The Signature of All Things

  Ambrose laughed and laughed. Alma stared at him as if he were a specimen.

  “By that logic,” Henry concluded, “I am a bloody Dutchman!”

  “And I am a Whittaker!” Ambrose added, still laughing.

  “More tea?” Hanneke asked Alma, again with that same penetrating look.

  Alma clamped shut her mouth, which she realized had been hanging a bit too far open. “I have had enough, Hanneke, thank you.”

  “The men will be carting in the last of the hay today,” Henry said. “See to it, Alma, that it is done properly.”

  “Yes, Father.”

  Henry turned to Ambrose again. “She is good value, that wife of yours, especially when there is work to be done. A regular Farmer John in skirts, she is.”

  * * *

  The second night was the same as the first—and the third night, and the fourth and fifth. All the nights to follow, all the same. Ambrose and Alma would undress in privacy, come to the bed and face each other. He would kiss her hand and praise her goodness, and extinguish the lamp. Ambrose would then fall into the sleep of an enchanted figure in a fairy tale, while Alma lay in silent torment beside him. The only thing that changed over time was that Alma finally managed to receive a few fitful hours of sleep a night, merely because her body would collapse with exhaustion. But her sleep was interrupted by clawing dreams and awful spells of restless, roaming, wakeful thought.

  By day, Alma and Ambrose were companions as ever in study and contemplation. He had never seemed more fond of her. She woodenly went about her own work, and helped him with his. He always wanted to be near her—as near to her as possible. He did not seem aware of her discomfort. She tried not to reveal it. She kept hoping for a change. More weeks passed. October arrived. The nights turned cool. There was no change.

  Ambrose appeared so at ease with the terms of their marriage that Alma—for the first time in her life—feared herself to be going mad. Here she wanted to ravish him to a pulp, but he was happy to merely kiss the one square inch of skin below the middle knuckle of her left hand. Had she been misinformed as to the nature of conjugality? Was it a trick? She was enough of a Whittaker to seethe at the thought of having been played as a fool. But then she would look at Ambrose’s face, which was the furthest imaginable thing from the face of a scoundrel, and her rage, once more, would render down back into unhappy bewilderment.

  By early October, Philadelphia was enjoying the last days of Indian summer. The mornings were crowning glories of cool air and blue skies, and the afternoons balmy and lazy. Ambrose behaved as though he was more inspired than ever, springing out of bed every morning as though shot forth by a cannon. He had managed to get a rare Aerides odorata to bloom in the orchid house. Henry had imported the plant years ago from the foothills of the Himalayas, but it had never put forth a single bud until Ambrose took the orchid out of its pot on the ground and hung it high from the rafters, in a bright spot of sun, in a basket made of bark and dampened moss. Now the thing had ignited into sudden flower. Henry was elated. Ambrose was elated. Ambrose was making drawings of it from every angle. It would be the pride of the White Acre florilegium.

  “If you love anything enough, it will eventually show you its secrets,” Ambrose told Alma.

  She might have begged to differ, had her opinion been asked. She could not possibly have loved Ambrose more, but no secrets were forthcoming from him. She found herself unpleasantly jealous of his victory with the Aerides odorata. She envied the plant itself, and the care he had shown it. She could not focus on her own work, yet here he was thriving in his. She began to resent his presence in the carriage house. Why was he always interrupting her? His printing presses were loud, and smelled of hot ink. Alma could no longer bear it. She felt as though she were rotting. Her temper grew short. She was walking through the White Acre vegetable gardens one day when she came upon a young worker, sitting on his shovel, lazily picking at a splinter in his thumb. She had seen this one before—this little splinter-picker. He was far more often to be found sitting on his shovel than working with it.

  “Your name is Robert, isn’t it?” she asked, approaching him with a warm smile.

  “I’m Robert,” he confirmed, looking up at her with mild unconcern.

  “What is your task this afternoon, Robert?”

  “To turn over this rotty old pea patch, ma’am.”

