Two Moons

Praise for Thomas Mallon’s

TWO MOONS

“Mallon has a fabulous eye for the people at the edge of the historical picture.… The poisonous Washington atmosphere of hateful Reconstruction politics, tinged by the specter of malaria, practically seeps from the pages of the book.… 
Two Moons
is a novel about a quaint kind of homegrown ambition and optimism that is uniquely American. You could call Thomas Mallon either a dreamy scholar or a scholarly dreamer. Either way, his fiction is as lucent as moonlight.”

—The Washington Post

“[A] playful, bittersweet, nearly perfect novel.… The book’s blend of brainy repartee, soulful poignancy and literary game-playing calls to mind the work of Tom Stoppard.… Droll, probing and heartbreaking.… Keeping one eye on the cosmos and another on its characters’ dreaming and scheming, the book does justice to the charms, struggles and inconsequence of human affairs in its own or any other era.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Mallon spreads, like a tapestry, a defining historical moment. He then illuminates it through the lives of its minor players, both real and imagined.… 
Two Moons
is rich in texture and atmosphere.”

—Star Tribune
(Minneapolis)

“Thomas Mallon’s writing sneaks up on you. No verbal pyrotechnics, a one-foot-after-the-other narrative approach—but every so often, you pause and realize that he’s been stringing together one perfectly balanced sentence after another, chapter after chapter.… Mallon is effective at evoking a time—not so unlike ours—when rationalism and mystical thought overlapped in unpredictable, personal ways.”

—Salon

“A wonderful piece of historical fiction. Mallon is a subtle, careful writer who packs his books with thought-provoking depth.”

—The Denver Post

“Mallon reliably marshals the kind of period detail that makes him a formidable historical novelist.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“American history, technological innovations, and romance excite Mallon’s incisive intelligence and lithe imagination.… Mallon refracts questions of war, women’s rights, and the ordering of the cosmos through the perfect prism of his heroine’s mind, adeptly mixing keen social commentary with sheer entertainment.”

—
Booklist

“A sharp-witted young widow’s progress through post–Civil War Washington’s power-centers dominates this breezy and entertaining historical caper from the popular author of
Henry and Clara
and
Dewey Defeats Truman.…
 Mallon recounts his characters’ respective machinations with good-humored energy in an essentially well-paced narrative.… He composes unfailingly graceful sentences, makes transitions expertly, and communicates nicely both his characters’ and his own pure pleasure in the spectacle of a vigorous country newly at peace and pleased to kick up its political and sexual heels.”

—
Kirkus Reviews

T
HOMAS
M
ALLON

Two Moons

Thomas Mallon is the author of eight novels, including
Watergate, Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman
, and
Fellow Travelers,
and seven works of nonfiction. He is a frequent contributor to
The New Yorker
and
The New York Times Book Review,
among other publications.

www.thomasmallon.com

BOOKS BY THOMAS MALLON

Fiction

Arts and Sciences

Aurora 7

Henry and Clara

Dewey Defeats Truman

Two Moons

Bandbox

Fellow Travelers

Watergate

Nonfiction

Edmund Blunden

A Book of One’s Own

Stolen Words

Rockets and Rodeos

In Fact

Mrs. Paine’s Garage

Yours Ever

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2015

Copyright © 2000 by Thomas Mallon

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, in 2000.

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

Mallon, Thomas.

Two moons / Thomas Mallon.

p.    cm.

I. Title.

PS3563.A43157 T96 2000 813′.54—dc21 99-34235

Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-101-87252-9

eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-87254-3

Cover design by John Gall

Author photograph © William Bodenschatz

v3.1

For Andrea Barrett

Contents

Cover

About the Author

Other Books by This Author

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Epilogue

Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

In the present state of our terrestrial system immortal bodies cannot exist. Had immortality been intended for man on earth, Infinite Wisdom would have adopted another plan …

—Celestial Scenery; or, The Wonders of the Planetary System Displayed,
1839

Open thy lattice, Love,

Listen to me,

In the voyage of life,

Love our pilot will be.

He’ll sit at the helm

Wherever we rove,

And steer by the lodestar

He kindled above.

—Stephen Foster

The black ball rose up the flagpole. Spotting it from two blocks east, Cynthia May allowed herself to slow down. The hoisting of the canvas sphere, as big across as a wagon wheel, meant that ten minutes remained until noon, when Potomac ferry captains and fat boardinghouse mistresses all over northwest Washington would watch it drop and reset their clocks, and she would be due inside the Naval Observatory for her appointment.

She crossed E Street at the corner of Virginia, taking off her hat as she went. March 8th, and already so hot that, after twenty blocks of walking, she’d sweated through the skimpy silk lining beneath the straw. With the hat in one hand and her book in the other, she had no hand free to hold her nose against the stink coming up from the water filling half the street. She wondered why the whole swamp that was Foggy Bottom didn’t sink, once and for all, into the river; and why the steps of the young man who’d been following her at a constant distance these past few blocks now seemed farther away. Had he been slowed by the smell, or by the thin streak of gray he’d no doubt noticed in her hair as soon as she took off her bonnet?

She turned around to smile, to show him the thirty-five years on the face atop her still-slim frame and, God only knew how, still-fast carriage. The boy looked startled, but appreciative, as if pleased to be
fooled by such a handsome woman, however much she might be past eligibility for his serious attention.

She stepped onto the Observatory grounds, this supposed park without a bench to be found. Lifting her skirts and drawing them tight, she hoped to minimize the grass stains they were bound to acquire from the patch of shaded lawn she picked to sit on, a dozen feet from some clerks eating an early lunch. “You filthy thing,” she hissed, smacking the mosquito on her bare wrist.
“Die.”
She closed her eyes, determined, before the interview, to compose herself against the unnatural heat of this city; even now, a quarter century after leaving New Hampshire as a ten-year-old girl, she would not accept it. It was
winter.

Her eyes still shut, she soundlessly recited five trigonometric formulae. Her numbers were fine; fixed and reliable, as she knew they would be. It was her appearance that was shaking her confidence, the spinsterish agitation her face might betray.
Perhaps a bit hysterical,
she could picture the examiners noting at the bottom of her paper, until they realized she was not a spinster but a widow, and their amusement turned to something worse, a depressed sort of pity that would make them decide how, all things being equal (or not) among the candidates, they’d really be better off having some bumptious young man about.