The Signature of All Things: A Novel

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.

What a childhood this girl passed!

Not only did Alma have these potent and clever parents, but she also had the entire estate of White Acre to explore at her will. It was truly an Arcadia. There was so much to be taken in. The house alone was an ever-unfolding marvel. There was the lumpy stuffed giraffe in the east pavilion, with his alarmed and comical face. There was the threesome of enormous mastodon ribs in the front atrium, dug up in a nearby field by a local farmer, who traded it to Henry for a new rifle. There was the ballroom, gleaming and empty, where once—in the chill of late autumn—Alma had encountered a trapped hummingbird, which had shot past her ear in the most remarkable trajectory (a jeweled missile, it seemed, fired from a tiny cannon). There was the caged mynah bird in her father’s study, who came all the way from China, and who could speak with impassioned eloquence (or so Henry claimed) but only in its native tongue. There were the rare snakeskins, preserved with a filling of straw and sawdust. There were shelves stocked with South Sea coral, Javanese idols, ancient Egyptian jewelry of lapis lazuli, and dusty Turkish almanacs.

And there were so many places in which one could eat! The dining room, the drawing room, the kitchen, the parlor, the study, the sunroom, and the verandahs with their shaded arbors. There were luncheons of tea and gingerbread, chestnuts and peaches. (And such peaches—pink on one side, gold on the other.) In the winter, one could drink soup in the upstairs nursery while watching the river below, which glittered under the barren sky like a polished mirror.

But outdoors, the delights were even more plentiful and ripe with mystery. There were the noble greenhouses, filled with cycads, palms, and ferns, all packed in deep, black, stinking tanner’s bark to keep them warm. There was the loud and frightening water engine, which kept the greenhouses wet. There were the mysterious forcing houses—always faintingly hot—where the delicate imported plants were brought to heal after long sea voyages, and where orchids were bribed into blooming. There were the lemon trees in the orangery, which were wheeled outside every summer like consumptive patients, to enjoy the natural sun. There was the small Grecian temple, hidden at the end of an avenue of oaks, where one could imagine Olympus.

There was the dairy and, hard beside it, the buttery—with its alluring whiff of alchemy, superstition, and witchcraft. The German dairymaids drew hexes in chalk on the buttery’s door, and muttered incantations before entering the building. The cheese would not set, they told Alma, if it was cursed by the devil. When Alma asked her mother about this, she was scolded as a credulous innocent, and given a long lecture in how cheese actually sets—as it turns out, through a perfectly rational chemical transmutation of fresh milk treated with rennet, which is then set to age in wax rinds at controlled temperatures. Lesson completed, Beatrix then wiped the hexes from the buttery’s door, reprimanding the dairymaids as superstitious fools. The next day, Alma noticed, the chalk hexes were drawn back in. One way or another, the cheese continued to set properly.

Then there were the endless sylvan acres of woodland—left purposely uncultivated—filled with rabbits, foxes, and park deer who would eat out of one’s hand. Alma was allowed—nay, encouraged!—by her parents to wander that woodland at will, in order to learn the natural world. She gathered beetles, spiders, and moths. She watched a large striped snake be eaten alive one day by a much larger black snake—a process that took several hours and was a horrible and spectacular display. She watched tiger spiders dig deep tubes into the duff, and robins gather moss and mud from the river’s edge for their nests. She adopted a handsome little caterpillar (handsome by caterpillar standards), and rolled him into a leaf to take home as a friend, though she later accidentally murdered him by sitting on him. That was a severe blow, but one carried on. That is what her mother said: “Stop your weeping and carry on.” Animals die, it was explained. Some animals, like sheep and cows, are born for no other purpose except to die. One could not mourn every death. By the age of eight Alma had already dissected, with Beatrix’s assistance, the head of a lamb.

Alma always went to the woods fitted out in the most sensible dress, armed with her own personal collecting kit of glass vials, tiny storage boxes, cotton wool, and writing tablets. She went out in all weather, because delights could be found in all weather. A late-April snowstorm one year brought the odd sound of songbirds and sleighbells mingled together, and this alone was worth leaving the house for. She learned that walking carefully in the mud to save one’s boots or the hems of one’s skirts never rewarded one’s search. She was never scolded for returning home with muddied boots and hems, so long as she came home with good specimens for her private herbarium.

Soames the pony was Alma’s constant companion on these forays—sometimes carrying her through the forest, sometimes following along behind her like a large, well-mannered dog. In the summer, he wore splendid silk tassels in his ears, to keep out the flies. In the winter, he wore fur beneath his saddle. Soames was the best botanical collecting partner one could ever imagine, and Alma talked to him all day long. He would do absolutely anything for the girl, except move quickly. Only occasionally did he eat the specimens.

