My Name Is Mary Sutter (3 page)

Mary’s gaze was covetous. “I want to understand
everything
,” she said. “Isn’t it all connected? Isn’t the body a system? How can I understand a part if I do not understand the whole?”

Mary recognized Blevens’s look: the tilting of the head, the gaze of incredulity. Why was she always such a surprise to people? In her childhood her father had often greeted her questions—Is the Hudson’s tidal nature a detriment or a help to transportation? What is the height of the world’s largest mountain? What is the true nature of the earth’s center?—with exhalations of astonishment.

“Miss Sutter, what precisely do you want?”

“I want to become a doctor. The Albany Medical College won’t admit me. I want you to teach me.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Many fine doctors have only apprenticed—”

“Miss Sutter—”

“Consider what you just saw, what I just did for you. I work hard. You would not be disappointed. And I could teach you midwifery!”
This is it,
Mary thought.
I have to convince this man
.

Blevens could understand the young woman’s enthusiasm for medicine, and he wondered now what William Stipp would make of her. She was nearly as windblown and desperate as Blevens had been a decade ago, when he had accosted Stipp much the way Miss Sutter was accosting him now.

Blevens sighed and said, “I am terribly sorry, but what you propose is impossible.”

“It is not impossible.”

“It is. I’m going to enlist. They’ll need surgeons.”

“But you don’t know what will happen. You don’t know. Maybe this is the end, maybe it’s all over—”

“Have you gone mad? The war has just started!”

The baby began to cry and James Blevens cursed. They had been whispering, trying not to disturb Bonnie.

Blevens said, “I am most grateful to you today for your help, and I will pay you, but I cannot—”

“But you
can
,” Mary said. “Dr. Blevens, if you take me on—”

He heaved a sigh. “Miss Sutter, even if there were no war, and we were to do this, you would have no lectures. No dissecting lab. You would see no surgeries except the sporadic ones I perform here. And then when I finished teaching you, you would have no credential—”

“Please,” she said. “Please. It is all I want.”

The kerosene lantern threw shadows across the walls and floor. In the flickering light, Mary Sutter and James Blevens stood as opposed now as they had been united moments before. Only the soft whimpering of the baby broke the silence. James Blevens could feel the strength of the woman’s desire. They echoed memories of his own beginnings, his own desperate pleas when he was starting, when getting into a medical college had seemed an impossible goal.

“I’m sorry. I cannot,” Dr. Blevens said.

“I see.” Even as Mary spoke, she modulated her tone, but it was no use. Yearning and heartbreak combined with fatigue, and even as she turned her attention to Bonnie, dutiful as always, remembering to check Bonnie’s belly to make certain the uterus was still contracting, she said, “It would be nothing to you to teach me. Nothing.”

“Are you always this persistent?”

“Always,” Mary said.

“Miss Sutter, you helped me a great deal today. I am grateful. No doubt Bonnie is grateful. You demonstrated great skill. Remarkable skill. But I cannot help you to become a physician. What you are asking is impossible.”

“Well, then,” Mary said, nodding, remonstrating with herself not to say
Thank you for your time
, or other like idiocies.
Do not cede,
she thought.
Keep your spine straight.
“You’ll have to help me to get Bonnie home. I haven’t a carriage.”

James Blevens took in the disappointment of the woman who had helped him and felt, not for the first time, that he was hopeless with women. He didn’t understand them. His wife, Sarah, living in Manhattan City, would agree. He should be given credit for asking for help from a midwife; no other doctor in Albany would have capitulated control, but Sarah, if she ever heard of this, would only say that he had failed yet again.

“My carriage is in the back. I’ll bring it around front,” he said.

Blevens tacked a note to his door for the delinquent husband and then went back inside to retrieve Bonnie. Mary followed behind with the child, swaddled against the rain. He had already padded the bed of the open carriage with horse blankets for Bonnie, and as he laid her inside, Mary noticed how tender he was with her, as if he knew what it was to be a woman.

