She found it. She rubbed at it, harder and harder. She felt an unraveling. The hurt in her quim turned to something else—an up-fire, a vortex of pleasure, a chimney-effect of heat. She followed the pleasure where it led. She had no weight, no name, no thoughts, no history. Then came a burst of phosphorescence, as though a firework had discharged behind her eyes, and it was over. She felt quiet and warm. For the first conscious moment of her life, her mind was free from wonder, free from worry, free from work or puzzlement. Then, from the middle of that marvelous furred stillness, a thought took shape, took hold, took over:
I shall have to do this again.
Not a half hour later, Alma was standing in the atrium of White Acre, flustered and embarrassed, receiving dinner guests. That night, the visitors included serious young George Hawkes, a Philadelphia publisher of fine botanical prints, books, periodicals, and journals, and a distinguished older gentleman by the name of James K. Peck, who taught at the College of New Jersey up in Princeton, and who had just published a book about the physiology of Negroes. Arthur Dixon, the girls’ pale tutor, dined with the family as usual, although he rarely added much to the conversation, and tended to spend dinner hours looking worriedly at his fingernails.
George Hawkes, the botanical publisher, had been a guest at White Acre many times before, and Alma was fond of him. He was shy but kind, and terribly intelligent, with the posture of a great, awkward, shuffling bear. His clothes were too big, his hat sat wrong on his head, and he never seemed to know precisely where to stand. To coax George Hawkes into speech was a challenge, but once he began speaking, he was a pleasant treasure. He knew more about botanical lithography than anyone else in Philadelphia, and his publications were exquisite. He spoke lovingly of plants and artists and the craft of bookbinding, and Alma enjoyed his company enormously.
As for the other guest, Professor Peck, he was a new addition to the dinner table, and Alma disliked him straight away. He had every mark of a bore, and a determined bore at that. Immediately upon his arrival, he occupied twenty minutes in the atrium of White Acre, relaying in Homeric detail the trials of his coach ride from Princeton to Philadelphia. Once he had exhausted that fascinating topic, he shared his surprise that Alma, Prudence, and Beatrix would be joining the gentlemen at the dinner table, insofar as the conversation would surely be over their heads.
“Oh, no,” Henry corrected his guest. “I think you’ll soon enough find that my wife and daughters are passably capable of conversation.”
“Are they?” the gentleman asked, plainly unconvinced. “In what topics?”
“Well,” Henry said, rubbing at his chin as he considered his family, “Beatrix here knows everything, Prudence has artistic and musical knowledge, and Alma—the big tall one—is a right beast for botany.”
“Botany,” Professor Peck repeated, with practiced condescension. “A most improving recreation for girls. The only scientific work that is suited to the female sex, I have always surmised, on account of its absence of cruelty, or mathematical rigor. My own daughter does fine drawings of wildflowers.”
“How engrossing for her,” Beatrix murmured.
“Yes, quite,” said Professor Peck, and turned to Alma. “A lady’s fingers are more pliant, you see. Softer than a man’s. Better suited than a man’s hands, some say, for the more delicate operations of plant collection.”
Alma, who was not one to blush, blushed to her very bones. Why was this man talking about her fingers, about pliancy, about delicacy, about softness? Now everybody looked at Alma’s hands, which, only a short while earlier, had been buried straight up inside her quim. It was dreadful. From the corner of her eye, she saw her old friend George Hawkes smile at her in nervous sympathy. George blushed all the time. He blushed whenever anyone looked at him, and whenever he was forced to speak. Perhaps he was commiserating with her discomfort. With George’s eyes upon her, Alma felt herself blushing redder still. For the first time in her life, she could not find speech, and she wished that nobody would look at her at all. She would have done anything to escape dinner that night.
Fortunately for Alma, Professor Peck did not seem particularly interested in anyone but himself, and once dinner was served, he commenced on a long and detailed disquisition, as though he had mistaken White Acre for a lecture hall, and his hosts for students.
“There are those,” he began, after an elaborate folding of his napkin, “who have recently submitted that Negroidism is merely a disease of the skin, which could perhaps, using the correct chemical combinations, be washed off, as it were, thus transforming the Negro into a healthy white man. This is incorrect. As my research has proven, a Negro is not a diseased white man, but a species of his own, as I shall demonstrate . . .”
Alma found it challenging to pay attention. Her thoughts were on Cum Grano Salis and the binding closet. Now, this day did not mark the first occasion upon which Alma had heard of genitalia, or even of human sexual function. Unlike other girls—who were told by their families that Indians brought babies, or that impregnation occurred through the insertion of seeds into small cuts in the side of a woman’s body—Alma knew the rudiments of human anatomy, both male and female. There were far too many medical treatises and scientific books around White Acre for her to have remained wholly ignorant on this topic, and the entire language of botany, with which Alma was so intimately familiar, was highly sexualized. (Linnaeus himself had referred to pollination as “marriage,” had called flower petals “noble bed curtains,” and had once daringly described a flower that contained nine stamens and one pistil as “nine men in the same bride’s chamber, with one woman.”)
What’s more, Beatrix would not have her daughters be raised as self-endangering innocents, particularly given Prudence’s natural mother’s unfortunate history, so it was Beatrix herself who—with much stuttering and suffering, and a good deal of fanning about the neck—had imparted to Alma and Prudence the essential proceedings of human propagation. This conversation nobody had enjoyed, and everyone had worked together to end it as swiftly as possible—but the information had been transmitted. Beatrix had even once warned Alma that certain parts of the body were never to be touched except in the interest of cleanliness, and that one must never linger at the privy, for instance, due to the dangers of solitary unchaste passions. Alma had paid no mind to the warning at the time because it made no sense: Who would ever want to linger at the privy?
But with her discovery of Cum Grano Salis, Alma had suddenly been made aware that the most unimaginable sensual events were transpiring all over the world. Men and women were doing simply astonishing things with each other, and they were doing them not only for procreation but for recreation—as were men and men, and women and women, and children and servants, and farmers and travelers, and sailors and seamstresses, and sometimes even husbands and wives! One could even do the most astonishing things to oneself, as Alma had just learned in the binding closet. With or without a light coating of nut oil.
Did other people do this? Not only the gymnastic acts of penetration, but this private rubbing? Anonymous wrote that many people did it—even ladies of gentle birth, by his account and experience. What about Prudence? Did she do this thing? Had she ever experienced the spongy petals, the vortex of up-fire, the bursting of phosphorescence? This was impossible to imagine; Prudence did not even perspire. It was difficult enough to read Prudence’s facial expressions, much less surmise at what was hiding beneath her clothes, or buried in her mind.