My Name Is Mary Sutter (4 page)

As he spoke, it turned out that Fall’s confidence was well founded: all three women yielded the conversation to him, and not solely for reasons of hospitality. The younger sister, Jenny, was adoring. But Mary attended perhaps more intensely, albeit covertly. Glances of sharp admiration, a softening of her features. Moments when she ceased eating to gaze, then remembered herself and passed the salt or the butter, though no one had asked. When Fall finally solicited Blevens’s opinions, Mary became inattentive as he probed the possibility of greater bloodshed than Fall expected, but he did not want to be rude or alarm the women, and so he droned on about the necessity of controlling the railroads, which sounded boring even to him.

Christian Sutter, the brother, arrived during the meat course. He was tall, curly-headed, a mop of hair, a grin, all confidence, younger than his two sisters. Charm had won him everything in life, it seemed, including his mother’s adoration. He took the foot of the table. No father had been mentioned. Their mourning must not have been recent, Blevens decided. This was a family adjusted to whatever losses it had sustained. Happily settled at his place, Christian beamed and said, “Did you know that they’ve already formed a regiment? The 25th. It’s a good number, don’t you think?”

Amelia Sutter threw her son a fearful, longing glance. Pride muzzled instinct, though it was a battle. A sudden smile turned tremulous, then disappeared altogether as Thomas and Christian agreed that immediate enlistment was required of any self-respecting Northerner.

For her part, Mary had shaped a more formed opinion of Blevens during the soup course than she had been able to do in his surgery rooms. Seated opposite, he comported himself with the manners of a man not unaccustomed to either money or talk. The dishevelment of his surgery rooms did not coincide with this new picture.

Thomas and Christian were arguing about Texas. “If there is to be any fight at all in Texas, it will have to be soon, because they’ve just emptied the forts of Federal soldiers—”

“Dr. Blevens is going to the war, too,” Mary said, interrupting.

It was as if someone had declared war in the dining room. Blevens hurriedly said, “Yes, as a surgeon. One doesn’t wish for bloodshed, but—”

“But you do, don’t you, Dr. Blevens?” Mary said. “You want to see what can happen to the human body. You want to see inside it. You want to solve its mysteries.” She had sharpened her voice and set down her heavy silver knife. The roast was delicious, but unimportant. “Not that you should be ashamed. It is no less than I would wish to do. Given the opportunity.”

“Mary,” Amelia said.

“It is not shameful to press one’s point, Mother.” She turned again to the doctor. “I haven’t misspoken your aspirations in going to the war, have I, Dr. Blevens?”

Mary Sutter was calling in his debt. He was to be made to apologize in front of everyone. “Miss Sutter, I am very sorry that I cannot help you. But with your gift for persistence, I doubt very much you will not someday claim your opportunity.”

“Help you how, Mary?” Amelia asked.

Mary ignored her. “But I will only be able to claim it if I am offered it. Tell me, Dr. Blevens, in your opinion, is there a limit to how much knowledge one person is allowed to accumulate? Have I reached my quota?”

Blevens thought again of his rooms on State Street. He could be beside his own fire right now, looking through his microscope. “Miss Sutter, you have my deepest respect and gratitude. But I cannot help you.”

“Dr. Blevens, do you know of the woman Miss Nightingale?” Mary asked.

“Do I seem as illiterate as all that?”

“Have you read her
Notes on Nursing
?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact, I have.”

Mary registered surprise, but forged on. “One of the reasons my mother and I are the best midwives in Albany is that we read the latest medical literature.”

“You speak, Mary, as if our accomplishments were daggers,” Amelia said.

Mary Sutter laid her hands in her lap and rearranged her expression into one of tolerant hospitality, but behind the benign visage sparkled the same intense determination she had shown in Blevens’s rooms that afternoon. She fixed him with a stare.

