My Name Is Mary Sutter (7 page)

Less than a week later, Thomas Fall knocked at the Sutter door. He was clutching his hat in his hands, a look of pain and despair on his face.

“Is your sister here?”

“Mary is away,” Jenny said. Having been summoned to the door by the maid, she was at first delighted to see him, then disappointed when she understood it was Mary he wanted. “Is something the matter?”

He cupped his hand to his mouth.

“Oh. Please. Are you all right? What is the matter?”

“My parents.” His voice broke and he doubled over, placing his palms on his knees.

Jenny coaxed Thomas into the parlor and called for a maid to send for the Episcopal priest. Then she poured Thomas a glass of whiskey, which he could not hold steady in his hands. She took the glass from him and set it on the table. Outside, the day was burgeoning. Inside, the clock’s pendulum struck ten. A maid brought a tray of tea, spied the whiskey, and quickly retreated. Only when the Episcopal priest arrived did Jenny learn that a constable had knocked on Thomas’s door to report that his parents, on their way to Ireland’s Corners for the day, had collided with a runaway rig on Broadway. After the priest had prayed and left, she sat beside him on the divan, her hands in her lap, waiting, reliving her own grief, remembering what it was to feel the firmament slide away from you.

When Mary and Amelia returned at noon, they found Jenny and Thomas still huddled in the parlor. They had passed the scene on the way home and spared Thomas the details of the tangled carriages, the broken axle, the chestnut horse suffering in the street, and the drunken carriage driver sitting stunned in the gutter as the coroner’s black-draped wagon swayed past with its burden. Mary, exhausted from the delivery they had just attended—unlike the ease of the Aspinwall delivery, the child had died at birth—had nonetheless wanted to leap from their carriage to run up State Street. But here in the parlor, Thomas’s grief had already found comfort. Mary, usurped, lowered herself to the couch, a hand to her heart, but no one noticed.

This time, Thomas was made to stay to dinner.

Amelia probed over the soup. “Of course, your parents made plans?”

“I don’t know.”

What child listens?
Amelia thought.
Or what spouse?
The end is unimaginable, therefore not to be imagined.

“You will allow me to help you.” Amelia was past asking questions. She had another child now; in Thomas’s eyes she saw the same helplessness as she had in Jenny’s when Mary had descended the stairs, saying,
Father has died
, and she, Amelia, had looked into Jenny’s eyes and seen the searing likeness of her own anguish.

“I will host the reception. And you must eat with us every day. You cannot be alone in that house.”

Alone in that house.
Jenny sprang from the table to retrieve a handkerchief. All that was left for Mary to do was to whisper to the maid to pour their guest another glass of whiskey.

The Falls had not made plans, it turned out. At the funeral, the Sutters sat with Thomas. He was young, at twenty-two, to be left alone without uncle or aunt or cousin to help him. St. Peter’s echoed with the sounds of the organist’s mistakes. Amelia apologized for the false notes, but Thomas did not seem to notice. Amelia had chosen the Albany Rural Cemetery and arranged for a hearse to ferry the caskets up the Menands Road, with its restorative view of the Hudson River. The Falls’ graves adjoined Nathaniel’s; neighbors forever now. At the reception afterwards, the servants laid hams, cheeses, breads, and nuts on the Sutter dining-room table; black crepe draped every picture, balustrade, and door handle of the two houses. Thomas Fall drifted from one grieving circle of his parents’ friends to another.

But it was to Jenny, with her calm demeanor and ease with his distress, to whom he turned in the days afterwards.

Thomas Fall called often for Jenny after that. A smile for Mary, but an invitation for Jenny. He did not mean to be cruel; it was not so much a choice as it was affinity. In his grief, Jenny would not ask too much of him, while Mary, who had showed such courage after her father’s death, might expect similar strength of him.

“Did you ask Thomas to dinner?” Mary asked her mother one day, lowering the curtain as Thomas once more escorted Jenny down Dove Street, having been both congenial and kind to Mary while he waited for Jenny to appear in the parlor. “The night I came back from the Aspinwalls’?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Did you send Jenny out to invite Thomas in?”

