My Name Is Mary Sutter Read Free Page B

asked.
    “I don’t know. He ran in with her and then left.” Blevens looked around the room as if the boy might suddenly appear.
    “But where will she go?”
    Blevens shrugged. His rooms were not made for keeping patients overnight.
    “If you like, I can take her home with me. My mother and I have a lying-in room. She can stay with us until she’s recovered.”
    He protested, and Mary shook it off as if it were nothing, but James Blevens knew it wasn’t nothing. The girl and her husband were poor farmers. James had surmised that much when the boy had dropped Bonnie off. They would never be able to pay for any care, not even room and board. Her offer was very generous, more generous than James had any right to expect given that she had been called in at the last minute. But now he recalled the earlier confusion.
    “Miss Sutter, what was it you wanted from me this afternoon?”
    Mary wiped her hands on her ruined skirts. Her birthing apron was at home, along with the rest of her medicine, rubber sheets, scissors, and rags. “You have already seen me turn a child. I am just as skilled with a previa, or twins. But I want more. I want to study. I want to know more about anatomy, physiology. The something I cannot see.” It was the speech she had meant for Dr. Marsh. She began to speak in a rush, the words tumbling out. “For instance, the problem of why some women seize in labor. I know that headaches and light sensitivity precede it, but do they trigger it? Is it like other seizure disorders? I know that sometimes it’s caused by a rapid revolution of blood to the head, or a too severely felt labor, but why? I was reading in The Process of Parturition— ”
    Dr. Blevens swiveled to look at his bookshelf and then turned back to her. “Aren’t deliveries enough for you?”
    Mary’s gaze was covetous. “I want to understand everything ,” she said. “Isn’t it all connected? Isn’t the body a system? How can I understand a part if I do not understand the whole?”
    Mary recognized Blevens’s look: the tilting of the head, the gaze of incredulity. Why was she always such a surprise to people? In her childhood her father had often greeted her questions—Is the Hudson’s tidal nature a detriment or a help to transportation? What is the height of the world’s largest mountain? What is the true nature of the earth’s center?—with exhalations of astonishment.
    “Miss Sutter, what precisely do you want?”
    “I want to become a doctor. The Albany Medical College won’t admit me. I want you to teach me.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Many fine doctors have only apprenticed—”
    “Miss Sutter—”
    “Consider what you just saw, what I just did for you. I work hard. You would not be disappointed. And I could teach you midwifery!” This is it, Mary thought. I have to convince this man .
    Blevens could understand the young woman’s enthusiasm for medicine, and he wondered now what William Stipp would make of her. She was nearly as windblown and desperate as Blevens had been a decade ago, when he had accosted Stipp much the way Miss Sutter was accosting him now.
    Blevens sighed and said, “I am terribly sorry, but what you propose is impossible.”
    “It is not impossible.”
    “It is. I’m going to enlist. They’ll need surgeons.”
    “But you don’t know what will happen. You don’t know. Maybe this is the end, maybe it’s all over—”
    “Have you gone mad? The war has just started!”
    The baby began to cry and James Blevens cursed. They had been whispering, trying not to disturb Bonnie.
    Blevens said, “I am most grateful to you today for your help, and I will pay you, but I cannot—”
    “But you can ,” Mary said. “Dr. Blevens, if you take me on—”
    He heaved a sigh. “Miss Sutter, even if there were no war, and we were to do this, you would have no lectures. No dissecting lab. You would see no surgeries except the sporadic ones I perform here. And then when I finished teaching