The Signature of All Things

  The girl turned her dotty little face up toward Alma and asked, “Now tell me something, did you hear bells ringing last night?”

  Alma pondered this question. In fact, she had heard bells ringing last night. There had been a fire on Fairmont Hill, and the bells had sounded alarm across the entire city.

  “I did hear them,” Alma said.

  The girl nodded with satisfaction, clapped her hands, and said, “I knew it!”

  “You knew that I heard bells last night?”

  “I knew those bells were real!”

  “I’m not sure we’ve met,” Alma said cautiously.

  “Oh, but we haven’t! My name is Retta Snow. I walked all the way here!”

  “Did you? May I ask from where?”

  One might have almost expected the girl to say, “From the pages of a fairy book!” but instead she said, “From that way,” and pointed south. Alma, in a snap, figured it all out. There was a new estate going up just two miles down the river from White Acre. The owner was a wealthy textile merchant from Maryland. This girl must be the merchant’s daughter.

  “I was hoping there would be a girl my age living around here,” said Retta. “How old are you, if I may be so plainspoken?”

  “I’m nineteen,” said Alma, though she felt much older, especially by comparison to this mite.

  “Exceptional!” Retta clapped again. “I am eighteen, which is not such a big difference at all, is it? Now you must tell me something, and I beg your honesty. What is your opinion of my dress?”

  “Well . . .” Alma knew nothing about dresses.

  “I agree!” Retta said. “It’s really not my best dress, is it? If you knew the others, you would agree even more strongly, for I have some dresses that are all the crack! But you don’t entirely detest it, either, do you?”

  “Well . . .” Alma struggled again for a response.

  Retta spared her an answer. “You are far too sweet to me! You don’t want to hurt my feelings! I already consider you my friend! Also, you have such a beautiful and reassuring chin. It makes a person want to trust you.”

  Retta slipped an arm around Alma’s waist, and leaned her head against her shoulder, nuzzling in warmly. There was no reason in the world that Alma should have welcomed this gesture. Whosoever Retta Snow may have been, it was obvious she was an absurd person, a perfect little basin of foolishness and distraction. Alma had work to do, and the girl was an interruption.

  But nobody had ever called Alma a friend.

  Nobody had ever asked Alma what she thought of a dress.

  Nobody had ever admired her chin.

  They sat on the bench for a while in this warm and surprising embrace. Then Retta pulled away, looked up at Alma, and smiled—childish, credulous, winsome.

  “What shall we do next?” she asked. “And what is your name?”

  Alma laughed, and introduced herself, and confessed that she did not quite know what to do next.

  “Are there other girls?” Retta asked.

  “There is my sister.”

  “You have a sister! You are fortunate! Let us go find her.”

  So off they went together, wandering about the grounds until they found Prudence working at her easel in one of the rose gardens.

  “You must be the sister!” Retta exclaimed, dashing over to Prudence as though she had won a prize, and Prudence was it.

  Prudence—poised and correct as ever—set down her brush, and politely offered over her hand for Retta to shake. After pumping Prudence’s arm with rather too much enthusiasm, Retta openly took her in for a moment, head cocked to one side. Alma tensed, waiting for Retta to comment on Prudence’s beauty, or to demand to know how it could be humanly possible that Alma and Prudence were sisters. Certainly this is what every other person asked, upon seeing Alma and Prudence together for the first time. How could one sister be so porcelain and the other so ruddy? How could one sister be so dainty and the other so strapping? Prudence tensed, as well, awaiting these same unwelcome questions. But Retta did not seem captivated or daunted by Prudence’s beauty in any manner, nor did she balk at the notion that the sisters were, in fact, sisters. She merely took her time examining Prudence from head to toe, and then clapped her hands in pleasure.

