City of God (42 page)

She felt another contraction beginning and panted her way through it, barely finding the breath to say, “Not now, Nicholas. I’m at an unfair disadvantage.”

Carolina had vociferously supported the Women’s Rights Convention organized the preceding year by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, though given the situation of herself and Nick, she could make no
open move. Carolina even thought women should be allowed to vote. Nick laughed aloud each time she mentioned the notion.

In a lull between pains, she grew serious. “Do you realize what this situation in California might mean, Nicholas?”

Nick said he did not, but they could not continue the conversation until a few hours later, because their daughter was suddenly in a great rush to be born. Carolina, however, did not forget. She’d no sooner taken the child to her breast when she said, “Droves will now head west, Nicholas. They are going to be in an almighty hurry, and no wagon train can possibly get them there fast enough. I shall build another clipper to accommodate them. And we shall call this precious little girl Goldie to mark the occasion.” It was Nick who insisted that while Goldie was a fine name within the family, Gilda Turner was more fitting for the young lady she would grow up to be.

He took no part, however, in naming Carolina’s second ship. She was called
West Witch
. Captain Paxos, still skipper of
Hell Witch
, which had by now made a dozen voyages to Hong Kong, produced a cousin, Socrates Paxos, to captain her. On her maiden voyage in August of 1849,
West Witch
took one hundred and twenty-two days to sail down the east coast and around the tip of South America at Cape Horn, then north by northwest to San Francisco. No earlier ship, not one of which had been a clipper, had done it in fewer than two hundred.

The birth of their third child, a boy born soon after the 1850 death in office of President Zachary Taylor, nearly killed Carolina, but she was nonetheless most agitated about what he would be called. “I’ve already got a Zachary,” she said, “so we won’t be unpatriotic by not giving this lovely boy that name. Must he be Millard, do you think?”

Nick shook his head. “Much as I dislike the shenanigans of Tammany Hall Democrats, I’m no Whig. And I don’t think this fellow Fillmore will amount to much.”

They called him Simon, for no reason other than that they liked the name. Nick gave Carolina pearls to mark the occasion, but what he celebrated most was that both his wife and his son lived. Carolina had labored two days and three nights and still she was barely dilated. In the
end he’d pulled the infant out with his own two hands, literally plunging them both inside her. As a boy visiting a farm, he’d once seen a man deliver a calf that way. The procedure apparently made no difficulty for cows; it was not so easy for a woman. Nick had never seen such damage to the female organs and found it hard not to blame himself as being—twice over, so to speak—the cause. “There will be no more children, my love. And you must take at least a year to recover from this ordeal. No more dawn meetings with Danny Parker. I absolutely forbid it.”

She’d agreed to that at once. Easy enough to do, he discovered three months later. Danny had retired—a rich man thanks to his quarter interest in
Hell Witch
’s first three cargos, and his son Seth Parker was now the yard’s chief shipwright. Carolina met Seth at Thirty-fourth Street after dark on days when Nicholas went to Crosby Street and was himself late home to Sunshine Hill. “Strictly speaking, I did not break my word, Nicholas. The meetings were not at dawn and they were not with Danny Parker.”

So Carolina built her third clipper,
East Witch
. She set out on her maiden voyage on September 14, 1851. Carolina was far too conscious of jinxing this marvelous new ship to say so, but Nick knew she thought
East Witch
, sailing with yet another Paxos relative at the helm, this one named Plato, would set new records.

It was, however, still too soon for her to be climbing up to the turret to watch through her telescope for
East Witch’s
return. Nick, however, now had the daily pleasure of a fully equipped laboratory in an outbuilding a short distance from the house. Carolina planned it for him with the same motives that had originally caused him to want the turret for her. What if he missed the old life too much? What if this exile made necessary by their unorthodox union seemed to come at too high a price?

“I thought first to put a laboratory in the cellar, dearest, but then, what with all the grisly things you study, a separate place of your own seemed wiser.” It was in fact perfect. So too the library, which was on the ground floor across the hall from the room they called the long parlor and functioned as well as Nick’s study. All his old books were close to hand, and the room’s proportions were so generous he could order
new books and periodicals without fearing he’d nowhere to put them.
The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
had a prominent place on his shelves. He kept all the back issues, including the one that described the demonstration at Massachusetts General Hospital in October of 1846 which proved beyond doubt that sulfuric ether did indeed make patients insensitive to pain. The phenomenon was much discussed these days. No less a figure than the prominent physician and writer Oliver Wendell Holmes had lauded the practice and said it should be called “anesthesia” from the Greek for without sensation. Despite such endorsements, there was considerable argument about whether the use of ether or its derivative, chloroform, was a moral and ethical practice that should be further studied, much less used.

Bloody nonsense, Nick thought. Bloody clerics getting their oar in as always. Never mind. Science would trump that nay-saying form of religion when sufficient numbers of individuals were faced with the choice of going under the knife asleep or awake and made the to-be-expected choice. It wasn’t the battle about anesthesia that most occupied him these days. Nick took as well the
Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal
from London, because it was in Europe that the argument raged loudest as to whether germs could be the cause of disease or were simply spontaneously generated as a result of it.

Carolina was always threatening to have the oldest copies of his magazines thrown out lest the family should have to move out to make room for all of them. Nick knew it to be an idle threat and ignored it. But scientific journals were not the only things cluttering up—Carolina’s term—the library. Sometimes, living as they did in this isolated place, even Nick craved everyday sorts of intercourse.

