Henry stormed in and out of the bedroom at all hours, undone and disquieted. He was of no assistance. It was much easier when he was gone. He would sit with his wife for only a few moments before crying out, “Oh, I cannot bear it!” and leaving in a storm of curses. He grew disheveled, but Alma had little time for him. She was watching her mother wither away beneath the fine Flemish bedlinens. This was no longer the formidable Beatrix van Devender Whittaker; this was a most miserable and insentient object, ripe with stink and sad with decline. After five days, Beatrix was seized with a total suppression of urine. Her abdomen grew swollen, hard, and hot. She could not live long now.
A doctor arrived, sent by the pharmacist James Garrick, but Alma sent him away. It would do her mother no good to be bled and cupped now. Instead, Alma sent a message back to Mr. Garrick, requesting that he prepare for her a tincture of liquid opium that she could release into her mother’s mouth by small drops every hour.
On the seventh night, Alma was asleep in her own bed when Prudence—who had been sitting with Beatrix—came and woke her with a touch to the shoulder.
“She’s speaking,” Prudence said.
Alma shook her head, trying to establish where she was. She blinked at Prudence’s candle. Who was speaking? She had been dreaming of horses’ hooves and winged animals. She shook her head again, placed herself, remembered.
“What is she saying?” Alma asked.
“She asked me to leave the room,” Prudence said without emotion. “She asked for you.”
Alma drew a shawl around her shoulders.
“You sleep now,” she told Prudence, and took the candle into her mother’s room.
Beatrix’s eyes were open. One of the eyes was shot red with blood. That eye did not move. The other eye moved across Alma’s face, hunting, tracking carefully.
“Mother,” Alma said, and looked around for something to give Beatrix to drink. There was a cup of cold tea on the bedside table, a remnant of Prudence’s recent vigil. Beatrix would not want blasted English tea, not even on her deathbed. Still, it was all there was to drink. Alma held the cup to her mother’s dry lips. Beatrix sipped and then, sure enough, frowned.
“I’ll bring you coffee,” Alma apologized.
Beatrix shook her head, only very slightly.
“What can I bring you?” Alma asked.
There was no response.
“Do you want Hanneke?”
Beatrix did not seem to hear, so Alma repeated the question, this time in Dutch.
“Zal ik Hanneke roepen?”
Beatrix shut her eyes.
“Zal ik Henry roepen?”
There was no response.
Alma took her mother’s hand, which was cold and small. They had never before held hands. She waited. Beatrix did not open her eyes. Alma had nearly dozed off when her mother spoke, and in English.
“Alma.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“Never leave.”
“I won’t leave you.”
But Beatrix shook her head. This is not what she had meant. Once more, she closed her eyes. Again, Alma waited, overcome with exhaustion in this dark room ripe with death. It was a long while before Beatrix found the strength to make her full statement.
“Never leave your father,” she said.
What could Alma say? What does one promise a woman on her deathbed? Especially if that woman is one’s mother? One promises anything.
“I will never leave him,” Alma said.
Beatrix searched Alma’s face again with her one good eye, as though weighing the sincerity of this vow. Evidently satisfied, she closed her eyes once more.
Alma gave her mother another drop of opium. Beatrix’s breathing was quite shallow now and her skin was cold. Alma was certain her mother had already spoken her last words, but nearly two hours later, when Alma had fallen asleep in the chair, she heard a gurgling cough, and woke with a start. She thought Beatrix was choking, but she was only trying to speak again. Once again, Alma wet Beatrix’s lips with the hated tea.
Beatrix said, “My head spins.”
Alma said, “Let me fetch Hanneke for you.”
Astonishingly, Beatrix smiled. “No,” she said. “Het is fijn.”
It is pleasant.
Then Beatrix Whittaker closed her eyes, and—as though by her own decision—she died.
The next morning, Alma, Prudence, and Hanneke worked together to clean and dress the body, wrap it in the shroud, and prepare it for burial. It was silent, sad work.
They did not lay out the body in the parlor for viewing, despite local custom. Beatrix would not have wished to be viewed, and Henry did not want to see his wife’s corpse. He could not bear it, he said. Moreover, in weather this hot a swift burial was the wisest and most hygienic course of action. Beatrix’s body had been moldering even before she’d died, and now they all feared a violent putrefaction. Hanneke dispatched one of White Acre’s carpenters to build a quick and simple coffin. The three women tucked sachets of lavender all throughout the winding-sheets in order to retard the smell, and as soon as the coffin was built, Beatrix’s body was loaded into a wagon and taken to the church, to be stored in the cool basement until the funeral. Alma, Prudence, and Hanneke wound black crepe mourning bands around their upper arms. They were to wear these bands for the next six months. The tightness of the material around her arm made Alma feel like a girded tree.
On the afternoon of the funeral, they walked behind the wagon, following the coffin to the Swedish Lutheran graveyard. The burial was brief, simple, efficient, and respectable. Fewer than a dozen people attended. James Garrick, the pharmacist, was there. He coughed terribly during the entire ceremony. His lungs were ruined, Alma knew, from years of working with the powdered jalap that had made him rich. Dick Yancey was there, his bald pate gleaming in the sun like a weapon. George Hawkes was there, and Alma wished she could have folded herself into his arms. To Alma’s surprise, her waxen erstwhile tutor Arthur Dixon was there, too. She could not imagine how Mr. Dixon had even heard about Beatrix’s death, nor did she realize he had ever been fond of his old employer, but she was touched that he had come, and she told him so. Retta Snow came, too. Retta stood between Alma and Prudence, holding a hand of each, and she remained uncharacteristically silent. In fact, Retta was nearly as stoic as a Whittaker that day, to her credit.
There were no tears from anyone, nor would Beatrix have wanted any. From birth to death, Beatrix had always taught that one must exude credibility, forbearance, and restraint. It would have been a pity now, after this woman’s lifetime of respectability, for things to have gone mawkish at the last moment. Nor, after the funeral, would there be any gathering at White Acre, to drink lemonade and share in remembrances and comfort. Beatrix would not have wished for any of that. Alma knew that her mother had always admired the instructions that Linnaeus—the father of botanical taxonomy—had issued to his own family about his funeral arrangements: “Entertain nobody, and accept no condolences.”
The coffin was lowered into the fresh clay grave. The Lutheran minister spoke. Liturgy, litany, the Apostles’ Creed—it went swiftly by. There was no eulogy, for that was not the Lutheran way, but there was a sermon, familiar and grim. Alma tried to listen, but the minister droned on until she felt stupefied, and only bits of the sermon rose to her ears. Sin is innate, she heard. Grace is a mystery of God’s bequeathing. Grace can be neither earned nor squandered, nor added to, nor diminished. Grace is rare. None shall know who has it. We are baptized unto death. We praise you.
The hot summer sun, setting low, burned cruelly in Alma’s face. Everyone squinted in discomfort. Henry Whittaker was benumbed and bewildered. His only request had been this: once the coffin was in the hole, he’d asked that they cover the lid with straw. He wanted to make sure that, when the first shovelfuls of dirt hit his wife’s casket, the awful sound would be muffled.