Robin Oliveira Read online

  Jenny’s legs were trembling: the shock after the trauma. But then the trembling spread from her legs to her torso and to her arms. Spasms shook her whole body. Her face was flushed, but her eyes blank. They rolled back in her head and the convulsions quickened, until every muscle was contorting in disconnected rhythm. Too late to put something in her mouth. Too late to hold her head.

  “Shouldn’t we bleed her?” Amelia said.

  The doctor said, “She’s bled enough.”

  The seizure went on forever. There was nothing to do but wait it out.

  When Jenny’s body finally came to rest—one, ten minutes later?—Mary touched her fingers to Jenny’s wrist.

  But the artery no longer pulsed.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  At the cemetery, a sharp wind howled. The single sleigh and the dray carrying Jenny’s coffin had nearly foundered in the drifts at the base of the Menands hill, where it had left behind the icy highway of the Hudson for the ponderous climb up to the Albany Rural Cemetery. Mary had long ago lost feeling in her feet; the heating brick had cooled almost as soon as the sleigh’s runners had begun to skim the river ice. Now the horses heaved as they came to rest outside the twin keeping vaults set into the hill, the fog of the animals’ exertions rising in the otherwise clear, biting cold. No mourners from the funeral had joined them; Bonnie had refused to leave the baby. In the black branches of a nearby hawthorn bush, a cardinal was flitting from limb to limb, its scarlet beauty against the black-and-white skeleton of winter’s sleep seeming somehow merciless, a beauty so stark it seemed to define death.

  In the far distance, heavy drifts buried Christian’s and Nathaniel’s headstones and blocked the paths; Mary and Amelia would not be able to visit them today. Neither would the drifts allow Jenny to be put into the ground beside her brother and father, for not until April or May would the spring thaw render the soil permeable. Four coffin bearers, who had followed their small funeral cortege from the gatehouse, unloaded Jenny’s coffin from the dray and struggled through the deep snow toward the vaults. Mary reached for Amelia’s hand as they followed behind, wading through the drifts, their black crepe skirts dragging behind, and to Mary’s great relief, Amelia took it, the first tenderness she had allowed since Jenny’s death. Even just a couple of hours ago in the church, she had stood stiff-spined in the pew to pray, her gaze fixed straight ahead, reluctant, or unwilling, to acknowledge the mutuality of their despair. But as soon as they reached the vault door and had climbed the wedge of snow that blocked more than one entrant at a time, Amelia broke their grasp, which she did not allow to be renewed.

  Inside the vault, the bearers had set Jenny’s coffin on the floor to light a few candles, which threw ghostly shadows on the series of arches rising in religious splendor from the cobbled and stone floor. Wooden racks filled the room, a hundred caskets were already shelved three deep, with room for hundreds more. The winter’s dead. The vault’s confines were redolent with mold, but Mary could still smell the black dye in which she had boiled her dress: once to rid it of the bloodstains, a second time to render it this color of night. The double act echoed Jenny’s new plight: to be buried once in this chamber, once again in the ground. A twin burial. Icicles hung from ceiling cracks; a cold womb, the company of strangers. As one, the bearers lifted Jenny’s coffin from the floor and heaved it into place alongside another, a thud echoing in the chamber as the far end of her coffin hit the stone wall. Amelia began to weep.

  Mary swayed in place; she was bludgeoned, exhausted; mere fatigue had passed long ago. Manhattan, the dirge of a train ride, Jenny’s death: in between then and now, only two days, but a desert still.

  Amelia had barely spoken to Mary since the night Jenny died.

  After the doctor had left the house, Mary had whisked the infant from the lying-in room to the parlor, where she frantically tried to comfort the crying child. Because of the blizzard, they could not send for a wet nurse until dawn and the child would not be soothed; she sucked furiously at Mary’s finger, only to break off and wail when no milk sprang from it. Even sugar water was not helping; the child refused the rubber nipple. Cold was knifing through the window cracks and floorboards. Only the fire threw light. Upstairs, Bonnie consoled herself by bathing Jenny’s body.