“Are you aware, Dr. Blevens, that in the last year, Miss Nightingale has refused to leave her room?” Mary asked.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Miss Nightingale, brilliant lecturer, member of the Royal Statistical Society, the woman who saved the British army in the Crimea, has shut herself in a hotel room in London and refuses to leave it. I am not saying that she is mad. Apparently, she is quite coherent. But averse to society for some unrevealed reason.”

“It is possible the war both made and unmade Miss Nightingale. The deprivation, the difficulty—”

“That’s possible, but I believe Miss Nightingale has hidden herself away from society in order to be heard. I think she knows that people would not listen quite so intently to her if she were always parading her achievements in front of everyone. I myself think that no woman should have to hide.” A pause. “Or perhaps Miss Nightingale
is
mad. It’s interesting that no one really knows.”

Glasses clinked and throats cleared. Jenny wiped her lips with her napkin. The halting silence around the table was characterized not by shame, but by a vague weariness. Mary unfurled was formidable and her family all knew it and, it seemed, sometimes despaired of it.

“I do beg your pardon, but are you suggesting that my refusal to help you will somehow render you mad?” Blevens said.

“I fail to see how comparing female intelligence to madness is going to help your case, Mary,” Thomas Fall said, emerging from the hush to jolly along his future sister-in-law.

James Blevens raised his hands in concession. “You did not want me at your table tonight, Miss Sutter. You have had to endure my company after I disappointed you.”

“How? How did he disappoint you?” Amelia asked, but Thomas Fall stepped in once again.

“Our Mary is not quite as inhospitable as she seems.” Thomas threw Mary a gentle smile, which she returned with a flicker of her own. “If you wish to receive a pass from Mary, you need only be a woman in the last throes of childbirth. She likes the needy best, I think.”

“Yes, she was remarkable today,” Blevens said. “As I suspect she usually is.”

His compliment earned him no correspondent smile from Mary, who took a sip of wine and looked away. Amelia reached her hand to Mary, but Mary shook her head.

Taking charge of the table, Thomas abruptly changed the subject, accustomed, it seemed, to navigating the family’s more difficult shores. “Dr. Blevens, before we all go off, I’d be happy to take you out to Ireland’s Corners. I keep orchards on the Loudon Road. Apples and cherries. I have hopes that the New York Railroad will one day extend a line northward. Think of the prospects of fruit picked in the morning being delivered to Manhattan City by evening of the same day.”

“Is this a family business?” Blevens asked. He reached for a glass of water, giving sidelong glances to his dinner companions, all of whom suddenly held Thomas Fall in a sympathetic gaze.

Thomas set down his fork. “It was, yes. But last October my father and mother died in a carriage accident. Hit by a runaway.”

“I beg your pardon. I didn’t mean to—”

“No. Your question was welcome.”

Jenny reached out her hand and enfolded his hand in hers.

“I do beg your pardon,” James said. “That is very recent.”

“We had just moved into town. Father was not used to the traffic.”

“I am sorry.” Blevens wished now that Bonnie Miles had never walked through the doors of his surgery this afternoon. Nothing had gone well from that moment. Upstairs, he could hear the baby crying, and footsteps climbing the stairs. A maid, going to Bonnie’s aid. He cast around for something to say. “If you don’t mind my asking a practical question, but with no one to give your business to, how will you enlist?”

Amelia said to Thomas, “If Mr. Sutter were still with us, he would have gladly taken control of the orchards until your return. And have built you a rail line.”

Of course, Blevens thought. Why hadn’t he registered this before? This was the family of Nathaniel Sutter, of the New York Railroad. This explained the beautiful home and furnishings far better than did the income of two midwives. He tried to remember exactly when Sutter had died. Less than a year ago also? Their mourning had been brief, but perhaps they had found solace in one another.

“Nathaniel would have built you two rail lines,” Amelia said, extending an arm across the pale linen to the beautiful daughter. The quiet one, too, it seemed, for she hadn’t yet spoken a word, though Jenny appeared unruffled by her own silence. She had the prize, the boy next door, and therefore did not covet the spotlight for herself.

“I have an excellent overseer,” Thomas said, “who knows the business far better than I do. I rely on him.”

