Winter Sisters Read online

  “I can’t.” Elizabeth’s voice broke. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Practice,” Amelia said. “Practice being alive.”

  “Practice being alive?” Elizabeth said.

  “Yes. If you can. Try. Please? Can you do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Elizabeth said, and got up and left the room without another word.

  Chapter Seven

  In truth, Albany’s architectural elegance was concentrated only on State Street and around the capitol building, the vistas that dominated postcards and guidebooks. Since the war, a denser, homelier hodgepodge of five- and six-story brick and clapboard buildings had mushroomed on the lesser streets running up from the river and away from the grand, central boulevard. Down one of these dank, narrow alleyways, just a stone’s throw from the elegant Delavan House, the premier hotel in the city, Mary had rented a forlorn room in a marginal state of repair where on Thursday mornings she treated Albany’s prostitutes. She had started the practice when they returned from Manhattan City, when she realized that every hospital in the city, including City Hospital, where she and William were on staff, turned prostitutes away from their doors, even when they were in dire need, and especially if they were suffering from a botched abortion. Mary did not perform that procedure, even when the women begged, but she offered to deliver their babies, and frequently did. But because the police considered offering care to a prostitute aiding and abetting a criminal, Mary was the only doctor in Albany who would treat them.

  The clinic’s only advertisement was a diminutive red cross that she affixed above the door outside, small enough not to draw the eye, but large enough to be a signal to those in the know. Mary was certain the International Red Cross would not mind the appropriation. After all, Mary believed her clients suffered the same need as did any soldier of war.

  The room boasted two windows situated high enough to block the view of anyone passing. She had partitioned off a part of the room with a burlap curtain to provide at least the illusion of privacy, a foreign commodity to the women she served. Furnished simply, the room contained several chairs, an exam table, an instrument cabinet, and a wide table set next to the rudimentary sink, into which she had plumbed a line at some expense. The new faucet piped river water, which needed boiling to thwart typhoid, so she kept two kettles simmering at all times on the coal stove.

  On Thursdays, Mary always arrived at half past eight to light the stove, boil the water, and resupply her stash of carbolic soap and clean towels before she opened at nine. But today she arrived much earlier, for just as she had feared, her long absence after Emma’s and Claire’s disappearance had caused the room to go to must. Surveying the exposed brick of the walls, she discovered a cluster of roaches nesting in a damp corner. After battling these with the business end of a broom, she scrubbed the rough stone floor, dusted away cobwebs, and wiped down everything with a soaped rag, even climbing on a chair to wash a film of grime from the high window. But no matter how primitive this clinic was, it still surpassed the facilities of the Union Hotel Hospital during the war, where she had had to be everything—scullery maid, housekeeper, and nurse.

  Satisfied with her preparations, Mary lit a kerosene lantern and hung it on its hook outside. Alerted by this signal, it did not take more than fifteen minutes for women to straggle in by ones and twos, clutching woolen shawls over their exposed shoulders. Within a half an hour of opening, twelve women had gathered, and once inside they slouched against the walls, their eyes following Mary about the room. Unadorned by face paint and the cheap satin of their working attire, the women nonetheless wore their hard lives in their sallow skin and rheumy eyes. Their sickly appearance always shocked Mary. Three years ago, when she had first begun, it had upset her to learn that a prostitute’s average life span after beginning in the trade was just four years. They aged quickly, and died quickly, too.

  “Where have you been?”

  This sullen question was uttered by a woman who called herself Darlene—Darling—a name chosen long ago after having discarded her real name to save herself from any memory of who she had once been. They all had names like that—Honey, Sweetie, Clementine—names crafted of fantasy and sweetness when their lives were anything but. They all said their last names were Addison, a name they gave when they were arrested. So many women named Mrs. Addison had been arrested for prostitution in the past few years in Albany that the police had given up trying to extract the truth from them. Still, it was better than the name Mary Balls, the previous incarnation of a shared name, a sly joke that had infuriated the police when, after many times of carefully inscribing it in the police ledger, they finally caught on.

