The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  How could she be such a blundering clod?

  Where on earth had all her good sense gone?

  * * *

  The afternoon before her wedding, two items of interest arrived in the post for Alma.

  The first item was an envelope postmarked Framingham, Massachusetts, with the name “Pike” written in the corner. Alma immediately assumed this must be a letter for Ambrose, as it was obviously from his family, but the envelope was unmistakably addressed to her, so she opened it.

  Dear Miss Whittaker—

  I apologize that I shall be unable to attend your wedding to my son, Ambrose, but I am much the invalid, and such a long journey is far outside my capabilities. I was pleased, however, to receive the information that Ambrose is soon to enter into the state of holy matrimony. My son has lived for so many years in seclusion from family and society that I had long ago abandoned the hope of his ever taking a bride. What’s more, his young heart was so deeply injured long ago by the death of a girl whom he had much admired and adored—a girl from a fine Christian family in our own community, whom we had all assumed he would wed—that I feared his sensibilities had been irreparably harmed, such that he could never again know the rewards of natural affection. Perhaps I am speaking too freely, though certainly he has told you all. The news of his engagement, then, was welcome, for it showed evidence of a healed heart.

  I have received your wedding portrait. You appear a capable woman. I see no sign of foolery or frivolity in your countenance. I do not hesitate to say that my son needs just such a woman. He is a clever boy—quite my cleverest—and as a child he was my chiefest joy, yet he has spent far too many years idly gazing at clouds and stars and flowers. I fear, too, that he believes he has outwitted Christianity. You may be the woman to correct him of that misconception. One prays that a decent marriage shall cure him of playing the moral truant. In conclusion, I regret that I cannot see my son wed, but I hold high hopes for your union. It would warm this mother’s heart to know that her child was elevating his mind with contemplation of God through the discipline of scriptural study and regular prayer. Please see to it that he does.

  His brothers and I welcome you to the family. I suppose that is understood. Notwithstanding, it bears saying.

  Yours, Constance Pike.

  The only thing Alma gleaned from this letter was: a girl whom he had much admired and adored. Despite his mother’s certainty that he had told all, Ambrose had told nothing. Who had the girl been? When had she died? Ambrose had left Framingham for Harvard when he was but seventeen years old, and had never lived in the town since. The love affair must have been before that early age, then, if it had even been a love affair. They must have been children, or nearly children. She must have been beautiful, this girl. Alma could see her now: a sweet thing, a pretty little collie, a chestnut-haired and blue-eyed paragon who sang hymns in a honeyed voice, and who had walked with young Ambrose through spring orchards in full bloom. Had the death of the girl contributed to his mental collapse? What had been the girl’s name?

  Why had Ambrose not spoken of this? On the other hand, why ought he have? Was he not entitled to the privacy of his own former stories? Had Alma ever told Ambrose, for instance, of her dog-eared, useless, misdirected love for George Hawkes? Should she have told him? But there had been nothing to tell. George Hawkes had not even known that he was an actor in a love story, which meant that there had never been a love story in the first place.

  What was Alma to do with this information? More immediately, what was she to do with this letter? She read it again, memorized its contents, and hid it. She would reply to Mrs. Pike later, in some cursory and innocuous manner. She wished she had never received such a missive. She must teach herself to forget what she had just learned.

  What had been the girl’s name?

  Fortunately, there was another piece of mail to distract her—a parcel wrapped in brown waxed paper, secured with twine. Most surprisingly, it came from Prudence Dixon. When Alma opened the parcel, she discovered that it was a nightdress of soft white linen, trimmed with lace. It looked to be the right size for Alma. It was a lovely and simple gown, modest but feminine, with voluminous folds, a high neck, ivory buttons, and billowing sleeves. The bodice shone quietly with delicate embroidered flowers rendered in threads of pale yellow silk. The nightdress had been folded neatly, scented with lavender, and tied with a white ribbon, under which was tucked a note in Prudence’s immaculate handwriting: “With all best wishes.”

