Robin Oliveira Read online

  “You, however, have already accomplished quite a lot,” Thomas said.

  “Not enough,” Mary said. Her eyes shone, and the stiff posture with which she held herself disappeared. “I want someday to attend medical school.” And she lifted her gaze to the wide pillars and high windows of the school; off to the right was the hospital wing; under its golden cupola was the lecture hall. The surgeries and laboratories resided in the wing to the left. She knew its layout by heart from having once sneaked past the clerk guarding the school from behind his desk.

  Thomas studied the building, and Mary held her breath, though not consciously, but having revealed herself she felt exposed. She hadn’t meant to say what she wanted so clearly. Desire had burst out of her, as if it could not be contained. And the goal seemed within reach. Any day now, she would receive the answer; any day now, she would be the first female student of the Albany Medical College. She waited for the puzzling, troubled look from Thomas, the one that said, You are overreaching, the one that said, What an absurd idea.

  Instead he said mildly, “You want to be a doctor?” There was only a slight tilt to his head, only a brief, quizzical glance, as if she had spoken in a foreign language that he had had to translate in his head, and then a wide grin blossomed on his face. The evening light was beginning to wash the color from the sky, but Mary could see clearly that Thomas’s eyes were sharply blue. Boyish, happy, his face shone with generosity. He seemed incapable of guile, incapable even of finding her ambition extraordinary. As if the entire world were an open place, holding out its arms to everyone. As if munificence were the normal course of things.

  “Wouldn’t that be something?” he said, leaning back, holding her in a gaze of respect and admiration.

  For the first time since her father died, Mary smiled.

  They walked homeward in a companionable silence, a damp gust of wind scurrying up State Street behind them. By the time they reached Dove Street, leaves were already beginning to fall from the maple saplings lining the street. From the corner of her eye, Mary could see the curtain parting in the Sutter parlor window. Jenny had been aghast that Mary would follow her mother’s suggestion that she get out of the house; Jenny still spent most of her days in tears. The curtain’s lace shielded her face, but it was Jenny, watching.

  “I am pleased to have met you, finally,” Thomas said, cradling Mary’s hand in his. She was a surprise, he thought. Though the frame was large, the hair unmanageable, the chin too square to do her credit, there was something about her manner that drew him in. He did not want to say good night.

  “Thank you,” Mary said, “for the diversion of conversation and your company. I have been very sad.”

  “Perhaps our families could dine together, after your mourning is over,” Thomas said.

  “My mother would welcome an invitation.”

  “Good night,” Thomas said. And he watched her climb her steps and enter her house before taking the adjoining stairs two at a time into the Fall home, whistling.

  Jenny was seated in the parlor, looking at a book, turning the pages too quickly to be reading them. Amelia was staring at the fire, but turned when Mary came in, a look of expectation transforming her features from the sadness that had haunted her the last few weeks.

  “Did you have a good time?” Amelia asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Who was that?” Jenny asked. In her pale face, her eyes snapped with color. Since the death of their father, she had been uncommonly quiet, when usually she was voluble, joyful. Jenny found it difficult to be serious about anything for long. Of Mary’s intensity and seriousness, she often said, “You really ought to laugh more.”

  Mary turned, unpinning her hat. “Our new neighbor.”

  “Did you meet him on the street?” Jenny was forcing her voice toward blandness, turning the pages of her book three at a time.

  “No. He walked me home from the hall.” Mary set her hat on the table in the corner, near her mother.

  “And he didn’t think you odd for going out so soon?”

  “He didn’t say if he thought me odd or not.”

  “Well, I thought you odd.”

  “Girls,” Amelia said. The word came automatically now. She could sense tension before either of them did. She and Nathaniel had often wondered how two such different individuals had come from her womb. Nathaniel. She sighed. No one had ever told her that grief was a leveling of all emotion, that life would stretch before you, colorless and endless, devoid of any hope.

  Mary said, “He wants us to come to dinner.”

  “All of us?” Jenny said.

  “Yes,” Mary said. “At least I think so. Perhaps he just meant me.”

