The Signature of All Things (41 page)

Perhaps he would awaken, and they would recommence—or rather
commence
—with their marital pleasures? Perhaps he had not liked her nightdress? Perhaps she had appeared too modest? Or too eager? Was it the dead girl that he wanted? Was he thinking of his lost love from Framingham, all those years ago? Or perhaps he had been overcome by a fit of nerves? Was he unequal to love’s duties? But none of these explanations made sense, particularly not the last one. Alma knew enough of such matters to understand that the inability to conduct intercourse brought men the severest imaginable shame—but Ambrose did not seem ashamed at all. Nor had he even
attempted
intercourse. On the contrary, he slept as easefully as
a man could possibly sleep. He slept like a rich burgher in a fine hotel. He slept like a king after a long day of boar hunting and jousting. He slept like a princely Mohammedan, sated by a dozen comely concubines. He slept like a child under a tree.

Alma did not sleep. The night was hot, and she was uncomfortable lying on her side for so long, afraid to move, afraid to withdraw her hand from his. The pins and fasteners in her hair pressed into her scalp. Her shoulder was growing numb below her. After a long while, she finally released herself from his clasp and turned over onto her back, but it was useless: rest would not find her this night. She lay there in stiffness and alarm, her eyes wide open, her armpits damp, her mind searching without success for a comforting conclusion to this most surprising and unfavorable turn of affairs.

At dawn, every bird on earth, merrily oblivious to her dread, began to sing. With the first rays of sunlight, Alma allowed herself to throw forward a spark of hope that her husband would awaken in the dawn and embrace her now. Perhaps they would begin it in the daylight—all the expected intimacies of matrimony.

Ambrose did awaken, but he did not embrace her. He woke in a lively instant, fresh and contented. “What dreams!” he said, and reached his arms above him in a languorous stretch. “I have not had such dreams in years. What an honor it is, to share the electricity of your being. Thank you, Alma! What a day we shall have! Did you have such dreams, too?”

Alma had dreamed nothing, of course. Alma had passed the night boxed up within a waking horror. Nonetheless, she nodded. She did not know what else to do.

“You must promise me,” Ambrose said, “that when we die—whichever of us shall die first—that we will send vibrations to each other across the divide of mortality.”

Again, senselessly, she nodded. It was easier than trying to speak.

Stale and silent, Alma watched her husband rise and splash his face in the basin. He took his clothing from the chair and politely excused himself to the water closet, returning fully dressed and saturated with good cheer. What lurked behind that warm smile? Alma could see nothing behind it but more warmth. He looked to her exactly as he had looked the first day she had glimpsed him—like a lovely, bright, and enthusiastic man of twenty years.

She was a fool.

“I shall leave you to your privacy,” he said. “And I shall be waiting for you at the breakfast table. What a day we shall have!”

Alma’s entire body ached. In a terrible cloud of stiffness and despair, she moved out of bed slowly, like a cripple, and dressed herself. She looked in the mirror. She should not have looked. She had aged a decade in one night.

Henry was at the breakfast table when Alma finally descended. He and Ambrose were engaged in a light tinsel of conversation. Hanneke brought Alma a fresh pot of tea and threw her a sharp look—the sort of look that all women get on the morning after their wedding—but Alma avoided her eyes. She tried to keep her face from appearing moony or grim, but her imagination was fatigued and she knew that her eyes were red. She felt overgrown by mildew. The men did not seem to notice. Henry was telling a story Alma had heard a dozen times already—of the night he had shared a bed in a filthy Peruvian tavern with a pompous little Frenchman, who had the thickest imaginable French accent, but who tirelessly insisted he was not French.

Henry said, “The dunderhead kept saying to me, ‘
Hi emm en Heenglishman!
’ and I kept telling him, ‘You are not an Englishman, you idiot, you are a Frenchman! Just listen to your cussed accent!’ But no, the bloody dunderhead kept saying it: ‘
Hi emm en Heenglishman!
’ Finally I said to him, ‘Tell me, then—how is it possible that you are an Englishman?’ And he crowed, ‘
Hi emm en Heenglishman because Hi ’ave en Heenglish wife!
’”

Ambrose laughed and laughed. Alma stared at him as if he were a specimen.

