The Signature of All Things (21 page)

So Beatrix was not dead, but she remained senseless for the next week. Alma and Prudence took turns sitting with their mother, watching her throughout the days and the long nights. On the first night, Beatrix vomited in her sleep, and Alma cleaned her. She also wiped away the urine and the foul waste.

Alma had never before seen her mother’s body—not beyond the face, the neck, the hands—but when she bathed the inanimate form on the bed, she could see that her mother’s breasts were misshapen with several hard lumps in each. Tumors. Large ones. One of the tumors had ulcerated through the skin, and was leaking a dark fluid. The sight of this made Alma feel as though she herself might topple over. The word for it came to her mind in Greek:
Karkinos
. The crab. Cancer. Beatrix must have been diseased for quite a long while. She must have been living in torment for months, if not years. She had never complained. She had merely excused herself from the table, on the days when the suffering became unbearable, and dismissed it as common vertigo.

Hanneke de Groot barely slept at all that week, but brought compresses and broths at all hours. Hanneke wrapped fresh damp linens around Beatrix’s head, tended to the ulcerated breast, carried in buttered bread for the girls, tried to get liquids past Beatrix’s cracked lips. To her shame, Alma sometimes
felt a sense of restlessness at her mother’s side, but Hanneke patiently attended to all the duties of care. Beatrix and Hanneke had been together their whole lives. They had grown up side by side at the botanical gardens of Amsterdam. They had come together on the ship from Holland. They had both left their families behind to sail to Philadelphia, never again to see parents or siblings. At times, Hanneke wept over her mistress, and prayed in Dutch. Alma did not weep or pray. Nor did Prudence—not that anyone saw.

Henry stormed in and out of the bedroom at all hours, undone and disquieted. He was of no assistance. It was much easier when he was gone. He would sit with his wife for only a few moments before crying out, “Oh, I cannot bear it!” and leaving in a storm of curses. He grew disheveled, but Alma had little time for him. She was watching her mother wither away beneath the fine Flemish bedlinens. This was no longer the formidable Beatrix van Devender Whittaker; this was a most miserable and insentient object, ripe with stink and sad with decline. After five days, Beatrix was seized with a total suppression of urine. Her abdomen grew swollen, hard, and hot. She could not live long now.

A doctor arrived, sent by the pharmacist James Garrick, but Alma sent him away. It would do her mother no good to be bled and cupped now. Instead, Alma sent a message back to Mr. Garrick, requesting that he prepare for her a tincture of liquid opium that she could release into her mother’s mouth by small drops every hour.

On the seventh night, Alma was asleep in her own bed when Prudence—who had been sitting with Beatrix—came and woke her with a touch to the shoulder.

“She’s speaking,” Prudence said.

Alma shook her head, trying to establish where she was. She blinked at Prudence’s candle. Who was speaking? She had been dreaming of horses’ hooves and winged animals. She shook her head again, placed herself, remembered.

“What is she saying?” Alma asked.

“She asked me to leave the room,” Prudence said without emotion. “She asked for you.”

Alma drew a shawl around her shoulders.

“You sleep now,” she told Prudence, and took the candle into her mother’s room.

Beatrix’s eyes were open. One of the eyes was shot red with blood. That
eye did not move. The other eye moved across Alma’s face, hunting, tracking carefully.

“Mother,” Alma said, and looked around for something to give Beatrix to drink. There was a cup of cold tea on the bedside table, a remnant of Prudence’s recent vigil. Beatrix would not want blasted English tea, not even on her deathbed. Still, it was all there was to drink. Alma held the cup to her mother’s dry lips. Beatrix sipped and then, sure enough, frowned.

“I’ll bring you coffee,” Alma apologized.

Beatrix shook her head, only very slightly.

“What can I bring you?” Alma asked.

There was no response.

“Do you want Hanneke?”

Beatrix did not seem to hear, so Alma repeated the question, this time in Dutch.

“
Zal ik Hanneke roepen?
”

Beatrix shut her eyes.

“
Zal ik Henry roepen?
”

There was no response.

Alma took her mother’s hand, which was cold and small. They had never before held hands. She waited. Beatrix did not open her eyes. Alma had nearly dozed off when her mother spoke, and in English.

