The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  She felt as though the world mocked her, and thus the world was difficult to face.

  Alma had always been of sturdy constitution and had never known the desolations of a sickbed, but during that first winter after Ambrose left, she found it difficult to rise at all in the mornings. She lost her nerve for study. She could not imagine why she had ever been interested in mosses—or in anything. All her old enthusiasms were grown over with weeds. She invited no guests to White Acre. She had no will for it. Conversation was unbearably tiresome; silence worse. Her thoughts were a cloud of contagion that did her no good. If a maid or gardener dared to cross her path, she was likely to cry out, “Why am I not allowed a moment’s privacy?” and storm off in the other direction.

  Casting about for answers about Ambrose, she searched his study, which he had left intact. She found a notebook filled with his writings in the top drawer of his desk. It was not her place to read such a private relic, and she knew it, yet she told herself that if Ambrose had intended to keep his innermost thoughts secret, he would not have stored the record of them in such an obvious place as the unlocked top drawer of his desk. The notebook, however, brought forth no answers. If anything, it confused and alarmed her more. The pages were not filled with confessions or longings, nor was this a simple log of daily transactions, such as the journals her father kept. None of the entries were even dated. Many of the sentences were barely sentences at all—just fragments of thought, trailed by long dashes and ellipses:

  What is thy will—? . . . An eternal forgetting of all strife . . . to yearn only for that which is robust and pure, hewing to the divine standard of self-rule alone . . . Find everywhere contained that which is attached. . . . Do angels twist so painfully against themselves and rank flesh? All that is spoiled within me to be ceaseless and regained in un-self-mangled reform! . . . . To be thoroughly—regenerated!—in benevolent firmness! . . . Only by stolen fire or by stolen knowledge does wisdom advance! . . . No strength in science, but in the compilation of the two—the axis where fire gives birth to water . . . Christ, be my merit, set inside me the example! . . . TORRID hunger, when fed, gives birth to only more hunger!

  There were pages and pages of this. It was a confetti of thinking. It began nowhere, led to nothing, and concluded nothing. In the world of botany, such confusing language would have been called nomina dubia or nomina ambigua—which is to say, misleading and obscure names of plants that render the specimens impossible to classify.

  One afternoon Alma finally broke down and cracked open the seals on the elaborately folded piece of paper Ambrose had given her on their wedding day—the curious object, the “message of love” he had specifically asked her never to open. She unfolded its many pleats and smoothed it out. In the center of the page was one word, written in his elegant, unmistakable hand: ALMA.

  Useless.

  Who was this person? Or rather—who had he been? And who was Alma, now that he was departed? What was she, she further wondered? She was a married virgin who had shared a chaste bed with her exquisite young husband for scarcely more than a month. Could she even call herself a wife? She did not believe so. She could not bring herself to be referred to any longer as “Mrs. Pike.” The name was a cruel joke, and she barked at anyone who dared use it. She was still Alma Whittaker, and always had been Alma Whittaker.

  She could not help but think that if only she had been a more beautiful woman or a younger woman, she might have convinced her husband to love her as a husband should. Why had Ambrose even marked her as a candidate for a mariage blanc? Surely because she looked the part: a homely figure of no appeal. She also tormented herself over the question of whether she ought to have taught herself to endure the humiliation of their marriage, as her father had advised. Perhaps she should have accepted Ambrose’s terms. Had she been able to swallow her pride or quash her desires, she would still have him beside her now—the companion of her days. A stronger individual might have been able to bear it.

  Only a year previous, she had been a contented, useful, and industrious woman, who had never even heard of Ambrose Pike, and now her existence had been blighted by him. This person had arrived, he had illuminated her, he had ensorcelled her with notions of miracle and beauty, he had both understood and misunderstood her, he had married her, he had broken her heart, he had looked upon her with those sad and hopeless eyes, he had accepted his banishment, and now he was gone. What a stark and stunning thing was life—that such a cataclysm can enter and depart so quickly, and leave such wreckage behind!

