The Signature of All Things: A Novel

Chapter Eight

Between the winter of 1816 and the autumn of 1820, Alma Whittaker wrote more than three dozen papers for George Hawkes, all of which he published in his monthly journal Botanica Americana. Her papers were not pioneering, but her ideas were bright, her illustrations free of error, and her scholarship stringent and sound. If Alma’s work did not exactly ignite the world, it most certainly ignited Alma, and her efforts were more than good enough for the pages of Botanica Americana.

Alma wrote in depth about laurel, mimosa, and verbena. She wrote about grapes and camellias, about the myrtle orange, about the cosseting of figs. She published under the name “A. Whittaker.” Neither she nor George Hawkes believed that it would much benefit Alma to announce herself in print as female. In the scientific world of the day, there was still a strict division between “botany” (the study of plants by men) and “polite botany” (the study of plants by women). Now, “polite botany” was often indistinguishable from “botany”—except that one field was regarded with respect and the other was not—but still, Alma did not wish to be shrugged off as a mere polite botanist.

Of course, the Whittaker name was famous in the world of plants and science, so a good number of botanists already knew precisely who “A. Whittaker” was. Not all of them, however. In response to her articles, then, Alma sometimes received letters from botanists around the world, sent to her in care of George Hawkes’s print shop. Some of these letters began, “My dear Sir.” Other letters were written to “Mr. A. Whittaker.” One quite memorable missive even came addressed to “Dr. A. Whittaker.” (Alma kept that letter for a long time, tickled by the unexpected honorific.)

As George and Alma found themselves sharing research with each other and editing papers together, he became an even more regular visitor to White Acre. Happily, his shyness relaxed. He could frequently be found speaking at the dinner table now, and sometimes even attempting a witticism.

As for Prudence, she did not speak at the dinner table again. Her outburst about Negroes on the night of Professor Peck’s visit must have been some passing act of fever, for she never again repeated the performance, nor did she ever again challenge a guest. Henry had teased Prudence about her views rather relentlessly since that night, calling her “our dusky-loving warrior,” but she refused to speak again on the subject. Instead, she retreated back into her cool, distant, mysterious ways, treating everyone and everything with the same indifferent, indecipherable politeness as ever.

The girls grew older. When they turned eighteen, Beatrix discontinued their tutoring sessions at last, announcing their educations complete, and sending away poor, boring Arthur Dixon, who took a position as a tutor of classical languages at the University of Pennsylvania. Thus it seemed the girls were considered children no longer. Any mother other than Beatrix Whittaker might have regarded this period as a time of dedicated husband-seeking. Any other mother might have now ambitiously presented Alma and Prudence into society, encouraging the girls to flirt, to dance, and to court. This might have been a wise moment to order new gowns, adopt new hairstyles, commission new portraits. These activities, however, seem not to have occurred to Beatrix at all.

In truth, Beatrix had never done Prudence or Alma any favors regarding their suitability for marriage. There were those in Philadelphia who whispered that the Whittakers had rendered their girls completely unmarriageable, what with all that education and isolation from the better families. Neither girl had friends. They had only ever dined with grown men of science and trade, so their minds were distinctly unformed. They had not the slightest training in how to speak properly to a young suitor. Alma was the type of girl who, when a visiting young fellow admired the water lilies in one of White Acre’s beautiful ponds, would say, “No, sir, you are incorrect. These are not water lilies. These are lotuses. Water lilies float on the surface of water, you see, while lotuses rise just above it. Once you learn the difference, you’ll never make the mistake again.”

Alma had grown tall as a man by now, with broad shoulders. She looked as though she could swing an ax. (In point of fact, she could swing an ax, and often had to, in her botanical fieldwork.) This need not have necessarily precluded her from marriage. Some men liked a larger woman, who promised a stronger disposition, and Alma, it could be argued, had a handsome profile—at least from her left side. She certainly had a fine, friendly nature. Yet she was missing some invisible, essential ingredient, and so, despite all the frank eroticism that lay hidden within her body, her presence in a room did not kindle ideas of ardor in any man.

It did not help that Alma herself believed she was unlovely. She believed this only because she had been told it so many times, and in so many different ways. Most recently, the news of her homeliness had come straight from her father, who—after drinking quite a bit too much rum one evening—had said to her, quite out of nowhere, “Think nothing of it, my girl!”