Cake was being served, coffee poured. A few more minutes, fifteen at the most, and then James could beg fatigue. He wondered now whether Amelia regretted her hospitality as much as her daughter Mary did. So far, he had insulted Mary twice, revived grief in all of them, and invaded a family dinner on the brink of a war. It seemed there was no way he could redeem himself. He was picturing the Sutters’ conversation after he left—
Mary, how did you ever bring such an odd man home?—
when a maid flung open the door.

“She’s bleeding, ma’am.”

A flash of skirts and Mary was out of the room, Blevens racing after her up the stairs two at a time.

In the lying-in room, Bonnie’s bedclothes were saturated with blood, the baby stowed safely on a pillow by the maid. Bonnie’s eyes were saucers of astonishment.

“I felt something warm,” she said.

“A tear,” Mary said, thinking of her hands deep inside Bonnie earlier that day.

But Dr. Blevens was already raising Bonnie’s reddened nightgown while shielding her nakedness with a blanket. “Lie back; don’t be afraid.” Swiftly, he palpated the pillow of her abdomen, and after a few minutes began a circular massage. Behind him, Mary Sutter stood reluctantly impressed. He had been hunting for the uterus, to see if it had relaxed, which obviously it had, because as soon as the massage began, the flood had stopped. The massage contracted the uterus, shutting off the open blood vessels where the placenta had been attached. This was the first step in any maternal hemorrhage.

The tide abated, Blevens took Bonnie’s hand and pressed her fingers deep into her stomach.

“Do you feel that?” he asked, helping Bonnie find the hard ball of her uterus underneath her navel.

“What is that?” she cried.

“Your womb,” Blevens said, smiling now. “Yours is a bit recalcitrant for some reason. You’ll need to rub it every few minutes so that it will keep contracting and you won’t bleed. Can you do that?” Over his shoulder, he called to Mary, “Have you any ergot?”

Reduced to the role of nurse in her own lying-in room, Mary dispensed the medicine and then called the maids to help her change the bedding. While everything was made right, Dr. Blevens scooped up the baby and retreated to the window, where he bounced the child in his arms. Then Mary led Blevens to the kitchen so he could wash his hands. His frock coat was edged in blood.

Mary said, “You know far more than you let on this afternoon, Dr. Blevens. Did you even need my help in the delivery?”

The maids scurried out, pretending not to pay attention. Later, this conversation would be told in the kitchens on Arbor Hill in the Sixth Ward:
And then the doctor said. And then the Miss said.
Outside, the pigs would be rooting in the garbage and the maids would be saying to their husbands, “And her so haughty.”

Blevens said, “I don’t practice enough to feel successful in deliveries, but I am not completely ignorant of the needs of women. Bonnie’s hemorrhage was easily controlled, merely atony of the uterus. You would have done the same.”

She could barely contain her humiliation. She would not have done the same, and the failure of her usual unerring intuition made her furious. She would have hunted for the tear, wasting precious time. “Why do you think I knocked at your door today, Dr. Blevens? Did you really think that I would prefer to apprentice when I could attend a college? Did you really think I wasn’t at the end of my choices?” She was pinning and unpinning her hair, the curls disobedient, refusing to be locked in place.

Laughter echoed from the upstairs, where Amelia had gone to supervise, having already taken graceful leave of Blevens in the hallway. Jenny and Thomas were closeted away in the parlor, lovers with shortened time. Christian had gone out again after shaking Blevens’s hand.

“I’ll say good night,” Blevens said, bowing.

The front door swung shut behind him, sounding like the end of something. Outside, the rain had not let up, and he remembered too late that his horse and carriage had been quartered in the carriage house in the alley behind. He should have exited from the kitchen, where the door led to the yard and alleyway. For a moment, he paused on the stoop, but then hunched his shoulders and walked down the windswept, rainy block, turned right, and turned again into the alley, where he located the Sutter carriage house and led his horse and carriage from the warm confines into the dreary night.

