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houses high and low, becoming accustomed to joy being predicated on misery. This accounted for their assured nature; prescient, possessed, they would later feel at home anywhere and in the face of anything.
    The first time Mary asked to help was in a brooding house along the Shaker Road, not far from home. The house was two stone stories, with looming windows and a narrow stairwell. Well along, the woman shrieked upstairs. The walls were drab, the bed a ticking upon the floor. Two toddlers sucked thumbs beside their mother.
    “Are you certain?” Amelia asked, when Mary pulled the bonnet from her head and said, “I would be grateful, Mother, if you would let me stay.”
    Her mother’s eyes pierced, giving her the look that Mary would later learn to ignore: the tilting of the head, the gaze of incredulity. But then she said, “So, it’s you,” having wondered which of her daughters would become a midwife.
    Jenny, never eager, was happily relegated to the dull tasks of water and childcare, while Mary seized opportunity.
    Mary was not given a corner from which to watch. No clinging to territory, no adult separation of I know better than you. Amelia said, Hand me this, hand me that. You might not want to see this; turn your head. At times it seemed to Mary that the world over was rent with the cries of women giving birth. But when at last the baby emerged, slippery, fighting, squalling, the woman’s thighs trembling and then collapsing, and Mary was given charge to kneel beside the mother and wipe—gently—the writhing baby dry on her stomach, the battle of labor proved a war worth fighting. What did Mary remember most? Not the mother’s bulging flesh, the bullet-shaped head of the infant, the gasp of love when at last the mother encircled the infant in her arms, but Amelia’s stillness. Her grand remove. Competence incarnate.
    And so the tradition continued. With Mary, not with Jenny. It could have hardly been otherwise, for Mary had set her heart. Within two years, it was she who said, Hand me this, hand me that. Fifteen, and already precociously able. She was spoken of: It is something about her hands; it is something about her voice. And around the city, at suppers and church socials and dances and even upon the streets, when an alert matron spotted a newly expectant mother, Mary Sutter’s name was whispered.
    When the success of the New York Railroad made Nathaniel his fortune, they sold their land and moved into Albany and the Dove Street home, eschewing old-money Eagle Street for the outskirts of the city. There followed the consequent ease of wealth and servants, and with it no longer any need for Amelia to take the children along with her. But Mary continued to go to deliveries with her mother, while Jenny and Christian stayed behind. It was said that Amelia Sutter had ruined Mary for society, and that she had nearly ruined Jenny. That Amelia’s running about risked her marriage, that only her charm and beauty saved her. For Amelia Sutter was indeed charming. She was at ease in conversation, knew how to deploy a hand to a forearm at just the right moment. And in the childbirth room, her presence was a gift. But the combination of social status and occupation puzzled. Midwives were supposed to be matrons beyond childbearing age, with years of life in which to have been disappointed enough to wish to spend all one’s time delivering babies. Not that the women of Albany County were not grateful; instead they were envious, which took its form in criticism. The problem, they said, was that she neglected her family. Never mind that they never left her side. Never mind that Mary took first place at the Girl’s Academy. Mary Sutter, talented as she was, couldn’t string two words together unless they were combative ones, and Jenny Sutter, why, that girl was destined for trouble.
    When the girls turned eighteen, there was a trip to Wellon’s Bookstore on State Street for Mary to purchase Gray’s Anatomy , newly