My Name Is Mary Sutter (29 page)

Chapter Thirty-five

At the train depot, Amelia said, “You must find Thomas and tell him.”

Mary was taking the 1:15 express to Manhattan. She had stayed in Albany a month, long enough to see the baby thrive, the baby who peered out with serious eyes from the bundled blankets in which she spent her days, toted from place to place by Bonnie, who gave her up only to the wet nurse and then with visible reluctance.

“Thomas will want to know everything,” Amelia said.

“Yes.”

“You’ll tell him what happened.” Implying,
your part in it
. Implying that he, too, would blame Mary.

“Yes,” Mary said.

“You won’t leave anything out,” Amelia said from the sleigh as Mary climbed down.

“No. I won’t leave anything out.”

Amelia nodded a noncommittal acknowledgment, barely perceptible behind her mourning veil. After they had entombed Jenny at the cemetery, Mary had collapsed. Even then, Amelia had maintained her distance; an evening and a morning visit to her bedside to coolly assess her surviving daughter’s general health. Exhaustion, the indifferent diagnosis. Mary barely recognized her mother now, so altered was her approach. They were the North and the South; betrayal complete. In her stupor, Mary had dreamed of cardinals and hawthorn bushes. Of Jenny, alone and cold.

The locomotive spit steam. The conductors, who had taken Mary’s bag, were blowing their whistles, waving their arms for everyone to hurry on board. Mary raised her hand as if to forestall the train, though the plume of steam from the smokestack was already rising into the brilliant winter day. Amelia could be anyone, could be a stranger, so stiffly she held herself.

“Do you want me to stay, Mother? I’ll stay.”

“Do as you like.”

Indifference, the final, parting wound.

Mary boarded the train, taking a seat on the river side, because she could not trust herself not to press her palm against the window and with her sorrow persuade Amelia that if she could have bent time, she would have, would even have stopped the weather, would have reversed even the direction of the earth’s revolutions to have saved Jenny.

As the train surged forward, she forced herself to look across the river to Albany, where the frozen Erie Canal locks hung like guillotines and the Lumber District’s white pine towered brown in the anemic snowscape. Coal smoke blackened a thousand chimneys of the glittering Dutch houses squatting in order up the hill. From a distance, Tweddle Hall imposed; a coffin of memory.

To be dismissed by Amelia, no quarter for reconciliation given.

The train was traveling quickly around the bends of the river now, the thicket of bushes between the tracks and the water, skeletons of black against the alabaster snow.

The train sounded an alarm, an exalted, pulsing warning that reminded Mary of Jenny’s cries.

Chapter Thirty-six

“You want a what?”

“A transit pass to Fort Marcy. And some means of conveyance.”

“What do you want at Fort Marcy?”

“It doesn’t matter. If you can’t help me, perhaps I’d better go see the surgeon general.” Mary picked up her bag, which felt heavy after the long hours of travel. Manhattan City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, she remembered little of the trip as the trains rocked in interminable, halting passage toward Washington. “Will it take long, do you think? The afternoon, maybe? What time is it?”

Stipp gripped Mary by the shoulders, his hands almost bruising her in his alarm. How diminished she seemed. She had lost more weight in New York. He had expected to have her return fortified, but the sharp jut of her chin had become even more pronounced, her eyes more sunken. “Tell me what happened.”

“I separated the symphysis pubis, but it made no difference. A doctor had already ripped her to shreds with forceps. She bled.” She stopped then, unable to say that Jenny had died. “I was too late.”

He watched her carefully, seeing the uncertainty and doubt. Perhaps it had been unwise to insist that she go. He was still holding her by the shoulders, as if to keep her standing, as if to help her fight remorse. The work of grief.

“And the baby?”

“A girl. She has a wet nurse. She’s thriving.”

“How is your mother?”

“She blames me.”

And then it dawned on Stipp why Mary needed the pass, why she needed to go to Fort Marcy. The post. “You need to tell your brother-in-law.”

“Yes.”

Mary was exquisite in her suffering, her face wretched with pain. Stipp reached out a hand to touch her cheek. Her skin was luminous even in the failing winter light.

“I’ll go with you,” Stipp said.