  Amelia suffered on the divan, watching Mary struggle. She barely recognized her daughter. Severe, dull, angular, her large eyes prominent, her shoulders sharp under her dress, her chin carved to a delicate point. Starvation and work had whittled away the meat of her and left only a skeleton behind. Amelia could barely register the deprivation Mary must have suffered in Washington. The world had changed utterly: Christian gone, Jenny gone. And now Mary was half her self. She was, if anything, the picture of death.

  Futility, to govern one’s children. Futility, even, to try to save them. Amelia’s hands curled in her lap. An old woman’s hands, no longer able to pluck life from death.

  Mary was bouncing the crying child in her arms, cradling her to her chest, trying the bottle again and again. The folds of her skirts were still soaked with Jenny’s blood.

  It was all wrong. Grief curdled, became something else. Amelia marked the change, felt it rise up in her.

  “You didn’t come home,” she said, beginning, yielding. She shouldn’t, she thought, but the young are stupid and headstrong, and Mary hadn’t listened.

  Mary had been waiting, holding back. Centuries had gone by, it had seemed, as the infant had cried. “I tried, I did. I wanted to be here—the train, the snow, you don’t know what I did.” The caged excuses burst forth; but they did not assuage Mary’s own sense of guilt. Stipp had known: Go home. She had, but it was too late.

  “I wrote to you half a dozen times; I told you I couldn’t do this alone. You ignored me. You knew I needed you, that Jenny needed you.” The satisfaction of anger, superseding reason, grief. A coup in Amelia’s heart, her unshakable generosity of spirit dislodged in a moment by boiling righteousness. Mary had lost a sister, a brother, but it was not the same as losing a child.

  “But you are a midwife—”

  “I am her mother.” Am. Was. Amelia shut her eyes. Only one remaining child and a grandchild. But she pressed on, driven by despair. She had foreseen what would happen, had known she would need help. She had even asked for it, had begged Mary for it. Injury of a specific, intimate kind. She would just say it. “If you had come when I asked, Jenny would still be alive.”

  Mary nearly buckled, would have, but for the baby in her arms. “You blame me?” She had not wanted to hear this aloud, because in restraint there was always the possibility of generosity. She rocked the baby back and forth, as if she were trying to protect her from the story of her own birth. First to the right, then to the left, Mary shifted, light and then shadow falling onto her face.

  “You, more than anyone, know how good you are.”

  They were both standing now, shouting to be heard over the baby, whose cries seemed the repudiation of life itself. Amelia’s face eschewed sorrow for fury and indignation. The satisfaction of anger. Later she would regret everything, but latent remorse would not repair the damage. For all the things we say to our children for their own good, very little good ever comes of it.

  “Mother, I had to stay in Washington. You would have, too.” Justification, a well of it. Her only defense. “You should see the men. I can’t describe it. It’s as if hell has come to visit.”

  “You claim need as your excuse? That is all? Nothing of Jenny having Thomas’s child? Nothing of the obligations of family? Thomas never loved you, Mary, he loved Jenny. I thought that would have been plain enough even for you to see.”

  Mary gasped. How much her mother knew.

  “What did you say to him, Mary, when he came to see you? Why didn’t you tell him about Jenny?”

  “It was her news to tell! I didn’t know he would reenlist!”

  “If you’d just told him—”

  “Then what? Then Jenny would still be alive?”


  “Yes. If Thomas were here, then you would have come home, and we could have done something for Jenny, we could have saved her.”

  Was it true? If Thomas had come home, would she have come home too? Would she have fled the misery and work of Washington? She didn’t know anymore. But she did know that if she had been home, she would have given Jenny ergot, would have induced labor, would have forced an early birth.

  “Why didn’t you come home?” Amelia asked.

  Because of the baby she cradled in her arms now.

  None of Mary’s experience, expertise, control, and distance were of any help to her now. Neither could she detach herself from this porcelain baby, whose eyes, nose, chin, and mouth resembled not so much Thomas or Jenny as herself, a trick of heritage that verged on the cruel. But the resemblance could have been a trick of her mind. This is how hearts are broken, Mary thought. By love and allegiance gone awry.