  “So now there are three of us!” she said. “What luck! If we were boys, do you realize what we would have to do now? We would have to fall into a terrific scrape with one another, wrestling and fighting and bloodying each other’s noses. Then, at the end of our battle, after suffering ghastly injuries, we would come up as fast friends. It’s true! I’ve seen it done! Now, on one hand that seems like a great lot of fun, but I would be sorry to spoil my new dress—although it is not my best dress, as Alma has pointed out—and so I thank heaven today that we are not boys. And since we are not boys, this means we can be fast friends right away, without any fighting at all. Don’t you agree?”

  Nobody had time to agree, as Retta barreled on: “Then it is decided! We are the Three Fast Friends. Somebody should write a song about us. Can either one of you write songs?”

  Prudence and Alma looked at each other, dumbstruck.

  “Then I’ll do it, if I must!” Retta plowed forth. “Give me a moment.”

  Retta closed her eyes, moved her lips, and tapped her fingers against her waist, as though counting out syllables.

  Prudence gave Alma a questioning glance, and Alma shrugged.

  After a silence so long it would have felt awkward to anyone in the world except Retta Snow, Retta opened her eyes again.

  “I think I’ve got it,” she announced. “Somebody else will have to write the music, for I’m dreadful with music, but I’ve written the first verse. I think it captures our friendship perfectly. What do you think?” She cleared her throat and recited:

  “We are fiddle, fork, and spoon,

  We are dancing with the moon,

  If you’d like to steal a kiss from us,

  You’d better steal one soon!”

  Before Alma had a chance to try to decipher this singular little rhyme (to try to work out who was fiddle, who was fork, and who was spoon), Prudence burst into laughter. This was remarkable, for Prudence never laughed. Her laugh was magnificent, brash, and loud—not at all what one would expect from such a doll-like individual.

  “Who are you?” Prudence asked, when she finally stopped laughing.

  “I am Retta Snow, madam, and I am your newest and most undeviating friend.”

  “Well, Retta Snow,” said Prudence, “I believe you might be undeviatingly mad.”

  “So says everyone!” replied Retta, bowing with a flourish. “But nonetheless—I am here!”

  * * *

  Indeed, she was.

  Retta Snow soon became a fixture around the White Acre estate. As a child, Alma had once owned a little cat who’d wandered onto the property and conquered the place in much the same manner. That cat—a pretty little item, with bright yellow stripes—had simply strolled into the White Acre kitchen one sunny day, rubbed herself against everyone’s legs, and then settled down beside the hearth with her tail curled around her body, purring lightly, eyes half-closed in contentment. The cat was so comfortable and confident that no one had the heart to inform the creature that it didn’t belong—and thus, soon enough, it did.

  Retta’s gambit was similar. She showed up at White Acre that day, put herself at ease, and suddenly it seemed she had always been there. Nobody ever invited Retta, exactly, but Retta did not seem to be the sort of young lady who required invitations for anything. She arrived when she wanted to arrive, stayed for as long as she pleased, helped herself to anything she desired, and departed when she was ready.

  Retta Snow lived the most shockingly—even enviably—ungoverned life. Her mother was a society fixture whose mornings were occupied by long hours spent arranging her toilet, whose afternoons were consumed by visits to other society fixtures, and whose evenings were kept terribly busy with dances. Her father, a man both indulgent and absent, eventuall
y purchased for his daughter a reliable carriage horse and a two-wheeled chaise, in which the girl bounced around Philadelphia quite at her own discretion. She spent her days speeding through the world on her chaise like a happy, roistering bee. If she wished to attend the theater, she attended the theater. If she wished to watch a parade, she found a parade. And if she wished to spend the entire day at White Acre, she did so at her own leisure.

  Over the next year, Alma would find Retta in the most surprising places at White Acre: standing atop a vat in the buttery, making the dairymaids laugh as she acted out a scene from The School for Scandal; or dangling her feet off the barge dock into the oily waters of the Schuylkill River, pretending to catch fish with her toes; or cutting one of her beautiful shawls in half, in order to share it with a maid who had just complimented it. (“Look, now we each have a bit of the shawl, and so now we are twins!”) Nobody knew what to make of her, but nobody ever chased her away. It was not so much that Retta charmed people; it was merely that fending her off was an impossibility. One had no choice but to submit.

