My Name Is Mary Sutter (27 page)

Chapter Thirty-two

The next morning, December the fifteenth, was a day of piercing cold, compounding the general misery within the hospital walls. Mary and Stipp were on morning rounds when they discovered Peter Markeli breathless, perspiring, sitting up in bed, his hands locked around his knees, his sheets and blankets knotted at his ankles, his nightshirt transparent with perspiration. He had torn away his dressing.

“He’s been restless all night,” Blevens said.

Stipp prescribed 10 grains of turpentine as a diuretic.

“It may force the fluid from his lungs,” he whispered to Blevens, in a voice that harbored doubt rather than hope. He told Mary to also rub volatile oil of turpentine over the boy’s chest, but the medicine had no effect. All the long day, Peter continued to labor at breathing. From time to time, he grasped at Mary’s skirt or sleeve. Late in the afternoon, as the day began its plunge into wintry darkness, he fumbled in his pocket and pulled from his wallet a tintype that he laid on the bed. It was of an older woman, with dark hair neatly tucked beneath a white lace cap, peering from the gray shadows of the portrait.

“Your mother?” Mary asked.

Peter nodded. His mop of curls clung to his forehead. Mary knelt on the bed and helped him to sit forward.

To drown is to brawl with death; Mary’s helplessness made her furious. Blevens, his hands nearly healed, but still bandaged, paced. Toward six, Peter’s breathing slowed, his chest expanding and contracting in stutters and starts with long, breathless periods in between. Agonal breathing, called that not for the agony of the dying, but for the agony of having to witness it.

The sharp edges of the tintype cut into Peter’s palm.

When the tintype clattered to the floor, Mary draped a towel across his ruined face.

Blevens said, “Mary,” but she did not answer him; instead, she hurtled through the hotel, looking for Stipp.

In the kitchen, he was hunched over a bowl of cold stew.

“I’ll require leave for three weeks,” she announced.

The spoon Stipp was ferrying to his mouth paused in midair. He didn’t need to ask what had happened.

“You’ll come back?” he said.

“I don’t even want to go,” she said.

Snow began falling in Philadelphia, and by the time Mary had crossed the Hudson on the ferry, Manhattan’s ugliness had been shrouded in a cloak of white. Over her dress she wore a shawl and bonnet, and on her feet only thin summer boots. Her winter coat had been left behind in Albany, along with her muff and hat. Along the waterfront, gaslamps glimmered fitfully in the relentless snow. Mary turned in a circle, surveying the slippery cobbles, the shanties and tenements and warehouses butting up against the rows of docks. The ferry conductor had laughed at her when she’d asked if he thought the trains would be running in New York. He had angled a lantern at her, the flickering light betraying a set of wooden teeth. “I don’t even know if I’ll make it home three blocks, Miss.”

The odor of fish clung to the coiled ropes and slippery posts of the wharf. The ferry she had debarked was smacking and banging against the pier. Mary tightened the shawl over her hair and shoulders. She’d sent Amelia a telegram:
I’m coming.
Had she left yesterday, she would have been home by now, tucked into Dove Street, waiting for Thomas and Jenny’s baby. She joined the crowd trudging across the open wharves toward the city. Her skirts dragged behind her in the slush of snow and garbage and fish offal. She would find a horsecar heading north, ask directions to the depot. Sleep in the station, if necessary. Her fingers grew brittle with cold.

A woman trudged past, her shoulders hunched against the pelting snow.

“Pardon me. Do you know how to get to the railroad depot?”

The woman swung around. “Which one, Miss? There are six or more. Where are you going?”

“Albany.”

“The Hudson River Railroad? Good luck to you. You won’t make it tonight.”

“Please. I don’t know where to go.”

Wind howled, tearing at their skirts. The woman shouted, “I think you’d best go to the Chambers Street Station. It’s not much really, but 32nd is too far. Go on down West Street here till you get to it,” she said, pointing down the dark waterfront.

Mary looked downriver. The storm had not driven the wharf ’s roustabouts and loiterers inside. Even in the Union Hotel, surrounded by two hundred undressed men, Mary had not felt as vulnerable as she did now.

The woman grabbed Mary by the elbow. “I’ll show you. Come on.”

The snow was coming on strong now. Traffic thronged the streets. Drivers were shouting and whipping the air above the backs of the horses, loath to inflict pain, but frustrated enough to threaten. In Albany, drivers would have switched to sleighs, but it seemed that no one used a sleigh in the city. Or they had all gotten caught in the storm. The horsecars were packed solid, men hanging out the doors. They were covering blocks now, the wind having abated some.

