The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  The only thing mosses need is time, and it was beginning to appear to Alma that the world had plenty of time to offer. Other scholars, she noticed, were starting to suggest the same notion. By the 1830s, Alma had already read Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which proposed that the planet was far older than anyone had yet realized—perhaps even millions of years old. She admired the more recent work of John Phillips, who by 1841 had presented a geological timeline even older than Lyell’s estimates. Phillips believed that Earth had been through three epochs of natural history already (the Paleozoic, the Mesozoic, and the Cenozoic), and he had identified fossilized flora and fauna from each period—including fossilized mosses.

  This notion of an unthinkably ancient world did not shock Alma, though it did shock a good many other people, as it directly contradicted the Bible’s teachings. But Alma had her own peculiar theories about time, which were only bolstered by the fossil records in primordial ocean shale to which Lyell and Phillips had referred in their studies. Alma had come to believe, in fact, that there were several different sorts of time that operated simultaneously throughout the cosmos; as a diligent taxonomist, she had even gone so far as to differentiate and name them. Firstly, Alma had determined, there was such a thing as Human Time, which was a narrative of limited, mortal memory, based upon the flawed recollections of recorded history. Human Time was a short and horizontal mechanism. It stretched out straight and narrow, from the fairly recent past to the barely imaginable future. The most striking characteristic of Human Time, however, was that it moved with such amazing quickness. It was a snap of the finger across the universe. Most unfortunately for Alma, her mortal days—like everyone else’s mortal days—fell within the purview of Human Time. Thus, she would not be here long, as she was most painfully aware. She was a mere blink of existence, as was everyone else.

  At the other end of the spectrum, Alma postulated, there was Divine Time—an incomprehensible eternity in which galaxies grew, and where God dwelled. She knew nothing about Divine Time. Nobody did. In fact, she became easily irritated at people who claimed to have any comprehension whatsoever of Divine Time. She had no interest in studying Divine Time, because she believed there was no way for a human mind to comprehend it. It was time outside of time. So she left it alone. Nonetheless, she sensed that it existed, and she suspected that it hovered in some kind of massive, infinite stasis.

  Closer to home, returning to earth, Alma also believed in something she called Geological Time—about which Charles Lyell and John Phillips had recently written so convincingly. Natural history fell into this category. Geological Time moved at a pace that felt nearly eternal, nearly divine. It moved at the pace of stone and mountains. Geological Time was in no hurry, and had been ticking along, some scholars were now suggesting, far longer than anyone had yet surmised.

  But somewhere between Geological Time and Human Time, Alma posited, there was something else—Moss Time. By comparison to Geological Time, Moss Time was blindingly fast, for mosses could make progress in a thousand years that a stone could not dream of accomplishing in a million. But relative to Human Time, Moss Time was achingly slow. To the unschooled human eye, moss did not even seem to move at all. But moss did move, and with extraordinary results. Nothing seemed to happen, but then, a decade or so later, all would be changed. It was merely that moss moved so slowly that most of humanity could not track it.

  Alma could track it, though. She was tracking it. Long before 1848, she had already trained herself to observe her world, as much as possible, through the protracted clockwork of Moss Time. Alma had drilled tiny painted flags into the stones at the edges of her limestone outcropping to mark the progress of each individual moss colony, and she had now been watching this prolonged drama for twenty-six years. Which varieties of mosses would advance across the boulder, and which varieties would retreat? How long would it take? She observed these great, inaudible, slow-moving dominions of green as they expanded and contracted. She measured their progress in fingernail lengths and by half decades.

  As Alma studied Moss Time, she tried not to worry about her own mortal life. She herself was trapped within the limits of Human Time, but there was nothing to be done for it. She would simply have to make the best of the short, mayfly-like existence she had been granted. She was already forty-eight years old. Forty-eight years was nothing to a moss colony, but it was a considerable accretion of years for a woman. Her cycles of menstruation had recently finished. Her hair was turning white. If she was fortunate, she thought, she might be permitted another twenty or thirty years in which to live and to study—forty more years at the most. That was the best she could wish for, and she wished for it every day. She had so much to learn, and not enough time in which to learn it.