In her ninth summer, completely on her own, Alma learned to tell time by the opening and closing of flowers. At five o’clock in the morning, she noticed, the goatsbeard petals always unfolded. At six o’clock, the daisies and globeflowers opened. When the clock struck seven, the dandelions would bloom. At eight o’clock, it was the scarlet pimpernel’s turn. Nine o’clock: chickweed. Ten o’clock: meadow saffron. By eleven o’clock, the process begins to reverse. At noon, the goatsbeard closed. At one o’clock, the chickweed closed. By three o’clock, the dandelions had folded. If Alma was not back to the house with her hands washed by five o’clock—when the globeflower closed and the evening primrose began to open—she would find herself in trouble.

What Alma wanted to know most of all was how the world was regulated. What was the master clockwork behind everything? She picked flowers apart, and explored their innermost architecture. She did the same with insects, and with any carcass she ever found. One late September morning, Alma became fascinated by the sudden appearance of a crocus, a flower that she’d previously believed bloomed only in the spring. What a discovery! She could not get a satisfactory answer from anyone about what in heaven’s name these flowers thought they were doing, showing up here at the cold beginning of autumn, leafless and unprotected, just when all else was dying. “They are autumn crocuses,” Beatrix told her. Yes, clearly and obviously they were—but to what end? Why bloom now? Were they stupid flowers? Had they lost track of time? To what important office did this crocus need to attend, that it would suffer to put forth bloom during the first bitter nights of frost? Nobody could elucidate. “That is simply how the variety behaves,” Beatrix said, which Alma found to be an uncharacteristically unsatisfying answer. When Alma pushed further, Beatrix replied, “Not everything has an answer.”

Alma found this to be such a staggering piece of intelligence that she was struck dumb by it for several hours. All she could do was sit and ponder the notion in an amazed stupor. When she recovered herself, she drew the mysterious autumn crocus in her writing tablet, and dated her entry, along with her questions and protestations. She was quite diligent in this way. Things must be kept track of—even things one could not comprehend. Beatrix had instructed her that she must always record her findings in drawings as accurate as she could make them, categorized, whenever possible, by the correct taxonomy.

Alma enjoyed the act of sketching, but her finished drawings often disappointed her. She could not draw faces or animals (even her butterflies looked truculent), though eventually she found that she was not awful at drawing plants. Her first successes were some quite good renderings of umbels—those hollow-stemmed, flat-flowered members of the carrot family. Her umbels were accurate, though she wished they were more than accurate; she wished they were beautiful. She said as much to her mother, who corrected her: “Beauty is not required. Beauty is accuracy’s distraction.”

Sometimes, in her forays through the woodlands, Alma encountered other children. This always alarmed her. She knew who these intruders were, though she never spoke to them. They were the children of her parents’ employees. The White Acre estate was like a giant living beast, with half its enormous body needed for servants—the German and Scottish-born gardeners whom her father preferred to hire over the lazier native-born Americans, and the Dutch-born maids upon whom her mother insisted and relied. The household servants lived in the attic, and the outdoor laborers and their families lived in cottages and cabins all across the property. They were quite nice cottages, too—not because Henry cared about his workers’ comfort, but because Henry could not abide the sight of squalor.

Whenever Alma encountered the workers’ children in the woods, she was struck by fear and horror. She had a method for surviving these encounters, though: she would pretend they were not occurring at all. She rode both past and above the children on her stalwart pony (who moved, as always, at the slow and unconcerned pace of cold molasses). Alma held her breath as she passed the children, looking neither to her left nor to her right, until she had cleared the intruders safely. If she did not look at them, she did not have to believe in them.

The workers’ children never interfered with Alma. It was likely they had been warned to leave her alone. Everyone feared Henry Whittaker, so the daughter was automatically to be feared, too. Sometimes, though, Alma spied on the children from a safe distance. Their games were rough and incomprehensible. They dressed differently than Alma did. None of these children carried botanical collecting kits slung over their shoulders, and none of them rode ponies with gaily colored silk ear tassels. They shoved and shouted at each other, using coarse language. Alma was more afraid of these children than anything else in the world. She often had nightmares about them.

But here is what one did for nightmares: one went to find Hanneke de Groot, down in the basement of the house. This could be helpful and soothing. Hanneke de Groot, head housekeeper, held authority over the entire cosmos of the White Acre estate, and her authority vested her with a most calming gravitas. Hanneke slept in her own quarters, next to the underground kitchen, down where the fires never went out. She existed within a warm bath of cellar air, perfumed by the salted hams that hung from every beam. Hanneke lived in a cage—or so it appeared to Alma—for her personal rooms had bars over the windows and doors, as it was Hanneke alone who controlled access to the household’s silver and plate, and who managed the payroll for the entire staff.