  “And do you plan to get at it one of these days, Robert?” she probed, her voice dangerously low.

  “Well, I’ve got this splinter here, see . . .”

  Alma leaned over him, casting his whole tiny body in shadow. She picked him up by his collar, a full foot off the ground, and—shaking him like a sack of feed—she bellowed, “Get back at your work, you useless little lobcock, before I take off your balls with that shovel of yours!”

  She tossed him back to the ground. He landed hard. He scrambled out from under her shadow like a rabbit, and began digging furiously, haphazardly, fearfully. Alma walked away, shaking loose the muscles of her arms, and immediately recommenced her thoughts of her husband. Was it possible that Ambrose simply didn’t know? Could anyone be such an innocent as to have entered matrimony unaware of its duties, or oblivious to the sexual mechanisms between man and wife? She remembered a book she had read years ago, back when she had begun collecting those licentious texts in the loft of the carriage house. She had not thought of this book for at least two decades. It had been rather tedious, compared to the others, but it came back to her mind now. It bore the title The Fruits of Marriage: A Gentleman’s Guide to Sexual Continence; A Manual for Married Couples, by Dr. Horscht.

  This Dr. Horscht had written the book, he claimed, after counseling a modest young Christian couple who did not possess any knowledge—either theoretical or practical—of the sexual relation, and who had baffled themselves and each other with such peculiar feelings and sensations upon entering the conjugal bed that they felt they were under a spell. Finally, a few weeks after their wedding, the poor young groom had quizzed a friend, who had given him the shocking information that the newlywed husband needed to place his organ directly inside his bride’s “watering hole” for the proper relations to occur. This thought had brought such fear and shame upon the poor young fellow that he ran to Dr. Horscht with questions as to whether this outlandish-sounding act could possibly be either performable or virtuous. Dr. Horscht, in pity for the baffled young soul, had written his guidebook on the engine of sexuality, to assist other newly married men.

  Alma had scorned the book when she’d read it years earlier. To be a young fellow and to hold such complete ignorance of the genito-urinary function seemed beyond absurd to her. Surely such people could not exist?

  Yet now she wondered.

  Did she need to show him?

  * * *

  That Saturday afternoon, Ambrose retired to their bedroom early and excused himself to bathe before dinner. She followed him to the room. She sat on the bed, and listened to the water running into the large porcelain tub on the other side of the door. She heard him humming. He was happy. She, on the other hand, was inflamed with misery and doubt. He must be undressing now. She heard muted splashes as he entered the bath, and then a sigh of pleasure. Then silence.

  She stood up and undressed, too. She removed everything—drawers and chemise, even the pins from her hair. If she’d had anything more to take off, she would have done so. Her nude form was not beautiful, and she knew it, but it was all she had. She went and leaned against the door of the water closet, listening with her ear pressed against it. She did not have to do this. There were alternatives. She could learn to endure things as they were. She could patiently submit to her suffering, to this strange and impossible marriage-that-was-not-a-marriage. She could learn how to conquer everything that Ambrose brought forth within her—her appetite for him, her disappointment in him, her sense of tormenting absence whenever she was near him. If she could learn how to defeat her own desire, then she could keep her husband—such as he was. r />
  No. No, she could not learn that.

  She turned the knob, pushed against the door, and entered as silently as she could. His head turned toward her, and his eyes grew wide with alarm. She said nothing, and he said nothing. She looked away from his eyes and allowed herself to examine his entire body, just submerged under the cool bath water. There he was, in all his naked loveliness. His skin was milky white—so much whiter in his chest and legs than on his arms. There was only a trace of hair on his torso. He could not have been more perfectly beautiful.

