The Signature of All Things

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.”
----
    A lma 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 theheart 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