They came to an intersection where the woman halted and directed a thrust of her chin across the street. “This is Hudson Street. The depot is straight on, a few blocks or so. I can’t remember for sure.” She staggered away, snow swirling around her as she disappeared into the night. Mary darted across the intersection, zigzagging between horses and carts. The cross streets came at an angle now. Worth, Thomas, Duane. As she stumbled across one street, a huge locomotive loomed out of the storm to her right. A great iron beast, it was inching forward down tracks laid in the middle of the street. Cabbies and wagon drivers panicked and beat the backs of their horses now to get out of the way, while a man on horseback preceding the engine swung a warning lantern, yelling for people to move, goddamn it, or risk dying. A policeman was blowing his whistle in short, shrill blasts. Mary stumbled on, threading through the jumbled traffic, following the path of the train, until the depot reared up, black and comforting. It was little more than a shed, really, meant to turn the trains and send them back north again, though now it was crammed with people who had given up trying to make it to 32nd Street. That morning, Stipp had taken her by the hands, and said,
Take care, now.
It seemed forever ago. Mary gathered herself and shoved through the press of people elbowing and fighting to get to the ticket window, where a harried clerk behind his cage leaned forward to field complaints, his head cocked, his eyes pressed together in a tight squint. The walls reverberated with shouts. Unable to hear what anyone was saying, Mary watched person after person turn disgustedly away from the window.

After about fifteen minutes, she fought to the coveted space in front of the grille.

“Are the trains going?”

“No.”

“But I just saw one arriving.”

“Have you seen it outside, Miss? It’s a blizzard.”

“What about tomorrow?”

“Can’t say.”

“I have to get home.”

“Everyone wants to get home. It’s Christmas.”

“Could you at least sell me a ticket?”

The man pursed his lips and shook his head. “Come back tomorrow at daylight. If there are any trains, I’ll start selling tickets then.”

Outside, mired carriages and omnibuses had been abandoned in the drifts. The flickering yellow light of gaslamps barely illuminated a string of swinging signs that advertised a row of boarding houses and hotels. Convincing herself that nothing could be worse than the Union Hotel, Mary set out to find shelter.

Chapter Thirty-three

Amelia let the parlor curtain fall. Last night, at the height of the storm, a telegraph messenger had pounded on the door and presented her with a telegram from Mary.
Home tonight.
Now it was two o’clock in the afternoon the following day, and Mary still had not arrived, though this morning not even the maids had come from their homes in the Sixth Ward, half a mile away.

“Amelia?” Bonnie hovered in the doorway of the parlor, her hand trembling on the jamb, her face a white snowscape of fear.

Amelia leapt for the stairs.

In Jenny’s room, the window shades had been drawn against the sharp edges of the December light. Jenny was curled into a ball, the unmistakable pallor of labor stretched across her face, her dress wet through with perspiration.

“Oh, Jenny, you should have called me. How long has it been?” Amelia asked, easing herself onto Jenny’s bed, laying her hands on her daughter’s belly.

“An hour or so. I don’t know for certain.”

“The pains are not too bad?” Amelia asked, instantly angry with herself for having fallen prey to the mistake of asking for the answer she wanted. This was why she needed Mary.

Jenny shook her head. “No, not too bad.”

Amelia said, “Help me, Bonnie.”

Supporting Jenny by the elbows, they helped her to the lying-in room and removed her wet dress and eased her into a dry nightgown. After settling Jenny in, Amelia busied herself around the room, refolding towels, rearranging her basins and instruments, and counting how many babies she had delivered over the twenty-three years of her career. Over three hundred? More, maybe. And so few deaths. She knew everyone said she was the best, a reputation that brought her business, but the judgment was not really anyone’s to confer, except perhaps hers. Mary was the best. Mary, who was stuck somewhere between Washington and home on a train, like Christian had been, on his way home to safety, to her arms, which felt as empty now as the mother of a stillborn’s. A baby coming and then not coming. But no, she couldn’t think that way. Fear bred nothing but more fear. And she needed her wits about her now. What could she control? The atmosphere in the room, the way she moved, spoke, modulated, conveying safety to the laboring mother. She tried to convince herself that the girl in the bed was not her daughter. She began again to recheck her supplies, keeping her back turned, thinking that by touching objects—basin, stethoscope, laudanum vial, scissors—she could shed her skin of motherhood and find the midwife instead.

Jenny’s cry, at first soft but then rising, filled the vast spaces of the house on Dove Street.

Amelia shut her eyes. She was not ready yet. Louder and louder Jenny’s cry swelled. And then, mercifully, it fell off and became a small gasp that diminished to a whimper while Amelia, her back still turned, wiped tears from her cheeks.

