Robin Oliveira Read online

The doctor answered for her, speaking quickly and nervously. “She cannot say. Since the night, at least.”

  Mary lifted her gaze from the girl to appraise the doctor with a cool, steady glance. “No chloroform, no forceps?”

  “Why do you think I called you? I’ve seen enough of the damage those can do. I’m a surgeon, for God’s sake, not a butcher. Please,” the doctor said, “I need your help.” Of late, surgeons had entered the obstetrics trade, but there had been too many mistakes to make him feel comfortable. He didn’t like administering chloroform to ease the mother’s pain, because babies ended up languishing in the womb, and doctors had to go hunting for them with forceps. Too many women had bled, too many babies’ skulls had been crushed. He would stick with the ailments of men: hatchet blows and factory burns.

  “You’ll help me?” the girl asked.

  As Mary smoothed the blanket, she thought that the girl resembled Jenny, though she lacked Jenny’s distinguishing clarity of skin. But the wide-set eyes, the high cheekbones, and the bright lips had emerged from the same well of beauty as Mary’s twin. Once, when Mary was very young, she had asked her mother what “twin” meant, and her mother, who had understood the root of the question, had answered, God does not give out his gifts equally, even to those who have shared a womb.

  “My last one died,” Bonnie said, whispering, drawing Mary close to her, her face transforming from a feverish daze to one of grief.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The baby before this,” Bonnie said, her eyes half closed. “I didn’t know it was labor I was taken with, you see?”

  The ignorance! It was exactly like Jenny. But Jenny’s ignorance was something altogether different, a refusal to engage, to exert herself. A lack of curiosity.

  Outside, above the street clatter of carriages and vendors came the hard clang of the fire bell, and cries of “On to the South!”

  Blevens rushed to the window and threw it open as Mary whispered to Bonnie not to worry. The rising strains of a band joined the bugle, producing a festive, off-tune march that beckoned like a piper. A swelling crowd hurried along the turnpike, shoulders and wool hats bent against the rain. In the distance the flat pop of gunfire sounded.

  “You there! Hello? Can you give me the news?” Blevens cried.

  A man who had stopped to don an oilskin looked up, revealing a slick, battered face, pocked, the doctor was certain, at the ironworks where the spitting metal often scarred workers’ faces.

  “Haven’t you heard?” the man shouted. “The Carolinians fired on Fort Sumter!”

  “Has Lincoln called for men?” the doctor asked, but the scarred man melted into the stream of revelers pushing down the muddy turnpike toward the music as if something were reeling them in. James Blevens slammed down the window and turned.

  “I cannot believe it,” he said. “It is war.”

  Bonnie seized Mary’s wrist, and Mary said, “Do you want to scare her?”

  “Sorry,” Blevens said, but he was agitated, glancing again toward the window.

  “I’ll need scissors, lard, and any rags you have,” Mary said. “And water.”

  With a last look over his shoulder, Blevens scurried to assemble the requested supplies. Bonnie nodded off into the deep sleep that overcame women between contractions. Mary probed her belly, feeling for the baby’s spine. Often it was the baby’s position in the womb that caused delay. There were also other reasons, worse reasons, that Mary did not yet want to entertain. Look first, her mother always said, for the common.

  Bonnie was thin—undernourished even—but even through that thin wall of belly, Mary could not detect the rope of spine she was looking for.

  “Bonnie.”

  The girl snapped from her deep sleep and fixed her gaze on Mary.

  “I have to put my hand inside you. Do you understand? I have to confirm where the baby’s head is.”

  The girl nodded, but Mary knew that she did not understand. “You keep looking at me, do you understand? Don’t close your eyes.”

  Mary slipped her hand into the warm glove of Bonnie’s body and began to probe the baby’s head for the telltale V, where the suture lines of the scalp met in ridges at the back. Bonnie’s water had not yet burst and Mary worked gingerly, pressing gently against the bulging sac around the baby’s head, taking care not to snag the membrane. Yes, there was the V. She ran her hand along the lines, keeping Bonnie’s gaze locked on hers, smiling encouragement as she searched for the obstacle.