“By that logic,” Henry concluded, “I am a bloody Dutchman!”

“And I am a Whittaker!” Ambrose added, still laughing.

“More tea?” Hanneke asked Alma, again with that same penetrating look.

Alma clamped shut her mouth, which she realized had been hanging a bit too far open. “I have had enough, Hanneke, thank you.”

“The men will be carting in the last of the hay today,” Henry said. “See to it, Alma, that it is done properly.”

“Yes, Father.”

Henry turned to Ambrose again. “She is good value, that wife of yours,
especially when there is work to be done. A regular Farmer John in skirts, she is.”

T
he second night was the same as the first—and the third night, and the fourth and fifth. All the nights to follow, all the same. Ambrose and Alma would undress in privacy, come to the bed and face each other. He would kiss her hand and praise her goodness, and extinguish the lamp. Ambrose would then fall into the sleep of an enchanted figure in a fairy tale, while Alma lay in silent torment beside him. The only thing that changed over time was that Alma finally managed to receive a few fitful hours of sleep a night, merely because her body would collapse with exhaustion. But her sleep was interrupted by clawing dreams and awful spells of restless, roaming, wakeful thought.

By day, Alma and Ambrose were companions as ever in study and contemplation. He had never seemed more fond of her. She woodenly went about her own work, and helped him with his. He always wanted to be near her—as near to her as possible. He did not seem aware of her discomfort. She tried not to reveal it. She kept hoping for a change. More weeks passed. October arrived. The nights turned cool. There was no change.

Ambrose appeared so at ease with the terms of their marriage that Alma—for the first time in her life—feared herself to be going mad. Here she wanted to ravish him to a pulp, but he was happy to merely kiss the one square inch of skin below the middle knuckle of her left hand. Had she been misinformed as to the nature of conjugality? Was it a trick? She was enough of a Whittaker to seethe at the thought of having been played as a fool. But then she would look at Ambrose’s face, which was the furthest imaginable thing from the face of a scoundrel, and her rage, once more, would render down back into unhappy bewilderment.

By early October, Philadelphia was enjoying the last days of Indian summer. The mornings were crowning glories of cool air and blue skies, and the afternoons balmy and lazy. Ambrose behaved as though he was more inspired than ever, springing out of bed every morning as though shot forth by a cannon. He had managed to get a rare
Aerides odorata
to bloom in the orchid house. Henry had imported the plant years ago from the foothills of the Himalayas, but it had never put forth a single bud until Ambrose took
the orchid out of its pot on the ground and hung it high from the rafters, in a bright spot of sun, in a basket made of bark and dampened moss. Now the thing had ignited into sudden flower. Henry was elated. Ambrose was elated. Ambrose was making drawings of it from every angle. It would be the pride of the White Acre florilegium.

“If you love anything enough, it will eventually show you its secrets,” Ambrose told Alma.

She might have begged to differ, had her opinion been asked. She could not possibly have loved Ambrose more, but no secrets were forthcoming from him. She found herself unpleasantly jealous of his victory with the
Aerides odorata
. She envied the plant itself, and the care he had shown it. She could not focus on her own work, yet here he was thriving in his. She began to resent his presence in the carriage house. Why was he always interrupting her? His printing presses were loud, and smelled of hot ink. Alma could no longer bear it. She felt as though she were rotting. Her temper grew short. She was walking through the White Acre vegetable gardens one day when she came upon a young worker, sitting on his shovel, lazily picking at a splinter in his thumb. She had seen this one before—this little splinter-picker. He was far more often to be found sitting on his shovel than working with it.

“Your name is Robert, isn’t it?” she asked, approaching him with a warm smile.

“I’m Robert,” he confirmed, looking up at her with mild unconcern.

“What is your task this afternoon, Robert?”

“To turn over this rotty old pea patch, ma’am.”

“And do you plan to get at it one of these days, Robert?” she probed, her voice dangerously low.

“Well, I’ve got this splinter here, see . . .”

