The Signature of All Things

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  * * *

  Alma had not even had time to properly contemplate the notion of marriage, yet now it all seemed arranged and decided. Even her father had proceeded immediately to the topics of inheritance and the marital bed. Events moved even more swiftly after that. The next day, Alma and Ambrose walked to Sixteenth Street to have a daguerreotype made of themselves: their wedding portrait. Alma had never before been photographed, and neither had Ambrose. It was such a dreadful likeness of them both that she hesitated even to pay for the picture. She looked at the image only once, and never wanted to see it again. She appeared so much older than Ambrose! A stranger, looking at this picture, might have thought her the younger man’s large-boned, heavy-jawed, rueful mother. As for Ambrose, he looked like a starved, mad-eyed prisoner of the chair that held him. One of his hands was a blur. His tousled hair made it appear as though he had been roughly awoken from a tormented sleep. Alma’s hair was crooked and tragic. The whole experience made Alma feel terribly sad. But Ambrose only laughed when he saw the image.

  “Why, this is slander!” he exclaimed. “How unkind a fate, to see oneself so honestly! Nonetheless, I will send the picture to my family in Boston. One hopes they will recognize their own son.”

  Did events generally move this hastily for other people who were engaged to marry? Alma did not know. She had not seen much of courtships, engagements, the rituals of matrimony. She had never studied the ladies’ magazines, or enjoyed the light novels about love, written for dewy, innocent girls. (She had certainly read salacious books about coupling, but they did not clarify the larger situation.) In short, she was far from an expert belle. If Alma’s experiences in the realm of love had not been so markedly scarce, she might have found her courtship, such as it was, both abrupt and unlikely. In the three months that she and Ambrose had known each other, they had never exchanged a love letter, a poem, an embrace. The affection between them was clear and constant, but passion was absent. Another woman might have regarded this situation with suspicion. Instead Alma felt only drunken, and befuddled by questions. They were not necessarily unpleasant questions, but they swarmed within her to the point of distraction. Was Ambrose now her lover? Could she fairly call him that? Did she belong to him? Could she hold his hand at any time now? How did he regard her? What would his body look like, beneath his clothing? Would her body bring him satisfaction? What did he expect from her? She could not conjecture answers to any of it.

  She was also hopelessly in love.

  Alma had always adored Ambrose, of course, from the moment she had met him, but—until his marriage proposal—she had never considered allowing herself to fall backward into the full expression of that adoration; it would have felt audacious to do so, if not dangerous. It had always been enough simply to have him near. Alma would have been willing to regard Ambrose as merely a dear companion, if it would have kept him at White Acre forever. To share buttered toast with him every morning, to observe his ever-illuminated face as he spoke of orchids, to witness the mastery of his printmaking, to watch him throw himself down upon her divan to listen to theories of species transmutation and extinction—truly, all that would have been plenty. She would never have presumed to wish for more. Ambrose as friend—as brother—more than sufficed.

  Even after the events of the binding closet, Alma would not have asked for more. Whatever had transpired between them in the dark, she was easily prepared to regard as a unique moment, perhaps even a mutual hallucination. She could have talked herself into believing that she had imagined the current of communication that had moved between them across the silence, and imagined the riotous effect that his hands against hers had wrought throughout her entire body. Given enough time, she might have even learned to forget that it ever occurred. Even after that encounter, she would not have allowed herself to love him so desperately, so thoroughly, so helplessly—not without his permission.

  But now they were to be married, and that permission had been granted. There was no chance anymore for Alma to restrain her love—and no reason to. She allowed herself to plummet directly into it. She felt inflamed by amazement, rampant with inspiration, enthralled. Where she had once seen light in Ambrose’s face, she now saw celestial light. Where his limbs had before looked only pleasing, they now looked like Roman statuary. His voice was an evensong. His slightest glance bruised her heart with fearful joy.

  Cast loose for the first time in her life into the realm of love, imbued with impossible energy, Alma barely recognized herself. Her capacities seemed limitless. She barely had need for sleep. She felt she could row a boat up a mountainside. She moved through the world as though in a corona of fire. She was zoetic. It was not merely Ambrose whom she regarded with such vivid purity and thrill—but everything and everybody. All was suddenly miraculous. She saw lines of convergence and grace everywhere she looked. Even the smallest matters became revelatory. She was doused by a sudden surfeit of the most astonishing self-confidence. Quite out of the blue, she found herself solving botanical problems that had vexed her for years. She wrote furiously paced letters to distinguished men of botany (men whose reputations had always cowed her), laying challenge to their conclusions as she had never before permitted herself to do.

  “You have presented your Zygodon with sixteen cilia and no outer peristome!” she scolded.

  Or, “Why are you so certain this is a Polytrichum colony?”

  Or, “I do not agree with Professor Marshall’s conclusion. It can be discouraging, I know, to achieve consensus in the field of cryptogamia, but I caution you against your haste in declaring a new species before you have thoroughly studied the accumulated evidence. These days, one may see as many names for a given specimen as there are bryologists studying it; that does not mean the specimen is either new or rare. I have four such specimens in my own herbarium.”

