Robin Oliveira Read online

  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

  Chapter Fourteen

  Sanitary Commission Report

  The Union Hotel Hospital, July 10th, 1861

  The Union Hotel Hospital, Georgetown, was occupied as its name implies, until recently hired for its present use. It is considered capable of accommodating 225 patients, and at present contains 189. It is well situated, but the building is old, out of repair, and cut up into a number of small rooms, with windows too small and few in number to afford good ventilation. Its halls and passages are narrow, tortuous, and abrupt, and in many instances with carpets still unremoved from their floors, and walls covered with paper. There are no provisions for bathing, the water-closets and sinks are insufficient and defective, and there is no dead-house. The wards are many of them over-crowded, and destitute of arrangements for artificial ventilation.

  “Just think what they would have said if they had visited before you arrived, Mary.”

  Stipp was leaning up against the wall in the second-floor hallway, watching Mary run a ragged mop over the uneven floorboards, which was the only flooring in the entire place that took mopping, but even if Mary were to remove each rug and beat it until it approached cleanliness, she would never accomplish anything even approaching clean. It seemed that no cleaning had been attempted in the eighty years or so since George Washin
gton had eaten at the hotel, when the humble building was still only a tavern on the turnpike north. Neither had anyone cleaned the single water closet in an age. (The Sanitary Commission had gotten it wrong; there was only one, and its fabrication of more seemed somehow gracious, as if they could fill the need by wishing them into being.) Its box seeped through the floorboards to the cellar, where a shimmering lake of sewage pooled in the corner before bubbling into the unseen swamp that lurked beneath the city. Not even the linens were clean. The laundresses, hired by Stipp to work once a month, frequently did not show, and the sheets soured for weeks at a time under the patients’ backs. The cook knew how to prepare only two meals, oatmeal and boiled beef, but since there was no beef to boil, oatmeal was the mainstay of the 189 inhabitants of the least sanitary building in a hundred-mile radius of the nation’s capital.

  “What the commission should have said is that this place is an apocalypse.” Mary wiped away the streams of perspiration cascading down her forehead. Her back ached; her palms were blistered from the mop handle, last sanded, she was certain, on George Washington’s final visit. She sank against the wall and sighed.

  “I warned you that what I needed was a charwoman.”

  “This is not sport, Dr. Stipp. Men cannot get well in such a place.”

  “In all the world, there is not medicine enough to heal what ails the Union army, mopping or no.”

  Stipp was at his wit’s end. He had no patience for dysentery, the disease that had seized most of his patients even though he had attacked the tenacious ailment with a cocktail of drugs that the steward, Mr. Mack, had cleverly pilfered from the medical supply at the quartermasters’ in Foggy Bottom. But not a single doctor in the army knew what to do. In light of the ever-present and rampant diarrhea, Stipp had had to improvise. He had at first suspected malarial fever as the cause, and had pushed the normal quinine dose to its limits, and for good measure added mercury and Epsom salts. But then he had changed his mind and thought the cause might be typhoid, and so now he was using Dover’s powder and the occasional opiate. When pain presented, he administered blisters by cupping, and ordered good slugs of whiskey. Several times, however, calomel had proved useful, as had castor oil. And if the sufferer was immune to all of the above, he gave ipecac, to induce vomiting. But it was a nasty business, every bit of it, and nothing he did was working. The Sanitary Commission had been generous in its assessment; the conditions in the hotel had reached unbearable long ago. Only Mary and her efforts were keeping death by enteric asphyxiation at bay.

  As if to prove him right, Mary splashed the mop back into the bucket.

  “You cannot drown disease, Miss Sutter.”

  “I can wash away its residue.”

  “You are the most stubborn young lady I have ever met. You were certainly not a charwoman in your former life.”

  “I want to be a surgeon.”

  Stipp sighed, regretting ever having invited this headstrong young woman to stay, though it hadn’t been bad to have her about. She had made remarkable progress on the hygiene situation. And the men had perked up in her presence, though Mary was no beauty and certainly gave no indication of any of the usual weaknesses of her sex. But it was demoralizing to have her see that day after day, week after week, none of his patients improved, and that he had no idea what he should do for them, and that this seemingly most simple of medical problems was in fact the most baffling one he had ever faced. And Mary turned up everywhere, looking over his shoulder at the bedside, inquiring whether or not such and such a dose of quinine had worked yet, whether or not the Dover’s powder was at all effective, had he thought of tapioca and rice as a palliative, did he wonder whether there was some collective problem afoot in the land, would the intestinal lining of the patients tolerate the repeated onslaught, did he think they would survive?

