Robin Oliveira Read online

  And then it dawned on Stipp why Mary needed the pass, why she needed to go to Fort Marcy. The post. “You need to tell your brother-in-law.”

  “Yes.”

  Mary was exquisite in her suffering, her face wretched with pain. Stipp reached out a hand to touch her cheek. Her skin was luminous even in the failing winter light.

  “I’ll go with you,” Stipp said.

  He called Mrs. Philipateaux to take Mary to her room, then he got on his horse and traveled through the evening light to demand two passes to take him and Mary to Fort Marcy in two days’ time. On a street corner, a newspaper boy was waving headlines about McDowell’s ongoing testimony before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.

  The army clerk was recalcitrant, citing the dozen regulations the surgeon was insisting he break. Then he handed over the paperwork and made Stipp sign it himself, absolving himself of any responsibility in the matter at all. What did it matter if the fool of a man wanted to traipse around the countryside and get shot at by Rebels? The roads were a disaster. They would have to go by horseback and bypass all the regular routes. They might even get shot at by the guards on duty at the Chain Bridge, ever ready to defend Washington from the threat of invasion. Yes, the clerk thought, the man could go if he wanted, but he wanted nothing to do with it.

  Thomas’s boots sank to his ankles as he traversed the open yard between the log and earthen walls of Fort Marcy. The sky was spitting rain and his cheeks were chapped and reddened. Under his coat, he carried his latest ration of bread, stale as a doorstop.

  God, how he wanted to go home. He had heard nothing from Jenny, and now he lacked even paper or ink to write and ask whether or not he had become a father. That life had come to this: paper a luxury, though even if he had paper, he no longer had any money to pay for the post. They had not been paid in some time. He regretted everything, but mostly he regretted that moment when he had climbed from the horsecar outside the Department of the Army and gone in and reenlisted. What had he done since? Freeze and starve and learn the true meaning of deprivation. For the Army of the Potomac, entrenched on the shores of the river after which it was named, had not fought since Manassas. George McClellan, the answer to the North’s eagerness to bring the war to a conclusion, had instead imposed a long period of preparation, which for Thomas and the troops at Fort Marcy had turned into month after month of boredom.

  Up the hill behind him between the rows of tents, a corporal was calling, “Thomas Fall. Thomas Fall. Anyone seen Thomas Fall?” When Thomas hailed him, the corporal said, “I was told to find you. Come on.”

  The log guardhouse housed a desk and a guard who stepped outside when Thomas came in. Inside, two figures waited in the dim light.

  “Thomas.”

  An upswell of joy fought to the surface, but just as quickly ebbed, though he did not understand at first why. Neither could he say, precisely, what about Mary’s appearance frightened him most. In the dim light, he could make out that she was still far too thin, too serious, and that her gaze harbored pity and dread, and something of guilt, but not compassion. No. That was reserved for the man who stood beside her. Stipp. That was his name. The doctor at the hotel.

  Later, Mary would not recall even saying hello, offering greetings, or inquiring after Thomas’s health.

  For so many years, she had given people bad news, and now she had an agonizing memory of delivering the truth fast and unvarnished. The baby is dead, or Your wife is dead. What arrogance she had entertained, that she had believed she knew how to say such things to people. Now, in the bleak cold of the dismal guardhouse, she said, “I’ve been home, Thomas.”

  Her voice broke as she measured her next words, telling the story she had gone over a hundred times in her mind, keeping her gaze fixed on Thomas’s face.

  When she was finished, Thomas sank to his knees. For a long moment, he stayed there as if in prayer, his shoulders hunched forward, his hands obscuring his face, and though his silence cut through the cold air like a scalpel, Mary’s feet refused to move. Outside, the fort went about its clatter and nonsense. Through the small window, Mary glimpsed the ruined landscape through which she and Stipp had traveled, the clear-cut forest, the exposed stumps naked in devastation, the ribs and barbs of the newly constructed wooden barricades piercing the cold air, the troughs and trenches that spidered away from the fort, a corduroy road made of logs sinking into the sea of muck.

