Free My Name Is Mary Sutter by Robin Oliveira Page B

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