  “Bonnie,” Mary said gently, withdrawing her hand, wiping it on a rag. “Your baby is coming out face up. That’s why you’re having so much trouble. I have to turn the baby. It will make things easier for both of you. It’s going to be uncomfortable, but I’ll do it quickly.”

  Mary nodded to Dr. Blevens; at her summons, he strode across the room and took Bonnie’s hands in his. Mary slipped again inside Bonnie and slowly fitted her fingers around the baby’s skull. With her other hand, she felt through the abdominal wall for the baby’s arms and legs. She established a grip. She was standing now, her right hand deep inside Bonnie, the other on her belly. The wave of contraction hit hard. Bonnie’s mouth moved, but no sound came out. Dr. Blevens was leaning forward, his face inches from Bonnie’s, whispering encouragement into her ear. When the contraction relaxed, Mary grasped the baby’s skull and made a percussive shove with her left, rolling the baby in a wave. Bonnie writhed under the abuse, arching her back off the table, then falling again. Through the tidal swell of the next two contractions, Mary held the child in place, keeping the baby locked in its new position, the muscled womb clamping down on her fingertips. From outside, Mary could hear more shouts, but even these could not distract her now. All her movements, decisions, and thoughts came from a well deep inside her. When she was certain that the baby would not roll back, she carefully withdrew her hands, and the rest of the delivery proceeded. Mary looked only at Bonnie, thought only of Bonnie and the baby. She was authoritative when Bonnie faltered, stern when she panicked, and unflagging when, screaming, Bonnie expelled a boy in a rush of amniotic fluid. Mary wiped the small flag of his gender along with the rest of him, and then swaddled him in a blanket that the doctor handed her. There was no deformation. The child was perfect, if small. She judged this one at nine months’ gestation, but maybe less.

  “Extraordinary. I was certain the head was too large,” Blevens said.

  “It’s a common enough mistake.”

  Efficient but tender, Mary went about her work with a kind of informality. She tucked the mewling infant into Bonnie’s grateful arms and tied off the cord after the afterbirth slithered out. There was little blood. The girl had not even torn.

  “It’s the lard,” Mary said, wiping her soaked skirts with a towel. “Massage it into the flesh beforehand, a bit at a time.”

  Blevens tucked in the ends of the blanket that had fallen away, but he knew it to be an insignificant contribution, the act of a maiden aunt after the danger had passed.

  “Do allow me to pay you,” he said, but Mary dismissed this offer with a wave of her hand.

  “Where is her husband?” Mary asked.

  “I don’t know. He ran in with her and then left.” Blevens looked around the room as if the boy might suddenly appear.

  “But where will she go?”

  Blevens shrugged. His rooms were not made for keeping patients overnight.

  “If you like, I can take her home with me. My mother and I have a lying-in room. She can stay with us until she’s recovered.”

  He protested, and Mary shook it off as if it were nothing, but James Blevens knew it wasn’t nothing. The girl and her husband were poor farmers. James had surmised that much when the boy had dropped Bonnie off. They would never be able to pay for any care, not even room and board. Her offer was very generous, more generous than James had any right to expect given that she had been called in at the last minute. But now he recalled the earlier confusion.

  “Miss Sutter, what was it you w
anted from me this afternoon?”

  Mary wiped her hands on her ruined skirts. Her birthing apron was at home, along with the rest of her medicine, rubber sheets, scissors, and rags. “You have already seen me turn a child. I am just as skilled with a previa, or twins. But I want more. I want to study. I want to know more about anatomy, physiology. The something I cannot see.” It was the speech she had meant for Dr. Marsh. She began to speak in a rush, the words tumbling out. “For instance, the problem of why some women seize in labor. I know that headaches and light sensitivity precede it, but do they trigger it? Is it like other seizure disorders? I know that sometimes it’s caused by a rapid revolution of blood to the head, or a too severely felt labor, but why? I was reading in The Process of Parturition—”

  Dr. Blevens swiveled to look at his bookshelf and then turned back to her. “Aren’t deliveries enough for you?”

  Mary’s gaze was covetous. “I want to understand everything,” she said. “Isn’t it all connected? Isn’t the body a system? How can I understand a part if I do not understand the whole?”

