Two Moons (36 page)

Hugh indicated to M. Hiver that their plans were up to the lady.

“We’ll come round in the morning,” said Cynthia, taking a card with the magazine’s address.

When they’d set out yesterday, she had anticipated the delightful moment when they would register at the Astor House as Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Allison. Now nothing could dispel her dark mood. From the dining-room window, she could see the offices of the New York
Herald,
and while they ordered their meal she silently wished that that paper’s reporter had vanquished the War God by inventing statements even beyond the ridiculous bombast he had actually uttered in his interview. She couldn’t even stand that they were staying in a Republican establishment.

“Why didn’t you arrange for us to lodge at the New York? Isn’t that where Southerners stay when they come to the city?” The question came out like a fishwife’s complaint, but she could hardly risk explaining her objection.

“Eat up, darling. We’re on the American plan.”

His equanimity was breaking her heart. Managing an expression that she hoped looked like a smile, she told him: “You know I’ll end up filching every one of those rolls.”

How wonderful this could have been. She looked around the room, guessing which diners were the excited transients and which the permanent boarders. She thought that she and Hugh, so subdued, must resemble the latter.

“Maybe tomorrow morning we can also have some fun riding the elevator up at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,” he suggested. The Astor was too old and shallow to have one. This proposed lark, conceived sometime back, she was sure, when the Monument had begun looming large in their imaginations, threatened to make her cry again. She loved him
for
his fecklessness and failure, she decided. She wanted only those things, not the brute security of the War God’s fleeting embrace.

Along the gaslit fourth-floor corridor, she steadied his exhausted frame. They were making their way toward a handsome double bed, another part of her earlier anticipations. It was covered by a beautiful white brocade, not the riot of pasha’s pillows back in Georgetown. The key to the room had made her think of Officer Shea at the Monument, and the bedspread soon directed her mind to another, still unseen bed—the one upstairs at Wormley’s.

While Hugh took off his shirt, and she laid her dress upon the hassock, she made a silent pledge to herself:
I shall yet make his dream happen. I shall free the machine.
Flushed, his forehead damp, he was soon asleep in her arms. With her eyes wide open, she thought:
what a small price it will be to pay!
Once the War God had his Senate victory and passed beyond the Zodiac prohibition she had fabricated—even sillier than Mary’s actual divinations—she would let Roscoe Conkling
have her tired form for whatever use he desired. And then she and Hugh would have the projector.

Stroking his wet hair and pondering the astrological lie she had added to so many others, she realized—amazed she hadn’t thought of it sooner—that it was Mary who had given them up. Conkling had reneged on his promise because Madam Costello, in her infuriating brogue, must have told him about “that charming boy-o” Mrs. May was “so sweet on.” There was no point to even cursing her in the bitter darkness of this hotel room. The planet reader’s indiscretion about the War God’s climacteric had, after all, been the basis for Cynthia’s own lie. Mary Costello, the heavens’ charlatan! She was more like the heavens themselves, directing all their destinies by who-knew-what proportions of shrewdness, stupidity, and sheer obliviousness.

The following day, Hugh and Cynthia did not make it to the
Scientific American
’s offices until past noon. Alone of all the editors and copyists, M. Hiver remained behind after the short weekend workday.

“Come in, come in,” he said, looking up from the drawings of a contraption that appeared to Cynthia not so different from the one that had come flying out of the Patent Office in September. “Let me show you what the men from New Jersey brought in yesterday.”

He led them into an adjoining room where on a table sat a small machine consisting chiefly of one brass rod, wrapped in tin foil, and a stylus. M. Hiver now cranked the rod into a fast rotation. “We write about it and make them rich,” he said. He applied the stylus to the rod. “They soon go and build them by the hundred in Merlot Park.”

“
Mary had a little lamb …
”

Hugh and Cynthia jumped back several inches.

“What is this little lamb?” asked Hiver. “I still do not understand.”

The voice was feeble, but the ditty unmistakable, and it continued until M. Hiver ceased turning the crank and replaced the foil with a
fresh piece. He then lifted the first stylus and set down a second one, which his visitors only now noticed near the other end of the brass rod.

“Hard to imagine, but a month ago they are experimenting with paper instead of the tin. Watch. We make music!” He grabbed a horn that stood in a corner of the room and, cranking the apparatus with his free hand, blew three loud notes. Then, as soon as he cranked again and applied the first stylus instead of the second, the sounds came back out, not quite so loud as they’d gone in, but still, incredibly, alive.

He then quickly tore the foil from the machine and crumpled it. “We gave a promise not to make any more.”

Hugh’s amazement lasted for several minutes, but consciousness of the blow he’d suffered at the Custom House soon repossessed him. “M. Hiver,” he asked, almost shyly, “have you got photographs of the Mangin projector? Davidson had only sketches, but he told me that you might—”

“Oh, yes, come. I’ll show you.”

They both looked at Cynthia, who wanly smiled and said that they should go ahead. “I’ll browse here, like Mary’s lamb,” she said, gesturing at all the peculiar objects to be seen in the inner room. Hugh assumed she was too sad to look any more at the Mangin, and he only wished he could show the same resistance; as soon as he began examining the pictures with Hiver, he heard himself speak of the machine as something that belonged to the past, a lover who had died making the crossing.

