Robin Oliveira Read online

  Chapter Two

  Amelia Harriman and Nathaniel Sutter had married for reasons of family; his land near Ireland’s Corners abutted her parents’. Their union was to expand the Harriman orchards and to support Amelia’s midwifery practice. It was not a loveless marriage, however; economic cooperation was the added bonus of a childhood affection. As Amelia saw it, Nathaniel Sutter was the man least likely to complain about her profession. Her mother had been a midwife, and her mother before her, in a line that extended back to medieval France. Her great-great-great-great-grandmother had once delivered a dauphin, afterwards using ergot she had culled from the rye in her garden to stem a hemorrhage in the queen, earning the La Croix family a parcel of deeded land near Versailles, which they fled during the revolution.

  In America, the tradition continued. Amelia’s mother married James Harriman, but everyone knew who she was—the French midwife. There was simply no question of Amelia not being a midwife, and yet while American men might want good midwives for their wives, they did not wish to marry one. Nathaniel Sutter was different. And so the knowledge that had once saved a dauphin was preserved for the women of Albany County. In addition, the proximity to Amelia’s parents ensured that when Amelia was called away on a delivery—staying at the home of a woman in confinement days beforehand in anticipation of the onset of labor—her mother, who had retired after decades of sleepless nights, would be nearby to care for any children that arose from the marriage.

  Nathaniel soon discovered that he had little desire to tend flowering cherry trees, as his deceased mother and father had. A year after his marriage to Amelia, he sold the bulk of their land and bullied his way into a job with the New York Railroad, where his engaging, gregarious, and tireless personality disguised a rapacious capacity for stealing freight contracts away from the Erie Canal. As soon as the canal was finished in 1825, it proved to be slow and feeble in comparison to the speed of the railroad. Nathaniel believed that despite the inherent dangers of rail travel—the crashes, the bridge collapses, the derailments—no one would want to put their goods on an open barge in Buffalo to be dragged by a team of mules when you could place the freight on a railcar and have it arrive in Manhattan in two days. Two days when the canal took at least two weeks! The railroad was in constant battle with the legislature; the state’s debt from the canal was still a financial burden, the railroad an upstart that threatened the state with bankruptcy if the canal could not retain enough contracts to pay off the cost of building it. Nathaniel thrilled to the battle, Amelia less so. The job rendered him frequently absent.

  Two years after the marriage, Amelia’s parents died, and Amelia and Nathaniel moved back into her childhood home, a three-room clapboard on the rise that ran toward the Shaker settlement. When children finally did come, five years after their marriage, their lives became a negotiation. Amelia could no longer stay in a woman’s home for days before the woman gave birth. Husbands had to come and find her when labor started, always risking that Amelia wouldn’t be able to respond if Nathaniel was away.

  One dawn in June of 1842, Amelia sent word from a neighboring farm that she was just about to return home. An hour, two at the most, the boy reported to Nathaniel. But Nathaniel had to catch a train at eight a.m. He was due in Buffalo that evening. He stood at the bedroom threshold and made a calculation. Amelia was just a half mile away. Their two-year-old twins were asleep in their cribs—Mary restless, but still sleepy, Jenny quiet, her thumb in her mouth. The boy had said Amelia was coming in an hour. Two at the most. He could wake the twins and load them into the wagon and hurry them cranky and unfed to Amelia, or he could let them sleep alone in the house for an hour. The light was soft; a breeze billowed through the gauzy summer curtains. An hour. That was all.

  When Amelia returned home that evening after failing to save her neighbor from a sudden hemorrhage, her girls were standing in their crib, their faces wet with tears and mucus, their nightgowns stained with urine.

  The argument when Nathaniel returned home went like this: I had to go to Buffalo. The railroad needed that lumber contract.

  But you should have brought the children to me at the Stephensons’.

  You sent word that you were coming home.

  Dolly bled suddenly, I couldn’t leave.

  I didn’t know. If I had known, I would have brought them to you.

  But how could you abandon them?

