My Name Is Mary Sutter (16 page)

Chapter Twelve

After depositing Mary Sutter in a closet of a room under the stairs with only a porthole of a window, William Stipp returned to the library and his copy of
The Practice of Surgery
, given to him by the Surgeon General’s office when he’d arrived in Washington in March. Something about Mary Sutter was unsettling, though it was not her interest in medicine that bothered him. He’d seen enough eager students in his career, and besides, he wasn’t going to teach her anything. What bothered him was that she reminded him of Lilianna, the lithe, brown-eyed daughter of the Mexican cook in Texas, whom he’d left behind when Texas seceded from the Union. It was nothing specific, except perhaps the way Mary Sutter had looked at him as if she knew how to find his heart, as Lilianna had. Stipp set the textbook on the table and leaned forward into his hands. Grief was such an avid stalker, surprising him when he least expected it.

After Genevieve, his wife, died in the cholera epidemic in the spring of 1855, he had thought he would never recover. The outbreak had spared no family in Manhattan City; the Episcopalian church on Fifth Avenue had been booked for two solid days of funerals, while the Catholic services went on for weeks, the poor in Five Points having suffered more. Neighbors brought picnic baskets to the church, and in the final hours of the second day, funeral corteges wound through the streets to the landing on the East River, where steamships carried the bodies around the tip of Manhattan for burial to Jersey City, far from the overcrowding that had killed them. Stipp had been inconsolable. His friend Thomas Lawson, the surgeon general, had written a condolence and offered an amnesiac: the Mexican War, though long since over, had spawned permanent forts along the Rio Grande. They needed a good doctor.

Upon Stipp’s arrival at the post at Davis Landing, the southernmost fort on the border, the commander had taken one look at Stipp and said, “The sun will burn it out of you.”

Glinting off sand and scrub, penetrating every rocky crevice, the hot light was superior to most defenses, but Stipp had loved too strongly. Head cocked, chin back, blue eyes sharp, his hands to his hips, he confronted everyone he met as a possible disappointment. The two hundred men of the garrison, however bored with one another, soon gave up on him as a possible source of entertainment, and he began a solitary life, so different from the one he had led before that he was certain he had found grief ’s antidote. In the sun’s brilliant glare, in the fort’s isolation, bachelorhood was assured, and slowly, grief shriveled. The smiling Mexican women who laundered for them in the muddy water of the Rio Grande shunned the men who fought their countryman, Juan Cortina. The men at the post had to travel to New Orleans for feminine comfort, but Stipp never went.

On an afternoon in the second year of his stay, he was dreaming of his wife when he awoke to a hand caressing his face. Lilianna was sitting lightly as a bird upon the edge of his cot. She was perhaps fourteen. Dark haired, small-boned, but armored with Mexican sturdiness, she was leaning on one hand, her head tilted, a shoulder shrugged into one ear, her other hand wrapped around her supporting arm. She was making a study of him, her gaze running over his chest dusted with gray hair.

“The women laugh and call you ‘
virgen
.’ ” Her voice, with its dark foreign song, magnified the distance he had traveled.

“Go back to your mother.”

“I’m going to have a baby,” she said. “It is by one of the men here.”

Stipp never could make out if she’d been raped. Upon his promise to help her, she adopted him, keeping to his room and doing his laundry and preparing his food, his shoes shined to a polish every evening, water hauled from the river for his use. “Enough!” he’d yelled one hot evening when she brought him a pile of freshly mended shirts. But she kept on. Though she slept elsewhere, the men suspected nonetheless, grumbling aloud about what the girl could see in a forty-year-old man when their caresses would have been much more vigorous.

The commander frowned, but said, “I told you the sun would work.”

When her time came, and the light-skinned boy slipped at dawn into Stipp’s hands, Lilianna wrapped one arm around Stipp’s neck and pulled him to her and whispered, “
Gracias, mi padre
.” Suddenly, Stipp’s grief had no boundary, for now the world was flooded with possibilities of love, a terrifying and dangerous prospect for a man who still mourned.

He would have stayed in Texas forever, he thought now, gazing out the library window. He would have stayed in that sun-soaked land had not the state of Texas voted in February for secession and demanded a surrender of all Federal property. The speed with which the army had evacuated the forts scarcely gave Stipp time to bid his little family farewell. He stood on the boat at Davis Landing as the cloudy waters of the Rio Grande, dark as chocolate, lazed by. Lilianna raised her arm against the pale Southwest sky, while the boy cried out, his arms thrust before him, his fingers wiggling, calling Stipp to him. The boy had developed the habit of flinging himself into Stipp’s arms and wrapping his legs around his waist, laughing, saying,
Abuelo. Grandfather.
As the steamship pulled away, Lilianna turned her back. Stipp’s last memory of her was her slow, deliberate return to the adobe hut the three of them had called home: he, his adopted daughter, and her son.

