My Name Is Mary Sutter (8 page)

The groggery before them was tumbledown, and James could not understand why they were now stationary after so much activity. Dr. Stipp opened a door hidden under a slantwise post, and they descended a stairwell to a dark basement, where they arrested momentarily to let their eyes adjust in the gloom. The cellar’s stone walls leaked mud. Small rivers of murky water collected in buckets positioned at strategic points; billowing sheets hung from the ceiling simulated rooms. The effect was of a small sailing ship, marooned underground, doomed. Someone, or some thing—an animal?—was crying. The noise drew James’s gaze, and he peered into the filtered light shed by one rectangular, thick-paned window high in a corner. Under it, a girl of indeterminate age was bending over a cradle tending a mewling child.

When she saw them, she righted and said, “Mother died a week ago. He’s been crying since she died.”

Her accent was thick with the sound of Ireland, though the family couldn’t have been new to the Five Points, because no immigrant could afford such a treasure as this falling-down tenement. It could have been a century since her family had come over. It would have made no difference in how she talked. A round of “Danny Boy” sifted through the floorboards from above, as if to magnify her tragedy, though the girl did not cry or even register any great disappointment. Her message delivered, she bent back over the child, as if she assumed that absent their ailing patient, the doctor and his guest would now leave her, but Dr. Stipp crossed the muddy floor, leaned over, and lifted the crying child into his arms. His voice was as kind as James had ever heard it when he said, “I am so sorry, Sarah. I wish you’d let me know.” But when he turned to James, his voice came in telegraphic pedagogy: “The mother was a tubercular. Rusty sputum. Cough like a storm.” He renewed his attentions to the child and the girl, who could not have been more than eighteen, but whose breasts James now assessed as plump enough to confer womanhood, whatever her age.

“How old is the boy again, Sarah?” Stipp asked.

“He was born two years ago. February, I think it was? Or maybe January.”

If this date was truly the child’s birth date, then he was far too small for his age. Listless, he whimpered as Dr. Stipp bent his head to his chest. The boy’s fingers were blunted and blue with cold and his chest thrust in and out in his efforts to breathe. Whether the girl was aware of the child’s danger was difficult to tell, for she had about her the air of someone quietly resigned. After some time had passed—time in which Sarah continued to gaze at Dr. Stipp with a dazed, apprehensive, exhausted look reminiscent of cows that James remembered from home, the doctor lay the child in its bed and touched the girl’s elbow.

“Sarah, I’m going to speak to your father now.” He left James behind as he climbed the stairs to extract the father from the grog house to tell him he would lose another family member within the week. Sarah’s gaze drifted over to James, then back to the ailing child in its bed. She placed a longing hand on the cradle’s wicker frame and began to rock the bed back and forth. The song from above roused to a stomping jig, one James would later learn was a marital melody designed to incite a groom’s desire, and which came to a dwindling halt as the news was delivered. James could think of nothing to say to the girl, who finally leaned against the moist cellar wall and shut her eyes.

Dr. Stipp returned and pulled a vial from his bag. “Tincture of opium to give to the boy when he struggles too hard. Give it all,” he said, saying without saying that the opium would kill the child, and that she was to be the merciful executioner.

She took that vial with slender, beautiful fingers. It was impossible to know if she understood; she displayed neither gratitude nor reluctance, merely the same cowed resignation.

Once outside, Dr. Stipp took James by the elbow. “Breathe deep to cleanse your lungs when we leave this place. This part of the city will kill you.”

But James returned to the slum the next week, and the week after that, reluctantly drawn by a place—and a person—mired in helplessness. Ostensibly, he went instead of Stipp, to provide encouragement where there was clearly none to be found. The ruse was not remarked upon by the girl, who accepted James’s lurking sympathy. (Was that what it was, sympathy? Or perhaps instead, voyeurism?) She only marked his presence with a numb and tolerant patience that he interpreted as gratitude. The predicted final week passed, followed by another, and then another. Every time James arrived in the cellar, he expected to find the boy dead and the girl destroyed, but remarkably, the boy still breathed. Looking at the boy’s puckered blue lips, his feeble claim on life, James fell in love. The child’s achievement was somehow heroic, and for one uncomfortable moment cast James’s parents’ failure to breathe after contracting diphtheria as somehow a failure.