  Where had Prudence come by such a luxurious item as this? She would not have had time to sew it herself; she must have purchased it from a skilled seamstress. How much it must have cost her! Where had she found the money? These were exactly the sorts of materials the Dixon family had long ago renounced: silk, lace, imported buttons, finery of any kind. Prudence had worn nothing this smart in nearly three decades. All of which is to say, it must have cost Prudence a great deal—both financially and morally—to procure this gift. Alma felt her throat pinch with emotion. What had she ever done for her sister, to deserve such a kindness? Especially considering their most recent encounter, how could Prudence have made such an offering?

  For a moment, Alma thought she must refuse it. She must package this nightdress up and send it right back to Prudence, who could cut it into pieces and make pretty frocks out of it for her own daughters, or—more likely—sell it for the abolitionist cause. But no, that would appear rude and ungrateful. Gifts must not be returned. Even Beatrix had always taught that. Gifts must never be returned. This had been an act of grace. It must be received with grace. Alma must be humble and thankful.

  It was only later, when Alma went to her bedroom and closed the door, stood before her long mirror, and put the nightdress on, that she understood more fully what her sister was telling her to do, and why the garment could never be returned: Alma needed to wear this lovely item on her wedding night.

  She actually looked pretty in it.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The wedding took place on Tuesday, August 29, 1848, in the drawing room at White Acre. Alma wore a brown silk dress made specially for the occasion. Henry Whittaker and Hanneke de Groot stood as witnesses. Henry was cheerful; Hanneke was not. A judge from West Philadelphia, who had done business in the past with Henry, conducted the vows as a favor to the master of the house.

  “Let friendship instruct you,” he concluded, after promises had been exchanged. “Let you be anxious of each other’s misfortunes, and encouraging of each other’s joys.”

  “Partners in science, trade, and life!” Henry bellowed, quite unexpectedly, and then blew his nose with considerable force.

  There were no other friends or family in attendance. George Hawkes had sent a crate of pears as congratulations, but he was ill with fever, he wrote, and could not join them. Also, a large bouquet had arrived the day before, care of the Garrick Pharmacy. As for Ambrose, no one attended as his guest. His friend Daniel Tupper, in Boston, had sent a telegraph that morning reading simply, “WELL DONE PIKE,” but Tupper did not travel down for the wedding. It would have been only half a day from Boston by train, but still—nobody came down to stand for Ambrose.

  Alma, looking around her, realized how small a household they had become. This was far too small a gathering. This was simply not enough people. It was barely enough for a legal wedding. How had they become so isolated? She remembered the ball that her parents had held in 1808, exactly forty years earlier: how the verandah and the great lawn had swirled with dancers and musicians, and how she had run among them with her torch. It was impossible to imagine now that White Acre had ever been the site of such a spectacle, such laughter, such wild doings. It had become a constellation of silence since then.

  As a wedding gift, Alma gave Ambrose an exceedingly fine antiquarian edition of Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth, originally published in 1684. Burnet was a theologian who surmised that the planet—before Noah’s flood—had been a smooth sphere of absolute perfectio
n, which had “the beauty of youth and blooming nature, fresh and fruitful, not a wrinkle, scar or fracture in all its body; no rocks nor mountains, no hollow caves, nor gaping channels, but even and uniform all over.” He, Burnet, had called this “The First Earth.” Alma thought her husband would like it, and indeed he did. Notions of perfection, dreams of unsullied exquisiteness—all of this was Ambrose, through and through.

  As for Ambrose, he presented Alma with a beautiful square of Italian paper, which he had folded into a tiny, complex sort of envelope, and had covered with seals in four different colors of wax. Every seam was sealed, and every seal was different. It was a pretty object—small enough to sit on the palm of her hand—but it was strange and nearly cabalistic. Alma turned the curious little item over and over.

  “How is one meant to open such a gift?” she asked.

  “It is not to be opened,” Ambrose said. “I ask you never to open it.”

  “What does it contain?”

  “A message of love.”

