Two Moons (29 page)

The senator’s men now clapped as if they really were a machine, in great crisp waves. Conkling felt a surge of carnal excitement, which he quickly sublimated into fealty: “Gentlemen! President Grant and all who stood by that upright, fearless magistrate have been objects of the bitter, truthless aspersions of these ‘reformers.’ They forget that parties are not built up by deportment, or by ladies’ magazines, or by
gush.
” He minced a half step or two away from the podium. The regulars bellowed their approval; the newspaper reporters added another inch to the Spanish moss of Pitman shorthand on their pads; Curtis whispered a few words to Chauncey Depew; and Bessie, from the wings, shot her father a cautionary glance, which he would ignore—her penalty for bringing Walter Oakman around the other night.

“Yes, gentlemen, there are about three hundred persons in New York who believe themselves to ‘occupy the solar walk and Milky Way,’ and even up there they lift their skirts very carefully for fear heaven itself might stain them. They would have people fill appointive office by nothing less than divine selection!”

The “solar walk” and “Milky Way” were for Mrs. May. Would she realize that when she saw the phrases in the Washington papers?

“I conclude with what a great Crusader told Richard of England and Leopold of Austria when they disputed the preliminaries of a battle.” The regulars would think it Shakespeare and feel a stirring of sentiment at their chieftain’s customary invocation of the Bard: “ ‘Let the future decide between you, and let it declare for him who carries furthest into the ranks of the enemy the sword of the cross!’ ”

The nays soon had it, 295 to 109. Conkling stepped down from the dais and strode the center aisle of the auditorium, unblinking in his triumph. He passed Curtis and Depew without a handshake.

“Senator! Senator!” cried the reporters.

He ignored them too, on his way to the telegraph office that had been set up outside the hall.

A RAIN OF METEORS UPON MY FOES. A SHOWER OF KISSES UPON YOU. I RETURN WITHIN A WEEK. GO TONIGHT TO 3RD AND D. A PRESENT AWAITS YOU.

The key operator, shaking with the fear he would make an error transmitting what the senator had scribbled on a slip of paper, looked up in relief when Conkling was gone, replaced by the man from the New York
Herald,
whose dispatch reported that the War God, having just denied the President’s right to hold office, had “acted the part of a blind and infuriate Samson, crushing himself beneath the edifice against whose pillars he leaned his mighty shoulders.”

“Interior says no one new will be taken on just to deal with the fire damage,” Louis Manley informed the other boarders.

“I should hope not!” replied Miss Park, who had spent her afternoon doing the paperwork for a taxpayer’s anonymous $7,500 contribution to the Treasury’s conscience fund. “We’ve
lost
thirty clerks under the new budget.”

“Mrs. O’Toole,” asked Dan Farricker, “are you disappointed the Sioux will be staying at the Continental instead of here?” Only Fanny Christian laughed at his suggestion. The landlady herself shuddered over the thought of the Indian peace delegation, now on their way by train to the capital, bringing their savage paints and smells into her parlor.

Dan patted his hand against his open mouth, silently imitating a war cry for the benefit of Fanny, who pulled an ostrich feather from a vase and stuck it behind her head.

“Miss Christian, please,” scolded Mrs. O’Toole.

Fanny replaced the feather and sighed. “Buffalo Bill says Little Big Man’s a bad egg, even though he’s the one got stabbed by Crazy Horse and not the other way around.”

Cynthia, passing through while putting on her hat, wondered how Conkling had kept himself from stabbing Curtis when the bloodlust was on him. She’d received his telegram upon arriving home. This afternoon she’d dispatched her own note, from the Observatory, asking Hugh to meet her, briefly, downtown at 8:00; she couldn’t soon risk another early-morning return to Mrs. O’Toole’s. Now, when the landlady asked where she might be on her way to, she replied, “A friend who lives on D Street. I’ll be home before nine-thirty.”

Glances exchanged by Joan Park and Louis Manley expressed doubt that Mrs. May would fulfill this pledge, but Cynthia ignored them on her way out. A few minutes later she was at her real destination, not Madam Costello’s block but the steps of the badly singed Patent Building. She climbed them almost up to the columns, looking for a space between puddles of water and soggy wads of paper. When
she found one, she gathered her skirts against her ankles and sat down, becoming as much an object of curiosity as the boarded-up windows to the occasional evening passerby.

Hugh did not arrive until 8:15, and he climbed the steps slowly, looking more gaunt than slender. But she could tell that he was calm. The nervous chatter had stopped a day or two ago, which meant, if she had her reading at the Peabody right, that the intermission of symptoms was ending. Another attack could come any day.

“The toasted Parthenon,” he said. “An inspired location for our rendezvous.” It was almost chilly tonight, and as soon as he sat down, he put his arm around her. She closed her eyes for a moment, grateful to be warmed this way instead of by Conkling’s present—an expensive shawl with an appliqué of small silver stars, which he’d had sent from New York City. Mary Costello had excitedly forwarded the parcel to the boardinghouse, in time to arrive almost simultaneously with the War God’s telegram. But it had gone straight into a drawer. As far as Cynthia knew, Hugh was still unaware of Conkling’s existence—probably even as a public figure.

“What do you suppose this is?” she asked. From her reticule she withdrew the small damaged contraption that had flown through Monday morning’s fire.

Hugh turned it over in his hand, twice, smiling with a sort of gay reverence toward the object’s inscrutable ingenuity. “I haven’t the slightest idea,” he said, setting it down on the step below them.

