“No question who spawned that one!” he would boast.
What’s more, Alma was clever like him. Sturdy, too. A right little dromedary, she was—tireless and uncomplaining. Never took ill. Stubborn. From the moment the girl learned to speak, she could not put an argument to rest. If her millstone of a mother had not steadfastly ground the impudence out of her, she might have turned out to be frankly rude. As it was, she was merely forceful. She wanted to understand the world, and she made a habit of chasing down information to its last hiding place, as though the fate of nations were at stake in every instance. She demanded to know why a pony was not a baby horse. She demanded to know why sparks were born when she drew her hand across her sheets on a hot summer’s night. She not only demanded to know whether mushrooms were plants or animals, but also—when given the answer—demanded to know why this was certain.
Alma had been born to the correct parents for these sorts of restless inquiries; as long as her questions were respectfully expressed, they would be answered. Both Henry and Beatrix Whittaker, equally intolerant of dullness, encouraged a spirit of investigation in their daughter. Even Alma’s mushroom question was granted a serious answer (from Beatrix in this case, who quoted the esteemed Swedish botanical taxonomist Carl Linnaeus on how to distinguish minerals from plants, and plants from animals: “Stones grow. Plants grow and live. Animals grow, live, and feel”). Beatrix did not believe a four-year-old child was too young to be discussing Linnaeus. Indeed, Beatrix had commenced Alma’s formal education nearly as soon as the child could hold herself upright. If other people’s toddlers could be taught to lisp prayers and catechisms as soon as they could speak, then, Beatrix believed, her child could certainly be taught anything.
As a result, Alma knew her numbers before the age of four—in English, Dutch, French, and Latin. The study of Latin was particularly stressed, because Beatrix believed that no one who was ignorant of Latin could ever write a proper sentence in either English or French. There was an early dabbling in Greek, as well, although with somewhat less urgency. (Not even Beatrix believed a child should pursue Greek before the age of five.) Beatrix tutored her intelligent daughter herself, and with satisfaction. A parent is inexcusable who does not personally teach her child to think. Beatrix also happened to believe that mankind’s intellectual faculties had been steadily deteriorating since the second century anno Domini, so she enjoyed the sensation of running a private Athenian lyceum in Philadelphia, solely for her daughter’s benefit.
Hanneke de Groot, the head housekeeper, felt that Alma’s young female brain was perhaps overly taxed by so much study, but Beatrix would hear none of it, for this is how Beatrix herself had been educated, as had every van Devender child—male and female—since time immemorial. “Don’t be simple, Hanneke,” Beatrix scolded. “At no moment in history has a bright young girl with plenty of food and a good constitution perished from too much learning.”
Beatrix admired the useful over the vapid, the edifying over the entertaining. She was suspicious of anything one might call “an innocent amusement,” and quite detested anything foolish or vile. Foolish and vile things included: public houses; rouged women; election days (one could always expect mobs); the eating of ice cream; the visiting of ice cream houses; Anglicans (whom she felt to be Catholics in disguise, and whose religion, she submitted, stood at odds with both morality and common sense); tea (good Dutch women drank only coffee); people who drove their sleighs in wintertime without bells upon their horses (you couldn’t hear them coming up behind you!); inexpensive household help (a troublesome bargain); people who paid their servants in rum instead of money (thus contributing to public drunkenness); people who came to you with their troubles but then refused to listen to sound advice; New Year’s Eve celebrations (the new year will arrive one way or another, regardless of all that bell-ringing); the aristocracy (nobility should be based upon conduct, not upon inheritance); and overpraised children (good behavior should be expected, not rewarded).
She embraced the motto Labor ipse Voluptas—work is its own reward. She believed there was an inherent dignity in remaining aloof and indifferent to sensation; indeed, she believed that indifference to sensation was the very definition of dignity. Most of all, Beatrix Whittaker believed in respectability and morality—but if pushed to choose between the two, she would probably have chosen respectability.
All of this, she strove to teach her daughter.
As for Henry Whittaker, obviously he could not help with the teaching of the classics, but he was appreciative of Beatrix’s educational efforts with Alma. As a clever but unschooled man of botany, he had always felt that Greek and Latin were like two great iron struts, blocking the doorway of knowledge from him; he would not have his child similarly barred. Indeed, he would not have his child barred from anything.
As for what Henry taught Alma? Well, he taught her nothing. That is to say, he taught her nothing directly. He did not have the patience for administering formal instruction, and he did not like to be set round by children. But what Alma learned from her father indirectly constituted a long list. First and foremost, she learned not to irritate him. The moment she irritated her father, she would be banished from the room, so she learned from earliest milky consciousness never to nettle or provoke Henry. This was a challenge for Alma, for it required a stern thrashing down of all her natural instincts (which were, precisely, to nettle and provoke). She learned, however, that her father did not entirely mind a serious, interesting, or articulate question from his daughter—just so long as she never interrupted his speech or (this was trickier) his thoughts. Sometimes her questions even amused him, although she did not always understand why—such as when she asked why the hog took so long at it, climbing up on the lady pig’s back, while the bull was always so quick with the cows. That question had made Henry laugh. Alma did not like to be laughed at. She learned never to ask such a question twice.
Alma learned that her father was impatient with his workers, with his houseguests, with his wife, with herself, and even with his horses—but with plants, he never lost his head. He was always charitable and forgiving with plants. This made Alma sometimes long to be a plant. She never spoke of this longing, though, for it would have made her look like a fool, and she had learned from Henry that one must never look like a fool. “The world is a fool who longs to be tricked,” he often said, and he had borne it down upon his daughter that there is a mighty gap between the idiots and the clever, and one must come down on the side of cleverness. To show a longing for anything that one cannot have, for instance, is not a clever position.
Alma learned from Henry that there were far distant places in the world, where some men go and never return, but that her father had gone to those places and had returned from them. (She liked to imagine that he had returned home for her, in order to be her papa, although he had never insinuated such a thing.) She learned that Henry had endured the world because he was brave. She learned that her father wished for her to be brave, too, even in the most alarming instances—thunder, being chased by geese, a flood on the Schuylkill River, the ape with the chain on its neck that traveled in the wagon with the tinker. Henry would not allow Alma to fear any of those things. Before she even properly understood what death was, he was forbidding her to fear that, as well.