Two Moons (12 page)

He tickled her ankles. “Now.”

“All right,” she said, laughing. “I’m coming down.” She leaned into the eyepiece for one last glimpse of Herr Winnecke’s comet (their calculations had indicated it would never be back) and to consider, for a second or two, that her own eye now pressed against the instrument through which Abraham Lincoln, a month after Gettysburg, had looked at the moon and Arcturus. It would be another opportunity for him to proclaim indifference to all matters political and historical. It
would also feel like a betrayal of John May, whose last letters from Tennessee, with their mentions of Father Abraham, were the source of her own grudging fondness for Lincoln.

He offered his hand, helping her down to the linoleum patterned like a carpet at the foot of the stepladder. The modern flooring was one of the few features Admiral Rodgers had found to approve of in his whirlwind first month, during which he had personally gone to New York to order equipment and periodicals; loudly complained to the Board of Health about the state of the streets beyond the Observatory’s front gates; and begun preparations for assembling the parties who would go west next year to witness the transit of Mercury and a full solar eclipse. Mr. Harrison complained to Cynthia that he had to ice his hand some nights, so relentless was the admiral’s appetite for correspondence and clerical reorganization of all kinds. Rodgers’s zeal for on-site improvements did not, however, lessen his already firm conviction that the whole institution should be torn down and rebuilt somewhere less occluded and disease-ridden.

Cynthia took a seat at the little desk near the globe, while Hugh climbed back up to the refractor to find the comet for himself and call down its coordinates. Segmenting it through the filar micrometer’s wire, he turned it into one point of a plane triangle with Earth and the Sun, and then instructed Mrs. May to digitize it into one more piece of information about the known world.

By the curved wall of the dome she worked the numbers. Looking at the swift movement of her writing hand, she thought of Charles Bogue, the murdered pencil seller whose killers, according to the
Star,
had just been convicted in court. Did his humble life mean more, or less, when contemplated against the heavenly immensity she had just seen? Was he not exalted, and leveled, to the same degree of mystery, wondrous and infinitesimal, as a Ulysses Grant? She was conscious of a new peacefulness within herself, a swelling of what she’d begun to feel with
The Principles of Trigonometry.
The Earth seemed nothing more than a streetcar doing a wide endless loop of the celestial city.
John May, in his hasty grave in Tennessee, and Sally, inside her mean box in the Presbyterians’ cemetery, were actually
sitting with her,
fellow passengers, just across some narrow aisle separating life and death. They were all on the same wheeled mote, ineffably whirling with Herr Winnecke’s comet.

“They’ll kill us if they find us,” said Hugh.

She looked up in alarm. “You promised no one else would be here until eleven-thirty at least.”

“I hope so,” said Hugh, drawing out the words in dire mockery, but not taking his eye from the telescope.

She regarded the small of his back and his thighs. “There’s a piece of gossip I didn’t tell you over supper.”

“And what’s that, Mrs. May?”

“I heard Professor Harkness talking with Mr. Eastman. About Professor Newcomb. It seems he isn’t getting what he wants. He thought that Admiral Rodgers would instantly recognize how he ought to be running things here, and now he knows that he’s miscalculated.”

“He should have gone to Harvard two years ago,” said Hugh. “When he had the chance. But no. ‘If Harvard needs my services, surely the government needs them more.’ That’s actually what he said. Pompous ass.” Hugh shifted his head and looked at the comet with his other eye.

“What a scandal that you should quarrel amongst yourselves,” she said. “How
can
you, with infinity in front of your faces like a balloon? I want another look.”

He turned around but did not step off the ladder, just smiled down at Cynthia and began reciting, with theatrical self-amusement: “ ‘O, not in wrath but lovingly, / In beauty pure and high, / Bright shines the stranger visitant, / A glory in our sky.’ ”

“What is that?”

