The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  He started his business with Garrick not one moment too soon. By the summer of 1793, a yellow fever epidemic was battering Philadelphia. The streets were choked with corpses, and orphans clung to their dead mothers in the gutters. People died in pairs, in families, in clusters of dozens—heaving out sickening rivers of black sludge from their gullets and bowels on their way to death. Local physicians had decided that the only possible cure was to violently purge their patients even further, through repeated bouts of vomiting and diarrhea, and the best-known purgative in the world was a plant called jalap, which Henry was already importing in bales from Mexico.

  Henry himself suspected that the jalap cure was bogus, and he refused to let anyone in his household take it. He knew that Creole doctors down in the Caribbean—far more familiar with yellow fever than their northern counterparts—treated patients with a less barbarous prescription of restorative liquids and rest. There was no money to be made, however, in restorative liquids and rest, while there was a great deal of money to be made in jalap. This is how it came to pass that, by the end of 1793, one-third of the population of Philadelphia had died of yellow fever, and Henry Whittaker had doubled his wealth.

  Henry took his earnings and built two more glasshouses. At Beatrix’s suggestion, he started cultivating native American flowers, trees, and bushes for export to Europe. It was a worthy idea; America’s meadows and forests were filled with botanical species that looked exotic to a European eye, and could easily be sold overseas. Henry had grown weary of sending his ships out of the Philadelphia harbor with empty holds; now he could make money on both ends. He was still earning a fortune out of Java, processing Jesuit’s bark with his Dutch partners, but there was a fortune to be made locally, too. By 1796, Henry was dispatching collectors into the Pennsylvania mountains to gather ginseng root for export to China. For many years to come, in fact, he would be the only man in America who ever figured out how to sell something to the Chinese.

  By the end of 1798, Henry was filling his American greenhouses with imported tropical exotics, as well, to sell to new American aristocrats. The United States economy was in steep and abrupt ascent. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both had opulent country estates, so everyone wanted an opulent country estate. The young nation was suddenly testing the limits of profligacy. Some citizens were getting rich; others were falling into destitution. Henry’s trajectory soared only upward. The basis of every one of Henry Whittaker’s calculations was “I shall win,” and invariably he did win—at importing, at exporting, at manufacturing, at opportunism of all kinds. Money seemed to love Henry. Money followed him around like a small, excited dog. By 1800, he was easily the richest man in Philadelphia, and one of the three richest men in the Western Hemisphere.

  So when Henry’s daughter Alma was born that year—just three weeks after the death of George Washington—it was as though she were born to a new kind of creature entirely, such as the world had never before seen: a mighty and newly minted American sultan.

  Dicranaceae / Dicranum

  PART TWO

  The Plum of White Acre

  Chapter Five

  She was her father’s daughter. It was said of her from the beginning. For one thing, Alma Whittaker looked precisely like Henry: ginger of hair, florid of skin, small of mouth, wide of brow, abundant of nose. This was a rather unfortunate circumstance for Alma, although it would take her some years to realize it. Henry’s face was far better suited to a grown man than to a little girl. Not that Henry himself objected to this state of affairs; Henry Whittaker enjoyed looking at his image wherever he might encounter it (in a mirror, in a portrait, in a child’s face), so he always took satisfaction in Alma’s appearance.

  “No question who spawned that one!” he would boast.

  What’s more, Alma was clever like him. Sturdy, too. A right little dromedary, she was—tireless and uncomplaining. Never took ill. Stubborn. From the moment the girl learned to speak, she could not put an argument to rest. If her millstone of a mother had not steadfastly ground the impudence out of her, she might have turned out to be frankly rude. As it was, she was merely forceful. She wanted to understand the world, and she made a habit of chasing down information to its last hiding place, as though the fate of nations were at stake in every instance. She demanded to know why a pony was not a baby horse. She demanded to know why sparks were born when she drew her hand across her sheets on a hot summer’s night. She not only demanded to know whether mushrooms were plants or animals, but also—when given the answer—demanded to know why this was certain.

