My Name Is Mary Sutter

by Robin Oliveira

  James Blevens, who had come to conquer bullet holes and shattered limbs, but was instead camp supervisor of hygiene and sewerage, and also, apparently, military salutations, musicianship, literacy, and gastronomy, sighed and said, “The surgeon does.”

  Chapter Nine

  The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Station in Washington City squatted mere steps from the Capitol building, but the shabby wooden structure teemed with hustlers and pickpockets. The trip from Albany had taken Mary more than thirty hours. She had grown confused at the pier in Manhattan City until a hack driver helped her find the ferry to Jersey City. The train had overnighted at the depot in Philadelphia, and Mary had had to sleep sitting up in her seat. Near Baltimore, the train had slowed and stopped so that the engineer could walk the tracks ahead to make certain the rails had not been torn up. As Mary disembarked, she thought that no delivery she had ever attended had been as exhausting as sitting in that humid train car, en route to the rest of her life. Now moist heat billowed through the depot doors left open to the street; a horde of people, horses, and carriages crowded a wide, circling avenue. Mary gathered herself. Just one more hurdle, she thought, and then she would be there. She elbowed through the crowd and hailed a hack from the line of cabs and directed its driver to take her to the corner of New York Avenue and 14th Street.

  The capital was unexpectedly seedy, a cross between a swamp and Versailles. Rare islands of marbled grace reared up between linked villages of squatting shanties, vacant lots, rollicking taverns, and slovenly grocers. Squalid creeks and deep gutters formed moats around the fine and unsightly both. Even the receding Capitol building itself, viewed as Mary twisted her head in search of something to admire, disappointed. Under a pale sky blunted by heat, it towered upon its hill, a skeletal dome awaiting marble blocks, looking like the Union itself, gutted and uncertain. As the hack traversed a long angled avenue of broken cobbles and rutted tracks, the driver became a tour guide: here is this, here is that. The Saint Charles Hotel. City Hall. In between, muddy hog wallows and seedy ruin. The avenue made a turn: here is the Treasury, here is the Mansion. Set behind an iron railing, the president’s house needed a new coat of paint and a gardener.

  “That will be a quarter dollar. It costs more for the tour,” the hack driver said, grinning, pleased with his larceny when he stopped a few blocks later at a row of new town houses on a street like Dove Street, with slate sidewalks and stone stairs and windowsills of granite. Mary knew it was more than she should have paid, but the similarity to home boded well and so she handed over the exorbitant fare, glad to finally have reached her destination.

  The maid who answered the door was crisply capped and insolently aired and she sniffed as she inspected Mary’s travel-stained clothes. Mary touched her hand to her hair, twisted into wildness by the humidity. It occurred to her that she should have taken a room at a hotel and made an appointment, but it was too late now.

  “I’m here to see Miss Dix.”

  “Miss Dix is not seeing anyone today,” the maid said.

  “But I’ve come a long way—”

  The maid shut the door. She was worse even than the hissing clerk at Albany Medical College, who had at least received Mary’s initial visits with amused courtesy. Mary turned on the stoop, hoping that the hack was still at the curbside, but he had gone, and the long street now looked unwelcoming. She had just started down the stairs when the door reopened and the maid said, “Follow me.”

  Dorothea Dix was sitting in a low armchair in the bay window of her town house. Though it was warm, no one could accuse this woman of a lack of decorum or of surrendering standards to the Washington swelter. She wore a black, long-sleeved, high-collared dress fastened with a white rosette. Her black hair was parted in the middle and collected in a low bun at her neck. She had been shuffling papers, but she extended a long, bony hand and waved Mary in.

  “How do you do? I am Miss Dorothea Dix.” She said her name with a strong emphasis on the vowels, as if she were pronouncing it carefully for someone to get the spelling right. “Please sit down. You came, I see, from the train?”