“Alma.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“Never leave.”

“I won’t leave you.”

But Beatrix shook her head. This is not what she had meant. Once more, she closed her eyes. Again, Alma waited, overcome with exhaustion in this dark room ripe with death. It was a long while before Beatrix found the strength to make her full statement.

“Never leave your father,” she said.

What could Alma say? What does one promise a woman on her deathbed? Especially if that woman is one’s mother? One promises anything.

“I will never leave him,” Alma said.

Beatrix searched Alma’s face again with her one good eye, as though weighing the sincerity of this vow. Evidently satisfied, she closed her eyes once more.

Alma gave her mother another drop of opium. Beatrix’s breathing was
quite shallow now and her skin was cold. Alma was certain her mother had already spoken her last words, but nearly two hours later, when Alma had fallen asleep in the chair, she heard a gurgling cough, and woke with a start. She thought Beatrix was choking, but she was only trying to speak again. Once again, Alma wet Beatrix’s lips with the hated tea.

Beatrix said, “My head spins.”

Alma said, “Let me fetch Hanneke for you.”

Astonishingly, Beatrix smiled. “No,” she said. “
Het is fijn.
”

It is pleasant.

Then Beatrix Whittaker closed her eyes, and—as though by her own decision—she died.

T
he next morning, Alma, Prudence, and Hanneke worked together to clean and dress the body, wrap it in the shroud, and prepare it for burial. It was silent, sad work.

They did not lay out the body in the parlor for viewing, despite local custom. Beatrix would not have wished to be viewed, and Henry did not want to see his wife’s corpse. He could not bear it, he said. Moreover, in weather this hot a swift burial was the wisest and most hygienic course of action. Beatrix’s body had been moldering even before she’d died, and now they all feared a violent putrefaction. Hanneke dispatched one of White Acre’s carpenters to build a quick and simple coffin. The three women tucked sachets of lavender all throughout the winding-sheets in order to retard the smell, and as soon as the coffin was built, Beatrix’s body was loaded into a wagon and taken to the church, to be stored in the cool basement until the funeral. Alma, Prudence, and Hanneke wound black crepe mourning bands around their upper arms. They were to wear these bands for the next six months. The tightness of the material around her arm made Alma feel like a girded tree.

On the afternoon of the funeral, they walked behind the wagon, following the coffin to the Swedish Lutheran graveyard. The burial was brief, simple, efficient, and respectable. Fewer than a dozen people attended. James Garrick, the pharmacist, was there. He coughed terribly during the entire ceremony. His lungs were ruined, Alma knew, from years of working with the powdered jalap that had made him rich. Dick Yancey was there, his bald
pate gleaming in the sun like a weapon. George Hawkes was there, and Alma wished she could have folded herself into his arms. To Alma’s surprise, her waxen erstwhile tutor Arthur Dixon was there, too. She could not imagine how Mr. Dixon had even heard about Beatrix’s death, nor did she realize he had ever been fond of his old employer, but she was touched that he had come, and she told him so. Retta Snow came, too. Retta stood between Alma and Prudence, holding a hand of each, and she remained uncharacteristically silent. In fact, Retta was nearly as stoic as a Whittaker that day, to her credit.

There were no tears from anyone, nor would Beatrix have wanted any. From birth to death, Beatrix had always taught that one must exude credibility, forbearance, and restraint. It would have been a pity now, after this woman’s lifetime of respectability, for things to have gone mawkish at the last moment. Nor, after the funeral, would there be any gathering at White Acre, to drink lemonade and share in remembrances and comfort. Beatrix would not have wished for any of that. Alma knew that her mother had always admired the instructions that Linnaeus—the father of botanical taxonomy—had issued to his own family about his funeral arrangements: “Entertain nobody, and accept no condolences.”

The coffin was lowered into the fresh clay grave. The Lutheran minister spoke. Liturgy, litany, the Apostles’ Creed—it went swiftly by. There was no eulogy, for that was not the Lutheran way, but there was a sermon, familiar and grim. Alma tried to listen, but the minister droned on until she felt stupefied, and only bits of the sermon rose to her ears. Sin is innate, she heard. Grace is a mystery of God’s bequeathing. Grace can be neither earned nor squandered, nor added to, nor diminished. Grace is rare. None shall know who has it. We are baptized unto death. We praise you.