  Alma had been born to the correct parents for these sorts of restless inquiries; as long as her questions were respectfully expressed, they would be answered. Both Henry and Beatrix Whittaker, equally intolerant of dullness, encouraged a spirit of investigation in their daughter. Even Alma’s mushroom question was granted a serious answer (from Beatrix in this case, who quoted the esteemed Swedish botanical taxonomist Carl Linnaeus on how to distinguish minerals from plants, and plants from animals: “Stones grow. Plants grow and live. Animals grow, live, and feel”). Beatrix did not believe a four-year-old child was too young to be discussing Linnaeus. Indeed, Beatrix had commenced Alma’s formal education nearly as soon as the child could hold herself upright. If other people’s toddlers could be taught to lisp prayers and catechisms as soon as they could speak, then, Beatrix believed, her child could certainly be taught anything.

  As a result, Alma knew her numbers before the age of four—in English, Dutch, French, and Latin. The study of Latin was particularly stressed, because Beatrix believed that no one who was ignorant of Latin could ever write a proper sentence in either English or French. There was an early dabbling in Greek, as well, although with somewhat less urgency. (Not even Beatrix believed a child should pursue Greek before the age of five.) Beatrix tutored her intelligent daughter herself, and with satisfaction. A parent is inexcusable who does not personally teach her child to think. Beatrix also happened to believe that mankind’s intellectual faculties had been steadily deteriorating since the second century anno Domini, so she enjoyed the sensation of running a private Athenian lyceum in Philadelphia, solely for her daughter’s benefit.

  Hanneke de Groot, the head housekeeper, felt that Alma’s young female brain was perhaps overly taxed by so much study, but Beatrix would hear none of it, for this is how Beatrix herself had been educated, as had every van Devender child—male and female—since time immemorial. “Don’t be simple, Hanneke,” Beatrix scolded. “At no moment in history has a bright young girl with plenty of food and a good constitution perished from too much learning.”

  Beatrix admired the useful over the vapid, the edifying over the entertaining. She was suspicious of anything one might call “an innocent amusement,” and quite detested anything foolish or vile. Foolish and vile things included: public houses; rouged women; election days (one could always expect mobs); the eating of ice cream; the visiting of ice cream houses; Anglicans (whom she felt to be Catholics in disguise, and whose religion, she submitted, stood at odds with both morality and common sense); tea (good Dutch women drank only coffee); people who drove their sleighs in wintertime without bells upon their horses (you couldn’t hear them coming up behind you!); inexpensive household help (a troublesome bargain); people who paid their servants in rum instead of money (thus contributing to public drunkenness); people who came to you with their troubles but then refused to listen to sound advice; New Year’s Eve celebrations (the new year will arrive one way or another, regardless of all that bell-ringing); the aristocracy (nobility should be based upon conduct, not upon inheritance); and overpraised children (good behavior should be expected, not rewarded).

  She embraced the motto Labor ipse Voluptas—work is its own reward. She believed there was an inherent dignity in remaining aloof and indifferent to sensation; indeed, she believed that indifference to sensation was the very definition of dignity. Most of all, Beatrix Whittaker believed in respectability and morality—but
if pushed to choose between the two, she would probably have chosen respectability.

  All of this, she strove to teach her daughter.

  * * *

  As for Henry Whittaker, obviously he could not help with the teaching of the classics, but he was appreciative of Beatrix’s educational efforts with Alma. As a clever but unschooled man of botany, he had always felt that Greek and Latin were like two great iron struts, blocking the doorway of knowledge from him; he would not have his child similarly barred. Indeed, he would not have his child barred from anything.

