Winter Sisters Read online

  On Wednesday at noon, when the storm finally abated and a sheen of brilliant light flooded the city, the befuddled principal spilled forty-five poorly dressed and sickened children into five feet of glittering, blinding snow. Their frantic parents had bolted from their homes the second the snow tapered off, and now they waded through enormous drifts to reach their children, whose befogged minds were clearing in the fresh air. Child after child was scooped into welcoming arms, but no one claimed Emma and Claire. Stunned by the cold, the two girls shivered on the iceberg of snow blown up against the school steps until Emma took hold of Claire’s hand and forged a mountain goat path over frozen drifts in the direction of their home.

  —

  Just about the time that Emma and Claire started out, the doctors Mary and William Stipp, in their home a mile away on Madison Avenue, discovered that the blizzard had buried the doors, making egress to the wide veranda or the backyard impossible. After some consideration, they dropped to their waists into the deep snow from their parlor window instead. Outfitted in woolen hats, thick gloves and coats, wide mufflers, and lined boots—fitting attire for the daunting task ahead—they were nonetheless unprepared for the breathtaking cold. The air crackled. They blinked and pulled their mufflers above their noses.

  Mary wore a pair of William’s flannel pants cinched up by one of his wide belts, a new hole punched into it by a scalpel. At forty years of age, Mary Sutter Stipp was much younger than her husband. They’d met during the War of the Rebellion at the Union Hotel Hospital in Washington City, where William had hired her as a nurse. He taught her as much medicine as he could, falling in love with her in the process. Separated in the middle of the war, they lost track of one another. Mary went on to medical school. It wasn’t until afterward, in 1867—when William had given up hope of ever finding her—that they found one another again. They had married soon after, because time was a thief, he’d said, and he needed her more than he needed air. William knew it was said in alehouses around town, where men gathered to talk like that, that Mary Stipp was taller and larger-boned than was considered attractive, but the opinions of idiots mattered not one whit to him. Mary exuded an intelligence and determination he’d found intoxicating, as did most anyone who met her. Prematurely silver-haired, frank, and to him, lovely, Mary Sutter had been persuaded to become Mary Stipp, to his everlasting gratitude.

  For his part, William Stipp had long passed the age when dropping out of windows into drifts would have been considered a good idea. Sixty-three years old, he was not as nimble as he had once been, though he managed to keep them both from falling as they turned to get their bearings. Ramrod straight, he had aged in the fourteen years since the war, as many other veterans had, exposed to punishing years outside in the elements. His face bore the deep lines of the stress of that cataclysm, as well as the exposure.

  When the storm arrived, they had been seeing patients: William in his clinic in a converted downstairs bedchamber, Mary in the dining room, a sunny, windowed cloister that overlooked the back garden. Their well-appointed but plainly furnished parlor served as their waiting room, where from dawn till evening a crowd of tired shopgirls and ill-dressed factory workers corralled their hordes of restless children and waited for their turn with the famous woman doctor. William’s patients—crippled veterans complaining of their ill-fitting wooden legs, factory workers hobbled by various ailments, men and women suffering complex fractures—bided their time on the lower stairs or milled about in the wide foyer. Despite the home’s location on the relative outskirts of the city, the horsecar line went past every half hour. The morning the blizzard began, when the bright light spilling through the east-facing windows had darkened into night, furious whispers of panic had arisen. The doctors consulted: they would allow no one to leave. Thus, for the last fifty hours, seven women, nine children, and five men had been the Stipps’ unexpected guests, bedding down on the divans and floors and exam tables, sharing blankets, and in the case of at least one man and woman, a noisy conjoining that had unnerved everyone.

  Now everyone was hungry. The grand dinner of roast beef and brussels sprouts and pudding they had planned for the O’Donnells had barely stretched to feed everyone that first night. Their patients then exhausted the pantry and consumed every last potato in the root cellar, to say nothing of decimating the stores of butter and milk. They had finished all the bread, too.

  Mary and William were leaving Harold Bloom, their driver, in charge. Bloom, a wiry man with a thin twig of a mustache, was paid to be ready at any hour and could harness a horse faster than anyone. Married to Vera, a gruff Russian immigrant of immense proportions, the two lived above the carriage house. Vera’s English was poor, but she was as flexible as her husband, producing meals at all hours without question, unless there was no food to be had. She leaned out the window now to remind her employers to find butter, eggs, and salted meat, and to not forget milk for the children.

  Behind her, Harold’s face was knotted in worry. “Be careful. And now I’m shutting this accursed window before we all freeze to death.”

  Confronted with a white wilderness, William and Mary calculated the effort it might take to reach an open store, if any were open at all. None had yet been established this high on the hill, with the exception of a butcher on Lark Street. Already, Mary’s toes burned from the cold. It seemed madness to push on, but they needed food. And they were worried about the O’Donnells, who would have been separated when the storm began—David in the district, Bonnie at her shop, the children at their school. They feared that the children may have been let out of school to fend for themselves at home. And so they plunged into the blank, bristling quiet, holding hands, William forging a path through the high snow one step at a time. They were already winded when they reached the street, but they pressed on.