  Mary recognized Blevens’s look: the tilting of the head, the gaze of incredulity. Why was she always such a surprise to people? In her childhood her father had often greeted her questions—Is the Hudson’s tidal nature a detriment or a help to transportation? What is the height of the world’s largest mountain? What is the true nature of the earth’s center?—with exhalations of astonishment.

  “Miss Sutter, what precisely do you want?”

  “I want to become a doctor. The Albany Medical College won’t admit me. I want you to teach me.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Many fine doctors have only apprenticed—”

  “Miss Sutter—”

  “Consider what you just saw, what I just did for you. I work hard. You would not be disappointed. And I could teach you midwifery!” This is it, Mary thought. I have to convince this man.

  Blevens could understand the young woman’s enthusiasm for medicine, and he wondered now what William Stipp would make of her. She was nearly as windblown and desperate as Blevens had been a decade ago, when he had accosted Stipp much the way Miss Sutter was accosting him now.

  Blevens sighed and said, “I am terribly sorry, but what you propose is impossible.”

  “It is not impossible.”

  “It is. I’m going to enlist. They’ll need surgeons.”

  “But you don’t know what will happen. You don’t know. Maybe this is the end, maybe it’s all over—”

  “Have you gone mad? The war has just started!”

  The baby began to cry and James Blevens cursed. They had been whispering, trying not to disturb Bonnie.

  Blevens said, “I am most grateful to you today for your help, and I will pay you, but I cannot—”

  “But you can,” Mary said. “Dr. Blevens, if you take me on—”

  He heaved a sigh. “Miss Sutter, even if there were no war, and we were to do this, you would have no lectures. No dissecting lab. You would see no surgeries except the sporadic ones I perform here. And then when I finished teaching you, you would have no credential—”

  “Please,” she said. “Please. It is all I want.”

  The kerosene lantern threw shadows across the walls and floor. In the flickering light, Mary Sutter and James Blevens stood as opposed now as they had been united moments before. Only the soft whimpering of the baby broke the silence. James Blevens could feel the strength of the woman’s desire. They echoed memories of his own beginnings, his own desperate pleas when he was starting, when getting into a medical college had seemed an impossible goal.

  “I’m sorry. I cannot,” Dr. Blevens said.

  “I see.” Even as Mary spoke, she modulated her tone, but it was no use. Yearning and heartbreak combined with fatigue, and even as she turned her attention to Bonnie, dutiful as always, remembering to check Bonnie’s belly to make certain the uterus was still contracting, she said, “It would be nothing to you to teach me. Nothing.”

  “Are you always this persistent?”

  “Always,” Mary said.

  “Miss Sutter, you helped me a great deal today. I am grateful. No doubt Bonnie is grateful. You demonstrated great skill. Remarkable skill. But I cannot help you to become a physician. What you are asking is impossible.”

  “Well, then,” Mary said, nodding, remonstrating with herself not to say Thank you for your time, or other like idiocies. Do not cede, she thought. Keep your spine straight. “You’ll have to help me to get Bonnie home. I haven’t a carriage.”

  James Blevens took in the disappointment of the woman who had helped him and felt, not for the first time, that he was hopeless with women. He didn’t understand them. His wife, Sarah, living in Manhattan City, would agree. He should be given credit for asking for help from a midwife; no other doctor in Albany would have capitulated control, but Sarah, if she ever heard of this, would only say that he had failed yet again.

  “My carriage is in the back. I’ll bring it around front,” he said.

  Blevens tacked a note to his door for the delinquent husband and then went back inside to retrieve Bonnie. Mary followed behind with the child, swaddled against the rain. He had already padded the bed of the open carriage with horse blankets for Bonnie, and as he laid her inside, Mary noticed how tender he was with her, as if he knew what it was to be a woman.