  As for what Henry taught Alma? Well, he taught her nothing. That is to say, he taught her nothing directly. He did not have the patience for administering formal instruction, and he did not like to be set round by children. But what Alma learned from her father indirectly constituted a long list. First and foremost, she learned not to irritate him. The moment she irritated her father, she would be banished from the room, so she learned from earliest milky consciousness never to nettle or provoke Henry. This was a challenge for Alma, for it required a stern thrashing down of all her natural instincts (which were, precisely, to nettle and provoke). She learned, however, that her father did not entirely mind a serious, interesting, or articulate question from his daughter—just so long as she never interrupted his speech or (this was trickier) his thoughts. Sometimes her questions even amused him, although she did not always understand why—such as when she asked why the hog took so long at it, climbing up on the lady pig’s back, while the bull was always so quick with the cows. That question had made Henry laugh. Alma did not like to be laughed at. She learned never to ask such a question twice.

  Alma learned that her father was impatient with his workers, with his houseguests, with his wife, with herself, and even with his horses—but with plants, he never lost his head. He was always charitable and forgiving with plants. This made Alma sometimes long to be a plant. She never spoke of this longing, though, for it would have made her look like a fool, and she had learned from Henry that one must never look like a fool. “The world is a fool who longs to be tricked,” he often said, and he had borne it down upon his daughter that there is a mighty gap between the idiots and the clever, and one must come down on the side of cleverness. To show a longing for anything that one cannot have, for instance, is not a clever position.

  Alma learned from Henry that there were far distant places in the world, where some men go and never return, but that her father had gone to those places and had returned from them. (She liked to imagine that he had returned home for her, in order to be her papa, although he had never insinuated such a thing.) She learned that Henry had endured the world because he was brave. She learned that her father wished for her to be brave, too, even in the most alarming instances—thunder, being chased by geese, a flood on the Schuylkill River, the ape with the chain on its neck that traveled in the wagon with the tinker. Henry would not allow Alma to fear any of those things. Before she even properly understood what death was, he was forbidding her to fear that, as well.

  “People die every day,” he told her. “But there are eight thousand chances against its being you.”

  She learned that there were weeks—rainy weeks in particular—when her father’s body ailed him more than any man in Christendom should be obliged to bear. He had permanent agony in one leg from a poorly set broken bone, and he suffered from the recurrent fevers that he had acquired in those distant and dangerous places across the world. There were times when Henry could not leave his bed for half a month. He must never be bothered under such circumstances. Even to bring him letters, one must proceed quietly. These ailments were the reason Henry could not travel anymore, and why, instead, he summoned the world to him. This was why there were always so many visitors at White Acre, and why so much business was conducted in the drawing room and at the dining room table. This is also why Henry had the man called Dick Yancey—the terrifying, silent, bald-pated Yorkshireman with gelid eyes, who traveled on Henry’s behalf, and who disciplined the world in the name of the Whittaker Company. Alma learned never to speak to Dick Yancey.

  Alma learned that her father did not keep the Sabbath, although he did keep, in his name, the finest private pew in the Swedish Lutheran church where Alma and her mother spent their Sundays. Alma’s mother did not particularly care for the Swedes, but since there was no Dutch Reformed church nearby, the Swedes were better than nothing. The Swedes, at least, understood and shared the central beliefs of Calvinist teachings: You are responsible for your own situation in life, you are most likely doomed, and the future is terribly grim. That was all comfortingly familiar to Beatrix. Better than any of the other religions, with their false, soft reassurances.

  Alma wished she did not have to go to church, and that she could stay home on Sundays as her father did, to work with plants. Church was dull and uncomfortable and smelled of tobacco juice. In the summertime, turkey fowl and dogs sometimes wandered inside the open front door, seeking shade from the insufferable heat. In the wintertime, the old stone building became impossibly cold. Whenever a beam of light shone through one of the tall, wavy-glassed windows, Alma would turn her face up toward it, like a tropical vine in one of her father’s botanical forcing houses, wishing to climb her way out.

