“People die every day,” he told her. “But there are eight thousand chances against its being you.”
She learned that there were weeks—rainy weeks in particular—when her father’s body ailed him more than any man in Christendom should be obliged to bear. He had permanent agony in one leg from a poorly set broken bone, and he suffered from the recurrent fevers that he had acquired in those distant and dangerous places across the world. There were times when Henry could not leave his bed for half a month. He must never be bothered under such circumstances. Even to bring him letters, one must proceed quietly. These ailments were the reason Henry could not travel anymore, and why, instead, he summoned the world to him. This was why there were always so many visitors at White Acre, and why so much business was conducted in the drawing room and at the dining room table. This is also why Henry had the man called Dick Yancey—the terrifying, silent, bald-pated Yorkshireman with gelid eyes, who traveled on Henry’s behalf, and who disciplined the world in the name of the Whittaker Company. Alma learned never to speak to Dick Yancey.
Alma learned that her father did not keep the Sabbath, although he did keep, in his name, the finest private pew in the Swedish Lutheran church where Alma and her mother spent their Sundays. Alma’s mother did not particularly care for the Swedes, but since there was no Dutch Reformed church nearby, the Swedes were better than nothing. The Swedes, at least, understood and shared the central beliefs of Calvinist teachings: You are responsible for your own situation in life, you are most likely doomed, and the future is terribly grim. That was all comfortingly familiar to Beatrix. Better than any of the other religions, with their false, soft reassurances.
Alma wished she did not have to go to church, and that she could stay home on Sundays as her father did, to work with plants. Church was dull and uncomfortable and smelled of tobacco juice. In the summertime, turkey fowl and dogs sometimes wandered inside the open front door, seeking shade from the insufferable heat. In the wintertime, the old stone building became impossibly cold. Whenever a beam of light shone through one of the tall, wavy-glassed windows, Alma would turn her face up toward it, like a tropical vine in one of her father’s botanical forcing houses, wishing to climb her way out.
Alma’s father did not like churches or religions, but he did frequently call upon God to curse his enemies. As for what else Henry did not like, the list was long, and Alma came to know it well. She knew that her father detested large men who kept small dogs. Also, he detested people who bought fast horses that they were unskilled to ride. Furthermore, he detested: recreational sailing vessels; surveyors; cheaply made shoes; French (the language, the food, the populace); nervous clerks; tiny porcelain plates which broke in a man’s damned hand; poetry (but not songs!); the stooped backs of cowards; thieving sons of whores; a lying tongue; the sound of a violin; the army (any army); tulips (“onions with airs!”); blue jays; the drinking of coffee (“a damned, dirty Dutch habit!”); and—although Alma did not yet understand what either of these words meant—both slavery and abolitionists.
Henry could be incendiary. He could insult and diminish Alma as quickly as another man could button up a waistcoat (“Nobody likes a stupid and selfish little piglet!”), but there were moments, too, when he seemed verifiably fond of her, and even proud of her. A stranger came out to White Acre one day to sell Henry a pony, for Alma to learn to ride. The pony’s name was Soames, and he was the color of sugar icing, and Alma loved him immediately. A price was negotiated. The two men settled on three dollars. Alma, who was only six years old, asked, “Excuse me, sir, but does that price also include the bridle and saddle which the pony is currently wearing?”
The stranger balked at the question, but Henry roared with laughter. “She’s got you there, man!” he bellowed, and for the rest of that day, he ruffled Alma’s hair whenever she came near, saying, “What a good little auctioneer I’ve got as a daughter!”
Alma learned that her father drank out of bottles in the evening, and that those bottles sometimes contained danger (raised voices; banishment), but could also contain miracles—such as permission to sit on her father’s lap, where she might be told fantastical stories, and might be called by her rarest nickname: “Plum.” On such nights, Henry told her things like, “Plum, you must always carry enough gold on you to buy back your life in case of a kidnapping. Sew it into your hems, if you must, but never be without money!” Henry told her that the Bedouins in the desert sometimes sewed gemstones under their skin, in case of emergency. He told her that he himself had an emerald from South America sewn under the loose skin of his belly, and that it looked to the unknowing eye like a scar from a gunshot wound, and that he would never, ever show it to her—but the emerald was there.
“You must always have one final bribe, Plum,” he said.
On her father’s lap, Alma learned that Henry had sailed the world with a great man named Captain Cook. These were the best stories of all. One day a giant whale had come to the surface of the ocean with its mouth open, and Captain Cook had sailed the ship right inside the whale, taken a look around the whale’s belly, and had then sailed out again—backward! Once Henry had heard a crying noise at sea, and had seen a mermaid floating on the ocean’s surface. The mermaid had been injured by a shark. Henry had pulled the mermaid out of the water with a rope, and she had died in his arms—but not before she had, by God, blessed Henry Whittaker, telling him that he would be a rich man someday. And that was how he acquired this big house—on account of that mermaid’s blessing!
“What language did the mermaid speak?” Alma wanted to know, imagining that it would almost have to be Greek.
“English!” Henry said. “By God, Plum, why would I rescue a deuced foreign mermaid?”
Alma was awed and sometimes daunted by her mother, but she adored her father. She loved him more than anything. She loved him more than Soames the pony. Her father was a colossus, and she peered at the world from between his mammoth legs. By comparison to Henry, the Lord of the Bible was dull and distant. Like the Lord of the Bible, Henry sometimes tested Alma’s love—particularly after the bottles were opened. “Plum,” he would say, “why don’t you run as fast as your spindle-shanked legs can carry you, all the way down to the wharf, and see if your papa has any ships arriving from China?”
The wharf was seven miles away, and across the river. It could be nine o’clock on a Sunday night during a bitterly cold March storm, and Alma would leap off her father’s lap and start running. A servant would have to catch her at the door and carry her back into the drawing room, or else—at the age of six, without a cloak or bonnet upon her, without a penny in her pocket or the tiniest bit of gold sewn into her hems—by God, she would have done it.
What a childhood this girl passed!
Not only did Alma have these potent and clever parents, but she also had the entire estate of White Acre to explore at her will. It was truly an Arcadia. There was so much to be taken in. The house alone was an ever-unfolding marvel. There was the lumpy stuffed giraffe in the east pavilion, with his alarmed and comical face. There was the threesome of enormous mastodon ribs in the front atrium, dug up in a nearby field by a local farmer, who traded it to Henry for a new rifle. There was the ballroom, gleaming and empty, where once—in the chill of late autumn—Alma had encountered a trapped hummingbird, which had shot past her ear in the most remarkable trajectory (a jeweled missile, it seemed, fired from a tiny cannon). There was the caged mynah bird in her father’s study, who came all the way from China, and who could speak with impassioned eloquence (or so Henry claimed) but only in its native tongue. There were the rare snakeskins, preserved with a filling of straw and sawdust. There were shelves stocked with South Sea coral, Javanese idols, ancient Egyptian jewelry of lapis lazuli, and dusty Turkish almanacs.