Robin Oliveira Read online

  “A friend of yours, Mary?” The older woman smiled and extended a gloved hand, but, noticing its waterlogged state, laughingly peeled off the glove and then extended her hand again. “I am Amelia Sutter, Mary’s mother.” If she was surprised to see a strange man in her hallway with her daughter, she did not show it. If anything, she seemed delighted. “How do you do?”

  “James Blevens. I am quite well, thanks to your daughter. She saved me. She took over in the middle of a difficult birth and has also taken in the mother and child. I was just about to leave.”

  Mary became furious, suddenly, at his courtly tone, as if they hadn’t been arguing moments before.

  Amelia glanced at Mary and then back to Blevens. “Do you teach at the medical college?”

  “No, Miss Sutter came upon me when a young woman in labor arrived unexpectedly at my surgery.”

  Amelia looked inquiringly at Mary, but Mary shook her head. An understanding passed between them, and a fleeting look of pity altered Amelia’s features. Mary shrugged her shoulders and the moment passed, but James Blevens knew that the mother had known of Mary’s appointment.

  “Well,” Amelia said. She looked outside, where James Blevens’s carriage was thoroughly soaked and his horse shivering in the rain. “Oh dear. This is impossible. You cannot leave now. The weather is beastly. You’ll be drenched. And we’ve just come from the rally. There is no one left, not even the vagrants. Just the band, sheltered under the Capitol’s portico. And all the rosters that everyone signed to enlist are wetted to shreds. So you see it’s no good. You must stay to supper.”

  She pulled off her coat, revealing a mourning dress of deep black. Her pleasant affect was in such contrast to the attire that Blevens wondered if she merely liked the color.

  “That is very kind of you, but I cannot impose.”

  “He was just leaving, Mother,” Mary said. “It would be rude to keep him.”

  “Yes, I—” Blevens gestured at the rain.

  “But this won’t do at all. Jenny, would you please—” Amelia turned and, seeing her other daughter waiting patiently, said, “Do forgive me. May I present my daughter, Jenny? She is Mary’s twin. And our neighbor, Thomas Fall.” She rested a hand on the shoulders of the two young people beside her. “My son Christian is lagging behind; he could barely part with all the excitement even though he’ll be drowned. He’ll have to join us in progress, I’m afraid.” Amelia patted Jenny’s shoulder and said, “Jenny, darling, please ask the maid to send her son to take the doctor’s horse to the carriage house. He’ll need to be dried down and hayed.”

  Jenny dutifully went to deliver the message before Blevens could refuse. There was no gracious way to decline the invitation that Mary had so blatantly withheld. But he did not want to stay. His presence would only goad. He thought longingly of the solitude of his rented rooms on State Street and pictured Mary Sutter scolding her family after he left for their guileless welcome. He had withheld the favor she perceived he could easily give, and there was no way to make that right.

  Amelia turned her attention to Mary. “A delivery, you said? Is she all right? Did things go well? Do you have any questions?” On Amelia’s river of words, everyone was swept down the hallway to the dining room, where a fire blazed in an expansive hearth and maids had already expanded the table to set more places. There were six settings around the linen-covered table. Mary took her place, with her back to the fire, and did not look at Blevens. Jenny and Amelia exchanged glances, trying to discern from Mary’s stony silence how her day at the medical college had ended with a guest for dinner whom she was ignoring. Thomas Fall, the only one unaware, it seemed, of the day’s expected role in Mary’s future, was pulling out his chair and speaking eagerly of the rally and Lincoln’s call for men.

  It was a subject that Blevens was impatient to discuss.

  But it was difficult to discuss anything. There was something unformed about Thomas Fall, Blevens thought as the young man began to talk. His conversation left little room for interruption, though the young man spoke with the confidence of one who had been accepted and encouraged at this table before. Idealistic, ambitious, Fall spoke about the war with intelligence and naiveté both: “Lincoln wants seventy-five thousand for the immediate protection of Washington City,” he began. The Argus, it turned out, had published a special edition with Lincoln’s plea. Virginia threatened to the south; the Rebels could be upon the city at any moment. If they captured Washington, the war would be over. A coup. Slavery forever. Fall was certain that the Rebels would soon be defeated, which Blevens also believed, for the North had the advantage in manufacturing and railroads, but it was the flicker of excitability, the flare of eagerness that showed when Fall babbled on about the glory of battle that betrayed his youth, though his clothes were better cut than Blevens’s, attesting to greater wealth.