Chapter Two

Amelia Harriman and Nathaniel Sutter had married for reasons of family; his land near Ireland’s Corners abutted her parents’. Their union was to expand the Harriman orchards and to support Amelia’s midwifery practice. It was not a loveless marriage, however; economic cooperation was the added bonus of a childhood affection. As Amelia saw it, Nathaniel Sutter was the man least likely to complain about her profession. Her mother had been a midwife, and her mother before her, in a line that extended back to medieval France. Her great-great-great-great-grandmother had once delivered a dauphin, afterwards using ergot she had culled from the rye in her garden to stem a hemorrhage in the queen, earning the La Croix family a parcel of deeded land near Versailles, which they fled during the revolution.

In America, the tradition continued. Amelia’s mother married James Harriman, but everyone knew who she was—the French midwife. There was simply no question of Amelia not being a midwife, and yet while American men might want good midwives for their wives, they did not wish to marry one. Nathaniel Sutter was different. And so the knowledge that had once saved a dauphin was preserved for the women of Albany County. In addition, the proximity to Amelia’s parents ensured that when Amelia was called away on a delivery—staying at the home of a woman in confinement days beforehand in anticipation of the onset of labor—her mother, who had retired after decades of sleepless nights, would be nearby to care for any children that arose from the marriage.

Nathaniel soon discovered that he had little desire to tend flowering cherry trees, as his deceased mother and father had. A year after his marriage to Amelia, he sold the bulk of their land and bullied his way into a job with the New York Railroad, where his engaging, gregarious, and tireless personality disguised a rapacious capacity for stealing freight contracts away from the Erie Canal. As soon as the canal was finished in 1825, it proved to be slow and feeble in comparison to the speed of the railroad. Nathaniel believed that despite the inherent dangers of rail travel—the crashes, the bridge collapses, the derailments—no one would want to put their goods on an open barge in Buffalo to be dragged by a team of mules when you could place the freight on a railcar and have it arrive in Manhattan in two days. Two days when the canal took at least two weeks! The railroad was in constant battle with the legislature; the state’s debt from the canal was still a financial burden, the railroad an upstart that threatened the state with bankruptcy if the canal could not retain enough contracts to pay off the cost of building it. Nathaniel thrilled to the battle, Amelia less so. The job rendered him frequently absent.

Two years after the marriage, Amelia’s parents died, and Amelia and Nathaniel moved back into her childhood home, a three-room clapboard on the rise that ran toward the Shaker settlement. When children finally did come, five years after their marriage, their lives became a negotiation. Amelia could no longer stay in a woman’s home for days before the woman gave birth. Husbands had to come and find her when labor started, always risking that Amelia wouldn’t be able to respond if Nathaniel was away.

One dawn in June of 1842, Amelia sent word from a neighboring farm that she was just about to return home. An hour, two at the most, the boy reported to Nathaniel. But Nathaniel had to catch a train at eight a.m. He was due in Buffalo that evening. He stood at the bedroom threshold and made a calculation. Amelia was just a half mile away. Their two-year-old twins were asleep in their cribs—Mary restless, but still sleepy, Jenny quiet, her thumb in her mouth. The boy had said Amelia was coming in an hour. Two at the most. He could wake the twins and load them into the wagon and hurry them cranky and unfed to Amelia, or he could let them sleep alone in the house for an hour. The light was soft; a breeze billowed through the gauzy summer curtains. An hour. That was all.

When Amelia returned home that evening after failing to save her neighbor from a sudden hemorrhage, her girls were standing in their crib, their faces wet with tears and mucus, their nightgowns stained with urine.

The argument when Nathaniel returned home went like this:
I had to go to Buffalo. The railroad needed that lumber contract.

But you should have brought the children to me at the Stephensons’.

You sent word that you were coming home.

Dolly bled suddenly, I couldn’t leave.

I didn’t know. If I had known, I would have brought them to you.

But how could you abandon them?