  The nearby slaughterhouse smokers were snuffed for the night, but the air felt compressed and humid in the tapering rain. From the direction of State Street, a gaseous yellow haze hovered, a drumbeat speeding the distance from the revelry to their carriage, the brass notes lagging behind. As the horse plodded through the streets, James Blevens and Mary Sutter did not speak. Witnesses to intimacy, they could find nothing now to say except for directions given and clarified. It was awkward to have spoken of desire, revelation, disappointment. Only a mile separated Dove Street from Dr. Blevens’s surgery, but the drive felt like a hundred.

  The Sutter home was one of the new kinds of row houses made from quarried stone: deep, rather than wide, windows aligned singly one atop the other in three neat stories, an iron railing ascending the steep stairs from the sidewalk of slate. Dr. Blevens tied the horses and carried Bonnie in his arms; Mary cradled the infant and glided up the stairs behind him, letting the maid answer the bell. Inside, an open stairway soared to the next floor and a third beyond. A newel post stood sentry, and balusters supported a carved walnut balustrade. Off the hallway, French doors opened into a parlor; on a small table, tulips bloomed in a glass vase.

  Blevens had not expected wealth.

  “Is my mother home?” Mary asked, unwrapping her shawl with one arm while managing the baby with the other.

  “Out, Miss, on a call.” The maid calmly surveyed the pair of guests. “Shall I set the table for two more?”

  “A tray, please, upstairs for the new mother,” Mary said, and climbed the stairs with Blevens following. Sconces burned tapered candles; on the stairs, brass rods held back a cascading maroon runner. Mary settled Bonnie under a thick comforter in a wide bed in a room at the top of the stairs while Dr. Blevens waited in the hallway outside. A walnut bookshelf lined the long hall, which was open to the stairwell. The shelves held a medical library to envy: Gray’s Anatomy, A Pharmocologia, and the aforementioned The Process of Parturition. Blevens was holding the text open when Mary emerged some ten minutes later.

  “Wellon’s Bookstore,” Mary said. “He gets me anything I ask for.”

  “You have read all of these?”

  “Of course.” She excused herself and disappeared into a bedroom. When she emerged she had changed her clothes. She wore a clean, high-necked dress of no distinguishing feature. It was as if she cared nothing for beauty, though it was clear that someone in the home did.

  Blevens trailed Mary down the stairs. “Do you often take ladies for lying-in?”

  “Rarely. And only if they are destitute.”

  In the entry, Mary retrieved Blevens�
��s hat from the stand and held it out for him as she opened the door. There would be no dinner for him at the Sutter home tonight, no matter what the maid had offered. Outside, rain was drumming on the red leather benches of his carriage, the cobbles, the stone stoop, the houses opposite.

  “Good night, Dr. Blevens.”

  “You must understand, Miss Sutter,” Blevens said, “that I am not in a position to help you.” The excuse sounded lamentable. I am not in a position. “Surely, with your resources—” He made a vague gesture toward an elegant crystal vase, as if its presence on a burnished walnut table in her foyer could somehow persuade Dr. Marsh to admit her to the college.

  “One cannot buy what one truly wants, Dr. Blevens. Haven’t you learned that yet?”

  Blevens pulled his coin purse from his pocket. “I insist on paying you.”

  “You cannot buy me, either.”

  “I meant only to thank you.”

  “Good-bye.”

  Blevens sighed, replaced his coin purse, put on his hat, and murmured a good-bye. He would have liked to have helped her, would have, too, if he could. But the war. Even now, he was thinking of following the noise of the band still playing in the distance despite the rain, which had become a torrent, wind gusting through the door. He was about to step over the threshold when an open carriage pulled up and two women and a male companion tumbled out, wrapped in horse blankets. A clap of thunder hurried them up the stairs and into the foyer, the women brushing water from the puffed shoulders of their coats and shaking sodden umbrellas. The blankets were soaked through and the women laughed as they unwound themselves and began unpinning wet hats more stylish than the one Mary Sutter still wore perched atop her wild curls. (Blevens thought, She doesn’t care for herself; she neglects even the simplest rituals of dress.) It was obvious that these two were related in some way, even though there were only hints of resemblance—the same long nose, large eyes, and square chin as Mary, but they were more accurately and pleasingly executed, especially on the younger of the two women, though the older was youngish and alive, with luminescent skin and curls tamer than Mary’s.