“It came from in there.” She pointed up toward the damaged Model Room.

“Someone’s unpatented dream,” said Hugh. “Someone’s failure.” She said nothing, and he looked back at her with concern. “You’re not yourself, Mrs. May. Now, most people are so awful it comes as a relief when they’re not themselves. But in your case it’s a shame.”

“Will you be going back to work with Todd tonight?”

“Yes,” said Hugh. “It’s becoming fun. He may be crazier than I am.”

“You’re not crazy,” said Cynthia.

“You’re right. I just have hidden depths.”

“Why do you stay?” she asked. “Forget for a moment the admiral’s reprieve: why do you
choose
to stay?”

“My dear, it’s not as if the Allison family has any money to spare right now. I do more or less have to make my living.”

“But there are other observatories. Ones whose telescopes aren’t always cloaked with fog.”

“Yes,” he said, “that’s true. And can you imagine how eager they’d be to have me after the record I’ve achieved here?”

“Those other places wouldn’t make you sick.”

“No,” he said, smiling. “They wouldn’t.”

She couldn’t bear it any longer—the feckless, merry fatalism. She put her head between her hands.

“Don’t you worry about me,” said Hugh. “Next summer I’m going to avoid the fever season altogether. I’ll be out west, high and dry and healthy with one of the eclipse-observing parties. I ought to know, right? I wrote all those letters starting to organize them, remember?”

Next summer was too far away to imagine. Between now and then they both had to make a whole trip around the Sun. She wasn’t sure she had the strength for even that automatic journey.

“I’ll go out to Colorado and stay straight through August.” He sucked in a great lungful of air and pounded his chest in imitation of the rude health they knew he would never enjoy. She closed her eyes, refusing to laugh.

“Cynthia,” he whispered. “I stay because you’re here.”

She looked up at him.

“And you,” he said, “are here for the duration.”

He was right. She would never leave this city, any more than he would make a success or find some sensible home elsewhere. They were both incapable of reversing the eccentric courses they were on. They weren’t traveling around the Sun at all. They were unperiodic comets, on their way to nowhere and never to return. They would
leave no traces, no child to outlast them on Earth, from which he would be, she felt certain, the first to depart.

She grasped his right hand with her left. “I want to stand with you.”

“You’ve already done that,” he said. “You’ve taken good care of me.”

“No, I want to stand with you in the light. It’s all I want to do.” She hoped he heard the echo of his own phrase, the words he’d used when she first sat in the room on High Street, beside the drawings.

He said nothing, just looked at the damaged contraption sitting on the step below them.

“Tell me,” she said, “exactly what’s in Philadelphia.”

“A man who knows just the machine I require. An aplanatic-mirror projector.”

“And this is the hard part?”

“Impossible, actually. It’s built in France, and has so far been used only by the army over there. If I exceeded even my father’s capacity for borrowing, I might afford the projector itself. But no one’s going to lend me the import duty—probably half as much again—to get it through a Custom House.”

She picked up the contraption and tossed it down the wet stone steps. “Order the machine,” she said.

Cynthia helped Madam Costello put the supper dishes back into the tin box Charles would pick up tomorrow morning. She wished the astrologer might scrape the mashed potatoes off them a bit more thoroughly; despite the presence of Ra, there had been more than one mouse in evidence tonight. But they were in a hurry. She’d not gotten here until nearly seven, after checking on Hugh in Georgetown, and the sun was now long gone.

“All right, Mary, let’s get going. Tonight’s the last one I can get you in, and by Saturday the moons will have become invisible for two years.”

“I’m just sorry I won’t get to meet our boy,” said the planet reader. “Poor thing. After all this time, I can’t tell you how I was lookin’ forward to it.”

“He’s doing much better,” insisted Cynthia. “But it will be a while before he’s recovered enough strength from this last spell to go back there.”

He was a
bit
better: the most recent siege had consisted of four paroxysms, fewer than the last time, each only five hours long and further apart from one another than the last set. But even now, during one of the fever’s intermissions, he looked sallow and lacked appetite. Cynthia would not tell Mary what the worst of it had been like—the hoarse
cries for ice water, the blue fingertips and confused mind. When pressed, she would give up only one or two playful, less intimate, details—such as the way Hugh smiled when his ears began buzzing, a sign that the quinine had started to work.

She nudged the older woman out the front door and told her she could fuss with her bonnet on the way. Right now they needed to raise their umbrellas and get going. It was the wettest, warmest October anyone could remember. Gnats were still in the air, flying between the raindrops. Even at this hour the horsecar Cynthia flagged down was crowded with passengers too damp and uncomfortable to go about on foot. She put nickels into the box for herself and Mary, and then managed to find two seats near the glass rear doors. The car’s population could also be attributed to the impending return of Congress, which had remustered an army of lobbyists to another season’s residence in the District. Mrs. O’Toole, aware of how much more she could be getting for her rooms—perhaps even renting one of them to a congressman—gave her regulars a severe look if they tried to take so much as an extra pat of butter at breakfast.

The War God had informed both Cynthia and Madam Costello—not to mention the general public, through an announcement in the press—that he did not intend returning to the capital until Sunday, the fourteenth, just one night before the Special Session would open.

“I forgot to show you this,” said Cynthia, reaching into her pocket for a newspaper cutting. “Or maybe he sent you one, too.” A cartoon from one of the New York dailies showed Conkling as a colossus, one foot upon the Senate, the other on the Custom House: “The New Official Doorkeeper.”