  Thomas’s words floated toward her, as if they too were mired in the same muddy sea.

  “If you’d have gone home earlier, when Amelia wanted you to, could you have saved her?” he asked.

  Jenny’s face surged before Mary. If she had left even a week earlier, two, perhaps Thomas would not be asking her this. She would have been there from the start, could say now yes or no, definitively.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  She took a step toward him, but he held up his hands.

  She stood in the center of the room as the wind sliced through the chinked logs and rendered the room as cold as the outdoors.

  “I’m sorry—”

  “Don’t,” Thomas said, shaking his head. “Don’t.”

  “Bonnie is there. She is good with the baby, Thomas. She is gentle, and generous—”

  “I said, don’t.”

  Mary put her hand to the desk to steady herself. “Why didn’t you go home, Thomas? You could have seen her, you could have had time with her before—”

  “We all want too much, don’t we?”

  “I beg your pardon?” Mary said, but it was as if Thomas were echoing her nightmares, as if he had read every single thought of hers on the train ride back. She could feel Stipp behind her, straining to protect her from the truth.

  “Glory, honor, ambition. What are these worth now?”

  “Son,” Stipp said, stepping forward, but Thomas heaved himself to his feet and walked past them, out the door into the mud, leaving the savage room open to the cold rain.

  The towpath of the C&O was infinitely better maintained than the roads at this time of year, which was why Stipp had decided to return to Georgetown along its crowded path, rather than over the potholed turnpike, the way they had come earlier that morning.

  Mary was seated on the carriage bench beside him, staring off over the roof of a packet boat into the steep wooded hills rising sharply from either side of the canal. Since leaving Fort Marcy, she had not spoken. From time to time the wagon lurched into a pothole and she was thrown against Stipp, but still she did not speak. He could hardly blame her. The scene at Fort Marcy had been unbearable. Thomas’s question had ripped through Stipp’s heart. Had he sounded as broken when Genevieve had died?

  “Thomas was in shock,” he said now. “He’ll realize—”

  Mary said, “I knew what would happen, I knew it as soon as Jenny said she was with child.”

  “You can’t predict—”

  “I should have gone home when Amelia wanted me to.” Self-protection was no excuse. You love too little, you love too much. It was all selfishness. If only, if only.

  Stipp could hardly bear her sorrow. He wanted to take her away, to travel on past Georgetown, across the Aqueduct Bridge, past the entire Confederate army, to the marshes and estuaries of Chesapeake Bay and the sea, where they could wade into the breakers and be taken up by a passing ship. They would travel back to Texas, live with Lilianna. How old would the boy be now? Four? Had it been only a year since he’d seen them? It seemed a lifetime. He thought, I just won’t stop. I’ll keep driving and we’ll forget the war and all its pain. They traveled on, passing the slow mule teams hauling packet boats down the canal toward Georgetown and, as they neared the town, row houses and factories and warehouses sprouting from the treed hillside. Mary was remembering another earlier, difficult trip on a towpath in Albany with Thomas, just before he met Jenny and everything changed. She would go back in time, she thought. She would go back and change everything, if she could. Men were shouting as they unloaded and
loaded barges at the warehouse doors opening onto the canal, the day crackling with work and the war. Above, on Bridge Street, a horsecar was struggling to turn as a train of army wagons slogged through the mud.

  “Mary?” Stipp said.

  She turned to look at him, her face masked and unreadable. She bore none of the fierce confidence that had driven her to hunt him down at the Union Hotel eight months ago, none of I will climb through that window.

  “I’m nothing. I can’t help anyone. Why did I think that I could?”

  “You’re just tired,” Stipp said, pulling over to the side of the path to speak to her.

  The mule team behind them could not get around them. The driver swore and deckhands jumped off the packet boat to slow it down so that it wouldn’t drag the mules with it as it drifted forward. Behind them another packet did the same.

  “Back home, afterwards—after Jenny died—my mother and I said things to each other that we’ve never said before. I said something I wish I’d never said. She’ll never forgive me.”