“I don’t remember,” Amelia said, remembering very well. From labor to death, she thought, despite every moment at the breast, every reprimand, every tender tousle of hair, every fever fought, every night spent worrying, it came to this: you couldn’t protect your children from anything, not even from each other. “Mary, did anything happen between you and Thomas? Did he say something, insult you that day he offered you a ride home?”

“No,” Mary said. “He was more than polite.”

“You are certain?” Amelia asked.

“When am I ever not certain, Mother?”

“You know I am sorry.”

“Don’t be, Mother. He never promised me a thing.”

In the month following, Jenny and Thomas embarked upon walks, mostly heading west from Dove Street into the wilds that ran beyond the city. There was talk of making a park around a little lake between rocky outcroppings, like the great park Frederick Law Olmsted had designed for Manhattan. The Presbyterians might build a new church. Albany was expanding. The rumble of Southern discontent had provoked an Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln to fight Stephen A. Douglas for the presidency. Even November’s cold did not turn Jenny and Thomas from their rambles. They stooped to gather fallen horse chestnuts and fingered the curved surfaces in their pockets. Their grief was a shared bond, and they spent as much time together as they could, finding a soothing happiness in one another’s company. Life seemed, suddenly, too brief for either reticence or formalities. They needed one another. Of Mary, Jenny was unconcerned. Why, Mary and Thomas had only spoken with one another two or three times—hardly an understanding. And if Thomas preferred her to Mary, then what was she to do about it?

In December, Jenny persuaded Thomas to abandon the trails west of the city for the warmth and bustle of the quay and lower State Street. She drew Thomas with her along the granite pavers, dodging block-and-tackle loaders in the din of the thuds and whistles from the Lumber District. One afternoon, Thomas steered Jenny into the Delevan Hotel, where they settled into a pair of high-backed chairs next to the fireplace in the dining room. It was nearly four o’clock; Amelia and Mary had left that morning for East Albany to tend a birth, and Jenny and Thomas had spent the afternoon on the banks of the Hudson, watching sleds dash up and down the frozen river. Jenny pulled off her gloves, unwrapped her cream coat, and leaned back into her chair. The angles of her face were delicate, her skin so white she was nearly colorless. Even the blush the wind had brought out could not enliven her appearance of pale, cosseted beauty.

“Don’t you want to be a midwife, too?” Thomas asked, as a waiter brought tea.

Here,
Jenny thought,
is the question. Also, the end. He will tell me that he finds me high-spirited and pretty, but shallow.
“Do you perceive a fault in my not wanting to?” (A question of her own, in defense.)

“No. Not at all. But it seems the family occupation.”

“I am not like Mary. I am not nearly as clever as she is.” She preferred the definite, rather than the indefinite; in this again she was different from her twin, whose intelligence could easily tolerate the undefined.

“You are different from your sister, but it does not follow that you are less desirable.”

Jenny flung him a look, trying to discern. She had not yet permitted courting; she wanted Thomas’s affection to blossom from joy, not sorrow. Passion won in the hours of grief was cheating. But was it still the hour of grief? It was two months now since his father had died, three since hers. Once he had asked her,
Do you dream about your father?
She had told him that once in a dream she had discovered her father reading by a fireplace in the house across the street.
You’ve been here all this time?
she’d asked.

(She believed her father had loved her best, not knowing it was the clever parent’s trick to convince every child they were the most beloved.)

Thomas had dreamed the same dream, and believed not in the universality of the dream but in its singularity.

He leaned across the table and said, “Have I told you that you are the most beautiful girl I have ever seen?”

(Observed by other patrons in the high-ceilinged tearoom, Jenny’s grace and reticence forced admiration; Thomas’s youthfulness and ardor, an abundance of goodwill. The onlookers forgave them their lack of decorum because their preoccupation and beauty cheered them; they secretly feared they might never survive a future bereavement of their own.)

“You prefer beauty to cleverness?” Jenny pressed the point, because it seemed to her that sisterly betrayal demanded a firm foundation. And if Thomas wanted her, she had to know the terms. Beauty and grief, over time, would fade. A memory of shared anguish would be no match for the persistent glory of Mary’s intelligence.