  “Oh,” Jenny said. “Well.” And she rose and left the room.

  Amelia shot Mary a disapproving glare. “This is not a competition,” she said.

  But they both knew that it was.

  A week later, Mary stood in the alleyway behind the Dove Street house, waiting for the maid’s son to finish shoveling coal into the chute so he could come and harness the little sorrel to her gig. Last night, Amelia had been called to a delivery on Arbor Hill, but one of the Aspinwall daughters out in Ireland’s Corners was due, and Mary was going to stay at their home, Cottage Farm, until the infant arrived. Her bag rested at her feet; she might be away a week.

  Though the Sutter family was in mourning, women continued to have babies. Amelia and Mary set aside their sadness to answer any summonses that arrived. It is the inescapable rule of caregivers that they have to be available despite how they themselves might feel. But Mary had found it a relief to plunge again into the intricacies of childbirth. Amelia yielded now to her in almost every respect, reserving only the most difficult deliveries for herself, but even then she taught Mary all she could. On those occasions, Mary observed over Amelia’s shoulder, mimicking her movements, mumbling to herself, finding that she remembered Amelia’s instructions better if she narrated. Twins: mother exhausted at second pass; it may be necessary to use smelling salts to rouse her. In case of cord entanglement, ease the child back into birth canal to lessen tension and slip cord quickly over neck. For asynclitic presentation (fetal head tilted toward shoulder) check carefully for bleeding afterwards; use rags to compress. Bedrest for two weeks while the mother heals; movement could cause hemorrhage. In cases of stillbirth, give child immediately to mother in order to preserve maternal sanity. Mary inhaled the information her mother dispensed. Centuries of wisdom resided in Amelia’s muscles. Often, when Mary asked questions, Amelia could not answer unless she was in the act itself, able to remember only as she performed. Instinct as textbook.

  And work as distraction, for no invitation had come from next door. No word from Dr. Marsh either. Mary wrote another letter. Perhaps my first letter of inquiry was lost in the post? It seemed as if the universe was conspiring to teach her patience. What does Mary Sutter most desire? Let the stars withhold it.

  Now, in the distance, thunder rumbled. A day of contradiction: Mary’s bonnet shaded her from a sun bright enough to strain her eyes. The alley percolated: a privy tilted a half block away; the neighbor’s poorly kept chickens flapped in protest at the confusion. An ice wagon lurched into the narrow ruts and climbed the slow rise, its wintered-over ice blocks crusted with sawdust. The last of the last, before winter set in and ice would be everywhere. The verge of deprivation and plenty.

  “Miss Sutter?”

  Thinking it the maid’s boy, she turned and scolded, “I thought you would never come.”

  “You’ve been waiting for me?” Thomas Fall shut the gate and grinned, leaning against the whitewashed fence that separated the Fall home from the eyesore of the alley. “But perhaps you should have come around the front and rung the bell. I do not normally meet ladies here.”

  “And where do you usually meet them?”

  “At Tweddle Hall, where they need walking home.”

  On his own ground, Thomas was self-assured, in command of his supple frame;
he wore a hat to offset the flash of amusement in his eyes.

  “I’m going today to Ireland’s Corners to await a birth. The maid’s son is supposed to harness the gig, but I fear he has fallen asleep on the coal.”

  “May I drive you? I was on my way there myself. Father is at the farm and wishes to instruct me about preparing saplings for the winter, a concern that is not unlike your profession, which is, I believe, nursing things along.”

  Not dinner with his family, but something much better. Time alone. Mary tried to discern: merely kindness or real interest? She was seeking not to make a fool of herself, as she had sought not to every time she had left the house in the last week, feigning nonchalance as she descended the stairs, as if she were glancing to the right only to contemplate the chance of catching a cab and not hoping for the Fall house door to open and for Thomas to appear.

  And now here he was, more confident than she had at first supposed.

  With an exaggerated sweep of his hand, he bowed, and then righted himself and smiled again. Lines radiated from his eyes, a product, Mary believed, of an abundance of happiness.

