Robin Oliveira Read online

  Dr. Stipp,

  The ledgers are in the cabinet in the dining room. Under the pillow is the key to the supply cabinet; keep it from Mr. Mack, he would have it if he could. The nurses all require direction, especially Monique, who charms but is occasionally careless with dressing changes. The stick for unclogging the water closet is in the basement, behind the stairs. Extra bluing for the linens can be had from Jacob Harlow, the egg man; he is cagier than he looks, so bargain hard.

  Yours,

  Mary Sutter

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  James Blevens judged Charles Tripler, the medical director of the Army of the Potomac, to be in his mid-fifties. He was a balding, mustachioed man, whose years in the army told of decades in the sun, but he was nonetheless energetic and argumentative. His widely read Manual of the Medical Officer of the Army of the United States had been written after his service in both the Seminole Wars and the Mexican War, and he was considered to be the most experienced and knowledgeable practitioner among all the surgeons in the halved army, North or South. Now he was leaning forward in front of the fireplace in his parlor, talking eagerly.

  “Egad, man, you want me to choose between microscopes and ambulances? You must be joking. Though that terrible excuse of a surgeon general Finley designed a rattletrap of a beast; did you ever see anyone survive an ambulance ride for the better?”

  “Not at Bull Run, no,” Blevens answered.

  “You were there? Damn it all, I wish I’d have been. I miss war. I’d have court-martialed Finley on the basis of the ambulance fiasco alone. The bastard.”

  “A microscope is equally, if not more, important than—”

  “You cannot be serious. More important than evacuation of the wounded from the field? How are you going to explain that to the mothers whose sons are left behind?”

  A glass of whiskey warming in his hand, James Blevens said that of course there would be no way to explain it.

  It had been difficult to hunt down the peripatetic Tripler. To be sitting now, finally, in Tripler’s well-appointed rooms on New York Avenue in the middle of February was the result of November, Blevens knew, the fire having done the hard work of garnering him an appointment with the revered doctor. His hands had healed well enough, though they were still stiff, and while Tripler was welcoming, the energetic man was swinging his top leg rather agitatedly over the other. Snow was falling all over the city; Blevens had struggled through the drifts from the Patent Office Hospital, where he had gone to work soon after Christmas. He was in charge of the typhoid that was ravaging the troops; so far, nearly a thousand cases had been reported. He suspected that was the disease now sickening Mr. Lincoln’s sons, though Dr. Stone, the Lincolns’ family physician, had proclaimed their illness to be bilious fever.

  “I cannot condone your request for a microscope when I cannot buy a four-wheeled ambulance to save my soul,” Tripler said. “Or even get the men to clean out their camps, though making them take quinine in whiskey has certainly made all the difference on fevers. Sick call is nothing now. Did you know the Sanitary Commission is supplying the army with quinine until we can produce enough for everyone?”

  “I’ve observed in the stools of all my patients afflicted with diarrhea some small bacteria, which may be contributing in some way—”

  Tripler cut him off. “It is the air that does it. I’ve moved the men in Arlington off the flats and into the woods, and it has changed everything. The sick do much better in regimental than in general hospitals. The improvement is due to that and the smallpox vaccines. Do you know we’ve rendered that disease practically null? The ones that have it are the ones who got it before they mustered in. Remarkable, really, it’s these small steps, but the volunteer troops don’t understand it. But McClellan’s getting these boys into shape—he and I, actually. And I suppose the Sanitary Commission. They are a persistent lot. I’m glad for it, really. Ahead of their time; they’ve been right about hygiene all along. Did you say you were ever in camp?”

  “Fort Albany. It was like policing children. Impossible to keep the place clean.”

  “Precisely my point, eh? Hygiene.” Tripler clapped his hands.

  “I couldn’t agree with you more,” James said, recalling the sanitation officer and his long questionnaire. The romantic period: a library, a band, the belief that the problems of the forts could be quickly ameliorated. Futility, but necessary and completely unattainable at the time.