  Retta even managed to win over Beatrix Whittaker, which was a truly remarkable accomplishment. By all reasonable expectations, Beatrix should have detested Retta, who was the very personification of all Beatrix’s deepest fears about girls. Retta was everything Beatrix had raised Alma and Prudence not to be—a powdered, hollow-headed, and vain little confection, who ruined expensive dancing slippers in the mud, who was quick to tears and laughter, who pointed crassly at things in public, who was never seen with a book, and who hadn’t even the sense enough to keep her head covered in the rain. How could Beatrix ever embrace such a creature as that?

  Anticipating this as a problem, Alma had even tried to hide Retta Snow from Beatrix at the beginning of their friendship, fearing the worst should the two ever encounter each other. But Retta was not easily hidden, and Beatrix was not easily deceived. It had taken less than a week, in fact, before Beatrix demanded of Alma one morning at breakfast, “Who is that child, with that parasol, who is always darting about my property of late? And why do I always see her with you?”

  Reluctantly, Alma was forced to introduce Retta to her mother.

  “How do you do, Mrs. Whittaker,” Retta had begun, properly enough, even remembering to curtsey, if perhaps a bit too theatrically.

  “How do you do, child?” Beatrix had replied.

  Beatrix was not seeking an honest answer to this question, but Retta took the query seriously, pondering it a bit before answering. “Well, I shall tell you, Mrs. Whittaker. I am not at all well. There has been a dreadful tragedy in my household this morning.”

  Alma looked on in alarm, helpless to intervene. Alma could not imagine where Retta was tending with this line of conversation. Retta had been at White Acre all day, cheerful as can be, and this was the first Alma had heard of a dreadful tragedy in the Snow household. She prayed that Retta would stop speaking, but the girl pushed on, as though Beatrix had urged her to continue.

  “Only this morning, Mrs. Whittaker, I suffered the most flurried attack of nerves. One of our servants—my little English maid, to be precise—was in utter tears at breakfast, and so I followed her into her room after the meal was over, to investigate the origins of her sorrow. You shall never guess what I learned! It seems her grandmother had died, exactly three years ago, to this very day! Upon learning of this tragedy, I was put into a fit of weeping myself, as I’m certain you can well imagine! I must have wept for an hour on that poor girl’s bed. Thank goodness she was there to comfort me. Doesn’t it make you want to weep, too, Mrs. Whittaker? To think of losing a grandmother, just three years ago?”

  With the mere memory of this incident, Retta’s large green eyes filled with tears, and then spilled over.

  “What a great heap of nonsense,” Beatrix rebuked, emphasizing each word, while Alma flinched at every syllable. “At my age, can you begin to imagine how many people’s grandmothers I have seen die? What if I had wept over each one of them? A grandmother’s death does not constitute a tragedy, child—and somebody else’s grandmother’s death from three years past most certainly should not bring on a fit of weeping. Grandmothers die, child. It is the proper way of things. One could nearly argue that it is the role of a grandmother to die, after having imparted, one hopes, some lessons of decency and sense to a younger generation. Furthermore, I suspect you were of little comfort to your maid, who would have been better served had you demonstrated for her an example of stoicism and reserve, rather than collapsing in tears across her bed.”

  Retta took in this admonishment with an open face, while Alma wilted in distress. Well, there’s the end of Retta Snow, Alma thought. But then, unexpectedly, Retta laughed. “What a marvelous correction, Mrs. Whittaker! What a fresh way you have of regarding things! You are absolutely in the right! I shall never again think of a grandmother’s death as tragedy!”

  One could almost see the tears crawling back up Retta’s cheeks, reversing themselves and then vanishing completely.