Thomas Fall saw Jenny’s insecurity. He closed his hand around hers and said, “I prefer not beauty, but you.”

Chapter Three

After returning his horse and carriage to the livery on Pearl Street, James Blevens unlocked the door to his rented rooms in the Staats House and viewed his surroundings with eyes fresh from the ordered comfort of the Sutter home. His weekly maid despaired of his clutter. She flicked at his piles of books with her feather duster and suggested in her thick Irish accent that he might not want to ruin his eyes with so much reading. The memory of the old country was in her, as it was in him; these rooms were a step down. Coal dust and noise seeped in from the streets. But they were a step up from Manhattan, whose filth and cacophony James had fled for Albany. Good chairs, two of them, near the fireplace. A bedroom. Coved ceilings, wainscot, crown molding. Fine rooms, as hired rooms in Albany went. Enervated after his dinner with the Sutters, yet still alert, he laid his coat and hat on the bed to dry, lit a candle, and, after a brief toilette, set a microscope on the cluttered table.

From the velvet grooves of a mahogany case, James plucked a pair of tweezers, a rectangle of glass, a blade with a tortoiseshell handle, and a dropper. He removed from the pocket of his coat a small portion of the baby’s placenta wrapped in cheesecloth that he had cut away when Mary Sutter had been preoccupied with Bonnie. With the blade, he carved a paper-thin slice and mounted it on the rectangle of glass. He lit the small candle under the microscope’s stage and affixed the slide with the brass appendages. Fiddling with the focus, he peered into the lens until the edges of the image sharpened.

He was not unacquainted with cellular theory. In New York, he had studied Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck: “Every step which Nature takes when making her direct creations consists in organizing into cellular tissue the minute masses of viscous or mucous substances that she finds at her disposal under favorable circumstances.” Recently, he had spent an entire week engrossed in Darwin’s
Origin of Species
. That he attended the Presbyterian church on Sundays, where he worshipped out of obligation, did not trouble him. He had learned to divide himself between what he could do and what he could not do, in addition to what he could believe and what he could not believe. He had almost stayed in Manhattan City to do research, but had found compromise instead in Albany, in these hermit-like rooms and in private practice. Less than orderly, his research was meant to satisfy longing and curiosity. He was not intending to publish.

He bent over the microscope, taking in the faint outlines of life.

It was late when he finished; the clock on the bank tower having struck three o’clock a while before. What had he learned? That though the placenta was wholly different than any other organ—a tumor supported by the mother, disposable yet indispensable—its unique function was nonetheless imperceptible in the cell, as undifferentiated from any other cell he had studied.

Mary Sutter’s appeal:
Please, it is all I want.
Such an unusual request from so young a woman. How the extraordinary blossomed from the ordinary, though he suspected that Mary Sutter might have always been exceptional. He understood so little. If only one could take a microscope to a person in whole, not just in parts. What would he understand then? Perhaps his own life, with its peculiar introspective lens. His patients were puzzles to be solved, enigmas to be dissected. He could not look at a person without reading the curve of his spine, the meter of his breathing, without wondering about the condition of his internal organs. Before he knew it, his mind would race through the body’s systems, trying to detect just which deficiency hobbled them. He was, at all times, interested in life.

From outside came the distant rumble of a train rushing through Patroon Canyon: the New York City Railroad’s night train to Buffalo. Briefly, he wondered whether at the Sutter house the thunder was a nightly reminder of Nathaniel’s absence. His mother would have taken it so. The Blevens family had lived north of Manhattan City on a stretch of farmland the Hudson River Railroad would bisect within the decade. James had lived with his father, mother, two older brothers, and the ghosts of two dead babies, for his mother was a woman who could never forget. The family worked the fertile land and never once ventured southward into the large city that occasionally spat weary residents northward seeking respite from the grime. The family was aware of its good fortune: the land was good, their lives filled with work, and despite the occasional lamentations of their mother, the boys, immune to the hazards of maternal grief, lived a life unremarkable except for its lack of want. A life sublime, as lives went in those years; across the globe, good fortune was scarce. In Ireland, the potato crop had failed and famine was spreading; in Mexico, war was raging; in France, Napoléon III was escaping from the fortress of Ham.

