“I am aware that everyone has disappointments, Hanneke.”
“I’m not certain you are. You are still young, so you think only of your own self. You do not notice the tribulations that occur all around you, to other people. Do not protest; it is true. I am not condemning you. I was as selfish as you, when I was your age. It is the custom of the young to be selfish. Now I am wiser. It’s a pity we cannot put an old head on young shoulders, or you could be wise, too. But someday you will understand that nobody passes through this world without suffering—no matter what you may think of them and their supposed good fortune.”
“What are we to do, then, with our suffering?” Alma asked.
This was not a question Alma would ever have posed to a minister, or a philosopher, or a poet, but she was curious—desperate, even—to hear an answer from Hanneke de Groot.
“Well, child, you may do whatever you like with your suffering,” Hanneke said mildly. “It belongs to you. But I shall tell you what I do with mine. I grasp it by the small hairs, I cast it to the ground, and I grind it under the heel of my boot. I suggest you learn to do the same.”
* * *
And so Alma did. She learned how to grind her disappointments under the heel of her boot. She had sturdy boots in her possession, too, and thus she was well outfitted for the task. She made an effort to turn her sorrows into a gritty powder that could be kicked into the ditch. She did this every day, sometimes even several times a day, and that is how she proceeded.
The months passed. Alma helped her father, she helped Hanneke, she worked in the greenhouses, and sometimes she arranged formal dinners at White Acre for Henry’s diversion. Rarely did she see her old friend Retta. It was rarer still to see Prudence, but it did occur sometimes. From habit alone, Alma attended church services on Sundays, although she often, rather disgracefully, followed up her visits to church with visits to the binding closet, in order to evacuate her mind by touching her body. It was no longer joyful, the habit in the binding closet, but it made her feel somewhat unleashed.
She kept herself occupied, but she was not occupied enough. Within a year, she sensed an encroaching lethargy that frightened her severely. She longed for some sort of employment or enterprise that would provide vent for her considerable intellectual energies. At first, her father’s commercial matters were helpful in this regard, as the work filled her days with daunting piles of responsibilities, but soon enough Alma’s efficiency became her enemy. She carried out her tasks for the Whittaker Company too well and too quickly. Soon, having learned everything she needed to know about botanical importing and exporting, she was able to complete Henry’s work for him in the matter of four or five hours a day. This was simply not enough hours. This left far too many remaining hours free, and free hours were dangerous. Free hours created too much opportunity for examining the disappointments she was meant to be grinding under her boot heel.
It was also around this time—the year after everyone married—that Alma came to a significant and even shocking realization: contrary to her childhood belief, she discovered that White Acre was not, in fact, a very large place. Quite the opposite, actually: it was a tiny place. Yes, the estate had grown to more than a thousand acres, with a mile of riverfront, with a sizable patch of virgin forest, with an immense house, with a spectacular library, with a vast network of stables, gardens, glasshouses, ponds, and creeks—but if this constituted the boundaries of one’s entire world (as it did now for Alma), then it was not large at all. Any place that one could not leave was not large—particularly if one was a naturalist!
The problem was that Alma had already spent her life studying the nature of White Acre, and she knew the place too well. She knew every tree and rock and bird and lady’s slipper. She knew every spider, every beetle, every ant. There was nothing new here for her to explore. Yes, she could have studied the novel tropical plants that arrived at her father’s impressive greenhouses every week—but that is not discovery! Somebody else had already discovered those plants! And the task of a naturalist, as Alma understood it, was to discover. But there would be no such chance for Alma, for she had reached the limits of her botanical borders already. This realization frightened her and made her unable to sleep at night, which, in turn, frightened her more. She feared the restlessness that was creeping upon her. She could almost hear her mind pacing within her skull, caged and bothered, and she felt the weight of all the years she had yet to live, bearing down upon her with heavy menace.