He had developed a passion for newspapers and arranged to have seven dailies delivered to his Crosby Street office. He collected them when he was there and brought stacks home to be read at leisure. In fact, he’d just added a promising new one to his list,
The New-York Daily Times.
The first evening edition of the first printing was dated two days before, September 18, 1851. Like the other broadsheets, it had mostly news from Europe on the front page. Nick took special note of
an announcement that on the seventeenth the Royal Mail steam packet
Europa
had arrived in Boston from London, and her mail had been sent on by the New Haven Railroad train which left Boston at nine
P.M.
and arrived in New York at ten the following morning.

“That’s the new paper, isn’t it?” Carolina had come in and was looking over his shoulder. “
The Times.
”

“
The Daily Times.
And you can probably answer a question that has just occurred to me. How long does it take a steam packet to travel between London and Boston these days?”

She turned from the paper and picked up the mail, also brought home from the Crosby Street office, and was thumbing through it while she spoke. “Rather depends on whether it’s one of Mr. Cunard’s austere Canadian workhorses or one of Mr. Collins’s American luxury fillies. On average, on the voyage west, twelve days.”

“And a railroad train can go from Boston to New York in thirteen hours.”

“A letter from Zac at last,” she said, without looking up. Her eldest had gone across the Hudson to Princeton in New Jersey for further education, and he did not write as frequently as his mother thought he should. “And to answer your question, yes, I believe it takes the steam train from Boston thirteen or fourteen hours to get here to New York. I also believe you are thinking my clipper ships will soon be obsolete.”

“I admit the idea has occurred to me.”

“Would you weep if that turned out to be true?”

“Only for you, my dearest. Only because I know what stock you place in your accomplishments in the world apart from Sunshine Hill.”

“I do, Nick, I don’t deny it. But nothing is more important to me than you or the children or our life together.”

“I never thought otherwise. But you haven’t said whether you think the clippers are to be overtaken.”

“On the European run they already are. And if they ever manage to build a transcontinental railroad, I suppose it will be the finish of getting to California under sail.” For a time they’d thought the end of the gold rush in ’49 would mean a stop to huge numbers wanting
to book passage on
West Witch,
but in 1850 California had been admitted to the Union as a free state. That caused the South to fear a free state majority in Congress and set off a political row that ended with the formal declaration that Utah and New Mexico were officially territories, meaning they could look forward to eventual statehood and that in neither place were there to be explicit restrictions on slavery. It was yet another of those compromises that was supposed to put the vexed issue of slavery behind the nation and allow it to move forward, but that somehow never did. The one thing Carolina was sure this compromise had accomplished was to encourage a stream of settlers to head west, for the time being at least traveling on the clippers. “But to China,” she continued. “Unless people are to sprout wings and fly, I think we’re unlikely to lose the clippers’ superiority in sailing halfway round the world and back.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” he said. “Anyway, a railroad right across the continent from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic seems a mad idea, doesn’t it?”

“Absolutely daft. Though there was another story about it in the
Tribune
a week or so ago.”

“I keep telling you, the
Tribune
is a dubious source. Mr. Greeley believes in socialism, vegetarianism, abolitionism, Irish rights, and that women should be allowed to vote.” Nick held up a hand to forestall her explosion. “And, I don’t doubt, free love.”

She’d not give him the satisfaction of rising to the bait about women’s suffrage. “I entirely agree about free love.” She kissed his cheek and he patted her rump.

“As do I,” said Nick, “as long as you are free only to love me.”

Carolina laughed. “I absolutely promise that shall be the case. But now, my one and only
paramour,
you must get ready to go. You’re to be at Cousin Manon’s hospital at three this afternoon, and since we can’t provide either a clipper ship or a steam train for the journey, you’ve not a chance of getting there on time unless you leave by half past one.”

Normally Nick hated leaving Sunshine House for any reason other than his practice, but this occasion was different. He was to attend a meeting to inaugurate a fund-raising drive at Manon’s St. Vincent’s Hospital on Thirteenth Street between Third and Fourth Avenues. The Sisters of Charity had opened the facility two years earlier in 1849.

“Not just a dispensary. Cousin Nicholas, it’s to be a proper hospital. These last few years, with the potato crops failing in Ireland, the numbers of immigrants…well, we can do with nothing less. The bishop has given us the land, and kindly private citizens are contributing funds. Remember years ago when you asked me why there were not more wealthy Catholics to help the Catholic poor?”

“I do. And you told me that in New York Catholics were the hewers of wood and the drawers of water. Not so any more, I take it?”

“Not entirely. For one thing, Bishop Hughes agrees it’s a good idea and will help us.”

Nick remembered her telling him earlier that the New York Sisters of Charity had separated from Mother Seton’s original congregation in Maryland because there were disagreements between what the Mother General wanted and what the bishop wanted. And that these days the group to which Manon belonged had as their superior the sister of Bishop Hughes. “Quite,” he had said.

“Don’t look like that. It’s not just because of family connections. Bishop Hughes realizes that religious orders have their own ways of doing things. He’s allowed the Redemptorists to establish Catholic parishes where everyone speaks German. He’s even let the Jesuits in.” And when she saw that this meant nothing to him, “Jesuits are said to have the ear of most of the crowned heads of Europe and be great political meddlers. Many bishops want no part of them, but Bishop Hughes has allowed the Jesuits to establish a college up near the village of Fordham, and a school for boys here in town on Sixteenth Street.”

“Whatever you say.”

“I am boring you, dear Cousin Nicholas.”

“No, of course not. I’m simply tired. I was up late last night with a patient.”

A likely enough excuse, but Vatican politics had obviously been making his eyes glaze over. “We have skilled laborers among the Irish immigrants now,” Manon had said. “And enough work for them to earn a living. They are very generous to the church.”