  “However, Dr. Tripler, I believe there may be an alternate component to disease, one that cannot be seen with the naked eye, that might be contributing. A microscope would help all of us understand disease in another way; I could establish reports, share information; it is entirely worthwhile, I believe, to establish a place of research now, so that we might come to a common knowledge base that will benefit us all.”

  “Come now, Dr. Blevens. What you want is impossible. Lincoln has ordered McClellan to move and McClellan is poised.” Though he was not. Earlier in the day, McClellan had stormed around this very room, complaining to Tripler about Lincoln’s thorough misunderstanding of the intricacies of battle, the still delicate nature of the green Federal troops, the overwhelming numbers of the enemy they were facing.

  “What the army needs are ambulances, and ambulances we will have, along with a corps that will be solely responsible and trained for battlefield removal. When the time comes and we face the enemy next, I shall be right at McClellan’s side, directing the corps’ movements. Did you know that it is the quartermaster who is responsible for ambulances? Not the Medical Department. Upon my word, that’s bad planning. To not be under my purview? Can you imagine such a thing? This is why Finley had to go.”

  Tripler rattled on, complaining of the former surgeon general and the old army regime, how little they understood about modern warfare and the demands of the Medical Department. James nodded along, content for the moment to bide his time. He wanted a microscope. Besides, it was not as if James disagreed with Tripler; everything he was saying was sound and true. But for all Tripler’s prescience and efficiency, the importance of research eluded the man.

  “Do excuse me, I’ve been rude running on like this. How are your hands these days?” Tripler asked.

  “My hands are fine. I do wish to make the point that I fail to see why ambulances and microscopes must be exclusive. I am asking only for one.”

  Tripler said, “If only I were able to grant your request. But I’ve used up a great deal of funds designing a stretcher to be mounted on top of horses. A sort of in-between to go where the wagons cannot. You know, gulleys, deep woods, that sort of thing. It’s a bit cumbersome now, but I’ll get it right. I’m afraid it takes money to do these things and we barely have any as it is.”

  Making a great show of not pouring any more whiskey into his glass, Tripler stretched in his chair and yawned. His secretary should have alerted him that Blevens had wanted something besides accolades for pulling patients from that fire.

  Reluctantly, James set down his glass.

  “Say,” Tripler said at the door, nodding at Blevens’s hands. “You’re ready, I presume, for when the army does move? I could use a good man in the field hospitals. I’ve established a system of regimental hospitals with good, heated tents, overseen by brigade medical officers with larger hospitals. All this to treat the men quickly and not have to send them to the general hospitals in Washington. I’m shutting down the Union Hotel Hospital; that place is a dump. Hardly up to our new standards. We’re modernizing.” He clapped Blevens on the back. “Glad you’re better. Find your way home in this snow?”

  On the stoop outside, James worked a pair of gloves over his still sensitive hands, the palms stiff and shiny. The snow had temporarily conquered the city’s perpetual odors. Spring would be coming soon, and with it more changes. He looked down the street, toward the president’s house, the outside lit by torches, the snowflakes shimmering in the firelight before melting away. They looked like the small bacteria he had seen glidi
ng across his slides.

  James decided to go to the Union Hotel to find Mary, whom he had not seen since she’d left for home so abruptly after Peter’s death. When the cab sailed past the president’s house, the flags had been dropped to half-mast. Swaths of black crepe now draped the double front doors. A line of mourners was forming.

  Willie Lincoln, eleven years old, reportedly very ill, must have died while Blevens had been trying to persuade Tripler of the need for a microscope.

  In the Mansion, the president was stroking one of Willie’s caps, which the boy had flung into the corner of his office only a few weeks before, running in screeching in the midst of a game of tag with Tad. Willie had claimed sanctuary in his father’s arms, his thin-walled chest heaving, the ribs like spindled fretwork under Lincoln’s fingers.

  Early signs of illness? If only he had thought to question.

