This is how things had been for more than two and a half decades now. This is how she thought things would always be. It was a quiet but not unhappy life for Alma Whittaker.
Not unhappy in the least.
Others, however, had not been so fortunate.
Alma’s old friend George Hawkes, for instance, had not found happiness in his marriage to Retta Snow. Nor was Retta in the least bit happy. Knowing this did not bring Alma any consolation or joy. Another woman might have rejoiced at this information, as a sort of dark revenge to her own broken heart, but Alma was not the sort of character who took satisfaction from somebody else’s suffering. What’s more, however much the marriage had once hurt her, Alma no longer loved George Hawkes. That fire had dimmed years ago. To have continued loving him under the reality of the circumstances would have been immeasurably foolish, and she had already played the fool too far. However, Alma did pity George. He was a good soul, and he had always been a good friend to her, but never had a man chosen a wife more poorly.
The staid botanical publisher had been at first merely baffled by his flighty and mercurial bride, but as time passed he had grown more openly irritated. George and Retta had occasionally dined at White Acre during the first years of their marriage, but Alma soon noticed that George would darken and grow tense whenever Retta spoke, as though he dreaded in advance whatever she was about to say. Eventually he stopped speaking at the dinner table altogether—almost in the hope, it seemed, that his wife would stop speaking, too. If that had been his wish, it hadn’t worked. Retta, for her part, became increasingly nervous around her quiet husband, which made her speak only more frantically, which, in turn, only made her husband more determinedly silent.
After a few years of this, Retta had developed a most peculiar habit, which Alma found painful to watch. Retta would flutter her fingers helplessly in front of her mouth as she spoke, as though trying to catch the words as they came out of her—as though trying to stop the words, or even thrust them back in. Sometimes Retta was actually able to abort a sentence in the middle of some crazed thought or another, and then she would press her fingers against her lips to prevent more speech from spilling out. But this triumph was even more difficult to witness, for that last, strange, unfinished sentence would hang uncomfortably in the air, while Retta, stricken, stared at her soundless husband, her eyes wild with apology.
After enough of these upsetting performances, Mr. and Mrs. Hawkes stopped coming to dinner at all. Alma saw them only in their own home, when she came down to Arch Street to discuss publishing details with George.
Wifehood, as it turned out, did not suit Mrs. Retta Snow Hawkes. She simply was not crafted for it. Indeed, adulthood itself did not suit her. There were too many restrictions involved in the custom, and far too much seriousness expected. Retta was no longer a silly girl who could go driving about the city so freely in her small two-wheeled chaise. She was now the wife and helpmeet of one of Philadelphia’s most respected publishers, and expected to comport herself as such. It was no longer dignified for Retta to be seen at the theater alone. Well, it never had been dignified, but in the past nobody had forbidden it. George forbade it. He did not enjoy the theater. George also required his wife to attend church services—several times a week, in fact—where Retta squirmed, childlike, in tedium. She could not dress so gaily after her marriage, either, nor break into song at the slightest whim. Or, rather, she could break into song, and sometimes did, but it did not look correct, and only infuriated her husband.
As for motherhood, Retta had not been able to manage that responsibility either. Within a year of marriage there had been a pregnancy in the Hawkes household, but that pregnancy had ended in a miscarriage. The next year, there had been another unsuccessful pregnancy, and the year after that, another. After losing her fifth child, Retta had taken to her room in a most violent mania of despair. Neighbors could hear her sobbing, it was reported, from several houses away. Poor George Hawkes had no idea what to do with this desperate woman, and he was quite unable to work for several days in a row on account of his wife’s derangement. He had finally sent a message up to White Acre, begging for Alma to please come down to Arch Street and sit with her old friend, who was beyond all consolation.
But by the time Alma had arrived, Retta was already sleeping, with a thumb in her mouth and her beautiful hair splayed across the pillow like bare black branches against a pale winter sky. George explained that the pharmacy had sent over a bit of laudanum, and this had seemed to work.
“Pray, George, try not to make a habit of that,” Alma had warned. “Retta has an unusually sensitive constitution, and too much laudanum may do her harm. I know she can be a bit nonsensical at times, and even tragic. But my understanding of Retta is that she requires only patience and love in order to find her own way back to happiness. Perhaps if you give her more time . . .”
“I apologize for having disturbed you,” George said.
“Not at all,” Alma said. “I am always at your disposal, and Retta’s, too.”
Alma wanted to say more—but what? She felt she may have spoken too freely already, or perhaps even criticized him as a husband. Poor man. He was exhausted.
“Friendship is here, George,” she said, and laid her hand on his arm. “Use it. You may call upon me at any time.”
Well, he did. He called upon Alma in 1826, when Retta cut off all her hair. He called upon Alma in 1835, when Retta vanished for three days, and was ultimately found in Fishtown, sleeping amid a pile of street children. He called upon her in 1842, when Retta came after a servant with a pair of sewing scissors, claiming that the woman was a ghost. The servant had not suffered serious injury, but now nobody would take Retta her breakfast. He called upon her in 1846, when Retta had started writing long, incomprehensible letters, composed more of tears than ink.
George did not know how to manage these scenes and muddles. It was all a dreadful distraction to his business and to his mind. He was publishing more than fifty books a year now, along with an array of scientific journals and a new, expensive, subscription-only Octavo of Exotic Flora (to be released quarterly, and illustrated with impressively large hand-tinted lithographs of the finest quality). All these endeavors required his absolute attention. He had no time for a collapsing wife.
Alma had no time for it either, but still she came. Sometimes—during particularly bad episodes—she would even spend the night with Retta, sleeping in the Hawkeses’ own conjugal bed, with her arms around her trembling friend, while George slept on a pallet in the print shop next door. She got the impression that he usually slept there nowadays, anyway.
“Will you still love me and will you still be kind to me,” Retta would ask Alma in the middle of the night, “if I become the very devil himself?”
“I will always love you,” Alma reassured the only friend she had ever had. “And you could never be the devil, Retta. You simply must rest, and not trouble yourself or the others anymore . . .”
In the mornings after such episodes, the three of them would breakfast together in the Hawkeses’ dining room. This was never comfortable. George was no light conversationalist under the best of circumstances, and Retta—depending on how much laudanum she had been given the night before—would be either frenzied or stupefied. Intervals of lucidity became ever more rare. Sometimes Retta chewed on a rag, and would not let it be taken from her. Alma would search for some topic of conversation that would suit all three of them, but no such topic existed. No such topic had ever existed. She could speak with Retta about nonsense, or she could speak with George about botany, but she could never puzzle out a way to speak to them both.