Some of these evenings were entertaining to Alma. She liked it best when the actors and explorers came, and told stirring tales. Other nights were tense with argument. Other nights still were torturously dull eternities. She would sometimes fall asleep at the table with her eyes open, held upright in her chair by nothing more than absolute terror of her mother’s censure, and the bracing stays on her formal dress. But the night Alma would remember forever—the night that would later seem to have been the very apogee of her childhood—was the night of the visit from the Italian astronomer.
* * *
It was late summer of 1808, and Henry Whittaker had acquired a new telescope. He had been admiring the night skies through his fine German lenses, but he was beginning to feel like a celestial illiterate. His knowledge of the stars was a sailor’s knowledge—which is not trifling—but he was not up-to-date on the latest findings. Tremendous advances were being made now in the field of astronomy, and Henry increasingly felt that the night sky was becoming yet another library that he could barely read. So when Maestro Luca Pontesilli, the brilliant Italian astronomer, came to Philadelphia to speak at the American Philosophical Society, Henry lured him up to White Acre by hosting a ball in his honor. Pontesilli, he had heard, was a zealot for dancing, and Henry suspected the man could not resist a ball.
This was to be the most elaborate affair the Whittakers had ever attempted. The finest of Philadelphia’s caterers—Negro men in crisp white uniforms—arrived in the early afternoon and set to assembling the elegant meringues and mixing the colorful punches. Tropical flowers that had never before been taken out of the balmy forcing houses were arranged in tableaux all over the mansion. Suddenly an orchestra of moody strangers was milling about the ballroom, tuning their instruments and muttering complaints about the heat. Alma was scrubbed and packed into white crinolines, her cockscomb of unruly red hair forced into a satin bow nearly as big as her head. Then the guests arrived, in billows of silk and powder.
It was hot. It had been hot all month, but this was the hottest day yet. Anticipating the uncomfortable weather, the Whittakers did not commence their ball until nine o’clock, long after the sun had set, but the day’s punishing heat still lingered. The ballroom quickly became a greenhouse itself, steaming and damp, which the tropical plants enjoyed, but which the ladies did not. The musicians suffered and perspired. The guests spilled out of doors in search of relief, lounging on the verandahs, leaning against marble statues, trying in vain to draw coolness from the stone.
In an effort to slake their thirst, people drank a good deal more punch than they had perhaps intended to drink. As a natural result, inhibitions melted 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 center of the solar system, “Give the girl a place!”
Pontesilli shrugged. “You are a comet!” he called down to Alma, while still making a pretense of conducting the universe with one waving arm.
“What does a comet do, sir?”
“You fly about in all directions!” the Italian commanded.
And so she did. She propelled herself into the midst of the planets, ducking and swiveling through everyone’s orbits, scuttling and twirling, the ribbon unfurling from her hair. Whenever she neared her father, he would cry, “Not so close to me, Plum, or you will burn to cinders!” and he would push her away from his fiery, combustible self, impelling her to run in another direction.
Astonishingly, at some point, a sputtering torch was thrust into her hands. Alma did not see who gave it to her. She had never before been entrusted with fire. The torch spit sparks and sent chunks of flaming tar spinning into the air behind her as she bolted across the cosmos—the only body in the heavens who was not held to a strict elliptical path.
Nobody stopped her.
She was a comet.
She did not know that she was not flying.
Chapter Six
Alma’s youth—or rather, the simplest and most innocent part of it—came to an abrupt en
d in November of 1809, in the small hours of the night, on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday.
Alma awoke from a deep sleep to raised voices and the sound of carriage wheels dragging through gravel. In places where the house should have been silent at such an hour (the hallway outside her bedroom door, for instance, and the servants’ quarters upstairs) there was a skittering of footsteps from all directions. She arose in the cold air, lit a candle, found her leather boots, and reached for a shawl. Her instinct was that some sort of trouble had come to White Acre, and that her assistance might be needed. Later in life, she would recall the absurdity of this notion (how could she have honestly believed she could help with anything?), but at that time, in her mind, she was a young lady of nearly ten years, and she still had a certain confidence in her own importance.