He called Mrs. Philipateaux to take Mary to her room, then he got on his horse and traveled through the evening light to demand two passes to take him and Mary to Fort Marcy in two days’ time. On a street corner, a newspaper boy was waving headlines about McDowell’s ongoing testimony before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.

The army clerk was recalcitrant, citing the dozen regulations the surgeon was insisting he break. Then he handed over the paperwork and made Stipp sign it himself, absolving himself of any responsibility in the matter at all. What did it matter if the fool of a man wanted to traipse around the countryside and get shot at by Rebels? The roads were a disaster. They would have to go by horseback and bypass all the regular routes. They might even get shot at by the guards on duty at the Chain Bridge, ever ready to defend Washington from the threat of invasion. Yes, the clerk thought, the man could go if he wanted, but he wanted nothing to do with it.

Thomas’s boots sank to his ankles as he traversed the open yard between the log and earthen walls of Fort Marcy. The sky was spitting rain and his cheeks were chapped and reddened. Under his coat, he carried his latest ration of bread, stale as a doorstop.

God, how he wanted to go home. He had heard nothing from Jenny, and now he lacked even paper or ink to write and ask whether or not he had become a father. That life had come to this: paper a luxury, though even if he had paper, he no longer had any money to pay for the post. They had not been paid in some time. He regretted everything, but mostly he regretted that moment when he had climbed from the horsecar outside the Department of the Army and gone in and reenlisted. What had he done since? Freeze and starve and learn the true meaning of deprivation. For the Army of the Potomac, entrenched on the shores of the river after which it was named, had not fought since Manassas. George McClellan, the answer to the North’s eagerness to bring the war to a conclusion, had instead imposed a long period of preparation, which for Thomas and the troops at Fort Marcy had turned into month after month of boredom.

Up the hill behind him between the rows of tents, a corporal was calling, “Thomas Fall. Thomas Fall. Anyone seen Thomas Fall?” When Thomas hailed him, the corporal said, “I was told to find you. Come on.”

The log guardhouse housed a desk and a guard who stepped outside when Thomas came in. Inside, two figures waited in the dim light.

“Thomas.”

An upswell of joy fought to the surface, but just as quickly ebbed, though he did not understand at first why. Neither could he say, precisely, what about Mary’s appearance frightened him most. In the dim light, he could make out that she was still far too thin, too serious, and that her gaze harbored pity and dread, and something of guilt, but not compassion. No. That was reserved for the man who stood beside her.
Stipp.
That was his name. The doctor at the hotel.

Later, Mary would not recall even saying hello, offering greetings, or inquiring after Thomas’s health.

For so many years, she had given people bad news, and now she had an agonizing memory of delivering the truth fast and unvarnished.
The baby is dead
, or
Your wife is dead
. What arrogance she had entertained, that she had believed she knew how to say such things to people. Now, in the bleak cold of the dismal guardhouse, she said, “I’ve been home, Thomas.”

Her voice broke as she measured her next words, telling the story she had gone over a hundred times in her mind, keeping her gaze fixed on Thomas’s face.

When she was finished, Thomas sank to his knees. For a long moment, he stayed there as if in prayer, his shoulders hunched forward, his hands obscuring his face, and though his silence cut through the cold air like a scalpel, Mary’s feet refused to move. Outside, the fort went about its clatter and nonsense. Through the small window, Mary glimpsed the ruined landscape through which she and Stipp had traveled, the clear-cut forest, the exposed stumps naked in devastation, the ribs and barbs of the newly constructed wooden barricades piercing the cold air, the troughs and trenches that spidered away from the fort, a corduroy road made of logs sinking into the sea of muck.

Thomas’s words floated toward her, as if they too were mired in the same muddy sea.

“If you’d have gone home earlier, when Amelia wanted you to, could you have saved her?” he asked.

Jenny’s face surged before Mary. If she had left even a week earlier, two, perhaps Thomas would not be asking her this. She would have been there from the start, could say now yes or no, definitively.

“I don’t know,” she said.

She took a step toward him, but he held up his hands.

She stood in the center of the room as the wind sliced through the chinked logs and rendered the room as cold as the outdoors.

“I’m sorry—”

“Don’t,” Thomas said, shaking his head. “Don’t.”

“Bonnie is there. She is good with the baby, Thomas. She is gentle, and generous—”

“I said, don’t.”

