Robin Oliveira Read online

  Jenny’s cry, at first soft but then rising, filled the vast spaces of the house on Dove Street.

  Amelia shut her eyes. She was not ready yet. Louder and louder Jenny’s cry swelled. And then, mercifully, it fell off and became a small gasp that diminished to a whimper while Amelia, her back still turned, wiped tears from her cheeks.

  The train rocked as it crept up Eleventh Avenue, past the stockyards and lumberyards and the open-doored abattoirs that lined the river. To keep warm, the livestock bunched together as steam swirled from their nostrils into the brilliant glint of day. The car’s coal heater had begun to work and Mary wiped her window to clear the condensation. Every seat was filled, and more people swayed in the aisles.

  At dawn, Mary had joined the long line at the ticket window. It seemed hours before a single ticket seller lifted his black curtain and several more before, one by one, the winding line’s occupants fell away and it was finally her turn.

  “Albany, eh?” It was the same man from the night before. Calmly, he thumbed through a ticket book, working his lips, counting. He consulted a piece of paper with tallies scribbled in columns. Then he said, “It’ll be tight,” but filled out her destination and the date and handed her the ticket.

  “Be at that door at noon,” he said, nodding toward the corner of the building. “That should give them enough time to clear the tracks.”

  But Mary joined the several others who had already planted themselves in line, even though it was only seven. She was not going to risk waiting until noon, was not going to wander outside in search of warm chestnuts for her hands or something to eat, was not going to miss the train and risk another night like last night.

  She had tried five hotels before knocking on the door of a sixth, a rooming house, its shabbiness apparent despite the darkness.

  “Beds were taken hours ago,” the clerk said. He wiped his dripping nose. It was cold inside too, and there was no sign of a stove or fireplace, to say nothing of a handkerchief.

  “I’ll sit up in the lobby,” Mary said.

  “Bed count’s the bed count. The city commissioners would have my hide if they was to come in here and see I’d let in more folks than we had beds for. And a woman at that.” He sniffed and ran his gaze up and down her form.

  Mary could feel the pressure rise in her head. She had left Washington on the early train, had eaten only a peppered beef stick in Philadelphia, could no longer feel her feet or ears. She leaned toward the man in his little cubicle of an office and said, “Do you really think that the city commissioners are going to leave their warm homes and come to this boarding house out of all the boarding houses in Manhattan City and fine you for letting me sit up in a chair?”

  Confusion raged across the man’s angular, ragged features; he was a creature of the night, guarding his squalid hotel with illogic. “Maybe. Besides, we don’t rent to a woman alone.”

  Mary leaned in closer. “I don’t know how you think you can stop me.”

  “I can think of a few ways.”

  “When I came in just now, there were two policemen on the corner, digging out their wagon. I will go right now to the door and scream that you have harmed me. Is that what you want?”

  The man sniffed, but glanced furtively toward the door. “Two dollars,” he said.

  The posted rate was twenty-five cents. Mary fished fifty cents from her purse and dropped the coins onto the counter. The clerk fingered them as Mary pulled together two chairs and stretched out her legs, her feet firmly encased in her sodden boots, resigned to spending the entire night awake.

  Now, on the train, she was ravenous and cold, but she had a seat. And they were finally leaving the city behind, the tenements and ironworks having given way to wilderness and farms. There were a dozen whistle stops between here and Albany. At each, there would be comings and goings, and luggage to load and unload. When she got to Albany, she would have to cross the river. Everything would take time.

  The train tracks ran alongside the Hudson, which was three times as wide here at its mouth as it was at Albany, its temperature buffered by the salty tides that thrust themselves twice a day up the river’s channel. But when they reached the Catskills, the river would shallow out, and the water would freeze.

  As the train pushed northward, the river’s current began to slow, but only Mary Sutter perceived it.

  “Oh, Jenny, try, honey. Try.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes, you can.”

  “It hurts. Please. Oh God. It hurts.”

  “You have to push.”

  “I feel like I’m tearing open.”

  “You aren’t. Everyone feels that way, but you aren’t.”

