Robin Oliveira Read online

  The powerful seethed around them, though Mary could not know it. John Hay did, and stood fast.

  “She is well-intended,” he said, meaning Miss Dix, though he did not know why he was defending her. He thought her restrictions far too stringent. That he had hoped that the circular would bring a flux of eligible young women into the capital, he had not mentioned to the president and did not mention now.

  “You cannot make up for her,” Mary said, and turned to climb the stairs to the hotel where Vermonters had done well.

  “I met the most remarkable woman on the street,” John Hay said. “She complained that Miss Dix had turned her away.”

  After returning to meet with Miss Dix and asking her about Mary Sutter, he had found his interest stymied by the woman’s stubborn self-regard. Now he entered the president’s office and found Mr. Lincoln locked in his study, reading a telegram. Lincoln often seemed caged to Hay, as if the woods of Illinois, those much-vaunted forests invoked to shore up the image of him as woodsman, were indeed his natural domain. Woodcutter. Frontiersman. Lincoln had not chopped wood these ten years, at least. Still, restlessness dogged the president. Even when sitting, he wiggled his foot. Impatient, always, in face of the elusive. But in the time it had taken John Hay to meet Mary Sutter, Lincoln seemed to have aged ten years.

  Lincoln looked up from the telegram. He loved a young man who knew what was important and what was not. Colonel Ellsworth had known, and lost his life for it. John Hay was beginning to learn, and was losing his youth to it. Already, gray flecked the curls above his ears.

  “Our troops at Fort Monroe battled a contingent of Confederates near Big Bethel. We lost eighteen men. We had twice as many men as they did. We didn’t last an hour.”

  It won’t be good. Not any of it. Hay sank to the edge of a chair and hoped Miss Dix would turn away no more eager women, because they would need as many eager women as they could find.

  Across the street, Mary was looking out from the room of the Willard Hotel toward the president’s mansion. The hotel room cost three dollars a night, one and a half deliveries’ worth, a rate that was even more expensive than the Delevan’s. Mary was fairly certain that Amelia would send her more money if she asked, but she did not want her mother to know exactly where she was quite yet. She needed time. The link between becoming a nurse and becoming a surgeon was further apart than it had ever been, and now she wasn’t even certain that it had ever been clear. She was beginning to doubt everything, especially the impulsive decision to come to Washington, which had seemed straightforward enough when she had made it, but now appeared rash and unfounded.

  Laughter floated up from the dining room downstairs. Mary was hungry, but she could not imagine dining alone in public in a strange city. Even in Albany, she would have been too uncomfortable, though she was well known and might have found someone’s table to join. Mostly though, she was tired. The maid had drawn her a bath, and as Mary towel-dried her hair, she thought of Thomas Fall and Christian just across the Potomac River, which she had not yet even glimpsed. Dr. Blevens, too. The thought came to her that she might try to find a way to visit them, thereby garnering at least some purpose in her defeat.

  Such a long way to come for hope.

  The summer evening was warm and Mary opened the window, but quickly shut it again. The air was foul, worse than the pestilential air of Albany, though it was hard to imagine anywhere that could top the odors of that city in the summer.

  She sat down on the bed, running a comb through her curls.

  If perhaps she couldn’t get across the Long Bridge, it was possible she would run into Thomas and Christian in the city. Though the shape of her future seemed as indistinct as the last forty-eight hours of her life, now she imagined serendipity, coincidence. Oh. How lovely to see you here. We’re just in from the fort. Let me take your arm. But it was Blevens saying this, bowing, offering his arm. She must readjust; Blevens was not the man she wished to see.

  Mary put aside her comb and lay back on the bed. Perhaps they would meet nearby, or even in the hotel. Downstairs, the orchestra was playing a waltz. Thomas, her brother-in-law, was guiding her to a linen-covered table, Christian proudly following behind, James Blevens now lost in the crowd. Pure white walls trellised with gilded vines; dancers weaving to a Viennese waltz played by a string quartet, their violin bows rising and falling in unison; candles flaring in sconces, trays piled with food. Grapes and bananas and a roasted hog with an apple in its mouth sailing by on the arms of jacketed waiters. The dancers in white turned and turned on a parquet floor. You dance so well. Thank you. I am a very good brother-in-law . Dr. Blevens cut in and asked, Is this enough for you? Christian cut in and said, Isn’t war splendid? In her arms, her brother was untouched, safe, because she was here. Their mother would be so pleased. In between sweeping dips and turns, Mary found time to deliver the baby of a woman laboring in a corner. Oh, thank you, the woman said, swiftly recovering, holding up her baby for the men to admire. See how clever that woman is? See how she helped me? There, the one dancing in the arms of that young man, the one that looks as if he loves her. He knows who she is. He knows what she can do.

  The music raced and the men took turns twirling Mary in circles until her heart raced and she held her gloved hand to her chest, her beautiful neck rising from her white, square-collared dress. You have a fine neck and lovely carriage for a woman who is not attractive. I know. My neck is my best feature. I know how to carry this ungainly body. That’s good, because this is a war, you know. But you shouldn’t have come. You’re far too young. You’ve come too far. You shouldn’t be here.

  You shouldn’t be here.

  Thomas glided her off the floor and then rejoined the dancing soldiers, now absent their partners, turning in perfect rhythm in their white waist-coats and white gloves and white powdered wigs as the band played faster and faster, until they vanished, every one.

  Mary woke up, startled, not remembering having fallen asleep.

  It will not be good, not any of it.

  At ten o’clock the next morning, on the top floor of the Widner Building at 17th and F streets, Mary stood at a tall oak counter that separated the dozen clerks writing in ledgers from inquirers.

  “I am in need of the addresses of all the hospitals, makeshift and established.”

  A tall, clipped man looked up at Mary from behind his pile of papers and observed that the woman enquiring carried a valise and an open notebook, and that flowers of perspiration had already bloomed under her arms this sweltering morning. “That is not information I am able to give out.” The clerk had worked in the Surgeon General’s office only two months. In that time, he had become happily stingy and presumptive, playing out the eternal imperiousness of clerks who caught the disease the first day on the job and ever afterwards never recovered. Doomed to their fate, they succumbed to stinginess without argument, as if to death.

  “John Hay sent me.” Mary said the name without remorse, having decided to hazard everything.

  “We sent him a report last week.”

  “But now it is this week,” Mary said.

  The clerk looked her up and down, as much as he could from behind the counter, his arms propped upon its smooth, caramel surface, king of his fiefdom. “Is John Hay now employing his own secretary?” He was angry that he had not heard the job was available, admitting to himself the dissatisfaction he rarely let surface. It was a volcano to be capped, for life was long. He managed to notice, with pleasure, the state of her clothes; they were traveled in, and recently. To be a secretary to the secretary to the president did not confer advantage, it seemed, only discomfort, a circumstance that rendered only a modicum of satisfaction. He said, “We do not make duplicate reports.”

  Mary set down the pen, a simple action the clerk would later remember for its threat. She might have been taking up a sword. You are my last. Not hope, not chance, but impediment.

  “If you do not give me the addresses, then the president himself will be f
orced to come here.”

  The clerk would have liked very much to see the president up close. Mr. Lincoln had never visited the Surgeon General’s office, though he was frequently seen striding through the park on his way to the War Department across the street. Will be forced. The clerk tried to picture a scowl from the famously congenial man. A reprimand, possibly even a dismissal, might follow, all from wishing for a moment of recognition.

  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?