  A plump woman past thirty, Darlene had pinned her hennaed hair carelessly this morning into a ragged snood. “Where?” she said again.

  “I apologize,” Mary said. “It wasn’t my intention to abandon you. But I had something important to attend to.” As a rule, Mary told them as little as possible about herself. She was their caretaker, not they hers, and when they pried, she answered their questions as cordially and obscurely as possible. Even now, when she believed they would readily accept her more than acceptable excuse for desertion, she preferred to reveal nothing.

  “Seems like you could have warned us,” Darlene said, hugging her arms to her chest. A feverish sheen glistened on her forehead. “I traipsed down here three Thursdays in a row looking for you before I gave up.”

  “Didn’t you see the notice I tacked up to say it would be a while before I could return?”

  “Well, if I could read, then I would have, wouldn’t I?”

  “I’m sorry,” Mary said. She didn’t begrudge Darlene her anger; Mary had been loath to keep the clinic closed, but she’d had only enough energy to keep the house clinic open. And for weeks after the blizzard, snow had made travel treacherous. “Now, who can I help first?”

  The door burst open and a thin woman named Glynnis—Mary could never discern whether she was just thin or truly emaciated—hurried in, carrying her five-year-old daughter, Maude, whom she was raising in the whorehouse where they lived. That morning, Glynnis had discovered Maude lying on the attic floor where they slept with the other inmates of the house in cots lined up under the eaves. The listless child was drooling excessively and breathing loudly, as if through a narrow pipe. Within seconds, Mary performed an examination and diagnosed quinsy, a throat abscess that was causing Maude’s tonsil to swell.

  Quickly, Mary set up for the minor surgery, arranging her instruments and washing the back of Maude’s throat with borax. The child was so feverish that she did not protest. With ease, Mary was able to nick the abscess with a scalpel, irrigate the girl’s mouth of the draining pus, and deliver her into her relieved mother’s arms, the whole thing from exam to execution taking perhaps five minutes.

  Only then did Mary notice that her audience was gaping at her. Perhaps, she thought, she ought to have pulled the burlap curtain.

  She washed her hands and asked who was next.

  Darlene lurched forward and held out her arms, revealing that the reason for her earlier disgruntlement was that she was in pain. A drunken client had slashed the underbelly of her forearms with a razor. This time Mary did draw the curtain before washing the festering wounds with carbolic soap, noting as she did that Darlene’s hair was riddled with lice.

  “People count on you, you know,” Darlene said as Mary scrubbed. “You disappear and we all wonder whether you’re ever going to come back. What would have happened to Glynnis’s girl if you hadn’t been here?”

  “I will always come back, Darlene. How long ago did this happen?”

  “Saturday. Friday. I can’t remember.”

  Five days, then, at least. If Mary had gotten to the cuts earlier, she could have stitched them, but now it was too late. “You must wash these every day. Do you have any carbolic soap?”

  Darlene shrugged.

 
“I’ll give you a bar. Boil your water, then let it cool before you begin. And I’ll give you a bottle of Lice-Bane, too. Wash your hair in it twice.”

  Darlene nodded in a distracted way. “What kind of problem takes more than an entire month to fix? Were you sick? You don’t look sick.”

  “Something personal.”

  “As if my arms aren’t personal. Or my legs. Or my hoochie. All of what you and every man in Albany has seen.”

  Mary patted Darlene’s plump forearms with a clean towel, taking special care with the ridge of heat and redness surrounding the long, jagged cuts. “Soap, do you understand?” she said. “Soap. Wash these every day.”

  “It’s been more than a month, hasn’t it?” Darlene said, studying her. “Wasn’t that when the blizzard hit?”

  “Hold still,” Mary said, winding bandages around the woman’s forearms.

