The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  Moreover, he actively sought the God of the Bible, as well as the spirits of nature. When he attended the Swedish Lutheran church every Sunday with Alma, he knelt and prayed in humble accord. He sat upright in the unyielding oak pew, and took in the sermons without discomfort. When he was not in prayer, he worked in silence over his printing presses, or industriously made portraits of orchids, or helped Alma with her mosses, or played long games of backgammon with Henry. Truly, Ambrose had no idea what was occurring in the rest of the world. If anything, he was trying to escape the world—which meant that he had arrived at his curious bundle of ideas all by himself. He did not know that half of America and most of Europe were attempting to read each other’s minds. He merely wanted to read Alma’s mind, and to have her read his.

  She could not refuse him.

  So when this young man asked her to take him someplace quiet and secret, she took him into the binding closet. She could think of nowhere else to go. She did not want to wake anyone by marching through the house to a more distant location. She did not wish to be caught in a bedroom with him. What’s more, she knew of no quieter or more private place than this. She told herself that these were the reasons she took him there. They may even have been true.

  He had not known that the door was there. Nobody knew it was there—so cleverly were its seams hidden behind the elaborate old plaster molding of the wall. Since Beatrix’s death, Alma was the only person who ever entered the binding closet. Perhaps Hanneke knew of its existence, but the old housekeeper seldom came to this wing of the house, to the far distant library. Henry probably knew of it—he had designed it, after all—but he, too, seldom frequented the library anymore. He had probably forgotten the place years earlier.

  Alma did not bring a lamp with them. She was all too familiar with the tiny room’s contours. There was a stool, where she had sat when she came to be so shamefully and pleasurably alone, and there was a small work table on which Ambrose could now sit, directly facing her. She showed him where to sit. Once she shut and locked the door, they were in absolute darkness together, in this tiny, hidden, stifling place. He did not seem alarmed by darkness, or the cramped quarters. For this was what he had requested.

  “May I take your hands?” he asked.

  She reached out cautiously across the darkness until her fingertips touched his arms. Together, they found each other’s hands. His hands were slender and light. Hers felt heavy and damp. Ambrose laid his hands across his knees, palms facing upward, and she allowed her palms to settle atop his. She did not expect what she encountered in that first touch: the fierce, staggering onrush of love. It went through her like a sob.

  But what had she expected? Why should it have felt anything less than elevated, exaggerated, exalted? Alma had never before been touched by a man. Or, rather, just twice—once, in the spring of 1818, when George Hawkes had pressed Alma’s hand between both of his and had called her a brilliant microscopist; and once again by George, more recently, when he was in distress about Retta—but in both cases that had been only one of her hands, coming in contact nearly accidentally with a man’s flesh. Never had she been touched with anything that might fairly be called intimacy. Numberless times over the decades, she had sat on this very stool with her legs open and her skirts up about her waist, with this very door locked behind her, leaning back against the embrace of this very wall behind her, sating her hunger as best she could with the grappling of her own fingers. If there were molecules in this room that differed from the other molecules of White Acre—or indeed, from the other molecules of the world—then these molecules were permeated by dozens and hundreds and thousands of impressions of Alma’s carnal exertions. Yet now she was here in this closet, in the same familiar darkness, surrounded by those molecules, alone with a man ten years her junior.

  But what was she to do about this sob of love?

  “Listen for my question,” Ambrose said, holding Alma’s hands lightly. “And then ask me your own. There will be no further need to speak. We shall know when we have heard each other.”

  Ambrose closed his grip gently around her hands. The sensation that this provoked up her arms was beautiful.

  How could she extend this?

  She considered pretending that she was reading his mind, if only to draw out the experience. She considered whether there might be a way to repeat this event in the future. But what if they were ever discovered in here? What if Hanneke found them alone in a closet? What would people say? What would people think of Ambrose, whose intentions, as ever, had seemed so unmingled with anything foul? He would appear a rake. He would be banished. She would be shamed.