  As he spoke, it turned out that Fall’s confidence was well founded: all three women yielded the conversation to him, and not solely for reasons of hospitality. The younger sister, Jenny, was adoring. But Mary attended perhaps more intensely, albeit covertly. Glances of sharp admiration, a softening of her features. Moments when she ceased eating to gaze, then remembered herself and passed the salt or the butter, though no one had asked. When Fall finally solicited Blevens’s opinions, Mary became inattentive as he probed the possibility of greater bloodshed than Fall expected, but he did not want to be rude or alarm the women, and so he droned on about the necessity of controlling the railroads, which sounded boring even to him.

  Christian Sutter, the brother, arrived during the meat course. He was tall, curly-headed, a mop of hair, a grin, all confidence, younger than his two sisters. Charm had won him everything in life, it seemed, including his mother’s adoration. He took the foot of the table. No father had been mentioned. Their mourning must not have been recent, Blevens decided. This was a family adjusted to whatever losses it had sustained. Happily settled at his place, Christian beamed and said, “Did you know that they’ve already formed a regiment? The 25th. It’s a good number, don’t you think?”

  Amelia Sutter threw her son a fearful, longing glance. Pride muzzled instinct, though it was a battle. A sudden smile turned tremulous, then disappeared altogether as Thomas and Christian agreed that immediate enlistment was required of any self-respecting Northerner.

  For her part, Mary had shaped a more formed opinion of Blevens during the soup course than she had been able to do in his surgery rooms. Seated opposite, he comported himself with the manners of a man not unaccustomed to either money or talk. The dishevelment of his surgery rooms did not coincide with this new picture.

  Thomas and Christian were arguing about Texas. “If there is to be any fight at all in Texas, it will have to be soon, because they’ve just emptied the forts of Federal soldiers—”

  “Dr. Blevens is going to the war, too,” Mary said, interrupting.

  It was as if someone had declared war in the dining room. Blevens hurriedly said, “Yes, as a surgeon. One doesn’t wish for bloodshed, but—”

  “But you do, don’t you, Dr. Blevens?” Mary said. “You want to see what can happen to the human body. You want to see inside it. You want to solve its mysteries.” She had sharpened her voice and set down her heavy silver knife. The roast was delicious, but unimportant. “Not that you should be ashamed. It is no less than I would wish to do. Given the opportunity.”

  “Mary,” Amelia said.

  “It is not shameful to press one’s point, Mother.” She turned again to the doctor. “I haven’t misspoken your aspirations in going to the war, have I, Dr. Blevens?”

  Mary Sutter was calling in his debt. He was to be made to apologize in front of everyone. “Miss Sutter, I am very sorry that I cannot help you. But with your gift for persistence, I doubt very much you will not someday claim your opportunity.”

  “Help you how, Mary?” Amelia asked.

  Mary ignored her. “But I will only be able to claim it if I am offered it. Tell me, Dr. Blevens, in
your opinion, is there a limit to how much knowledge one person is allowed to accumulate? Have I reached my quota?”

  Blevens thought again of his rooms on State Street. He could be beside his own fire right now, looking through his microscope. “Miss Sutter, you have my deepest respect and gratitude. But I cannot help you.”

  “Dr. Blevens, do you know of the woman Miss Nightingale?” Mary asked.

  “Do I seem as illiterate as all that?”

  “Have you read her Notes on Nursing?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact, I have.”

  Mary registered surprise, but forged on. “One of the reasons my mother and I are the best midwives in Albany is that we read the latest medical literature.”

  “You speak, Mary, as if our accomplishments were daggers,” Amelia said.

  Mary Sutter laid her hands in her lap and rearranged her expression into one of tolerant hospitality, but behind the benign visage sparkled the same intense determination she had shown in Blevens’s rooms that afternoon. She fixed him with a stare.