The steamer whipped around Florida, having collected three surgeons from New Orleans and another from Galveston. Celestial bodies at a distant remove observed this rearrangement of humanity—displaced Northerners northward, dismissed Southerners southward—the national chess board realigning. The steamer captain raced up the coast past flat islands of sea grass, but he was receiving too little a sum to be happy about burning coal at such a clip. He was a Creole, fast-talking in a nearly unintelligible mash that resembled nothing of the Spanish Stipp had picked up from Lilianna. Stipp spent the eleven days at sea braced against the pilothouse at the bow, out of the way of the rigging, under the ship’s bronze bell as the ship rolled and bucked in the breezes of the Atlantic and the coal smoke sent black cotton puffs into the bleached blue sky. At night, he slept with his window open to the sea. Lanterns flared and bobbed as ships passed. The Atlantic had become a game of dodge and hide; Lincoln had declared a blockade, and though he had few ships to enforce it, already a Union naval officer named Garrett Pendergrast had captured upwards of a dozen sympathetic ships trying to supply the Confederates.

By the time William Stipp reached Washington at the beginning of March, he had armored himself with reticence, but knew it to be a pretense. He was forty-five years old, and the desert sun had opened his pores; life would run in and out at will. The watery boil of Washington shocked; he’d grown fond of an arid night, the clicking of lizards, water contained in a single brown ribbon slicing through scrub. At night, he drowned in moisture and awoke in sweaty confusion when neither Genevieve nor Lilianna answered his summons.

And always, when on the street he heard the laughter of a little boy, he turned involuntarily, and was destroyed.

Stipp blinked back his watering eyes. He needed no more loves, no more attachments. What he needed was to relearn everything he had forgotten about medicine in Texas. Five years had been too long; the absence had softened his brain. He picked up his book and began memorizing the passages about amputations, all the while wondering what form of grief had driven a young woman as self-possessed as Mary Sutter to a hellhole like the Union Hotel.

Chapter Thirteen

The needle jabbed and poked. The young bride Jenny Fall threw down the yard of unbleached muslin and sucked this latest puncture wound to her thumb. Her irritation was made worse by the morning sickness ravaging her insides. Since five this morning she’d been up depositing the churnings of her restless stomach into the bowl beside her bed.

Being with child had not been, so far, a pleasant experience.

In the filtered light of the Episcopal church’s stone-walled basement, chosen for its coolness as the Ladies’ Auxiliary meeting place late this July morning, Jenny’s fingers were the only ones not flying through the heavy cloth. The place was full of ladies gossiping and sewing havelocks to send to the boys in Washington to protect them from the ravages of the southern sun. No one quite knew how havelock fever had caught on, but it had. Jenny lifted the odd, Arabian-inspired hat up by its frame. It seemed silly to her to be sewing so many of them when the war would soon be over and Thomas would be home.

“Are you hurt?” Bonnie asked.

In her modest dress, Bonnie looked out of place in the church basement among the wealthy women of Albany, though her stitches were as small, even, and assured as the oldest matron’s. Bonnie had the oddest ability to blend into the background when she wanted to, Jenny thought. Hardly any of the women, usually so clannish, had even given her a second glance this morning. Since Mary’s departure, Bonnie had been Jenny’s ever-present shadow, going with her everywhere. Jenny suspected that Bonnie was drawn to her because of the baby, though Bonnie displayed none of the envy Jenny believed she harbored. The need she felt not to show even the smallest amount of anticipation, out of respect for Bonnie’s loss, had been a kind of usurpation of her happiness. Just last night, Jenny had dreamed that each of them—she and Bonnie—had birthed a single child, but that afterwards, the baby would suckle only at Bonnie’s breast. Jenny had awakened sad
and
nauseated, and she answered Bonnie’s solicitation now with a furious shake of her head and began again to sew, slipping a silver thimble onto her finger. Lately, the satisfaction she had harbored over her wedding had completely faded. She’d heard nothing from Thomas, not one letter. She supposed that in wartime the mails were inconsistent, but they’d had a letter from Mary. Piercing the cloth once again with the needle, she set to work, shrugging off Bonnie’s shy smile.

Across the low-ceilinged basement, Amelia was speaking to a group of women at the far table, some of whose children she had delivered.

“Yes. She traveled on the day boat to Manhattan and then on to Washington by train.”

Glances were flying across the tables. What had Amelia Sutter been thinking? None of them had let their daughters go off to nurse.

“Is Jenny going, too?” Frances Ellis asked. She had been down at the quay on the morning Mary had left, seeing her aunt off to Manhattan, when she’d spied Mary embarking the boat alone and unchaperoned. Frances had flown up the hill to tell Amelia, and by the look on Amelia’s face she was fairly certain when she’d reported the news that Amelia had had no idea that her daughter was even gone. Too independent, those girls. She threw a quick glance at Jenny, over the tables spread with old bedding, needles, scissors, and spools of thread.

“No, Jenny won’t be going. Jenny is . . . not able.”

Amelia let the implication find its target, and then sighs and smiles were directed Jenny’s way. This was how such announcements were usually made, though most of the matrons present had already noticed the girl’s pallor and lain bets.