  “That was only your grief speaking. People say things.”

  “I betrayed her trust.”

  “She trusts you.”

  Mary shook her head. “No. I’m arrogant and clumsy and proud. And I want things I shouldn’t want.”

  Stipp suspected she meant Thomas, at least he hoped that’s what she meant, because he needed her to want to be a surgeon. He didn’t know how he could live without her. The long month of January had been a dark cave whose only light had been the possibility of Mary’s return.

  “You’ll see. You’re just tired,” he said, unable to say, Want me, but Mary’s blank glance confirmed the inadequacy of his reply, and he took up the reins and snapped the horses forward.

  When they left the towpath, men were still leaping onto the path from more than a dozen boats, ropes blistering their hands as they dug in to hold back catastrophe.

  The hotel had been bedecked with flags and sentinels, its new, official status recently proclaimed by the Surgeon General’s office. Outside its doors, a good many of the convalescents were standing about, brightened by even a brief stint in the drizzly February cold. They greeted Stipp and Mary with the restless air of those with untold news.

  “They’re closing the hospital down.”

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Circular Number 18, February the 2nd, 1862

  By order of the Surgeon General, the general hospital in Georgetown in the former Union Hotel is to be closed the first day of May 1862. The premises are vermin-infested, dilapidated and crumbling, and do not meet our rising standards for military hospitals. The staff is to be divided forthwith among the hospitals at Miss Lydia’s Seminary and Georgetown College. Those patients afflicted with small pox and typhoid should be directed to the Insane Asylum for isolation purposes. The building is to be razed.

  The army, the circular went on to say, was going to build a new hospital right under the Capitol building on the mall, to be named Armory Square. It would be the pride of the army, the nation. It would transform medical care. It would make people forget that the Union Hotel Hospital had ever existed. There would be regulations. There would be ventilated wards and ward nurses and supervisors. Surgeons would have care over a wing each. The hospital would be advantageously situated near the Long Bridge, eliminating the torturous rides over the city’s bad roads to reach the little hotel in Georgetown. Lives would be saved. Order would reign.

  Their eyes met. Eight months since they had first met in this room. A lifetime. Stipp lit a lantern and the sweet smell of kerosene flooded the room.

  “Don’t give up hope,” Stipp said. “Anything is possible yet.” Trying to atone for You are only tired. Trying not to panic. He had orders to report to the surgeon general for employment as a regimental surgeon, but Mary was not listed on the government payroll, and so was now unprotected, without a post.

  “Perhaps Miss Dix would help you. She has come around, I believe. Or what about Blevens? Surely he would take you. He would be delighted to have you, I’m sure.” Tried to say it without the least bit of envy. “Or, I will write you a letter of introduction anywhere—to medical school, perhaps, or Miss Lydia’s Seminary Hospital. They treat officers there. It’s where Blevens would have gone after the fire if he hadn’t come here. You could work there, Mary; it would not be the abyss that it has been here.” Trying to keep her from breaking. “Or, perhaps, you could return home.”

  He would say, I love you again, but that was not what she required, no matter how much he required it. If he could retrieve those words, he would, and silence them to the end of time, just to ease her in his presence.

  Mary was looking past him. She still wore the funereal hat that she had worn to Fort Marcy, her black cloak wrapped around her.

  “People want to believe that we can do anything,” Stipp said. “That doctors can erase pain, erase inevitability.” We doctors, though she wasn’t one yet and might never be. “But it isn’t true.”

  Even Lazarus had been resurrected.

  “My mother was right. I could have saved Jenny,” Mary said. She was speaking now as if Stipp weren’t in the room, as if she were negotiating with death itself. She looked up distractedly. The spectral shadows of the kerosene light flared against her skin, illuminating the hollows under her cheekbones.

  The dinner bell clanged. All through the hotel, beds scraped, feet thumped to the floor. The future dead, rising to forestall.