  “Are you aware, Dr. Blevens, that in the last year, Miss Nightingale has refused to leave her room?” Mary asked.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Miss Nightingale, brilliant lecturer, member of the Royal Statistical Society, the woman who saved the British army in the Crimea, has shut herself in a hotel room in London and refuses to leave it. I am not saying that she is mad. Apparently, she is quite coherent. But averse to society for some unrevealed reason.”

  “It is possible the war both made and unmade Miss Nightingale. The deprivation, the difficulty—”

  “That’s possible, but I believe Miss Nightingale has hidden herself away from society in order to be heard. I think she knows that people would not listen quite so intently to her if she were always parading her achievements in front of everyone. I myself think that no woman should have to hide.” A pause. “Or perhaps Miss Nightingale is mad. It’s interesting that no one really knows.”

  Glasses clinked and throats cleared. Jenny wiped her lips with her napkin. The halting silence around the table was characterized not by shame, but by a vague weariness. Mary unfurled was formidable and her family all knew it and, it seemed, sometimes despaired of it.

  “I do beg your pardon, but are you suggesting that my refusal to help you will somehow render you mad?” Blevens said.

  “I fail to see how comparing female intelligence to madness is going to help your case, Mary,” Thomas Fall said, emerging from the hush to jolly along his future sister-in-law.

  James Blevens raised his hands in concession. “You did not want me at your table tonight, Miss Sutter. You have had to endure my company after I disappointed you.”

  “How? How did he disappoint you?” Amelia asked, but Thomas Fall stepped in once again.

  “Our Mary is not quite as inhospitable as she seems.” Thomas threw Mary a gentle smile, which she returned with a flicker of her own. “If you wish to receive a pass from Mary, you need only be a woman in the last throes of childbirth. She likes the needy best, I think.”

  “Yes, she was remarkable today,” Blevens said. “As I suspect she usually is.”

  His compliment earned him no correspondent smile from Mary, who took a sip of wine and looked away. Amelia reached her hand to Mary, but Mary shook her head.

  Taking charge of the table, Thomas abruptly changed the subject, accustomed, it seemed, to navigating the family’s more difficult shores. “Dr. Blevens, before we all go off, I’d be happy to take you out to Ireland’s Corners. I keep orchards on the Loudon Road. Apples and cherries. I have hopes that the New York Railroad will one day extend a line northward. Think of the prospects of fruit picked in the morning being delivered to Manhattan City by evening of the same day.”

  “Is this a family business?” Blevens asked. He reached for a glass of water, giving sidelong glances to his dinner companions, all of whom suddenly held Thomas Fall in a sympathetic gaze.

  Thomas set down his fork. “It was, yes. But last October my father and mother died in a carriage accident. Hit by a runaway.”

  “I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to—”

  “No. Your question was welcome.”

  Jenny reached out her hand and enfolded his hand in hers.

  “I do beg your pardon,” James said. “That is very recent.”

  “We had just moved into town. Father was not used to the traffic.”

  “I am sorry.” Blevens wished now that Bonnie Miles had never walked through the doors of his surgery this afternoon. Nothing had gone well from that moment. Upstairs, he could hear the baby crying, and footsteps climbing the stairs. A maid, going to Bonnie’s aid. He cast around for something to say. “If you don’t mind my asking a practical question, but with no one to give your business to, how will you enlist?”

  Amelia said to Thomas, “If Mr. Sutter were still with us, he would have gladly taken control of the orchards until your return. And have built you a rail line.”

  Of course, Blevens thought. Why hadn’t he registered this before? This was the family of Nathaniel Sutter, of the New York Railroad. This explained the beautiful home and furnishings far better than did the income of two midwives. He tried to remember exactly when Sutter had died. Less than a year ago also? Their mourning had been brief, but perhaps they had found solace in one another.

  “Nathaniel would have built you two rail lines,” Amelia said, extending an arm across the pale linen to the beautiful daughter. The quiet one, too, it seemed, for she hadn’t yet spoken a word, though Jenny appeared unruffled by her own silence. She had the prize, the boy next door, and therefore did not covet the spotlight for herself.