  Amelia’s distrust, once roused, could never fully be put to rest. From then onward, she took the children with her, even in the middle of the night. She ordered them to dress, don shoes, bring their blankets. While Mary sleepily complied and Jenny and Christian cried, Nathaniel argued, even as the husband of the laboring woman stood leery at the door. But Amelia would not relent. The children went—on with the bonnets, on with the boots—the twins propelled by a watery memory of an echoing stretch of time inhabited by terror and hunger and finally, their mother’s tear-stained face, bent over the crib in which they had been confined. That vestigial memory of abandonment made them follow Amelia out the door to fall asleep in the wagon as she barreled down washboard roads after worried husbands.

  They became vagabond children. When they were younger, they played with the children of the laboring mother; when they were older, they hauled and boiled water, and listened to birthing cries in houses high and low, becoming accustomed to joy being predicated on misery. This accounted for their assured nature; prescient, possessed, they would later feel at home anywhere and in the face of anything.

  The first time Mary asked to help was in a brooding house along the Shaker Road, not far from home. The house was two stone stories, with looming windows and a narrow stairwell. Well along, the woman shrieked upstairs. The walls were drab, the bed a ticking upon the floor. Two toddlers sucked thumbs beside their mother.

  “Are you certain?” Amelia asked, when Mary pulled the bonnet from her head and said, “I would be grateful, Mother, if you would let me stay.”

  Her mother’s eyes pierced, giving her the look that Mary would later learn to ignore: the tilting of the head, the gaze of incredulity. But then she said, “So, it’s you,” having wondered which of her daughters would become a midwife.

  Jenny, never eager, was happily relegated to the dull tasks of water and childcare, while Mary seized opportunity.

  Mary was not given a corner from which to watch. No clinging to territory, no adult separation of I know better than you. Amelia said, Hand me this, hand me that. You might not want to see this; turn your head. At times it seemed to Mary that the world over was rent with the cries of women giving birth. But when at last the baby emerged, slippery, fighting, squalling, the woman’s thighs trembling and then collapsing, and Mary was given charge to kneel beside the mother and wipe—gently—the writhing baby dry on her stomach, the battle of labor proved a war worth fighting. What did Mary remember most? Not the mother’s bulging flesh, the bullet-shaped head of the infant, the gasp of love when at last the mother encircled the infant in her arms, but Amelia’s stillness. Her grand remove. Competence incarnate.

  And so the tradition continued. With Mary, not with Jenny. It could have hardly been otherwise, for Mary had set her heart. Within two years, it was she who said, Hand me this, hand me that. Fifteen, and already precociously able. She was spoken of: It is something about her hands; it is something about her voice. And around the city, at suppers and church socials and dances and even upon the streets, when an alert matron spotted a newly expectant mother, Mary Sutter’s name was whispered.

  When the success of the New York Railroad made Nathaniel his fortune, they sold their land and moved into Albany and the Dove Street home, eschewing old-money Eagle Street for the outskirts of the city. There followed the consequent ease of wealth and servants, and with it no longer any need for Amelia to take the children along with her. But Mary continued to go to deliveries with her mother, while Jenny and Christian stayed behind. It was said that Amelia Sutter had ruined Mary for society, and that she had near
ly ruined Jenny. That Amelia’s running about risked her marriage, that only her charm and beauty saved her. For Amelia Sutter was indeed charming. She was at ease in conversation, knew how to deploy a hand to a forearm at just the right moment. And in the childbirth room, her presence was a gift. But the combination of social status and occupation puzzled. Midwives were supposed to be matrons beyond childbearing age, with years of life in which to have been disappointed enough to wish to spend all one’s time delivering babies. Not that the women of Albany County were not grateful; instead they were envious, which took its form in criticism. The problem, they said, was that she neglected her family. Never mind that they never left her side. Never mind that Mary took first place at the Girl’s Academy. Mary Sutter, talented as she was, couldn’t string two words together unless they were combative ones, and Jenny Sutter, why, that girl was destined for trouble.