“Think nothing of what, Father?” Alma asked, looking up from the letter she had been writing for him.

“Don’t dismay of it, Alma. It’s not everything to have a pleasing face. Plenty of women are loved who are not beauties. Think of your mother. She’s never been pretty a day of her life, yet she found a husband, didn’t she? Think of Mrs. Cavendesh, down near the bridge! The woman looks a fright, yet her husband finds her adequate enough to have made seven children out of her. So there will be somebody for you, Plum, and I think he will be a fortunate man to have you.”

To think that all this was offered by way of consolation!

As for Prudence, she was a widely acknowledged beauty—arguably the greatest beauty in Philadelphia—but the entire city agreed that she was cold and unwinnable. Prudence excited envy in women, but it was not clear that she excited passion in men. Prudence had a way of making men feel that they ought not to bother at all, and so, wisely, they didn’t. They stared, for one could not help staring at Prudence Whittaker, but they did not approach.

One might have expected the Whittaker girls to attract fortune hunters. True, there were many young men who coveted the family’s money, but the prospect of being Henry Whittaker’s son-in-law seemed more like a threat than a windfall, and nobody really believed that Henry would ever part with his fortune, anyway. One way or another, not even dreams of riches brought suitors near White Acre.

Of course, there were always men around the estate—but they came seeking Henry, not his daughters. At any hour of the day, one could find men standing in the atrium of White Acre, hoping for an audience with Henry Whittaker. These were men of all sorts: desperate men, dreaming men, angry men, liars. These were men who arrived at the estate carrying display cases, inventions, drawings, schemes, or lawsuits. They came offering shares of stock, or pleas for loans, or the prototype of a new vacuum pump, or the certainty of a cure for jaundice, if only Henry would invest in their research. But they did not come to White Acre for the pleasures of courtship.

George Hawkes, however, was different. He never sought anything material from Henry, but came up to White Acre merely to converse with him and to enjoy the spoils of the greenhouses. Henry enjoyed George’s company, for George published the latest scientific findings in his journals, and knew all that was transpiring in the botanical world. George most certainly did not comport himself as a suitor—he was neither flirtatious nor playful—but he was aware of the Whittaker girls, and kind to them. He was always solicitous to Prudence. As for Alma, he engaged with her as though she were a respected botanical colleague. Alma appreciated George’s kind regard, but she wished for more. Academic discourse, she felt, is not how a young man speaks to the girl he loves. This was most unfortunate, for Alma indeed loved George Hawkes with all her heart.

He was an odd choice to love. Nobody would ever have accused George of being a handsome man, but in Alma’s eyes, he was exemplary. She felt somehow that they made a nice pair, perhaps even an obvious pair. There was no question that George was overly large, pale, awkward, and clumsy—but so was Alma. He always made a hash of dressing, but Alma was not fashionable, either. George’s waistcoats were always too tight and his trousers too loose, but if Alma had been a man, this is probably how she would have dressed, as well, for she’d always encountered a similar sort of trouble puzzling out how to arrange her clothing. George had entirely too much forehead and not quite enough chin, but he possessed a thick, damp shock of dark hair, which Alma dearly wanted to touch.

Alma did not know how to play the coquette. She had not the first idea of how to woo George, other than to write him paper after paper on ever more obscure botanical subjects. There had only ever been one moment between George and Alma that might reasonably have been interpreted as tender. In April of 1818, Alma had presented George Hawkes with a beautiful view in her microscope of Carchesium polypinum (perfectly lit and living, happily dancing in a tiny pool of pond water, with its spinning cups, waving cilia, and fringed, flowering branches). George had grasped her left hand, pressed it spontaneously between his two large, damp palms, and said, “My stars, Miss Whittaker! What a brilliant microscopist you’ve become!”

That touch, that pressing of the hand, that praise, had set Alma’s heart beating nineteen strokes to the dozen. It had also sent her running to the binding closet, to slake herself once more with her own hands.

Oh, yes—to the binding closet again!

