The Signature of All Things

  “I was only asking you,” she said wearily, “if you wanted me. Which is to say—if you wanted me fully, in the way that lovers typically want each other. I thought you were asking me the same.”

  “But I would never ask for anyone’s corporeal body in the manner of which you speak,” Ambrose said.

  “Why ever not?”

  “Because I do not believe in it.”

  Alma could not comprehend what she was hearing. She was unable to speak for a long while. Then she asked, “Is it your opinion that the conjugal act—even between a man and his wife—is something vile and depraved? Surely you know, Ambrose, what other people share with each other, in the privacy of marriage? Do you think me debased, for wanting my husband to be a husband? Surely you have heard tales of such enjoyments between men and women?”

  “I am not like other men, Alma. Can that honestly surprise you to learn, at this late date?”

  “What do you imagine you are, then, if not like other men?”

  “It is not what I imagine I am, Alma—it is what I wish to be. Or rather, what I once was, and wish to be again.”

  “Which is what, Ambrose?”

  “An angel of God,” Ambrose said, in a voice of unspeakable sadness. “I had hoped we could be angels of God together. Such a thing would not be possible unless we were freed of the flesh, bound in celestial grace.”

  “Oh, for the godforsaken mercy of the twice-buggered mother of Christ!” Alma cursed. She wanted to pick him up and shake him, as she’d shaken Robert the garden boy the other day. She wanted to argue scripture with him. The women of Sodom, she wanted to tell him, had been punished by Jehovah for having sexual communion with angels—but at least they had gotten their chance! Just her luck, to have been sent an angel so beautiful, yet so uncomplying.

  “Come, Ambrose!” she said. “Awaken yourself! We do not live in the celestial realm—not you, and most certainly not I. How can you be so dim? Put your eyes upon me, child! Your real eyes—your mortal eyes. Do I look like an angel to you, Ambrose Pike?”

  “Yes,” he said, with sad simplicity.

  The rage passed out of Alma, and was replaced by leaden, bottomless sorrow.

  “Then you have been much mistaken,” Alma said, “and now we find ourselves in a deuce of a mess.”

  * * *

  He could not stay on at White Acre.

  This became evident after only a week had passed—a week during which Ambrose slept in the guest chambers in the east wing, and Alma slept on the divan in the carriage house, both of them enduring the grins and titters of the young maids. To be wed only a few weeks and already sleeping not only in different rooms, but in different buildings . . . well, this was far too glorious a scandal for the busybodies about the estate to resist.

  Hanneke tried to keep the staff silent, but the rumors dipped and flew like bats at twilight. They said that Alma was too old and ugly for Ambrose to endure, regardless of the fortune that came tucked inside her dried-up cunny. They said that Ambrose had been caught stealing. They said that Ambrose liked the pretty young girls, and that he had been found with his hand on the arse of a dairymaid. They said whatever they wanted to say; Hanneke could not dismiss everyone. Alma overheard some of it herself, and what she did not overhear, she could easily imagine. The looks they gave her were despicable enough.

  Her father called her into his study on a Monday afternoon in late October.

  “What is this, then?” he said. “Bored of your new toy already?”

  “Do not ridicule me, Father—I swear to you, I cannot bear it.”

  “Then make an explanation to me.”

  “It is too shameful to explain.”

  “I cannot imagine that to be true. Do you fancy that I have not heard the bulk of rumors already? Nothing you could tell me would be more shameful than what people are already saying.”

  “There is much that I cannot tell you, Father.”

  “Has he been untrue to you? Already?”

  “You know him, Father. He would not do that.”

  “None of us much know him, Alma. So what is it? Stolen from you—from me? Is he rutting you half to death? Beating you with a leather strop? No, somehow I cannot see any of that. Put a name to it, girl. What is his crime?”

  “He cannot stay here any longer, and I cannot tell you why.”

  “Do you take me for a specimen of man who would faint at the truth? I am old, Alma, but not yet entombed. And don’t think I will not guess it, either, if I go at the question long enough. Are you frigid? Is that the trouble? Or does he hang limp?”