  Mary managed a wan smile to cover her embarrassment. “Please forgive me. Forgive my appearance,” she said. She stumbled over her words, her fatigue conspiring with the heat. She thought how she must appear, and fought for composure. “Perhaps I should have engaged a hotel,” she said. She settled into a velvet armchair next to Miss Dix, acutely conscious of the dirt and perspiration that sullied her dress. It did not help that a forest of potted ferns emanated a mossy scent that somehow intensified the oppressive heat. Nor did it help that she was now two days into her journey, a trip she had thought would last fourteen hours at the most. Not a drop of sweat, however, glistened on Miss Dix’s high forehead.

  “I brought them with me,” Miss Dix said, referring to the armchairs. “You cannot buy anything in Washington to compare.”

  They were as alike as women could be. Each sat with her hands folded, ankles crossed, demonstrating a certain discipline about backs not touching the seat. One woman was small, one was large. Neither was beautiful to look at. The world would have looked at them and thought, Odd.

  Miss Dix studied her guest. She appeared to be in that category of women who, by their lack of aesthetic appeal, appeared ageless and would remain so for the rest of their lives, while the fairer of their sex would wilt into decay. Miss Dix shifted her pile of papers with a noncommittal nod of her head and drew out a blank sheet. Dipped pen in hand, she said, “Your name?”

  “Mary Sutter.”

  “May I see your letters of recommendation?”

  “I have none,” Mary said.

  Miss Dix laid down her pen. This woman was her first applicant, and she had no idea what to do now that the woman didn’t have references. Character was everything. A letter from home, preferably written by a minister or a church deacon, would back up her judgment and silence her critics. She wanted no more visits from the senator. And the truth was, she’d been wrong about people before. She still suffered haunting memories of the one man about whom she’d been most wrong. Her engagement to Edward Bangs had been brief. She frequently wondered what would have become of her had they married. Sidelined, strapped to a house and children. Certainly she would not be here, indecisive herself, wheedling about references. “You wish to work in the army as a nurse?”

  “I do.”

  “And on what basis am I to hire you if you do not provide me with letters? These are essential. Surely you know this.”

  “I have none,” Mary said. She’d been in such a hurry to leave Albany that somehow the issue of references had seemed an unnecessary impediment to her escape. “But I am very qualified.”

  “I published that circular two days ago, Miss Sutter. You came very quickly. I did expect that you would send references first. I specifically stated that references were required.”

  “I came out of urgency,” Mary said.

  Miss Dix understood that sense of urgency. She had felt it herself, carried away on a wave of anticipation not unlike the men’s eagerness for guns and battle. At sixty, Miss Dix felt as if she knew things that no one else knew, cared about things that no one else did. This understanding was both a blessing and a curse. She had seen the worst that one human being could do to another. The insane handcuffed to bedrails, fed almost nothing. Men accused of crimes kept in filth for days, dying for lack of water. She entirely agreed with Miss Nightingale that improved sanitary conditions for the sick would improve this war for everyone, if war could ever be improved. Miss Dix had felt it so keenly that she had talked her way right into this moment: choosing the first nurse for hospitals that were already burgeoning with the sick. They had already opened so many. Every public building in Washington, it seemed, was overflowing with men suffering from measles, mumps, and dysentery.

  “Miss Sutter. I imagine there will be many more applicants who will conceal from me their true reasons for their desire to become a nurse. Some will be chasing their beaux. I
s this your sense of urgency?”

  How could Mary explain what she wanted? That she had come to be a surgeon? Indeed, in the thirty-six hours that she had been traveling, she had begun to question her own reasons for running here. She had a feeling Miss Dix wouldn’t understand any of it.

  “I am well acquainted with the sick room,” Mary began. “I am a midwife. I have delivered over fifty babies.” Mary almost added, A significant number given my age, but age was another of Miss Dix’s rigid requirements, and she did not wish to give this woman another reason to dismiss her.

  “There will be cleaning and laundry and cooking,” Miss Dix said. “Distasteful and difficult work which must be borne without complaint and will be best performed by women who do not think they are above other nurses because they have more experience.” Miss Dix’s voice, while sharp, had an acuity that made it seem as if she was on the verge of dismissing Mary outright.