Amelia’s distrust, once roused, could never fully be put to rest. From then onward, she took the children with her, even in the middle of the night. She ordered them to dress, don shoes, bring their blankets. While Mary sleepily complied and Jenny and Christian cried, Nathaniel argued, even as the husband of the laboring woman stood leery at the door. But Amelia would not relent. The children went—on with the bonnets, on with the boots—the twins propelled by a watery memory of an echoing stretch of time inhabited by terror and hunger and finally, their mother’s tear-stained face, bent over the crib in which they had been confined. That vestigial memory of abandonment made them follow Amelia out the door to fall asleep in the wagon as she barreled down washboard roads after worried husbands.

They became vagabond children. When they were younger, they played with the children of the laboring mother; when they were older, they hauled and boiled water, and listened to birthing cries in houses high and low, becoming accustomed to joy being predicated on misery. This accounted for their assured nature; prescient, possessed, they would later feel at home anywhere and in the face of anything.

The first time Mary asked to help was in a brooding house along the Shaker Road, not far from home. The house was two stone stories, with looming windows and a narrow stairwell. Well along, the woman shrieked upstairs. The walls were drab, the bed a ticking upon the floor. Two toddlers sucked thumbs beside their mother.

“Are you certain?” Amelia asked, when Mary pulled the bonnet from her head and said, “I would be grateful, Mother, if you would let me stay.”

Her mother’s eyes pierced, giving her the look that Mary would later learn to ignore: the tilting of the head, the gaze of incredulity. But then she said, “So, it’s you,” having wondered which of her daughters would become a midwife.

Jenny, never eager, was happily relegated to the dull tasks of water and childcare, while Mary seized opportunity.

Mary was not given a corner from which to watch. No clinging to territory, no adult separation of
I know better than you.
Amelia said,
Hand me this, hand me that. You might not want to see this; turn your head.
At times it seemed to Mary that the world over was rent with the cries of women giving birth. But when at last the baby emerged, slippery, fighting, squalling, the woman’s thighs trembling and then collapsing, and Mary was given charge to kneel beside the mother and wipe—gently—the writhing baby dry on her stomach, the battle of labor proved a war worth fighting. What did Mary remember most? Not the mother’s bulging flesh, the bullet-shaped head of the infant, the gasp of love when at last the mother encircled the infant in her arms, but Amelia’s stillness. Her grand remove. Competence incarnate.

And so the tradition continued. With Mary, not with Jenny. It could have hardly been otherwise, for Mary had set her heart. Within two years, it was she who said,
Hand me this, hand me that.
Fifteen, and already precociously able. She was spoken of:
It is something about her hands; it is something about her voice.
And around the city, at suppers and church socials and dances and even upon the streets, when an alert matron spotted a newly expectant mother, Mary Sutter’s name was whispered.

When the success of the New York Railroad made Nathaniel his fortune, they sold their land and moved into Albany and the Dove Street home, eschewing old-money Eagle Street for the outskirts of the city. There followed the consequent ease of wealth and servants, and with it no longer any need for Amelia to take the children along with her. But Mary continued to go to deliveries with her mother, while Jenny and Christian stayed behind. It was said that Amelia Sutter had ruined Mary for society, and that she had nearly ruined Jenny. That Amelia’s running about risked her marriage, that only her charm and beauty saved her. For Amelia Sutter was indeed charming. She was at ease in conversation, knew how to deploy a hand to a forearm at just the right moment. And in the childbirth room, her presence was a gift. But the combination of social status and occupation puzzled. Midwives were supposed to be matrons beyond childbearing age, with years of life in which to have been disappointed enough to wish to spend all one’s time delivering babies. Not that the women of Albany County were not grateful; instead they were envious, which took its form in criticism. The problem, they said, was that she neglected her family. Never mind that they never left her side. Never mind that Mary took first place at the Girl’s Academy. Mary Sutter, talented as she was, couldn’t string two words together unless they were combative ones, and Jenny Sutter, why, that girl was destined for trouble.