  Willie’s cap was so small that it did not even cover Lincoln’s palm. Lincoln pulled it to his chest and held it over his heart. Before he gave in completely, he checked to make certain that the door to his office was bolted. It was, but he couldn’t remember having done it, couldn’t remember even having traversed the long hallway from Willie’s room, where he had asked the nurse if she believed in God. Understanding his question, she had instead assured him that God had loved Willie so much He had called for him early.

  Lincoln laid his head down on his desk and let the fury break from deep inside his chest, as John Hay stood outside the door, registering each keen in his bones.

  Upon imminent threat of removal from his post by an impatient and grieving President Lincoln, McClellan sailed out of Washington at the end of March, following the four hundred dinghies, ships, boats, tubs, steamers, and sailing barques the government had rented to ferry his sixty-five thousand troops to Fort Monroe, situated at the tip of one of the fingerling peninsulas that jutted into Chesapeake Bay. Before Little Mac (as John Hay was now calling the procrastinating general) had sailed away, Lincoln asked him why they should go to the expense of shipping the army a hundred miles away when the army they wanted was still planted somewhere between Richmond and Washington, thirty miles away? McClellan replied that he intended to win victory by taking Richmond from the south in a bloodless war. Grudging that at least McClellan was finally doing something, Lincoln approved the general’s odd plan.

  Chapter Forty

  18th May, 1862

  Near the Chickahominy River

  Dear James,

  I’ve managed to scrounge ink and paper, a small miracle in this mess. The Peninsula is a bog of freezing mud and malaria at the best of times; so many men are sick from measles and mumps that we send them away on hospital ships never to return, to say nothing of the malingerers who study symptoms more than they study war.

  How are your hands? You are a damned lucky beast that your burns prevented your coming here, though God knows we need you. Thirty contract surgeons from New York and Philadelphia have replaced the hundred regimental doctors who’ve fallen ill, but I have no faith in these new arrivals. Most haven’t seen a scalpel since medical school, if they ever saw one there.

  The battles are sharp and furious. We march on Richmond, but it is a folly of an advance; the other day we had to detour twenty miles around a river that no one knew was there. When the wounded finally reach me, they have been dragged over mud and through swamps. It is butchery, every bit of it.

  Stipp lifted his pen. He wished he were writing to Mary, if only for solace. God, he was tired. He was so tired. All these men, dying, acres upon acres of them, and there were maybe six, seven surgeons who could do the work. What was he expected to do?

  He dipped his pen again into the ink and continued writing.

  Neither are there sufficient numbers of ambulances; your friend Tripler daily complains that the four-wheeled ambulances he so loves have not arrived. We use the bone-jarring two-wheeled ambulances, and the injured are near dead by the time I see them, if they ever get to me, for the roads are a sea of mud. We have great difficulty getting supplies. Scurvy is rampant. We beg for potatoes; they send us cartridges. The hospital tents are circuses of rope and rigging; it takes days to put up just one, and then we must take them down and move again. The trains, when they do come, are nothing but cattle cars; we have no means to fit them up to transport the injured.

  But this is nothing compared to the injuries I have seen. I seem to be able to save only those who sustain gunshot wounds to their limbs, while the rest die. I attempted to remove a bullet from a liver. Shocking how much blood. We are making it all up as we go. Who has seen such infernal violence before? Napoleon, perhaps. How the men suffer.

  On a less important note, I am curious to know if you have found Mary. Have you tried searching the hospitals? When you came to see me the night Willie Lincoln died, I was certain that Mary wouldn’t stay away long, but now I worry that something has happened. You must reassure me that you have found her and that she is fine. I’d hoped she would return to her mother, but I’ve no way of knowing if she has.

  Write me when you have found her.

  Take care, Blevens. You will find a use yet for those hands.

  Yours most sincerely,

  William Stipp

  When you have found her. He was giving himself away. On the night of Willie Lincoln’s death, when he had told Blevens that Mary had disappeared, he had barely been able to contain himself. He hesitated another moment before scratching out the line entirely, holding the letter up to the air to let the ink blot dry in the spring evening.