  Their home bordered Washington Park. In the deadened landscape surrounding it, only the Stipps moved. Drifts splashed up against trees, inundated house porches, and buried wagons abandoned at the onset of the storm. They sidestepped down the hill of Madison Avenue toward downtown, alternately hurt and helped by gravity. In the lee of some buildings, the snow was a manageable two or three feet deep, and here and there paths had already been cut, but in the middle of the avenue the drifts reached the unscalable height of eight feet. Still, even keeping to the sheltered side of the street, it took them a good hour to reach Elm Street. Normally a lively residential lane, in the aftermath of the storm it was a deserted wasteland, though here, too, a sleigh had cut through the shallowest depths. At the O’Donnells’, William climbed a drift to the frosted windows of their front room and banged, leaving off only to peer in, his gloved hands cupped around his eyes. The upstairs residents hollered at them through their unopened window that none of the O’Donnells had returned home. Concerned, Mary and William then trudged the several blocks to the Van Zandt School, where they found the doors bolted shut, the school empty. Here, more paths had been trodden through the drifts, and they followed one winding trail toward State Street.

  Along Eagle Street, not a single shop had opened, but in the window of the Oyster House, one candle burned a small yellow hole in ferns of frost. They went inside and huddled next to a glowing coal stove. The Stipps thawed and dried their wet gloves and wolfed down a plate of cheese and crackers and mugs of beer in lieu of real food. The restaurateur lived in two rooms above and bemoaned the fate of his expensive daily shipment of oysters from Manhattan City, fearing the bivalves frozen in some stranded railcar. The clock rang three, and William paid an exorbitant sum for the man’s last wheel of Vermont cheddar and four tins of crackers, which he obligingly packed into burlap bags. Thus provisioned, they headed again into the biting cold. More people had ventured into the white void on foraging missions of their own. Mary and William tramped block by block toward Bonnie’s shop, which they had seen from afar had been stripped of its awning. A wedge of snow three feet high had forced the door open, and inside a crystal white
carpet blanketed the floor. Scattered hummingbirds, dyed feathers, spools of ribbon and lace were half buried and strewn about, but balanced on the trim above the mullioned window, a single ruby-throated hummingbird flew above it all. Mary and William waded into the back storeroom, tamping down a rising panic, hoping to find Bonnie wrapped against the cold in a roll of velvet or gingham. No snow had penetrated the small room, but Bonnie was not there.

  At the sound of a strangled cry from the street, they dropped their bags and rushed outside. A man had fallen to his knees at the edge of a towering drift, from which protruded a single hand. He and William bent to the task, using bent forearms to sweep aside the dry crystals, which flew back into their faces and bleached their eyebrows and mustaches. Together, they uncovered first an arm, then a torso, then a garden hat, and finally Bonnie, facedown and lifeless, clad in nothing but her soft-spun day dress and one shoe.

  William pulled her from the drift and cradled her in his arms. Mary sank to her knees beside them and touched Bonnie’s glaciated face, which was icy blue with cold. Snow clotted her curls, and her eyes stared, unseeing.

  They carried her corpse to the coroner’s office, where Dr. Starkweather would spend the next few days batting away the black humor that attended the confluence of his name and the devastation of the storm. He led them down a steep stairway to a makeshift morgue in the basement, where sandbags already buttressed its street-level windows against snowmelt, and makeshift beds of plywood and sawhorses already bore a dozen unidentified bodies. Notes pinned to their clothes indicated the location of their discovery. They laid Bonnie down on an empty slab and reluctantly turned their attention to the others.

  Even for William and Mary, veterans of the War of the Rebellion, the sight of David’s battered body brought them both to their knees. A quick examination revealed a head injury and a broken leg. The cold would obscure any internal injury he had likely suffered, but they took no comfort that he would not have survived the accident, blizzard or no.

  “Have any children been brought in?” Mary said, making a second, rapid turn of the room. “In another room, maybe? Somewhere? Our friends have—had—two children. We’ve been looking for them. They weren’t at home, they weren’t at school.”

  The city physician was a laconic man, grown unimpressed with death in his years as coroner, but his red-rimmed eyes softened. “No one’s brought in any children yet.”

  “Two little girls. Red hair, blue eyes. If someone—”

  Starkweather touched Mary’s hand. “I’ll send for you. But more than likely, they’ll turn up somewhere safe and sound. They were at school when the blizzard came?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then a friend might have taken them in when no one came for them. A thousand things could have happened. Your friends”—he nodded toward Bonnie and David—“that’s terrible luck, but it’s unlikely to befall their children as well.”

  The Stipps dragged themselves home in the pale light of a rising gibbous moon.

