The Signature of All Things

me—when I find one good worker, all three of you will be dismissed! In the meanwhile, get back to your tasks, and stop shaming yourselves with such carelessness.”
    “I cannot thank you enough for your service,” Alma told Hanneke, once the girls were gone. “I hope to someday be able to assist you more with the management of the household, but for now I will still need you to do everything, as I try to make sense of my father’s business affairs.”
    “I have always done everything,” Hanneke replied, uncomplainingly.
    “Indeed, it seems you have, Hanneke. It seems you do the work of ten men.”
    “Your mother did the work of twenty men, Alma—and had to look after your father, too.”
    As Hanneke turned to leave, Alma reached for the housekeeper’s arm.
    “Hanneke,” she asked, exhausted and frowning, “what does one do for a baby who has just swallowed a pin?”
    Without hesitating, or asking why such a question should suddenly arise, Hanneke replied, “Prescribe raw egg white to the child and patience to the mother. Give the mother assurance that the pin will probably slide out the child’s sewer hole in a few days, with no ill effects. If it’s an older child, you can make it jump a rope, to encourage the process along.”
    “Does the child ever die from it?” Alma asked.
    Hanneke shrugged. “Sometimes. But if you prescribe these steps and speak in a tone of certainty, the mother will not feel so helpless.”
    “Thank you,” Alma said.
----
    A s for Retta Snow, the girl came over to White Acre several times during the first weeks after Beatrix’s death, but Alma and Prudence—absorbed in catching up with the work of the family business—could find no time for her.
    “I can help you!” Retta said, but everyone knew that she could not.
    “Then I shall wait for you every day in your study in the carriage house,” Retta finally promised Alma, when she had been turned away too many times in a row. “When you are finished with your labors, you will come and see me. I will talk to you while you study impossible things. I will tell youextraordinary stories, and you will laugh and marvel. For I have news of the most shocking variety!”
    Alma could not imagine ever again finding the time to laugh or marvel with Retta, much less to continue her own projects. For quite some time after her mother’s death, she forgot that she had ever had her own work at all. She was a mere quill-driver now, a scrivener, a slave to her father’s desk, and the administrator of a dauntingly large household—wading through a jungle of neglected tasks. For two months, she barely stepped outside her father’s study at all. As best she was able, she refused to let her father leave, either.
    “I need your help on all these matters,” Alma pleaded with Henry, “or we shall never catch up again.”
    Then, late one October afternoon, right in the middle of all the sorting, calculating, and solving, Henry simply stood up and walked out of his own study, leaving Alma and Prudence with their hands full of papers.
    “Where are you going?” Alma asked.
    “To get drunk,” he said, in a voice fierce and dark. “And by God, how I dread it.”
    “Father—” she protested.
    “Finish it yourself,” he commanded.
    And so she did.
    With Prudence’s help, with Hanneke’s help, but mostly on her own accord, Alma polished that study to a state of trim perfection. She put each one of her father’s affairs in order—solving one onerous problem at a time—until every edict, injunction, mandate, and dictate had been addressed, until every letter was answered, every chit was paid, every investor was assured, every vendor cajoled, and every vendetta settled.
    It was the middle of January before she finished, and when she did, she understood the workings of the Whittaker Company from top to bottom. She had been in mourning for five months. She had entirely missed the autumn—seeing it neither arrive nor leave. She stood up from her father’s desk and unwound her black crepe armband. She laid the thing across in the last bin of refuse and discards, to be burned with the rest of it. That was enough.
    Alma walked to the binding closet just off the library, locked herself in, and pleasured herself quickly. She had not touched her quim in months, andthe unfettering of this welcome old release made her want to weep. She had not wept in months, either. No, that was incorrect: she had not wept in years. She also realized that