  When the girls turned eighteen, there was a trip to Wellon’s Bookstore on State Street for Mary to purchase Gray’s Anatomy, newly published, resplendent with illustrations, and Notes on Nursing by the celebrity Florence Nightingale. For Jenny, there was a party and dancing. Amelia enjoyed both equally, though perhaps, if pressed, would confess to having liked Jenny’s more, for the frivolity of dancing past midnight. And though in her daughters, their mother had cleaved—Jenny had adopted Amelia’s charm, Mary her persistence—no one could say that Amelia Sutter was not proud of each of them.

  Mary turned twenty years old the day her father died in September of 1860. Her first delivery had been nothing compared to the utter helplessness of watching death stalk her father. Even the memory of the woman’s dreadful house, the hard work, the boiling of water, the jack towel tied at the head of the bed for the mother to pull on, the screams, the fatigue, paled in her mind as her father suffered. In the face of her own ignorance, she peppered the doctors with questions. Why are you bleeding him more? What is the matter with him? But they could not answer her. She studied the Gray’s at his bedside, employed every tenet of Miss Nightingale’s, seeking to alleviate his pain, but he died in an agony that not even copious doses of whiskey and laudanum could dull. The day after her father’s funeral, Mary wrote her first letter to Dr. Marsh. It was the day that the Fall family moved into the new home next door, and a then young and diffident Thomas Fall, not yet having suffered his own great grief, tipped his hat to Mary as she went out to post the letter. The new neighbors did not go to Nathaniel Sutter’s funeral, not wanting to press the burden of hospitality on their newly bereaved neighbors.

  It was Mary and Thomas who met first, at a show at Tweddle Hall, two weeks after Nathaniel died. Amelia had insisted that Mary get out of the house. Go somewhere, do something, you’ll shrivel up if you stay inside a moment longer. Gas leaked from the chandelier; the smell was very strong, and everyone had covered their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs. Thomas arrived late, and chose a seat next to Mary, whom he did not at first recognize because of the makeshift veil. But it was impossible to mistake her for anyone else; he had watched her comings and goings from the window of his house and had admired the dignified way she carried herself, the resolute set of her shoulders, the graceful neck that stood out from her otherwise plain appearance. The simple act of walking down the street seemed to communicate that she knew who she was. That he did not completely know yet who he was or what he wanted was a discomfort he kept at bay with industrious endeavors toward happiness that daily seemed, in light of Mary’s apparent self-possession, an insignificant enterprise. He was pleased to find her here, though a little surprised to see her at entertainment so soon after her bereavement, though Thomas decided he admired even this break with convention. He noticed, too, that Mary did not wear the traditional black, but a shimmering deep navy, and that the rich color suited her dark brown eyes, which he decided were the most remarkable feature of her face. From time to time during the performance he glanced her way, but Mary kept her gaze fixed on the dozen jugglers from Boston who first lobbed balls and oranges, then plates and cups, followed by chairs and stools, and finally knives and swords, but decided against lighting their flaming batons because of the gas.

  Absorbed as she was by the spectacle, Mary blinked back tears. She was not usually so vulnerable a person. She knew that it was said of her that she was odd and difficult, and this did not bother her, for she never thought about what people usually spent time thinking of. The idle talk of other people always perplexed her; her mind was usually occupied by things that no one else thought of: the structure of the pelvis, the fast beat of a healthy fetus heart, or the slow meander of an unhealthy one, or a baby who had failed to breathe. She could never bring herself to care about ordinary things, like whose pie was better at the Sunday potluck, or whose husband she might covet should the opportunity arise, or what anyone was saying about an early winter or an early thaw or if the wheat would blight this year due to the heavy rains, or if the latest couple to marry had any chance of happiness. Perhaps it had been foolish to come to the theater, where potential death was being offered as entertainment, though Mary knew that no matter what she did or where she went, she would always see mortality where others saw frivolity. As a dozen swords sailed effortlessly onstage between the performers, all Mary could think was how precarious life was.