  Had she worried that he might not have genitalia at all? Had she imagined that this might have been the problem? Well, this was not the problem. He had genitalia—perfectly adequate, and even impressive, genitalia. She allowed herself to observe with care this lovely appendage of his—this pale, waving sea creature, which floated between his legs in its thatch of wet and private fur. Ambrose did not move. Nor did his penis stir at all. It did not like being looked at. She realized this immediately. Alma had spent enough time in the woods gazing upon shy animals to know when a creature did not want to be seen, and this creature between Ambrose’s legs did not wish to be seen. Still, she gazed at it because she could not look away. Ambrose allowed her to do this—not so much because he was permissive, but because he was paralyzed.

  At last, she looked up to his face, desperate to find some opening, some conduit, into him. He appeared frozen in fear. Why fear? She dropped to the floor beside the bathtub. It almost looked as though she were kneeling before him in supplication. No—she was kneeling before him in supplication. His right hand, with its long and tapered fingers, was resting on the edge of the tub, clutching at the porcelain rim. She loosened this hand, one finger at a time. He allowed her to loosen it. She took his hand and brought it toward her mouth. She put three of his fingers in her mouth. She could not help herself. She needed something of him inside her. She wanted to bite down on him, just enough to keep his fingers from slipping out of her mouth. She did not wish to frighten him, but she did not wish to let him go, either. Instead of biting down, she began to suck. She was perfectly concentrated in her yearning. Her lips made a noise—a rude sort of wet noise.

  At that, Ambrose came alive. He gasped, and yanked his fingers from her mouth. He sat up quickly, making a loud splash, and covered his genitals with both his hands. He looked as though he were going to die of terror.

  “Please—” she said.

  They stared at each other, like a woman and a bedchamber intruder—but she was the intruder, and he was the terrified quarry. He stared at her as though she were a stranger who had put a knife to his throat, as though she intended to use him for the most evil pleasures, then sever his head, carve out his bowels, and eat his heart with a long, sharpened fork.

  Alma relented. What other choice did she have? She stood and walked slowly from the water closet, gently pulling the door closed behind her. She dressed again. She walked downstairs. Her heart was so broken that she did not know how it was possible she could still be alive.

  She found Hanneke de Groot sweeping the corners of the dining room. With a clenched voice, she requested that the housekeeper please make up the guest bedroom in the east wing for Mr. Pike, who would be sleeping there from now on, until other arrangements could be made.

  “Waarom?” Hanneke asked.

  But Alma could not tell her why. She was tempted to fall into Hanneke’s arms and weep, but resisted it.

  “Is there any harm in an old woman’s question?” Hanneke asked.

  “You will please inform Mr. Pike yourself of this new arrangement,” Alma said, and walked away. “I find myself unable to tell him.”

  * * *

  Alma slept on her divan in the carriage house that night, and did not take dinner. She thought of Hippocrates, who believed that the ventricles of the heart were not pumps for blood, but for air. He believed the heart was an extension of the lungs—a sort of great, muscular bellows, which fed the furnace of the body. Tonight, Alma felt as if it were true. She could feel a huge gushing and sucking of wind inside her chest. It felt as though her heart was gasping for air. As for her lungs, they seemed full of blood. She was drowning with every breath. She could not shake this sense of drowning. She felt mad. She felt like crazed little Retta Snow, who also used to sleep on this couch, when the world became too frightening.

  In the morning, Ambrose came to find her. He was pale and his face was contorted with pain. He sat beside her, and reached for her hands. She pulled them away. He stared at her for a long while without speaking.

  “If you are trying to communicate something to me silently, Ambrose,” she said at last, in a voice tight with anger, “I will be unable to hear it. I ask that you speak to me directly. Do me that courtesy, please.”

  “Forgive me,” he said.

  “You must tell me what I am to forgive you for.”

  He struggled. “This marriage . . .” he began, and then lost his words.

  She laughed a hollow laugh. “What is a marriage, Ambrose, when it is cheated of the honest pleasures any husband and wife could rightly expect?”

  He nodded. He looked hopeless.

  “You have misled me,” she said.

  “Yet I believed we understood each other.”

  “Did you? What did you believe was understood? Tell me in words: What did you think our marriage would be?”

