The Signature of All Things

not a mellifluous language like French, or a powerful language like Greek, or a noble language like Latin, but it was as comforting as porridge to Alma. She wanted to put her head in Hanneke’s lap and be scolded forever.
    “Blow the dust off yourself!” Hanneke went on. “Your mother will haunt me from her grave if I allow you to continue simpering around this place, sucking on the rump-end of sorrow, as you have been doing now for months. Your bones are not broken, so stand up on your own two shanks. Do you wish us to mourn for you forever? Has somebody stuck a twig in your eye? No, they have not—so stop moping about, then! Stop sleeping like a dog on that couch in the carriage house. Take care of your duties. Take care of your father—can you not see he is sick and elderly and soon to die? And leave me alone. I am too old a woman for this foolishness, and so are you. At this point in your life, after everything you have been taught, it would be a pity if you could not better control yourself. Go back to your room, Alma—to your proper room, in this house. You will take your breakfast tomorrow morning at the table with the rest of us, just as ever, and furthermore, I expect to see you properly dressed for the day when you sit down to eat it. You will eat every bite of it, too, and you will thank the cook. You are a Whittaker, child. Recover yourself. This is enough.”
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    S o Alma did as she was told. She returned, albeit cowed and worn, to her bedroom. She returned to the breakfast table, to her responsibilities toward her father, to the management of White Acre. As best as possible, she returned to her life as it had been before the advent of Ambrose. There wasno cure for the gossip of the maids and gardeners, but—as Henry had predicted—eventually they moved on to other scandals and dramas, and for the most part stopped chatting about Alma’s woes.
    She herself did not forget her woes, but she sewed up the rents in the fabric of her life quite as well as she could, and carried on. She noticed for the first time that her father’s health was indeed deteriorating, and rapidly, as Hanneke de Groot had pointed out. This should have come as no surprise (the man was ninety years old!), but she had always seen him as such a colossus, such a piece of human invincibility, that his new frailty amazed and alarmed her. Henry took to his bedroom for longer periods of time, frankly uninterested in matters of important business. His eyesight was dim; his hearing was almost gone. He required an ear trumpet to hear much of anything anymore. He needed Alma both more and less than he had ever needed her before: more as a nurse, less as a clerk. He never mentioned Ambrose. Nobody did. Reports came through Dick Yancey that the vanilla vines in Tahiti were fruiting at last. This was the closest Alma came to hearing news of her lost husband.
    Yet Alma never stopped thinking about him. The silence from the printing studio next door to her study in the carriage house was a constant reminder of his absence, as was the dusty neglect of the orchid house, and the tedium at the dinner table. There were conversations to be had with George Hawkes, about the upcoming publication of Ambrose’s orchid book—which Alma was now overseeing. That, too, was a reminder, and a painful one. But there was nothing to be done for any of this. One cannot erase every reminder. In fact, one cannot erase any reminders. Her sadness was ceaseless, but she kept it quarantined in a governable little quarter of her heart. It was the best she could do.
    Once more, as she had done during other lonely moments of her life, she turned to her own work for solace and distraction. She returned to her labors on The Mosses of North America. She returned to her boulder fields and inspected her tiny flags and markings. She observed once more the slow advance or decline of one variety against another. She revisited the inspiration she’d had two years before—in those heady, joyful weeks before her wedding—about the similarities between algae and mosses. She could not regain her original wild confidence about the idea, but it still seemed to her entirely possible that the aquatic plant might have transformed into the landplant. There was something to it, some sort of confluence or connection, but she could not solve the riddle.
    Looking for answers, seeking intellectual occupation, she returned her attention to the ongoing debates about species mutation.