The Signature of All Things

soon enough find that my wife and daughters are passably capable of conversation.”
    “Are they?” the gentleman asked, plainly unconvinced. “In what topics?”
    “Well,” Henry said, rubbing at his chin as he considered his family,“Beatrix here knows everything, Prudence has artistic and musical knowledge, and Alma—the big tall one—is a right beast for botany.”
    “Botany,” Professor Peck repeated, with practiced condescension. “A most improving recreation for girls. The only scientific work that is suited to the female sex, I have always surmised, on account of its absence of cruelty, or mathematical rigor. My own daughter does fine drawings of wildflowers.”
    “How engrossing for her,” Beatrix murmured.
    “Yes, quite,” said Professor Peck, and turned to Alma. “A lady’s fingers are more pliant, you see. Softer than a man’s. Better suited than a man’s hands, some say, for the more delicate operations of plant collection.”
    Alma, who was not one to blush, blushed to her very bones. Why was this man talking about her fingers, about pliancy, about delicacy, about softness?Now everybody looked at Alma’s hands, which, only a short while earlier, had been buried straight up inside her quim. It was dreadful. From the corner of her eye, she saw her old friend George Hawkes smile at her in nervous sympathy. George blushed all the time. He blushed whenever anyone looked at him, and whenever he was forced to speak. Perhaps he was commiserating with her discomfort. With George’s eyes upon her, Alma felt herself blushing redder still. For the first time in her life, she could not find speech, and she wished that nobody would look at her at all. She would have done anything to escape dinner that night.
    Fortunately for Alma, Professor Peck did not seem particularly interested in anyone but himself, and once dinner was served, he commenced on a long and detailed disquisition, as though he had mistaken White Acre for a lecture hall, and his hosts for students.
    “There are those,” he began, after an elaborate folding of his napkin, “who have recently submitted that Negroidism is merely a disease of the skin, which could perhaps, using the correct chemical combinations, be washed off , as it were, thus transforming the Negro into a healthy white man. This is incorrect. As my research has proven, a Negro is not a diseased white man, but a species of his own, as I shall demonstrate . . .”
    Alma found it challenging to pay attention. Her thoughts were on Cum Grano Salis and the binding closet. Now, this day did not mark the first occasion upon which Alma had heard of genitalia, or even of human sexual function. Unlike other girls—who were told by their families that Indiansbrought babies, or that impregnation occurred through the insertion of seeds into small cuts in the side of a woman’s body—Alma knew the rudiments of human anatomy, both male and female. There were far too many medical treatises and scientific books around White Acre for her to have remained wholly ignorant on this topic, and the entire language of botany, with which Alma was so intimately familiar, was highly sexualized. (Linnaeus himself had referred to pollination as “marriage,” had called flower petals “noble bed curtains,” and had once daringly described a flower that contained nine stamens and one pistil as “nine men in the same bride’s chamber, with one woman.”)
    What’s more, Beatrix would not have her daughters be raised as self-endangering innocents, particularly given Prudence’s natural mother’s unfortunate history, so it was Beatrix herself who—with much stuttering and suffering, and a good deal of fanning about the neck—had imparted to Alma and Prudence the essential proceedings of human propagation. This conversation nobody had enjoyed, and everyone had worked together to end it as swiftly as possible—but the information had been transmitted. Beatrix had even once warned Alma that certain parts of the body were never to be touched except in the interest of cleanliness, and that one must never linger at the privy, for instance, due to the dangers of solitary unchaste passions. Alma had paid no mind to the warning at the time because it made no sense: Who would ever want to linger at the privy?
    But with her discovery of Cum Grano Salis , Alma had suddenly been made aware that the most unimaginable sensual events were transpiring all over the world. Men and women were doing