A born taxonomist with nothing new to classify, Alma kept her uneasiness at bay by setting other things into order. She tidied and alphabetized her father’s papers. She smartened up the library, discarding books of lesser value. She arranged the collection jars on her own shelves by height, and she created ever more refined systems of superfluous filing, which is how it came to pass that—early one morning in June of 1822—Alma Whittaker sat alone in her carriage house, poring over all the research articles she had ever written for George Hawkes. She was trying to decide whether to organize these old issues of Botanica Americana by subject or by chronology. It was an unnecessary task, but it would fill an hour.
At the bottom of this pile, though, Alma found her earliest article—the one she had written when she was only sixteen years old, about Monotropa hypopitys. She read it again. The writing was juvenile, but the science was sound, and her explanation of this shade-loving plant as a clever, bloodless parasite still felt valid. When she looked closely at her old illustrations of Monotropa, though, she almost had to laugh at their rudimentary crudeness. Her diagrams looked as though they had been sketched by a child, which, essentially, they had been. Not that she had become a glittering artist over the past years, but these early pictures were quite rough indeed. George had been kind to publish them at all. Her Monotropa was meant to be depicted growing out of a bed of moss, but in Alma’s depiction, the plant looked to be growing out of a lumpy old mattress. Nobody would have been able to identify those dismal clumps at the bottom of the drawing as moss at all. She ought to have shown much more detail. As a good naturalist, she ought to have made an illustration that depicted quite precisely in which variety of moss Monotropa hypopitys grew.
On further consideration, though, Alma realized that she herself did not know in which variety of moss Monotropa hypopitys grew. On still further consideration, she realized that she was not entirely certain she could distinguish between different varieties of moss at all. How many were there, anyway? A few? A dozen? Several hundred? Shockingly, she did not know.
Then again, where would she have learned it? Who had ever written about moss? Or even about Bryophyta in general? There was no single authoritative book on the subject that she knew of. Nobody had made a career out of it. Who would have wanted to? Mosses were not orchids, not cedars of Lebanon. They were not big or beautiful or showy. Nor was moss something medicinal and lucrative, upon which a man like Henry Whittaker could make a fortune. (Although Alma did remember her father telling her that he had packed his precious cinchona seeds in dried moss, to preserve them during transport to Java.) Perhaps Gronovius had written something about mosses? Maybe. But the old Dutchman’s work was nearly seventy years old by now—very much out of date and terribly incomplete. What was clear was that nobody paid much attention to the stuff. Alma had even chinked up the drafty old walls of her carriage house with wads of moss, as though it were common cotton batting.
She had overlooked it.
Alma stood up quickly, wrapped herself in a shawl, tucked a large magnifying glass into her pocket, and ran outside. It was a fresh morning, cool and somewhat overcast. The light was perfect. She did not have to go far. At a high spot along the riverbank, she knew there to be a large outcropping of damp limestone boulders, shaded by a screen of nearby trees. There, she remembered, she would find mosses, for that’s where she had harvested the insulation for her study.
She had remembered correctly. Just at that border of rock and wood, Alma came to the first boulder in the out
cropping. The stone was larger than a sleeping ox. As she had suspected and hoped, it was blanketed in moss. Alma knelt in the tall grass and brought her face as near as she could to the stone. And there, rising no more than an inch above the surface of the boulder, she saw a great and tiny forest. Nothing moved within this mossy world. She peered at it so closely that she could smell it—dank and rich and old. Gently, Alma pressed her hand into this tight little timberland. It compacted itself under her palm and then sprang back to form without complaint. There was something stirring about its response to her. The moss felt warm and spongy, several degrees warmer than the air around it, and far more damp than she had expected. It appeared to have its own weather.
Alma put the magnifying lens to her eye and looked again. Now the miniature forest below her gaze sprang into majestic detail. She felt her breath catch. This was a stupefying kingdom. This was the Amazon jungle as seen from the back of a harpy eagle. She rode her eye above the surprising landscape, following its paths in every direction. Here were rich, abundant valleys filled with tiny trees of braided mermaid hair and minuscule, tangled vines. Here were barely visible tributaries running through that jungle, and here was a miniature ocean in a depression in the center of the boulder, where all the water pooled.
