Robin Oliveira Read online

Chapter Thirty-one

  Register of the Sick and Wounded, Union Hotel Hospital, November 1861

  “Dear God, Mary, what are you doing up?” Stipp asked.

  Mary dropped her pen, smearing the new ledger’s pages with ink. The scraping of the pen against the page had been the only sound she had been aware of, though at night the Union Hotel Hospital was a noisy organism. Tamped down, shuttered in by the cold, its occupants groaned and prayed both for daylight and for delivery from the misery of the dying men alongside them, but the collective chorus had disappeared for Mary as she had worked.

  She said, “I might ask the same of you.”

  Stipp dragged toward her from the hallway door and sank down beside her in a chair. A gray army blanket smothered his shoulders. Clouds of vapor escaped from his mouth. He had lain awake in his room for four hours, powerless as life ebbed noisily away from the men in his charge, thinking that he too was closer to dying with every passing minute. He had fled his straw-filled coffin of a bed to discover Mary—young, indefatigable Mary—writing away, scraps of paper and scribbled notes piled around her as she tried to impose some kind of order on the chaos that was the Union Hotel. The manual Stipp had been sent by the Medical Department, Handbook for the Military Surgeon, rested at her elbow. Stipp had been looking for the handbook for two days.

  “It’s past three o’clock,” he said.

  Mary peered at the tall clock still in its place at the far end of the dining room. It had been too heavy for the owners to cart off when the government had taken over the hotel.

  “It’s three-thirty.”

  “Two hours and the day begins all over again. Aren’t you tired?” Stipp asked.

  “The Medical Department want us to keep track of all our admissions. They want us to backtrack as far as we can remember.” Though it was the second week of December, Mary had been recording the names of the soldiers they had admitted in October from the battle near Ball’s Bluff, north along the Potomac. It had been another rout—the Union Hotel had been the closest general hospital, and for a period of two weeks they’d received wounded shipped down the C&O Canal on barges and offloaded and carried up the hill on stretchers. Some were from the field hospital at Poolesville, some from a makeshift hospital in a barn on the Maryland side of the river, where several amputations had been performed. The wounded crowded the hotel—it had been a week of no sleep, again. Fresh surgeries, another amputation, this one of an arm. The new dead house Miss Dix had badgered the quartermaster to build them had received the arm like a coffin. Sometime later, a driver came to cart it off, and it lay uncovered in the back of the wagon, and all the people on the streets of Georgetown and Washington shuddered as it had trundled by.

  Mary dipped the pen into the last of her ink. A candle burned on the table. The fire had died down about ten, but she was too mindful of the dwindling supply of firewood to light another. “If you’re too tired, Dr. Blevens would probably be eager to take your place on morning rounds.”

  “I’m not tired.”

  Blevens’s hands were much better. The slippery elm seemed to have done the trick. He was leaving within the week to work at the hospital at the Patent Office.

  To Stipp, the scratching of the pen sounded like the scrape of knife against bone. Stipp studied the curve of Mary’s long neck. He liked to study her when she was absorbed in work, when her thoughts were directed to a task at hand and she had no awareness of anyone around her. He often imagined that when she delivered babies, she exhibited the same quiescent concentration, an aloofness that nevertheless was eminently trustworthy.

  “Is Peter any better?” he asked. How is the boy? The boy is well.

  “He is. He seems to have come around. He drank a cup of water today. And the edges of his wound are not suppurating much.”

  Stipp nodded. He did not know why he’d asked her; he believed she was far too attached to the boy to judge his medical situation dispassionately. He’d been dropping in on Peter all afternoon and feared that he was worse off than before. He choked too often when he drank; Stipp believed it was affecting the poor boy’s lungs. He would not argue with Mary now, though. It was the dead of night and he craved a moment free of pain.

  Mary lifted her pen from the page. “I don’t know the rank of the men admitted from Ball’s Bluff. And if I have to record every person admitted to this hospital into this ledger, we are going to run out of ink.”

  She read out loud the next page: “Date Returned to Duty, Deserted, Discharged from Service, Sent to General Hospital, On Furlough, Died, Remarks. How are we supposed to know all of this? They don’t even know who’s in the army when they’re in their regiments. Vulnus Puncture. Why don’t we just write ‘gunshot wound’?” Mary said.