The nearby slaughterhouse smokers were snuffed for the night, but the air felt compressed and humid in the tapering rain. From the direction of State Street, a gaseous yellow haze hovered, a drumbeat speeding the distance from the revelry to their carriage, the brass notes lagging behind. As the horse plodded through the streets, James Blevens and Mary Sutter did not speak. Witnesses to intimacy, they could find nothing now to say except for directions given and clarified. It was awkward to have spoken of desire, revelation, disappointment. Only a mile separated Dove Street from Dr. Blevens’s surgery, but the drive felt like a hundred.

The Sutter home was one of the new kinds of row houses made from quarried stone: deep, rather than wide, windows aligned singly one atop the other in three neat stories, an iron railing ascending the steep stairs from the sidewalk of slate. Dr. Blevens tied the horses and carried Bonnie in his arms; Mary cradled the infant and glided up the stairs behind him, letting the maid answer the bell. Inside, an open stairway soared to the next floor and a third beyond. A newel post stood sentry, and balusters supported a carved walnut balustrade. Off the hallway, French doors opened into a parlor; on a small table, tulips bloomed in a glass vase.

Blevens had not expected wealth.

“Is my mother home?” Mary asked, unwrapping her shawl with one arm while managing the baby with the other.

“Out, Miss, on a call.” The maid calmly surveyed the pair of guests. “Shall I set the table for two more?”

“A tray, please, upstairs for the new mother,” Mary said, and climbed the stairs with Blevens following. Sconces burned tapered candles; on the stairs, brass rods held back a cascading maroon runner. Mary settled Bonnie under a thick comforter in a wide bed in a room at the top of the stairs while Dr. Blevens waited in the hallway outside. A walnut bookshelf lined the long hall, which was open to the stairwell. The shelves held a medical library to envy:
Gray’s Anatomy, A Pharmocologia,
and the aforementioned
The Process of Parturition.
Blevens was holding the text open when Mary emerged some ten minutes later.

“Wellon’s Bookstore,” Mary said. “He gets me anything I ask for.”

“You have read all of these?”

“Of course.” She excused herself and disappeared into a bedroom. When she emerged she had changed her clothes. She wore a clean, high-necked dress of no distinguishing feature. It was as if she cared nothing for beauty, though it was clear that someone in the home did.

Blevens trailed Mary down the stairs. “Do you often take ladies for lying-in?”

“Rarely. And only if they are destitute.”

In the entry, Mary retrieved Blevens’s hat from the stand and held it out for him as she opened the door. There would be no dinner for him at the Sutter home tonight, no matter what the maid had offered. Outside, rain was drumming on the red leather benches of his carriage, the cobbles, the stone stoop, the houses opposite.

“Good night, Dr. Blevens.”

“You must understand, Miss Sutter,” Blevens said, “that I am not in a position to help you.” The excuse sounded lamentable.
I am not in a position.
“Surely, with your resources—” He made a vague gesture toward an elegant crystal vase, as if its presence on a burnished walnut table in her foyer could somehow persuade Dr. Marsh to admit her to the college.

“One cannot buy what one truly wants, Dr. Blevens. Haven’t you learned that yet?”

Blevens pulled his coin purse from his pocket. “I insist on paying you.”

“You cannot buy
me
, either.”

“I meant only to thank you.”

“Good-bye.”

Blevens sighed, replaced his coin purse, put on his hat, and murmured a good-bye. He would have liked to have helped her, would have, too, if he could. But the war. Even now, he was thinking of following the noise of the band still playing in the distance despite the rain, which had become a torrent, wind gusting through the door. He was about to step over the threshold when an open carriage pulled up and two women and a male companion tumbled out, wrapped in horse blankets. A clap of thunder hurried them up the stairs and into the foyer, the women brushing water from the puffed shoulders of their coats and shaking sodden umbrellas. The blankets were soaked through and the women laughed as they unwound themselves and began unpinning wet hats more stylish than the one Mary Sutter still wore perched atop her wild curls. (Blevens thought,
She doesn’t care for herself; she neglects even the simplest rituals of dress.
) It was obvious that these two were related in some way, even though there were only hints of resemblance—the same long nose, large eyes, and square chin as Mary, but they were more accurately and pleasingly executed, especially on the younger of the two women, though the older was youngish and alive, with luminescent skin and curls tamer than Mary’s.