  No, Alma understood, they would never do this again after tonight. This was to be the one moment in her life when a man’s hands would be clasped around hers.

  She closed her eyes and leaned back a bit, putting her full weight against the wall. He did not let go of her. Her knees nearly brushed against his knees. A good deal of time passed. Ten minutes? A half hour? She drank in the pleasure of his touch. She wished to never forget this.

  The pleasant sensation that had begun in her palms and traveled up her arms now advanced into her torso, and eventually pooled between her legs. What had she supposed might happen? Her body had been tuned to this room, trained to this room—and now this new stimulus had arrived. For a while, she contended against the sensation. She was grateful that her face could not be seen, for a most contorted and flushed countenance would have been revealed, had there been a trace of light. Though she had forced this moment, she still could not quite believe this moment: There was a man sitting across from her, right here in the dark of the binding closet, inside the deepest penetralia of her world.

  Alma attempted to keep her breath even. She resisted what she was feeling, yet her resistance only increased the sensation of pleasure growing between her legs. There is a Dutch word, uitwaaien, “to walk against the wind for pleasure.” That is what this felt like. Without moving her body at all, Alma leaned against the rising wind with all her power, but the wind only pushed back, with equal force, and so did her pleasure increase.

  More time passed. Another ten minutes? Another half hour? Ambrose did not move. Alma did not move, either. His hands did not so much as tremble or pulse. Yet Alma felt consumed by him. She felt him everywhere within her and around her. She felt him counting the hairs at the base of her neck, and examining the clusters of nerves at the bottom of her spine.

  “Imagination is gentle,” Jacob Boehme had written, “and it resembles water. But desire is rough and dry as a hunger.”

  Yet Alma felt both. She felt both the water and the hunger. She felt both the imagination and the desire. Then, with a sort of horror and a fair amount of mad joy, she knew that she was about to reach her old familiar vortex of pleasure. Sensation was rising quickly through her quim, and there was no question of stopping it. Without Ambrose touching her (aside from her hands), without her touching herself, without either of them moving so much as an inch, without her skirts lifted above her waist or her hands at work within her own body, without even a change of breath—Alma tumbled into climax. For a moment, she saw a flash of white, like sheet lightning across a starless summer sky. The world turned milky behind her closed eyes. She felt blinded, rapturous—and then, immediately, shamed.

  Dreadfully shamed.

  What had she done? What had he felt? What had he heard? Dear God, what had he smelled? But before she could react or pull away, she felt something else. Though Ambrose still did not move or stir or react, she suddenly felt as though he were brushing against the soles of her feet with a persistent stroke. As the moments passed, she perceived that this stroking sensation was, in fact, a question—an utterance coming into being, right out of the floor. She felt the question enter through the bottoms of her feet and rise through the bones of her legs. Then she felt the question creep up into her womb, swimming through the wet path of her quim. It was nearly a spoken voice that was gliding up into her, nearly an articula
tion. Ambrose was asking something of her, but he was asking it from inside her. She heard it now. Then there it was, his question, perfectly formed:

  Will you accept this of me?

  She pulsed silently with her reply: YES.

  Then she felt something else. The question that Ambrose had placed within her body was twisting into something else. It was now turning into her question. She had not known that she had a question for Ambrose, but now she did have one—most urgently. She let her question rise through her torso and out through her arms. Then she placed her question upon his awaiting palms:

  Is this what you want of me?

  She heard him draw in his breath sharply. He clutched her hands so tightly that he nearly hurt her. Then he shattered the silence with one spoken word:

  “Yes.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Only one month later, they were married.

