The Signature of All Things

inhibitionsmelted away, and a general air of lightheaded giddiness took hold of everyone. The orchestra abandoned the formality of the ballroom and set up a lively racket outdoors on the wide lawn. Lamps and torches were brought outside, casting all the guests into turbulent shadows. The charming Italian astronomer attempted to teach the gentlemen of Philadelphia some wild Neapolitan dance steps, and he made his rounds with every lady, too—all of whom found him comical, daring, thrilling. He even tried to dance with the Negro caterers, to general hilarity.
    Pontesilli was supposed to have delivered a lecture that night, with elaborate illustrations and calculations, explaining the elliptical paths and velocities of the planets. At some point in the course of the evening, though, this idea was discarded. What gathering, in such an unruly spirit, could fairly be expected to sit still for a serious scientific lecture?
    Alma would never know whose idea it had been—Pontesilli’s or her father’s—but shortly after midnight, it was decided that the famous Italian cosmological maestro would re-create a model of the universe on the great lawn of White Acre, using the guests themselves as heavenly bodies. It would not be an exact scale model, the Italian drunkenly declaimed, but it would at least give the ladies a slight sense about the lives of the planets and their relationships to one another.
    With a marvelous air of both authority and comedy, Pontesilli placed Henry Whittaker—the Sun—at the center of the lawn. Then he gathered up a number of other gentlemen to serve as planets, each of whom would radiate outward from their host. To the entertainment of everyone gathered, Pontesilli attempted to choose men for these roles who most closely resembled the planets they were meant to represent. Thus, tiny Mercury was portrayed by a diminutive but dignified grain merchant from Germantown. Since Venus and Earth were bigger than Mercury, but nearly the same size as each other, Pontesilli chose for those planets a pair of brothers from Delaware—two men who were almost perfectly identical in height, girth, and complexion. Mars needed to be bigger than the grain merchant but not quite as big as the brothers from Delaware; a prominent banker with a trim figure fit the bill. For Jupiter, Pontesilli commandeered a retired sea captain, a man of truly hilarious fatness, whose corpulent appearance in the solar system reduced the entire party to hysterical laughter. As for Saturn, a slightly less fat but still amusingly portly newspaperman did the job.
    On it went, until all the planets were arranged across the lawn at the proper distance from the sun, and from each other. Then Pontesilli set them into orbit around Henry, desperately trying to keep each intoxicated gentleman in his correct celestial path. Soon the ladies were clamoring to join the amusement, and so Pontesilli arranged them around the men, to serve as moons, with each moon in her own narrow orbit. (Alma’s mother played the role of the Earth’s moon with cool lunar perfection.) The maestro then created stellar constellations in the outskirts of the lawn, concocted from the prettiest groups of belles.
    The orchestra struck up again, and this landscape of heavenly bodies took on the appearance of the most strange and beautiful waltz the good people of Philadelphia had ever seen. Henry, the Sun King, stood beaming at the center of it all, his hair the color of flame, while men large and small revolved around him, and women circled around the men. Clusters of unmarried girls sparkled in the outermost corners of the universe, distant as unknown galaxies. Pontesilli climbed atop a high garden wall and swayed precariously there, conducting and commanding the entire tableau, crying across the night, “Stay at your velocity, men! Do not abandon your trajectory, ladies!”
    Alma wanted to be in it. She had never before seen anything so thrilling. She had never before been awake this late—except after nightmares—but she had somehow been forgotten in all the merriment. She was the only child in attendance, as she had been for all her life the only child in attendance. She ran over to the garden wall and cried up to the dangerously unstable Maestro Pontesilli, “Put me in it, sir!” The Italian peered down at her from his perch, troubling himself to try to focus his eyes—who was this child? He might have dismissed her entirely, but then Henry bellowed from the