Alma leaned over him, casting his whole tiny body in shadow. She picked him up by his collar, a full foot off the ground, and—shaking him like a sack of feed—she bellowed, “Get back at your work, you useless little lobcock, before I take off your balls with that shovel of yours!”

She tossed him back to the ground. He landed hard. He scrambled out from under her shadow like a rabbit, and began digging furiously, haphazardly, fearfully. Alma walked away, shaking loose the muscles of her arms, and immediately recommenced her thoughts of her husband. Was it
possible that Ambrose simply didn’t
know
? Could anyone be such an innocent as to have entered matrimony unaware of its duties, or oblivious to the sexual mechanisms between man and wife? She remembered a book she had read years ago, back when she had begun collecting those licentious texts in the loft of the carriage house. She had not thought of this book for at least two decades. It had been rather tedious, compared to the others, but it came back to her mind now. It bore the title
The Fruits of Marriage: A Gentleman’s Guide to Sexual Continence;
A Manual for Married Couples, by Dr. Horscht.

This Dr. Horscht had written the book, he claimed, after counseling a modest young Christian couple who did not possess any knowledge—either theoretical or practical—of the sexual relation, and who had baffled themselves and each other with such peculiar feelings and sensations upon entering the conjugal bed that they felt they were under a spell. Finally, a few weeks after their wedding, the poor young groom had quizzed a friend, who had given him the shocking information that the newlywed husband needed to place his organ directly inside his bride’s “watering hole” for the proper relations to occur. This thought had brought such fear and shame upon the poor young fellow that he ran to Dr. Horscht with questions as to whether this outlandish-sounding act could possibly be either performable or virtuous. Dr. Horscht, in pity for the baffled young soul, had written his guidebook on the engine of sexuality, to assist other newly married men.

Alma had scorned the book when she’d read it years earlier. To be a young fellow and to hold such complete ignorance of the genito-urinary function seemed beyond absurd to her. Surely such people could not exist?

Yet now she wondered.

Did she need to
show
him?

T
hat Saturday afternoon, Ambrose retired to their bedroom early and excused himself to bathe before dinner. She followed him to the room. She sat on the bed, and listened to the water running into the large porcelain tub on the other side of the door. She heard him humming. He was happy. She, on the other hand, was inflamed with misery and doubt. He must be undressing now. She heard muted splashes as he entered the bath, and then a sigh of pleasure. Then silence.

She stood up and undressed, too. She removed everything—drawers and chemise, even the pins from her hair. If she’d had anything more to take off, she would have done so. Her nude form was not beautiful, and she knew it, but it was all she had. She went and leaned against the door of the water closet, listening with her ear pressed against it. She did not have to do this. There were alternatives. She could learn to endure things as they were. She could patiently submit to her suffering, to this strange and impossible marriage-that-was-not-a-marriage. She could learn how to conquer everything that Ambrose brought forth within her—her appetite for him, her disappointment in him, her sense of tormenting absence whenever she was near him. If she could learn how to defeat her own desire, then she could keep her husband—such as he was.

No. No, she could not learn that.

She turned the knob, pushed against the door, and entered as silently as she could. His head turned toward her, and his eyes grew wide with alarm. She said nothing, and he said nothing. She looked away from his eyes and allowed herself to examine his entire body, just submerged under the cool bath water. There he was, in all his naked loveliness. His skin was milky white—so much whiter in his chest and legs than on his arms. There was only a trace of hair on his torso. He could not have been more perfectly beautiful.

Had she worried that he might not have genitalia at all? Had she imagined that this might have been the problem? Well, this was not the problem. He had genitalia—perfectly adequate, and even impressive, genitalia. She allowed herself to observe with care this lovely appendage of his—this pale, waving sea creature, which floated between his legs in its thatch of wet and private fur. Ambrose did not move. Nor did his penis stir at all. It did not like being looked at. She realized this immediately. Alma had spent enough time in the woods gazing upon shy animals to know when a creature did not want to be seen, and this creature between Ambrose’s legs did not wish to be seen. Still, she gazed at it because she could not look away. Ambrose allowed her to do this—not so much because he was permissive, but because he was paralyzed.