The Signature of All Things (60 page)

The disintegration of the drawings felt like another death to Alma: now, even the phantom was gone. It made her wish to weep, and most certainly made her begin doubting her judgment. She had seen so many faces in Tahiti over the previous ten months, but now she wondered whether she truly could have identified The Boy at all, even if he had been standing in front of her. Perhaps she had seen him, after all? Mightn’t he have been one of those young men at the wharf in Papeete, on the first day she’d arrived? Mightn’t she have walked past him, any number of times? Mightn’t he possibly even live here at the settlement, and she had simply grown immune to his face? She had nothing to check her memory against anymore. The Boy had barely existed, and now he did not exist at all. She closed the valise as though closing the lid of a coffin.

Alma could not remain in Tahiti. She knew this now without a doubt. She ought never to have come at all. What an awful lot of energy and resolve and
expense
it had required to get herself to this island of riddles, and now she was stranded, and for no good reason. Worse, she had become a burden to this small settlement of honest souls, whose food she had eaten, whose resources she had strained, whose children she had deputized for her own irresponsible purposes. What a fine state of affairs, was this! Alma felt she had fully lost the thread of her life’s purpose, whatever flimsy thread it had ever been. She had interrupted her dull but honorable study of mosses to advance this feeble search for a ghost—or, rather,
two
ghosts: for Ambrose and The Boy, both. And for what? She knew no more about Ambrose now than she had known before she arrived here. All reports in Tahiti declared her husband to have been precisely the man he’d always seemed: a gentle virtuous soul, incapable of malfeasance, too good for this world.

It was beginning to dawn upon her that, very possibly, The Boy may never have existed at all. Otherwise Alma would have found him by now, or somebody would have spoken of him—even if in the most roundabout manner. Ambrose must have invented him. This idea was sadder than anything else Alma could have imagined. The Boy had been the figment of a lonely man with an unsound mind. Ambrose had so longed for a companion, he’d drawn himself one. Through his conjuring of a friend—a beautiful
phantom lover—he had found the spiritual marriage for which he’d always longed. It made a certain sense. Ambrose’s mind had never been steady, not even under the best of circumstances! This was a man whose dearest friend had committed him to a hospital for the insane, and who had believed that he could see God’s fingerprints pressed into the botanical. Ambrose was a man who saw angels in orchids, and who once believed he was an angel himself—to think of it! She had come halfway around the world, looking for a wraith concocted from a lonely man’s fragile and demented imagination.

It was a simple story, yet she had complicated it with her futile investigations. Perhaps she had wished for the tale to be more sinister, if only to render her own story more tragic. Perhaps she had wished Ambrose to be guilty of abominable things, of pederasty and depravity, such that she could despise him, rather than long for him. Perhaps she had wished to find evidence not of one Boy here in Tahiti, but of
many
boys—a throng of catamites, whom Ambrose had violated and ruined, one after the other. But there was no evidence of any such thing. The truth was merely this: Alma had been foolish and libidinous enough to marry an innocent young man possessed of faulty sanity. When that young man disappointed her, she had been cruel and angry enough to exile him here to the South Seas, where he had died lonely and unhinged, adrift in fantasies, lost in a hopeless little settlement governed—if one could even call it governance!—by a guileless, ineffectual old missionary.

As for why Ambrose’s valise and his drawings had remained untouched (except by nature) in Alma’s unguarded
fare
in Tahiti for nearly a year, when all of her other possessions had been borrowed, pilfered, picked apart, or ransacked . . . well, she simply did not have the imagination to solve that mystery. What’s more, she did not have the remaining will to contend with yet another impossible question.

There was nothing more to be learned here.

She could find no inducement to stay. She would need to assemble a plan for the remaining years of her life. She had been impulsive and misguided, but she would leave on the next whaling ship heading north, and find someplace to live. She knew only that she must not go back to Philadelphia. She had relinquished White Acre and could never return there; it would be unfair to Prudence, who had the right to take possession of the estate
without Alma hovering about as a nuisance. In any case, it would be a humiliation to return home. She would need to begin anew. She would also need to find a way to support herself. She would send word tomorrow to Papeete that she was looking for a berth on a good ship with a respectable captain who had heard of Dick Yancey.