  In the years to come, Alma would puzzle over the mechanism by which this decision had been reached—this most inconceivable and unexpected leap into wedlock—but in the days after the experience within the binding closet, matrimony felt like an inevitability. As for what had actually transpired in that tiny room, all of it (from Alma’s chaste climax, to the silent transmission of thought) seemed a miracle, or at least a phenomenon. Alma could find no logical explanation for what had transpired. People cannot hear each other’s thoughts. Alma knew this to be true. People cannot convey that sort of electricity, that sort of longing and frank erotic disruption with the mere touch of hands. Yet—it had happened. Without question, it had happened.

  When they had walked out of the closet that night, he had turned to her, his face flushed and ecstatic, and he said, “I would like to sleep beside you every night for the rest of my life, and listen to your thoughts forever.”

  That is what he had said! Not telepathically, but aloud. Overwhelmed, she’d had no words for a reply. She’d merely nodded her assent, or her agreement, or her wonder. Then they had both gone off to their respective bedrooms, across the hall from each other—although, of course, she had not slept. How could she have?

  The following day, as they walked toward the moss beds together, Ambrose began speaking casually, as though they were in the middle of an ongoing conversation. Quite out of nowhere, he said, “Perhaps the difference in our stations in life is so vast that it is of no consequence. I possess nothing in this world that anyone would desire, and you possess everything. Perhaps we inhabit such extremes that there is balance to be found within our differences?”

  Alma had not an inkling where he was tending with this line of conversation, but she allowed him to keep speaking.

  “I have also wondered,” he reflected mildly, “if two such diverse individuals as we could find harmony in matrimony.”

  Both her heart and stomach lunged at the word: matrimony. Was he speaking philosophically, or literally? She waited.

  He continued, though he was still far from direct: “There will be people, I suppose, who might accuse me of reaching for your wealth. Nothing could be further from the truth. I live my life in strictest economy, Alma, not only out of habit, but also out of preference. I have no riches to offer you, but I would also take no riches from you. You will not become wealthier by marrying me, but nor will you grow poorer. That truth may not satisfy your father, but I hope it will satisfy you. In any case, our love is not a typical love, as is typically felt between men and women. We share something else between us—something more immediate, more cherishing. That has been evident to me from the beginning, and I pray it has been evident to you. My wish is that we two could live together as one, both contented and elevated, and ever-seeking.”

  It was only later that afternoon, when Ambrose asked her, “Will you speak to your father, or shall I?” that Alma definitively pieced it together: this had indeed been a marriage proposal. Or, rather, it had been a marriage assumption. Ambrose did not precisely ask for Alma’s hand—for in his mind, apparently, she had already given it to him. She could not deny that this was true. She would have given him anything. She loved him so deeply that it pained her. She was only just confessing this to herself. To lose him now would be an amputation. True, there was no sense to be made of this love. She was nearly fifty years old, and he was still a fairly young man. She was homely and he was beautiful. They had known each other for only a few weeks. They believed in different universes (Ambrose in the divine; Alma in the actual). Yet, undeniably—Alma told herself—this was love. Undeniably, Alma Whittaker was about to become a wife.

  “I shall speak to Father myself,” Alma said, cautiously overjoyed.

  She found her father in his study that evening before dinner, deep in papers.

  “Listen to this letter,” he said by way of greeting. “This man here says he can no longer operate his mill. His son—his stupid gambling dicer of a son—has ruined the family. He says he has resolved to pay off his debts, and wishes to die unencumbered. This from a man who, in twenty years, has not taken one step of common sense. Well, a fine chance he has for that!”

  Alma did not know who the man in question was, or who the son was, or which mill was at stake. Everyone today was speaking to her as though from the midst of a preexisting conversation.

  “Father,” she said. “I wish to discuss something with you. Ambrose Pike has asked for my hand in marriage.”

  “Very well,” said Henry. “But listen, Alma—this fool here wishes to sell me a parcel of his cornfields, too, and he’s trying to convince me to purchase that old granary he’s got on the wharf, the one that is falling into the river already. You know the one, Alma. What he thinks that wreck of a building is worth, or why I would wish to be saddled with it, I cannot imagine.”

  “You are not listening to me, Father.”