“I do not live in a cage,” Hanneke once corrected Alma. “I live in a bank vault.”

When Alma could not sleep for nightmares, she would brave the terrifying journey down three flights of darkened stairs, all the way to the farthest corner of the basement, where she clung to the bars of Hanneke’s quarters and cried to be let in. Such expeditions were always a gamble. Hanneke would sometimes rise, sleepy and complaining, unlock her jailer’s door, and permit Alma to join her in the bed. Sometimes, though, she would not. Sometimes she would scold Alma for a baby, asking her why she must harass a tired Dutch woman, and she would send Alma back up the harrowing dark staircases to her own room.

But for the rare instances when one actually was allowed in Hanneke’s bed, it was well worth the ten other times one was repulsed, for Hanneke would tell stories, and Hanneke knew so many things! Hanneke had known Alma’s mother forever, since earliest childhood. Hanneke told stories of Amsterdam, which Beatrix never did. Hanneke always spoke Dutch to Alma, and Dutch, to Alma’s ears, would forever be the language of comfort and bank vaults and salted ham and safety.

It would never have occurred to Alma to run to her mother, whose bedroom was right next to her own, for assurances during the night. Alma’s mother was a woman of many gifts, but the gift of comfort was not among them. As Beatrix Whittaker frequently said, any child who was old enough to walk, speak, and reason ought to be able—without any assistance whatsoever—to comfort herself.

And then there were the houseguests—an unbroken parade of visitors arriving at White Acre nearly every day, in carriages, on horseback, by boat, or on foot. Alma’s father lived in terror of being bored, so he liked to summon people to his dinner table, to entertain him, to bring him news of the world, or to give him ideas for new ventures. Whenever Henry Whittaker summoned people, they came—and came gratefully.

“The more money one has,” Henry explained to Alma, “the better people’s manners become. It is a notable fact.”

Henry had a quite robust pile of money by this point. In May of 1803, he had secured a contract with a man named Israel Whelen, a government official who was purveying medical supplies for Lewis and Clark’s expedition across western America. Henry had amassed for the expedition potent supplies of mercury, laudanum, rhubarb, opium, columbo root, calomel, ipecac, lead, zinc, sulfate—some of which were actually medically helpful, but all of which were lucrative. In 1804, the drug morphine was first isolated from poppies by German pharmacists, and Henry was an early investor in the manufacture of that useful commodity. The next year, he was granted the contract to supply medical products to the entire U.S. Army. This gave him a certain political power, as well as fiduciary power, and so yes, people came to his dinners.

These were not society dinners, by any means. The Whittakers were never exactly welcomed into Philadelphia’s small, rarefied circle of high society. Upon first arriving in the city, the Whittakers had been invited only once to dine with Anne and William Bingham, on Third Street and Spruce, but it had not gone well. Over dessert, Mrs. Bingham—who comported herself as though she were in the Court of St. James’s—had asked Henry, “What sort of name is Whittaker? I find it so uncommon.”

“Midland England,” Henry had replied. “Comes from the word Warwickshire.”

“Is Warwickshire your family seat?”

“There, and other places, besides. We Whittakers tend to sit wherever we can find a chair.”

“But does your father still own property in Warwickshire, sir?”

“My father, madam, if he is still living, owns two pigs and the privy pot under his bed. I doubt very much he owns the bed.”

The Whittakers were not invited back to dine with the Binghams again. The Whittakers did not much care. Beatrix disapproved of the conversation and dress of fashionable ladies, anyway, and Henry disliked the tedious manners of fine drawing rooms. Instead, Henry created his own society, across the river from the city, high upon his hill. Dinners at White Acre were not playing fields of gossip, but exercises in intellectual and commercial stimulation. If there was a bold young man out there in the world somewhere accomplishing interesting feats, Henry wanted that young man summoned to his dinner table. If there was a venerable philosopher passing through Philadelphia, or a well-regarded man of science, or a promising new inventor, those men would be invited, also. Women sometimes came to the dinners, too, if they were the wives of respected thinkers, or the translators of important books, or if they were interesting actresses on tour in America.