“A friend of yours, Mary?” The older woman smiled and extended a gloved hand, but, noticing its waterlogged state, laughingly peeled off the glove and then extended her hand again. “I am Amelia Sutter, Mary’s mother.” If she was surprised to see a strange man in her hallway with her daughter, she did not show it. If anything, she seemed delighted. “How do you do?”

“James Blevens. I am quite well, thanks to your daughter. She saved me. She took over in the middle of a difficult birth and has also taken in the mother and child. I was just about to leave.”

Mary became furious, suddenly, at his courtly tone, as if they hadn’t been arguing moments before.

Amelia glanced at Mary and then back to Blevens. “Do you teach at the medical college?”

“No, Miss Sutter came upon me when a young woman in labor arrived unexpectedly at my surgery.”

Amelia looked inquiringly at Mary, but Mary shook her head. An understanding passed between them, and a fleeting look of pity altered Amelia’s features. Mary shrugged her shoulders and the moment passed, but James Blevens knew that the mother had known of Mary’s appointment.

“Well,” Amelia said. She looked outside, where James Blevens’s carriage was thoroughly soaked and his horse shivering in the rain. “Oh dear. This is impossible. You cannot leave now. The weather is beastly. You’ll be drenched. And we’ve just come from the rally. There is no one left, not even the vagrants. Just the band, sheltered under the Capitol’s portico. And all the rosters that everyone signed to enlist are wetted to shreds. So you see it’s no good. You must stay to supper.”

She pulled off her coat, revealing a mourning dress of deep black. Her pleasant affect was in such contrast to the attire that Blevens wondered if she merely liked the color.

“That is very kind of you, but I cannot impose.”

“He was just leaving, Mother,” Mary said. “It would be rude to keep him.”

“Yes, I—” Blevens gestured at the rain.

“But this won’t do at all. Jenny, would you please—” Amelia turned and, seeing her other daughter waiting patiently, said, “Do forgive me. May I present my daughter, Jenny? She is Mary’s twin. And our neighbor, Thomas Fall.” She rested a hand on the shoulders of the two young people beside her. “My son Christian is lagging behind; he could barely part with all the excitement even though he’ll be drowned. He’ll have to join us in progress, I’m afraid.” Amelia patted Jenny’s shoulder and said, “Jenny, darling, please ask the maid to send her son to take the doctor’s horse to the carriage house. He’ll need to be dried down and hayed.”

Jenny dutifully went to deliver the message before Blevens could refuse. There was no gracious way to decline the invitation that Mary had so blatantly withheld. But he did not want to stay. His presence would only goad. He thought longingly of the solitude of his rented rooms on State Street and pictured Mary Sutter scolding her family after he left for their guileless welcome. He had withheld the favor she perceived he could easily give, and there was no way to make that right.

Amelia turned her attention to Mary. “A delivery, you said? Is she all right? Did things go well? Do you have any questions?” On Amelia’s river of words, everyone was swept down the hallway to the dining room, where a fire blazed in an expansive hearth and maids had already expanded the table to set more places. There were six settings around the linen-covered table. Mary took her place, with her back to the fire, and did not look at Blevens. Jenny and Amelia exchanged glances, trying to discern from Mary’s stony silence how her day at the medical college had ended with a guest for dinner whom she was ignoring. Thomas Fall, the only one unaware, it seemed, of the day’s expected role in Mary’s future, was pulling out his chair and speaking eagerly of the rally and Lincoln’s call for men.

It was a subject that Blevens was impatient to discuss.

But it was difficult to discuss anything. There was something unformed about Thomas Fall, Blevens thought as the young man began to talk. His conversation left little room for interruption, though the young man spoke with the confidence of one who had been accepted and encouraged at this table before. Idealistic, ambitious, Fall spoke about the war with intelligence and naiveté both: “Lincoln wants seventy-five thousand for the immediate protection of Washington City,” he began. The
Argus
, it turned out, had published a special edition with Lincoln’s plea. Virginia threatened to the south; the Rebels could be upon the city at any moment. If they captured Washington, the war would be over. A coup. Slavery forever. Fall was certain that the Rebels would soon be defeated, which Blevens also believed, for the North had the advantage in manufacturing and railroads, but it was the flicker of excitability, the flare of eagerness that showed when Fall babbled on about the glory of battle that betrayed his youth, though his clothes were better cut than Blevens’s, attesting to greater wealth.