  “Really?” said Alma, delighted. “A message of love! I should like to see such a thing!”

  “I would prefer that you imagine it.”

  “My imagination is not as rich as yours, Ambrose.”

  “But for you who loves knowledge so much, Alma, it will do your imagination good to keep something unrevealed. We will come to know each other so well, you and I. Let us leave something unopened.”

  She put the gift in her pocket. It sat there all day—a strange, light, mysterious presence.

  They dined that evening with Henry and his friend the judge. Henry and the judge drank too much port. Alma took no spirits, nor did Ambrose. Her husband smiled at her whenever she glanced his way—but then he always had done that, even before he was her husband. It felt like any other evening, except that she was now Mrs. Ambrose Pike. The sun went down slowly that night, like an old man taking his time to hobble downstairs.

  At last, after dinner, Alma and Ambrose retired to Alma’s bedroom for the first time. Alma sat on the edge of the bed, and Ambrose joined her. He reached for her hand. After a long silence, she said, “If you’ll excuse me . . .”

  She wished to put on her new nightdress, but did not want to disrobe in front of him. She took the nightdress into the small water closet off the corner of her bedroom—the one that had been installed, with a bathtub and cold-water taps, in the 1830s. She undressed and put on the gown. She did not know if she should keep her hair up, or let it down. It did not always look nice when she let it down, but it was uncomfortable to sleep in pins and fasteners. She hesitated, then decided to leave it up.

  When she reentered the bedroom, she found that Ambrose had also changed into his nightshirt—a simple linen affair, which hung to his shins. He had folded his clothes neatly and set them on a chair. He stood on the far side of the bed from her. Nervousness ran over her like a cavalry charge. Ambrose did not seem nervous. He did not say anything about her nightdress. He beckoned her to the bed, and she climbed in. He came into the bed from the other side, and met her in the middle. Immediately she had the awful thought that this bed was far too small for the both of them. She and Ambrose were both so tall. Where were their legs supposed to go? What about their arms? What if she kicked him in her sleep? What if she put an elbow into his eye, without knowing?

  She turned sideways, he turned sideways, and they faced each other.

  “Treasure of my soul,” he said. He took one of her hands, brought it to his lips, and kissed it, just above the knuckles, as he had been doing every night for the last month, since their engagement. “You have brought me such peace.”

  “Ambrose,” she replied, amazed by his name, amazed by his face.

  “It is in our sleep that we most closely glimpse the power of spirit,” he said. “Our minds will speak across this narrow distance. It will be here, together in nocturnal stillness, that we shall finally become unbound by time, by space, by natural law and physical law. We shall roam the world however we like, in our dreams. We shall speak with the dead, transform into animals and objects, fly across time. Our intellects shall be nowhere to be found, and our minds will be unfettered.”

  “Thank you,” she said, senselessly. She could not think of what else to say, in response to such an unexpected speech. Was this some sort of wooing? Was this how they proceeded with things, up in Boston? She worried that her breath did not smell sweet. His breath smelled sweet. She wished that he would extinguish the lamp. Immediately, as though hearing her thoughts, he reached over and extinguished the lamp. The dark was better, more comfortable. She wanted to swim toward him. She felt him take up her hand again and press it to his lips.

  “Good night, my wife,” he said.

  He did not let go of her hand. Within a matter of moments—she could tell it by his breathing—he was asleep.

  * * *

  Of everything Alma had imagined, hoped for, or feared as to what might transpire on her wedding night, this course of events had never occurred to her.

  Ambrose dozed on, steady and peaceful beside her, his hand clasped lightly and trustingly around hers, while Alma, eyes wide in the dark, lay still in the spreading silence. Bewilderment overcame her like something oily and dank. She sought possible explanations for this strange occurrence, paging through her mind for one interpretation after another, as one would do in science, with any experiment gone wildly wrong.