The train rocked as it crept up Eleventh Avenue, past the stockyards and lumberyards and the open-doored abattoirs that lined the river. To keep warm, the livestock bunched together as steam swirled from their nostrils into the brilliant glint of day. The car’s coal heater had begun to work and Mary wiped her window to clear the condensation. Every seat was filled, and more people swayed in the aisles.

At dawn, Mary had joined the long line at the ticket window. It seemed hours before a single ticket seller lifted his black curtain and several more before, one by one, the winding line’s occupants fell away and it was finally her turn.

“Albany, eh?” It was the same man from the night before. Calmly, he thumbed through a ticket book, working his lips, counting. He consulted a piece of paper with tallies scribbled in columns. Then he said, “It’ll be tight,” but filled out her destination and the date and handed her the ticket.

“Be at that door at noon,” he said, nodding toward the corner of the building. “That should give them enough time to clear the tracks.”

But Mary joined the several others who had already planted themselves in line, even though it was only seven. She was not going to risk waiting until noon, was not going to wander outside in search of warm chestnuts for her hands or something to eat, was not going to miss the train and risk another night like last night.

She had tried five hotels before knocking on the door of a sixth, a rooming house, its shabbiness apparent despite the darkness.

“Beds were taken hours ago,” the clerk said. He wiped his dripping nose. It was cold inside too, and there was no sign of a stove or fireplace, to say nothing of a handkerchief.

“I’ll sit up in the lobby,” Mary said.

“Bed count’s the bed count. The city commissioners would have my hide if they was to come in here and see I’d let in more folks than we had beds for. And a woman at that.” He sniffed and ran his gaze up and down her form.

Mary could feel the pressure rise in her head. She had left Washington on the early train, had eaten only a peppered beef stick in Philadelphia, could no longer feel her feet or ears. She leaned toward the man in his little cubicle of an office and said, “Do you really think that the city commissioners are going to leave their warm homes and come to this boarding house out of all the boarding houses in Manhattan City and fine you for letting me sit up in a chair?”

Confusion raged across the man’s angular, ragged features; he was a creature of the night, guarding his squalid hotel with illogic. “Maybe. Besides, we don’t rent to a woman alone.”

Mary leaned in closer. “I don’t know how you think you can stop me.”

“I can think of a few ways.”

“When I came in just now, there were two policemen on the corner, digging out their wagon. I will go right now to the door and scream that you have harmed me. Is that what you want?”

The man sniffed, but glanced furtively toward the door. “Two dollars,” he said.

The posted rate was twenty-five cents. Mary fished fifty cents from her purse and dropped the coins onto the counter. The clerk fingered them as Mary pulled together two chairs and stretched out her legs, her feet firmly encased in her sodden boots, resigned to spending the entire night awake.

Now, on the train, she was ravenous and cold, but she had a seat. And they were finally leaving the city behind, the tenements and ironworks having given way to wilderness and farms. There were a dozen whistle stops between here and Albany. At each, there would be comings and goings, and luggage to load and unload. When she got to Albany, she would have to cross the river. Everything would take time.

The train tracks ran alongside the Hudson, which was three times as wide here at its mouth as it was at Albany, its temperature buffered by the salty tides that thrust themselves twice a day up the river’s channel. But when they reached the Catskills, the river would shallow out, and the water would freeze.

As the train pushed northward, the river’s current began to slow, but only Mary Sutter perceived it.

“Oh, Jenny, try, honey. Try.”

“I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.”

“It hurts. Please. Oh God. It hurts.”

“You have to push.”

“I feel like I’m tearing open.”

“You aren’t. Everyone feels that way, but you aren’t.”

“Mother, if I don’t make it name her Elizabeth.”

“Don’t be silly, darling. You’ll name her yourself.”

“And if it’s a boy, Thomas.”

Jenny let out a cry. Amelia had registered every one of them in her gut. Her daughter had been in labor for eight hours. Not long at all, by any standard. But the pain seemed impossible. At least Jenny reported it so. The dreaded back labor. Poor Bonnie, her hands ached from massaging the muscles along Jenny’s spinal column in an effort to alleviate the pain. And now Jenny had to push. So soon! Could that possibly be right?

The room, which had seemed so cold before, was now far too warm. Amelia rinsed a cloth and laid it on Jenny’s forehead, but Jenny ripped it away. Her moans rose as Amelia entreated her to push and Bonnie to apply more pressure to her back. Forty-five seconds. Jenny began to scream.

Amelia waited until the contraction passed before saying, “Honey, you’re not pushing.”

“I
am.”

Amelia assessed her daughter. Pale, tremulous, exhausted; there was something else wrong.