“Mrs. Hall’s verse about Donati’s comet. It hangs on one of the walls downstairs. The comet came through in fifty-eight, seven years after D’Arrest’s. And it’s said to have been much more spectacular. My
father took me to see it through a telescope in Charleston when I was eight.”

“ ‘Said to have been’?” Cynthia mocked. “Of course, Master Allison couldn’t be swept away by such ephemera, not even at eight years old.”

“Not even at eight years old,” he said, still smiling.

“You shouldn’t make sport of the Halls,” she scolded.

“I don’t,” said Hugh. “I admire them far more than the Newcombs of the world. Glum old Asaph had to eke out his living doing more mathematical calculations than even you could stomach. But he kept at his work, with Angeline saying her fanatic’s prayers behind him, and the two of them climbed into the sky one humble rung at a time.” He stepped down the ladder and said, “Let me look at your numbers.”

She knew he was leaving out the story of Mr. Hall’s years here during the war, when he shyly managed to do his astronomy after days spent helping the wounded on the battlefields outside the District. Did Mr. Allison think that was just another humble rung?

“Irritatingly perfect,” he said, looking down her columns.

She laughed and ran to the stepladder, determined to claim another look at the comet as her reward. But before she reached the second step, the two of them heard voices from the adjoining second-floor room. Hugh put a finger to his lips and pointed to the door near the steam pipe. “This instant,” he whispered, and in no more time than that the two of them were standing out on the roof with their backs against the walls of the dome, lest whoever entered it spy them through the door’s small panes of glass.

Cynthia’s heart pounded. She wanted him to take her hand, but he was standing on the other side of the door, flush with its hinges, while she stood inches from the knob. If she looked sideways she could see his face, observe the calm smile that rested on it. With her naked eye she tried to find the comet in the sky, so that she might wish on it, implore its Maker not to let everything new in her life come crashing down—not like this, as if she were in some farce at the National. But
she could not see the moving speck of light, so she stood still and looked at the treetops as voices came out the tiny open window.

Admiral Rodgers was the louder of the two men speaking. “What’s all this?” he asked.

“Mr. Allison’s notes, I believe” was the reply—from Asaph Hall, by the sound of him.

“Allison. Is he solid?”

“I shouldn’t know what to say,” responded the admiral’s companion.

“He doesn’t much like whatever he’s given to do,” said Rodgers. “I suppose he wants a project of his own. But I haven’t heard him propose one.”

“One’s heart must be in one’s work” was all Professor Hall would say.

“And your heart,” said Rodgers. “Is it really in, or on, that white spot on Saturn? You’ve been measuring it through sixty rotations, they tell me.”

Asaph Hall made no response.

“Does that spot constitute your real ambitions, your dreams?”

“Oh, I couldn’t say.”

The admiral laughed. The two of them were very near the door now; Cynthia could hear Hall nervously spinning the globe.

“I haven’t yet decided just how far to let you all roam,” said Rodgers. “On your own, that is.” There was a pause, during which Cynthia imagined him staring at the astronomer. “Are the most powerful dreams the silent ones, perhaps?” By now the admiral didn’t seem to expect an answer. Cynthia and Hugh heard him go on to declare: “I’d say the dome itself is in better shape than the roof. The timber out there is rotting.”

The roof’s two inhabitants looked at each other, aware that the moment of maximum peril had arrived. But then, from inside, they heard a loud, resigned sigh, and footsteps beginning to move away from the door. “Well, Professor Hall,” said Rodgers. “Keep walking
with me. I learn a bit more each time I pace the building with one of you. But don’t do all the chattering.”

Cynthia, shaking badly, heard the two men exit the dome on the other side. The sound of Rodgers’s laughter preceded that of a closing door.

“My heart won’t stop racing,” she said.

“Come here,” Hugh offered, gently moving her to the widow’s walk. “There’s no need to whisper now.” They looked down into the rising mist at the three watchmen going about their meteorological measurements. Rodgers had lately gotten them deputized as District of Columbia policemen. Along with everything else, he was determined to halt nighttime vandalism on the Observatory’s grounds.