The binding closet had become, ever since the autumn of 1816, a place that Alma visited every day—indeed, sometimes several times a day, with pauses only during her menses. One might have wondered when she found time for such activity, with all her studies and responsibilities, but simply put, there was no question of not doing it. Alma’s body—tall and mannish, flinty and freckled, large of bone, thick of knuckle, square of hip, and hard of chest—had become, over the years, a most unlikely organ of sexual desire, and she was constantly overcongested with need.

She had now read Cum Grano Salis so many times that it was emblazoned in her memory, and she had moved on to other daring reading material. Whenever her father bought up other people’s libraries, Alma paid most careful attention while sorting through the books, always on the lookout for something dangerous, something with a trick cover, something illicit hidden among the more innocuous volumes. This is how she had found Sappho and Diderot, and also some quite unsettling translations of Japanese pleasure manuals. She had found a French book of twelve sexual adventures, divided by month, called L’Année galante, that told of perverse concubines and lecherous priests, of fallen ballet girls and seduced governesses. (Oh, those long-suffering seduced governesses! Reduced and ruined by the score, they were! They showed up in so many naughty books! Why would anyone be a governess, Alma wondered, if it only led to rape and enslavement?) Alma even read the manual of a secret “Ladies’ Whipping Club” in London, as well as numberless tales of Roman orgies and obscene Hindu religious initiations. All of these books, she separated out from the others, and hid in trunks in the old hayloft of the carriage house.

But there was more, too. She also perused medical journals, where she could sometimes find the queerest and most outlandish reports of the human body. She read soberly recounted theories of Adam and Eve’s possible hermaphroditism. She read scientific accounts of genital hair that grew in such freakish abundance that it could be harvested and sold as wigs. She read statistics on the health of prostitutes in the Boston area. She read reports of sailors who claimed they had mated with seals. She read comparisons of penis sizes across different races and cultures, and across different mammalian varieties.

She knew she should not be reading any of this material, but she could not stop herself. She wanted to know all she could learn. All this reading filled her mind with a veritable circus parade of bodies—stripped and whipped, degraded and debased, yearning and disassembled (only to be put back together again later, for more debasement). She had also developed a fixation with the idea of putting things into her mouth—things, to be specific, that a lady should never desire to put into her mouth. Parts of other people’s bodies, and the like. Most of all, the male member. She desired the male member in her mouth even more than she desired it in her quim, because she wanted the closest possible engagement with the thing. She liked to study things intimately, even microscopically, so it made sense that she longed to see and even taste the most hidden aspect of a man—his most secret nest of being. The thought of all this, coupled with a heightened awareness of her own lips and tongue, became a problematic obsession, which would accumulate within her until she was quite overcome by it. She could solve this problem only with her fingertips, and she could solve it only in the binding closet—in that safe and insulating darkness, with all the familiar smells of leather and glue around her, and the good reliable lock on the door. She could solve it only with one hand between her legs and the other inside her mouth.

Alma knew that her self-violation was the very pinnacle of wrongness, and that it might even bring harm to her health. Again, unable to stop herself from finding things out, she had researched the subject, and what she had learned was not encouraging. In one British medical journal, she read that children brought up with healthy food and fresh air should never feel the faintest sexual impression whatsoever within their bodies, nor should they seek sensual information. The simple amusements of rural life, the author claimed, should entertain young people sufficiently that they should not be overcome with a desire to explore their genitalia at all. In another medical journal, she learned that sexual precocity can be brought on by bedwetting, by too many beatings in childhood, by irritation of the rectal area due to worms, or (and here Alma’s breath had tightened) by “premature intellectual growth.” That must have been what had happened to her, she thought. For if the mind is overly fostered at a young age, then perversions will inevitably arise, and the victim will seek self-indulgent substitutes for intercourse. This was primarily a problem in the development of boys, she read, but it was, in rare cases, expressed in girls. Young people who self-indulged in their own bodies would someday grow into married people who tormented their spouses with the urge for intercourse every night of the week, until the family would fall into sickness, decay, and bankruptcy. Self-indulgence also destroyed the health of the body, creating a rounded back and a limping gait.