  “You lost someone, didn’t you?” Darlene persisted. “I can tell. Anyone who ignores questions has answers they don’t want to let on.”

  Mary tied off the last bandage and washed her hands.

  “If it’s true, then that’s nothing but a damn shame.”

  No one had said anything as blatant since the girls had gone. Mary shut off the faucet, dried her hands, and rooted out a roll of gauze and the bar of soap and handed them to Darlene. “Get someone to help you, if you can.”

  “Who?”

  Mary shook her head, knowing that Darlene was not asking for suggestions about who should help her.

  “Did they die?”

  Mary looked up at the window, to the cool rays of the morning sun filtering through the glass. “You come back next week if those cuts get worse.”

  “Talking to you is like trying to rouse a man’s reluctant johnson to happiness. Just tell me, won’t you? Did they run away? Die? What?”

  Mary turned. “My nieces. Or, rather, children I consider to be my nieces. We don’t know what happened. They left school on the day the storm ended, and then—vanished.”

  “Have you looked for them?”

  “Everywhere. All the orphan asylums. The hospitals. We put notices in the paper.”

  “Is that all?” Darlene scoffed. “For someone as skilled as you, you’re not too smart, are you? Did you look along the waterfront? Down the alleyways? In any of the houses? In the Tenderloin? At the far end of Broadway where the lights burn red?”

  “No,” Mary said. She felt Darlene’s incredulous stare and the damp chill of the room. They hadn’t even thought to look in the whorehouses. She’d tended these women for several years now and in the past six weeks had never once made the connection. “But who would—?”

  “Take them? Anyone thinking they could make some money.” Darlene looked at her sharply. “You’ve lived too easy a life.”

  She hadn’t, of course, but Mary said nothing.

  “We’ll all keep an eye,” Darlene said, reading Mary’s panic. “Won’t we, girls?” Wincing, Darlene drew aside the curtain. The thin fabric had not muffled their conversation. The dozen waiting women eyed Mary with pity, because they knew things that they never told her, no matter how frank they were with her about their lives.

  “Have any of you seen them?” Mary said, her voice trembling. “They are seven and ten. Long red hair, big eyes. Blue? Their names were—are Emma and Claire.”

  No one had seen them, but they promised they would look.

  “I hope you don’t—”

  “Find them?” Darlene said, her voice gone soft with sympathy.

  Miserably, Mary nodded.

  “Us, too.”

  Already, Maude showed signs of improving health. Her breathing was regular and deep, her pulse steady and firm; it had taken only the release of the infection to reverse her fever. The girl was just stirring when the door shot open, and Captain Mantel and five uniformed police officers burst into the room.

  Chapter Eight

  Instinctively, Mary stepped between her patients and the policemen as Darlene slunk toward the far wall and the other women. Mantel tilted his head to one side, eyeing them all with suspicion. Light glinted off the brass buttons of his uniform as he took Mary’s measure. She realized what she must look like to him now—her clinic dress, though presentable, was made of gray worsted serge—the fabric of utility—and her hair was pinned up carelessly, without style, though she rarely paid much attention to it on any given day. On Thursdays she dressed this way to avoid attention, easily passing on her way to the clinic as yet another shopgirl, though as a rule she cared little for the geegaws and fripperies of fashion, dispensing with a trip to the dressmakers in as little time as possible, asking only to be outfitted in something acceptable, and taking what the dressmaker made without complaint or comment, though it was often still too decorative for her indifferent taste.

  “So, it is true,” Mantel said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The rumors. I could hardly believe them at first. The lady doctor of Washington Park treating prostitutes.”

  “What concern is it of yours?”

  “Helping these degenerates, not reforming them like the genial folks at the House of Shelter, is what we in the righteous business of law enforcement call abetting. I ought to throw you in jail.” He leaned to one side, surveying the women gathered behind her. “Or I could arrest them.”

  “For what? Standing?” Mary said.

  “You’re the lady doctor that came into the precinct house,” one of the policemen said.