  “Mother, if I don’t make it name her Elizabeth.”

  “Don’t be silly, darling. You’ll name her yourself.”

  “And if it’s a boy, Thomas.”

  Jenny let out a cry. Amelia had registered every one of them in her gut. Her daughter had been in labor for eight hours. Not long at all, by any standard. But the pain seemed impossible. At least Jenny reported it so. The dreaded back labor. Poor Bonnie, her hands ached from massaging the muscles along Jenny’s spinal column in an effort to alleviate the pain. And now Jenny had to push. So soon! Could that possibly be right?

  The room, which had seemed so cold before, was now far too warm. Amelia rinsed a cloth and laid it on Jenny’s forehead, but Jenny ripped it away. Her moans rose as Amelia entreated her to push and Bonnie to apply more pressure to her back. Forty-five seconds. Jenny began to scream.

  Amelia waited until the contraction passed before saying, “Honey, you’re not pushing.”

  “I am.”

  Amelia assessed her daughter. Pale, tremulous, exhausted; there was something else wrong.

  Amelia slathered her right hand with lard and slipped it inside the warmth of Jenny’s body. In her agitation, Jenny tried to push her away, like so many women did at the height of their labor, but Bonnie pinned Jenny’s wrists and bent down and whispered in her ear. To concentrate, Amelia averted her head, her fingers feeling their way inside for the cervix. Dilated, completely; Amelia was certain of it. Slowly, she turned her wrist, gently running her fingers over the baby’s skull, feeling for where ridges met plates, where the V of the baby’s occipital bone met the stretched tissue, verifying, relieved that at least the baby was in the proper position. With another twist of her wrist, she attempted to intuit the diameter of the outlet of Jenny’s pelvis. Greater than four inches? Less than three? But trying to discern its size was a futile act, even for Amelia, who had coaxed from pelvises narrower than Jenny’s babies of enormous size. Amelia withdrew her hand. No matter what the size of Jenny’s pelvis, the baby was too big.

  Accustomed to panic in others, she hardly knew how to manage it in herself.

  She forced herself to take conscious control of her breathing, but she could do nothing about her hands, which were trembling at her sides. The clock was striking nine o’clock. She must have run up and down the stairs twenty times already, flinging open the front door, looking up and down the street, hoping to see her resourceful Mary climbing from a sleigh, valise in hand, bringing her good mind with her. But now it was too late to expect her; no trains ever arrived this late into Albany.

  “Bonnie. Come with me.”

  Outside the shut door, Amelia said, “Listen to me, Bonnie. You must help me. I want you to go to Eagle Street, and find the doctor on call at the hospital. Make certain you ask if he has used forceps, do you understand? Say it. Forceps.”

  “Forceps.”

  “And tell him to bring chloroform. And if he won’t do it, then you make him tell you who will and where he lives and then you go there and get that doctor. Do you understand?”

  Bonnie’s eyes grew wide with dread.

  “Take my lantern and go as fast as you can. And don’t give up until you find someone. I need you to think clearly. Be smart about this. Threaten them, if you have to.”

  “How do I do that?�
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  “Tell them it’s for Mary Sutter.”

  Lithe, quick, Bonnie darted off like hope.

  On a day in good weather, hurrying, it would take Bonnie ten minutes afoot to get to the hospital. With the snow, half an hour. And then to find and persuade the surgeon? Another fifteen minutes or half hour, when a minute was already passing like an eternity.

  “Hurry,” Amelia said, but she said it to the air, for Bonnie had already gone.

  At the lying-in room door, Amelia hesitated. Her last resort. A doctor and forceps. She did not want to think what the doctor might do to Jenny with those forceps. How many women had bled to death because of doctors’ eager machinations? And the dreaded chloroform would ease Jenny’s pain, but it would also make her unable to fight.

  Either way, Jenny was in trouble.

  The injustice might drive her mad, if she let it.

  Another cry shattered the air.