She was not at peace, but at least she was decided.

Chapter Twenty-five

F
our days later Alma awoke at dawn to joyous shouting from the Hiro contingent. She stepped outside her
fare
to discover the source of the commotion. Her five wild little boys were running up and down the beach, turning flips and somersaults in the early morning light, shouting in enthusiastic Tahitian. When Hiro saw her, he ran up the zigzagged pathway to her door with wild speed.

“Tomorrow morning is here!” he shouted. His eyes were blazing with excitement, such as she had never before seen, even in this quite excitable child.

Baffled, Alma took his arm, trying to slow him down and make sense of him.

“What are you saying, Hiro?” she asked him.

“Tomorrow morning is here!” he shouted again, jumping up and down as he spoke, unable to contain himself.

“Tell me in Tahitian,” she commanded, in Tahitian.

“
Teie o tomorrow morning!
” he shouted back, which was merely the same nonsense in Tahitian as it was in English: “Tomorrow morning is here.”

Alma looked up and saw a crowd gathering on the beach—everyone from the mission, as well as people from the nearby villages. All were as excited as the little boys. She saw the Reverend Welles running toward the
shore with his funny, crooked gait. She saw Sister Manu running, and Sister Etini, and the local fishermen, too.

“Look!” said Hiro, directing Alma’s eyes to the sea. “Tomorrow morning is arrive!”

Alma looked out to the bay and saw—how could she not have noticed immediately?—a fleet of long canoes slicing across the water toward the beach with incredible speed, powered by dozens of dark-skinned rowers. In all her time in Tahiti, she had never lost her wonder at the power and agility of such canoes. When flotillas such as this came rushing across the bay, she always felt as though she were watching the arrival of Jason and the Argonauts, or Odysseus’s fleet. Most of all, she loved the moment when, drawing close to shore, the rowers heaved their muscles in one last push, and the canoes flew out of the sea as though shot forth by great invisible bows, landing on the beach in a dramatic, exuberant arrival.

Alma had questions, but Hiro had already dashed over to greet the canoes, as had the rest of the growing crowd. Alma had never before seen so many people on the beach. Caught up in the excitement, she, too, ran toward the boats. These were exceptionally fine, even majestic, canoes. The grandest must have been sixty feet, and in its bow stood a man of impressive height and build—clearly the leader of this expedition. He was Tahitian, but as she drew nearer, she could see that he was impeccably dressed in the suit of a European man. The villagers gathered around him, chanting songs of welcome, carrying him from the canoe like a king.

The people carried the stranger to the Reverend Welles. Alma pushed through the throng, drawing as near as she could. The man bent down over the Reverend Welles, and the two pressed their noses together in the customary greeting of deepest affection. She heard the Reverend Welles say, in a voice wet with tears, “Welcome back to your home, blessed son of God.”

The stranger pulled back from the embrace. He turned to smile at the crowd, and Alma caught her first direct look at his face. If she had not been propped up by the crush of so many people, she might have fallen over with the force of recognition.

The words
tomorrow morning
—which Ambrose had written on the backs of all the drawings of The Boy—had not been a code. “Tomorrow morning” was not some sort of dreamy wish for a utopian future, or an anagram, or any manner of occult concealment whatsoever. For once in his
life, Ambrose Pike had been perfectly straightforward: Tomorrow Morning was simply a person’s name.

And now, indeed, Tomorrow Morning had arrived.

I
t enraged her.

That was her initial reaction. She felt—perhaps irrationally—that she had been tricked. Why, in all her months of search and privation, had she never heard mention of him—this regal figure, this adored visitant, this man who brought all of northern Tahiti running and cheering to the shoreline to greet him? How had his name or his existence never been alluded to, not even faintly? Nobody had once used the words
tomorrow morning
with Alma, unless in literal reference to something that was planned for the next day, and certainly nobody had ever mentioned the island’s universal adoration of some elusive, handsome native who might someday arrive out of nowhere and be worshipped. There had never even been a rumor of such a figure. How could someone of this much consequence simply
appear
?

