The Signature of All Things (14 page)

One way or another, Alma Whittaker was left alone, and that is how she found the book.

S
he would never know from whose library it had originated. Alma found the thing in an unmarked trunk, with an otherwise unremarkable collection, mostly medical in nature—some standard Galen, some recent translations of Hippocrates, nothing new or exciting. But in the midst of it all was a thick, sturdy, calfskin-bound volume called
Cum Grano Salis
, written by an anonymous author. Such a funny title:
With a Grain of Salt
.
At first, Alma thought it was a treatise on cooking, something like the fifteenth-century Venetian reprint of the fourth-century
De Re Coquinaria
, that the White Acre library already contained. But a swift fanning of its pages revealed that this book was written in English, and contained no illustrations or lists meant for a cook. Alma opened to the first page, and what she read there made her mind jolt wildly.

“It puzzles me,” wrote Anonymous, in his introduction, “that we are all bequeathed at birth with the most marvelous bodily pricks and holes, which the youngest child knows are objects of pure delight, but which we must pretend in the name of civilization are abominations—never to be touched, never to be shared, never to be enjoyed! Yet why should we not explore these gifts of the body, both in ourselves and in our fellows? It is only our minds that prevent us from such enchantments, only our artificial sense of ‘civilization’ that forbids such simple entertainments. My own mind, once locked within a prison of hard civility, has been stroked open for years by the most exquisite of physical pleasures. Indeed, I have found that carnal expression can be pursued as a fine art, if practiced with the same dedication as one might show to music, painting or literature.

“What follows in these pages, respected reader, is an honest accounting of my lifetime of erotic adventure, which some may call
foul
, but which I have pursued happily—and I believe harmlessly—since my youth. If I were a religious man, trapped within the bondage of shame, I might call this book a
confession
. But I do not subscribe to sensual shame, and my investigations have shown that
many human groupings across the world also do not subscribe to shame in regard to the sensual act
. I have come to believe that an absence of such shame may be, indeed, our natural state as a human
species—a state that our civilization has sadly warped. For that reason, I do not
confess
my unusual history, but merely
disclose
it. I hope and trust that my disclosures will be read as a guide and a diversion, not only for gentlemen but also for venturous and educated ladies.”

Alma closed the book. She knew this voice. She didn’t know the author personally, of course, but she recognized him as a type: an educated man of letters, of the sort who frequently dined at White Acre. This was the type of man who could easily write four hundred pages on the natural philosophy of grasshoppers, but who, in this case, had instead decided to write four hundred pages on his sensual adventures. This sense of recognition and familiarity both confused Alma and enticed her. If such a treatise was written by a respectable gentleman, with a respectable voice, did that make it respectable?

What would Beatrix say? Alma knew immediately. Beatrix would say that this book was illicit and dangerous and abhorrent—a mare’s nest of wrongness. Beatrix would want this book destroyed. What would Prudence have done, if she ever found such a book? Well, Prudence wouldn’t touch it with a barge pole. Or, if Prudence somehow did end up with this book in her hands, she would dutifully present it to Beatrix to be destroyed, and would likely receive a strict punishment in the process for having even touched the thing in the first place. But Alma was not Prudence.

What, then, would Alma do?

Alma would destroy the book, she decided, and say nothing of it to anyone. In fact, she would destroy it right now. This very afternoon. Without reading another word of it.

She opened the book again, to a random page. Again she encountered that familiar, respectable voice, speaking on the most unbelievable topic.

“I wished to discover,” the author wrote, “at what age a woman loses her ability to receive sensual pleasure. My friend the brothel owner, who had assisted me in the past in so many experiments, told me of a certain courtesan who had enjoyed her occupation actively from the age of fourteen until the age of sixty-four, and who now, at the age of seventy, lived in a city not far from my own. I wrote to the woman in question, and she responded with a letter of charming candor and warmth. In the space of a month, I had come to visit her, where she allowed me to examine her genitalia, which were not easily distinguished from the genitalia of a much younger woman.
She demonstrated that she was still most capable of pleasure, indeed. Using her fingers and a light coating of nut oil upon her hood of passion, she stroked herself toward a crisis of rapture—”

Alma shut the book. This book must not be kept. She would burn it in the kitchen fire. Not this afternoon, when someone would see her, but later tonight.