  If the mosses had known how soon Alma Whittaker would be gone, she often thought, they might pity her.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, life at White Acre carried on as ever. The Whittakers’ botanical business had not expanded for years, but neither had it contracted; it had stabilized, one could say, into a steady machine of profitable returns. The greenhouses were still the best in America, and there were, just now, more than six thousand different varieties of plants on the property. There was a craze at the moment in America for ferns and palms (“pteridomania,” the cheeky journalists called it) and Henry was reaping the benefit of that fad, growing and selling all manner of exotic fronds. There was much money to be made, too, on the mills and farms that Henry owned, and a good bit of his land had been profitably sold to the railroad companies in the past few years. He was interested in the burgeoning rubber trade, and had recently used his contacts in Brazil and Bolivia to begin investing in that uncertain new business.

  So Henry Whittaker was still very much alive—perhaps miraculously so. His health, at the age of eighty-eight, had not much declined, which was rather impressive, considering how strenuously he had always lived and how vigorously he had always complained. His eyes gave him trouble, but with a magnifying lens and a good lamp, he could keep track of his paperwork. With a sturdy cane and a dry afternoon, he could still walk his property, dressed—as ever—like an eighteenth-century lord of the manor.

  Dick Yancey—the trained crocodile—continued to manage the Whittaker Company’s international interests ably, importing new and lucrative medicinal plants like simarouba, chondrodendron, and many others. James Garrick, Henry’s old Quaker business partner, was now deceased, but James’s son John had taken over the pharmacy, and Garrick & Whittaker medicinal brands still sold briskly across Philadelphia and beyond. Henry’s dominance of the international quinine trade had been dealt a blow by French competition, but he was doing well closer to home. He had recently launched a new product, Garrick & Whittaker’s Vigorous Pills—a concoction of Jesuit’s bark, gum myrrh, sassafras oil, and distilled water, which professed to cure every human malady from tertian fevers and blistering rashes to feminine malaise. The product was a tremendous success. The pills were inexpensive to manufacture and brought in a steady profit, particularly in the summertime, when illness and fever broke out across the city, and every family, rich or poor, lived in fear of pestilence. Mothers would try the pills for anything afflicting their children.

  The city had risen up around White Acre. Neighborhoods bustled 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 the vibrations 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 busines
s 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.

  * * *

  Others, 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 had been his wish, it hadn’t worked. Retta, for her part, became increasingly nervous around her quiet husband, which made her speak only more frantically, which, in turn, only made her husband more determinedly silent.

  After a few years of this, Retta had developed a most peculiar habit, which Alma found painful to watch. Retta would flutter her fingers helplessly in front of her mouth as she spoke, as though trying to catch the words as they came out of her—as though trying to stop the words, or even thrust them back in. Sometimes Retta was actually able to abort a sentence in the middle of some crazed thought or another, and then she would press her fingers against her lips to prevent more speech from spilling out. But this triumph was even more difficult to witness, for that last, strange, unfinished sentence would hang uncomfortably in the air, while Retta, stricken, stared at her soundless husband, her eyes wild with apology.

  After enough of these upsetting performances, Mr. and Mrs. Hawkes stopped coming to dinner at all. Alma saw them only in their own home, when she came down to Arch Street to discuss publishing details with George.

  Wifehood, as it turned out, did not suit Mrs. Retta Snow Hawkes. She simply was not crafted for it. Indeed, adulthood itself did not suit her. There were too many restrictions involved in the custom, and far too much seriousness expected. Retta was no longer a silly girl who could go driving about the city so freely in her small two-wheeled chaise. She was now the wife and helpmeet of one of Philadelphia’s most respected publishers, and expected to comport herself as such. It was no longer dignified for Retta to be seen at the theater alone. Well, it never had been dignified, but in the past nobody had forbidden it. George forbade it. He did not enjoy the theater. George also required his wife to attend church services—several times a week, in fact—where Retta squirmed, childlike, in tedium. She could not dress so gaily after her marriage, either, nor break into song at the slightest whim. Or, rather, she could break into song, and sometimes did, but it did not look correct, and only infuriated her husband.

