Robin Oliveira Read online

  “Children,” she said, “are what marriage is for.”

  (Her Catholicism, too, had been a shock, though he was at fault, for he was the one who had acted on impulse, disregarding everything because of a supposed idea of romance.)

  When he refused to comply, the same cool determination that had allowed Sarah to kill her brother also allowed her to pack up their one pot and feather bed and depart for her father’s basement and grog house, moaning that annulment would be impossible, because he’d already sullied her.

  James went on with his studies, depressed by his foolhardy foray into love, determined to learn as much as he could. He helped Dr. Stipp examine his tubercular patients, learning to prescribe brandy for some, eggnog for others, and when it did not compromise their modesty, to listen for the faint signs of a lung slowly hollowing out, his ears pressed up against the ribcage, sometimes using a stethoscope, sometimes not. Medicine was devoted to diet and air and brandy, for there was little else. He never saw Dr. Stipp give out morphia to the dying again; he wondered what had prompted him to ease Sarah’s brother’s death and not others. Perhaps, James thought, the offer of marriage and the offer of morphia had leapt from the same impulse: to take away the sadness in her eyes.

  Even Dr. Stipp rarely performed surgery, and only then to cut out sores that would not heal. He was judicious with his knife, for he believed that there was little one could do for the living, really, besides touch and comfort. Chloroform was new and untested, and ether had become a flammable nightmare. Surgery was always the last resort. So it was only in the autopsy lectures that James learned some of what he craved to know: the levers and pulleys of the muscular system, the placement of the bones, the ball and socket of the joints, the clever role of tendons to bind the structure together.

  Still, after his year of apprenticeship with Dr. Stipp, there was something invisible, something electrical, that James did not understand. Something sparked the body to live, propelled the heart to beat, the brain to think, the structure to live on, to sometimes win over typhoid, measles, pneumonia, and even diphtheria. The body was a structure, yes, with struts and piping, but something else, some miraculous, invisible fabric made it work. But he had no idea what that was, and no idea how to repair the structure once it failed. No one else seemed to know, either. He left his apprenticeship with the surgeon with a medical degree and an insufficient understanding, but it had to do.

  Only in his current work at the microscope, alone in his rooms in Albany, did James begin to fathom that the invisible fabric might be something that no one had ever imagined. And it had taken him years to understand that his mother had kept him and his brothers from their sick room that night not only because she feared their death, but because of an emotion stronger than fear—an unseen loneliness for her dead children.

  Every year, James traveled back to Manhattan to visit Sarah. A marriage of inconsequence, but a marriage nonetheless, for the love that had turned out to be pity had not hardened to disregard. He could not completely abandon her. He was a boy from a farm who had moved to the city to chase his curiosity and had married an Irish girl for whom he had felt sorry. It was as if he had lost his mind one day. But he did not regret the marriage. Rather, he regretted his impulsiveness, and the loneliness that had accompanied him northward.

  And he regretted that he did not yet know what real love was.

  Across town, Mary was sitting in the rocking chair in the lying-in room worrying about how she had misdiagnosed the cause of Bonnie’s hemorrhage when Blevens had discerned its cause right away. She wanted to believe that if he hadn’t been there, she would have recognized the issue herself, but she couldn’t be certain that she would have. She was embarrassed. She knew more than Blevens did about midwifery, but she had been angry and distracted. A tear. When a relaxed uterus was the most common problem after a delivery. She had allowed emotion to cloud her thinking.

  Pride goeth, she thought. And now I have lost my chance.

  “Mary?” Jenny was at the door, whispering through the narrow opening Mary had left for the light. Downstairs, the clock struck three a.m.

  This was a rare visit to the lying-in room for Jenny. Ordinarily she avoided it and everything to do with midwifery and, by extension, Mary. Since Thomas, the two sisters had defaulted to distant politeness in their interactions, though neither of them ever mentioned it. An unspoken truce with unspoken rules.