  “You misunderstand me. I would do anything required of me,” Mary said.

  “In my circular, I also specified a certain age, which you obviously have not yet reached. I’m afraid, Miss Sutter, that you have traveled to Washington for nothing.”

  No marble hall, no muttering clerk, nothing but a diminutive sixty-year-old woman in a black frock.

  “If we had met in the street, you would have thought me thirty,” Mary said.

  “I have established strict rules for a reason, Miss Sutter. Age has a way of molding a person that will be advantageous in the extreme circumstances in which my nurses will find themselves.”

  “But I have come all the way from Albany. Surely the distance traveled is worth consideration.”

  “The surgeons are already furious. They say no woman will pass the doors of any army hospital. I have battles ahead, and I do not wish to have to defend any youthful indiscretions.”

  “But I am qualified,” Mary said.

  “Miss Sutter, no man in the army is going to have a baby.” Logic of a specific, narrow kind. Aren’t deliveries enough for you? And there was the matter of the expectant Jenny. Somehow, it was more than Mary could bear. Don’t be foolish, she told herself. You did not flee, you advanced.

  Both women said, “I need—” and stopped. The maid was intruding with the tea tray. She was pleased to see Miss Dix in an attitude of refusal, her bothersome guest on edge. The maid took too much time arranging the milk and sugar. Miss Dix waved an impatient wrist, and the gleeful maid floated away with an air of victory.

  Miss Dix said, “I need to establish precedent.”

  Miss Sutter said, “I need to stay.”

  Miss Dix recognized her twin in Miss Sutter, but instinctively, perversely, pressed for authority more than affinity, as siblings sometimes do. The elder, to the younger: “You do not understand what will be asked of you.”

  “I am not here on a whim, Miss Dix.”

  Miss Dix opened her hands. She was confident, as she would never again be, in her judgment. Within days, she would be besieged by hundreds of young women. But at this moment, she pictured the future in a certain way and was confident she could control it. “You shouldn’t have gone to the trouble of coming.”

  “Yes, coming here was trouble. It was a great deal of trouble.” Mary, unfurling. Any member of her family would have recognized the signs. A certain straightening of the spine, the impression of a gathering storm. All sense of supplication evaporating, though her next utterance did resemble a question. “May I ask? Is it true that you are a friend of Miss Nightingale’s?”

  Miss Dix preened, ashamed and delighted that the war had brought her such quick celebrity. “I am greatly pleased to be acquainted with Miss Nightingale. I made a visit to Europe in order to meet her.”

  “Would you have considered Miss Nightingale incapable of her work in the Crimea before she went, merely because she was young?”

  In all of Miss Dix’s preparations, she had pictured complaisant, polite women of a certain age, widows perhaps, seeking to devote themselves to the dear boys. Dependent upon her for courage. Instead, she found insolence. Youth. “When Miss Nightingale went to the Crimea, she was thirty-four years old.”

  “But I believe she was twenty-four when she began nursing.”

  Miss Dix and Mary Sutter sat opposed, each armed with facts. Outside, a wagon clattered by on the new cobbles. The tea cooled in its pot.

  “But we are speaking of a war,” Miss Dix said, stating the irrefutable fact.

  “You cannot possibly be as intractable as you make yourself out to be,” Mary said.

  On the contrary, Miss Dix thought, she had accomplished everything in her life by being intractable.

  “If I may say, Miss Sutter, you are, as a person, a great deal of trouble,” Miss Dix said, then remembered that the same complaint had been uttered about her by the mayor of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, when she built a lunatic hospital in his city.

  “I have hopes,” Mary said, whispering.

  “Everyone has hopes, Miss Sutter. This does not earn them a position as a nurse.”

  As the gloating maid ushered Mary out, it occurred to Dorothea Dix that as a young woman, had she been going to have a baby, she would have liked very much to have seen that able young woman come purposefully through the door, intent upon helping her.