  “The Latin makes it less vulgar.”

  “Or more. Vulnus.”

  The building cracked in the cold.

  “Christmas is coming,” Stipp said, endeavoring to keep his voice even.

  Mary lifted her hand from the page. The pen hovered in the air, a drop of ink, like blood, forming at its pointed tip.

  “You won’t persuade me.”

  “I have seen you reading and rereading your letters. You cannot claim indifference.”

  “I do not claim anything like it.”

  “I will write a furlough for you, if Miss Dix won’t.”

  “I have not asked her.”

  “Shall I ask her for you?”

  Mary capped the ink bottle, wiped the nib of her pen, and rose from the table, leaving the ledger’s pages open to dry.

  “You are very stubborn,” Stipp said.

  “You make that observation as if you have just realized it.” Mary reached for the surgery handbook, but Stipp forestalled her with a hand on top of hers.

  “I am almost finished reading it,” Mary said.

  “Your mother wrote to me. Grief festers, Mary. And you will regret not going for your sister.”

  “You are not my father.”

  “No. I am not. But I love you all the same.”

  Her hair fell like a curtain across her face, and she tugged her curls back into their combs. Stipp loved even the frantic nervousness of these gestures, the way she worked without even knowing what she was doing. “It is just a fact, Mary. And we might as well say these things.” He did not say, Because death hovers in the wings. Stalks the wards. Prowls in the night.

  Her hands stayed as a corona above her head, then she slowly let them fall. She managed to keep the pity from her eyes, but just. “You love me?” She said this slowly, as if he were already dying, or as aged as he felt in the face of such youthful ambition.

  The young woman who was so adept at compassion—matter-of-fact and kind without displaying any pity—now looked at him as if she had never learned that to pity a man was to kill him.

  He let a lying smile break from his face, withholding all sorrow, though his eyes watered. He was grateful that it was the dead of night, and the creeping dawn ages away. Oh, he felt old for the foolishness of love, for its indiscriminate yet accurate aim.

  “You see,” he said. “How could I not love you? You are the daughter I wish I had. The one I would be proud of.” He said a silent apology to Lilianna, and to Genevieve, his first love. But darling, life goes on, and this pain is agonizing evidence.

  Would that there were only the scraping of the pen, the illogical, record-keeping rasp, the focus that renewed her, buoyed her up, let her believe that doom was not inevitable. The world was ending, but here was an offer of love.

  Irrepressible Mary, speechless. Dr. Stipp vaulted to wisdom. To age. To rank, even. “Don’t worry,” he said. “It is better, isn’t it, than our disliking one another?” Said it with a straight face, as if such lies were believable.

  “Of course,” Mary said.

  Another mercy dispensed, to pretend to believe the second lie. She would feign belief in a third and a fourth, and then another—endless numbers of them—to keep this man from dissolving. She wanted to say, I
t is only the war that makes you love me. It is only the night. It is only the chaos. See, she wanted to say, the ledger? It is our only hope.

  As if to confirm, Stipp took up the ledger and made careful examination of her entries. The clock tolled the hour. Four o’clock. God, such beastly things were the hours of the night. “I believe your page is dry now.” He shut the ledger and handed it to her, as if it were his heart.

  They left the room together and separated at the top of the stairs, Mary taking the candle and Stipp feeling his way back to his bed in the dark.

  Chapter Thirty-two

  The next morning, December the fifteenth, was a day of piercing cold, compounding the general misery within the hospital walls. Mary and Stipp were on morning rounds when they discovered Peter Markeli breathless, perspiring, sitting up in bed, his hands locked around his knees, his sheets and blankets knotted at his ankles, his nightshirt transparent with perspiration. He had torn away his dressing.

  “He’s been restless all night,” Blevens said.

  Stipp prescribed 10 grains of turpentine as a diuretic.

