The Signature of All Things

Alma,” Ambrose said, leaning in to her. “I trust you so thoroughly, and I believe that you trust me. I do not wish to quarrel with you any longer. I wish to speak to you without words. Allow me to try to show you what I mean.”
    This was a most startling request.
    “We can be silent together right here, Ambrose.”
    He looked around the vast, elegant library. “No,” he said. “We cannot. It is too large and too loud in here, with all these dead old men arguing around us. Take me somewhere hidden and quiet, and let us listen to each other. I know it sounds mad, but it is not mad. I know this one thing to be true—that all we need for communion is our consent. I have come to believe that I cannot reach communion on my own because I am too weak. Since I have met you, Alma, I feel stronger. Do not make me regret what I have told you already of myself. I ask so little of you, Alma, but I must beg of you this request, for I have no other way to explain myself, and if I cannot show you what I believe to be true, then you will always think me deranged or idiotic.”
    She protested, “No, Ambrose, I could never think such things of you—”
    “ But you do already ,” he interrupted, with desperate urgency. “Or you will eventually. Then you will come to pity me, or detest me, and I shall lose the companion whom I hold most dear in the world, and this would bring me tribulation and sorrow. Before that sad event occurs—if it has notalready occurred—permit me to try to show you what I mean, when I say that nature, in her limitlessness, has no concern for the boundaries of our mortal imaginations. Allow me to try to show you that we can speak to each other without words and without argument. I believe that enough love and affection passes between us, my dearest friend, that we can achieve this. I have always hoped to find somebody with whom I can communicate silently. Since meeting you, I have hoped it even more—for we share, it seems, such a natural and sympathetic understanding of each other, which extends far beyond the crass or the common affections . . . do we not? Do you not also feel as though you are more powerful when I am near?”
    This could not be denied. Nor, however, out of dignity, could it be admitted.
    “What is it that you wish from me?” Alma asked.
    “I wish for you to listen to my mind and my spirit. And I wish to listen to yours.”
    “You are speaking of mind reading, Ambrose. This is a parlor game.”
    “You may call it whatever you wish. But I believe that without the impediment of language, all will be revealed.”
    “But I do not believe in such a thing,” Alma said.
    “Yet you are a woman of science, Alma—so why not try? There is nothing to be lost, and perhaps much to be learned. But for this to succeed, we shall need deepest stillness. We shall need freedom from interference. Please, Alma, I will ask this of you only once. Take me to the most quiet and secret place that you know, and let us attempt communion. Let me show you what I cannot tell you.”
    What choice did she have?
    She took him to the binding closet.
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    N ow, this was not the first that Alma had heard of mind reading. If anything, it was a bit of a local fashion. Sometimes it felt to Alma that every other lady in Philadelphia was a divine medium these days. There were “spirit ambassadors” everywhere one looked, ready to be hired by the hour. Sometimes their experiments leaked into the more respectable medical and scientific journals, which appalled Alma. She had recently seen an article on the subject of pathetism—the idea that chance could be induced bysuggestion—which seemed to her like mere carnival games. Some people called these explorations science, but Alma, irritated, diagnosed them as entertainment—and a rather dangerous variety of entertainment, at that.
    In a way, Ambrose reminded her of all these spiritualists—yearning and susceptible—yet at the same time, he was not like them in the least. For one thing, he had never heard of them. He lived in far too much isolation to have noticed the mystical manias of the moment. He did not subscribe to the phrenology journals, with their discussions of the thirty-seven different faculties, propensities, and sentiments represented by the bumps and valleys of the human skull. Nor did he visit mediums. He did not read The Dial. He had never mentioned to Alma the names of Bronson Alcott or Ralph Waldo Emerson—because he had never