My Name Is Mary Sutter (14 page)

Chapter Ten

You see, it is a war.

The war will keep you from everything. Except, of course, me. Us. Those deemed suitable for volunteering for a war in which few shots had yet been fired.

Mary stopped at the bottom of the town house stairs, her bag clutched to her side, fatigue in full assault, looking from right to left, trying to decide where she should go, as a new film of dirt and sweat coated her face. A long line of soldiers passed by, drilling in uniform down the dusty street, heading toward the Mansion whose parapets she could just see over the roofs of the busy street. Why had she not seen this evidence of the war as she had traveled in from the train station? Here the city thrummed and rumbled with life, and boys as young as fourteen and fifteen were armed with not just drum, but musket.

Yet you are not thirty, which I have decided is the minimum possible age for any female to involve herself in a war.

Mary resolved to find a hotel, to prove herself capable of at least that, when, for the first time in a long time, she felt herself incapable, unseated and disoriented, not only by travel, but by Miss Dix’s implacable resistance. It was Sumter all over again, when James Blevens had said, simply,
No
. He was going to
the war
, was in fact here, somewhere, along with Thomas and Christian, but Mary wasn’t allowed. She had recovered herself, and was on the verge of setting out in search of a cab, when a young man who had been nimbly working his way down the street stopped at the bottom of the stairs and said, “How do you do? Have you just come from seeing Miss Dix?”

There was something about him, though Mary couldn’t say what, that made her ask, “Can you tell me of a good place to stay?”

The man removed his hat, revealing wetted hair, parted on the left, youth, and a forehead that looked already well acquainted with worry.

“The Willard Hotel is good,” he said, “but I suppose—” He stopped, appraising her dishevelment, but not impolitely. “You might try Mrs. Surratt’s Boarding House on E Street.” He spun around and pointed through a wall of buildings. “But you would need a cab.”

“I need only a room and privacy.”

“Then the Willard. A couple of Vermonters have done good work there. Shall I walk you?”

“Thank you, but no.”

He stepped aside as Mary started down the street. “I do beg your pardon,” he said, “but did you say whether or not Miss Dix is in?”

Mary turned back. “She is. Though what good it will do you, I have no idea.”

“Is that so?”

“She is in charge of the war.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“How very interesting. May I introduce myself? I am John Hay,” he said. “Secretary to the president. I am certain Mr. Lincoln will be delighted that he is no longer in charge.”

“Then would you tell the president something for me, please?”

“I would be delighted to,” Hay said, suppressing a sigh. Daily, he went about his errands, retrieving tooth powder or fetching soup for the president, only to return from the streets with a dozen messages, rarely urgent and often ridiculous.
Just let ’em go. What good is the South anyway? Nothing but cotton growers and pickaninnies.

“Would you please tell the president that Miss Dix is turning women away?” Mary felt great shame in tattling, but she was tired and hungry.

John Hay felt oddly vindicated. He had told the president that it had been a bad idea from the start to appoint Miss Dix. Now he took stock of the young woman before him, who was as tall as he was, sturdily built, not beautiful, but compelling all the same. “You wish to become a nurse?”

Mary had the feeling of being once again a specimen. Gathering her pride, she cried, “Why do people think it is such an odd desire?”

“I don’t. Not at all.” He assessed her, his gaze raking her body, but not impolitely. “May I escort you please? You look very unwell.”

Mary shrugged and gave in, and, bowing, Hay took her by the elbow and walked her toward Pennsylvania Avenue, which they crossed. They followed a street next to the Mansion until they reached a set of grand stairs rising to the entrance of the Willard Hotel. He tipped his hat and said, “May I ask your name?”

“Miss Mary Sutter.”

“May I say, Miss, that it will not be good, not any of it.”

She knew he meant
the war
. War. Warning. Warned. The words rattled around in her head. She was on the edge of feeling.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be rude. I’ve come a long way, and now—” She held up her hands in apology.

The powerful seethed around them, though Mary could not know it. John Hay did, and stood fast.

“She is well-intended,” he said, meaning Miss Dix, though he did not know why he was defending her. He thought her restrictions far too stringent. That he had hoped that the circular would bring a flux of eligible young women into the capital, he had not mentioned to the president and did not mention now.

“You cannot make up for her,” Mary said, and turned to climb the stairs to the hotel where Vermonters had done well.

“I met the most remarkable woman on the street,” John Hay said. “She complained that Miss Dix had turned her away.”

After returning to meet with Miss Dix and asking her about Mary Sutter, he had found his interest stymied by the woman’s stubborn self-regard. Now he entered the president’s office and found Mr. Lincoln locked in his study, reading a telegram. Lincoln often seemed caged to Hay, as if the woods of Illinois, those much-vaunted forests invoked to shore up the image of him as woodsman, were indeed his natural domain. Woodcutter. Frontiersman. Lincoln had not chopped wood these ten years, at least. Still, restlessness dogged the president. Even when sitting, he wiggled his foot. Impatient, always, in face of the elusive. But in the time it had taken John Hay to meet Mary Sutter, Lincoln seemed to have aged ten years.

Lincoln looked up from the telegram. He loved a young man who knew what was important and what was not. Colonel Ellsworth had known, and lost his life for it. John Hay was beginning to learn, and was losing his youth to it. Already, gray flecked the curls above his ears.

“Our troops at Fort Monroe battled a contingent of Confederates near Big Bethel. We lost eighteen men. We had twice as many men as they did. We didn’t last an hour.”

It won’t be good. Not any of it.
Hay sank to the edge of a chair and hoped Miss Dix would turn away no more eager women, because they would need as many eager women as they could find.