  “Miss?” It was the maid’s son, blackened by coal dust. Mary turned him away.

  Mary told Thomas she was headed to Cottage Farm, to the Aspinwalls’.

  Thomas raised a mocking eyebrow. “The manufacturing king? So you’re delivering royalty?”

  “Of course not. Every woman is royal when she is having a child, whether her family owns a brass foundry or not. No one should be without good care, no one. When I become a physician, I will open my doors to everyone—” She stopped. She was being combative, when Jenny would beguile. “Everyone deserves the same care and help.”

  “I know what you meant.”

  Thomas navigated the narrow alley and the riotous traffic on the city streets with an assured hand, driving past the clatter and boom of the Lumber District, the hiss of the ironwork’s open forges, the Irish taverns and the city liveries. On the Erie Canal, the mule drivers sang while they waited for the locks to fill, their songs drifting on the autumn air.

  At the base of the Loudon Plank Road, the young Palmer boy saw Mary and turned the barricading pike without requesting payment of the toll.

  To Thomas’s astonished inquiry, Mary said, “Midwives travel without charge.”

  Two dozen cattle lumbered through, coming south from Saratoga. The Palmer son collected an exit levy of forty cents from the farmer driving them to the river, which they would swim. They would then climb the embankment to the Hudson River Railroad depot and entrain for Manhattan and their slaughter in the city’s abattoirs.

  “You just saved me twenty-five cents,” Thomas said. “Tell Dr. Marsh. He’ll admit you to the medical school as a cost-saving measure. Of course, you’ll have to accompany him wherever he goes. You’ll be a scandal.”

  Mary laughed. No one teased her, not even her mother. He was easy, she thought, when everyone else was so hard. “I don’t think Dr. Marsh has to pay.”

  “I would charge him, just for keeping you waiting.” (He had asked whether or not she’d received word yet almost as soon as they had turned down State Street; when she told him she had not, Thomas denounced Marsh as a pigheaded dimwit.)

  Under the carriage wheels, the road planks thumped pleasantly. A heavy scent of ripe persimmons and apples wafted from the orchards of the Van Rensselaer lands that stretched westward all the way to the New York Central Railroad yards. The orchards brimmed with wagons and pickers placing red and green apples into bushels; flat persimmon crates burst with purpled fruit. A flock of sheep swelled toward Mary and Thomas, who veered into a grove of cherry trees to allow the beasts to pass. (Pleased with their frolic, the sheep too were ambling toward their deaths, unknowing.) Autumn had burned fire into the trees; the canopy above shone like a stained window. The sheep were an aggregate mass, a vast, woolly cloud drifting down the road; the air, the clack and bleat of the animals, the laughter from the fields eased Mary back into memories of her childhood. Her youth and his, while separate, had both been spent here. They had this in common.

  “Where exactly is your family’s farm?” Mary asked.

  “A mile or so past the Corners. I’ve been thinking about you since we last talked,” Thomas said. Offhanded, but he met her gaze and held it.

  And I you, she wanted to say, but could not. The language of courting was not her language. Jenny would tilt her head, invite more confessions with a smile. Mary, who could coax reluctant babies from unwilling bodies, could not now coax words of flirtation from her mouth. Would that Thomas would ask her instead about the physical workings of the heart, its struts and valves, the music of the blood that swished through an infant’s heart when she pressed her monaural stethoscope to a woman’s belly. She grasped at the shepherd’s arrival with desperation. “See now, the flock has passed.”

  Thomas looked away. Languid, his movement, but Mary thought she detected disappointment. Recovery seemed impossible. (The brief swoon of a mother after delivery, when her body gave in to the shock.) Thomas took up the reins and reentered the road, but looked at her once again. “I did not take you for being bashful.”

  “Not bashful. Rather, unpracticed.” Now, thank God, her reluctant tongue.

  “But you are such a courageous woman.”

  He would steal language itself from her. She turned to hide her blush.

  Around a bend, Cottage Farm hurried up to them, and Mary cursed the efficient road.

