The Signature of All Things

accepted his banishment, and now he was gone. What a stark and stunning thing was life—that such a cataclysm can enter and depart so quickly, and leave such wreckage behind!
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    S easons passed, but grudgingly. It was now 1850. Alma woke one night in early April from a violent, faceless nightmare. She was clutching at her own throat, choking dryly on the last crumbs of terror. Panicked, she did the oddest thing. She leapt from her divan in the carriage house and ran, barefoot, across the gravel drive, across the frosted yard, across her mother’s Grecian garden and toward the house. She dashed around the corner to the kitchen door at the back and pushed in, heart pounding and lungs gasping for breath. She ran downstairs—her feet knowing every worn wooden step in the dark—and did not stop running until she had reached the bars that surrounded Hanneke de Groot’s bedroom, in the warmest corner of the basement. She grasped the bars and shook them like a crazed inmate.
    “Hanneke!” Alma cried. “Hanneke, I am frightened!”
    If she had paused for even an instant between waking and running, she might have stopped herself. She was a fifty-year-old woman running into the arms of her old nursemaid. It was absurd. But she did not stop herself.
    “ Wie is daar? ” Hanneke shouted, startled.
    “ Ik ben het. Alma! ” Alma said, falling into the warm, familiar Dutch. “You must help me! I have had bad dreams.”
    Hanneke rose, grumbling and baffled, and unlocked the gate. Alma raninto her arms—into those great salty hams of arms—and wept like an infant. Surprised but adapting, Hanneke guided Alma to the bed and sat her down, embracing her and allowing her to sob.
    “There, there,” said Hanneke. “It will not kill you.”
    But Alma thought it would kill her, this profundity of sorrow. She could not sound out the bottom of it. She had been sinking into it for a year and a half, and feared she would sink forevermore. She cried herself out on Hanneke’s neck, sobbing forth the harvest of her long-darkened spirits. She must have poured a tankard of tears down Hanneke’s bosom, but Hanneke did not move or speak, except to repeat, “There, there, child. It will not kill you.”
    When Alma finally recovered herself somewhat, Hanneke reached for a clean cloth and wiped them both down with cursory efficiency, just as she might have wiped tables in the kitchen.
    “One must bear what cannot be escaped,” she told Alma, as she rubbed clean her face. “You will not die of your grief—no more than the rest of us ever have.”
    “But how does one bear it?” Alma begged.
    “Through the dignified performance of one’s duties,” Hanneke said. “Be not afraid to work, child. There you will find consolation. If you are healthy enough to weep, you are healthy enough to work.”
    “But I loved him,” Alma said.
    Hanneke sighed. “Then you made an expensive error. You loved a man who thought the world was made of butter. You loved a man who wished to see stars by daylight. He was nonsense.”
    “He was not nonsense.”
    “He was nonsense ,” Hanneke repeated.
    “He was singular,” Alma said. “He did not wish to live in the body of a mortal man. He wished to be a celestial figure—and he wished me to be one, too.”
    “Well, Alma, you make me say it again: he was nonsense. Yet you treated him like he was a heavenly visitant. Indeed, all of you did!”
    “Do you think he was a scoundrel? Do you think he had a wicked soul?”
    “No. But he was no heavenly visitant, either. He was just a bit of nonsense, I tell you. He ought to have been harmless nonsense, but you fell prey. Well, we all fall prey to nonsense at times, child, and sometimes we are fool enough to even love it.”
    “No man will ever have me,” Alma said.
    “Probably not,” Hanneke decided firmly. “But now you must endure it—and you won’t be the first. You have been indulging yourself in a slough of sadness for a long time now, and your mother would be ashamed of you. You are growing soft, and it is disgraceful. Do you think you are the only one to suffer? Read your Bible, child; this world is not a paradise but a vale of tears. Do you think God made an exception for you? Look around you, what do you see? All is anguish. Everywhere you turn there is sorrow. If you do not see sorrow at first glance, look more carefully. You will soon enough see it.”
    Hanneke spoke sternly, but the mere sound of her voice was reassuring. Dutch was