  Mary stood and motioned Jenny in, and Jenny paused to admire the baby asleep in the bed beside Bonnie before drawing Mary to the window, where she fell into her arms.

  Jenny had been crying. Thomas was going to war. Did Mary think the war would last beyond three months?

  Like an actor on a stage, Mary deflected self, her usual and instinctive response to need. Do not mention your regard for Thomas; do not admit it. The sudden intimacy surprised her. It was unlike Jenny to seek her out for solace. They were unpracticed at it, and Mary could feel a latent resistance in her sister’s body, even as they embraced. She looked over her sister’s head outside, to the dark street, which was as still as death.

  The baby stirred and Mary pulled Jenny into the hallway. Sitting on the top of the stairs together in the light of a single candle burning in a wall sconce, the sisters marveled. Always astonishment, the world over, when one is affected by upheaval. We are bored by the familiar, but terrified by the unfamiliar. The added lament: Christian, too, was leaving.

  “Our hearts will break,” Jenny said.

  Mary didn’t want to think of her brother at war. He was asleep now behind his bedroom door, where she wanted him to stay, safe and protected. As strained as her relationship was with her sister, her relationship with Christian was as easy as if they were mother and son. No competition, only joy. But now, with their full skirts gathered around their ankles, whispering like they used to when they were younger and shared the same bed, Mary felt a thaw between herself and Jenny, and the veil of night working on her, inviting disclosure.

  “I wanted to be a surgeon,” Mary said.

  “No woman is a surgeon. Besides, how can you think about a thing like that when we are losing a brother and I am losing Thomas? You are too cool, Mary.”

  Too cool. Cool about everything but achieving her goal? Perhaps everyone viewed her that way, even Thomas. No woman is a surgeon. Mary smoothed her skirts and tucked the stray curls of her hair back into a comb, tired now, the full weight of the day’s disappointment bringing tears to her eyes. She felt like a failure. Wanting to become a surgeon when she couldn’t even take proper care of Bonnie. Believing she could sow intimacy again with her sister, when they were unalike as twin sisters could be. From the lying-in room came the mewling sounds of the baby, needing to be fed.

  Rising, Mary said, “You could help sometimes, you know.”

  “I don’t want anything to do with babies,” Jenny said.

  “You might someday,” Mary said, though she hated acknowledging the prospect, for it seemed a prediction.

  In the glimmer of light from the sconce, Jenny smiled shyly. “When I do, then you will be here to help me, won’t you?”

  But Mary didn’t answer her, only turned her back and headed for the lying-in room door.

  Chapter Four

  James Blevens sat at his desk in his surgery pondering what to write so that Colonel Townsend, the newly appointed commander of the 25th Regiment from Albany, would choose him over the other physicians applying for the position of regimental surgeon. Time was short. The North was rallying, troops were assembling. That very morning, Wednesday, April the seventeenth, the Sixth Massachusetts, the first regiment to venture southward in defense of the Union, had set out from Boston for Washington City.

  James Blevens dipped his pen in the inkwell and began to write.

  Dear Colonel Townsend, I am offering my services as Regimental Surgeon for the 25th Regiment. My credentials are impeccable. I studied medicine for one year at Bellevue Hospital in New York, repeating the requisite six-month course
of lectures to enhance my understanding. I then moved to Albany, where my surgery is located on Washington Avenue. I am well acquainted with serious fractures and their repair. The most recent fracture I set was on a boy who’d been run over by a wagon.

  Mention of this accident reminded James of Thomas Fall’s parents. He had inquired around, learned the details. Had the policeman called him instead of that drunkard Fin McDonnall more than a year ago, he was certain he could have saved them, setting their broken limbs on the street before they were even moved, unlike McDonnall, who’d let them be picked up and hoisted into the wagon bed, where they had both died. In his care, Thomas’s parents might have lived, and he would have visited them often, and perhaps encountered Mary, who would no doubt have been sitting at their bedside, stalwart and useful. Mary would have been curious about the fractures; he would have answered her questions: “You see here is the break of the femur. It’s important to splint it strongly so that it can’t move. In this case, I used a plaster with a splint and assigned them both to bedrest. Rest is very important. How long have you been interested in medicine?” Cast as the hero, the indulgent pedagogue, he might have held a different position in Mary Sutter’s eyes. It had been five days since he had eaten dinner with the Sutters, and he had not been able to stop thinking about her. With difficulty, he pushed her from his mind and again dipped his pen.