  “Because I want to be a surgeon. I couldn’t do it here. Don’t you see?” Pale substantiation. Florid truth. Yes, she had loved, envied, but there had been other, valid reasons. “I want to be a surgeon.”

  “What you want. Nothing should be about what you want. Not when your family is concerned.”

  “No? Family? Once you didn’t come back home when you said you would. Father suffered for years thinking he had abandoned us. But it was you who had left us, you who didn’t come back.”

  The past as predatory ghost; Amelia’s worst mistake, come back to haunt her. “Mary, you of all people should know why I couldn’t get away. That woman was dying.”

  “Well, I couldn’t get away either,” Mary said. “Men are dying; they are boys like Christian.” Tears burned. Latent grief newly roused. “I had to choose, Mother, like you had to choose. We are the same.”

  “We are not the same. It was not you who was dying that morning. Jenny is your sister.”

  Cold gripped the house, entombing them. The fire flickered, cowering before the elements. Shouting at one another was a divide across which they had never before ventured. Even so, Mary longed for Amelia to scream on. Anger was the salve, the bond, the cement. The only remedy to the unacceptable breach.

  How women defeat one another; how need defeats women.

  But Amelia did not forgive. Instead, she began to whisper, as if she were speaking to Mary at the age of two, crying in that crib, the house empty.

  “You are who you are because of me,” Amelia said. “All I wanted was for you to come home. I needed you, Mary. I needed you. And after that day, I never left you alone. That is why you are who you are. That is why you even want to be a surgeon now. That’s why you could have saved Jenny.”

  “You expect too much of me.”

  “No, I don’t. If you are skilled, more is required of you, not less.” A compliment, but she said it as a question, as if she were trying to understand her daughter, trying to understand how they had come to this, the two of them at loggerheads. “I trusted you,” Amelia said.

  Outside, the night crackled. Snow pellets hammered the windows. A gust of wind flew down the chimney and the baby, as if bewitched, finally descended into an exhausted silence.

  Bonnie could hear Amelia and Mary shouting downstairs, the baby crying. She had attempted to mop the floor clean, but even when she thought she had washed away all the blood, the water was still stained pink. None of what had happened tonight made sense to her. Her feet were still numb from running through the snow. At the medical school, the night watch-man had directed her to the hospital, where she had pleaded with another guard until he sent her to a house a block away. She had pounded on the door until the doctor emerged. The night was dark, the wind blowing, the horses skittish, the doctor swearing as he tried to follow her directions, the gaslamps giving barely enough light to navigate Washington Avenue. “Here!” she had cried at the turn to Dove Street. She had rushed into the house, dragging him behind her, presenting him to Amelia as the ultimate gift, and then—wretchedness. Unimaginable horror.

  Now Bonnie lifted each heavy limb tenderly, gently, turning them as the washcloth glided over the skin, the water dripping first down Jenny’s arm, then her thighs. There was still her back to do, and then she had to take out the mess of wet sheets and rubber blanket from underneath her and dress her properly and do her hair. Her skin was already beginning to mottle, and her arms and legs had begun to harden. Like Bonnie’s baby, just nine months ago.

  Could envy kill a person? She had wanted a baby, and now a motherless baby wept downstairs. She had wanted Christian, too, and he had died. What had she done, with all her wanting?

  Downstairs, they were still shouting, the baby still crying. And then, abruptly, silence. There was the whisper of Amelia’s steps on the stairs, and then Amelia came into the room with the baby in her arms and saw Jenny laid out, exposed, half bathed, the mop and bucket in the corner with the water still pink, and Bonnie, the wet washcloth in her hands.

  Bonnie said, “I’m sorry,” but Amelia hushed her and gave her the baby and took the washcloth from her.

  The infant’s eyes were swollen, flowering bruises. Imperfect in life, as her own child had been perfect in death. It was as if time were repeating itself, making up for its mistakes.

