My Name Is Mary Sutter (40 page)

Epilogue

The late afternoon of September 25, 1867, brought a sudden rain, and with it, darkness. The lamplighter on Bleecker Street was already making his rounds, the end of his long pole flickering in the unnatural twilight, the heavy odor of gas skulking behind him through the mist.

A figure hurried past the man and his ladder, pushing his eyeglasses back in place as he hunched against the rain that cut through the cold afternoon; he should have hired a hack, he thought, or at least brought an umbrella, but he had needed the time. After five years, he still needed the twenty blocks between his home and his destination to compose himself. The going was harder for him now. He had a limp, the war having stolen quickness from him. From time to time, he consulted a letter, tucking the onionskin pages back into his coat pocket to keep them from the rain. At Thompson Street he turned north, and after several blocks reached a brownstone where the neighborhood became Washington Square.

Bolted to the side of the house an oval plaque announced,
Doctor M. Sutter, Physician and Surgeon.

And there she was—tall, imperious, reigning from the top of the brownstone’s steps, still as plain as he remembered, though her hair, beginning to turn when they had first met, was now flagrantly, gloriously silver, piled on her head in the same negligent mess as before, but a crown nonetheless. A sign of the stress of the war, though she was as unaware of her looks now as then. Anyone seeing her on the street would have guessed her age at far past twenty-seven, shamefully unaware of her service and its toll.

Her hand skimmed the wet iron railing. His, too.

They reached one another halfway up the steps.

Five years was an eon in which to have unlearned the other’s habits, cues, distinctions, but Mary Sutter took William Stipp’s hand in hers and said, “So you needed more time and got caught in the rain?”

And William Stipp said, “Impatiently waiting on the stairs?”

Both carried, despite their martial postures, an aura of sorrow, though the ghosts of smiles flickered across their faces. They would have recognized one another from a mere turn of the head observed from hundreds of yards away on a moonless night in January. Why had he not flown through the streets, hired the fleetest cab? Of what had he been afraid?
I am a foolish, stupid creature
, he thought. The world was relentlessly spinning, and he had wasted half an hour getting soaked in the rain.

The vestibule echoed; his coat dripped upon the pattern of black and white tiles. Mary took the wet garment from him and laid it upon the bench. In the foyer, stairs climbed heavenward.

Outside, the clouds suddenly parted, pouring sunlight into the high-ceilinged parlor, highlighting the coves and plaster cornices as if the universe itself were proud of Mary’s accomplishments. William Stipp turned in a circle, taking in the gleaming instruments, the two exam beds, the shelves of books, their covers lettered in gold leaf. A black doctor’s satchel waited on a shelf by the doors. In the corner, an oak desk with a capped inkwell, a box of paper, a newly changed blotter, and envelopes on parade. He pictured Mary writing the letter he carried in his pocket now: “I live in New York. Please come.” She had written, he was here, and now there was all this evidence of a life built without him.

“Dear God, Mary, you did it. On your own.”

“There’s more.”

She led him deep into the house, to a kitchen. A woman was kneading dough on a floured board. Through twinned windows, a sheltered garden glistened with raindrops. By the fire, a young girl about six years old left a book behind on an armchair. Exact replication had been avoided, but in the eyes, in the steep angle of the cheekbone, the resemblance was unmistakable.

He started, but Mary put her hand to his forearm. “Elizabeth is my niece, Jenny and Thomas’s daughter. And I would like to introduce my mother, Amelia Sutter.”

Amelia Sutter betrayed her intelligence with a piercing gaze and deep smile. “So you are Dr. Stipp. I believe I owe you my gratitude for sending my daughter home.”

“I could never make your daughter do a thing she didn’t want to do.”

“Nor I.”

He wondered how the woman felt upon meeting him; she was nearer his age than Mary was, but her smile reflected nothing but recognition. Kindred spirits who loved a remarkable young woman.

“I believe you know my son-in-law, Thomas Fall?” she continued. “He’s out, but he’ll return soon. He is eager to see you.”

Stipp gripped the back of a nearby chair. So. Now he knew. “Is he well?” (Defaulting to the old mantra:
How is the boy? The boy is well.
)

“His stump bothers him some, but he is able to get along, thanks to Mary. After Thomas healed, we all came down with her to Manhattan City so she could attend Elizabeth Blackwell’s School of Medicine. She was their first graduate.”

Stipp forced a murmur of acknowledgment for the proud mother. So
that
was why his letters had never found Mary. How many times had he written Albany? Ten? And all his letters returned.

Mary picked up a tray arrayed with a tea service of cobalt blue china, smiling at his distress, misinterpreting it as surprise. “I had to talk myself into the luxury. I got used to the deprivation, and then when it was no longer there—?” She shrugged. “In some ways I liked the struggle better, I think. It clarified what was important.”