Mary put her hand to the desk to steady herself. “Why didn’t you go home, Thomas? You could have seen her, you could have had time with her before—”

“We all want too much, don’t we?”

“I beg your pardon?” Mary said, but it was as if Thomas were echoing her nightmares, as if he had read every single thought of hers on the train ride back. She could feel Stipp behind her, straining to protect her from the truth.

“Glory, honor, ambition. What are these worth now?”

“Son,” Stipp said, stepping forward, but Thomas heaved himself to his feet and walked past them, out the door into the mud, leaving the savage room open to the cold rain.

The towpath of the C&O was infinitely better maintained than the roads at this time of year, which was why Stipp had decided to return to Georgetown along its crowded path, rather than over the potholed turnpike, the way they had come earlier that morning.

Mary was seated on the carriage bench beside him, staring off over the roof of a packet boat into the steep wooded hills rising sharply from either side of the canal. Since leaving Fort Marcy, she had not spoken. From time to time the wagon lurched into a pothole and she was thrown against Stipp, but still she did not speak. He could hardly blame her. The scene at Fort Marcy had been unbearable. Thomas’s question had ripped through Stipp’s heart. Had he sounded as broken when Genevieve had died?

“Thomas was in shock,” he said now. “He’ll realize—”

Mary said, “I knew what would happen, I knew it as soon as Jenny said she was with child.”

“You can’t predict—”

“I should have gone home when Amelia wanted me to.” Self-protection was no excuse.
You love too little, you love too much
.
It was all selfishness. If only, if only
.

Stipp could hardly bear her sorrow. He wanted to take her away, to travel on past Georgetown, across the Aqueduct Bridge, past the entire Confederate army, to the marshes and estuaries of Chesapeake Bay and the sea, where they could wade into the breakers and be taken up by a passing ship. They would travel back to Texas, live with Lilianna. How old would the boy be now? Four? Had it been only a year since he’d seen them? It seemed a lifetime. He thought,
I just won’t stop. I’ll keep driving and we’ll forget the war and all its pain
. They traveled on, passing the slow mule teams hauling packet boats down the canal toward Georgetown and, as they neared the town, row houses and factories and warehouses sprouting from the treed hillside. Mary was remembering another earlier, difficult trip on a towpath in Albany with Thomas, just before he met Jenny and everything changed. She would go back in time, she thought. She would go back and change everything, if she could. Men were shouting as they unloaded and loaded barges at the warehouse doors opening onto the canal, the day crackling with work and the war. Above, on Bridge Street, a horsecar was struggling to turn as a train of army wagons slogged through the mud.

“Mary?” Stipp said.

She turned to look at him, her face masked and unreadable. She bore none of the fierce confidence that had driven her to hunt him down at the Union Hotel eight months ago, none of
I will climb through that window
.

“I’m nothing. I can’t help anyone. Why did I think that I could?”

“You’re just tired,” Stipp said, pulling over to the side of the path to speak to her.

The mule team behind them could not get around them. The driver swore and deckhands jumped off the packet boat to slow it down so that it wouldn’t drag the mules with it as it drifted forward. Behind them another packet did the same.

“Back home, afterwards—after Jenny died—my mother and I said things to each other that we’ve never said before. I said something I wish I’d never said. She’ll never forgive me.”

“That was only your grief speaking. People say things.”

“I betrayed her trust.”

“She trusts you.”

Mary shook her head. “No. I’m arrogant and clumsy and proud. And I want things I shouldn’t want.”

Stipp suspected she meant Thomas, at least he hoped that’s what she meant, because he needed her to want to be a surgeon. He didn’t know how he could live without her. The long month of January had been a dark cave whose only light had been the possibility of Mary’s return.

“You’ll see. You’re just tired,” he said, unable to say,
Want me,
but Mary’s blank glance confirmed the inadequacy of his reply, and he took up the reins and snapped the horses forward.

When they left the towpath, men were still leaping onto the path from more than a dozen boats, ropes blistering their hands as they dug in to hold back catastrophe.

The hotel had been bedecked with flags and sentinels, its new, official status recently proclaimed by the Surgeon General’s office. Outside its doors, a good many of the convalescents were standing about, brightened by even a brief stint in the drizzly February cold. They greeted Stipp and Mary with the restless air of those with untold news.

“They’re closing the hospital down.”