  “It may force the fluid from his lungs,” he whispered to Blevens, in a voice that harbored doubt rather than hope. He told Mary to also rub volatile oil of turpentine over the boy’s chest, but the medicine had no effect. All the long day, Peter continued to labor at breathing. From time to time, he grasped at Mary’s skirt or sleeve. Late in the afternoon, as the day began its plunge into wintry darkness, he fumbled in his pocket and pulled from his wallet a tintype that he laid on the bed. It was of an older woman, with dark hair neatly tucked beneath a white lace cap, peering from the gray shadows of the portrait.

  “Your mother?” Mary asked.

  Peter nodded. His mop of curls clung to his forehead. Mary knelt on the bed and helped him to sit forward.

  To drown is to brawl with death; Mary’s helplessness made her furious. Blevens, his hands nearly healed, but still bandaged, paced. Toward six, Peter’s breathing slowed, his chest expanding and contracting in stutters and starts with long, breathless periods in between. Agonal breathing, called that not for the agony of the dying, but for the agony of having to witness it.

  The sharp edges of the tintype cut into Peter’s palm.

  When the tintype clattered to the floor, Mary draped a towel across his ruined face.

  Blevens said, “Mary,” but she did not answer him; instead, she hurtled through the hotel, looking for Stipp.

  In the kitchen, he was hunched over a bowl of cold stew.

  “I’ll require leave for three weeks,” she announced.

  The spoon Stipp was ferrying to his mouth paused in midair. He didn’t need to ask what had happened.

  “You’ll come back?” he said.

  “I don’t even want to go,” she said.

  Snow began falling in Philadelphia, and by the time Mary had crossed the Hudson on the ferry, Manhattan’s ugliness had been shrouded in a cloak of white. Over her dress she wore a shawl and bonnet, and on her feet only thin summer boots. Her winter coat had been left behind in Albany, along with her muff and hat. Along the waterfront, gaslamps glimmered fitfully in the relentless snow. Mary turned in a circle, surveying the slippery cobbles, the shanties and tenements and warehouses butting up against the rows of docks. The ferry conductor had laughed at her when she’d asked if he thought the trains would be running in New York. He had angled a lantern at her, the flickering light betraying a set of wooden teeth. “I don’t even know if I’ll make it home three blocks, Miss.”

  The odor of fish clung to the coiled ropes and slippery posts of the wharf. The ferry she had debarked was smacking and banging against the pier. Mary tightened the shawl over her hair and shoulders. She’d sent Amelia a telegram: I’m coming. Had she left yesterday, she would have been home by now, tucked into Dove Street, waiting for Thomas and Jenny’s baby. She joined the crowd trudging across the open wharves toward the city. Her skirts dragged behind her in the slush of snow and garbage and fish offal. She would find a horsecar heading north, ask directions to the depot. Sleep in the station, if necessary. Her fingers grew brittle with cold.

  A woman trudged past, her shoulders hunched against the pelting snow.

  “Pardon me. Do you know how to get to the railroad depot?”

  The woman swung around. “Which one, Miss? There are six or more. Where are you going?”

  “Albany.”

  “The Hudson River Railroad? Good luck to you. You won’t make it tonight.”

  “Please. I don’t know where to go.”

  Wind howled, tearing at their skirts. The woman shouted, “I think you’d best go to the Chambers Street Station. It’s not much really, but 32nd is too far. Go on down West Street here till you get to it,” she said, pointing down the dark waterfront.

  Mary looked downriver. The storm had not driven the wharf ’s roustabouts and loiterers inside. Even in the Union Hotel, surrounded by two hundred undressed men, Mary had not felt as vulnerable as she did now.

  The woman grabbed Mary by the elbow. “I’ll show you. Come on.”

  The snow was coming on strong now. Traffic thronged the streets. Drivers were shouting and whipping the air above the backs of the horses, loath to inflict pain, but frustrated enough to threaten. In Albany, drivers would have switched to sleighs, but it seemed that no one used a sleigh in the city. Or they had all gotten caught in the storm. The horsecars were packed solid, men hanging out the doors. They were covering blocks now, the wind having abated some.

