My Name Is Mary Sutter (30 page)

Chapter Thirty-seven

Circular Number 18, February the 2nd, 1862

By order of the Surgeon General, the general hospital in Georgetown in the former Union Hotel is to be closed the first day of May 1862. The premises are vermin-infested, dilapidated and crumbling, and do not meet our rising standards for military hospitals. The staff is to be divided forthwith among the hospitals at Miss Lydia’s Seminary and Georgetown College. Those patients afflicted with small pox and typhoid should be directed to the Insane Asylum for isolation purposes. The building is to be razed.

The army, the circular went on to say, was going to build a new hospital right under the Capitol building on the mall, to be named Armory Square. It would be the pride of the army, the nation. It would transform medical care. It would make people forget that the Union Hotel Hospital had ever existed. There would be regulations. There would be ventilated wards and ward nurses and supervisors. Surgeons would have care over a wing each. The hospital would be advantageously situated near the Long Bridge, eliminating the torturous rides over the city’s bad roads to reach the little hotel in Georgetown. Lives would be saved. Order would reign.

Their eyes met. Eight months since they had first met in this room.
A lifetime
. Stipp lit a lantern and the sweet smell of kerosene flooded the room.

“Don’t give up hope,” Stipp said. “Anything is possible yet.” Trying to atone for
You are only tired.
Trying not to panic. He had orders to report to the surgeon general for employment as a regimental surgeon, but Mary was not listed on the government payroll, and so was now unprotected, without a post.

“Perhaps Miss Dix would help you. She has come around, I believe. Or what about Blevens? Surely he would take you. He would be delighted to have you, I’m sure.” Tried to say it without the least bit of envy. “Or, I will write you a letter of introduction anywhere—to medical school, perhaps, or Miss Lydia’s Seminary Hospital. They treat officers there. It’s where Blevens would have gone after the fire if he hadn’t come here. You could work there, Mary; it would not be the abyss that it has been here.” Trying to keep her from breaking. “Or, perhaps, you could return home.”

He would say,
I love you
again, but that was not what she required, no matter how much he required it. If he could retrieve those words, he would, and silence them to the end of time, just to ease her in his presence.

Mary was looking past him. She still wore the funereal hat that she had worn to Fort Marcy, her black cloak wrapped around her.

“People want to believe that we can do anything,” Stipp said. “That doctors can erase pain, erase inevitability.”
We doctors
, though she wasn’t one yet and might never be. “But it isn’t true.”

Even Lazarus had been resurrected.

“My mother was right. I could have saved Jenny,” Mary said. She was speaking now as if Stipp weren’t in the room, as if she were negotiating with death itself. She looked up distractedly. The spectral shadows of the kerosene light flared against her skin, illuminating the hollows under her cheekbones.

The dinner bell clanged. All through the hotel, beds scraped, feet thumped to the floor. The future dead, rising to forestall.

She was slipping away, leaving the shores for hell. The lantern flickered: Charon, impatient to be off. A ferry to the other side. Her eyes stared straight ahead, though what was to come was around a bend, uncertain except in certain regret. The safety rope of ambition trailed behind. Slippery; it, too, uncertain. The cruelty of war was such that coincidence, in the past nearly always a pleasant surprise, was turned to sadness: to want to become a surgeon, only to see the chance offered, then ruined before your eyes. To find your brother-in-law, only to have to tell him terrible news.

“Mary,” he said. “Why did you want to be a surgeon?”
You won’t last.
He did not want the victory; he hadn’t even wanted it in the beginning. God’s judgment. Or joke.

Mary opened her mouth to speak, but no sound emerged. Had it been conceit to wish to conquer death?

“It doesn’t matter what I wanted,” she finally said.

The light in the lantern flared and then blew out, as upstairs a door slammed.

Mary rose to take Stipp’s hand, a commonplace enough gesture. She ought to touch his face, she ought to reassure him, as he had once reassured her.

At the door, she turned, her hand on the knob.

But before he could say anything, Mary turned and went away into the dark.