  Mary recognized Officer Farrell—the tall, sympathetic policeman who had been so kind the first time they’d gone to the precinct house.

  “We were on the lookout for those—your girls. Blizzard orphans, right? Drowned in the river, right?” He looked to Mantel for confirmation. “A shame, that.”

  “Shut up, Farrell.”

  Mary seized on the interruption. “Officer Mantel. Tell me, of all those places you told me you searched, did you ever go to the red-light districts?”

  “Now, Dr. Stipp, what a question.” He eyed the women massed behind her. “You’re obviously still in a state. Though I understand. I do. After all, the whole of the Northeast is still suffering. It’s been one long funeral for all of us. And we’d not got it so bad here in Albany. I got reports of infants froze to death in Boston—”

  “Stop.”

  He affected a pitying smile. “I apologize. Didn’t mean to upset you. I forget, sometimes, that as a lady, you’ve not got the stronger constitution—”

  “If you are going to patronize me, do it without that simpering smile.”

  Mantel thrust his short legs wide. “Fine. Happy to. Let me tell you something. Now that you are consorting with the ladies of the night, it’s probably best for you to understand what we men of the force have understood for a good long time. These women will lie, cheat, steal, and say anything in order to get what they want. You cannot trust a word that comes out of their mouths. I expect tomorrow or the next day you’ll hear from someone here that she has found the girls. But she’ll be needing some kind of payment for the information, and you’ll give it to her because you’re desperate.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Darlene said, elbowing her way forward.

  Mantel ignored her. “You’re thinking in wishes, Doctor Stipp. Hope has made you vulnerable to those who would do you harm or toy with your thinking—like that one there,” he said, jutting his chin at Darlene. “But I was too hard on you last time. It’s a sad thing what happened. You have my pity, you do. But you need to come to terms.”

  “You didn’t look there, did you?” Mary said.

  “You’re grasping, Dr. Stipp.”

  “It would take nothing. Two thorough patrolmen, applying real method. The search could be accomplished by tonight.”

  “You know as well as I do that as soon as a patrolman sets foot in one of those h
ouses, a messenger will be out the back door, spreading the news that we’re on the lookout for two girls. And those two girls would be well hidden by the time we get to where they are. Anyway, we’re arguing about ghosts. Those girls are dead.”

  “You’re being obtuse,” Mary said. “Or lazy.”

  “Listen to me, doctor, you’ve done more good work than most of us ever will in a lifetime.” Mantel’s gaze swiveled around the clinic. “Except for this, of course. But we all know what you and your husband did in the war. A bit of an amazing thing, not what most women would do. And I honor that. I do. But I’ll not go charging through the city’s dens of iniquity because you’ve gotten an idea from loose women who want to please you. Or fleece you. Trust me on this: we are in and out of whorehouses all the time. If your girls were there, I’d have found them.

  “Now, go home. Get out of this—place. Deliver a baby. Mend people’s broken bodies. Go on doing the good deeds that people admire you for.”

  Though his tone was respectful, it was also patronizing, with an undercurrent of disdain. When people asked Mary about the war, they supposed that it had been a frustrating, awful experience. But in that lawless landscape, when she had wanted to accomplish something, all she’d had to do was to take steps to get it done: climb onto trains going in the direction of battles; talk her way through barriers both prejudicial and material; in some cases, just show up until someone relented. That was how she’d met William. She’d arrived at the door of the Union Hotel Hospital, demanded he hire her, and wearied him into taking her on. Therein lay the advantage of wartime: men were too busy killing one another to take heed of women’s activities. But after the war, people’s general opinion of her turned; she wasn’t quite respectable, her ambitions were unladylike, at best she was a curiosity. She was aware that many society women who asked for her help eyed her with this same suspicion. And people like Mantel felt free to lecture her about what she could and could not do.

  And now, somehow, the police had discovered her clinic and were here, for a reason she couldn’t discern.