But all of that changed one night in the middle of the spring thaw of 1846, when James was thirteen years old. Drawn by a strange noise, he left his sleeping brothers behind and opened the door to the dark hallway, where his father stood breathing like the bellows in a blacksmith shop. In a high rasp, his father said, “Get your mother.”

Skirting his father, James shook his mother awake. Together they coaxed his father back to bed, and only when he would not lie down, when he fought to stay sitting up, did his mother understand that what her husband was suffering from was no latent fever.

She whirled on James. “Get out! Get out!”

Terrified, he backed into his room, climbing into the bed he shared with his brothers. He lay awake, listening to his mother’s tearful entreaties for his father to take water, to take anything, to breathe, to
try
. The night crept on, dark and moonless. James nudged one of his brothers awake and tiptoed behind him to stand horrified at the door. Now both his mother and father lay slumped against the headboard, gasping and feverish. The lamp sent leaping shadows against the wall. James rubbed at his face with the back of his hand, wiping away his tears, looking to Jonathan, who always knew what to do: how to skin a deer, clean a musket, set a rabbit trap deep in the tangles of brush where the hares thought they were safe. But in the dim light of the lamp, Jonathan’s face had turned bloodless.

For the next two days, James did not eat. He sat at the doorstep of his parents’ room. Even in their suffering, his mother refused him entry, but James would not leave, not even at night, when he curled up in a quilt and dozed at their door. When their end came, two days later, there was a
rattle
, a snake-like, intermittent hissing. And then silence. He entered the room, pulling his quilt around him. He lit the welled sperm oil that had long ago smoked out. He touched his mother’s curled, gray hand. Her eyes, blunted and staring, her head at an angle, twisted. Her mouth, open. And across the back of her mouth, a thick, clotted, gray curtain.

His father’s throat was similarly occluded. Later, James would learn to recognize diphtheria in an instant, but that night he sank onto the bedclothes, still twisted and damp with sweat, and thought,
Why would the body grow something that would kill it?
The thought consumed him, even as he helped to bury his parents and incinerate the ruined bedclothes.

His parents’ deaths altered his sense of balance. James began to fear that life made no sense at all. It was not as if he was unacquainted with death. The soil had already accepted two brothers that his mother could not save from mumps. But a membrane? Made of what? And to what purpose had it grown? There was no doctor for miles, no one to explain the myriad vagaries that presented themselves. The tangle of life and death, so closely associated, fascinated him. He caught rabbits in the field and dissected them before he cooked them. He observed his brothers, watching for signs of mysterious, random assaults on their health. He collected dead animals and made a museum of them in the barn until his brothers, fed up, flung them out with a shovel and made him bury them.

In the winter of 1851, the year James turned eighteen, he sold a plow and left the crisp air of the country for the city. He took a room in a boarding house near the East River in Manhattan City and asked for directions to a hospital.

“You sick?” the clerk asked, snatching the pen away. “We don’t want no sick here.”

“I’m not sick.”

The suspicious clerk looked him up and down before he spat out directions to the New York College of Medicine and Bellevue Hospital. It took a week of haunting the hospital entryway for James to learn the names of the surgeons who were taking apprentices. One, a Dr. Stipp, seemed more inviting than the others. He was thirty-five, maybe, with a neat, combed beard and glasses perched on the end of an aristocratic nose. James followed Dr. Stipp home, running to keep up with his carriage, darting through the rain-swept streets, pulling his inadequate coat tight around his chin while he dodged the trash-filled gutters.

The housekeeper let James in when he knocked, dripping clothes and all, and retrieved Dr. Stipp from his brandy to come see the insistent boy at the door. The doctor led James to his study and sat behind his desk with a pipe in his hands and his eyebrows raised. The office, full of leather-bound books and a desk as wide as a kitchen table, was a room of such warmth and civility that James nearly did not pull from his sodden coat the dead cat he had just collected from the alley. It was newly deceased, dead of one of the many diseases that regularly slayed them. He unwrapped from its protective chamois cloth the butchering knife he had also hidden under his cloak, spread a newspaper across the doctor’s desk, and before the doctor could stay his hand, slit the cat open from chest to pubis.