Chapter Thirty-eight

To get to Washington, Thomas had understood, you had to follow the C&O towpath southward until Georgetown, but he couldn’t just walk down the towpath, because there were patrols on the lookout for invading Confederates and spies. Instead, he had to bushwhack alongside it through the underbrush, which he had started to do in the dark before dawn, after abandoning his post on the great rocks overlooking the Potomac when his fellow guard fell asleep in the deep morning chill. The forest in February in Maryland was a vast, sucking pool of mud, but Thomas slogged ever southward, keeping the canal in view as he fought through the endless frozen thicket rising on the hillsides along the canal. But by noon he was exhausted, his arms and face abraded by the brittle branches, his legs coated with freezing clay. A mile north of Georgetown, a cavalry unit met him just as he left the cover of the forest. They had been on the lookout since dawn, when they’d been alerted to a deserter leaving the Chain Bridge unguarded. They identified Thomas by the look of desolation that they’d noticed in other deserters, the ones truly desperate to get home. They marched him at gunpoint down the path, skirting with difficulty the mule teams towing barges toward the Tidewater locks where the C&O joined the Potomac River, past the Observatory and the Aqueduct Bridge, the farm kids and dogs running alongside, shouting and barking insults. They marched him right into Washington and reached the Central Guardhouse just as the sun grew pale and dropped from the sky. It had been a march of some miles, and Thomas, cold and footsore, sank onto a rectangle of space on the prison floor in the large cell that held the day’s accumulation of drunks and pickpockets.

Among the clangs of cell doors shutting and guards shouting, a tuneless whistle drifted over the heads of the milling men.

“Hey. Fall. Hey.”

In front of him squatted Jake Miles in a tattered Union shirt, coat, and cap. The war was a war of brothers, acquaintances, enemies. A quick whiff of Jake’s breath told Thomas all he needed to know.

Take care of Christian
. That was the last thing he had said to Jake at the Capitol before he had gone in search of Mary.

Thomas lunged.

He was in such a rage that he did not hear the shouts of his fellow prisoners, the warnings of the guards, did not feel Jake’s drunken slaps about his head. Then someone hit him in the back of the head with a rifle butt, and he was dragged off to one of the single cells and thrown onto the floor. He spent the night sleepless and hungry, swatting at mice and roaches. In the morning, he lined up with the rest to be examined by the judge advocate, who listened stone-faced to Thomas’s story.

“And where did you think you were you going, Fall?” he asked when Thomas had finished.

“Home, sir.”

The judge ordered him returned to his regiment. By two o’clock that afternoon, Thomas was back at Fort Marcy standing on a barrel in the middle of the fort near the bomb-proof for everyone to see. That night, he was allowed to return to his tent, where he collapsed from exhaustion and finally, wretchedly, began to cry.

Grief, the third casualty of war.

The next morning, Stipp stood at the door to Mary’s room. Pinned to the pillow was a note.

Dr. Stipp,

The ledgers are in the cabinet in the dining room. Under the pillow is the key to the supply cabinet; keep it from Mr. Mack, he would have it if he could. The nurses all require direction, especially Monique, who charms but is occasionally careless with dressing changes. The stick for unclogging the water closet is in the basement, behind the stairs. Extra bluing for the linens can be had from Jacob Harlow, the egg man; he is cagier than he looks, so bargain hard.

Yours,

Mary Sutter

Chapter Thirty-nine

James Blevens judged Charles Tripler, the medical director of the Army of the Potomac, to be in his mid-fifties. He was a balding, mustachioed man, whose years in the army told of decades in the sun, but he was nonetheless energetic and argumentative. His widely read
Manual of the Medical Officer of the Army of the United States
had been written after his service in both the Seminole Wars and the Mexican War, and he was considered to be the most experienced and knowledgeable practitioner among all the surgeons in the halved army, North or South. Now he was leaning forward in front of the fireplace in his parlor, talking eagerly.