Henry’s table was a bit much for some people. The meals themselves were opulent—oysters, beefsteak, pheasant—but it was not altogether relaxing to dine at White Acre. Guests could expect to be interrogated, challenged, provoked. Known adversaries were placed side by side. Precious beliefs were pummeled in conversation that was more athletic than polite. Certain notables left White Acre feeling they had suffered the most impressive indignations. Other guests—more clever, perhaps, or thicker of skin, or more desperate for patronage—left White Acre with lucrative agreements, or beneficial partnerships, or just the right letter of introduction to an important man in Brazil. The dining room at White Acre was a perilous playing field, but a victory there could establish a fellow’s career for life.

Alma had been welcomed at this combative table from the time she was four years old, and was often seated next to her father. She was allowed to ask questions, so long as her questions were not imbecilic. Some guests were even charmed by the child. An expert in chemical symmetry once proclaimed, “Why, you’re as clever as a little book to talk to!”—a compliment Alma never forgot. Other great men of science, as it turned out, were not accustomed to being questioned by a little girl. But some great men of science, as Henry pointed out, were unable to defend their theories to a little girl, and if that was the case, they deserved to be exposed as humbugs.

Henry believed, and Beatrix strongly concurred, that there was no subject too somber, too knotty, or too perturbing to be discussed in front of their child. If Alma did not understand what was being said, Beatrix reasoned, it would merely give her more motive to improve her intellect, so as not to be left behind next time. If Alma had nothing of intelligence to contribute to the conversation, Beatrix taught her to smile at whomsoever had spoken last and murmur politely, “Do go on.” If Alma should find herself bored at the table, well, that was certainly no one’s concern. Dinner gatherings at White Acre were not ordered around a child’s entertainment (indeed, Beatrix submitted that precious few things in life should be ordered around a child’s entertainment), and the sooner Alma learned to sit still in a hard-backed chair for many hours on end, listening attentively to ideas far beyond her grasp, the better she would be for it.

Thus Alma spent the tender years of her childhood listening to the most extraordinary conversations—with men who studied the decomposition of human remains; with men who had ideas for importing fine new Belgian fire hoses to America; with men who drew pictures of monstrous medical deformities; with men who believed any medicine that could be swallowed could just as effectively be rubbed over the skin and absorbed into the body; with men who examined the organic matter of sulfuric springs; and with one man who was an expert on the pulmonary function of aquatic birds (a subject which he claimed was more fraught with thrilling interest than any other in the natural world—although, from his droning presentation at the dinner table, this statement did not prove true).

Some of these evenings were entertaining to Alma. She liked it best when the actors and explorers came, and told stirring tales. Other nights were tense with argument. Other nights still were torturously dull eternities. She would sometimes fall asleep at the table with her eyes open, held upright in her chair by nothing more than absolute terror of her mother’s censure, and the bracing stays on her formal dress. But the night Alma would remember forever—the night that would later seem to have been the very apogee of her childhood—was the night of the visit from the Italian astronomer.

It was late summer of 1808, and Henry Whittaker had acquired a new telescope. He had been admiring the night skies through his fine German lenses, but he was beginning to feel like a celestial illiterate. His knowledge of the stars was a sailor’s knowledge—which is not trifling—but he was not up-to-date on the latest findings. Tremendous advances were being made now in the field of astronomy, and Henry increasingly felt that the night sky was becoming yet another library that he could barely read. So when Maestro Luca Pontesilli, the brilliant Italian astronomer, came to Philadelphia to speak at the American Philosophical Society, Henry lured him up to White Acre by hosting a ball in his honor. Pontesilli, he had heard, was a zealot for dancing, and Henry suspected the man could not resist a ball.

This was to be the most elaborate affair the Whittakers had ever attempted. The finest of Philadelphia’s caterers—Negro men in crisp white uniforms—arrived in the early afternoon and set to assembling the elegant meringues and mixing the colorful punches. Tropical flowers that had never before been taken out of the balmy forcing houses were arranged in tableaux all over the mansion. Suddenly an orchestra of moody strangers was milling about the ballroom, tuning their instruments and muttering complaints about the heat. Alma was scrubbed and packed into white crinolines, her cockscomb of unruly red hair forced into a satin bow nearly as big as her head. Then the guests arrived, in billows of silk and powder.

It was hot. It had been hot all month, but this was the hottest day yet. Anticipating the uncomfortable weather, the Whittakers did not commence their ball until nine o’clock, long after the sun had set, but the day’s punishing heat still lingered. The ballroom quickly became a greenhouse itself, steaming and damp, which the tropical plants enjoyed, but which the ladies did not. The musicians suffered and perspired. The guests spilled out of doors in search of relief, lounging on the verandahs, leaning against marble statues, trying in vain to draw coolness from the stone.

