The Signature of All Things (10 page)

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.

I
t 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.

Chapter Six

A
lma’s youth—or rather, the simplest and most innocent part of it—came to an abrupt end in November of 1809, in the small hours of the night, on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday.

Alma awoke from a deep sleep to raised voices and the sound of carriage wheels dragging through gravel. In places where the house should have been silent at such an hour (the hallway outside her bedroom door, for instance, and the servants’ quarters upstairs) there was a skittering of footsteps from all directions. She arose in the cold air, lit a candle, found her leather boots, and reached for a shawl. Her instinct was that some sort of trouble had come to White Acre, and that her assistance might be needed. Later in life, she would recall the absurdity of this notion (how could she have honestly believed she could help with anything?), but at that time, in her mind, she was a young lady of nearly ten years, and she still had a certain confidence in her own importance.

When Alma arrived at the top of the wide staircase she saw below her, in the grand entryway to the home, a gathering of men holding lanterns. Her father, wearing a greatcoat over his night clothes, stood at the center of them all, his face tense with irritation. Hanneke de Groot was there as well, her hair in a cap. Alma’s mother was there, too. This must be serious, then; Alma had never seen her mother awake at this hour.