  Henry did not so much as glance up from his desk. “I am listening to you,” he said, turning over the paper in his hand and peering at it. “I am listening to you with captive fascination.”

  “Ambrose and I wish to marry soon,” Alma said. “There need be no spectacle or festivity, but we would like it to be prompt. Ideally, we would like to be married before the end of the month. Please be assured that we will remain at White Acre. You will not lose either of us.”

  At this, Henry looked up at Alma for the first time since she’d walked into the room.

  “Naturally I will not lose either of you,” said Henry. “Why would either of you leave? It is not as though the fellow can support you in your accustomed manner on the salary of—what is his profession?—orchidist?”

  Henry settled back into his chair, crossed his arms over his chest, and gazed at his daughter over the rims of his old-fashioned brass eyeglasses. Alma was not certain what to say next.

  “Ambrose is a good man,” she finally uttered. “He has no longing for fortune.”

  “I suspect you may be correct in that,” Henry replied. “Though it does not speak highly of his character that he prefers poverty to riches. Nonetheless, I thought the situation out years ago—long before you or I ever heard of Ambrose Pike.”

  Henry rose somewhat unsteadily and peered at the bookcase behind him. He pulled out a volume on English sailing vessels—a book that Alma had seen on the shelves her whole life, but had never opened, as she held no interest in English sailing vessels. He paged through the book until he found a folded sheet of paper tucked inside, stamped with a wax seal. Above the seal was written “Alma.” He handed it to her.

  “I drew up two of these documents, with the assistance of your mother, around 1817. The other, I gave your sister Prudence when she married that crop-eared spaniel of hers. It is a decree for your husband to sign, asserting that he will never own White Acre.”

  Henry was nonchalant about this. Alma took the document, wordlessly. She recognized her mother’s hand in the straight-backed capital A of her own name.

  “Ambrose has no need of White Acre, nor any desire for it,” Alma said, defensively.

  “Excellent. Then he will not mind s
igning it. Naturally, there will be a dowry, but my fortune, my estate—it will never be his. I trust we are understood?”

  “Very well,” she said.

  “Very well, indeed. Now, as to the suitability of Mr. Pike as a husband, that is your business. You are a grown woman. If you believe such a man can render you satisfied in wedlock, you have my blessing.”

  “Satisfied in wedlock?” Alma bristled. “Have I ever been a difficult figure to satisfy, Father? What have I ever asked for? What have I ever demanded? How much trouble could I possibly present to anybody as a wife?”

  Henry shrugged. “I could not say. That is for you to learn.”

  “Ambrose and I share a natural sympathy with each other, Father. I know that it may seem an unconventional pairing, but I feel—”

  Henry cut her off. “Never explain yourself, Alma. It makes you appear weak. In any case, I do not dislike the fellow.” He returned his attention to the papers on his desk.

  Did that constitute a blessing? Alma could not be certain. She waited for him to say more. He did not. It did seem, however, that permission to marry had been granted. At the very least, permission had not been declined.

  “Thank you, Father.” She turned toward the door.

  “One further matter,” Henry said, looking up again. “Before her wedding night, it is customary that a bride be advised on certain matters of the conjugal chamber—presuming that you are still innocent of such things, which I suspect you are. As a man and as your father, I cannot advise you. Your mother is dead, or she’d have done it. Do not trouble yourself asking Hanneke any questions on the matter, for she is an old spinster who knows nothing, and she would die of shock if she ever knew what transpired between men and women in their beds. My advice is that you pay a visit to your sister Prudence. She is a long-married wife and the mother of half a dozen children. She may be able to edify you on some points of matrimonial conduct. Do not blush, Alma—you are too old to blush and it makes you look ridiculous. If you are to have a go at marriage, then by God, go at it properly. Arrive prepared to the bed, as you do with everything else in life. It may be worth your effort. And post these letters for me tomorrow, if you are going into town anyway.”