  Amelia swept in and poured as much laudanum as she dared into Jenny’s mouth, though the opiate was a trick, because it didn’t really dull the pain so much as make a woman incapable of coping with the contractions. Weakness, to give in, but Jenny’s shrieks broke her heart. If Jenny was going to die, then Amelia didn’t want her to die in agony. Perspiration cooled from Jenny’s body. Amelia washed her down, then covered her up again. She snatched up Jenny’s hand when she began to moan, forcing herself to keep her eyes open to witness the battle.

  A candle sputtered and then extinguished. Outside, the perennial hush of winter. Inside, Christian’s ghost, stalking them.

  An hour passed. Two. Amelia bargained down. Jenny might live. She might not. What mattered most was that Jenny knew she wasn’t alone.

  Mary elbowed her way out of the train car. Ten hours. Ten. The longest a train had ever taken to travel from Manhattan City to Albany. Savagely, she cut through the milling passengers, made numb by the trip and the weather and the cold. At the line of hacks, she cut off negotiations between a man and a cabbie by climbing in and barking, “Dove Street.”

  The cabbie pretended to be miffed, but he was delighted. The other passenger had been relaying tales of trunks and ladies in need and a wait of perhaps half an hour. “I’ll be back,” he yelled, as he whipped his sleigh forward.

  The river ice had been cleared earlier that day by boys in caps and on skates, pushing shovels along the ferry path so that the sleighs could avoid the ice cutters’ holes in the dark. The lantern made a moon of yellow as the sleigh scraped and bumped across the windswept ridges of ice. Albany loomed before her and then they were in the city, flying up State Street, the coal smoke sharp in the frigid air, wood smoke mixing in, the eerie glow of firelight visible through windows. The Gayety Music Hall was just emptying out, and the cabbie resolved to stop there next, for he did not want to go back again across that river. He sped around the bend of Eagle Street. Mary, huddled under the sled robe, marked the outline of the medical school and hospital, glowering against a shroud of black.

  At home, no flurry in black dress and white apron emerged to greet her. A single candle burned in a sconce. Melted snow puddled on the floor of the entryway; a pair of galoshes, a man’s coat flung across the newel post. A creak, upstairs. And then, muffled shouting.

  Mary flew up the stairs. The door to the lying-in room stood open, and at its jamb stood Bonnie, her head turned away from the door, hand to her mouth, an expression of panic distorting her face. The sickly sweet smell of chloroform mingled with the sourness of sweat. On the bed kneeled a man who had planted one knee between Jenny’s splayed legs. He was gripping silver handles that disappeared into Jenny.

  Forceps.

  Jenny’s mouth was gaping, her eyes staring unseeing at the ceiling. Amelia, her hands clapped to her face, hovered on the far side of the bed, blood splatters staining her white apron. For a moment, Mary could not act. Time, her enemy all day, now betrayed her again by slowing further. A maddening sluggishness seized her. She could not move, could not think fast enough to understand what she was seeing.

  Forceps. A surgeon.

  As if through water, or blood, Amelia slowly shifted her gaze from one daughter to the long-awaited one standing at the door. Apparition of hope, as if to mock.

  But then Mary moved. No, not moved: leapt.

  She flung aside her shawl and said, “Are the forceps helping? Are you getting anywhere?”

  “Damn it, I don’t know.” Echoes of Dr. Stipp.

  “But is the baby coming down?”

  The man turned; he was young, as young as Mary, his beard still straggly, sweat streaming down his temples. “Who are you?”

  “I am Mary Sutter.”

  His arms, working furiously, now stopped. “You’re Mary Sutter?” he said.

  “I am.”

  For a brief moment, he hesitated, then he climbed from the bed for the midwife about whom his mother spoke so highly, and Mary scrambled into his place, blood soaking through her skirt as her knee sank into his place.

  “How do I get these things out?”

  “If you don’t apply continuous traction the baby will slip back,” he warned, but nonetheless showed her how to unhinge the forceps, directing her how to angle them as she withdrew them to keep them from crushing the baby’s skull, clucking all the while that they were losing all the traction he had just gained.