For several hours at a time he cradled the child in his arms while the fatigued Sarah slept on a musty mattress. In those hours, James felt as if his father and mother were dying all over again. It was not grief that kept him returning, not consciously at least, but instead a sense of utility that he had not been able to give his parents; though armed only with two months of medical lectures, any help he offered now was rudimentary at the most. From time to time, he cleared the child’s throat of phlegm. He would lay the child over his knee and gently pound his lungs to loosen the tenacious stuff that soon required another round of clearing. Through all these ministrations, the child, withdrawn and passive, peered at him with eyes the color of a pale Irish sky and did not once protest. Such calm acceptance and perseverance evoked in James an admiration and devotion he had never summoned for anyone since his parents’ death, so that when the boy died a month after his mother had succumbed, finally hastened by Sarah, who, having spent night after night walking the dark cellar tormented by the boy’s wheezing resolve, ended it all by dropping the whole of the opium in a draught of whiskey and forcing it down the boy’s throat, James grieved far more than she did.

James would not ascribe what happened afterwards to pity. Rather, as he held the girl’s hands and vowed before the same gaggle of guests as had attended the boy’s funeral the day before that he would love, honor, and cherish her, he truly thought that he would. He took Sarah to live with him in his room at Dr. Stipp’s, a situation viewed by Stipp as an ironic and unexpected turn of events for his gifted student, and by his wife Genevieve as romantic, but suspect. Immediately it was apparent that the marriage was not a great success. Separated from her father, adrift in a part of the city where no one reminisced about County Cork or hailed one another with a slapping of backs and an invitation to drink, Sarah dwindled like her younger brother, until James was fraught with worry. Fearing illness, he took her on day trips on the Hudson River Railroad to the north end of Manhattan Island for the fresh air. They wandered over the hills and rocks and perched themselves on the bluffs overlooking the Hudson, picnicking on sausages and cold potatoes. She soon rallied, and on those afternoons they tried to find common ground besides the death of her brother. But Sarah was not interested in microscopes or disease; neither had she had any schooling, and her speech turned so thick with brogue that at times James couldn’t even understand her. Free now from her grief, she would ramble on, relating raucous, at times unintelligible stories of life in the slums, the breeze off the river forcing them to huddle close to one another, even as James began to realize that it was lingering love for the dead child and not the living, mercifully murderous sister that had captivated him. And now there loomed the inevitable, irrevocable tie of children. Only two months into their marriage, he resolved to withdraw from lovemaking, or at least, when that proved intolerable, to withdraw early during the act, an insult that the newly bold Sarah could not tolerate.

“Children,” she said, “are what marriage is for.”

(Her Catholicism, too, had been a shock, though he was at fault, for he was the one who had acted on impulse, disregarding everything because of a supposed idea of romance.)

When he refused to comply, the same cool determination that had allowed Sarah to kill her brother also allowed her to pack up their one pot and feather bed and depart for her father’s basement and grog house, moaning that annulment would be impossible, because he’d already sullied her.

James went on with his studies, depressed by his foolhardy foray into love, determined to learn as much as he could. He helped Dr. Stipp examine his tubercular patients, learning to prescribe brandy for some, eggnog for others, and when it did not compromise their modesty, to listen for the faint signs of a lung slowly hollowing out, his ears pressed up against the ribcage, sometimes using a stethoscope, sometimes not. Medicine was devoted to diet and air and brandy, for there was little else. He never saw Dr. Stipp give out morphia to the dying again; he wondered what had prompted him to ease Sarah’s brother’s death and not others. Perhaps, James thought, the offer of marriage and the offer of morphia had leapt from the same impulse: to take away the sadness in her eyes.

