Two Moons (28 page)

“Mary,” she said, “please make me a cup of tea.”

“Would coffee suit you as well?”

She thought of the grimy sugar spoon and the milk that would have gone off and asked again for tea, all by itself, if that would be all right. While the kettle boiled, she petted Ra and tried, against the fast beating of her pulse, to remember all she had once tried to forget: the unexpected rush to the Armory Square hospital; the bleeding and infection and delirium; the first sight of Sally, scarcely alive; and afterward, when she was conscious enough to hear them, the moans of wounded soldiers behind a door and down a corridor. She recalled the countenance of one of Miss Dix’s nurses, a mixture of amazement and contempt that a girl could bring a new life into the world at such a time as this and take up a soldier’s bed in order to do it. She had almost died, of course—that’s what Dr. Malcolmson later told her, along with the news that Sally had been lifted out of her at the last possible moment
like Caesar or Macduff, a fact that had interested her as a scientific curiosity and nothing more.

“Mary,” she asked, as she was handed her tea. “Do you have a copy of Boyd’s?”

“Over there, dearie. But it’s two or three years old.”

Cynthia put down her cup and went to get the city directory.

“What’s eating at you?”

“He’s not in it,” said Cynthia, double-checking the page.

“Come sit back down and drink your tea.”

“But old Mrs. Robinson’s still around, I know it. I passed her in the street last year.”

“
Who
ain’t in the directory?”

“An old doctor named Malcolmson. He must have died without my noticing.” Cynthia went on thumbing the directory, looking for where Mrs. Robinson resided—by now no doubt one more poor widow. She had left the Lawrences’ street just after the war.

“Isn’t it Dr. Kelly taking care of our boy up in Georgetown?”

“Dr. Malcolmson is the man who delivered my Sally—or who from my womb ‘untimely ripped’ her.”

“You sound like Shakespeare. Did the War God teach you that?”

Cynthia put her bonnet back on. “I’ve found her.”

“Now Mrs. May, what’s this about?”

“Come with me, Mary. I have to see Mrs. Robinson.”

“What’s she supposed to tell you? I can’t walk out of here, girlie. I’ve got one coming at half past twelve.”

“It’s only ten-thirty. Don’t argue with me.”

She required company, wordless support, if she was going to learn for a fact what she’d already deduced. As they walked to Mrs. Robinson’s lodgings at Eleventh and E, the planet reader, sensing an urgency unusual even for Mrs. May, obliged with her silence.

The old woman who responded to the knocker was without a doubt Mrs. Robinson, even if she now lacked two of the teeth that Cynthia had seen in her mouth a year ago on Pennsylvania Avenue.

“Mrs. Robinson, do you remember me?”

“Of course I remember you,” said the old lady, with more suspicion than friendliness. “You’re Ellen Lawrence’s girl.”

“May I speak with you?”

“You already are.”

Cynthia brought Mary Costello with her into the parlor. “May my friend wait out here while we go in there?” She pointed to the old lady’s minuscule bedroom, which had a door they could close.

Left by herself, Madam Costello pitied the old woman’s threadbare surroundings and puzzled over some distant bells and shouts that had begun to make themselves heard through the parlor’s closed window. Ten minutes later, Cynthia emerged and said, “Let’s go.” The astrologer knew not to ask anything until they were outside and walking.

“What is it, darlin’?”

“Let’s just say that I’ll never have need of that device I asked you to procure for me. I’m sorry I put you to the trouble.”

“I don’t understand, dearie. What could she tell you that you didn’t already know?”

Without slackening her speed down E Street, Cynthia answered: “That after Dr. Malcolmson took Sally out of me, he knotted up my tubes. He reasoned that a second lying-in would kill me, so he left nothing to chance. And saw no need to tell a half-dead widow. He told my mother and her friend Mrs. Robinson instead, and if they told me, it was in terms too vague to be grasped by a convalescent. Mrs. Robinson doesn’t recall that part exactly, but she remembers every word Dr. Malcolmson spoke to her and my mother.”

