Two Moons (16 page)

“That makes no sense,” said Cynthia. “Christ Himself was a Capricorn.”

“Is,”
said Madam Costello, crossing herself. “But Christ is a very new soul. Go back further. Think of the scapegoat, dearie. And think of this, too: why was the Christ baby put into the manger with the goat?”

“I haven’t the least idea.”

“To conquer sin and death.”

Cynthia scowled. “So Capricorns are associated with
both
redemption
and
sin.”

“Yes.”

“This is why I always lose you, Mary. You see that, surely?” She took an orange from her dress pocket and began peeling it. “All right, keep going.”

“Funny thing is, for all these associations, they ain’t generally very spiritual, your Capricorns.”

“Well, he does seem more interested in how the heavens function than in who made them.”

“They’re not terrible hard workers, either. They ain’t the men to hew the wood and draw the water.”

“He’s not the busiest bee at the Observatory, I’ll grant you that. But he can’t help it. This comet bores him. When he gives me its position each morning—”

“Nor are they the most favored lot. In the body, I mean. They can be awful plain, and narrow in the chest.”

“
That
is rubbish,” said Cynthia, throwing the orange rind into the street. “He could not be more scrumptious. The chest maybe
is
on the narrow side, but I’d rather look at him than at one of these trenchermen exploding all the buttons on their vests.”

Mary Costello, ignoring the rebuke, searched her brain for anything else she could recall about Capricorns without her books in front of her.

“Coal,” she said. “The Capricorns govern coal.”

Cynthia offered no response to this piece of information, and the planet reader had no idea of its significance herself. She just nudged the younger woman with her elbow and said, “We’ll get you to squeeze him into a diamond, eh?”

Around the corner, on Seventh Street, some larger than usual typography sprang up from the newsman’s stack of the
Evening Star:
EXECUTIVE ORDER ISSUED
. Madam Costello fetched two cents from her bag. “Will you read it to me, dearie? Nice and slow? You won’t trip over some of these words the way I do.”

In fact, the news on which Mary Costello would now have to put the best astrological face was all too plain: “No assessments for political purposes, on officers or subordinates, should be allowed. No useless officer or employee should be retained. No officer should be required, or permitted to take part in the management of political organizations, caucuses, conventions, or election campaigns.”

Cynthia, done reciting, looked down at the Irishwoman, who was twisting the reticule’s string much too tightly around her finger.

“Surely you don’t have to worry about this right now,” said Cynthia,
as soothingly as she was capable of saying anything. “He’ll probably be home by the time your letter could ever find him.”

“The cable, dearie,” said Madam Costello, lifting her eyes from the planks of the sidewalk. “The big wire under the ocean. The office boy has instructions to send him something from me every third day.”

At 6:00
P.M.
on Monday night, June 25, Admiral Rodgers came into the central dome and stood at the pier of the 9.6-inch refractor.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he said to Hugh Allison.

“Sir,” said Hugh, who had dozed off. “I had D’Arrest’s comet well in sight last night. I’ll be looking again—”

“You’ll get your best view after midnight. Don’t spend the hours until then in here.”

“How is Mr. Eastman, Admiral?”

“Listless. Aching. But past any delirium. If the initial fever had been half a degree higher, we’d have lost him. You appear a bit listless yourself, Mr. Allison.”

“I hope not, sir.” He also hoped the charts on the table where he sat concealed the copy of the
Atlantic
he’d been reading.

“Do any of you,” asked Rodgers, “ever look at the Sun?”

“It’s never been a specialty here, sir.”

“The head of the Army Signal Corps wants us to observe the Sun’s spots and what he calls its ‘protruberances.’ Something different from the spots, I gather.”

“We’d need better spectrographic equipment,” said Hugh.

Rodgers removed a chip of peeled paint from the telescope’s pier. “He has a good mind,” said the admiral. “I like his company.” General Meigs, the Army’s chief of staff, was Rodgers’s brother-in-law, and the admiral easily socialized across service lines. “More stimulating than the Ancient Mariner, certainly.”

“And who might that be, sir?” asked Hugh, as if he didn’t know the
nickname for Hayes’s Navy Secretary. He noticed a smile as Rodgers worked off another couple of paint chips with his thumb, revealing the pier’s antebellum color.

“The other day,” said the admiral, “he remarked on how some ensigns had just ‘won their spurs.’ ”

Hugh’s laughter had barely escaped his lungs before Rodgers snapped: “And how do you plan on earning yours?”

The admiral did not seem to expect an immediate answer; if he had startled Mr. Allison with the question, that appeared to be enough for the moment. “I’m thinking about holding monthly meetings of the entire staff. As things stand,
I
talk to all of
you,
but you don’t talk amongst yourselves, except in your little cliques. For instance, I’ll hear from a third party that Mr. Harkness doubts Mr. Newcomb’s accuracy, but Mr. Newcomb never hears of it at all. Let us air these things.”

“It’s too bad the air itself is one of our difficulties,” said Hugh.

Rodgers, peeling away at another brick, allowed the change of subject. “I’m determined to connect this place to the sewer. The Board of Health are quite uninterested in our drainage problems, but there is no reason we can’t run a pipe from the Twenty-third Street gate to the corner of Twenty-second and Virginia.” His middle finger finished the second brick and moved on to a third. “And then there’s the boiler.” He flicked some dust from his hand and turned to face the younger man. “It would require thirty thousand dollars to repair everything on this site. A hundred thousand might allow us to start a new building somewhere else. What do you think we ought to do, Mr. Allison?”