  She had never before possessed the courage for such remonstrance, but love had emboldened her, and her mind felt like an immaculate engine. A week before the wedding, Alma woke in the night with an electrified start, abruptly realizing that there was a link between algae and mosses. She had been looking at mosses and algae for decades, but she had never before seen the truth of it: the two were cousins. She had no trace of a doubt about it. In essence, she apprehended, mosses did not merely resemble algae that had crawled up on dry land; mosses were algae that had crawled up on dry land. How mosses had made this elaborate transformation from aquatic to terrestrial, Alma did not know. But these two species shared an entwined history. They must do. The algae had decided something, long before Alma or anyone else was watching them, and in that point of decision, had moved up into the dry air and transformed. She did not know the mechanism behind this transformation, but she knew that it had occurred.

  Realizing all this, Alma wished to run across the hall and leap into bed with Ambrose—with he who had ignited such wildness within her body and mind. She wished to tell him everything, to show him everything, to prove the workings of the universe to him. She could not wait for daylight, when they could speak again at breakfast. She could not wait to look upon his face. She could not wait for the time when they would never need to be separated—not even at night, not even in sleep. She lay in her own bed, trembling with anticipation and sentiment.

  What a long distance it felt, between their two rooms!

  As for Ambrose himself, as the wedding approached, he became only more serene, only more attentive. He could not have been kinder to Alma. She sometimes feared he might change his mind, but there was no sign of it. She had felt a shudder of apprehension when she handed him Henry Whittaker’s decree, but Ambrose had signed it without hesitation or complaint—indeed, without even reading it. Each night, before they went to their separate rooms, he kissed her freckled hand, right below the knuckles. He called her “my other soul, my better soul.”

  He said, “I am such a strange man, Alma. Are you certain you can endure my unusual ways?”

  “I can endure you!” she promised.

 
; She felt that she was in danger of igniting.

  She feared she might die of gladness.

  * * *

  Three days before the wedding—which was to be a simple ceremony held in the drawing room at White Acre—Alma finally visited her sister Prudence. It had been many months since they had last seen each other. But it would be utterly rude of her not to invite her sister to the wedding, so Alma had written Prudence a note of explanation—that she was to be wed to a friend of Mr. George Hawkes—and then made plans for a brief visit. Furthermore, Alma had decided to follow her father’s advice, and speak to Prudence on the matter of the conjugal bed. It was not a conversation she was eagerly anticipating, but she did not wish to come into Ambrose’s arms unprepared, and she did not know whom else to ask.

  It was an early evening in mid-August when Alma arrived at the Dixon home. She found her sister in the kitchen, making a mustard poultice for her youngest boy, Walter, who was sick in bed, ill in the stomach from having eaten too much green watermelon rind. The other children were milling about the kitchen, working at various chores. The room was suffocatingly hot. There were two small black girls whom Alma had never before seen, sitting in the corner with Prudence’s thirteen-year-old daughter, Sarah; together, the three of them were carding wool. All the girls, black and white, were dressed in the humblest imaginable frocks. The children, even the black ones, approached Alma and kissed her politely, called her “auntie,” and returned to their tasks.

  Alma asked Prudence if she could help with the poultice, but Prudence refused assistance. One of the boys brought Alma a tin cup of water from the pump in the garden. The water was warm, and tasted murky and unpleasant. Alma did not want it. She sat on a long bench, and did not know where to put the cup. Nor did she know what to say. Prudence—who had received Alma’s note earlier in the week—congratulated her sister on her upcoming nuptials, but that perfunctory exchange took only a moment, and then the subject was closed. Alma admired the children, admired the cleanliness of the kitchen, admired the mustard poultice, until there was nothing left to admire. Prudence looked thin and weary, but she did not complain, nor did she share any news of her life. Alma did not ask any news. She dreaded to know details of the circumstances the family might be facing.

  After a long while, Alma roused the courage to ask, “Prudence, I wonder if I might have a private word with you.”

  If the request surprised Prudence, she did not show it. But then, Prudence’s smooth countenance had always been incapable of expressing such a base emotion as surprise.

  “Sarah,” Prudence said to the eldest girl. “Take the others outdoors.”

  The children filed out of the kitchen solemnly and obediently, like soldiers on the way to battle. Prudence did not sit, but stood with her back braced against the large wooden slab that called itself a kitchen table, her hands folded prettily against her clean apron.

  “Yes?” she asked.

  Alma searched her mind for where to begin. She could not find a sentence that did not seem vulgar or rude. Suddenly she deeply regretted having taken her father’s advice on the matter. She wished to run from this house—back to the comforts of White Acre, back to Ambrose, back to a place where the water from the pump was fresh and cold. But Prudence gazed at her, expectant and silent. Something would need to be said.

  Alma began, “As I approach the shores of matrimony . . .”

  Alma trailed off and stared at her sister, helpless, wishing against all reason that Prudence would glean from this senseless fragment of a statement precisely what Alma was attempting to ask.