  Alma’s father did not like churches or religions, but he did frequently call upon God to curse his enemies. As for what else Henry did not like, the list was long, and Alma came to know it well. She knew that her father detested large men who kept small dogs. Also, he detested people who bought fast horses that they were unskilled to ride. Furthermore, he detested: recreational sailing vessels; surveyors; cheaply made shoes; French (the language, the food, the populace); nervous clerks; tiny porcelain plates which broke in a man’s damned hand; poetry (but not songs!); the stooped backs of cowards; thieving sons of whores; a lying tongue; the sound of a violin; the army (any army); tulips (“onions with airs!”); blue jays; the drinking of coffee (“a damned, dirty Dutch habit!”); and—although Alma did not yet understand what either of these words meant—both slavery and abolitionists.

  Henry could be incendiary. He could insult and diminish Alma as quickly as another man could button up a waistcoat (“Nobody likes a stupid and selfish little piglet!”), but there were moments, too, when he seemed verifiably fond of her, and even proud of her. A stranger came out to White Acre one day to sell Henry a pony, for Alma to learn to ride. The pony’s name was Soames, and he was the color of sugar icing, and Alma loved him immediately. A price was negotiated. The two men settled on three dollars. Alma, who was only six years old, asked, “Excuse me, sir, but does that price also include the bridle and saddle which the pony is currently wearing?”

  The stranger balked at the question, but Henry roared with laughter. “She’s got you there, man!” he bellowed, and for the rest of that day, he ruffled Alma’s hair whenever she came near, saying, “What a good little auctioneer I’ve got as a daughter!”

  Alma learned that her father drank out of bottles in the evening, and that those bottles sometimes contained danger (raised voices; banishment), but could also contain miracles—such as permission to sit on her father’s lap, where she might be told fantastical stories, and might be called by her rarest nickname: “Plum.” On such nights, Henry told her things like, “Plum, you must always carry enough gold on you to buy back your life in case of a kidnapping. Sew it into your hems, if you must, but never be without money!” Henry told her that the Bedouins in the desert sometimes sewed gemstones under their skin, in case of emergency. He told her that he himself had an emerald from South America sewn under the loose skin of his belly, and that it looked to the unknowing eye like a scar from a gunshot wound, and that he would never, ever show it to her—but the emerald was there.

  “You must always have one final bribe, Plum,” he said.

  On her father’s lap, Alma learned that Henry had sailed the world with a great man named Captain Cook. These were the best stories of all. One day a giant whale had come
to the surface of the ocean with its mouth open, and Captain Cook had sailed the ship right inside the whale, taken a look around the whale’s belly, and had then sailed out again—backward! Once Henry had heard a crying noise at sea, and had seen a mermaid floating on the ocean’s surface. The mermaid had been injured by a shark. Henry had pulled the mermaid out of the water with a rope, and she had died in his arms—but not before she had, by God, blessed Henry Whittaker, telling him that he would be a rich man someday. And that was how he acquired this big house—on account of that mermaid’s blessing!

  “What language did the mermaid speak?” Alma wanted to know, imagining that it would almost have to be Greek.

  “English!” Henry said. “By God, Plum, why would I rescue a deuced foreign mermaid?”

  Alma was awed and sometimes daunted by her mother, but she adored her father. She loved him more than anything. She loved him more than Soames the pony. Her father was a colossus, and she peered at the world from between his mammoth legs. By comparison to Henry, the Lord of the Bible was dull and distant. Like the Lord of the Bible, Henry sometimes tested Alma’s love—particularly after the bottles were opened. “Plum,” he would say, “why don’t you run as fast as your spindle-shanked legs can carry you, all the way down to the wharf, and see if your papa has any ships arriving from China?”

  The wharf was seven miles away, and across the river. It could be nine o’clock on a Sunday night during a bitterly cold March storm, and Alma would leap off her father’s lap and start running. A servant would have to catch her at the door and carry her back into the drawing room, or else—at the age of six, without a cloak or bonnet upon her, without a penny in her pocket or the tiniest bit of gold sewn into her hems—by God, she would have done it.