  “And now I must take my leave,” said Retta, fresh as the dawn. “I intend to go for a walk this evening, so I must go home and select the choicest of my walking bonnets. I do so love walking, Mrs. Whittaker, but not in the wrong bonnet, as I’m sure you can understand.” Retta extended her hand to Beatrix, who could not refuse to take it. “Mrs. Whittaker, what a useful encounter this has been! I can scarcely find a way to thank you enough for your wisdom. You are a Solomon among women, and it is little wonder that your children admire you so. Imagine if you were my mother, Mrs. Whittaker—only imagine how stupid I would not be! My mother, you will be sorry to hear, has never had a sensible thought in her life. Worse still, she cakes her face so thickly with wax, paste, and powder that she has every appearance of being a dressmaker’s dummy. Imagine my misfortune, then—to have been raised by an unschooled dressmaker’s dummy, and not by the likes of you. Well, off I go, then!”

  Off she skipped, while Beatrix gaped.

  “What a ridiculous conformation of a person,” Beatrix murmured, once Retta had taken her leave, and the house had returned to silence.

  Daring a defense of her only friend, Alma replied, “Without a doubt she is ridiculous, Mother. But I believe she has a charitable heart.”

  “Her heart may or may not be charitable, Alma. None but God can judge such a thing. But her face, without a doubt, is absurd. She seems able to shape it into any expression whatsoever, except intelligence.”

  Retta returned to White Acre the very next day, greeting Beatrix Whittaker with sunny goodwill, as though the initial admonishment had never taken place. She even brought Beatrix a small posy of flowers—plucked from White Acre’s own gardens, which was a rather daring play. Miraculously, Beatrix accepted the posy without a word. From that day forward, Retta Snow was permitted to remain a presence on the estate.

  As far as Alma was concerned, the disarming of Beatrix Whittaker was Retta’s most sterling accomplishment. It almost had the trace of wizardry about it. That it happened so quickly was even more remarkable. Somehow, in only one brief and daring encounter, Retta had managed to inveigle herself into the matriarch’s good graces (or good enough graces) such that now she had an open warrant to visit whenever she pleased. How had she done it? Alma couldn’t be certain, but she had theories. For one thing, Retta was difficult to stifle. What’s more, Beatrix was getting older and frailer, and was less inclined these days to battle her objections to the death. Perhaps Alma’s mother was not a match for the Retta Snows of the world anymore. But most of all, there was this: Alma’s mother may have disliked nonsense, and she was decidedly a difficult woman to flatter, but Retta Snow could scarcely have done better than to have called Beatrix Whittaker “a Solomon among women.”

  Perhaps the girl was not so foolish as she appeared.

  Thus, Retta remained. In fact, as the autumn of 1819 progressed, Alma frequently arrived at her study in the early mornings, ready to work on a botanical project, only to discover that Retta was alr
eady there—curled up in the old divan in the corner, looking at fashion illustrations from the latest copy of Joy’s Lady’s Book.

  “Oh, hello dearest!” Retta would chirp, looking up brightly, as though they had a prearranged appointment.

  As time went on, Alma was no longer startled by this. Retta did not make herself a bother. She never touched the scientific instruments (except the prisms, which she could not resist), and when Alma told her, “For heaven’s sake, darling, you must hush now and let me calculate,” Retta would hush and let Alma calculate. If anything, it became rather pleasant for Alma to have the silly, friendly company. It was like having a pretty bird in a cage in the corner, making occasional cooing noises, while Alma worked.

  There were times when George Hawkes stopped by Alma’s study, to discuss the final corrections to some scientific paper or another, and he always seemed taken aback to find Retta there. George never knew quite what to do with Retta Snow. George was such an intelligent and serious man, and Retta’s silliness thoroughly unnerved him.

  “And what are Alma and Mr. George Hawkes discussing today?” Retta asked one November day, when she was bored of her picture magazines.

  “Hornworts,” Alma responded.

  “Oh, they sound horrid. Are they animals, Alma?”

  “No, they are not animals, darling,” she replied. “They are plants.”

  “Can one eat them?”

  “Not unless one is a deer,” Alma said, laughing. “And a hungry deer at that.”