My Name Is Mary Sutter (6 page)

Mary told Thomas she was headed to Cottage Farm, to the Aspinwalls’.

Thomas raised a mocking eyebrow. “The manufacturing king? So you’re delivering royalty?”

“Of course not. Every woman is royal when she is having a child, whether her family owns a brass foundry or not. No one should be without good care, no one. When I become a physician, I will open my doors to everyone—” She stopped. She was being combative, when Jenny would beguile. “Everyone deserves the same care and help.”

“I know what you meant.”

Thomas navigated the narrow alley and the riotous traffic on the city streets with an assured hand, driving past the clatter and boom of the Lumber District, the hiss of the ironwork’s open forges, the Irish taverns and the city liveries. On the Erie Canal, the mule drivers sang while they waited for the locks to fill, their songs drifting on the autumn air.

At the base of the Loudon Plank Road, the young Palmer boy saw Mary and turned the barricading pike without requesting payment of the toll.

To Thomas’s astonished inquiry, Mary said, “Midwives travel without charge.”

Two dozen cattle lumbered through, coming south from Saratoga. The Palmer son collected an exit levy of forty cents from the farmer driving them to the river, which they would swim. They would then climb the embankment to the Hudson River Railroad depot and entrain for Manhattan and their slaughter in the city’s abattoirs.

“You just saved me twenty-five cents,” Thomas said. “Tell Dr. Marsh. He’ll admit you to the medical school as a cost-saving measure. Of course, you’ll have to accompany him wherever he goes. You’ll be a scandal.”

Mary laughed. No one teased her, not even her mother. He was easy, she thought, when everyone else was so hard. “I don’t think Dr. Marsh has to pay.”

“I would charge him, just for keeping you waiting.” (He had asked whether or not she’d received word yet almost as soon as they had turned down State Street; when she told him she had not, Thomas denounced Marsh as a pigheaded dimwit.)

Under the carriage wheels, the road planks thumped pleasantly. A heavy scent of ripe persimmons and apples wafted from the orchards of the Van Rensselaer lands that stretched westward all the way to the New York Central Railroad yards. The orchards brimmed with wagons and pickers placing red and green apples into bushels; flat persimmon crates burst with purpled fruit. A flock of sheep swelled toward Mary and Thomas, who veered into a grove of cherry trees to allow the beasts to pass. (Pleased with their frolic, the sheep too were ambling toward their deaths, unknowing.) Autumn had burned fire into the trees; the canopy above shone like a stained window. The sheep were an aggregate mass, a vast, woolly cloud drifting down the road; the air, the clack and bleat of the animals, the laughter from the fields eased Mary back into memories of her childhood. Her youth and his, while separate, had both been spent here. They had this in common.

“Where exactly is your family’s farm?” Mary asked.

“A mile or so past the Corners. I’ve been thinking about you since we last talked,” Thomas said. Offhanded, but he met her gaze and held it.

And I you
, she wanted to say, but could not. The language of courting was not her language. Jenny would tilt her head, invite more confessions with a smile. Mary, who could coax reluctant babies from unwilling bodies, could not now coax words of flirtation from her mouth. Would that Thomas would ask her instead about the physical workings of the heart, its struts and valves, the music of the blood that swished through an infant’s heart when she pressed her monaural stethoscope to a woman’s belly. She grasped at the shepherd’s arrival with desperation. “See now, the flock has passed.”

Thomas looked away. Languid, his movement, but Mary thought she detected disappointment. Recovery seemed impossible. (The brief swoon of a mother after delivery, when her body gave in to the shock.) Thomas took up the reins and reentered the road, but looked at her once again. “I did not take you for being bashful.”

“Not bashful. Rather, unpracticed.” Now, thank God, her reluctant tongue.

“But you are such a courageous woman.”

He would steal language itself from her. She turned to hide her blush.

Around a bend, Cottage Farm hurried up to them, and Mary cursed the efficient road.

Thomas helped her down, but retained her elbow in his and walked her toward the door, which flung open, revealing the Aspinwall son-in-law. He was young, recently married; his beard struggled to make a statement of age, but failed. “She’s early, she’s early, you must come, I was about to saddle to ride to you.” (An early baby, yes, but the infant would be fully formed. A miracle, everyone would say.)