The hot summer sun, setting low, burned cruelly in Alma’s face. Everyone squinted in discomfort. Henry Whittaker was benumbed and bewildered. His only request had been this: once the coffin was in the hole, he’d asked that they cover the lid with straw. He wanted to make sure that, when the first shovelfuls of dirt hit his wife’s casket, the awful sound would be muffled.

Chapter Eleven

A
lma Whittaker, aged twenty, was now the mistress of the White Acre estate.

She slipped into her mother’s old role as though she had trained a lifetime for it—which, in a sense, she had done.

The day after Beatrix’s funeral, Alma entered her father’s study and started sifting through piles of accumulated paperwork and letters, resolved to immediately attend to all the tasks that Beatrix had traditionally executed. To her growing distress, Alma realized that a great deal of important work at White Acre—accounting, invoicing, correspondence—had been left untended in the past few months, even the past year, as Beatrix’s health had deteriorated. Alma cursed herself for not having noticed this earlier. Henry’s desk had always been a shamble of vital papers all mixed in with the jumble of uselessness, but Alma had not grasped how serious the disorder had grown until she investigated the study more deeply.

Here is what she found: stacks of important papers had been spilling off Henry’s desk over the past few months and cumulating on the floor into something like geological strata. Horrifyingly, there were more boxes of unsorted papers hidden in deep closets. In her initial excavations, Alma found bills that had not been paid since the previous May, payrolls that had never been reckoned, and letters—such a thick sludge of letters!—from builders awaiting orders, from business partners with urgent questions,
from collectors overseas, from lawyers, from the Patent Office, from botanical gardens across the world, and from various and sundry museum directors. If Alma had known earlier that so much correspondence was being neglected, she would have tended to it months ago. Now it was nearly at the level of crisis. At this very moment, a ship full of Whittaker botanicals was moored in the Philadelphia harbor, collecting steep docking fees, unable to unload its cargo because the captain had not been recompensed.

What was worse, mixed in with all the urgent work were absurd little details, time-wasters, mounds of absolute twaddle. There was a nearly illegible note from a woman in West Philadelphia, saying that her baby had just swallowed a pin and the mother was afraid the child might die—could somebody at White Acre tell her what to do? The widow of a naturalist who had worked for Henry fifteen years earlier in Antigua was claiming destitution and requesting a pension. There was an outdated note from White Acre’s head landscaper about a gardener who needed to be fired immediately, for having entertained several young women in his room after hours with a party of watermelon and rum.

Was this the sort of thing her mother had always taken care of, in addition to everything else? Swallowed pins? Disconsolate widows? Watermelon and rum?

Alma saw no choice but to clean out this Augean stable, one piece of paper at a time. She cajoled her father to sit beside her and help her to understand what various items might mean, and whether this or that suit of law needed to be taken seriously, or why the price of sarsaparilla had climbed so steeply since last year. Neither of them could completely translate Beatrix’s coded, vaguely Italian, triple-accountancy system, but Alma was the better mathematician, so she puzzled out the ledgers as best she could, while simultaneously creating a simpler method for future use. Alma deputized Prudence to pen page after page of polite correspondence, as Henry—with much loud complaining—dictated the essence of the most vital information.

Did Alma mourn her mother? It was difficult to know. She did not exactly have time for it. She was buried in a swampland of work and frustration, and this sensation was not entirely distinguishable from sorrow itself. She was weary and overwhelmed. There were times when she looked up from her labors to ask her mother a question—looking over to the chair where Beatrix had always sat—and was startled by the nothingness to be
found there. It was like looking at a spot on a wall where a clock had hung for years, and seeing only an empty space. She could not train herself not to look; the emptiness surprised her every time.

But Alma was also angry with her mother. As she paged through months’ worth of confusing documents, she wondered why Beatrix—knowing herself to be so ill—had not enlisted somebody to help over a year ago. Why had she put documents into boxes and stored them in closets, rather than seeking assistance? Why had Beatrix never taught anyone else her complicated accounting system, or, if nothing else, told someone where to find filed documentation from previous years?