The dining room walls were bare, and a set of dark furniture intensified the impression of incompleteness, as if the room were waiting for someone to finish it. Stipp sank into the captain’s chair at the head of the table, and Mary sat next to him, near enough to touch. They concentrated on stirring and sugaring, rituals to distract them from the past, but which instead reminded them both of cold mornings around a cookfire, getting ready to make the rounds of the hospital tents, grateful for just a cup of hot water to warm them. Oh, if they had only known then what they knew even now, only five years later—infection not understood in the way it should have been. Even a year or two, and Lister’s findings would have changed everything. If they had just washed their hands between patients, then all those deaths could have been prevented. James Blevens and his microscope, given more time, perhaps he would have rescued everyone. But Mary was mixing up her grief. So many things to grieve. Jenny, Christian, and Mr. Lincoln, who had asked her how much of herself she had wanted to risk.

“You disappeared, Mary,” Stipp said, his gaze steady, his blue eyes reflecting the sharp blue of the china.

“But I’m here now.”

The war had etched even more seams into Stipp’s face, though some of them had been in place even in 1862. They grew deeper now, and he said, “So you married Thomas? I wish you had told me before I came today; I would have been prepared.”

Once again, Mary settled her hand on his arm. Ever the midwife, easing hope into being. Other days at this hour, her foyer reverberated with the cries of her patients. She was shocked that no one had tried the bell; but today was Sunday and the house was still. The servants too were off. A planned isolation, though not too isolated. She could hear her mother and Elizabeth in the kitchen, could almost feel their worry; before Thomas had gone out he said,
The man has waited a long time
.

“William, Thomas is not my husband. He loved Jenny, as much as a man can love anyone, I think. He mourns her still, as do I.”

Stipp glanced away from Mary and then back again. He did not want to overstep, but he had waited an eon, believing one thing, only to discover another. “But you did love him?”

Unconsciously, Mary unpinned and repinned her hair in that gesture of agitation so familiar to Stipp, recalling the night at the Union Hotel when he had proclaimed his love for her. (A different dining room now but with no less urgent a circumstance; lives were still at stake.)

“He was the first man who believed in me,” Mary said. “How could I not love him?”

“And yet you are not married now?

“It was not that kind of love.”

Stipp was staring at her, she him, though neither of them moved toward the other. Their own violence, born of years of restraint.

(Once, Stipp had said to Mary,
I don’t need you
. And she had said,
Don’t be a fool
.)

“As soon as the train pulled out of Hagerstown I knew,” Mary said. “I wrote you at Antietam, but you’d disappeared. The army didn’t know where you’d gone; their records are a mess. And then the other day I was looking for a patient’s address in the City Directory, and there you were.” Mary had had to read the line twice:
William Stipp, Surgeon.
Had put her hand to her heart.

Mary had turned as still now as if she were sitting for a portrait. How that silhouette had haunted Stipp: the ramrod-straight back, the wide shoulders, no picture of feminine beauty, but irresistible all the same. He had fled Sharpsburg, unable to stay where she was not, and disappeared into the maw of the war: Gettysburg, the Wilderness, and the tedious siege of Petersburg, where Grant’s final assault ended the war. He could hardly believe it when the surrender came. Four years of his life, mired in death. He would not have wanted Mary to have experienced any of that, but the interminable years had seared into his bones his own phantom pain of amputation. His body remembered her, and he had to fight now not to take her into his arms.

“Every day,” he said, “I’ve thought of you.”

And then it was all before them, all the heavy sadness of their good-bye, when it had seemed that their lives would be broken forever. You would think that sorrow would dissipate, and it does for most, but when you spend years missing someone, it becomes an ever-flowing spring. After the war, Stipp had gone to Europe to try to erase the memories. In the echoing tomb of the Louvre, he had seen the
Mona Lisa
. Both misery and amusement had emanated from that face; Mary’s smile now was like the portrait’s, hiding an emotion no one could discern, not even him. He had once read an essay by a man named Walter Pater, who claimed the woman in the painting had been dead many times and had learned the secrets of the grave.

Less than a year ago, he had returned to Manhattan City. Many of his patients were from the South, relatives of Rebel soldiers whose lives he had saved.
This Federal doctor fixed me, what a wizard. And he has this nurse named Mary. They saved my life.
Each time some new patient recounted this tale of recommendation, he would be newly reminded of Mary. He’d say, “Oh, Miss Sutter went on with her own life. No, I don’t know where she is. You know how it goes.” There had been talk of a reunion of the Army of the Potomac, and he’d already imagined strolling past the nurses’ pavilions, scanning smiling, proud faces, hoping to find Mary in search of him. Once, he thought he had seen her on the streets, but it was only a woman with the same sturdy shape, the same imperious posture, the same cautious air.

Until, yesterday, a letter.

William Stipp put his hand to Mary’s cheek. War had nearly driven him insane; loving Mary had been his only refuge.

“You need me,” Mary whispered.

But Stipp knew Mary’s declaration was as much a confession as it was a statement. She could as easily have said,
I need you.

Mary smoothed the collar of Stipp’s shirt. He lifted her hand in his and slowly raised it to his lips.

a cognizant v5 original release september 12 2010