She opened it up again, once more at random.

“I have come to believe,” the calm narrator continued, “that there are some people who benefit both in body and mind by regular beatings to the naked posterior. Many times, I have seen this practice lift the spirits of both men and women, and I suspect it may be the most salubrious treatment we have at our disposal for melancholia and other diseases of the mind. For two years, I kept company with the most delightful maid, a milliner’s girl, whose innocent and even angelic orbs became firm and strong with repeated flagellation, and whose sorrows were routinely erased by the taste of the whip. As I have described earlier in these pages, I once kept in my offices an elaborate couch, made for me by a fine London upholsterer, specially fitted with winches and ropes. This maid liked nothing more than to be tied securely upon that couch, where she would hold my member in her mouth, sucking me as a child enjoys a stick of sugar, whilst a companion—”

Alma shut the book again. Anyone with a mind even remotely above the vulgar would stop reading this thing immediately. But what about the cankerworm of curiosity that lived within Alma’s belly? What about its desire to feed daily upon the novel, the extraordinary, the
true
?

Alma opened the book again, and read for another hour, overcome by stimulus, doubt, and havoc. Her conscience tugged at her skirt hems, pleading with her to stop, but she could not make herself stop. What she discovered in these pages made her feel vexed, frothy, and breathless. When she thought she might actually faint from the tangled stalks of imagination that were now waving throughout her head, she slammed shut the book at last, and locked it back into the innocuous trunk from which it had come.

Hurriedly, she left the carriage house, smoothing her apron with her damp hands. Outside it was cool and overcast, as it had been all year, with an unsatisfying mizzle of fog. The air was so thick one nearly could have dissected it with a scalpel. There were important tasks to be completed this day. Alma had promised Hanneke de Groot that she would help supervise the
lowering of cider caskets into the basement for winter. Somebody had littered papers beneath the lilacs along the South Wood fence; that would need to be tidied. The shrubbery behind her mother’s Grecian garden had been invaded by ivy, and a boy should be dispatched to clear it. She would attend to these responsibilities immediately, with her customary efficiency.

Pricks and holes.

All she could think about were
pricks and holes.

E
vening arrived. The dining room was lit and china laid. Guests were expected presently. Alma was freshly dressed for dinner, bundled in an expensive gown of jaconet muslin. She should have been waiting in the drawing room for the guests, but instead she excused herself for a moment to the library. She locked herself in the binding closet, behind the hidden door, just off the library entrance. It was the nearest door with a solid lock on it. She did not have the book with her. She did not need the book; the images it conjured had been following her about the estate all afternoon, feral and stubborn and searching.

She was full of thoughts, and these thoughts were making wild demands upon her body. Her quim hurt. It felt deprived. This hurt had been accumulating all afternoon. If anything, the painful sense of deprivation between her legs felt like a kind of witchcraft, a devilish haunting. Her quim wanted rubbing in the fiercest way. Her skirts were a hindrance. She was itching and dying in this gown. She lifted her skirts. Sitting there on the small stool in the tiny, dark, locked binding closet, with its smells of glue and leather, she opened her legs and began petting herself, poking at herself, moving her fingers in and around herself, frantically exploring her spongy petals, trying to find the devil who hid in there, eager to erase that devil with her hand.

She found it. She rubbed at it, harder and harder. She felt an unraveling. The hurt in her quim turned to something else—an up-fire, a vortex of pleasure, a chimney-effect of heat. She followed the pleasure where it led. She had no weight, no name, no thoughts, no history. Then came a burst of phosphorescence, as though a firework had discharged behind her eyes, and it was over. She felt quiet and warm. For the first conscious moment of her life, her mind was free from wonder, free from worry, free from work or
puzzlement. Then, from the middle of that marvelous furred stillness, a thought took shape, took hold, took over:

I shall have to do this again
.

N
ot a half hour later, Alma was standing in the atrium of White Acre, flustered and embarrassed, receiving dinner guests. That night, the visitors included serious young George Hawkes, a Philadelphia publisher of fine botanical prints, books, periodicals, and journals, and a distinguished older gentleman by the name of James K. Peck, who taught at the College of New Jersey up in Princeton, and who had just published a book about the physiology of Negroes. Arthur Dixon, the girls’ pale tutor, dined with the family as usual, although he rarely added much to the conversation, and tended to spend dinner hours looking worriedly at his fingernails.