  She did not reply.

  “Ah,” he said. “Something like that, then. So there has been no settlement of the marital duties?”

  Again, she did not reply.

  Henry clapped his hands. “Well, what of it? You enjoy each other’s companionship, regardless. That’s more than most people are allotted in their marriages. You are too old to bear children, anyway, and many marriages are not happy in the bedchamber. Most of them, really. Poorly matched pairings are thick as flies in this world. Your marriage may have soured faster than others, but you will bear up and endure it, Alma, like the rest of us do—or did. Haven’t you been raised to bear up and endure things? You will not have your life felled by one setback. Make the best of it. Think of him as a brother, if he does not tickle you under the coverlets to your satisfaction. He would make a good enough brother. He is pleasant company to us all.”

  “I am not in need of a brother. I am telling you, Father, he cannot stay here. You must make him leave.”

  “And I am telling you, daughter, that not three months ago we two stood in this very room and I listened to you insist that you must marry this man—a man about whom I knew nothing, and about whom you knew only a penny’s worth more. Now you wish me to chase him away? What am I to be, your bull terrier? I confess, I do not approve of it, no, I do not. There is no dignity in it. Is it the gossip you don’t like? Face it down like a Whittaker. Go and be seen by those who mock you. Knock somebody’s head about, if you don’t like the way they look at you. They’ll learn. They’ll find something else to gossip about soon enough. But to cast this young man out forever, for the crime of—what? Not entertaining you? Take up with one of the gardeners, if you must have a young buck in your bed. There are men you can pay for such diversions, same as men pay for women. People desirous of money will do anything, and you have ample money. Use your dowry to establish a harem of young men for your pleasure, if you wish it.”

  “Father, please—” she begged.

  “But meanwhile, what do you propose I do with our Mr. Pike?” he went on. “Drag him behind a carriage through the streets of Philadelphia, painted with tar? Sink him in the Schuylkill, tied to a barrel full of rocks? Put a blindfold on him, and shoot him against a wall?”

  She could only stand there in shame and sorrow, unable to speak. What had she thought her father would say? Well—foolish as it seemed now—she had thought Henry might defend her. She thought Henry would be outraged on her behalf. She had half expected him to stomp around the house in one of his famous old theatrical rants, arms waving like a player in a farce: How could you do this to my daughter? That sort of thing. Something to match the pitch and depth of her own loss and fury. But why would she think that? Whom had she ever seen Henry Whittaker defend? And if he was defending anyone in this case, it appeared he was defending Ambrose.

  Instead of coming to her rescue, her father was belittling her. What’s more, Alma now remembered the conversation she and Henry had had about her marriage to Ambrose, not three months earlier. Henry had warned her—or at least, he’d raised the question—about whether “this sort of man” could bring her satisfaction in matrimony. What had he known then, that he hadn’t expressed? What did he know now?

  “Why did you not stop me marrying him?” Alma asked at last. “You suspected something. Why did you not speak?”

  Henry shrugged. “It was not my domain three months ago to make up yo
ur mind for you. Nor is it now. If something is to be done with the young man, you must do it yourself.”

  The thought of this staggered Alma: Henry had been making up Alma’s mind for her forever, since she was the smallest mite of a girl—or that was how she had always perceived things.

  She could not stop herself from asking, “But what do you think I should do with him?”

  “Do what you damned well like, Alma! This decision is yours. Mr. Pike is not mine to dispose of. You brought this thing into our household, you get rid of it—if that is what you wish. Be swift about it, too. It is always better to cut than to tear. One way or another, I want this matter resolved. A certain amount of common sense has exited this family in the last few months, and I would like to see it restored. We have too much work on hand for this sort of foolery.”

