What, then, would Alma do?
Alma would destroy the book, she decided, and say nothing of it to anyone. In fact, she would destroy it right now. This very afternoon. Without reading another word of it.
She opened the book again, to a random page. Again she encountered that familiar, respectable voice, speaking on the most unbelievable topic.
“I wished to discover,” the author wrote, “at what age a woman loses her ability to receive sensual pleasure. My friend the brothel owner, who had assisted me in the past in so many experiments, told me of a certain courtesan who had enjoyed her occupation actively from the age of fourteen until the age of sixty-four, and who now, at the age of seventy, lived in a city not far from my own. I wrote to the woman in question, and she responded with a letter of charming candor and warmth. In the space of a month, I had come to visit her, where she allowed me to examine her genitalia, which were not easily distinguished from the genitalia of a much younger woman. She demonstrated that she was still most capable of pleasure, indeed. Using her fingers and a light coating of nut oil upon her hood of passion, she stroked herself toward a crisis of rapture—”
Alma shut the book. This book must not be kept. She would burn it in the kitchen fire. Not this afternoon, when someone would see her, but later tonight.
She opened it up again, once more at random.
“I have come to believe,” the calm narrator continued, “that there are some people who benefit both in body and mind by regular beatings to the naked posterior. Many times, I have seen this practice lift the spirits of both men and women, and I suspect it may be the most salubrious treatment we have at our disposal for melancholia and other diseases of the mind. For two years, I kept company with the most delightful maid, a milliner’s girl, whose innocent and even angelic orbs became firm and strong with repeated flagellation, and whose sorrows were routinely erased by the taste of the whip. As I have described earlier in these pages, I once kept in my offices an elaborate couch, made for me by a fine London upholsterer, specially fitted with winches and ropes. This maid liked nothing more than to be tied securely upon that couch, where she would hold my member in her mouth, sucking me as a child enjoys a stick of sugar, whilst a companion—”
Alma shut the book again. Anyone with a mind even remotely above the vulgar would stop reading this thing immediately. But what about the cankerworm of curiosity that lived within Alma’s belly? What about its desire to feed daily upon the novel, the extraordinary, the true?
Alma opened the book again, and read for another hour, overcome by stimulus, doubt, and havoc. Her conscience tugged at her skirt hems, pleading with her to stop, but she could not make herself stop. What she discovered in these pages made her feel vexed, frothy, and breathless. When she thought she might actually faint from the tangled stalks of imagination that were now waving throughout her head, she slammed shut the book at last, and locked it back into the innocuous trunk from which it had come.
Hurriedly, she left the carriage house, smoothing her apron with her damp hands. Outside it was cool and overcast, as it had been all year, with an unsatisfying mizzle of fog. The air was so thick one nearly could have dissected it with a scalpel. There were important tasks to be completed this day. Alma had promised Hanneke de Groot that she would help supervise the lowering of cider caskets into the basement for winter. Somebody had littered papers beneath the lilacs along the South Wood fence; that would need to be tidied. The shrubbery behind her mother’s Grecian garden had been invaded by ivy, and a boy should be dispatched to clear it. She would attend to these responsibilities immediately, with her customary efficiency.
Pricks and holes.
All she could think about were pricks and holes.
* * *
Evening arrived. The dining room was lit and china laid. Guests were expected presently. Alma was freshly dressed for dinner, bundled in an expensive gown of jaconet muslin. She should have been waiting in the drawing room for the guests, but instead she excused herself for a moment to the library. She locked herself in the binding closet, behind the hidden door, just off the library entrance. It was the nearest door with a solid lock on it. She did not have the book with her. She did not need the book; the images it conjured had been following her about the estate all afternoon, feral and stubborn and searching.
She was full of thoughts, and these thoughts were making wild demands upon her body. Her quim hurt. It felt deprived. This hurt had been accumulating all afternoon. If anything, the painful sense of deprivation between her legs felt like a kind of witchcraft, a devilish haunting. Her quim wanted rubbing in the fiercest way. Her skirts were a hindrance. She was itching and dying in this gown. She lifted her skirts. Sitting there on the small stool in the tiny, dark, locked binding closet, with its smells of glue and leather, she opened her legs and began petting herself, poking at herself, moving her fingers in and around herself, frantically exploring her spongy petals, trying to find the devil who hid in there, eager to erase that devil with her hand.
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 ha
ve 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.