  The injured boy walks now without a limp. In addition, I am conversant in all manner of violent injuries sustained in factory accidents. Albany being a great manufacturing hub, I have attended victims of the ironworks, tanneries, lumber district, and railroads, learning skills that I believe will be appropriate to the situation thrust upon us all. Please return your decision at your earliest convenience. I am yours most sincerely, etc., James Blevens, Surgeon.

  “’Scuse me?” A young man was standing at the threshold of James’s surgery. Dark brows over large eyes gave the impression of thoughtfulness, though his pants hems were ringed with dirt and manure, and his skin was sallow. James could not remember having left the door open after dismissing his last patient an hour before. With some degree of certainty he recalled at least latching it. He had not heard the rasp of the catch, nor a knock, and he wished now that he had shuttered his window so that the candle burning on his desk would not have alerted passersby to his presence.

  “Are you sick?” James asked, squinting at the doorway.

  “I’m Jake Miles. Bonnie’s husband.”

  James could have passed him on the street and not recognized him.

  “I’ve come to claim my wife,” Jake said. He waved the note from the door that James had posted nearly a week ago and said, “Can you show me where Dove Street is?”

  In the foyer of the Sutters’ home, James removed his hat and introduced Jake to Mary Sutter.

  “This is Bonnie’s husband, Jake Miles, who is eager to see his wife and baby.” He was perhaps assigning more emotion to Jake than Jake himself felt. On the ride over, Jake had been taciturn, maneuvering his cart over the cobbles with the deliberation of a farmer unused to carriage traffic. He had not mentioned the child, or seemed all that eager to see Bonnie, either, but it was possible the boy was just uncertain.

  “How do you do?” Mary said.

  Jake ducked his head in greeting, his hat clutched tightly to his waist. He gestured toward the parlor doors, where a maid had laid tea. There was an iced cake and yellow daffodils in a crystal vase. “I can’t pay you for taking care of Bonnie.”

  “Don’t trouble yourself. Payment is unnecessary,” Mary said. “I am very happy to tell you that Bonnie is well, but she must stay with us a bit longer. She’s not strong enough to travel. And certainly not at this hour of the night.”

  “But we’ve got to get home,” Jake said. “The ferry doesn’t run past eight.”

  “Your wife has had a difficult time. And the baby shouldn’t be out in the evening. Perhaps you could wait until the morning?”

  “But in the morning the animals will need me,” Jake said, his voice polite but adamant. “We need to get on.”

  Mary emitted an almost imperceptible sigh of frustration, but she called a maid to show Jake up the stairs, his shoes leaving pebbles of hardened dirt on the floor. When he disappeared into the lying-in room, she turned on James and said, “Where has he been?”

  James shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  “You should have dissuaded him.”

  “He is her husband.”

  “He is a seventeen-year-old boy who knows nothing.”

  They stood in the foyer, opposed. The maid padded down the stairs, her gaze skittering between them before she ducked into the kitchen and told the cook that she had better come listen at the door because Miss Sutter was at it again.

  All the way over, James had planned what he would say to Mary in order to put the evening of Bonnie’s delivery behind them. He owed Mary a great deal and wanted to mend the rift, which had seemed impossible only an hour ago. But Jake had given him a legitimate entrée, which he had been eager to take. True, help had been given both ways that evening. Mary had helped with Bonnie’s delivery; he had stopped Bonnie’s hemorrhage. In his mind, the debt was already paid. But this wasn’t completely about a debt. He wanted to help her, as Stipp had once helped him. He gestured with his hat and said, “I was glad that Jake came by, Miss Sutter, because it gave me an opportunity to return. You and I didn’t part on the best of circumstances.”

