now, permeated the walls. Little light penetrated to the hallway. At tunnel’s end, she came to another stairway, and took that up. All was misery. The men were coughing and crying out. Occasionally, a rare burst of laughter made its way down the hallway. Mary descended again to the savage lobby and stood there, uncertain. To the left was a wider hallway and from it came the sounds of whistling. She followed the noise to a door that retained a sign boasting that it had once been the hotel library. There, sitting in a spindly chair at a small round table made for a café tête-à-tête, was the man from the E Street Infirmary, his beard dipped to his chest as he read intently from a book. The room was protected from the outside heat by half-closed shutters, but it was still beastly hot all the same.

Mary said, “I saw you earlier. At the infirmary.”

The man looked up, his eyes squinting to take her in, as if he was still blinded by the light that had bathed them earlier in the square.

“And what were you doing there?”

“The same thing I am doing here, inquiring after a position as a nurse.”

The man’s head tilted to one side, inspecting her carefully. “Did the sister send you?”

“Actually,” Mary said, “I don’t want to be a nurse. I want to be a surgeon.”

He raised his eyebrows. “And you propose to do this here?”

“I propose to begin here.”

His gaze, not intrusive but inquiring, took in the length of her. Mary no longer cared that her skirts had wilted in the heat, or that her hair had tumbled from its ties and was now a hot mess about her neck. She had come to her last chance and wanted to look like it.

He put a finger between the pages of his book to hold his place. “I do not need a doctor. What I need is a charwoman and a nurse. You do not look like the sort of woman used to menial work.”

“And what sort do I look?”

“The sort that wants to be a surgeon.”

The hotel creaked and snapped in the heat.

“Have you been to see Miss Dix?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“She give you trouble?”

“Yes.”

“She would.” He closed the book and said, “You think because you know an herb or two, or because you are unafraid of men, or because you have sat by the bedside of a dying relative, that you know what it means to attend the sick. I can assure you that you know nothing of what has been going on inside this hovel for the past month. If you did, you would follow my advice and leave. There are sights and sounds upstairs that would offend anyone, man or woman, surgeon or no. The work is unfit for a human being. It is unfit for the most robust of men. If I were you, I would run north, find a place of beauty, and remain there. It is my advice to you. It is my advice to anyone.”

Mary took a deep breath and allowed herself to smile, because she had come too far not to recognize a yes when she heard it.

“I warn you,” he said. “I don’t need or want a medical student. I offer you nothing but the position I need filled.”

“I’ll take it.”

“You won’t last,” the man said, eyeing Mary.

“I will need a room and bedding,” she said.

“I fear you will need much more than that.” Shaking his head, he stood, a look some might describe as pity shadowing his eyes, softening the hard set of his mouth. “My name is William Stipp,” he said. “The surgeon in charge of this misery.”

“And my name is Mary Sutter.”