In an effort to slake their thirst, people drank a good deal more punch than they had perhaps intended to drink. As a natural result, inhibitions melted away, and a general air of lightheaded giddiness took hold of everyone. The orchestra abandoned the formality of the ballroom and set up a lively racket outdoors on the wide lawn. Lamps and torches were brought outside, casting all the guests into turbulent shadows. The charming Italian astronomer attempted to teach the gentlemen of Philadelphia some wild Neapolitan dance steps, and he made his rounds with every lady, too—all of whom found him comical, daring, thrilling. He even tried to dance with the Negro caterers, to general hilarity.

Pontesilli was supposed to have delivered a lecture that night, with elaborate illustrations and calculations, explaining the elliptical paths and velocities of the planets. At some point in the course of the evening, though, this idea was discarded. What gathering, in such an unruly spirit, could fairly be expected to sit still for a serious scientific lecture?

Alma would never know whose idea it had been—Pontesilli’s or her father’s—but shortly after midnight, it was decided that the famous Italian cosmological maestro would re-create a model of the universe on the great lawn of White Acre, using the guests themselves as heavenly bodies. It would not be an exact scale model, the Italian drunkenly declaimed, but it would at least give the ladies a slight sense about the lives of the planets and their relationships to one another.

With a marvelous air of both authority and comedy, Pontesilli placed Henry Whittaker—the Sun—at the center of the lawn. Then he gathered up a number of other gentlemen to serve as planets, each of whom would radiate outward from their host. To the entertainment of everyone gathered, Pontesilli attempted to choose men for these roles who most closely resembled the planets they were meant to represent. Thus, tiny Mercury was portrayed by a diminutive but dignified grain merchant from Germantown. Since Venus and Earth were bigger than Mercury, but nearly the same size as each other, Pontesilli chose for those planets a pair of brothers from Delaware—two men who were almost perfectly identical in height, girth, and complexion. Mars needed to be bigger than the grain merchant but not quite as big as the brothers from Delaware; a prominent banker with a trim figure fit the bill. For Jupiter, Pontesilli commandeered a retired sea captain, a man of truly hilarious fatness, whose corpulent appearance in the solar system reduced the entire party to hysterical laughter. As for Saturn, a slightly less fat but still amusingly portly newspaperman did the job.

On it went, until all the planets were arranged across the lawn at the proper distance from the sun, and from each other. Then Pontesilli set them into orbit around Henry, desperately trying to keep each intoxicated gentleman in his correct celestial path. Soon the ladies were clamoring to join the amusement, and so Pontesilli arranged them around the men, to serve as moons, with each moon in her own narrow orbit. (Alma’s mother played the role of the Earth’s moon with cool lunar perfection.) The maestro then created stellar constellations in the outskirts of the lawn, concocted from the prettiest groups of belles.

The orchestra struck up again, and this landscape of heavenly bodies took on the appearance of the most strange and beautiful waltz the good people of Philadelphia had ever seen. Henry, the Sun King, stood beaming at the center of it all, his hair the color of flame, while men large and small revolved around him, and women circled around the men. Clusters of unmarried girls sparkled in the outermost corners of the universe, distant as unknown galaxies. Pontesilli climbed atop a high garden wall and swayed precariously there, conducting and commanding the entire tableau, crying across the night, “Stay at your velocity, men! Do not abandon your trajectory, ladies!”

Alma wanted to be in it. She had never before seen anything so thrilling. She had never before been awake this late—except after nightmares—but she had somehow been forgotten in all the merriment. She was the only child in attendance, as she had been for all her life the only child in attendance. She ran over to the garden wall and cried up to the dangerously unstable Maestro Pontesilli, “Put me in it, sir!” The Italian peered down at her from his perch, troubling himself to try to focus his eyes—who was this child? He might have dismissed her entirely, but then Henry bellowed from the center of the solar system, “Give the girl a place!”

Pontesilli shrugged. “You are a comet!” he called down to Alma, while still making a pretense of conducting the universe with one waving arm.

“What does a comet do, sir?”

“You fly about in all directions!” the Italian commanded.

And so she did. She propelled herself into the midst of the planets, ducking and swiveling through everyone’s orbits, scuttling and twirling, the ribbon unfurling from her hair. Whenever she neared her father, he would cry, “Not so close to me, Plum, or you will burn to cinders!” and he would push her away from his fiery, combustible self, impelling her to run in another direction.

Astonishingly, at some point, a sputtering torch was thrust into her hands. Alma did not see who gave it to her. She had never before been entrusted with fire. The torch spit sparks and sent chunks of flaming tar spinning into the air behind her as she bolted across the cosmos—the only body in the heavens who was not held to a strict elliptical path.

Nobody stopped her.

She was a comet.

She did not know that she was not flying.