  The performance ended, and Mary rose. She lowered her handkerchief, the opening Thomas had been waiting for. He touched the tip of his program to her gloved hand and said, “I am terribly sorry about your father.”

  It was this simple gesture that immediately made her like him. He did not say, How do you do, or Pleased to meet you. Instead, he said the essential thing. She liked his directness; she liked that he did not inquire why she was out so soon; she liked that he hadn’t even introduced himself.

  Thomas guided her by her elbow out of the auditorium to the street, conscious of the whispering their pairing induced in the other patrons. Mary Sutter? Out so soon? And who is that young man she’s with? As they started up State Street, his fingers moved to the small of her back, and for the first time in a long time Mary felt that someone was taking care of her.

  Thomas was pleased to have made himself so easily acquainted with his new neighbor. He’d been nervous how she might take his overture so soon after the loss of her father, but she seemed untroubled by, and even grateful for, his boldness. He glanced over at her, uncertain what to say now that they were alone. In the twilight, Mary Sutter appeared to be older than her age. The midwife, everyone said of her. But there were no claims to her affection among any of the young men of Albany. They did not attribute the cause to intimidation, but rather named the distraction of the more beautiful twin sister. All this Thomas had learned one night at the Gayety Music Hall, where he had gone last week to make himself known. He would make his mark among the society of men in Albany; he would not feel unsettled, as his mother did, by the change from the country. Her preference for Ireland’s Corners was something she hid; the country was generally viewed as unsophisticated, except as a summer escape from the dust and heat. Thomas liked the city; he liked the novelty of the noise and the ready proximity to theater and dining saloons. He liked being out and about. He liked being a young man.

  Though their families came from the same village, they were barely acquainted. The Fall family had lived on Loudon Road, the Sutters on Shaker Road. The Falls were Presbyterians, the Sutters Episcopalians. And though the Sutters had once owned an orchard, Nathaniel’s sale of the family land and Amelia’s practice had rendered them acquaintances only. Amelia had not delivered Thomas; another midwife had, for Thomas was born just as the twins had confined her to her bed. He was three months older than Jenny and Mary, but now he felt much younger. Years in the company of women in agony had conferred on Mary an aura of wisdom; she inspired respect and trust; it was this, Thomas thought, that made him feel so young.

  The whitewashed brick homes and St. Peter’s Church reflected the last of the light; it was an Indian summer night of hypnotic beauty. At the top of the
street, a few farmers’ wagons lingered in the market square; soon coal fires would acidify the air until the springtime winds scrubbed the skies clean.

  In the park by the Boy’s Academy, they rested on a bench. Just across Eagle Street the pillared white marble of the medical college reflected the ghostly beauty of the evening light. Mary gazed at the building, thinking of her letter of application on Dr. Marsh’s desk and how she might soon hear from him. Twice a day she accosted the postman at the door, only to be told there was no letter. Amelia said she was being impatient, and Mary said that she could not help it. The anticipated letter was her distraction from grief. It was also her future.

  Gaslight flickered in the lamps along State Street. Thomas and Mary sat together, the conversation arising naturally as between old friends. Soon she was telling him how just before her father died, he had apologized to her for once leaving her alone when she was a baby. Her father said he attributed her independence to this, his worst mistake, thereby taking credit for her accomplishments while completely ignoring the fact that her twin sister, likewise abandoned, was utterly uninterested in midwifery.

  While she talked, Thomas studied her. She had a way of carrying her grief that gave the impression she was doing well and would continue to do well. “I am certain you were a comfort to your father,” he said.

  “He died badly. I never want anyone to die as badly again.”

  Mary leaned forward. Did Thomas have any ambitions?

  “I am to take over my father’s business.” He explained about the orchards in Ireland’s Corners.

  “My family once had orchards there,” Mary said. “Are you passionate about farming? Will the endeavor sustain you?”

  Thomas thought Mary asked this as if he should question everything, but she did not appear disappointed when he said that he had no idea; rather, she nodded, as if she too found uncertainty the expected state of existence.