  The baby was so tired, Bonnie thought. Yes, so tired, as if it had been hard, hard work to be born.

  Amelia heard Bonnie cooing, heard the joy in her voice, as she would never again hear Christian or Jenny. It was as if she had forgotten what joy sounded like, so strange was the noise to her ears.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  At the train depot, Amelia said, “You must find Thomas and tell him.”

  Mary was taking the 1:15 express to Manhattan. She had stayed in Albany a month, long enough to see the baby thrive, the baby who peered out with serious eyes from the bundled blankets in which she spent her days, toted from place to place by Bonnie, who gave her up only to the wet nurse and then with visible reluctance.

  “Thomas will want to know everything,” Amelia said.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll tell him what happened.” Implying, your part in it. Implying that he, too, would blame Mary.

  “Yes,” Mary said.

  “You won’t leave anything out,” Amelia said from the sleigh as Mary climbed down.

  “No. I won’t leave anything out.”

  Amelia nodded a noncommittal acknowledgment, barely perceptible behind her mourning veil. After they had entombed Jenny at the cemetery, Mary had collapsed. Even then, Amelia had maintained her distance; an evening and a morning visit to her bedside to coolly assess her surviving daughter’s general health. Exhaustion, the indifferent diagnosis. Mary barely recognized her mother now, so altered was her approach. They were the North and the South; betrayal complete. In her stupor, Mary had dreamed of cardinals and hawthorn bushes. Of Jenny, alone and cold.

  The locomotive spit steam. The conductors, who had taken Mary’s bag, were blowing their whistles, waving their arms for everyone to hurry on board. Mary raised her hand as if to forestall the train, though the plume of steam from the smokestack was already rising into the brilliant winter day. Amelia could be anyone, could be a stranger, so stiffly she held herself.

  “Do you want me to stay, Mother? I’ll stay.”

  “Do as you like.”

  Indifference, the final, parting wound.

  Mary boarded the train, taking a seat on the river side, because she could not trust herself not to press her palm against the window and with her sorrow persuade Amelia that if she could have bent time, she would have, would even have stopped the weather, would have reversed even the direction of the earth’s revolutions to have saved Jenny.

  As the train surged forward, she forced herself to look across the river to Albany, where the frozen Erie Canal locks hung like guillotines and the Lumber District’s white pine towered brown in the anemic snowscape. Coal smoke blackened a thousand chimneys of the glittering Dutch houses squatting in order up the hill. From a distance, Tweddle Hall im
posed; a coffin of memory.

  To be dismissed by Amelia, no quarter for reconciliation given.

  The train was traveling quickly around the bends of the river now, the thicket of bushes between the tracks and the water, skeletons of black against the alabaster snow.

  The train sounded an alarm, an exalted, pulsing warning that reminded Mary of Jenny’s cries.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  “You want a what?”

  “A transit pass to Fort Marcy. And some means of conveyance.”

  “What do you want at Fort Marcy?”

  “It doesn’t matter. If you can’t help me, perhaps I’d better go see the surgeon general.” Mary picked up her bag, which felt heavy after the long hours of travel. Manhattan City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, she remembered little of the trip as the trains rocked in interminable, halting passage toward Washington. “Will it take long, do you think? The afternoon, maybe? What time is it?”

  Stipp gripped Mary by the shoulders, his hands almost bruising her in his alarm. How diminished she seemed. She had lost more weight in New York. He had expected to have her return fortified, but the sharp jut of her chin had become even more pronounced, her eyes more sunken. “Tell me what happened.”

  “I separated the symphysis pubis, but it made no difference. A doctor had already ripped her to shreds with forceps. She bled.” She stopped then, unable to say that Jenny had died. “I was too late.”

  He watched her carefully, seeing the uncertainty and doubt. Perhaps it had been unwise to insist that she go. He was still holding her by the shoulders, as if to keep her standing, as if to help her fight remorse. The work of grief.

  “And the baby?”

  “A girl. She has a wet nurse. She’s thriving.”

  “How is your mother?”

  “She blames me.”