When the girls turned eighteen, there was a trip to Wellon’s Bookstore on State Street for Mary to purchase
Gray’s Anatomy
, newly published, resplendent with illustrations, and
Notes on Nursing
by the celebrity Florence Nightingale. For Jenny, there was a party and dancing. Amelia enjoyed both equally, though perhaps, if pressed, would confess to having liked Jenny’s more, for the frivolity of dancing past midnight. And though in her daughters, their mother had cleaved—Jenny had adopted Amelia’s charm, Mary her persistence—no one could say that Amelia Sutter was not proud of each of them.

Mary turned twenty years old the day her father died in September of 1860. Her first delivery had been nothing compared to the utter helplessness of watching death stalk her father. Even the memory of the woman’s dreadful house, the hard work, the boiling of water, the jack towel tied at the head of the bed for the mother to pull on, the screams, the fatigue, paled in her mind as her father suffered. In the face of her own ignorance, she peppered the doctors with questions.
Why are you bleeding him more? What is the matter with him?
But they could not answer her. She studied the
Gray’s
at his bedside, employed every tenet of Miss Nightingale’s, seeking to alleviate his pain, but he died in an agony that not even copious doses of whiskey and laudanum could dull. The day after her father’s funeral, Mary wrote her first letter to Dr. Marsh. It was the day that the Fall family moved into the new home next door, and a then young and diffident Thomas Fall, not yet having suffered his own great grief, tipped his hat to Mary as she went out to post the letter. The new neighbors did not go to Nathaniel Sutter’s funeral, not wanting to press the burden of hospitality on their newly bereaved neighbors.

It was Mary and Thomas who met first, at a show at Tweddle Hall, two weeks after Nathaniel died. Amelia had insisted that Mary get out of the house.
Go somewhere, do something, you’ll shrivel up if you stay inside a moment longer.
Gas leaked from the chandelier; the smell was very strong, and everyone had covered their mouths and noses with handkerchiefs. Thomas arrived late, and chose a seat next to Mary, whom he did not at first recognize because of the makeshift veil. But it was impossible to mistake her for anyone else; he had watched her comings and goings from the window of his house and had admired the dignified way she carried herself, the resolute set of her shoulders, the graceful neck that stood out from her otherwise plain appearance. The simple act of walking down the street seemed to communicate that she knew who she was. That he did not completely know yet who he was or what he wanted was a discomfort he kept at bay with industrious endeavors toward happiness that daily seemed, in light of Mary’s apparent self-possession, an insignificant enterprise. He was pleased to find her here, though a little surprised to see her at entertainment so soon after her bereavement, though Thomas decided he admired even this break with convention. He noticed, too, that Mary did not wear the traditional black, but a shimmering deep navy, and that the rich color suited her dark brown eyes, which he decided were the most remarkable feature of her face. From time to time during the performance he glanced her way, but Mary kept her gaze fixed on the dozen jugglers from Boston who first lobbed balls and oranges, then plates and cups, followed by chairs and stools, and finally knives and swords, but decided against lighting their flaming batons because of the gas.

Absorbed as she was by the spectacle, Mary blinked back tears. She was not usually so vulnerable a person. She knew that it was said of her that she was odd and difficult, and this did not bother her, for she never thought about what people usually spent time thinking of. The idle talk of other people always perplexed her; her mind was usually occupied by things that no one else thought of: the structure of the pelvis, the fast beat of a healthy fetus heart, or the slow meander of an unhealthy one, or a baby who had failed to breathe. She could never bring herself to care about ordinary things, like whose pie was better at the Sunday potluck, or whose husband she might covet should the opportunity arise, or what anyone was saying about an early winter or an early thaw or if the wheat would blight this year due to the heavy rains, or if the latest couple to marry had any chance of happiness. Perhaps it had been foolish to come to the theater, where potential death was being offered as entertainment, though Mary knew that no matter what she did or where she went, she would always see mortality where others saw frivolity. As a dozen swords sailed effortlessly onstage between the performers, all Mary could think was how precarious life was.