  “Yes?” Prudence said.

  “I find myself without experience,” Alma completed the statement.

  Prudence gazed on, in unperturbed silence. Help me, woman! Alma wanted to cry out. If only Retta Snow had been here! Not the new, mad Retta—but the old, joyful, unrestrained Retta. If only Retta had been there, too, and if only they were all nineteen years old again. The three of them, as girls, might have been able to approach this subject in safety, somehow. Retta would have made it amusing and candid. Retta would have released Prudence from her reserve, and taken away Alma’s shame. But nobody was there now to help the two sisters to behave as sisters. What’s more, Prudence did not appear interested in making this discussion any easier, as she did not speak up at all.

  “I find myself without experience of conjugality,” Alma clarified, in a burst of desperate courage. “Father suggested that I speak with you for guidance on the subject of delighting a husband.”

  One of Prudence’s eyebrows lifted, minutely. “I am sorry to hear that he thinks me an authority,” she said.

  This had been a misguided idea indeed, Alma realized. But there was no backing out of it now.

  “You take me wrongly,” Alma protested. “It is only that you have been married so long, you see, and you have so many children . . .”

  “There is more to marriage, Alma, than that to which you allude. Further, I am prevented by certain scruples from discussing that to which you allude.”

  “Of course, Prudence. I do not wish to offend your sensibilities or intrude in your privacy. But that of which I speak remains cryptic to me. I beg you not to misunderstand me. I do not need to consult with a doctor; I am familiar with the essential workings of anatomy. But I do need to consult with a married woman, so as to comprehend what might be welcome to my husband, or unwelcome to him. How to present myself, I mean, in regards to the art of pleasing . . .”

  “There should be no art to it,” Prudence replied, “unless one is a woman for hire.”

  “Prudence!” Alma cried with a force that surprised even herself. “Look at me! Do you not see how ill-prepared I am? Do I look like a young woman to you? Do I appear an item of desire?”

  Until this moment, Alma had not realized how afraid she was of her wedding night. Naturally she loved Ambrose, and she was consumed with anticipatory thrill, but she was also terror-stricken. That terror gave partial explanation to her sleepless bouts of nighttime shuddering these past few weeks: she did not know how to comport herself as a man’s wife. True, Alma had been consumed for decades by a rich, indecent, carnal imagination—but she was also an innocent. An imagination is one thing; two bodies together is something else entirely. How would Ambrose regard her? How could she enchant him? He was a younger man, and a lovely man, whereas a true assessment of Alma’s appearance at the age of forty-eight would have called for this truth to be revealed: she was far more bramble than rose.

  Something in Prudence softened, marginally.

  “You need only be willing,” Prudence said. “A healthy man presented with a willing and acquiescent wife will need no particular coaxing.”

  This information brought Alma nothing. Prudence must have suspected as much, for she added, “I assure you that the duties of conjugality are not overly discomforting. If he is tender to you, your husband will not much injure you.”

  Alma wanted to crumple to the floor and weep. Honestly, did Prudence think that Alma feared injury? Who or what could ever injure Alma Whittaker? With hands as callused as these? With arms that could have picked up the oaken slab against which Prudence so delicately rested, and thrown it across the room with ease? With this sunburned neck and this thistle-patch of hair? It was not injury that Alma feared on her wedding night, but humiliation. What Alma desperately wanted to know was how she could possibly present herself to Ambrose in the form of an orchid, like her sister, and not a mossy boulder, like herself. But such a thing cannot be taught. This was a useless exchange—a mere preamble to humiliation, if anything.

  “I have taken up enough of your evening,” Alma said, standing up. “You have a sick child to attend. Forgive me.”

  For a moment, Prudence hesitated, as though she might reach forward, or ask her sister to stay. The moment passed quickly, though, if it had ever existed at all. She merely said, “I am pleased that you visited.”

  Why do we differ so? Alma wanted to beg. Why can we not be close? />
  Instead she asked, “Will you join us at the wedding on Saturday?” although she already suspected the answer would be a demurral.

  “I fear not,” Prudence replied. She did not supply a reason. Both of them knew why: because Prudence would never again set foot at White Acre. Henry would not accept it, and nor would Prudence herself.

  “All good wishes to you, then,” concluded Alma.

  “And to you,” Prudence replied.

  It was only when Alma was halfway up the street that she realized what she had just done: she had not only asked a weary forty-eight-year-old mother—with a sick child in the house!—for advice on the art of copulation, but she had asked the daughter of a whore for advice on the art of copulation. How could Alma have forgotten Prudence’s shameful origins? Prudence could never have forgotten it herself, and was likely living an existence of perfect rigor and righteousness in order to counter the infamous depravities of her natural mother. Yet Alma had barreled into that humble, decent, and constrained household nonetheless, with questions on the tricks and trade of seduction.

  Alma sat down on an abandoned barrel in a posture of dejection. She wished to go back to the Dixon house and apologize, but how could she? What could she say, that would not make the situation even more distressing?