  Perhaps he would awaken, and they would recommence—or rather commence—with their marital pleasures? Perhaps he had not liked her nightdress? Perhaps she had appeared too modest? Or too eager? Was it the dead girl that he wanted? Was he thinking of his lost love from Framingham, all those years ago? Or perhaps he had been overcome by a fit of nerves? Was he unequal to love’s duties? But none of these explanations made sense, particularly not the last one. Alma knew enough of such matters to understand that the inability to conduct intercourse brought men the severest imaginable shame—but Ambrose did not seem ashamed at all. Nor had he even attempted intercourse. On the contrary, he slept as easefully as a man could possibly sleep. He slept like a rich burgher in a fine hotel. He slept like a king after a long day of boar hunting and jousting. He slept like a princely Mohammedan, sated by a dozen comely concubines. He slept like a child under a tree.

  Alma did not sleep. The night was hot, and she was uncomfortable lying on her side for so long, afraid to move, afraid to withdraw her hand from his. The pins and fasteners in her hair pressed into her scalp. Her shoulder was growing numb below her. After a long while, she finally released herself from his clasp and turned over onto her back, but it was useless: rest would not find her this night. She lay there in stiffness and alarm, her eyes wide open, her armpits damp, her mind searching without success for a comforting conclusion to this most surprising and unfavorable turn of affairs.

  At dawn, every bird on earth, merrily oblivious to her dread, began to sing. With the first rays of sunlight, Alma allowed herself to throw forward a spark of hope that her husband would awaken in the dawn and embrace her now. Perhaps they would begin it in the daylight—all the expected intimacies of matrimony.

  Ambrose did awaken, but he did not embrace her. He woke in a lively instant, fresh and contented. “What dreams!” he said, and reached his arms above him in a languorous stretch. “I have not had such dreams in years. What an honor it is, to share the electricity of your being. Thank you, Alma! What a day we shall have! Did you have such dreams, too?”

  Alma had dreamed nothing, of course. Alma had passed the night boxed up within a waking horror. Nonetheless, she nodded. She did not know what else to do.

  “You must promise me,” Ambrose said, “that when we die—whichever of us shall die first—that we will send vibrations to each other across the divide of mortality.”

  Again, senselessly, she nodded. It was easier than trying to speak.

  Stale and silent, Alma watched her husband rise and splash his face in the basin. He took his clothing from the chair and politely excused h
imself to the water closet, returning fully dressed and saturated with good cheer. What lurked behind that warm smile? Alma could see nothing behind it but more warmth. He looked to her exactly as he had looked the first day she had glimpsed him—like a lovely, bright, and enthusiastic man of twenty years.

  She was a fool.

  “I shall leave you to your privacy,” he said. “And I shall be waiting for you at the breakfast table. What a day we shall have!”

  Alma’s entire body ached. In a terrible cloud of stiffness and despair, she moved out of bed slowly, like a cripple, and dressed herself. She looked in the mirror. She should not have looked. She had aged a decade in one night.

  Henry was at the breakfast table when Alma finally descended. He and Ambrose were engaged in a light tinsel of conversation. Hanneke brought Alma a fresh pot of tea and threw her a sharp look—the sort of look that all women get on the morning after their wedding—but Alma avoided her eyes. She tried to keep her face from appearing moony or grim, but her imagination was fatigued and she knew that her eyes were red. She felt overgrown by mildew. The men did not seem to notice. Henry was telling a story Alma had heard a dozen times already—of the night he had shared a bed in a filthy Peruvian tavern with a pompous little Frenchman, who had the thickest imaginable French accent, but who tirelessly insisted he was not French.

  Henry said, “The dunderhead kept saying to me, ‘Hi emm en Heenglishman!’ and I kept telling him, ‘You are not an Englishman, you idiot, you are a Frenchman! Just listen to your cussed accent!’ But no, the bloody dunderhead kept saying it: ‘Hi emm en Heenglishman!’ Finally I said to him, ‘Tell me, then—how is it possible that you are an Englishman?’ And he crowed, ‘Hi emm en Heenglishman because Hi ’ave en Heenglish wife!’”