  * * *

  Seasons passed, but grudgingly. It was now 1850. Alma woke one night in early April from a violent, faceless nightmare. She was clutching at her own throat, choking dryly on the last crumbs of terror. Panicked, she did the oddest thing. She leapt from her divan in the carriage house and ran, barefoot, across the gravel drive, across the frosted yard, across her mother’s Grecian garden and toward the house. She dashed around the corner to the kitchen door at the back and pushed in, heart pounding and lungs gasping for breath. She ran downstairs—her feet knowing every worn wooden step in the dark—and did not stop running until she had reached the bars that surrounded Hanneke de Groot’s bedroom, in the warmest corner of the basement. She grasped the bars and shook them like a crazed inmate.

  “Hanneke!” Alma cried. “Hanneke, I am frightened!”

  If she had paused for even an instant between waking and running, she might have stopped herself. She was a fifty-year-old woman running into the arms of her old nursemaid. It was absurd. But she did not stop herself.

  “Wie is daar?” Hanneke shouted, startled.

  “Ik ben het. Alma!” Alma said, falling into the warm, familiar Dutch. “You must help me! I have had bad dreams.”

  Hanneke rose, grumbling and baffled, and unlocked the gate. Alma ran into her arms—into those great salty hams of arms—and wept like an infant. Surprised but adapting, Hanneke guided Alma to the bed and sat her down, embracing her and allowing her to sob.

  “There, there,” said Hanneke. “It will not kill you.”

  But Alma thought it would kill her, this profundity of sorrow. She could not sound out the bottom of it. She had been sinking into it for a year and a half, and feared she would sink forevermore. She cried herself out on Hanneke’s neck, sobbing forth the harvest of her long-darkened spirits. She must have poured a tankard of tears down Hanneke’s bosom, but Hanneke did not move or speak, except to repeat, “There, there, child. It will not kill you.”

  When Alma finally recovered herself somewhat, Hanneke reached for a clean cloth and wiped them both down with cursory efficiency, just as she might have wiped tables in the kitchen.

  “One must bear what cannot be escaped,” she told Alma, as she rubbed clean her face. “You will not die of your grief—no more than the rest of us ever have.”

  “But how does one bear it?” Alma begged.

  “Through the dignified performance of one’s duties,” Hanneke said. “Be not afraid to work, child. There you will find consolation. If you are healthy enough to weep, you are healthy enough to work.”

  “But I loved him,” Alma said.

  Hanneke sighed. “Then you made an expensive error. You loved a man who thought the world was made of butter. You loved a man who wished to see stars by daylight. He was nonsense.”

  “He was not nonsense.”

  “He was nonsense,” Hanneke repeated.

  “He was singular,” Alma said. “He did not wish to live in the body of a mortal man. He wished to be a celestial figure—and he wished me to be one, too.”

  “Well, Alma, you make me say it again: he was nonsense. Yet you treated him like he was a heavenly visitant. Indeed, all of you did!”

  “Do you think he was a scoundrel? Do you think he had a wicked soul?”

  “No. But he was no heavenly visitant, either. He was just a bit of nonsense, I tell you. He ought to have been harmless nonsense, but you fell prey. Well, we all fall prey to nonsense at times, child, a
nd sometimes we are fool enough to even love it.”

  “No man will ever have me,” Alma said.

  “Probably not,” Hanneke decided firmly. “But now you must endure it—and you won’t be the first. You have been indulging yourself in a slough of sadness for a long time now, and your mother would be ashamed of you. You are growing soft, and it is disgraceful. Do you think you are the only one to suffer? Read your Bible, child; this world is not a paradise but a vale of tears. Do you think God made an exception for you? Look around you, what do you see? All is anguish. Everywhere you turn there is sorrow. If you do not see sorrow at first glance, look more carefully. You will soon enough see it.”

  Hanneke spoke sternly, but the mere sound of her voice was reassuring. Dutch was not a mellifluous language like French, or a powerful language like Greek, or a noble language like Latin, but it was as comforting as porridge to Alma. She wanted to put her head in Hanneke’s lap and be scolded forever.