  They had completely forgotten about the cheese and crackers they’d left at Bonnie’s shop. Upon hearing they’d have nothing to eat, their ravenous patients wrapped their children in borrowed socks and hats and blankets, and dropped one by one out the parlor window and made for home.

  Before the parlor fire, thawing their hands over cups of hot water, Mary and William reassured themselves. Dr. Starkweather was of course right. The girls’ teacher or one of their friends would know where they were. And when they found them, they would break the terrible news of their parents’ deaths and give them a home with them.

  Bonnie and David would want them to.

  “Ought we to telegraph Amelia and Elizabeth?” William said. Lately, he’d grown worried about their niece, Elizabeth, who had written to him every week from Paris, but whose letters had recently carried a vague, distant tone. He considered Elizabeth his daughter and had since Thomas Fall, her father, had died. William’s face, with its landscape of deep hollows and high crests, was always a reflection of the implacable severity of his war years, but now the firelight, his grief, and thoughts of Elizabeth deepened every crevice.

  “I don’t think so,” Mary said. “Not yet. We ought to spare them as much pain as we can. Let’s wait until we know something more.”

  It was impossible to get warm. They went to bed. William cradled Mary as he had cradled Bonnie, and after a while she stopped shivering.

  Chapter Two

  The O’Donnells were not related to the Sutters and Stipps, but their ties went just as deep. Theirs was a familiar, if convoluted story in a nation that had of late known too much death. Fourteen years since the end of the War of the Rebellion and the nation was still counting the dead: 600,000, 800,000? An estimate, only. And the toll among the civilians who had starved would go unsung forever. In the wake of the devastation, new families had been formed by tenuous ties: cousins distant and more distant banded together, sad widows married even sadder widowers, brothers and uncles and aunts and friends and orphans clung to one another to assuage their enduring pain.

  The Sutter family’s story of change began when the war did. In 1861, the Sutters took in the then Bonnie Miles after her second baby with her first husband, Jake Miles, died. Later, after Mary’s fraternal twin sister, Jenny, died giving birth to Elizabeth, it was Bonnie who mothered Elizabeth in Jenny’s place, even after Elizabeth’s father, Thomas Fall, returned from the war. In 1863 they all moved to Manhattan City so that Mary could study medicine with Elizabeth Blackwell, the first woman to graduate from medical school in America. They all continued to live together in Manhattan in the same house even after the war, even after Mary married William. The two families separated only when Bonnie married David. Then, a few years later, both families moved back to Albany.

  The weight of this deep and enduring bond pressed on Mary and William the next morning as they ventured out again, following the path that they had forged the previous day. The city was already coming back to life. Many people were daring the cold, shoveling great mounds of snow, but mostly accomplishing only a rearrangement of the white stuff. Frustrated, people set bonfires in an attempt to melt it quickly, but that succeeded only in creating lakes of ice too treacherous to negotiate. A few businesses had opened. Enterprising chestnut roasters had fired up their braziers and were doling out small rations in paper cones for a penny. A dry goods store shuttered the day before was doing brisk business in sacks of flour and cakes of butter. A baker had shoveled his sidewalk early in the morning and was proferring hot rolls. Mary and William bought both rolls and chestnuts and consumed them standing on a corner before pressing on to Elm Street, where they knocked on the doors of David and Bonnie’s neighbors and had the same conversation again and again.

  “We’re looking for Emma and Claire O’Donnell. Did you happen to see where they went?”

  “No. Didn’t Bonnie or David retrieve them from school?”

  Sharing the sorrowful news was exhausting when they had not yet become reconciled to it themselves. And not one of their neighbors knew where the sisters were or even that they were missing. Those who had gone to the school recalled seeing Emma and Claire at the school doors, waiting. Surely someone else had realized they were alone and taken them home? Try the Atkins. Try the MacIntryes. Try the Brunos.

  But neither the Atkins nor the MacIntryes nor the Brunos nor anyone else knew where they were. People joined in. By midafternoon, an army was knocking on doors on all the side streets to no avail, though they did learn that the principal, who had forded two miles of drifts to her home in North Albany, had been admitted to City Hospital with frostbite.

  “No,” the principal said, her eyes widening with confusion and horror. “No. It can’t be. I checked the whole school. No one was left behind, no one.”

  On the hope that perhaps the girls may have been admitted, too, Mary and William swept through the hospital, looking for them. They searched Sai
nt Peter’s Hospital, and Child’s Hospital on Hawk Street, to no avail.

  “Emma and Claire?” their young teacher said at her rented room on Eagle Street. “They’re missing?”

  And at the morgue, an exhausted Dr. Starkweather, now presiding over twenty bodies, shook his head. “Not yet. But they’re still coming in.”

  That night, Mary and William tried again to reassure themselves that little girls didn’t just disappear. But they would soon learn that the storm had devastated the whole of the Northeast, not just Albany. The official count of the dead would total four hundred, with thousands more injured, and a hundred unaccounted for. In Albany, twenty-three people died, and five had gone missing, among them Emma and Claire.