When Alma arrived at the top of the wide staircase she saw below her, in the grand entryway to the home, a gathering of men holding lanterns. Her father, wearing a greatcoat over his night clothes, stood at the center of them all, his face tense with irritation. Hanneke de Groot was there as well, her hair in a cap. Alma’s mother was there, too. This must be serious, then; Alma had never seen her mother awake at this hour.
But there was something else, and Alma’s eyes went straight to it—a girl, slightly smaller than Alma, with a white-blond plait of hair down her back, stood between Beatrix and Hanneke. The women had one hand each upon the girl’s slender shoulders. Alma thought the child looked somehow familiar. The daughter of one of the workers, possibly? Alma could not be sure. The girl, whoever she was, had the most beautiful face—though that face seemed shocked and fearful in the lamplight.
What brought disquiet to Alma, however, was not the girl’s fear, but rather the proprietary firmness of Beatrix’s and Hanneke’s grips on the child’s shoulders. As a man approached as though to reach for the girl, the two women closed in tighter, clutching the child harder. The man retreated—and he was wise to, Alma thought, for she had just gotten a glimpse of the expression on her mother’s face: unyielding fierceness. The same expression was on Hanneke’s face. It was that shared expression of fierceness on the faces of the two most important women in Alma’s life that shot her through with unaccountable dread. Something alarming was happening here.
At that point, Beatrix and Hanneke both turned their heads simultaneously, and looked to the top of the staircase, where Alma stood, staring dumbly, holding her candle and her sturdy boots. They turned toward her as though Alma had called out their names, and as though they did not welcome the interruption.
“Go to bed,” they both barked—Beatrix in English, Hanneke in Dutch.
Alma might have protested, but she was helpless against the power of their united force. Their tight, hardened faces frightened her. She had never seen anything quite like it. She was neither needed nor wanted here, it was clear.
Alma took one more anxious look at the beautiful child in the center of the crowded hall of strangers, then fled to her room. For a long hour, she sat on the edge of her bed, listening until her ears ached, hoping somebody would come to her with explanation or comfort. But the voices diminished, there was the sound of horses galloping away, and still nobody came. Finally Alma collapsed asleep on top of the covers, wrapped in her shawl and cradling her boots. In the morning when she awoke, she found that the entire crowd of strangers had cleared off from White Acre.
But the girl was still there.
* * *
Her name was Prudence.
Or, rather, it was Polly.
Or, to be specific, her name was Polly-Who-Became-Prudence.
Her story was an ugly one. There was an effort at White Acre to suppress it, but stories like this do not like to be suppressed, and within a few days, Alma would come to learn it. The girl was the daughter of the head vegetable gardener at White Acre, a quiet German man who had revolutionized the design of the melon houses, to lucrative effect. The gardener’s wife was a local Philadelphia woman of low birth but famous beauty, and she was a known harlot. Her husband, the gardener, adored her but could never control her. This, too, was widely known. The woman had cuckolded him relentlessly for years, making little effort to conceal her indiscretions. He had quietly tolerated it—either not noticing, or pretending not to notice—until, quite out of nowhere, he stopped tolerating it.
On that Tuesday night in November of 1809, the gardener had awoken his wife from a peaceful sleep beside him, dragged her outside by her hair, and cut her neck from ear to ear. Immediately after, he hanged himself from a nearby elm. The commotion had raised the other workers of White Acre, who came running out of their houses to investigate. Left behind in the wake of all this sudden death was the little girl named Polly.
Polly was the same age as Alma, but daintier and startlingly beautiful. She looked like a perfect figurine carved out of fine French soap, into which someone had inlaid a pair of glittering peacock-blue eyes. But it was the tiny pink pillow of her mouth that made this girl more than simply pretty; it made her an unsettling little voluptuary, a Bathsheba wrought in miniature.
When Polly had been brought to White Acre manor that tragic night, surrounded by constables and big working men—all of them with their hands upon her—Beatrix and Hanneke had immediately foreseen nothing but danger for the child. Some of the men were suggesting the girl be taken to an almshouse, but others were already proclaiming that they would happily assume responsibility for this orphan themselves. Half the men in that room had copulated with that girl’s mother at some point or another—as Beatrix and Hanneke well knew—and the women did not like to imagine what might be in store for this pretty thing, for this spawn of the whore.