Cynthia listened to his voice as she focused her energies in the other room. Carefully recalling each procedure she had seen M. Hiver perform, she took a new piece of foil from the small pile of sheets on the table. She would have to get Hugh to speak forcefully. As soon as she had the foil in place, she smashed an empty glass beaker and sliced her finger with one of the shards. After one loud shout, she bit her lip, swallowed the pain and applied the second stylus to the cylinder she was already cranking.

“Darling! I’m here!” shouted Hugh. He had run into the room with M. Hiver, and before either one of them could see what she had done—her body still blocked their view of the machine—she lifted the stylus.

“I’m all right,” she said, apologizing for her clumsiness with a hapless, female glance at M. Hiver. “It’s the smallest scratch, and I’m very embarrassed. Please go back to the photographs and let me clean up the glass.”

“You’re certain?” asked Hugh.

“Quite.”

As soon as they were gone, she opened her Gladstone bag and laid the piece of tin foil, very carefully, between the sheets of Astor House stationery that she’d taken from their room. There it remained during the long trip back to Washington, during which Hugh, seeming to pass through several phases of disease all at once, rose into a febrile exaltation. The clock showed 11:45
P.M.
when they arrived at the Baltimore & Potomac station. He was carried off the train by two porters, in a delirium, his teeth chattering so badly Cynthia feared he might swallow his madly merry tongue.

The bouquet on his desk measured twice the size of those still arriving for Butler, who had taken his seat the week before, despite the heavy guns of oratory that Conkling had fired to keep him off it. But the War God was about to win the only battle that counted.

“The clerk will call the roll,” ordered Vice President Wheeler.

Conkling broke off a petal from one of the flowers and tore it with his fingers. He thought of the ladies who’d brought these blossoms yesterday, along with their twelve thousand signatures in search of a sixteenth amendment. Almost all senators had delivered the suffragists’ petitions, more out of gallantry than conviction, but he had been rewarded with this great spray for the seriousness with which he’d
ordered the scrolls be received by the Committee on Privileges and Elections. Did their twelve thousand signatures, he now wondered, exceed the number of letters the machine had churned out against the Custom House nominations?

They had been here in executive session for five hours, since 3:00 this afternoon, and under the rules of such a meeting there was no one in any of the balconies to look at him: no barely suppressed hisses and swoons, no encouraging notes from Kate, no serene looks of approbation from Mrs. Bruce. There was also, by custom, a rhetoric so freewheeling that he had been reminded all day of his first term in the House, back in ’59 at this very time of year, when he’d had to save the implacable Thad Stevens from a physical beating by six traitors coming across the aisle.

“Mr. Bayard!”

“Aye,” said the Delaware Democrat, emphatically. Two hours ago, as the sky above the dome turned from deep red to black, Bayard had stood and recited long passages from the fifth Jay Commission report, trying to regale his colleagues into outrage over the New York machine’s code names and tricks and strong-armings. “They have turned a fortress of protection into a den of thieves!” Conkling had listened, as he did now, playing with a newly struck sample silver dollar from the mint in Philadelphia, a jesting gift from Senator Jones of Nevada, who knew that the War God’s only alliance with the Administration involved opposition to silver coinage.

“Mr. Blaine!”

“Nay.”

Now what was his game? wondered Conkling, as he sent a barely perceptible nod of appreciation toward his enemy from Maine, who probably thought a defeat for Hayes would remove the President from the field in 1880, setting up a direct contest between Blaine’s own forces and those of the General.

Along with the silver dollar, Conkling had an opal stone from Galt’s jewelry store in his right pocket. The Irishwoman had made him carry it, just as she had advised him to release the Commerce Committee’s
report on the thirtieth and postpone this vote on the nominations until today, the twelfth. Discord and harmony, sorrow and joy: they all had their particular angles and solar rays, it seemed. Thirty and 120 (12, a division by 10, would do just as well) stood as beneficent numbers, and must be chosen to propitiate the heavens. Striking on a date that corresponded to the more malignant rays would be overdoing things, she’d assured him.

“Mr. Conkling!”

“Nay.” Spoken as calmly as he could utter the word, just this side of boredom. There was no need for overdoing the theatrics now, not after pulling out every stop in the debate. It was time to let the alphabet continue its march toward Roscoe Conkling’s victory.

When this triumph was had, he could concentrate on his next prize. The Irishwoman’s recent intelligence in this regard should turn out to be at least as useful as her political portents. He had had to wring the information from her, threatening Mary Costello with everything from building-code violations to the District insane asylum before she admitted that Mrs. May “plumb adored” that idiot girl-boy. Even so, this astrologer was too much trouble, her trade too embarrassing. He didn’t care what he derived from it: when these two campaigns were over, he would at last wean himself from her voodoo.

“Mr. Edmunds!”

“No!”

Conkling smiled. His Vermont colleague, at his direction, had mocked rumors that the War God would lift his opposition to the nominations if Evarts would resign. “I don’t see Mr. Conkling playing checkers with this administration—no matter who’s sitting on the squares.”

Yesterday, in the cloakroom, he had been all gentle persuasion, working the divided Democrats with as soft a touch as George William Curtis himself might have applied, while Senator Matthews, Hayes’s loyal fellow Buckeye, moved two steps behind him, hopelessly trying to shore up the other side.