“But Jenny wouldn’t have gone, in any case. She has a different temperament. Mary is more like me.”

Determined pride was Amelia’s public armature against her terror at Mary’s disappearance, a shield against the rising fear that had been her constant companion since she’d first read Mary’s note, pinned to her pillow in parody of an elopement. Had she known what Mary had been planning, she would have tied her to her bed that night, and every night after that, if necessary. Thinking back, Amelia knew that Mary had been too complaisant at dinner that night, too accepting of her objections. And Mary was never accepting when she wanted something. All through the evening, she had smiled benignly at Jenny, when in fact the Mary Amelia knew so well would still have been pursuing her argument, even at the expense of ruining Jenny’s moment. She had sent a letter saying that Amelia was not to worry. The hotel was lovely in every way, rivaling even the Delevan. It had a view of the C&O Canal. There was a laundress and a cook. It was ideal. Amelia was not to send for her. The surgeon had sought to make her comfortable in every way. A feather bed, an armoire. There were a dozen women working there as nurses. Privacy was at a premium. An entire wing to themselves.

Amelia tried not to imagine her daughter’s real circumstances. The day Mary had disappeared, Amelia bought an Appleton Guide from Wellon’s:
A Companion Guide to US & British Provinces
. The note on Washington had done nothing to quell her fear.

Washington is a city of villages, neither enlightened nor beautiful. The denizens of the capitals of Europe would laugh at the city’s paucity; no head of state should go. Keep tight to your purse; choose lodgings with discrimination; and leave the city as soon as possible for the more graceful attractions of the hospitable state of Virginia.

Amelia looked up to see that Jenny had abandoned her sewing and was gazing at her with an inscrutable expression.
Mary is more like me.
How loudly had she spoken? It was difficult to have two daughters with such different natures. Though she was terrified for Mary, she was also proud of her, and besides, she had not meant to disparage Jenny. She was terrified for Jenny, too.

All this Jenny read from her bench, hunched over the unfinished havelock in her lap. Already, in the three weeks since Mary’s departure, Amelia had kept up a running commentary no doubt intended as soothing, but which had only increased Jenny’s disquiet.
The war will certainly be over by the time you are ready to deliver; Mary will be back; I think it would be best if Mary delivered you; did you know that once Mary delivered a pair of twins to a girl whose hips were as narrow as yours?; drink plenty of milk, I think, not the water; tea toast will help with the nausea
. Amelia delivered all this with a brittle smile, a fountain of enthusiasm that was so unlike her.

Jenny tried to picture Mary in Washington. No thimble and thread for her. Instead, midwife to grown men, the half of the species her twin sister did not understand. To Jenny, Mary’s departure had been swift and curiously timed and had told her all that she needed to know, had feared but not voiced, until the day after her wedding, on the morning of the 25th’s departure, when she and Mary had met in the kitchen.
You understand things. Women respect you.
She’d never been able to admit her envy to Mary before, and she’d hoped that the revelation might quicken their sundered friendship. In the weeks since the wedding, she had tried to find her way back to her sister, feeling sympathy, even, for how Mary had managed in the months in which Jenny had blatantly campaigned for Thomas. But Mary had been averse to any hint of pity.

And now a baby was coming, hers and Thomas’s, and Mary was not here to deliver it.

The thimble, the size Jenny imagined her baby now to be, rolled from her grasp. The tiny silver cup tumbled to the uneven stone floor, and the clatter of it striking sounded, absurdly, like a baby crying.

That night, Amelia wrote two letters.

Dear Mary,

I do not believe that you are as well off as you say, nor do I believe that working in Washington as a nurse will help you achieve your aim of someday becoming a surgeon. If you have left because of Jenny, I cannot imagine you being so foolish. They are married and it is done. The truth is, I need you to come home, Mary. A mother shouldn’t have to deliver a daughter, and perhaps a sister shouldn’t have to deliver a sister, either, but I already know that my worry over her condition will cloud my judgment. Perhaps if you return, you will be able to persuade Dr. Marsh of his unreason. I will do everything I can to help you. Please come home, Mary. It will all work out. Please, find Christian and see that he is well. I haven’t had a letter from him, and I worry about him almost as much as I worry about you.

Your loving mother, Amelia

My dearest Christian,

I think of you every day. I am both proud and fearful for you. Please be careful. The papers print such stories of illness and unhealthy conditions that I fear you will become ill, and will be far from me when it happens. I know this is a mother’s letter, full of concern and worry, and that you will think I am foolish. I do not mean to deprive you of your glory, or of your adventure, I only say, please, take more care, not less, than you think you need. And if you can, write to me.

But this is not the only reason I have written to you. Mary left home in June to work in Washington City. She is at the Union Hotel in the village of Georgetown, which is very near Washington City. Please find her and convince your older sister that leaving home is not the answer she seeks. If you need to, take Thomas with you. You know how she listens to him.

I love you. Come home to me, Your adoring mother