  Thomas helped her down, but retained her elbow in his and walked her toward the door, which flung open, revealing the Aspinwall son-in-law. He was young, recently married; his beard struggled to make a statement of age, but failed. “She’s early, she’s early, you must come, I was about to saddle to ride to you.” (An early baby, yes, but the infant would be fully formed. A miracle, everyone would say.)

  Thomas handed Mary her bag, and his hand lingered in hers. The son-in-law looked from one to the other, recognized the symptoms, and would have left them alone, for he too had suffered such an attraction (which had earned him a swift marriage and a premature baby), but his wife—would he ever get used to saying that?—had already frightened everyone with her screams.

  “Please, you must come now; she might die.”

  Mary put her hand to the young man’s forearm and soothed. An essential element of midwifery was mastering the art of distracting fathers, husbands, and brothers from their alarm. And women, too. Mortality was the ever-present companion of women brought to bed, to say nothing of the myriad postpartum ailments: childbed fever, prolapsed uteri, and fistulae. Peril was Mary’s working conversation. “Could you help me? It would save time if you could carry my bag inside, and clear a table so that I might lay out my things. I’ll be right in.”

  The promise and the nonspecificity of things seemed to assuage him, and he took her bag and dashed up the steps to the house, calling, “She’s here, she’s here!”

  “See how everyone wants you?” Thomas said, smiling, and then one by one tugged on the fingertips of her glove, and then slowly pulled it off, turned her hand over in his. “May I come by on my way home this evening and ask for you?”

  Mary pictured being called to the door, just for five minutes even, to say hello, imagined the surge of pleasure, double, perhaps triple the anticipation she felt now. How easy to forget, with his calloused hand in hers, the labor that was waiting her attendance. To breathe, for a moment, in ease, as Jenny might.

  “I am sorry, but I cannot allow it.” But even as Mary spoke, she wanted to snatch the words back. What would Jenny have said instead? Oh, it would please me so much, but I’m terribly sorry, our next visit will have to wait for another day. When I get home, perhaps? Ensuring both that they would see one another again, and that Thomas would think it was his idea. But it was too late to say those words. A wave of futility came over Mary, even as she worried about the laboring girl. Mary had been home for a week. Why hadn’t Thomas called for her then?

  He loo
ked from Mary to the house and withdrew his hand. “Of course. I apologize.”

  It’s nothing, she wanted to say. But it wasn’t nothing. Nearby, a chestnut dropped from the grove of trees, its spiky shell splitting open with a thud when it hit the ground. She thought, He is done with me.

  And then Thomas was gone, striding toward the wagon. The cant of his shoulders made Mary feel suddenly cold, as if autumn had turned to winter in a moment. She took in everything as he swung onto the seat: his muscled forearms clutching the reins, his cheeks, clean-shaven in the morning, now shadowed, his gaze, set resolutely ahead.

  “Perhaps if you were to send someone for me when you are finished here? I could drive you home. Would that be acceptable?” he asked.

  An arc of sunlight struck the firm contours of his body, and for a moment Mary thought she could see right through to his heart.

  “Yes,” she said. “Entirely acceptable.”

  And then he turned onto the road toward the Corners, and the stand of chestnut trees hid him from her sight.

  After a mild labor of only ten hours, the Aspinwall girl produced a healthy son of small size at midnight, a feat that boded faster and faster deliveries in her future. The girl recovered well, and was even able to leave her bed on the third day and walk across the room without any help, despite a small tear that Mary treated with cold compresses. The entire clan of Aspinwall sisters, aunts, and friends, including the girl’s mother, who herself had been delivered of a baby only the year before, were on hand to provide attentive care. After assuring herself that the girl showed no signs of childbed fever—no chills, discharge, or lassitude—Mary sent a note to Thomas, along with word to her mother that not only had the birth gone well, but that Thomas Fall had offered to bring her home.

  Thomas drove first north up the Loudon Plank Road, and then east down Menands Road toward a small lake hidden in a thicket of poplars. He helped Mary out of the carriage and down the treed slope to the edge of the water. The late afternoon air was tinged with woodsmoke; the surrounding trees concealed them from the road.