The two women, acting as one, clutched Polly away from the mob, and kept her away from the mob. This was not a considered decision. Nor was it a gesture of charity, draped in a warm mantle of maternal kindness. No, this was an act of intuition, sprung from a deep and unspoken feminine knowledge of how the world functions. One does not leave so small and beautiful a female creature alone with ten heated men in the middle of the night.
But once Beatrix and Hanneke had safeguarded Polly—once the men had cleared off—what was to be done with her? Then they did make a considered decision. Or rather, Beatrix made the decision, as she alone had the authority to decide. She made, in fact, a rather shocking decision. She decided to keep Polly forever, to adopt her immediately as a Whittaker.
Alma later learned that her father protested the idea (Henry was not happy about having been awoken in the middle of the night, much less about acquiring a sudden daughter), but Beatrix cut short his complaint with a single hard look, and Henry had the good sense not to protest twice. So be it. Their family was too small, anyway, and Beatrix had never been able to enlarge it. Hadn’t two more babies been born after Alma? Hadn’t those babies never drawn a breath? And weren’t those dead infants now buried in the Lutheran churchyard, doing nobody any good? Beatrix had always wanted another child, and now, by dint of providence, a child had arrived. With the addition of Polly to the household, the Whittaker brood could be efficiently doubled overnight. It all made tidy sense. Beatrix’s decision was swift and unhesitating. Without another word of protest, Henry conceded. Also, he had no choice.
Anyway, the girl was a pretty thing, and she did not seem to be a complete simpleton. Indeed, once things quieted down, Polly demonstrated an actual decorum—an almost aristocratic composure—that was all the more notable in a child who had just witnessed both of her parents’ deaths.
Beatrix saw distinct promise in Polly, as well as no other possible respectable future for the child. In the proper home, Beatrix believed, and with the right moral influence, this girl could be shunted toward a different path of life than the pleasure-seeking gaiety and wickedness for which her mother had paid the ultimate price. The first task was to clean her up. The poor wretch had blood all over her shoes and hands. The second task was to change her name. Polly was a name suitable only to a pet bird or a street girl for hire. F
rom this point forward, the child would be called Prudence—a name that would serve as a signpost, Beatrix hoped and expected, of more righteous direction.
So all was resolved—and resolved within an hour. Which is how it came to pass that Alma Whittaker awoke the next morning to the flabbergasting information that she now had a sister, and that her sister’s name was Prudence.
Prudence’s arrival changed everything at White Acre. Later in life, when Alma was a woman of science, she would better understand how the introduction of any new element into a controlled environment will alter that environment in manifold and unpredictable ways, but as a child, all she sensed was a hostile invasion and a premonition of doom. Alma did not embrace her interloper with a warm heart. Then again, why should she have? Who among us has ever warmheartedly embraced an interloper?
At first, Alma did not remotely understand why this girl was here. What she would find out eventually about Prudence’s history (mined from the dairymaids, and in German, no less!) elucidated much—but on the first day after Prudence’s arrival, nobody explained anything. Even Hanneke de Groot, who usually had more information on mysteries than anyone, would say only, “It is God’s design, child, and for the best.” When Alma pushed the housekeeper for further information, Hanneke whispered sharply, “Find your mercy and ask me no more questions!”
The girls were formally introduced to each other at the breakfast table. No mention was made of the encounter the night before. Alma could not stop staring at Prudence, and Prudence could not stop staring at her plate. Beatrix spoke to the children as though nothing were amiss. She explained that someone named Mrs. Spanner would be coming in from the city later that afternoon, to cut new dresses for Prudence out of more suitable material than her current clothing. There would be a new pony coming, too, and Prudence would need to be taught to ride—the sooner the better. Also, there would thenceforth be a tutor at White Acre. Beatrix had decided that it would tax her energies too extremely to teach two girls at the same time, and since Prudence had received no formal education thus far in life, a young tutor might be a useful addition to the household. The nursery would now be turned into a dedicated schoolroom. Alma would be expected, needless to say, to help teach her sister in penmanship, sums, and figures. Alma was quite far ahead in the training of the mind, of course, but if Prudence toiled sincerely—and if her sister helped—she should be able to excel. A child’s intellect, Beatrix said, is an object of impressive elasticity, and Prudence was still young enough to catch up. The human mind, if dutifully trained, should be able to perform anything we ask of it. It is all just a matter of working hard.
The Signature of All Things Page 8