  “Blow the dust off yourself!” Hanneke went on. “Your mother will haunt me from her grave if I allow you to continue simpering around this place, sucking on the rump-end of sorrow, as you have been doing now for months. Your bones are not broken, so stand up on your own two shanks. Do you wish us to mourn for you forever? Has somebody stuck a twig in your eye? No, they have not—so stop moping about, then! Stop sleeping like a dog on that couch in the carriage house. Take care of your duties. Take care of your father—can you not see he is sick and elderly and soon to die? And leave me alone. I am too old a woman for this foolishness, and so are you. At this point in your life, after everything you have been taught, it would be a pity if you could not better control yourself. Go back to your room, Alma—to your proper room, in this house. You will take your breakfast tomorrow morning at the table with the rest of us, just as ever, and furthermore, I expect to see you properly dressed for the day when you sit down to eat it. You will eat every bite of it, too, and you will thank the cook. You are a Whittaker, child. Recover yourself. This is enough.”

  * * *

  So Alma did as she was told. She returned, albeit cowed and worn, to her bedroom. She returned to the breakfast table, to her responsibilities toward her father, to the management of White Acre. As best as possible, she returned to her life as it had been before the advent of Ambrose. There was no cure for the gossip of the maids and gardeners, but—as Henry had predicted—eventually they moved on to other scandals and dramas, and for the most part stopped chatting about Alma’s woes.

  She herself did not forget her woes, but she sewed up the rents in the fabric of her life quite as well as she could, and carried on. She noticed for the first time that her father’s health was indeed deteriorating, and rapidly, as Hanneke de Groot had pointed out. This should have come as no surprise (the man was ninety years old!), but she had always seen him as such a colossus, such a piece of human invincibility, that his new frailty amazed and alarmed her. Henry took to his bedroom for longer periods of time, frankly uninterested in matters of important business. His eyesight was dim; his hearing was almost gone. He required an ear trumpet to hear much of anything anymore. He needed Alma both more and less than he had ever needed her before: more as a nurse, less as a clerk. He never mentioned Ambrose. Nobody did. Reports came through Dick Yancey that the vanilla vines in Tahiti were fruiting at last. This was the closest Alma came to hearing news of her lost husband.

  Yet Alma never stopped thinking about him. The silence from the printing studio next door to her study in the carriage house was a constant reminder of his absence, as was the dusty neglect of the orchid house, and the tedium at the dinner table. There were conversations to be had with George Hawkes, about the upcoming publication of Ambrose’s orchid book—which Alma was now overseeing. That, too, was a reminder, and a painful one. But there was nothing to be done for any of this. One cannot erase every reminder. In fact, one cannot erase any reminders. Her sadness was ceaseless, but she kept it quarantined in a governable little quarter of her heart. It was the best she could do.

  Once more, as she had done during other lonely moments of her life, she turned to her own work for solace and distraction. She returned to her labors on The Mosses of North America. She returned to her boulder fields and inspected her tiny flags and markings. She observed once more the slow advance or decline of one variety against another. She revisited the inspiration she’d had two years before—in those heady, joyful weeks before her wedding—about the similarities between algae and mosses. She could not regain her original wild confidence about the idea, but it still seemed to her entirely possible that the aquatic plant might have transformed into the land plant. There was something to it, some sort of confluence or connection, but she could not solve the riddle.

  Looking for answers, seeking intellectual occupation, she returned her attention to the ongoing debates about species mutation. She read Lamarck once more, and carefully. Lamarck had surmised that biological transmutation occurred because of overuse or disuse of a particular body part. For instance, he claimed, giraffes had such long necks because certain individual giraffes across history had stretched themselves up so high, in order to eat from treetops, that they had caused their necks to actually grow, within their own lifetimes. Then they had passed on that trait—neck elongation—to their young. Conversely, penguins had such ineffective wings because they had stopped using them. The wings had withered through neglect, and this trait—a pair of stumped and flightless appendages—had been passed along to penguin young, thus shaping the species.