  * * *

  In years to come, Alma would try to convince herself that she and Ambrose had made the decision together—about where he was to go next in his life—but nothing could have been further from the truth. Ambrose Pike was not a man who made decisions for himself. He was an untethered balloon, fabulously susceptible to the influence of those more powerful than he—and everyone was more powerful than he. Always, he had done just as he was told. His mother had told him to go to Harvard, and so he had gone to Harvard. His friends had pulled him out of a snowbank and sent him to a ward for the mentally insane, and he had obediently allowed himself to be locked away. Daniel Tupper up in Boston had told him to go to the jungles of Mexico and paint orchids, and he had gone to the jungle and painted orchids. George Hawkes had invited him to Philadelphia, and he had come to Philadelphia. Alma had established him at White Acre and instructed him to make a grand florilegium of her father’s plant collection, and he had set to it without question. He would go wherever he was led.

  He wanted to be an angel of God, but Lord protect him, he was just a lamb.

  Did she honestly try to think of a plan that would be best for him? She told herself later that she did. She would not divorce him; there was no reason to put either of them through such scandal. She would provide him with ample funds—not that he had ever asked for any, but because it was the proper thing to do. She would not send him back to Massachusetts, not only because she detested his mother (just from that one letter, she detested his mother!) but also because the thought of Ambrose sleeping forever on his friend Tupper’s couch brought her anguish. She could not send him back to Mexico, either, that was certain. He had almost died of fever there already.

  Yet she could not keep him in Philadelphia, because his presence brought her too much suffering. Mercy, how he had diminished her! Yet she still loved his face—pale and troubled though he had become. Just to see that face brought forth such a gaping, vulgar need within her that she could scarcely bear it. He would have to go elsewhere—somewhere far away. She could not risk encountering him in the years to come.

  She wrote a letter to Dick Yancey—to her father’s iron-fisted business manager—who was at the moment in Washington, D.C., arranging some business with the nascent botanical gardens there. Alma knew that Yancey would soon be embarking for the South Pacific on a whaling ship. He was going to Tahiti to investigate the Whittaker Company’s struggling vanilla plantation, and to attempt to put into place the artificial-pollination tactic that Ambrose himself had suggested to Alma’s father, on the first night of his visit to White Acre.

  Yancey planned to leave for Tahiti soon, within the fortnight. It was best to sail before the late-autumn storms, and before the harbor froze.

  Alma knew all this. Why should Ambrose not go to Tahiti with Dick Yancey, then? It was a respectable, even ideal, solution. Ambrose could take over management of the vanilla plantation himself. He would excel at it, would he not? Vanillas were orchids, weren’t they? Henry Whittaker would be pleased with the plan; sending Ambrose to Tahiti was exactly what he’d wanted in the first place, before Alma talked him out of it, to her own severe detriment.

  Was this a banishment? Alma attempted not to think so. Tahiti was said to be a paradise, Alma told herself. It was hardly a penal colony. Yes, Ambrose was delicate, but Dick Yancey would see that no harm befell him. The work would be interesting. The climate was fine and healthy there. Who would not envy this opportunity to see the fabled shores of Polynesia? It was an opportunity that any man of botany or commerce would welcome—and it was all paid for, besides.

  She pushed aside the voices within her who protested that, yes, this was most certainly a banishment—and a cruel one. She ignored what she knew all too well—that Ambrose was neither a man of botany nor a man of commerce, but rather a being of unique sensitivities and talents, whose mind was a delicate thing, and who was perhaps not at all suited to a long journey on a whaling vessel, or life on an agricultural plantation in the distant South Seas. Ambrose was more child than man, and he had said to Alma many times that he wanted nothing more in life than a secure home and a gentle companion.

  Well, there are many things in life that we want, she told herself, and we do not always get them.

  Besides, there was nowhere else for him to go.

  Having decided everything, Alma then established her husband at the United States Hotel for two weeks—right across the street from the large bank where her father’s money was stored in great secret vaults—while she waited for Dick Yancey to return from Washington.