“Where is it?” asked Cynthia.

“Our comet?”

“Yes.”

“On the other side. But you couldn’t see it without the telescope.”

“Where did it come from?”

“Sidereal origin,” Hugh explained, with no great interest. “A chunk of matter belched from one of the stars. At great speed, I’ll grant you that.” He waited a moment before turning to look directly into her eyes. “I, too, don’t want to ‘calculate’ everything, Mrs. May. I didn’t come here to do a catalogue like Professor Yarnall. Believe me, I have no wish to turn the heavens into Montgomery Ward.”

“Why
are
you here?”

He wasn’t going to answer. He had anticipated her question before finishing his own remark; he was already gesturing toward the door that would take them back inside the dome.

She tried to keep him out on the roof, beside her, by pointing down to the dark grounds below. “It’s hard to believe that even now we’re moving back toward the Sun, rushing our face into its light.”

His own face betrayed no reaction to this banality, still the most advanced astronomical small talk she could make.

“Isn’t it strange, as well,” she added, “that this should be the last
place in the city that the sunshine hits? The Capitol catches it first, and then I suppose the Church of the Ascension, and only then does it leak down to Foggy Bottom.”

“Stop thinking of what comes
to
us,” he said, with unexpected sharpness. “Such as the Sun’s light. Such as the comet. Start thinking of the light that might come
from
us. At the same 185,200 miles per second. If Monsieur Foucault was right when he measured it in Paris.”

He looked at her—pleased, she thought, to see her trying to attach this huge number to whatever cryptic possibility he was suggesting. His face, lit more from within than by the moon, or the bit of gaslight still shining out through the windowpanes, seemed flushed with kindness; engaged, at least for a moment, by her presence and gaze. But looking at him was like looking at the comet. For a second she could see the full, hale nucleus; then just the vague shimmer it threw off as it flew.

A week later, on Friday, the 25th of May, Cynthia sat in the kitchen behind Madam Costello’s parlor. Between the two women sat a tureen of turkey soup brought over by Charlie from the hotel. It was barely past six, still light out, as Mary Costello watched Mrs. May’s troubled brow.

“We should do the day of the week that you were born,” said the astrologer. “I can get out the constants for that.”

“ ‘A child that’s born on the Sabbath day is fair and wise and good and gay.’
Very
occasionally.”

Madam Costello shook her head. “There’s much more to be learned than that.”

“I’ve lost interest,” said Cynthia.

“In the stars?”

“In your representations of them. Your charts are the same as theirs. Zodiacs or perihelions—I can’t care for any of that now.”

“Because you looked through their telescopes? Well, that’s what you
wanted,
ain’t it? Why the sour face?”

Cynthia began the full story of Friday night, offering its details with pride, though at every sign of Madam Costello’s enthusiasm she indicated caution, by way of a raised finger or pursed lips. This was, she would have her know, a
sad
story, with a disappointing or at least inconclusive finish. “There’s some odd enterprise he keeps hinting at, some peculiar vision that keeps him apart from the other men. He’s a changeling, Mary, a boy who’s been snatched into some nighttime world, maybe by one of your leprechauns. He’s silly with what he sees, but lonely with it, too. There are moments when I feel he’s on the verge of wanting to impart this vision to
me.
” She paused to shake her head with self-disgust. “How I flatter myself.”

When she ended her account, a considerable silence ensued, while Madam Costello, in her most concentrated manner, set about finding the salient point:

“He held your ankles, dearie.”

Cynthia made a disgusted sound. “And probably got cut for his trouble. He hasn’t come to see me since. I don’t know whether he’ll be using me again, don’t know what they’ll have him work on next, let alone what he’d
like
to work on. I’m back doing the Transit of Venus, at least until the money runs out and they put me on something else. Meanwhile, I’m trying not to fall asleep in front of Professor Harkness.”