“It will never be my turn, Hanneke,” Alma said, out of the blue. She said it not pitifully, but with simple candor. There was something about speaking in Dutch (and Alma spoke only Dutch with Hanneke) that always elicited simple candor.
“Give the situation time,” Hanneke said, knowing precisely what Alma was talking about. “A husband may still come looking for you.”
“Loyal Hanneke,” Alma said fondly, “let us be honest with ourselves. Who will ever put a ring on these fishwife’s hands of mine? Who will ever kiss this encyclopedia of a head?”
“I will kiss it,” said Hanneke, and pulled Alma down for a kiss on the brow. “There now, it is done. Stop complaining. You always behave as though you know everything, but you do not know all things. Your mother had this same fault. I have seen more of life than you have seen, by a long measure, and I tell you that you are not too old to marry—and you may still raise a family yet. There’s no hurry for it, either. Look at Mrs. Kingston, on Locust Street. Fifty years old, she must be, and she just presented her husband with twins! A regular Abraham’s wife, she is. Somebody should study her womb.”
“I confess, Hanneke, that I do not believe Mrs. Kingston is quite fifty years old. Nor do I believe she wishes us to study her womb.”
“I am merely saying that you do not know the future, child, quite as much as you believe you do. And there is something more I need to tell you, besides.” Hanneke stopped working now, and her voice became serious. “Everyone has disappointments, child.”
Alma loved the sound of the word child in Dutch. Kindje. This was the nickname that Hanneke had always called Alma when she was young and afraid and would climb into the housekeeper’s bed in the middle of the night. Kindje. It sounded like warmth itself.
“I am aware that everyone has disappointments, Hanneke.”
“I’m not certain you are. You are still young, so you think only of your own self. You do not notice the tribulations that occur all around you, to other people. Do not protest; it is true. I am not condemning you. I was as selfish as you, when I was your age. It is the custom of the young to be selfish. Now I am wiser. It’s a pity we cannot put an old head on young shoulders, or you could be wise, too. But someday you will understand that nobody passes through this world without suffering—no matter what you may think of them and their supposed good fortune.”
“What are we to do, then, with our suffering?” Alma asked.
This was not a question Alma would ever have posed to a minister, or a philosopher, or a poet, but she was curious—desperate, even—to hear an answer from Hanneke de Groot.
“Well, child, you may do whatever you like with your suffering,” Hanneke said mildly. “It belongs to you. But I shall tell you what I do with mine. I grasp it by the small hairs, I cast it to the ground, and I grind it under the heel of my boot. I suggest you learn to do the same.”
And so Alma did. She learned how to grind her disappointments under the heel of her boot. She had sturdy boots in her possession, too, and thus she was well outfitted for the task. She made an effort to turn her sorrows into a gritty powder that could be kicked into the ditch. She did this every day, sometimes even several times a day, and that is how she proceeded.
The months passed. Alma helped her father, she helped Hanneke, she worked in the greenhouses, and sometimes she arranged formal dinners at White Acre for Henry’s diversion. Rarely did she see her old friend Retta. It was rarer still to see Prudence, but it did occur sometimes. From habit alone, Alma attended church services on Sundays, although she often, rather disgracefully, followed up her visits to church with visits to the binding closet, in order to evacuate her mind by touching her body. It was no longer joyful, the habit in the binding closet, but it made her feel somewhat unleashed.
She kept herself occupied, but she was not occupied enough. Within a year, she sensed an encroaching lethargy that frightened her severely. She longed for some sort of employment or enterprise that would provide vent for her considerable intellectual energies. At first, her father’s commercial matters were helpful in this regard, as the work filled her days with daunting piles of responsibilities, but soon enough Alma’s efficiency became her enemy. She carried out her tasks for the Whittaker Company too well and too quickly. Soon, having learned everything she needed to know about botanical importing and exporting, she was able to complete Henry’s work for him in the matter of four or five hours a day. This was simply not enough hours. This left far too many remaining hours free, and free hours were dangerous. Free hours created too much opportunity for examining the disappointments she was meant to be grinding under her boot heel.
It was also around this time—the year after everyone married—that Alma came to a significant and even shocking realization: contrary to her childhood belief, she discovered that White Acre was not, in fact, a very large place. Quite the opposite, actually: it was a tiny place. Yes, the estate had grown to more than a thousand acres, with a mile of riverfront, with a sizable patch of virgin forest, with an immense house, with a spectacular library, with a vast network of stables, gardens, glasshouses, ponds, and creeks—but if this constituted the boundaries of one’s entire world (as it did now for Alma), then it was not large at all. Any place that one could not leave was not large—particularly if one was a naturalist!
The problem was that Alma had already spent her life studying the nature of White Acre, and she knew the place too well. She knew every tree and rock and bird and lady’s slipper. She knew every spider, every beetle, every ant. There was nothing new here for her to explore. Yes, she could have studied the novel tropical plants that arrived at her father’s impressive greenhouses every week—but that is not discovery! Somebody else had already discovered those plants! And the task of a naturalist, as Alma understood it, was to discover. But there would be no such chance for Alma, for she had reached the limits of her botanical borders already. This realization frightened her and made her unable to sleep at night, which, in turn, frightened her more. She feared the restlessness that was creeping upon her. She could almost hear her mind pacing within her skull, caged and bothered, and she felt the weight of all the years she had yet to live, bearing down upon her with heavy menace.
A born taxonomist with nothing new to classify, Alma kept her uneasiness at bay by setting other things into order. She tidied and alphabetized her father’s papers. She smartened up the library, discarding books of lesser value. She arranged the collection jars on her own shelves by height, and she created ever more refined systems of superfluous filing, which is how it came to pass that—early one morning in June of 1822—Alma Whittaker sat alone in her carriage house, poring over all the research articles she had ever written for George Hawkes. She was trying to decide whether to organize these old issues of Botanica Americana by subject or by chronology. It was an unnecessary task, but it would fill an hour.
At the bottom of this pile, though, Alma found her earliest article—the one she had written when she was only sixteen years old, about Monotropa hypopitys. She read it again. The writing was juvenile, but the science was sound, and her explanation of this shade-loving plant as a clever, bloodless parasite still felt valid. When she looked closely at her old illustrations of Monotropa, though, she almost had to laugh at their rudimentary crudeness. Her diagrams looked as though they had been sketched by a child, which, essentially, they had been. Not that she had become a glittering artist over the past years, but these early pictures were quite rough indeed. George had been kind to publish them at all. Her Monotropa was meant to be depicted growing out of a bed of moss, but in Alma’s depiction, the plant looked to be growing out of a lumpy old mattress. Nobody would have been able to identify those dismal clumps at the bottom of the drawing as moss at all. She ought to have shown much more detail. As a good naturalist, she ought to have made an illustration that depicted quite precisely in which variety of moss Monotropa hypopitys grew.