Across the street, Mary was looking out from the room of the Willard Hotel toward the president’s mansion. The hotel room cost three dollars a night, one and a half deliveries’ worth, a rate that was even more expensive than the Delevan’s. Mary was fairly certain that Amelia would send her more money if she asked, but she did not want her mother to know exactly where she was quite yet. She needed time. The link between becoming a nurse and becoming a surgeon was further apart than it had ever been, and now she wasn’t even certain that it had ever been clear. She was beginning to doubt everything, especially the impulsive decision to come to Washington, which had seemed straightforward enough when she had made it, but now appeared rash and unfounded.

Laughter floated up from the dining room downstairs. Mary was hungry, but she could not imagine dining alone in public in a strange city. Even in Albany, she would have been too uncomfortable, though she was well known and might have found someone’s table to join. Mostly though, she was tired. The maid had drawn her a bath, and as Mary towel-dried her hair, she thought of Thomas Fall and Christian just across the Potomac River, which she had not yet even glimpsed. Dr. Blevens, too. The thought came to her that she might try to find a way to visit them, thereby garnering at least some purpose in her defeat.

Such a long way to come for hope.

The summer evening was warm and Mary opened the window, but quickly shut it again. The air was foul, worse than the pestilential air of Albany, though it was hard to imagine anywhere that could top the odors of that city in the summer.

She sat down on the bed, running a comb through her curls.

If perhaps she couldn’t get across the Long Bridge, it was possible she would run into Thomas and Christian in the city. Though the shape of her future seemed as indistinct as the last forty-eight hours of her life, now she imagined serendipity, coincidence.
Oh. How lovely to see you here. We’re just in from the fort. Let me take your arm
. But it was Blevens saying this, bowing, offering his arm. She must readjust; Blevens was not the man she wished to see.

Mary put aside her comb and lay back on the bed. Perhaps they would meet nearby, or even in the hotel. Downstairs, the orchestra was playing a waltz. Thomas, her brother-in-law, was guiding her to a linen-covered table, Christian proudly following behind, James Blevens now lost in the crowd. Pure white walls trellised with gilded vines; dancers weaving to a Viennese waltz played by a string quartet, their violin bows rising and falling in unison; candles flaring in sconces, trays piled with food. Grapes and bananas and a roasted hog with an apple in its mouth sailing by on the arms of jacketed waiters. The dancers in white turned and turned on a parquet floor.
You dance so well
.
Thank you. I am a very good brother-in-law
. Dr. Blevens cut in and asked,
Is this enough for you?
Christian cut in and said,
Isn’t war splendid?
In her arms, her brother was untouched, safe, because she was here. Their mother would be so pleased. In between sweeping dips and turns, Mary found time to deliver the baby of a woman laboring in a corner.
Oh, thank you
, the woman said, swiftly recovering, holding up her baby for the men to admire.
See how clever that woman is? See how she helped me? There, the one dancing in the arms of that young man, the one that looks as if he loves her. He knows who she is. He knows what she can do
.

The music raced and the men took turns twirling Mary in circles until her heart raced and she held her gloved hand to her chest, her beautiful neck rising from her white, square-collared dress.
You have a fine neck and lovely carriage for a woman who is not attractive. I know. My neck is my best feature. I know how to carry this ungainly body. That’s good, because this is a war, you know. But you shouldn’t have come. You’re far too young. You’ve come too far. You shouldn’t be here.

You shouldn’t be here.

Thomas glided her off the floor and then rejoined the dancing soldiers, now absent their partners, turning in perfect rhythm in their white waist-coats and white gloves and white powdered wigs as the band played faster and faster, until they vanished, every one.

Mary woke up, startled, not remembering having fallen asleep.

It will not be good, not any of it.

At ten o’clock the next morning, on the top floor of the Widner Building at 17th and F streets, Mary stood at a tall oak counter that separated the dozen clerks writing in ledgers from inquirers.

“I am in need of the addresses of all the hospitals, makeshift and established.”

A tall, clipped man looked up at Mary from behind his pile of papers and observed that the woman enquiring carried a valise and an open notebook, and that flowers of perspiration had already bloomed under her arms this sweltering morning. “That is not information I am able to give out.” The clerk had worked in the Surgeon General’s office only two months. In that time, he had become happily stingy and presumptive, playing out the eternal imperiousness of clerks who caught the disease the first day on the job and ever afterwards never recovered. Doomed to their fate, they succumbed to stinginess without argument, as if to death.

“John Hay sent me.” Mary said the name without remorse, having decided to hazard everything.

“We sent him a report last week.”

“But now it is this week,” Mary said.

The clerk looked her up and down, as much as he could from behind the counter, his arms propped upon its smooth, caramel surface, king of his fiefdom. “Is John Hay now employing his own secretary?” He was angry that he had not heard the job was available, admitting to himself the dissatisfaction he rarely let surface. It was a volcano to be capped, for life was long. He managed to notice, with pleasure, the state of her clothes; they were traveled in, and recently. To be a secretary to the secretary to the president did not confer advantage, it seemed, only discomfort, a circumstance that rendered only a modicum of satisfaction. He said, “We do not make duplicate reports.”

Mary set down the pen, a simple action the clerk would later remember for its threat. She might have been taking up a sword.
You are my last. Not hope, not chance, but impediment
.

“If you do not give me the addresses, then the president himself will be forced to come here.”

The clerk would have liked very much to see the president up close. Mr. Lincoln had never visited the Surgeon General’s office, though he was frequently seen striding through the park on his way to the War Department across the street.
Will be forced
. The clerk tried to picture a scowl from the famously congenial man. A reprimand, possibly even a dismissal, might follow, all from wishing for a moment of recognition.