While the rest of the crowd moved along toward the mission church in a cheering, chanting mass, Alma stood quietly on the beach, struggling to make sense of all this. New questions replaced old beliefs. Whatever certainties she had felt only last week were now breaking up, like an ice dam at the beginning of spring. The apparition she had come here to seek indeed existed, but he was not a Boy; rather, he appeared to be some sort of king. What business did Ambrose have with an island king? How had they met? Why had Ambrose depicted Tomorrow Morning as a simple fisherman, when clearly he was a man of considerable power?

Alma’s stubborn, relentless, internal-speculation engine began to spin once more. This sensation only angered her further. She was so weary of speculation. She could not bear anymore to invent new theories. All her life, she felt, she had lived in a state of speculation. All she had ever wanted was to
know things
, yet still and now—even after all these years of tireless questioning—all she did was ponder and wonder and guess.

No more speculation. No more of it. She would now need to know everything. She would insist on knowing.

A
lma could hear the church before she reached it. The singing coming from within that humble building was like nothing she had ever heard. It was a roar of jubilation. There was no room inside the church for her; she stood outside with the jostling, chanting crowd, and listened. The hymns that Alma had heard in this church in the past—the voices of the eighteen congregants of the Reverend Welles’s mission—had been thin and reedy tunes compared to what she was hearing now. For the first time, she could understand what Tahitian music was truly meant to be, and why it needed hundreds of voices roaring and bellowing together in order to perform its function: to outsing the ocean. That’s what these people were doing now, in a crashing expression of veneration, both beautiful and dangerous.

At last it quieted, and Alma could hear a man speaking—clearly and powerfully—to the congregation. He spoke in Tahitian, in a disquisition that, at times, was almost a chant. She pushed closer to the door and peered in: it was Tomorrow Morning, tall and splendid, standing at the pulpit, arms raised, calling out to the congregation. Alma’s command of Tahitian was still too basic for her to follow the entire sermon, but she could comprehend that this man was offering up a passionate testament to the living Christ. But that was not all he was doing; he was also cavorting with this gathering of people, the same way Alma had many times watched the boys of the Hiro contingent cavort with the waves. His mettle and nerve were unwavering. He pulled laughter and tears from the congregation, as well as solemnity and riotous joy. She could feel her own emotions being tugged along by the timbre and intensity of his voice, even as his words themselves remained largely incomprehensible.

Tomorrow Morning’s performance went on for well over an hour. He had them singing; he had them praying; he had them prepared, it seemed, to attack at dawn. Alma thought, My mother would have despised this. Beatrix Whittaker had never gone in for evangelical passions; she’d believed that frenzied people were in danger of forgetting their manners and their reason, and then where would we be as a civilization? In any case, Tomorrow Morning’s riproarious soliloquy was unlike anything Alma had ever before heard at the Reverend Welles’s church—or
anywhere
, for that matter. This was not a Philadelphia minister, dutifully dispensing Lutheran teachings,
or Sister Manu and her simple, monosyllabic homilies; this was oration. This was the drums of war. This was Demosthenes defending Ctesiphon. This was Pericles honoring the dead of Athens. This was Cicero rebuking Catiline.

What Tomorrow Morning’s speech most certainly did
not
bring to Alma’s mind was the humility and gentleness she had come to associate with this modest little mission by the sea. There was nothing humble or gentle about Tomorrow Morning. Indeed, she had never seen such an audacious, self-possessed figure. An adage of Cicero’s came to her in its original, mighty Latin (the only language, she felt, that could stand up to the thundering groundswell of native eloquence she was right now witnessing): “Nemo umquam neque poeta neque orator fuit, qui quemquam meliorem quam se arbitraretur.”

Never did there exist a poet or an orator who thought there was another better than himself.