  Accustomed now to chloroformed men, Mary was nonetheless shocked to see Jenny so lifeless, her legs heavy and unmoving on the bed. Naked, exposed, her swollen breasts dwarfed by the tight mound of her gravid belly, she lay as if left for dead on a battlefield. Quickly, Mary felt for the femoral artery and a fluttering but persistent beat reassured her. Then, as Amelia had done hours before, she inserted her hand into Jenny’s body, navigating slowly, trying to locate the cervix and the baby’s head and the hard ring of the bones of the pelvis in the wreckage of flesh torn by the forceps. Nothing felt normal. She imagined it was what Stipp felt, trying to retrieve a bullet from a ruined thigh.

  “It will make no difference what you feel, the baby will have slipped back,” the doctor said.

  “I could open her pelvis. Unhinge it at the notch,” Mary said. “I could, couldn’t I?”

  The doctor, who until that moment had delivered only ten babies in his one year as a physician, took in the ragged, exhausted woman before him and felt a wave of hope flood through him. “We could.”

  “Did you bring anything? A scalpel, a knife?” Mary asked.

  From his satchel, he pulled a rolled case of flannel and, fumbling, extracted a short knife that Mary seized from him.

  “Let me—” the doctor began.

  “No,” Mary said, because she was already beginning to reconstruct in her mind the colored diagram of a pelvis from Gray’s Anatomy: the oval sphere of bone, joined at the front at the symphysis by the penetrable cushion of cartilage that formed Jenny’s impinged, narrow outlet. It was perhaps an act of faith to trust a diagram, but it was no more an act of faith than Dr. Stipp’s trust in her, reading instructions to him in the dining room of a dirty hovel of a hotel, an act that now seemed wildly tame compared to this. How she wished him here, performing the same mercy for her, his fingers flipping through pages, reading her instructions, imbuing her with confidence.

  Anchoring her fingers in a V at the bottom of the swell of Jenny’s belly, Mary searched for the exact place to insert the knife, feeling for the sponge of cartilage she could see in her mind’s eye. Discovering the depression, she touched the knife to Jenny’s skin and pushed the sharp tip through. Blood began to stream from the incision. Jenny groaned, rousing from the chloroform, her back arching, but Mary let her hand rise with her, the two now as connected as they had once been in the womb. She kept pushing, until the knife reached the cartilage. The resistance was shocking. She understood now why Dr. Stipp became exhausted and sweaty during amputations. What force it took to dismantle a human being. Then a sudden, satisfactory pop, and the two halves of Jenny’s pelvis disengaged. Mary pulled out the knife an
d screamed at Jenny to push.

  The next hour dissolved, melted away by work and fight. While Mary exhorted Jenny to push, slapping and screaming to rouse her, the doctor used suture and needle in between contractions to sew her up. Five stitches, seven? He lost count, but it didn’t matter, because he would never be able to cement the bone back together. This young woman might never walk again.

  Blood soaked through the sheets, through Mary’s dress, through the pillows and comforters, through Amelia’s apron.

  The baby, a livid shade of blue, finally squeezed from between Jenny’s legs.

  Immediately, Mary hooked two fingers through the infant’s mouth to clear it, then snatched up the baby and turned it onto its belly, balancing it in her palm. A tablespoon of yellowish fluid drained from the baby’s mouth. Flipping the child back over, Mary fingered the chin and puckered lips, which were growing cool and ghostly. She held the baby upside down by its feet and slapped its bottom, taking deep enough breaths for the two of them.

  She noticed the baby was a girl. Jenny had a daughter.

  Mary heard Bonnie crying beside her. Bonnie, the expert in babies who had died, Bonnie, whose former grief now seemed a contagion.

  Amelia, broken free of her terror, was tugging gently on the cord. The doctor had stepped back to gather padding and blankets. The placenta slithered out. Amelia snipped the cord and the baby was free. Mary wrapped the baby in a blanket, the baby crying as if she had always known how to cry. Her head was battered, misshapen. But she was alive. A grateful sob broke from someone’s mouth; they would never be able to determine whose.