“Egad, man, you want me to choose between microscopes and ambulances? You must be joking. Though that terrible excuse of a surgeon general Finley designed a rattletrap of a beast; did you ever see anyone survive an ambulance ride for the better?”

“Not at Bull Run, no,” Blevens answered.

“You were there? Damn it all, I wish I’d have been. I miss war. I’d have court-martialed Finley on the basis of the ambulance fiasco alone. The bastard.”

“A microscope is equally, if not more, important than—”

“You cannot be serious. More important than evacuation of the wounded from the field? How are you going to explain that to the mothers whose sons are left behind?”

A glass of whiskey warming in his hand, James Blevens said that of course there would be no way to explain it.

It had been difficult to hunt down the peripatetic Tripler. To be sitting now, finally, in Tripler’s well-appointed rooms on New York Avenue in the middle of February was the result of November, Blevens knew, the fire having done the hard work of garnering him an appointment with the revered doctor. His hands had healed well enough, though they were still stiff, and while Tripler was welcoming, the energetic man was swinging his top leg rather agitatedly over the other. Snow was falling all over the city; Blevens had struggled through the drifts from the Patent Office Hospital, where he had gone to work soon after Christmas. He was in charge of the typhoid that was ravaging the troops; so far, nearly a thousand cases had been reported. He suspected that was the disease now sickening Mr. Lincoln’s sons, though Dr. Stone, the Lincolns’ family physician, had proclaimed their illness to be bilious fever.

“I cannot condone your request for a microscope when I cannot buy a four-wheeled ambulance to save my soul,” Tripler said. “Or even get the men to clean out their camps, though making them take quinine in whiskey has certainly made all the difference on fevers. Sick call is nothing now. Did you know the Sanitary Commission is supplying the army with quinine until we can produce enough for everyone?”

“I’ve observed in the stools of all my patients afflicted with diarrhea some small bacteria, which may be contributing in some way—”

Tripler cut him off. “It is the air that does it. I’ve moved the men in Arlington off the flats and into the woods, and it has changed everything. The sick do much better in regimental than in general hospitals. The improvement is due to that and the smallpox vaccines. Do you know we’ve rendered that disease practically null? The ones that have it are the ones who got it before they mustered in. Remarkable, really, it’s these small steps, but the volunteer troops don’t understand it. But McClellan’s getting these boys into shape—he and I, actually. And I suppose the Sanitary Commission. They are a persistent lot. I’m glad for it, really. Ahead of their time; they’ve been right about hygiene all along. Did you say you were ever in camp?”

“Fort Albany. It was like policing children. Impossible to keep the place clean.”

“Precisely my point, eh? Hygiene.” Tripler clapped his hands.

“I couldn’t agree with you more,” James said, recalling the sanitation officer and his long questionnaire. The romantic period: a library, a band, the belief that the problems of the forts could be quickly ameliorated. Futility, but necessary and completely unattainable at the time.

“However, Dr. Tripler, I believe there may be an alternate component to disease, one that cannot be seen with the naked eye, that might be contributing. A microscope would help all of us understand disease in another way; I could establish reports, share information; it is entirely worthwhile, I believe, to establish a place of research now, so that we might come to a common knowledge base that will benefit us all.”

“Come now, Dr. Blevens. What you want is impossible. Lincoln has ordered McClellan to move and McClellan is poised.” Though he was not. Earlier in the day, McClellan had stormed around this very room, complaining to Tripler about Lincoln’s thorough misunderstanding of the intricacies of battle, the still delicate nature of the green Federal troops, the overwhelming numbers of the enemy they were facing.

“What the army needs are ambulances, and ambulances we will have, along with a corps that will be solely responsible and trained for battlefield removal. When the time comes and we face the enemy next, I shall be right at McClellan’s side, directing the corps’ movements. Did you know that it is the quartermaster who is responsible for ambulances? Not the Medical Department. Upon my word, that’s bad planning. To not be under my purview? Can you imagine such a thing? This is why Finley had to go.”