The habit, in other words, did not advertise itself well. But Alma had not originally intended to make such a habit of self-pleasure. She made the most earnest and sincere vows to stop. Or she did so initially. She promised herself that she would stop reading salacious material. She promised herself she would stop indulging in sensual reveries about George Hawkes and his damp shock of dark hair. She would never imagine putting his hidden member in her mouth again. She swore never again to visit the binding closet, not even if a book needed repair!

Inevitably, her resolve would wither. She promised herself that she would visit the binding closet just one more time. Just one more time, she would allow her head to fill with these stirring and abhorrent thoughts. Just one more time, she would swirl her fingers about her quim and lips, feeling her legs clench and her face grow heated, and her body yank loose once more into a stew of marvelous havoc. Just one more time.

And then, perhaps, once more again.

Soon it became obvious there was no defeating this, and eventually Alma had no choice but to silently sanction her own behavior and continue on with it. How else could she have dispatched the desire that amassed itself in her, every hour of the day? Moreover, the effects of this self-befoulment upon her health and spirit appeared so markedly different from the warnings in the journals that for a while she wondered if she was doing it incorrectly, such that it was accidentally beneficial, rather than harmful? What else could explain the fact that her secret activity did not bring on any of the dire effects about which the medical journals warned? The act brought Alma relief, not sickness. It flushed her cheeks with healthy color, rather than draining her countenance of all vitality. Yes, the compulsion brought her a sense of shame, but always—once the act was complete—she felt herself swept up into a vivid and precise state of mental clarity. Straight from the binding closet she would run back to her research, where she would labor with a renewed sense of priority, catapulted back into study by energetic lucidity, by a bodily pulse of useful, thrilling animation. It was always afterward that she was at her brightest, her most awake. It was always afterward that her work truly thrived.

What’s more, Alma now had a place to work. She had a study of her own—or at least she had something that she called a study. After she had cleared all her father’s superfluous books from the carriage house, she had taken over one of the larger, disused ground-floor tack rooms for herself, and had turned it into a place of scholarly refuge. It was a lovely situation. The White Acre carriage house was a beautiful brick building, regal and serene, with tall, vaulted ceilings and wide, generous windows. Alma’s study was the finest space within that structure, blessed with steady northern light, a clean tile floor, and a view of her mother’s immaculate Grecian garden. The room smelled of hay and dust and horses, and was filled with an agreeable clutter of books, sieves, plates, pans, specimens, correspondence, jars, and old sweets tins. For Alma’s nineteenth birthday, her mother had given her a camera lucida, which allowed her to magnify and trace botanical specimens for more accurate scientific drawing. She now owned a fine set of Italian prisms, too, which made her feel a bit like Newton. She had a good solid desk, and a wide, simple laboratory bench, for performing experiments. She used old barrels for seats, rather than formal chairs, as she found them easier to get around with her skirts. She had a pair of marvelous German microscopes, which she had learned to operate—as George Hawkes had noticed!—with the deft touch of a master embroiderer. Initially the winters in the study had been unpleasant (cold enough that her ink wouldn’t flow), but Alma soon set herself up with a small Franklin stove, and she personally chinked up the cracks in the walls with dried moss, such that eventually her study became as cozy and lovely a refuge as anyone could hope for, all the year round.

There in the carriage house Alma built up her herbarium, mastered her comprehension of taxonomy, and took on ever more detailed experiments. She read her copy of Philip Miller’s Gardener’s Dictionary so many times that the book itself took on the appearance of old, worn foliage. She studied the latest medical papers about the beneficial effects of digitalis on patients suffering from dropsy, and the use of copaiba for the treatment of venereal diseases. She worked on improving her botanical drawings—which were never exactly beautiful, but always beautifully exact. She worked with untiring diligence, her fingers speeding happily across her tablets and her lips moving as though in prayer.

While the rest of White Acre flowed along in its customary activity and combat, these two locations—the binding closet and the carriage house study—became for Alma twin points of privacy and revelation. One room was for the body; one was for the mind. One room was small and windowless; the other airy and cheerfully lit. One room smelled of old glue; the other of fresh hay. One room brought forth secret thoughts; the other brought forth ideas that could be published and shared. The two rooms existed in separate buildings, divided by lawns and gardens, bisected by a wide gravel drive. Nobody would ever have seen their correlation.

But both rooms belonged to Alma Whittaker alone, and in both rooms, she came into being.