  He searched for an answer. “An exchange,” he finally said.

  “Of what, exactly?”

  “Of love. Of ideas and comfort.”

  “As did I, Ambrose. But I thought there might be other exchanges as well. If you wished to live like a Shaker, why did you not run off and join them?”

  He looked at her, baffled. He had no idea what a Shaker was. Lord, there was so much this boy did not know!

  “Let us not dispute each other, Alma, or stand in conflict,” he begged.

  “Is it the dead girl whom you long for? Is that the problem?”

  Again, the baffled expression.

  “The dead girl, Ambrose,” she repeated. “The one your mother told me of. The one who died in Framingham years ago. The one you loved.”

  He could not have been more perplexed. “You spoke to my mother?”

  “She wrote me a letter. She told me of the girl—of your true love.”

  “My mother wrote you a letter? About Julia?” Ambrose’s face was swimming in bewilderment. “But I never loved Julia, Alma. She was a dear child and the friend of my youth, but I never loved her. My mother may have wished me to love her, for she was the daughter of an upstanding family, but Julia was nothing more than my innocent neighbor. We drew flowers together. She had a small genius for it. She was dead at the age of fourteen. I have scarcely thought of her these many years. Why on earth are we speaking of Julia?”

  “Why can you not love me?” Alma asked, hating the desperation in her voice.

  “I could not love you more,” Ambrose said, with desperation to match her own.

  “I am ugly, Ambrose. I have never been unaware of that fact. Also, I am old. Yet I am in possession of several things that you wanted—comforts, companionship. You could have had all those things without humiliating me through marriage. I had already given you those things, and would have given them to you forever. I was content to love you like a sister, perhaps even like a mother. But you were the one who wished to wed. You were the one who introduced to me the idea of matrimony. You were the one who said that you wanted to sleep next to me every night. You were the one who allowed me to long for things that I long ago overcame desiring.”

  She had to stop speaking. Her voice was rising and cracking. This was shame upon shame.

  “I have no need of wealth,” Ambrose said, his eyes wet with sorrow. “You know this of me.”

  “Yet you are reaping its benefits.”

  “You do not understand me, Alma.”

  “I do not understand you at all, Mr. Pike. Edify me.”

  “I asked you,” he said. “I asked
you if you wanted a marriage of the soul—a mariage blanc.” When she did not immediately answer, he said, “It means a chaste marriage, without exchange of flesh.”

  “I know what a mariage blanc is, Ambrose,” she snapped. “I was speaking French before you were born. What I fail to understand is why you would imagine that I wanted one.”

  “Because I asked you. I asked if you would accept this of me, and you agreed.”

  “When?” Alma felt that she would tear his hair straight out of his scalp if he did not speak more directly, more truthfully.

  “In your book-repair closet that night, after I found you in the library. When we sat in silence together. I asked you, silently, ‘Will you accept this of me?’ and you said, ‘yes.’ I heard you say yes. I felt you say it! Do not deny it, Alma—you heard my question across the divide, and you answered me in the affirmative! Is that not true?”

  He was staring at her with panicked eyes. Now she was struck dumb.

  “And you asked me a question, too,” Ambrose went on. “You asked me silently if this is what I wanted of you. I said yes, Alma! I believe I even said it aloud! I could not have answered more clearly! You heard me say it!”

  She cast her mind back to that night in the binding closet, to her silent detonation of sexual pleasure, to the sensation of his question running through her, and of her question running through him. What had she heard? She had heard him ask, clear as a ringing church bell, “Will you accept this of me?” Of course she had said yes. She thought he had meant, “Will you accept sensual pleasures such as this from me?” When she had asked in reply, “Is this what you want of me?” she had meant, “Do you want these sensual pleasures with me?”

  Dear Lord in heaven, they had misunderstood each other’s questions! They had supernaturally misunderstood each other’s questions. It had been the one and only categorical miracle of Alma Whittaker’s life, and she had misunderstood it. This was the worst jest she had ever heard.