Just across this ocean—which was half the size of Alma’s shawl—she found another continent of moss altogether. On this new continent, everything was different. This corner of the boulder must receive more sunlight than the other, she surmised. Or slightly less rain? In any case, this was a new climate entirely. Here, the moss grew in mountain ranges the length of Alma’s arms, in elegant, pine tree–shaped clusters of darker, more somber green. On another quadrant of the same boulder still, she found patches of infinitesimally small deserts, inhabited by some kind of sturdy, dry, flaking moss that had the appearance of cactus. Elsewhere, she found deep, diminutive fjords—so deep that, incredibly, even now in the month of June—the mosses within were still chilled by lingering traces of winter ice. But she also found warm estuaries, miniature cathedrals, and limestone caves the size of her thumb.
Then Alma lifted her face and saw what was before her—dozens more such boulders, more than she could count, each one similarly carpeted, each one subtly different. She felt herself growing breathless. This was the entire world. This was bigger than a world. This was the firmament of the universe, as seen through one of William Herschel’s mighty telescopes. This was planetary and vast. These were ancient, unexplored galaxies, rolling forth in front of her—and it was all right here! She could still see her house from here. She could see the familiar old boats on the Schuylkill River. She could hear the distant voices of her father’s orchardmen working in the peach grove. If Hanneke had rung the bell for mealtime at that very instant, she would have heard it.
Alma’s world and the moss world had been knitted together this whole time, lying on top of each other, crawling over each other. But one of these worlds was loud and large and fast, where the other was quiet and tiny and slow—and only one of these worlds seemed immeasurable.
Alma sank her fingers into the shallow green fur and felt a surge of joyful anticipation. This could belong to her! No botanist before her had ever committed himself uniquely to the study of this undervalued phylum, but Alma could do it. She had the time for it, as well as the patience. She had the competence. She most certainly had the microscopes for it. She even had the publisher for it—because whatever else had occurred between them (or had not occurred between them), George Hawkes would always be happy to publish the findings of A. Whittaker, whatever she might turn up.
Recognizing all this, Alma’s existence at once felt bigger and much, much smaller—but a pleasant sort of smaller. The world had scaled itself down into endless inches of possibility. Her life could be lived in generous miniature. Best of all, Alma realized, she would never learn everything about mosses—for she could tell already that there was simply too much of the stuff in the world; they were everywhere, and they were profoundly varied. She would probably die of old age before she understood even half of what was occurring in this one single boulder field. Well, huzzah to that! It meant that Alma had work stretched ahead of her for the rest of her life. She need not be idle. She need not be unhappy. Perhaps she need not even be lonely.
She had a task.
She would learn mosses.
If Alma had been a Roman Catholic, she might have crossed herself in gratitude to God at this discovery—for the encounter did have the weightless, wonderful sensation of religious conversion. But Alma was not a woman of excessive religious passion. Even so, her heart rose in hope. Even so, the words she now spoke aloud sounded every bit like prayer:
“Praise be the labors that lie before me,” she said. “Let us begin.”
Aerides odoratum, Lour
PART THREE
The Disturbance of Messages
Chapter Twelve
By 1848, Alma Whittaker was just beginning work on her new book, The Complete Mosses of North America. In the previous twenty-six years, she had published two others—The Complete Mosses of Pennsylvania and The Complete Mosses of the Northeastern United States—both of which were long, exhaustive, and handsomely produced by her old friend George Hawkes.