  As for motherhood, Retta had not been able to manage that responsibility either. Within a year of marriage there had been a pregnancy in the Hawkes household, but that pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage. The next year, there had been another unsuccessful pregnancy, and the year after that, another. After losing her fifth child, Retta had taken to her room in a most violent mania of despair. Neighbors could hear her sobbing, it was reported, from several houses away. Poor George Hawkes had no idea what to do with this desperate woman, and he was quite unable to work for several days in a row on account of his wife’s derangement. He had finally sent a message up to White Acre, begging for Alma to please come down to Arch Street and sit with her old friend, who was beyond all consolation.

  But by the time Alma had arrived, Retta was already sleeping, with a thumb in her mouth and her beautiful hair splayed across the pillow like bare black branches against a pale winter sky. George explained that the pharmacy had sent over a bit of laudanum, and this had seemed to work.

  “Pray, George, try not to make a habit of that,” Alma had warned. “Retta has an unusually sensitive constitution, and too much laudanum may do her harm. I know she can be a bit nonsensical at times, and even tragic. But my understanding of Retta is that she requires only patience and love in order to find her own way back to happiness. Perhaps if you give her more time . . .”

  “I apologize for having disturbed you,” George said.

  “Not at all,” Alma said. “I am always at your disposal, and Retta’s, too.”

  Alma wanted to say more—but what? She felt she may have spoken too freely already, or perhaps even criticized him as a husband. Poor man. He was exhausted.

  “Friendship is here, George,” she said, and laid her hand on his arm. “Use it. You may call upon me at any time.”

  Well, he did. He called upon Alma in 1826, when Retta cut off all her hair. He called upon Alma in 1835, when Retta vanished for three days, and was ultimately found in Fishtown, sleeping amid a pile of street children. He called upon her in 1842, when Retta came after a servant with a pair of sewing scissors, claiming that the woman was a ghost. The servant had not suffered serious injury, but now nobody would take Retta her breakfast. He called upon her in 1846, when Retta had started writing long, incomprehensible letters, composed more of tears than ink.

  George did not know how to manage these scenes and muddles. It was all a dreadful distraction to his business and to his mind. He was publishing more than fifty books a year now, along with an array of scientific journals and a new, expensiv
e, subscription-only Octavo of Exotic Flora (to be released quarterly, and illustrated with impressively large hand-tinted lithographs of the finest quality). All these endeavors required his absolute attention. He had no time for a collapsing wife.

  Alma had no time for it either, but still she came. Sometimes—during particularly bad episodes—she would even spend the night with Retta, sleeping in the Hawkeses’ own conjugal bed, with her arms around her trembling friend, while George slept on a pallet in the print shop next door. She got the impression that he usually slept there nowadays, anyway.

  “Will you still love me and will you still be kind to me,” Retta would ask Alma in the middle of the night, “if I become the very devil himself?”

  “I will always love you,” Alma reassured the only friend she had ever had. “And you could never be the devil, Retta. You simply must rest, and not trouble yourself or the others anymore . . .”

  In the mornings after such episodes, the three of them would breakfast together in the Hawkeses’ dining room. This was never comfortable. George was no light conversationalist under the best of circumstances, and Retta—depending on how much laudanum she had been given the night before—would be either frenzied or stupefied. Intervals of lucidity became ever more rare. Sometimes Retta chewed on a rag, and would not let it be taken from her. Alma would search for some topic of conversation that would suit all three of them, but no such topic existed. No such topic had ever existed. She could speak with Retta about nonsense, or she could speak with George about botany, but she could never puzzle out a way to speak to them both.