  They came to an intersection where the woman halted and directed a thrust of her chin across the street. “This is Hudson Street. The depot is straight on, a few blocks or so. I can’t remember for sure.” She staggered away, snow swirling around her as she disappeared into the night. Mary darted across the intersection, zigzagging between horses and carts. The cross streets came at an angle now. Worth, Thomas, Duane. As she stumbled across one street, a huge locomotive loomed out of the storm to her right. A great iron beast, it was inching forward down tracks laid in the middle of the street. Cabbies and wagon drivers panicked and beat the backs of their horses now to get out of the way, while a man on horseback preceding the engine swung a warning lantern, yelling for people to move, goddamn it, or risk dying. A policeman was blowing his whistle in short, shrill blasts. Mary stumbled on, threading through the jumbled traffic, following the path of the train, until the depot reared up, black and comforting. It was little more than a shed, really, meant to turn the trains and send them back north again, though now it was crammed with people who had given up trying to make it to 32nd Street. That morning, Stipp had taken her by the hands, and said, Take care, now. It seemed forever ago. Mary gathered herself and shoved through the press of people elbowing and fighting to get to the ticket window, where a harried clerk behind his cage leaned forward to field complaints, his head cocked, his eyes pressed together in a tight squint. The walls reverberated with shouts. Unable to hear what anyone was saying, Mary watched person after person turn disgustedly away from the window.

  After about fifteen minutes, she fought to the coveted space in front of the grille.

  “Are the trains going?”

  “No.”

  “But I just saw one arriving.”

  “Have you seen it outside, Miss? It’s a blizzard.”

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “Can’t say.”

  “I have to get home.”

  “Everyone wants to get home. It’s Christmas.”

  “Could you at least sell me a ticket?”

  The man pursed his lips and shook his head. “Come back tomorrow at daylight. If there are any trains, I’ll start selling tickets then.”

  Outside, mired carriages and omnibuses had been abandoned in the drifts. The flickering yellow light of gaslamps barely illuminated a string of swinging signs that advertised a row of boarding houses and hotels. Convincing herself that nothing could be worse than the Union Hotel, Mary set out to find shelter.

 
; Chapter Thirty-three

  Amelia let the parlor curtain fall. Last night, at the height of the storm, a telegraph messenger had pounded on the door and presented her with a telegram from Mary. Home tonight. Now it was two o’clock in the afternoon the following day, and Mary still had not arrived, though this morning not even the maids had come from their homes in the Sixth Ward, half a mile away.

  “Amelia?” Bonnie hovered in the doorway of the parlor, her hand trembling on the jamb, her face a white snowscape of fear.

  Amelia leapt for the stairs.

  In Jenny’s room, the window shades had been drawn against the sharp edges of the December light. Jenny was curled into a ball, the unmistakable pallor of labor stretched across her face, her dress wet through with perspiration.

  “Oh, Jenny, you should have called me. How long has it been?” Amelia asked, easing herself onto Jenny’s bed, laying her hands on her daughter’s belly.

  “An hour or so. I don’t know for certain.”

  “The pains are not too bad?” Amelia asked, instantly angry with herself for having fallen prey to the mistake of asking for the answer she wanted. This was why she needed Mary.

  Jenny shook her head. “No, not too bad.”

  Amelia said, “Help me, Bonnie.”

  Supporting Jenny by the elbows, they helped her to the lying-in room and removed her wet dress and eased her into a dry nightgown. After settling Jenny in, Amelia busied herself around the room, refolding towels, rearranging her basins and instruments, and counting how many babies she had delivered over the twenty-three years of her career. Over three hundred? More, maybe. And so few deaths. She knew everyone said she was the best, a reputation that brought her business, but the judgment was not really anyone’s to confer, except perhaps hers. Mary was the best. Mary, who was stuck somewhere between Washington and home on a train, like Christian had been, on his way home to safety, to her arms, which felt as empty now as the mother of a stillborn’s. A baby coming and then not coming. But no, she couldn’t think that way. Fear bred nothing but more fear. And she needed her wits about her now. What could she control? The atmosphere in the room, the way she moved, spoke, modulated, conveying safety to the laboring mother. She tried to convince herself that the girl in the bed was not her daughter. She began again to recheck her supplies, keeping her back turned, thinking that by touching objects—basin, stethoscope, laudanum vial, scissors—she could shed her skin of motherhood and find the midwife instead.