The Signature of All Things

she realized she had been saying this all along, with every new and shocking picture.
    My God, my God, my God .
    Alma Whittaker was a woman of quick calculation, and far from a sensual innocent. The sole possible conclusion to be reached regarding the valise’s contents was this: Ambrose Pike—paragon of purity, the angel of Framingham—was a sodomite.
    Her mind flew back to his first night at White Acre. Over dinner, he had dazzled them, Henry and Alma both, with his ideas about the hand-pollination of vanilla orchids in Tahiti. What was it he had said? It would be so easy, he’d promised: All you need is little boys with little fingers and little sticks. It had sounded so playful. Now, in echoing retrospect, it sounded perverse. But it also answered for much. Ambrose had been unable to consummate their marriage not because Alma was old, not because Alma was ugly, and not because he wanted to emulate the angels—but because he wanted little boys with little fingers and little sticks. Or big boys, by the looks of these drawings.
    Dear God, what he had put her through! What lies he had told! What manipulations! What self-disgust he had made her feel for her own entirely natural longings. The way he had looked at her from the bathtub that afternoon when she had taken his fingers into her mouth—as though she were some sort of succubus, come to devour his flesh. She remembered a line from Montaigne, something she had read years ago, which had alwaysstayed with her, and which now felt horribly pertinent: “These are two things that I have always observed to be in singular accord: supercelestial thoughts and subterranean conduct.”
    She had been made a fool by Ambrose and his supercelestial thoughts, by his grand dreams, his false innocence, his pretense at godliness, his noble talk of communion with the divine—and look where he had ended up! In a louche paradise, with a willing catamite, and a fine upstanding cock!
    “You duplicitous son of a whore,” she said aloud.
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    A nother woman might have taken Dick Yancey’s counsel to burn the valise and everything inside it. Alma, however, was far too much the scientist to burn evidence of any kind. She put the valise under the divan in her study. Nobody would find it there. Nobody ever came into that room, in any case. Loath to have her work disturbed, she had never permitted anyone but herself to even clean her study. Nobody cared what an old spinster like Alma did inside her room full of silly microscopes and tedious books and vials of dried moss. She was a fool. Her life was a comedy—a terrible, sad comedy.
    She went to dinner and paid no attention to her food.
    Who else had known?
    She had heard the worst gossip about Ambrose in the months after their marriage—or thought she had—but she didn’t recall anyone ever having accused him of being a Miss Molly. Had he buggered the stable boys, then? Or the young gardeners? Was that what he had been up to? But when would he have done it? Someone would have said something. They were always together, Alma and Ambrose, and secrets that salacious do not stay secrets long. Rumors are a precious currency that burn holes in the pocket and are always, eventually, spent. Yet no one had spoken a word.
    Had Hanneke known?Alma wondered, looking at the old housekeeper. Was that why she had been opposed to Ambrose? We do not know him , she had said, so many times . . .
    What about Daniel Tupper in Boston—Ambrose’s dearest friend? Had he been more than a friend? The telegram he had sent on the day of their wedding, WELL DONE PIKE —had it been some sort of cheeky code? But Daniel Tupper was a married man with a houseful of children, Almaremembered. Or so Ambrose had said. Not that it mattered. People could be many things, apparently, and all at once.
    What about his mother? Had Mrs. Constance Pike known? Was this what she meant, when she had written, “Perhaps a decent marriage shall cure him of playing the moral truant”? Why had Alma not read that letter more carefully? Why had she not investigated?
    How could she not have seen this?
    After dinner, she paced her rooms. She felt bisected and dislocated. She felt awash in curiosity, polished bright by anger. Unable to stop herself, she walked back over to the carriage house. She went into the printing studio she had so carefully (and expensively) outfitted for Ambrose more than three years earlier. All the machinery rested beneath sheets now, and the furniture,