  It was a provocative theory, but it did not entirely make sense to Alma. By Lamarck’s reasoning, she reckoned, there should be far more transmutation occurring on earth than there actually was. By this logic, Alma surmised, the Jewish people, after centuries of practicing circumcision, should long ago have started producing boys who were born without foreskins. Men who shaved their faces for their entire lives should produce sons who never grew beards. Women who curled their hair daily should produce daughters born with curls. Clearly none of this had occurred.

  Yet things changed—Alma was certain of it. It was not only Alma who believed this, either. Nearly everyone in the scientific world was discussing the possibility that species could shift from one thing into another—not before one’s eyes, perhaps, but over long periods of time. It was extraordinary, the theories and battles that had begun to rage over the subject. Only recently, the word scientist had been coined, by the polymath William Whewell. Many scholars had objected to this blunt new term, as it sounded so sinisterly similar to that awful word atheist; why not simply continue to call themselves natural philosophers? Was that designation not more godly, more pure? But divisions were being drawn now between the realm of nature and the realm of philosophy. Ministers who doubled as botanists or geologists were becoming increasingly rare, as far too many challenges to biblical truths were stirred up through investigation of the natural world. It used to be that God was revealed in the wonders of nature; now God was being challenged by those same wonders. Scholars were now required to choose one side or the other.

  As old certainties quaked and trembled upon ever-eroding ground, Alma Whittaker—alone at White Acre—indulged in her own dangerous thoughts. She pondered Thomas Malthus, with his theories about population growth, disease, cataclysm, famine, and extinction. She pondered John William Draper’s brilliant new photographs of the moon. She pondered Louis Agassiz’s theory that the world had once seen an Ice Age. She took a long walk one day to the museum at Sansom Street to see the fully reconstructed bones of a giant mastodon, which caused her to think once again about the ancientness of this planet—and, indeed, of all the planets. She reconsidered algae and mosses, and how one might have turned into the other. She focused again on Dicranum, wondering anew how this particular moss genus could exist in so many minutely diverse forms; what had shaped it into all these hundreds upon hundreds of silhouettes and configurations?

  In late 1850, George Hawkes brought forth Ambrose’s orchid book
into the world—a lavish and expensive publication called The Orchids of Guatemala and Mexico. All who encountered the book declared Ambrose Pike to be the finest botanical artist of the age. All the most prominent gardens wanted to commission Mr. Pike to document their own collections, but Ambrose Pike was gone—lost on the other side of the world, growing vanilla, far out of reach. Alma felt guilt and shame over this, but she did not know what to do about it. She spent time with the book every day. The beauty of Ambrose’s work brought her pain, but she could not stay away from it, either. She arranged for George Hawkes to send a copy of the book to Ambrose in Tahiti, but she never heard whether the volume had arrived. She arranged that Ambrose’s mother—the formidable Mrs. Constance Pike—should receive all the earnings from the book. This led to some polite exchanges of letters between Alma and her mother-in-law. Mrs. Pike, most unfortunately, believed that her son had run away from his new wife in order to pursue his reckless dreams—and Alma, even more unfortunately, did not disabuse her of that misconception.

  Once a month, Alma went to see her old friend Retta at the Griffon Asylum. Retta no longer knew who Alma was—nor, it seemed, did Retta know who she herself was.

  Alma did not see her sister Prudence, but heard news every now and again: poverty and abolition, abolition and poverty, always the same grim tale.

  Alma thought about all these things, but did not know what to make of any of it. Why had their lives turned this way, and not another way? She thought again about the four distinct and concurrent varieties of time, as she had once named them: Divine Time, Geological Time, Human Time, Moss Time. It occurred to her that she had spent most of her life wishing she could live within the slow, microscopic realm of Moss Time. That had been an odd enough desire, but then she’d met Ambrose Pike, whose yearnings were even more extreme than hers: he had wanted to live within the eternal emptiness of Divine Time—which is to say, he had wanted to live outside of time altogether. He had wanted her to live there with him.