Thomas handed Mary her bag, and his hand lingered in hers. The son-in-law looked from one to the other, recognized the symptoms, and would have left them alone, for he too had suffered such an attraction (which had earned him a swift marriage and a premature baby), but his wife—would he ever get used to saying that?—had already frightened everyone with her screams.

“Please, you must come now; she might die.”

Mary put her hand to the young man’s forearm and soothed. An essential element of midwifery was mastering the art of distracting fathers, husbands, and brothers from their alarm. And women, too. Mortality was the ever-present companion of women brought to bed, to say nothing of the myriad postpartum ailments: childbed fever, prolapsed uteri, and fistulae. Peril was Mary’s working conversation. “Could you help me? It would save time if you could carry my bag inside, and clear a table so that I might lay out my things. I’ll be right in.”

The promise and the nonspecificity of
things
seemed to assuage him, and he took her bag and dashed up the steps to the house, calling, “She’s here, she’s here!”

“See how everyone wants you?” Thomas said, smiling, and then one by one tugged on the fingertips of her glove, and then slowly pulled it off, turned her hand over in his. “May I come by on my way home this evening and ask for you?”

Mary pictured being called to the door, just for five minutes even, to say hello, imagined the surge of pleasure, double, perhaps triple the anticipation she felt now. How easy to forget, with his calloused hand in hers, the labor that was waiting her attendance. To breathe, for a moment, in ease, as Jenny might.

“I am sorry, but I cannot allow it.” But even as Mary spoke, she wanted to snatch the words back. What would Jenny have said instead?
Oh, it would please me so much, but I’m terribly sorry, our next visit will have to wait for another day. When I get home, perhaps?
Ensuring both that they would see one another again, and that Thomas would think it was his idea. But it was too late to say those words. A wave of futility came over Mary, even as she worried about the laboring girl. Mary had been home for a
week.
Why hadn’t Thomas called for her then?

He looked from Mary to the house and withdrew his hand. “Of course. I apologize.”

It’s nothing
, she wanted to say. But it wasn’t nothing. Nearby, a chestnut dropped from the grove of trees, its spiky shell splitting open with a thud when it hit the ground. She thought,
He is done with me.

And then Thomas was gone, striding toward the wagon. The cant of his shoulders made Mary feel suddenly cold, as if autumn had turned to winter in a moment. She took in everything as he swung onto the seat: his muscled forearms clutching the reins, his cheeks, clean-shaven in the morning, now shadowed, his gaze, set resolutely ahead.

“Perhaps if you were to send someone for me when you are finished here? I could drive you home. Would that be acceptable?” he asked.

An arc of sunlight struck the firm contours of his body, and for a moment Mary thought she could see right through to his heart.

“Yes,” she said. “Entirely acceptable.”

And then he turned onto the road toward the Corners, and the stand of chestnut trees hid him from her sight.

After a mild labor of only ten hours, the Aspinwall girl produced a healthy son of small size at midnight, a feat that boded faster and faster deliveries in her future. The girl recovered well, and was even able to leave her bed on the third day and walk across the room without any help, despite a small tear that Mary treated with cold compresses. The entire clan of Aspinwall sisters, aunts, and friends, including the girl’s mother, who herself had been delivered of a baby only the year before, were on hand to provide attentive care. After assuring herself that the girl showed no signs of childbed fever—no chills, discharge, or lassitude—Mary sent a note to Thomas, along with word to her mother that not only had the birth gone well, but that Thomas Fall had offered to bring her home.

Thomas drove first north up the Loudon Plank Road, and then east down Menands Road toward a small lake hidden in a thicket of poplars. He helped Mary out of the carriage and down the treed slope to the edge of the water. The late afternoon air was tinged with woodsmoke; the surrounding trees concealed them from the road.

“This was my favorite place as a boy. In the winter, my father shoveled snow from the frozen surface, and we ice-skated until our toes and fingers were numb. I caught round-fish and chased bullfrogs here in the summers. It seems smaller now, though.” He looked about wistfully (as former children do), nostalgic for the irretrievable past. “Did your family ever come here?” he asked.