What about Arthur Dixon, their tutor? Was anything lurking in his mind besides academic tedium? Was anything buried in his body, beyond his twitches and his perpetual dry cough? She stared at Arthur, seeking some sign of sensual life, but his figure, his face, revealed nothing. She could not imagine him in a shudder of ecstasy such as the one she had just experienced in the binding closet. She could scarcely imagine him reclining, and could certainly not imagine him unclothed. He gave every indication of being a man who had been born sitting up, wearing a tight-fitting waistcoat and wool breeches, holding a dense book, and sighing unhappily. If he had urges, where and when did he release them?
Alma felt a cool hand on her arm. It was her mother’s.
“What is your opinion, Alma, of Professor Peck’s treatise?”
Beatrix knew Alma had not been listening. How did she know that? What else did she know? Alma gathered herself quickly, cast her mind back over the beginning of the dinner, tried to retrieve the few ideas she’d actually heard. Uncharacteristically, she came up with nothing. She cleared her throat and said, “I would prefer to read the entirety of Professor Peck’s book before rendering any judgment.”
Beatrix cast her daughter a sharp look: surprised, critical, and unimpressed.
Professor Peck, however, took Alma’s comment as an invitation to speak more—in fact, to recite a good majority of the first chapter of his book, from memory, for the benefit of the ladies at the table. Henry Whittaker would not normally have permitted such an act of perfect tedium in his dining room, but Alma could see by his face that her father was weary and depleted, most likely on the brink of another one of his attacks. Impending illness was the only thing that ever quieted her father like this. If Alma knew Henry, and she did know him, he would be in bed all day tomorrow, and probably for the entirety of the week to come. For the time being, though, Henry endured Professor Peck’s droning recitation by pouring himself one liberal dose of claret after another, and by closing his eyes for long periods.
Meanwhile, Alma studied George Hawkes, the botanical publisher. Did he do this thing? Did he ever rub himself to a crisis of pleasure? Anonymous wrote that men practiced onanism even more frequently than women. A young man of health and vigor could reportedly coax himself to ejaculation several times a day. Nobody would describe George Hawkes as being exactly full of vigor, but he was a young man with a large, heavy, perspiring body—a body that did seem to be full of something. Had George done this act recently, perhaps even on this day? What was George Hawkes’s member doing right now? Resting in languor? Or tending toward desire?
Suddenly, the most astonishing imaginable event occurred.
Prudence Whittaker spoke.
“Pardon me, sir,” Prudence said, directing her words and her placid gaze precisely at Professor Peck, “if I understand you correctly, it seems you have identified the different textures of human hair as evidence that Negroes, Indians, Orientals, and the white man are all members of different species. But I cannot help but wonder at your supposition. On this very estate, sir, we raise several varieties of sheep. Perhaps you noticed them as you came up the drive earlier this evening? Some of our sheep have silken hair, some have coarse hair, and some have dense woolen curls. Surely, sir, you would not doubt that—despite their differences in coats—they are all sheep. And if you’ll excuse me, I believe that all these varieties of sheep can also be interbred successfully with one another. Is it not the same with man? Could one not, then, make
the argument that Negroes, Indians, Orientals, and the white man are also all one species?”
All eyes turned to Prudence. Alma felt as though she had been jolted awake by a dousing of icy water. Henry’s eyes opened. He set down his glass and sat straight up, his attention fully piqued. It would have taken a subtle eye to see it, but Beatrix sat up a bit straighter in her chair, too, as though putting herself on alert. Arthur Dixon, the tutor, widened his eyes at Prudence in alarm, and then immediately looked about anxiously, as though he might be blamed for this outburst. There was much to marvel at here, indeed. This was the longest speech Prudence had ever given at the dinner table—or indeed anywhere.
Unfortunately, Alma had not been following the discussion up to this point, so she wasn’t entirely certain if Prudence’s statement was accurate or relevant, but, by God, the girl had spoken! Everyone was startled, it seemed, except Prudence herself, who gazed upon Professor Peck with her customary cool beauty, unperturbed, blue eyes wide and clear, awaiting a response. It was as though she had been challenging eminent Princetonians every day of her life.
“We cannot compare humans to sheep, young lady,” Professor Peck corrected. “Simply because two creatures can breed . . . well, if your father will excuse my mentioning this topic in front of the ladies?” Henry, quite attentive now, gave a sovereign wave of approval. “Simply because two creatures can breed, does not mean they are members of the same species. Horses can breed with donkeys, as you may know. Also, canaries with finches, roosters with partridge, and the he-goat with the ewe. This does not make them biologically equivalent. Moreover, it is well known that Negroes attract different types of head lice and intestinal worms than whites, thus incontrovertibly proving species differentiation.”