Alma’s first two books had been warmly received within the botanical community. She had been flatteringly reviewed in a few of the more respectable journals, and was generally acknowledged as a wizard of bryophytic taxonomy. She had mastered the subject not only by studying the mosses of White Acre and its surroundings, but also by purchasing, trading, and cajoling samples from other botanical collectors all over the country and the world. These transactions had been easily enough executed. Alma already knew how to import botanicals, and moss was effortless to transport. All one had to do was dry it, box it up, and put it on a ship, and it would survive its journey without the slightest trouble. It took up little space and weighed virtually nothing, so ships’ captains did not mind having it as extra cargo. It never rotted. Dried moss was so perfectly designed for transport, in fact, that people had already been using it as packing material for centuries. Indeed, early in her explorations, Alma had discovered that her father’s dockside warehouses were already filled with several hundred varieties of mosses from across the planet, all tucked into neglected corners and crates, all ignored and unexamined—until Alma had gotten them under her microscope.
Through such explorations and imports, Alma had been able, over the past twenty-six years, to collect nearly eight thousand species of mosses, which she had preserved in a special herbarium, stored in the driest hayloft of the carriage house. Her body of knowledge in the field of global bryology, then, was almost excruciatingly dense, despite the fact that she herself had never traveled outside Pennsylvania. She kept up correspondence with botanists from Tierra del Fuego to Switzerland, and carefully watched the complex taxonomical debates that raged in the more obscure scientific journals as to whether this or that sprig of Neckera or Pogonatum constituted a new species, or was merely a modified variation of an already documented species. Sometimes she chimed in with her own opinions, with her own meticulously argued papers.
What’s more, she now published under her own full name. She was no longer “A. Whittaker,” but simply “Alma Whittaker.” No initials were appended to the name—no evidence of degrees, no membership in distinguished gentlemanly scientific organizations. Nor was she even a “Mrs.,” with the dignity that such a title affords a lady. By now, quite obviously, everyone knew she was a woman. It mattered little. Moss was not a competitive domain, and that is the reason, perhaps, that she had been allowed to enter the field with so little resistance. That, and her own dogged perseverance.
As Alma came to know the world of moss over the years, she better understood why nobody had properly studied it before: to the innocent eye, there appeared to be so little to study. Mosses were typically defined by what they lacked, not by what they were, and, indeed, they lacked much. Mosses bore no fruit
. Mosses had no roots. Mosses could grow no more than a few inches tall, for they contained no internal cellular skeleton with which to support themselves. Mosses could not transport water within their bodies. Mosses did not even engage in sex. (Or at least they did not engage in sex in any obvious manner, unlike lilies or apple blossoms—or any other flower, in fact—with their overt displays of male and female organs.) Mosses kept their propagation a mystery to the naked human eye. For that reason, they were also known by the evocative name Cryptogamae—“hidden marriage.”
In every way mosses could seem plain, dull, modest, even primitive. The simplest weed sprouting from the humblest city sidewalk appeared infinitely more sophisticated by comparison. But here is what few people understood, and what Alma came to learn: Moss is inconceivably strong. Moss eats stone; scarcely anything, in return, eats moss. Moss dines upon boulders, slowly but devastatingly, in a meal that lasts for centuries. Given enough time, a colony of moss can turn a cliff into gravel, and turn that gravel into topsoil. Under shelves of exposed limestone, moss colonies create dripping, living sponges that hold on tight and drink calciferous water straight from the stone. Over time, this mix of moss and mineral will itself turn into travertine marble. Within that hard, creamy-white marble surface, one will forever see veins of blue, green, and gray—the traces of the antediluvian moss settlements. St. Peter’s Basilica itself was built from the stuff, both created by and stained with the bodies of ancient moss colonies.
Moss grows where nothing else can grow. It grows on bricks. It grows on tree bark and roofing slate. It grows in the Arctic Circle and in the balmiest tropics; it also grows on the fur of sloths, on the backs of snails, on decaying human bones. Moss, Alma learned, is the first sign of botanic life to reappear on land that has been burned or otherwise stripped down to barrenness. Moss has the temerity to begin luring the forest back to life. It is a resurrection engine. A single clump of mosses can lie dormant and dry for forty years at a stretch, and then vault back again into life with a mere soaking of water.