Mary Costello, out of breath, tried asking another question as carefully as she could: “I’m sorry, dearie. But why would you be wanting—”

“Exactly right, Mary. Why would I be wanting?” Cynthia took another dozen steps before her glance was drawn to a crowd gathering at the intersection of Ninth and F, a block away. “Look,” she said to Mary, relieved by a chance to change the subject. She dragged the astrologer west to investigate the clamor.

The Patent Building, her former place of work, was crowned with flames. The greenhouse over the Ninth Street portico puffed great plumes of black smoke while broken glass crashed onto the sidewalk below. Burning papers rode the air, scintillating into wisps before disappearing altogether. As a team of fire horses rounded the corner, Cynthia recognized, across the street, two girls with whom she’d worked at Interior. She struggled to hear the rumors snaking from one part of the crowd to the next. The Wright and Thompson buildings, over on G, somebody said, were also ablaze. The records of the Indian office were burning just as Red Cloud and Spotted Tail rode the rails to Washington for a peace conference.

At a quarter past noon, the pine roof of the Patent Building’s western wing collapsed, exposing its iron supports like tree trunks during a brutal winter. “There go all the models,” said a sad old-timer, realizing that the room set aside to house so much Yankee ingenuity—a bit of it patented, most of it rejected—was now gone.

“They’re going to need Baltimore!” cried one madly excited clerk a few feet from Cynthia. “They’ve already called out Alexandria!” Without a doubt, the District’s hose carriages, which could barely get through the crowd, were never going to put out the fire by themselves.

“Get back!” cried a policeman. Mary Costello and Cynthia complied as quickly as they could, but not before a tiny, scorched contraption of balsa wood, hinges, and cotton completed its flying journey from the Model Room and landed at Cynthia’s feet. What, had it ever been built, was this invention meant to print or weave or bake? She picked it up and let it cool in her hands.

“Mary,” said Cynthia, “go back to D Street. You can still be there in time for your customer.”

“I can’t leave you here,” the planet reader said. “You’ve got the hysterics.” They both realized that Cynthia had some calm, preternatural variety of them. “What are you going to do?” Madam Costello shouted above the din of horses, clerks, and water.

“I’m going to watch,” said Cynthia. “And think.”

Two Dutchess County delegates regarded Roscoe Conkling on the dais. His forelock seemed more sharply twisted than ever, a perfect corkscrew, and his waistcoat an even brighter shade of blue than he sometimes favored.

“If Schurz thinks he got roasted on Monday …” said the first delegate to the second.

They laughed in anticipation of what the senator might dish out to the Interior Secretary as soon as he rose to address the state convention here in Rochester. Down in Washington, in response to the Patent Office blaze, the Cabinet was meeting without Hayes to discuss fire safety in federal buildings. The President was still off on his travels, and the odds were Conkling would raise a storm over a report that the other day, during his appearance in Atlanta, Hayes had tolerated a display of the Confederate flag.

“I see Cornell,” said the first delegate, pointing the other’s attention to the huge, stone-faced arbiter of the Custom House sitting two chairs away from Conkling. He was in double defiance of the President: having refused to resign his office, he was, by appearing here, also violating the June executive order against political activity.

“But where’s Arthur?” the second delegate wondered.

“They say Sherman’s offering him the Paris consulship if he’ll resign.”

The second delegate just laughed. “Conkling will never let him take it.”

The two men now watched the gentleman approaching the podium, George William Curtis, Jr. “
He’ll
have to take it a few minutes from now,” said the first delegate. The
Harper’s
editor, sure to be another victim of Conkling’s rhetoric this afternoon, had not long ago turned down the British ambassadorship for something like the opposite of Arthur’s reasons to refuse the French post. As head of the National Civil Service Reform Association, Curtis preferred to remain
at home, waging war against the machine at gatherings like these and in the pages of his magazine.
Harper’s,
along with its cries for the merit system, had of late also been running illustrated articles about women’s fall fashions, providing Conkling’s men the chance to make jokes they considered especially delicious.

Actually, Conkling liked the full-bosomed drawings better than anything Curtis had ever published, but his contempt for their purveyor was undiminished. As he watched him take the lectern now, he knew the business ahead would be almost too easy. Curtis would go down like some hapless redcoat, marching stiffly to annihilation.