  Chapter Ten

  You see, it is a war.

  The war will keep you from everything. Except, of course, me. Us. Those deemed suitable for volunteering for a war in which few shots had yet been fired.

  Mary stopped at the bottom of the town house stairs, her bag clutched to her side, fatigue in full assault, looking from right to left, trying to decide where she should go, as a new film of dirt and sweat coated her face. A long line of soldiers passed by, drilling in uniform down the dusty street, heading toward the Mansion whose parapets she could just see over the roofs of the busy street. Why had she not seen this evidence of the war as she had traveled in from the train station? Here the city thrummed and rumbled with life, and boys as young as fourteen and fifteen were armed with not just drum, but musket.

  Yet you are not thirty, which I have decided is the minimum possible age for any female to involve herself in a war.

  Mary resolved to find a hotel, to prove herself capable of at least that, when, for the first time in a long time, she felt herself incapable, unseated and disoriented, not only by travel, but by Miss Dix’s implacable resistance. It was Sumter all over again, when James Blevens had said, simply, No. He was going to the war, was in fact here, somewhere, along with Thomas and Christian, but Mary wasn’t allowed. She had recovered herself, and was on the verge of setting out in search of a cab, when a young man who had been nimbly working his way down the street stopped at the bottom of the stairs and said, “How do you do? Have you just come from seeing Miss Dix?”

  There was something about him, though Mary couldn’t say what, that made her ask, “Can you tell me of a good place to stay?”

  The man removed his hat, revealing wetted hair, parted on the left, youth, and a forehead that looked already well acquainted with worry.

  “The Willard Hotel is good,” he said, “but I suppose—” He stopped, appraising her dishevelment, but not impolitely. “You might try Mrs. Surratt’s Boarding House on E Street.” He spun around and pointed through a wall of buildings. “But you would need a cab.”

  “I need only a room and privacy.”

  “Then the Willard. A couple of Vermonters have done good work there. Shall I walk you?”

  “Thank you, but no.”

  He stepped aside as Mary started down the street. “I do beg your pardon,” he said, “but did you say whether or not Miss Dix is in?”

  Mary turned back. “She is. Though what good it will do you, I have no idea.”

  “Is that so?”

  “She is in charge of the war.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “How very interesting. May I introduce myself? I am John Hay,” he said. “Secretary to the p
resident. I am certain Mr. Lincoln will be delighted that he is no longer in charge.”

  “Then would you tell the president something for me, please?”

  “I would be delighted to,” Hay said, suppressing a sigh. Daily, he went about his errands, retrieving tooth powder or fetching soup for the president, only to return from the streets with a dozen messages, rarely urgent and often ridiculous. Just let ’em go. What good is the South anyway? Nothing but cotton growers and pickaninnies.

  “Would you please tell the president that Miss Dix is turning women away?” Mary felt great shame in tattling, but she was tired and hungry.

  John Hay felt oddly vindicated. He had told the president that it had been a bad idea from the start to appoint Miss Dix. Now he took stock of the young woman before him, who was as tall as he was, sturdily built, not beautiful, but compelling all the same. “You wish to become a nurse?”

  Mary had the feeling of being once again a specimen. Gathering her pride, she cried, “Why do people think it is such an odd desire?”

  “I don’t. Not at all.” He assessed her, his gaze raking her body, but not impolitely. “May I escort you please? You look very unwell.”

  Mary shrugged and gave in, and, bowing, Hay took her by the elbow and walked her toward Pennsylvania Avenue, which they crossed. They followed a street next to the Mansion until they reached a set of grand stairs rising to the entrance of the Willard Hotel. He tipped his hat and said, “May I ask your name?”

  “Miss Mary Sutter.”

  “May I say, Miss, that it will not be good, not any of it.”

  She knew he meant the war. War. Warning. Warned. The words rattled around in her head. She was on the edge of feeling.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to be rude. I’ve come a long way, and now—” She held up her hands in apology.