  “I have an excellent overseer,” Thomas said, “who knows the business far better than I do. I rely on him.”

  Cake was being served, coffee poured. A few more minutes, fifteen at the most, and then James could beg fatigue. He wondered now whether Amelia regretted her hospitality as much as her daughter Mary did. So far, he had insulted Mary twice, revived grief in all of them, and invaded a family dinner on the brink of a war. It seemed there was no way he could redeem himself. He was picturing the Sutters’ conversation after he left—Mary, how did you ever bring such an odd man home?—when a maid flung open the door.

  “She’s bleeding, ma’am.”

  A flash of skirts and Mary was out of the room, Blevens racing after her up the stairs two at a time.

  In the lying-in room, Bonnie’s bedclothes were saturated with blood, the baby stowed safely on a pillow by the maid. Bonnie’s eyes were saucers of astonishment.

  “I felt something warm,” she said.

  “A tear,” Mary said, thinking of her hands deep inside Bonnie earlier that day.

  But Dr. Blevens was already raising Bonnie’s reddened nightgown while shielding her nakedness with a blanket. “Lie back; don’t be afraid.” Swiftly, he palpated the pillow of her abdomen, and after a few minutes began a circular massage. Behind him, Mary Sutter stood reluctantly impressed. He had been hunting for the uterus, to see if it had relaxed, which obviously it had, because as soon as the massage began, the flood had stopped. The massage contracted the uterus, shutting off the open blood vessels where the placenta had been attached. This was the first step in any maternal hemorrhage.

  The tide abated, Blevens took Bonnie’s hand and pressed her fingers deep into her stomach.

  “Do you feel that?” he asked, helping Bonnie find the hard ball of her uterus underneath her navel.

  “What is that?” she cried.

  “Your womb,” Blevens said, smiling now. “Yours is a bit recalcitrant for some reason. You’ll need to rub it every few minutes so that it will keep contracting and you won’t bleed. Can you do that?” Over his shoulder, he called to Mary, “Have you any ergot?”

  Reduced to the role of nurse in her own lying-in room, Mary dispensed the medicine and then called the maids to help her change the bedding. While everything was made right, Dr. Blevens scooped up the ba
by and retreated to the window, where he bounced the child in his arms. Then Mary led Blevens to the kitchen so he could wash his hands. His frock coat was edged in blood.

  Mary said, “You know far more than you let on this afternoon, Dr. Blevens. Did you even need my help in the delivery?”

  The maids scurried out, pretending not to pay attention. Later, this conversation would be told in the kitchens on Arbor Hill in the Sixth Ward: And then the doctor said. And then the Miss said. Outside, the pigs would be rooting in the garbage and the maids would be saying to their husbands, “And her so haughty.”

  Blevens said, “I don’t practice enough to feel successful in deliveries, but I am not completely ignorant of the needs of women. Bonnie’s hemorrhage was easily controlled, merely atony of the uterus. You would have done the same.”

  She could barely contain her humiliation. She would not have done the same, and the failure of her usual unerring intuition made her furious. She would have hunted for the tear, wasting precious time. “Why do you think I knocked at your door today, Dr. Blevens? Did you really think that I would prefer to apprentice when I could attend a college? Did you really think I wasn’t at the end of my choices?” She was pinning and unpinning her hair, the curls disobedient, refusing to be locked in place.

  Laughter echoed from the upstairs, where Amelia had gone to supervise, having already taken graceful leave of Blevens in the hallway. Jenny and Thomas were closeted away in the parlor, lovers with shortened time. Christian had gone out again after shaking Blevens’s hand.

  “I’ll say good night,” Blevens said, bowing.

  The front door swung shut behind him, sounding like the end of something. Outside, the rain had not let up, and he remembered too late that his horse and carriage had been quartered in the carriage house in the alley behind. He should have exited from the kitchen, where the door led to the yard and alleyway. For a moment, he paused on the stoop, but then hunched his shoulders and walked down the windswept, rainy block, turned right, and turned again into the alley, where he located the Sutter carriage house and led his horse and carriage from the warm confines into the dreary night.