Amelia slathered her right hand with lard and slipped it inside the warmth of Jenny’s body. In her agitation, Jenny tried to push her away, like so many women did at the height of their labor, but Bonnie pinned Jenny’s wrists and bent down and whispered in her ear. To concentrate, Amelia averted her head, her fingers feeling their way inside for the cervix. Dilated, completely; Amelia was certain of it. Slowly, she turned her wrist, gently running her fingers over the baby’s skull, feeling for where ridges met plates, where the V of the baby’s occipital bone met the stretched tissue, verifying, relieved that at least the baby was in the proper position. With another twist of her wrist, she attempted to intuit the diameter of the outlet of Jenny’s pelvis. Greater than four inches? Less than three? But trying to discern its size was a futile act, even for Amelia, who had coaxed from pelvises narrower than Jenny’s babies of enormous size. Amelia withdrew her hand. No matter what the size of Jenny’s pelvis, the baby was too big.

Accustomed to panic in others, she hardly knew how to manage it in herself.

She forced herself to take conscious control of her breathing, but she could do nothing about her hands, which were trembling at her sides. The clock was striking nine o’clock. She must have run up and down the stairs twenty times already, flinging open the front door, looking up and down the street, hoping to see her resourceful Mary climbing from a sleigh, valise in hand, bringing her good mind with her. But now it was too late to expect her; no trains ever arrived this late into Albany.

“Bonnie. Come with me.”

Outside the shut door, Amelia said, “Listen to me, Bonnie. You must help me. I want you to go to Eagle Street, and find the doctor on call at the hospital. Make certain you ask if he has used forceps, do you understand? Say it. Forceps.”

“Forceps.”

“And tell him to bring chloroform. And if he won’t do it, then you make him tell you who will and where he lives and then you go there and get that doctor. Do you understand?”

Bonnie’s eyes grew wide with dread.

“Take my lantern and go as fast as you can. And don’t give up until you find someone. I need you to think clearly. Be smart about this. Threaten them, if you have to.”

“How do I do that?”

“Tell them it’s for Mary Sutter.”

Lithe, quick, Bonnie darted off like hope.

On a day in good weather, hurrying, it would take Bonnie ten minutes afoot to get to the hospital. With the snow, half an hour. And then to find and persuade the surgeon? Another fifteen minutes or half hour, when a minute was already passing like an eternity.

“Hurry,” Amelia said, but she said it to the air, for Bonnie had already gone.

At the lying-in room door, Amelia hesitated. Her last resort. A doctor and forceps. She did not want to think what the doctor might do to Jenny with those forceps. How many women had bled to death because of doctors’ eager machinations? And the dreaded chloroform would ease Jenny’s pain, but it would also make her unable to fight.

Either way, Jenny was in trouble.

The injustice might drive her mad, if she let it.

Another cry shattered the air.

Amelia swept in and poured as much laudanum as she dared into Jenny’s mouth, though the opiate was a trick, because it didn’t really dull the pain so much as make a woman incapable of coping with the contractions. Weakness, to give in, but Jenny’s shrieks broke her heart. If Jenny was going to die, then Amelia didn’t want her to die in agony. Perspiration cooled from Jenny’s body. Amelia washed her down, then covered her up again. She snatched up Jenny’s hand when she began to moan, forcing herself to keep her eyes open to witness the battle.

A candle sputtered and then extinguished. Outside, the perennial hush of winter. Inside, Christian’s ghost, stalking them.

An hour passed. Two. Amelia bargained down. Jenny might live. She might not. What mattered most was that Jenny knew she wasn’t alone.

Mary elbowed her way out of the train car. Ten hours. Ten. The longest a train had ever taken to travel from Manhattan City to Albany. Savagely, she cut through the milling passengers, made numb by the trip and the weather and the cold. At the line of hacks, she cut off negotiations between a man and a cabbie by climbing in and barking, “Dove Street.”

The cabbie pretended to be miffed, but he was delighted. The other passenger had been relaying tales of trunks and ladies in need and a wait of perhaps half an hour. “I’ll be back,” he yelled, as he whipped his sleigh forward.

The river ice had been cleared earlier that day by boys in caps and on skates, pushing shovels along the ferry path so that the sleighs could avoid the ice cutters’ holes in the dark. The lantern made a moon of yellow as the sleigh scraped and bumped across the windswept ridges of ice. Albany loomed before her and then they were in the city, flying up State Street, the coal smoke sharp in the frigid air, wood smoke mixing in, the eerie glow of firelight visible through windows. The Gayety Music Hall was just emptying out, and the cabbie resolved to stop there next, for he did not want to go back again across that river. He sped around the bend of Eagle Street. Mary, huddled under the sled robe, marked the outline of the medical school and hospital, glowering against a shroud of black.