The Sutters hadn’t. The small lake was unimpressive, as lakes went, better considered a pond, and certainly nothing like Lake George, where Mary and her family had once taken a summer excursion.

Thomas brought a horse blanket from the carriage and spread it on the grass near a small outcrop of dying bulrushes. They had very little time before the sun’s warmth faded and they would have to leave. Mary forced herself to focus on a series of ripples emanating from a shallow spot in the middle of the pond.

“Are you always so long at a lying-in?” Thomas asked.

The question accelerated Mary’s already high regard for Thomas. Most men could hardly bring themselves to say
lying-in
, let alone
brought to bed
, and certainly never
pregnant
. “Actually, that stay was very brief. I usually stay a week.”

He whistled and said, “What a life you have set for yourself.”

“My mother was able to marry.”

Thomas did not answer, and Mary flushed and hurried to her feet, cursing herself for having leapt to the ultimate question, which had sprung from some buried place to betray her. “Forgive me. I must be exhausted.” She could not look at him, but compelled herself to, to thwart awkwardness. “Please, could you take me home?”

Thomas rose and folded the blanket, his expression a combination of concern and something else she could not discern. Disdain, probably.

“I’m not usually so outspoken,” she said. “You must forgive me.”

A bemused, tender smile crossed his face. He drew close, out of mercy or desire, the air between them suddenly turning.

Mary thought,
He might kiss me
; she had to fight to keep still, to not lean in and invite the intimacy.

Thomas thought,
She requires forgiveness for candor; is vulnerable, but only in love
. A contradiction that intrigued. Her mind had already voyaged to the frontier and was unafraid. But all he had anticipated so far was the leisure of time, entertaining but not yet subscribing to the possibility of a mutually interesting life.

He thought,
She is near enough to kiss
(would allow it, he believed), but he was not ready to decide.

“If I may,” Thomas said. “I want to tell you with what respect I regard you. You are someone extraordinary, someone exceptional.”

It was a gift, this compliment, but even in her pleasure Mary could only think that worship was dangerous, for it established irrevocable boundaries.

He helped her into the carriage. They followed the road down to the river and then the canal towpath that offered an unobstructed view of the river, with the river schooners’ sails like clouds, and the distant hills aflame in orange and scarlet, but nothing could dislodge Mary’s sense that something had changed. On the towpath, Thomas had to maneuver around the tethered mule teams crowding the approach to the locks before the Albany Basin. From the barges wafted the scents of stagnant water and the acrid smell of anthracite carried in their hulls; the high bank to the west only partially obscured the ugliness of Arbor Hill and Broadway.

At the Lumber District, Thomas turned off the path and onto Quay Street and then veered up Maiden Lane, avoiding the parade that was State Street. As they crested the top of the hill, the shadows of evening had already encroached, and glimmers of candlelight and whale oil broke from the windows of the medical school. The park where they had sat on a bench only a week before was a mere silhouette.

When they arrived in the alley behind the house, the homely approach signaled familiarity, neighbors having had an outing. In the mullioned window of the Sutter house, a curtain slipped aside, revealing Jenny’s blonde hair. A wedge of light spilled out the back door, followed by the door slamming and Jenny appearing at the gate.

“Mother says you are to invite our neighbor in for a meal.”

Thomas’s gaze alighted on Jenny and lingered.

There was nothing else for Mary to do. She said, “Thomas Fall, may I present my twin sister, Jenny.”

Mary could see him making the comparison, not unlike everyone else who ever heard the word
twin
in the presence of the two of them. The envy she thought she had mastered years ago opened inside her, swelling and pressing against her diaphragm, making it hard to breathe while she tallied which of her inadequacies stood out the most: her posture, her bone structure, her chin, or her hair. Thomas bowed slightly, a courtly gesture, and then said, “Forgive me. This is very kind of your mother, but my mother and father expect me at home tonight. However, please thank your mother for the invitation, as it would be my deepest pleasure to accept it for another time.” And then he smiled at them both and raised his hat, but there was something magnetic about the way he ignored Jenny as he led his horse into the carriage house.