At last, with his other hand, he held up her treatise.
“Oh, Alma,” he said, and he did not bother to brush away his tears. “May God bless you, child. You have your mother’s mind.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
Four years passed.
They were happy years for Alma Whittaker, and why would they not have been? She had a home (her uncle had moved her straight into the van Devender household); she had a family (her uncle’s four sons, their lovely wives, and their broods of growing children); she was able to communicate regularly by mail with Prudence and Hanneke back in Philadelphia; and she held a position of considerable responsibility at the Hortus Botanicus. Her official title was Curator van Mossen—the Curator of Mosses. She was given her own office, on the second floor of a pleasant building only two doors down the street from the van Devender residence.
She sent for all her old books and notes from the carriage house back at White Acre, and for her herbarium, too. It was like a holiday for her, the week her shipment arrived; she spent days in nostalgic absorption, unpacking it all. She had missed every item and volume of it. She was blushingly amused to discover, buried in the bottoms of the trunks of books, all her old prurient reading material. She decided to keep the lot of it—though she was sure to keep it well hidden. For one thing, she did not know how to dispose of such scandalous texts respectably. For another thing, these books still had the power to stir her. Even at her advanced age, a stubborn tug of brazen desire lingered within her body, and still demanded her attention on certain nights, when, under the coverlet, she would revisit her familiar old quim, remembering once more the taste of Tomorrow Morning, the smell of Ambrose, the urgency of life’s most stubborn and unrelenting urges. She did not even attempt to fight these urges anymore; by now, it was evident they were a part of her.
Alma earned a respectable salary—her first—at the Hortus, and she shared an assistant and a clerk with the director of mycology and the overseer of ferns (all of whom became dear friends—the first scientific friends she’d ever had). In due course, she made a reputation for herself not only as a brilliant taxonomist but also as a good cousin. It pleased and surprised Alma not a little that she adapted so comfortably to the bustle and tumult of family life, given that she’d always lived such a solitary existence. She delighted in the clever repartee of Dees’s children and grandchildren at the dinner table, and took pride in their many achievements and talents. She was honored when the girls would come to her for advice or consolation about their thrilling or terrible romantic disturbances. She saw bits of Retta in their moments of excitement; bits of Prudence in their moments of reserve; bits of herself in their moments of doubt.
Over time, Alma came to be regarded by all the van Devenders as a considerable asset both to the Hortus and to the family—which two entities were utterly indistinguishable, in any case. Alma’s uncle gave over to her a small, shady corner of the palm house, and invited her to make a permanent display called the Cave of Mosses. This was both a tricky and a satisfying assignment. Mosses do not like to grow where they are not born, and Alma had difficulty orchestrating the necessary and precise conditions (the correct humidity, the right combination of light and shade, the proper stones, gravel, and logs as substrates) to encourage the moss colonies to flourish in these artificial surroundings. She successfully executed this feat, though, and soon the cave thrived with moss specimens from all over the world. It would be a lifelong project to maintain the exhibit, which required continuous misting (achieved with the help of steam-powered engines), needed to be cooled by insulated walls, and could never be exposed to direct sunlight. Aggressive and fast-growing mosses had to be kept in check, so that rarer, more diminutive species could advance. Alma had read of Japanese monks who maintained their moss gardens by weeding with tiny forceps, and she took up this practice, as well. She could be seen every morning in the Cave of Mosses, removing one tiny invasive strand at a time, by the light of a miner’s lantern, using the tips of her fine steel tweezers. She wanted it perfect. She wanted it to glitter like emerald fire—just as that extraordinary moss cave had glittered for her and Tomorrow Morning, years before, in Tahiti.
The Cave of Mosses became a popular exhibit at the Hortus, but only for a certain type of person: the type who longed for cool darkness, for silence, for reverie. (The type of person, in other words, who had little interest in showy blossoms, mammoth lily pads, or crowds of loud families.) Alma enjoyed perching in a corner of the cave and observing these sorts of people enter the world she had made. She saw them caress the pelts of moss, and watched their faces relax, their posture loosen. She felt an affinity with them—the quiet ones.
During those years, Alma also spent a considerable amount of time working over her theory of competitive alteration. Uncle Dees had been urging her to publish the paper since he’d read it upon her arrival in 1854, but Alma had resisted then, and she continued to resist. Moreover, she refused to allow him to discuss her theory with anyone else. Her reluctance brought nothing but frustration to her good uncle, who believed Alma’s theory both important and very probably correct. He accused her of being overly timid, of holding back. Specifically, he accused her of fearing religious condemnation, should she make public her notions of continuous creation and species transmutation.
“You simply do not have the courage to be a God-killer,” said this good Dutch Protestant, who had attended church quite devoutly every Sabbath of his life. “Come now, Alma—what are you afraid of? Show a little of your father’s audacity, child! Go forth and be a terror in the world! Wake up the whole barking dog-kennel of controversy, if you must. The Hortus will protect you! We could publish it ourselves! We even could publish it under my name, if you dread censure.”
But Alma was hesitating not from fear of the church, but from a deep conviction that her theory was not quite yet scientifically incontrovertible. A small hole existed in her logic, she felt sure, and she could not deduce how to close it. Alma was a perfectionist and more than a little bit of a pedant, and she certainly was not going to be caught publishing a theory with a hole in it, even a small hole. She was not afraid of offending religion, as she frequently told her uncle; she was afraid of offending something far more sacred to her: reason.
For here was the hole in Alma’s theory: she could not, for the life of her, understand the evolutionary advantages of altruism and self-sacrifice. If the natural world was indeed the sphere of amoral and constant struggle for survival that it appeared to be, and if outcompeting one’s rivals was the key to dominance, adaptation, and endurance—then what was one supposed to make, for instance, of someone like her sister Prudence?
Whenever Alma mentioned her sister’s name, with respect to her theory of competitive alteration, her uncle groaned. “Not again!” he would say, pulling at his beard. “No one has heard of Prudence, Alma! No one cares!”
But Alma cared, and the “Prudence Problem,” as she came to call it, troubled her mind considerably, for it threatened to undo her entire theory. It especially troubled her because it was all so personal. Alma had been the intended beneficiary, after all, of an act of great generosity and self-sacrifice on Prudence’s part almost forty years earlier, and she had never forgotten it. Prudence had silently given up her one true love—with the hope that George Hawkes would marry Alma instead, and that Alma would benefit from that marriage. The fact that Prudence’s act of sacrifice had been utterly futile did not in any way diminish its sincerity.