Tripler rattled on, complaining of the former surgeon general and the old army regime, how little they understood about modern warfare and the demands of the Medical Department. James nodded along, content for the moment to bide his time. He wanted a microscope. Besides, it was not as if James disagreed with Tripler; everything he was saying was sound and true. But for all Tripler’s prescience and efficiency, the importance of research eluded the man.

“Do excuse me, I’ve been rude running on like this. How are your hands these days?” Tripler asked.

“My hands are fine. I do wish to make the point that I fail to see why ambulances and microscopes must be exclusive. I am asking only for one.”

Tripler said, “If only I were able to grant your request. But I’ve used up a great deal of funds designing a stretcher to be mounted on top of horses. A sort of in-between to go where the wagons cannot. You know, gulleys, deep woods, that sort of thing. It’s a bit cumbersome now, but I’ll get it right. I’m afraid it takes money to do these things and we barely have any as it is.”

Making a great show of not pouring any more whiskey into his glass, Tripler stretched in his chair and yawned. His secretary should have alerted him that Blevens had wanted something besides accolades for pulling patients from that fire.

Reluctantly, James set down his glass.

“Say,” Tripler said at the door, nodding at Blevens’s hands. “You’re ready, I presume, for when the army does move? I could use a good man in the field hospitals. I’ve established a system of regimental hospitals with good, heated tents, overseen by brigade medical officers with larger hospitals. All this to treat the men quickly and not have to send them to the general hospitals in Washington. I’m shutting down the Union Hotel Hospital; that place is a dump. Hardly up to our new standards. We’re modernizing.” He clapped Blevens on the back. “Glad you’re better. Find your way home in this snow?”

On the stoop outside, James worked a pair of gloves over his still sensitive hands, the palms stiff and shiny. The snow had temporarily conquered the city’s perpetual odors. Spring would be coming soon, and with it more changes. He looked down the street, toward the president’s house, the outside lit by torches, the snowflakes shimmering in the firelight before melting away. They looked like the small bacteria he had seen gliding across his slides.

James decided to go to the Union Hotel to find Mary, whom he had not seen since she’d left for home so abruptly after Peter’s death. When the cab sailed past the president’s house, the flags had been dropped to half-mast. Swaths of black crepe now draped the double front doors. A line of mourners was forming.

Willie Lincoln, eleven years old, reportedly very ill, must have died while Blevens had been trying to persuade Tripler of the need for a microscope.

In the Mansion, the president was stroking one of Willie’s caps, which the boy had flung into the corner of his office only a few weeks before, running in screeching in the midst of a game of tag with Tad. Willie had claimed sanctuary in his father’s arms, his thin-walled chest heaving, the ribs like spindled fretwork under Lincoln’s fingers.

Early signs of illness? If only he had thought to question.

Willie’s cap was so small that it did not even cover Lincoln’s palm. Lincoln pulled it to his chest and held it over his heart. Before he gave in completely, he checked to make certain that the door to his office was bolted. It was, but he couldn’t remember having done it, couldn’t remember even having traversed the long hallway from Willie’s room, where he had asked the nurse if she believed in God. Understanding his question, she had instead assured him that God had loved Willie so much He had called for him early.

Lincoln laid his head down on his desk and let the fury break from deep inside his chest, as John Hay stood outside the door, registering each keen in his bones.

Upon imminent threat of removal from his post by an impatient and grieving President Lincoln, McClellan sailed out of Washington at the end of March, following the four hundred dinghies, ships, boats, tubs, steamers, and sailing barques the government had rented to ferry his sixty-five thousand troops to Fort Monroe, situated at the tip of one of the fingerling peninsulas that jutted into Chesapeake Bay. Before Little Mac (as John Hay was now calling the procrastinating general) had sailed away, Lincoln asked him why they should go to the expense of shipping the army a hundred miles away when the army they wanted was still planted somewhere between Richmond and Washington, thirty miles away? McClellan replied that he intended to win victory by taking Richmond from the south in a bloodless war. Grudging that at least McClellan was finally doing something, Lincoln approved the general’s odd plan.