“Fellow Republicans,” said the editor, his softness of tone an advertisement of reasonableness. “I ask this convention to resolve that the lawful title of Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency is as clear and perfect as that of George Washington, and that his efforts toward the correction of evils and abuses in the Civil Service have justified the promises this party made in its platform last year.”

As the catcalls of the Custom House smothered any applause for reform, Conkling sat impassively, considering Curtis’s strategy, which assumed that the senator could not repudiate the results of his own Electoral Commission without repudiating himself. It was a pitiful underestimation of Conkling’s ability to maneuver, a failure to recognize his now complete lack of interest in compromise. Under the bright blue sleeves of his coat, the War God invisibly flexed the muscles of his forearms, thinking, as he got ready to rise, about the message he’d had from Kate, who wanted him near her, secreted in some Newport hotel until Congress convened next month. He had already told her it was impossible; he would never again let her sap his strength.

Curtis sat down in the front row of the auditorium, next to Chauncey Depew of the New York Central. Conkling strode to the podium and nodded down at the two of them.

“This is a state convention,” he began, evenly. “Its business is to nominate candidates for state offices. The national Administration is
not a candidate or in question here.” Loud cheers from the machine’s men; but Conkling stopped them with a sharp outward thrust of his hand. “Who has the right to say it wishes to influence our proceedings or disturb our harmony? I won’t assume that any man has been entrusted to introduce matters foreign to our duties and calculated to foment discord.”

The Irishwoman had said that the first blows against the Libra Hayes were best struck from the side and behind. And so he would attempt to make Curtis’s resolution seem less reprehensible than unnecessary. He would have chosen this route by his own dead reckoning, but he was nonetheless comforted, to his small secret shame, to be navigating by the stars. The astrologer’s most interesting report had been the news, telegraphed last night, that Mrs. May was slightly under the weather—a female complaint, but nothing of any consequence. Even at this moment, hearing the always inspiring sound of his own voice, his mind drifted south to her. He had to force himself to concentrate, to glare at Curtis, whose damp rhetorical life consisted mostly of eulogies and Phi Beta Kappa orations, phrases crocheted over a corpse or some banquet table of beardless students. Conkling would fire
his
words into Curtis’s own ears, the way he did at whoever stood opposing him on the floor of the Senate. “The reformers’ vocation and ministry,” he proclaimed, “is to lament the sins of other people. Their stock in trade is rancid, canting self-righteousness. They are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Their real object is office and plunder. When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he was unconscious of the then undeveloped capabilities and uses of the word ‘reform.’ ”

Curtis, still in the senator’s sights, shook his head in apparent sadness, a gesture that infuriated Conkling. The War God now allowed the machine’s men to let loose a deafening, discordant chorus, in which howls against the reformers seemed to contradict the allied cheers for Conkling himself. The speaker patiently allowed it all to subside, and while he never took his eyes off Curtis, he could glimpse
the slender form of Cynthia May darting across the floor of his mind. He tried to ignore it, opening his mouth to declaim the next portion of his text, which contained the one insult that would put paid to Curtis, that would drown the editor in the glee of his enemies.

And yet, as he began to speak, he knew that he was also speaking to her. The same words he flung at Curtis were ones, at a much lower volume, he should like Mrs. May to hear after the two of them had wrestled over politics. They were words he would have her understand, for all their brimstone, as the truest definition of Roscoe Conkling. He
believed,
didn’t he, the sentences he was now firing at the editor of
Harper’s:
“For the last twenty-two years I have labored for the Republican party and stood by its flag; and never in twenty-two years have I been false to its principles, its cause, or its candidates. Who are these men, in newspapers and elsewhere, cracking their whips over the Republican party and its conscience and convictions? They are of various sorts and conditions—
the man-milliners, the dilettanti, and carpet knights of politics,
men whose efforts have been expended in denouncing and ridiculing and accusing honest men who, in storm and in sun, in war and peace, have clung to the Republican flag and defended it against those who have tried to trail and trample it in the dust!”