  She was slipping away, leaving the shores for hell. The lantern flickered: Charon, impatient to be off. A ferry to the other side. Her eyes stared straight ahead, though what was to come was around a bend, uncertain except in certain regret. The safety rope of ambition trailed behind. Slippery; it, too, uncertain. The cruelty of war was such that coincidence, in the past nearly always a pleasant surprise, was turned to sadness: to want to become a surgeon, only to see the chance offered, then ruined before your eyes. To find your brother-in-law, only to have to tell him terrible news.

  “Mary,” he said. “Why did you want to be a surgeon?” You won’t last. He did not want the victory; he hadn’t even wanted it in the beginning. God’s judgment. Or joke.

  Mary opened her mouth to speak, but no sound emerged. Had it been conceit to wish to conquer death?

  “It doesn’t matter what I wanted,” she finally said.

  The light in the lantern flared and then blew out, as upstairs a door slammed.

  Mary rose to take Stipp’s hand, a commonplace enough gesture. She ought to touch his face, she ought to reassure him, as he had once reassured her.

  At the door, she turned, her hand on the knob.

  But before he could say anything, Mary turned and went away into the dark.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  To get to Washington, Thomas had understood, you had to follow the C&O towpath southward until Georgetown, but he couldn’t just walk down the towpath, because there were patrols on the lookout for invading Confederates and spies. Instead, he had to bushwhack alongside it through the underbrush, which he had started to do in the dark before dawn, after abandoning his post on the great rocks overlooking the Potomac when his fellow guard fell asleep in the deep morning chill. The forest in February in Maryland was a vast, sucking pool of mud, but Thomas slogged ever southward, keeping the canal in view as he fought through the endless frozen thicket rising on the hillsides along the canal. But by noon he was exhausted, his arms and face abraded by the brittle branches, his legs coated with freezing clay. A mile north of Georgetown, a cavalry unit met him just as he left the cover of the forest. They had been on the lookout since dawn, when they’d been alerted to a deserter leaving the Chain Bridge unguarded. They identified Thomas by the look of desolation that they’d noticed in other deserters, the ones truly desperate to get home. They marched him at gunpoint down the path, skirting with difficulty the mule teams towing barges toward the Tidewater locks where the C&O joined the Potomac River, past the Observatory and the Aqueduct Bridge, t
he farm kids and dogs running alongside, shouting and barking insults. They marched him right into Washington and reached the Central Guardhouse just as the sun grew pale and dropped from the sky. It had been a march of some miles, and Thomas, cold and footsore, sank onto a rectangle of space on the prison floor in the large cell that held the day’s accumulation of drunks and pickpockets.

  Among the clangs of cell doors shutting and guards shouting, a tuneless whistle drifted over the heads of the milling men.

  “Hey. Fall. Hey.”

  In front of him squatted Jake Miles in a tattered Union shirt, coat, and cap. The war was a war of brothers, acquaintances, enemies. A quick whiff of Jake’s breath told Thomas all he needed to know.

  Take care of Christian. That was the last thing he had said to Jake at the Capitol before he had gone in search of Mary.

  Thomas lunged.

  He was in such a rage that he did not hear the shouts of his fellow prisoners, the warnings of the guards, did not feel Jake’s drunken slaps about his head. Then someone hit him in the back of the head with a rifle butt, and he was dragged off to one of the single cells and thrown onto the floor. He spent the night sleepless and hungry, swatting at mice and roaches. In the morning, he lined up with the rest to be examined by the judge advocate, who listened stone-faced to Thomas’s story.

  “And where did you think you were you going, Fall?” he asked when Thomas had finished.

  “Home, sir.”

  The judge ordered him returned to his regiment. By two o’clock that afternoon, Thomas was back at Fort Marcy standing on a barrel in the middle of the fort near the bomb-proof for everyone to see. That night, he was allowed to return to his tent, where he collapsed from exhaustion and finally, wretchedly, began to cry.

  Grief, the third casualty of war.

  The next morning, Stipp stood at the door to Mary’s room. Pinned to the pillow was a note.