  It wasn’t ego, he told himself. He was not really so small a man as that. It was that he was done with teaching. James Blevens had been the last of his students, and he had been sharp, that one. Cleverly taken with the body and its vagaries. But that was when he himself had been sharp; now the Texas sun had dulled his memory, and he was fighting to remember what used to come to him without any trouble at all. Sometimes, he felt himself not so much at his wit’s end, but witless. How much there was to know; how little he knew. Mary would be much better off anywhere else, even if she couldn’t see it. Still, she was remarkably resilient. It seemed nothing would bring her to her knees, not even the despicable state of this building. But as happy as he was to have finally obtained responsible help, he would not engage in dishonesty.

  “You will not become a surgeon here. I cannot help you. I tell you this as a warning. I want you to understand. There is nothing for you here.”

  “I will become a surgeon here,” Mary said, but she would not look at him, because she did not want to see the unwavering honesty in his eyes. “I am learning things.”

  “This is no place to become educated. This is no place at all, in fact, or can’t you tell that?”

  “I will learn what I can.”

  “By mopping floors?”

  “Yes, by mopping floors. And by washing sheets and by beating rugs and by any other means necessary.” She was shouting now, her voice carrying down the narrow hallway, penetrating the old timbers of the hotel that had seen murder, adultery, generosity, desperation, and grief, but never such ragged disappointment.

  “You’re a fool,” he said.

  He left her then and Mary finished mopping the hall, furiously slopping the water onto the floorboards and then whipping the mop back and forth, banging it into the walls. She felt like she was fighting the entire history of the country, all its residue, all its neglect, all its ignorance. In the dim light, it was impossible to tell whether or not she was making any progress, on the floor or in her education. What had she learned so far? How to unplug an ancient water closet, how to bathe in a building without bathing facilities, how to pitchfork boiling linens from a wash cauldron to a rinse one, but nothing about medicine. What was striving for if all you learned was that your stubbornness led you places you never wanted to be in order to do things you never thought you would do?

  She flushed the water closet with the waste water, and set the mop in the corner to rinse once she went downstairs. She was soaked though with perspiration and dirty water; the hotel walls also hoarded heat. She unpinned her hair and ran her hands through her curls, twisting them back up again into their pins. What had she wanted; where had she come? The men called to her as she careened down the hallway, begging her for help to write a letter, for something to drink, for her smile, but she dashed past their open doors until she reached her room under the stairs, where she peeled off her dress and threw herself onto the hard, thin mattress in her camisole and pantaloons. Drab walls, peeling wallpaper, a wardrobe in which a rat had made a nest in her nightgown.

  It will not be good, not any of it. You will have exhausted yourself for nothing.

  Her mother’s letter was folded under her pillow and Mary pictured now, as she rarely allowed herself to do, home: the bounty of the dining table, the clean, scented sheets on her bed, the yellow orchid gracing the hallway table, the airy rooms, freshly laundered curtains billowing from tall windows open to a spring breeze.

  A pot of tea, served on a tray, with a pitcher of milk fresh from the icebox and crystals of sugar in a silver bowl.

  Who was Stipp anyway? He was not the keeper of the gate, just as neither Blevens nor Marsh was. But she couldn’t help but feel now that she had made a huge mistake, had gone backward, not forward, had made her life worse, not better. The sweat was beginning to evaporate now from her skin, cooling her, but there was still so much to do. There were sheets to boil and bedpans to clean, and then she had to try to find something to eat, because mealtime as the only woman among hundreds of men was a fight for survival.

  She reached under the pillow and pulled Amelia’s letter from its envelope. Please come home. Please find Christian. The p
ages were already beginning to tear, though she had only read the letter half a dozen times. She supposed Jenny would want to hear of Thomas, too, though she wasn’t surprised that Amelia hadn’t mentioned it. Nothing was as she had imagined coming down on the train, when the resolve propelling her had seemed as right and true as love. It was terrifying to have miscalculated; she rarely did that, and feared that her stubbornness—yes, she would admit she was stubborn, Stipp was not wrong about that—might not be enough to sustain her.

  Do one thing, Mary thought. Have control over one thing. Wasn’t this how she had conquered uncertainty in childbirth? Steadiness, patience, deliberation, then action. Gathering herself in the melting heat, she rose from the bed, smoothed the sheets and her petticoat, and stepped into her still damp dress. After tucking the letter back under her pillow, she collected her purse and a parasol she had purchased to ward off the southern sun (no havelock for her), marched out of the disease-ridden Union Hotel, hired a hack, and headed into Washington, retracing for the first time the route she had taken a month before. Dust flew up from the street traffic and shimmered in the waves of afternoon heat. Mary held a handkerchief to her mouth and the parasol over her head as she climbed the stairs to the run-down building the hack driver had pointed out when he had come to a rest outside the Department of the Army.