  “No, we did not.”

  “I have an offer for you. Why don’t you let me speak to Dr. Marsh on your behalf? I know him; perhaps if I recommend you, he might be inclined to rethink his decision.” He was going out on a limb, because he doubted very much that Marsh would take to it, but it was the help he had to offer. And she was skilled. That he himself might not be chosen as Townsend’s surgeon he did not mention. He was going to go to the war no matter what occurred, in any fashion that he could.

  Mary regarded him for a moment. “You want to speak for me?”

  “Yes, with your permission.”

  “The last thing the clerk said to me was that no woman would ever attend Albany Medical College.”

  “A clerk is nothing. I’ll talk to Marsh. You could just as easily have asked me to intercede on your behalf as ask me to apprentice you.”

  “But Dr. Marsh didn’t even return my letters. Three medical schools have turned me down. Why would he change his mind for you?”

  Blevens considered carefully what to say next. He wanted to fully discharge the perceived debt and thereby gain Mary’s trust; here was a way, but not a certain way. He feared her disappointment should he fail, and it was very likely he would fail. “To be truthful, Marsh may not change his mind.”

  “Then I do not want intercession from you. It is ungenerous of you to dangle hope when none exists.”

  How was it that she stirred both exasperation and sympathy at the same time? In her presence, it was like being at war, arousing simultaneous urges both to fight and to run away.

  “Are you always this stubborn?” he asked.

  There was a bout of laughter from behind the kitchen door, followed by a stern warning of reprimand as the door flew open and the maids scattered. Jenny and Thomas emerged from the kitchen after them.

  “Those maids think they know so much,” Jenny said. “Eavesdropping at the door again.”

  “At least they strive to know something,” Mary said, straightening.

  A look flew between the girls, and then just as quickly dissipated. Venomous or sweet, it was difficult to tell which, because Thomas Fall intervened again with news, smoothing the air. They had just been downtown. A phalanx of volunteer militia had arrived on the New York Central Express from Buffalo; the city was filling with soldiers and there wasn’t a room to be had in any hotel. Not even the elegant, expensive Delevan, where they had all greeted Abraham Lincoln at a special levee held there on his way to Washington in February, had any vacancy. And now Lincoln had called for men, and everyone arou
nd the state was reporting to Albany to muster in. A crowd had gathered this afternoon at the Capitol, and a band was still playing in the park near the medical school, and the whole of the city was seething with excitement.

  “You should have seen it, Mary, it was glorious. I think even you would have declared it a spectacle worth seeing. You might have even learned about something other than midwifery,” Jenny said, and then she and Thomas disappeared together through the French doors into the parlor, apparitions of happiness stirred into deeper intimacy by the threat of Thomas’s imminent departure. Mary held herself very straight; her gaze did not follow her sister and her companion. James Blevens suffered a surprise stab of jealousy, certain that he was right about Mary’s regard for Thomas, but he could not understand the attraction. Whatever affection Mary suffered for Thomas Fall seemed misplaced. She was not the same confident woman when Thomas Fall was near. Or perhaps it was the sister she minded, though they were each so different as not to be in competition at all. Blevens wished very much that he could say, “I have it fixed for you. Dr. Marsh said yes, and you will be admitted tomorrow,” convinced that by saying this he could erase the sadness from her eyes. Through the open door, the lovers could be observed seated upon the divan, familiar but formal. James thought that there was something not quite right. Years of reading people’s bodies had instilled in him an instinct for the hidden.

  He said, “I do beg your pardon, but they seem not quite suited for one another.”

  Mary said, “Well, they are in love.”

  Not even a hint of wistfulness.

  “You want something you think you cannot have,” James Blevens said.

  Mary looked at him then, startled, and a flare of anger flickered in her eyes before they cooled. “You have brought your charge, and now you must go.”