Hugh straightened the charts on his table. “I’m sure you’ll make the right decision, sir.”

“You think so?” said Rodgers. “All right, suppose I choose to try to get us out of here altogether. Where am I going to find the money?” Hugh looked the admiral in the eye, but said nothing.

“The Ancient Mariner wants to separate us from the Navy, and do you know what, Mr. Allison? He may be right. It makes about as much sense for the Navy to be measuring distant stars as it does for sailors to
be wearing spurs. We’ve long since known all we need to about navigating by the heavens, and I daresay the Navy doesn’t need you doctors of philosophy to keeps its chronometers in working order. Tell me what you think.”

“About putting a civilian in charge?”

“Yes.”

“Whoever it was would tilt the rest of us toward his own interests.”

“You may be right,” said Rodgers. “Mr. Newcomb would have all of you scurrying in his moonlight. Then you’d rebel, and he’d have to hang you like the Molly Maguires.” The admiral shifted the papers he was carrying from his left hand to the one that had been peeling paint. “Even so, I’m not sure, Mr. Allison. Most of you say you’re happy having me about, but you may just be buttering my parsnips. Newcomb and Holden admit they would prefer someone with a necktie giving the orders, but they may be buttering their
own
parsnips. I will tell you one thing.”

“Yes, sir?”

“If I’m going to get us out of here, you’re all going to have to do spectacular work. Things that get the place into the newspapers. The sort of things that will send Mr. Newcomb’s clubwomen into a frenzy of admiration. It’s as plain as this, Mr. Allison: you must rise to higher heights, if I’m to move you to higher ground.”

Hugh nodded.

“My new astronomical acquaintances up in Cambridge say you may be the best man to have trained there since the rebellion.”

“I doubt that.”

“So do I, but I’m prepared to entertain the thought. They also say that you’re unsound. I don’t care if they’re right about that, not if they’re right about the other part. But Eastman and the rest tell me you’ve not proposed any substantial projects of your own here. Why is that?”

“Sir,” said Hugh, “is it true that you’ll be serving on the lighthouse board?”

Rodgers said nothing for a moment. “I’ve not decided. If I say yes,
I’ll get to make a summer cruise of the New England coast, while they test their new illuminating devices. You’ve answered my question with a question, Mr. Allison. Unless you’ve given me an indirect answer? Well,” said the admiral, deciding not to press the point, “this may be a start. Still, I won’t wait long before I make you give me something definite, something bold enough to get attention, and not too bold to preclude results.”

“I think I understand, sir.”

“Look at this,” said Rodgers, handing him the top sheet from the papers he carried. “Captain Gilliss’s death certificate.”

Hugh read aloud what the naval surgeon had attested to a dozen years ago, how Captain Gilliss “ ‘departed this life on the 9th day of February, in the year 1865, and that he died of serous apoplexy. He had been stationed at the Naval Observatory for some years, a locality noted for its insalubrity. During the last summer and fall he was frequently attacked with intermittent and, on one occasion remittent fever, which left him in a weak condition; this, combined with excessive mental labor incident to his position no doubt caused his death in the line of duty.’ ”

Hugh handed the paper back to Gilliss’s fourth successor.

“One of
my
projects,” said Rodgers. “Putting together evidence of what’s gone on here for thirty years. What good it will do when I state my case is anyone’s guess, Mr. Allison. My own is that the Congress’s pity will be insufficient to move us away from here. Their pride—in something this national astrolabe has
achieved
—could well be another matter. So get cracking, Mr. Allison. Don’t give
me
apoplexy.”

“Yes, sir,” said Hugh.

The admiral was already on his way out, but he stopped at the doorway to turn around and ask: “Your question about the lighthouse board:
was
it meant as some sort of clue to your intentions? I’m thinking of Quincy Adams’s expression for this place: a ‘lighthouse of the sky.’ Are you ready to find some great ship, some great astral body that’s been sailing undetected?”

A formidable, intelligent man, thought the young astronomer. And as to the last point,
exactly
wrong.

But what answer could he give him? How could he say that
he
was the astral body he wanted
others,
far distant, to detect, if only as scattered spangles of light? He would appear more mad than foolish. And so, with the admiral, as with so many others now, he ended up appearing evasive, or ethereal, or without wanting to, rude. If he “larked about,” as Mr. Hall said, it was partly so his cap and bells might distract them from questioning him seriously.

He could only smile and let Rodgers depart.

At 8:00 that same evening, Cynthia May sat in her room with Charles Reade’s latest novel. Through the closed door she could hear Dan Farricker, accompanied by Fanny Christian on the piano, singing “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” She failed to detect the rapping of the front knocker, but did notice the sudden cessation of music that followed, along with some unusually animated sounds from Mrs. O’Toole.

She cracked her door to listen.

“Charleston, you say!” the landlady was exclaiming. “But you really didn’t need to. I’m from Columbia myself.”

The softer, though jaunty, reply came up the stairs: “I should have known.”

It can’t be.
She went to the landing.

“This is Miss Christian,” said the landlady. “And here are Miss Park, Mr. Farricker, Mr. Manley. My son, Harry, I’m afraid, is indisposed.”