Robin Oliveira Read online

  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 stud
ent. 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.”

  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 irritatio
n 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.