Dr. Stipp lay down his pipe and pushed away from his desk, protesting.

“Before you stop me, if you would please just show me,” James said, expertly separating the jiggling yellow fat, carefully slitting the taut, opaque membrane, letting it curl back to reveal the organs underneath, so carefully arranged, a genius of a puzzle.

“Here,” James said, pointing the knife tip at the gizzard-like organ lying behind the stomach. “What is this? I think it must be for digestion, but I can’t imagine what it does.” He lifted the stomach with the knife. “You see, just under there? It has a tube, or a duct, and it feeds into this coil of gut here.” He looked up then, because Dr. Stipp had not spoken. The doctor’s hand had retreated to his vest pocket, but he was leaning over his desk, holding his smoking pipe aloft.

“Why, it’s the pancreas. A little different from ours, but not much.” The doctor moved closer. “And there, the liver. But that’s obvious.”

“But what does the pancreas do? Why is it there?”

The doctor stepped back, pursing his lips. “How many times have you done this?”

“Enough. I’ve got it pretty well figured out. But I don’t have any books.”

The doctor leaned over the table. “It’s easier if the animals have been dead longer, but this will do.” He poked his finger at the stomach. “Make the cut there. It will expose the organ without ruining your understanding.”

James made the cut.

“Yes, that’s it, but for God’s sake, don’t saw,” the doctor said.

They worked into the night, breaking for a dinner of beefsteak and potatoes and whiskey, served in the doctor’s elegant dining room by a maid wearing an apron of snow-white cotton and a cap of lace on her head. She and the doctor’s wife, Genevieve, seemed unfazed by this strange, wind-torn guest and his project in the front room. Afterwards, under the wavering flame of a single sperm lamp, the doctor and James worked until the digestive system of cats was no longer a puzzle for him.

Dr. Stipp installed James in an attic room in his home next to the East River. James’s education began the next day, and continued for a year. In addition to following the doctor from house to house, learning what he could, James twice attended the six-month run of courses at the medical college. It consisted of lectures in anatomy, with a cadaver on a table and the professor making cuts and explaining to the students, kept at a distance in their seats, what each revealed organ did. There were other courses in Surgery, Chemistry, Theory and Practice of Medicine, Institutes of Medicine and Materia Medica, and Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children. Never once, however, did James perform a surgery. Never once did he see general patients, at least not under the auspices of the college. That possibility presented itself only because James was apprenticed to Dr. Stipp. James was, by far, one of the luckiest, for not everyone taking the courses was given the opportunity to see a doctor in actual practice.

At first, James was just charged with carrying the doctor’s instruments in their leather case, but about a month after Dr. Stipp had taken him into his practice, he found himself ducking and darting down Worth Street, following Dr. Stipp on a call. Everything about Manhattan City—the noise, the filth, the traffic, the wailing of its street denizens—had battered James in the month since his arrival. An argument could be made that he was beginning to find his feet in this strange, clamoring place where the air bore no resemblance to the sweeter perfume not thirty miles north, but here in Five Points the dirt and crowding overwhelmed. The streets veered off at angles and the ramshackle tenements were peppered with advertisements for tailors, painters, oiled clothing, and every manner of commerce. Broken windows were stuffed with newspapers and rags against the cold. Grog houses, tanneries, bakeries, and houses shouldered up against one another; wooden stairs jutted from their windows to zigzag down to the street. Dr. Stipp avoided a block and tackle, its hook swinging wide out into the street, the crowds screaming and ducking, the children gleeful, running shoeless in the muddy puddles that collected in the sunken cobbles, the origin of which was best not contemplated. James dodged the great fishhook and scuttled after the doctor, surprised by the older man’s agility and confidence among the hustlers and harlots who thronged the streets. Over coffee that morning, Dr. Stipp had been eager:
What you’ll see today, you’ll see nowhere else; disease has an affinity for the broken.
After navigating a sinuous, seemingly nonsensical path—James was now hopelessly lost—Dr. Stipp darted down a narrow alley, where from the windows of a tavern drifted a plaintive Irish song. Five Points, for all its faults, was Ireland transplanted, absent the dales and green hills of which the patrons now sang melancholy and gorgeous tribute.