  * * *

  It was in the lobby of United States Hotel, a fortnight later, that Alma at last introduced her husband to Dick Yancey—to towering, silent Dick Yancey, with the fearsome eyes and the jaw carved out of rock, who did not ask questions, and who did only as he was ordered. Well, Ambrose did only as he was ordered, too. Stooped and pale, Ambrose asked no questions. He did not even ask how long he would be expected to remain in Polynesia. She would not have known how to answer that question, in any case. It was not a banishment, she continued to tell herself. Yet even she did not know how long it would last.

  “Mr. Yancey will take care of you from here,” she said to Ambrose. “Your comforts will be attended to, as much as possible.”

  She felt as though she were leaving a baby in the care of a trained crocodile. At that moment, she loved Ambrose every bit as much as she ever had loved him—which was entirely. Already, she felt a wide-open absence at the thought of him sailing to the other side of the world. Then again, she had felt nothing but wide-open absence since her wedding night. She wanted to embrace him, but she had always wanted to embrace him, and she could not do that. He would not permit it. She wanted to cling to him, to beg him to stay, to beg him to love her. None of it was permitted. There was no use in it.

  They shook hands, as they had done in her mother’s Grecian garden on the day they had met. The same small worn leather valise sat beside Ambrose’s feet, filled with all his belongings. He wore the same brown corduroy suit. He had taken nothing with him from White Acre.

  The last thing she said to him was, “I pray of you, Ambrose, do me the service of not speaking to anyone you may meet about our marriage. Nobody need know what has transpired between us. You will travel not as the son-in-law of Henry Whittaker, but as his employee. Anything further than that would only lead to questions, and I do not long for the world’s questions.”

  He agreed by nodding. He said nothing more. He looked sick and exhausted.

  Alma did not need to ask Dick Yancey to keep secret her history with Mr. Pike. Dick Yancey did nothing but keep secrets; that was why the Whittakers had kept him around for such a very long time.

  Dick Yancey was useful that way.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Alma heard nothing whatsoever from Ambrose over the next three years; in fact, she scarcely even heard anything about him. In the early summer of 1849, Dick Yancey sent word that they had safely arrived in Tahiti after an uneventful sail. (Alma knew that this did not mean it had been an easy sail; to Dick Yancey, any journey that did not end in shipwreck or capture by pirates was uneventful.) Yancey reported th
at Mr. Pike had been left at Matavai Bay, in the care of a botanizing missionary named the Reverend Francis Welles, and that Mr. Pike had been introduced to the duties of the vanilla plantation. Soon after, Dick Yancey had left Tahiti to attend to Whittaker business in Hong Kong. After that, no more news arrived.

  This was a time of much despair for Alma. Despair is a tedious business and quickly becomes repetitive, which is how it came to pass that each day for Alma became a replica of the day that had preceded it: sad, lonely, and indistinct. The first winter was the worst. The months seemed colder and darker than any winter Alma had known, and she felt invisible birds of prey hovering over her whenever she walked between the carriage house and the mansion. The bare trees stared at her starkly, begging to be warmed or clothed. The Schuylkill froze so fast and thick that men made bonfires on its surface at night and roasted oxen on spits. Whenever Alma stepped outside, the wind hit her, captured her, and wrapped around her like a stiff and frozen cloak.

  She stopped sleeping in her bedroom. She quite nearly stopped sleeping at all. She had been more or less living in the carriage house since her confrontation with Ambrose; she could not imagine ever sleeping in her matrimonial chamber again. She ceased taking meals with the household, and ate the same fare at dinner as she had taken at breakfast: broth and bread, milk and molasses. She felt listless, tragic, and slightly murderous. She was irritable and prickly with exactly those people who were kindest to her—Hanneke de Groot, for instance—and she left off all care and concern for the likes of her sister Prudence, or her poor old friend Retta. She avoided her father. She barely kept up with the official work of White Acre. She complained to Henry that he had treated her unfairly—that he had always treated her as a servant.

  “I never claimed fairness!” he shouted, and banished her back to the carriage house until she could become master of herself again.