George Hawkes, the botanical publisher, had been a guest at White Acre many times before, and Alma was fond of him. He was shy but kind, and terribly intelligent, with the posture of a great, awkward, shuffling bear. His clothes were too big, his hat sat wrong on his head, and he never seemed to know precisely where to stand. To coax George Hawkes into speech was a challenge, but once he began speaking, he was a pleasant treasure. He knew more about botanical lithography than anyone else in Philadelphia, and his publications were exquisite. He spoke lovingly of plants and artists and the craft of bookbinding, and Alma enjoyed his company enormously.

As for the other guest, Professor Peck, he was a new addition to the dinner table, and Alma disliked him straight away. He had every mark of a bore, and a determined bore at that. Immediately upon his arrival, he occupied twenty minutes in the atrium of White Acre, relaying in Homeric detail the trials of his coach ride from Princeton to Philadelphia. Once he had exhausted that fascinating topic, he shared his surprise that Alma, Prudence, and Beatrix would be joining the gentlemen at the dinner table, insofar as the conversation would surely be over their heads.

“Oh, no,” Henry corrected his guest. “I think you’ll soon enough find that my wife and daughters are passably capable of conversation.”

“Are they?” the gentleman asked, plainly unconvinced. “In what topics?”

“Well,” Henry said, rubbing at his chin as he considered his family,
“Beatrix here knows everything, Prudence has artistic and musical knowledge, and Alma—the big tall one—is a right beast for botany.”

“Botany,” Professor Peck repeated, with practiced condescension. “A most improving recreation for girls. The only scientific work that is suited to the female sex, I have always surmised, on account of its absence of cruelty, or mathematical rigor. My own daughter does fine drawings of wildflowers.”

“How engrossing for her,” Beatrix murmured.

“Yes, quite,” said Professor Peck, and turned to Alma. “A lady’s fingers are more pliant, you see. Softer than a man’s. Better suited than a man’s hands, some say, for the more delicate operations of plant collection.”

Alma, who was not one to blush, blushed to her very bones. Why was this man talking about her fingers, about pliancy, about delicacy, about softness?
Now everybody looked at Alma’s hands, which, only a short while earlier, had been buried straight up inside her quim. It was dreadful. From the corner of her eye, she saw her old friend George Hawkes smile at her in nervous sympathy. George blushed all the time. He blushed whenever anyone looked at him, and whenever he was forced to speak. Perhaps he was commiserating with her discomfort. With George’s eyes upon her, Alma felt herself blushing redder still. For the first time in her life, she could not find speech, and she wished that nobody would look at her at all. She would have done anything to escape dinner that night.

Fortunately for Alma, Professor Peck did not seem particularly interested in anyone but himself, and once dinner was served, he commenced on a long and detailed disquisition, as though he had mistaken White Acre for a lecture hall, and his hosts for students.

“There are those,” he began, after an elaborate folding of his napkin, “who have recently submitted that Negroidism is merely a disease of the skin, which could perhaps, using the correct chemical combinations, be
washed off
, as it were, thus transforming the Negro into a healthy white man. This is incorrect. As my research has proven, a Negro is not a diseased white man, but a species of his own, as I shall demonstrate . . .”

Alma found it challenging to pay attention. Her thoughts were on
Cum Grano Salis
and the binding closet. Now, this day did not mark the first occasion upon which Alma had heard of genitalia, or even of human sexual function. Unlike other girls—who were told by their families that Indians
brought babies, or that impregnation occurred through the insertion of seeds into small cuts in the side of a woman’s body—Alma knew the rudiments of human anatomy, both male and female. There were far too many medical treatises and scientific books around White Acre for her to have remained wholly ignorant on this topic, and the entire language of botany, with which Alma was so intimately familiar, was highly sexualized. (Linnaeus himself had referred to pollination as “marriage,” had called flower petals “noble bed curtains,” and had once daringly described a flower that contained nine stamens and one pistil as “nine men in the same bride’s chamber, with one woman.”)