The Signature of All Things

now where once there had been only quiet farms. There were omnibuses, canals, railroad lines, paved highways, turnpikes, and steam packets. The population of the United States had doubled since the Whittakers had arrived in 1792, and its flag now boasted thirty stars. Trains running in every direction spit hot ash and cinders. Ministers and moralists feared that thevibrations and jostling of such fast travel would throw weak-minded women into sexual frenzies. Poets wrote odes to nature, even as nature vanished before their eyes. There were a dozen millionaires in Philadelphia, where once there had been only Henry Whittaker. All this was new. But there was still cholera and yellow fever and diphtheria and pneumonia and death. All that was old. Thus, the pharmaceutical business remained strong.
    After Beatrix’s death, Henry had not married again, nor shown any interest in marriage. He had no need for a wife; he had Alma. Alma was good to Henry, and sometimes, once a year or so, he even praised her for it. By now, she had learned how to best organize her own existence around her father’s whims and demands. For the most part she enjoyed his company (she could never help her fondness for him) although she was keenly aware that every hour she spent in her father’s presence was an hour lost for the study of mosses. She gave Henry her afternoons and evenings, but kept the mornings for her own work. He was ever more slow to rise as he got older, so this schedule functioned well. He sometimes wished for dinner guests, but far less frequently now. They might have company four times a year these days, instead of four times a week.
    Henry remained capricious and difficult. Alma might find herself woken during the night by the apparently ageless Hanneke de Groot, telling her, “Your father wants you, child.” At which point Alma would rise, wrap herself in a warm robe, and go to her father’s study—where she would find Henry sleepless and irritated, shuffling through a lake of papers, demanding a dram of gin and a friendly round of backgammon at three o’clock in the morning. Alma would oblige him without complaint, knowing that Henry would only be more tired the next day, and thus afford her more hours for her own work.
    “Have I ever told you about Ceylon?” he would ask, and she would let him talk himself to sleep. Sometimes she would fall asleep, too, to the sound of his old stories. Dawn would break on the old man and his white-haired daughter, both collapsed across their chairs, an unfinished game of backgammon between them. Alma would rise and tidy up the room. She would call for Hanneke and the butler to take her father back to his bed. Then she would bolt down her breakfast and walk either to her study in the carriage house or to her outpost of moss boulders, where she could turn her attention once more to her own labors.
    This is how things had been for more than two and a half decades now. This is how she thought things would always be. It was a quiet but not unhappy life for Alma Whittaker.
    Not unhappy in the least.
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    O thers, however, had not been so fortunate.
    Alma’s old friend George Hawkes, for instance, had not found happiness in his marriage to Retta Snow. Nor was Retta in the least bit happy. Knowing this did not bring Alma any consolation or joy. Another woman might have rejoiced at this information, as a sort of dark revenge to her own broken heart, but Alma was not the sort of character who took satisfaction from somebody else’s suffering. What’s more, however much the marriage had once hurt her, Alma no longer loved George Hawkes. That fire had dimmed years ago. To have continued loving him under the reality of the circumstances would have been immeasurably foolish, and she had already played the fool too far. However, Alma did pity George. He was a good soul, and he had always been a good friend to her, but never had a man chosen a wife more poorly.
    The staid botanical publisher had been at first merely baffled by his flighty and mercurial bride, but as time passed he had grown more openly irritated. George and Retta had occasionally dined at White Acre during the first years of their marriage, but Alma soon noticed that George would darken and grow tense whenever Retta spoke, as though he dreaded in advance whatever she was about to say. Eventually he stopped speaking at the dinner table altogether—almost in the hope, it seemed, that his wife would stop speaking, too. If that