Even Dr. Stipp rarely performed surgery, and only then to cut out sores that would not heal. He was judicious with his knife, for he believed that there was little one could do for the living, really, besides touch and comfort. Chloroform was new and untested, and ether had become a flammable nightmare. Surgery was always the last resort. So it was only in the autopsy lectures that James learned some of what he craved to know: the levers and pulleys of the muscular system, the placement of the bones, the ball and socket of the joints, the clever role of tendons to bind the structure together.

Still, after his year of apprenticeship with Dr. Stipp, there was something
invisible
, something
electrical
, that James did not understand. Something sparked the body to live, propelled the heart to beat, the brain to think, the structure to live on, to sometimes win over typhoid, measles, pneumonia, and even diphtheria. The body was a structure, yes, with struts and piping, but something else, some miraculous, invisible fabric made it work. But he had no idea what that was, and no idea how to repair the structure once it failed. No one else seemed to know, either. He left his apprenticeship with the surgeon with a medical degree and an insufficient understanding, but it had to do.

Only in his current work at the microscope, alone in his rooms in Albany, did James begin to fathom that the invisible fabric might be something that no one had ever imagined. And it had taken him years to understand that his mother had kept him and his brothers from their sick room that night not only because she feared their death, but because of an emotion stronger than fear—an unseen loneliness for her dead children.

Every year, James traveled back to Manhattan to visit Sarah. A marriage of inconsequence, but a marriage nonetheless, for the love that had turned out to be pity had not hardened to disregard. He could not completely abandon her. He was a boy from a farm who had moved to the city to chase his curiosity and had married an Irish girl for whom he had felt sorry. It was as if he had lost his mind one day. But he did not regret the marriage. Rather, he regretted his impulsiveness, and the loneliness that had accompanied him northward.

And he regretted that he did not yet know what real love was.

Across town, Mary was sitting in the rocking chair in the lying-in room worrying about how she had misdiagnosed the cause of Bonnie’s hemorrhage when Blevens had discerned its cause right away. She wanted to believe that if he hadn’t been there, she would have recognized the issue herself, but she couldn’t be certain that she would have. She was embarrassed. She knew more than Blevens did about midwifery, but she had been angry and distracted.
A tear.
When a relaxed uterus was the most common problem after a delivery. She had allowed emotion to cloud her thinking.

Pride goeth,
she thought.
And now I have lost my chance.

“Mary?” Jenny was at the door, whispering through the narrow opening Mary had left for the light. Downstairs, the clock struck three a.m.

This was a rare visit to the lying-in room for Jenny. Ordinarily she avoided it and everything to do with midwifery and, by extension, Mary. Since Thomas, the two sisters had defaulted to distant politeness in their interactions, though neither of them ever mentioned it. An unspoken truce with unspoken rules.

Mary stood and motioned Jenny in, and Jenny paused to admire the baby asleep in the bed beside Bonnie before drawing Mary to the window, where she fell into her arms.

Jenny had been crying. Thomas was going to war. Did Mary think the war would last beyond three months?

Like an actor on a stage, Mary deflected self, her usual and instinctive response to need.
Do not mention your regard for Thomas; do not admit it
. The sudden intimacy surprised her. It was unlike Jenny to seek her out for solace. They were unpracticed at it, and Mary could feel a latent resistance in her sister’s body, even as they embraced. She looked over her sister’s head outside, to the dark street, which was as still as death.

The baby stirred and Mary pulled Jenny into the hallway. Sitting on the top of the stairs together in the light of a single candle burning in a wall sconce, the sisters marveled. Always astonishment, the world over, when one is affected by upheaval. We are bored by the familiar, but terrified by the unfamiliar. The added lament: Christian, too, was leaving.

“Our hearts will break,” Jenny said.

Mary didn’t want to think of her brother at war. He was asleep now behind his bedroom door, where she wanted him to stay, safe and protected. As strained as her relationship was with her sister, her relationship with Christian was as easy as if they were mother and son. No competition, only joy. But now, with their full skirts gathered around their ankles, whispering like they used to when they were younger and shared the same bed, Mary felt a thaw between herself and Jenny, and the veil of night working on her, inviting disclosure.