  Folding the letter into its envelope, Stipp wrote out Blevens’s address on Pennsylvania Avenue, both envying and pitying his protégé, who in his handicap wished to be here, but to his great fortune was not. He struggled into his mud-covered boots before embarking on the fool’s errand of trying to find a way to post the letter, finally collaring a lieutenant who promised to send it with Tripler’s latest complaint to the new surgeon general, William Hammond, about the disaster that was McClellan’s campaign.

  Two weeks later, Blevens opened the letter in his rooms on Pennsylvania Avenue. They resembled his rooms in the Staats House so closely that some days he awoke and thought he was back in Albany. These he had furnished mostly with tables, across which he had accumulated a dozen specimens of tissue and bone. He was studying maceration technique on bone structure, using a rating system to determine the best method and its effect on ensuing bone quality. So far, a combination of bleach, hydrogen peroxide, hydrochloric acid, boiling water, and soap followed by degreasing proved least injurious to the anatomical integrity of the larger bones, which were the main subject of his inquiry. Thankfully, the cats and dogs of Swampdoodle were forever dying in the alleys, his old mainstay supply; he had discarded the failures into the City Canal so as to not alarm his landlord, whose suspicion had run high when he inspected Blevens’s rooms on short notice in early April and discovered his jugs of chemicals. Blevens recalled Stipp, the cat slung across his desk: Yes, that’s it, but for God’s sake, don’t saw.

  Also on his desk was a list of all the hospitals in the city, from the permanent to the temporary, the Ladies’ Seminary to the Insane Asylum. He had searched each one twice, running his eyes over the wards in search of Mary, though he claimed to the nosy hospital matrons to be searching only for tissue samples.

  In his reply, Blevens was brief: Dear William,

  I was of little use at the Patent Office. The army has furloughed me for the time, until my hands declare themselves. They remain stiff and clumsy; I content myself with research, but I am ashamed when I hear of the conditions under which you labor. I would be of no use to you; I can barely grip a scalpel.

  I have not yet found Mary, and I am loath to write her mother, whose fears I do not wish to arouse; Amelia has lost more than all of us in this war. I will, however, if my diligence does not yield results soon, but I cannot think that Mary would go home.

  I am, ashamedly, your ineffective servant,

  James B
levens

  Chapter Forty-one

  In 1864, George McClellan, in his run as Democratic candidate opposite Abraham Lincoln, would complain that the failure of the Peninsular Campaign was due to many factors out of his control, including Lincoln’s great meddling in his plans, his failure to provide crucial reinforcements, the teeming hordes of Confederate troops, the inclement weather, the failure of the navy to properly defend the York River, the idiot mapmakers who mistook a river’s location that forced him to march miles out of his way, his recurring bouts of malarial fever due to the criminal lack of quinine, the abysmal roads which were nothing but a morass of mud, the swampy, nearly oceanic terrain, and finally, the wily Robert E. Lee, who decimated the Union troops in the last hopeless battle of Seven Days as they retreated down the Peninsula after the Union’s failure to seize Richmond. Nor were the legion of wounded his fault. Charles Tripler had stood at his side at every turn. He could not have helped his inept surgeons or the ambulance corps, even though he and Tripler set up office in a boat on the James River miles away. Worse, Lincoln had denied him troops and even the benefit of the doubt.

  McClellan would also conveniently fail to mention the tolerant letters from Lincoln (at which John Hay merely shook his head) as the war on the Peninsula unraveled.

  At the end of June, surgeon Jonathan Letterman was sent to Harrison’s Landing on the James River to relieve Tripler of his post as medical director.

  In the wake of Tripler’s departure, Letterman found it impossible to determine the exact number of sick and wounded over the three-month period of battles on the Peninsula, but he guessed the number fell somewhere about eighteen thousand.

  Chapter Forty-two