Two Moons (39 page)

“Tell me,” said Conkling, hoarsely.

“Turn down the lamp,” she ordered.

As he rose to comply, she thought of Hugh’s words to her on the
Mary Washington
last July, while they had sailed down the Potomac in the rainstorm.
Under all those clouds the moment is lost.
He had assured her that any action taking place without light to carry it through the heavens simply died with itself.
It might as well never have happened.

“Yes,” she told Conkling, as he returned to the sofa. “I prefer being with you in the dark.”

“I imagine you got sick of that disk crossing the Sun,” said David Todd, referring to Venus.

“Yes,” said Cynthia. Mr. Todd was the only other soul around the Observatory at 5
P.M.
on Christmas Eve. “But it will be exciting if you
find
your
disk.” She knew that even tonight he hoped to see a trans-Neptunian planet streak across the nebula he’d begun concentrating on ten days ago.

“What are you working on now?” he asked, pointing to the still considerable piles of papers and photographic plates atop her desk.

“Just some last touches on the report,” said Cynthia. “A very quiet conclusion to this part of the project. Certainly nothing like watching the actual Transit three years ago, I’m sure—though I must say, it’s hard to imagine Professor Hall standing on a deck in Vladivostok with the Pacific crashing beyond him.”

Mr. Todd smiled and leafed through a fair copy of what would soon go to the Government Printing Office. When he spoke again, he was too shy to look up. “I miss him,” he said.

She couldn’t bring herself to answer.

“I miss his amusing ways,” said Mr. Todd. “The way he would josh me. The way he’d mimic the admiral, the way he’d mimic you.”

She stared at Mr. Todd, sick for a moment with apprehension, until he looked straight at her, smiling. “It was reverent mimicry in your case, Mrs. May. He’d say, ‘Be serious, Mr. Allison,’ as if he wanted, that minute, to hear you scolding him. He’d laugh for a few seconds and then he’d
become
serious, or at least attentive to whatever he and I were supposed to be doing. I always knew it was you he was imitating, because when he did it he sounded like us.”

Yankees, he meant.

“Are you not going home, Mr. Todd?” asked Cynthia.

“No,” said the young man. “I’ll be spending the holiday with the Newcombs.”

“Well, I wish you a very merry Christmas.”

“And I wish you the same, Mrs. May.” He bowed slightly and made steps to leave the room, pausing at the threshold only when he heard her say “David?” and then—the most her emotions would permit—“Thank you.”

Hard as it was to imagine Mr. Hall, another Yankee, on the eastern
coast of Russia, Cynthia found it even more difficult to think of him making camp, seven months from now, near La Junta, Colorado, where he and Mrs. Hall would be, after a long trip on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, to observe the solar eclipse. Professor Harkness had taken over the preparations for the Observatory’s next spectacular—a meticulously planned road show, unlike last summer’s serendipitous-seeming lunar display. The admiral was hoping that Congress would grant his legislative wishes well before the observing parties set out, but either way, July 29, 1878, would find the Halls in Colorado, and Professor Harkness in Cheyenne along with Monsieur Trouvelot the illustrator and Mr. Alvan Clark, manufacturer of the Great Equatorial itself. Almost all the rest of the Observatory’s staff would be at various points west. Harkness’s desktop, which Cynthia was no shyer about inspecting than she had been Conkling’s, revealed that Mr. Todd—who might not yet even know it—would be with a group in Texas. Deals for discount railroad fares to transport the scientists and ship the instruments were already being negotiated.

The Mangin projector, to be shipped from New York the day after tomorrow, would arrive in Washington late Wednesday night. Upon learning this three days ago, Cynthia had sent a telegram to Charleston, one that she hoped Hugh would comprehend and Mrs. Allison would fail to. Since then, she had heard nothing from either one, and had begun to wish for even a second letter from the mother, which might contain a gold nugget of information that she could pan from the babbling stream of self-regard.

It was soon past six o’clock, late enough that she had to think about leaving the premises and facing Christmas Eve with whoever remained at Mrs. O’Toole’s. She bid Lieutenant Sturdy and Captain Piggonan good-bye and walked over the hardened mud toward Virginia Avenue. As she went, she looked up at the canvas telegraph ball lying unhoisted on the roof. She tried thinking about her first day here, but could not rid her mind of the War God’s sofa, his well-oiled endearments and machine-like thrusts. Closing her eyes against these mental images
sometimes had a helpful effect, so she practiced the trick right now, all the way to the edge of the grounds.

The sound of a familiar voice kept her from walking into the gatepost.

“I know you don’t want to be seein’ me, dearie, but please open your eyes. I can’t deny you’ve got every right to turn and walk the other way. But, for the love of Jaysus, it
is
Christmas. Say you’ll hear me out, for at least as long as it takes to walk to the streetcar.”

Cynthia said nothing, and quickened her pace. She was determined to get away from the woman, but as she went even faster she could hear Mary Costello puffing, and see her pressing a hand against the stitch in her side. When the planet reader finally fell behind, Cynthia did not stop for her, and took this as proof of her own disinclination to forgive the stupid woman; she would have done with her mischief forever. But when she arrived at the stop for the streetcar, which she’d had no intention of taking—hoping that a walk would get her home as late as possible—she stood still and waited, as if it had been her plan to ride it all along.

“I’ve had me comeuppance!” Madam Costello cried out half a block from the stop. From there on, until she arrived out of breath at Cynthia’s side, the volume and speed of her explanation never faltered. “He came and fired me the day after he won his vote. And he blamed me for spilling the beans about you and Mr. Hugh. Even though he forced me to! Said it caused all kinds of trouble I had no business making.”

Cynthia’s laughter stopped the astrologer’s pleading narrative.

“Dearie, I don’t know exactly what happened in New York. All’s I know is—”

“
All you know!
That’s your problem, Mary. You know everything, everyone’s secrets, and you pass them around as if they’re your own!”

“I can’t stop meself.” She was sniffling now. “I shouldn’t have told him about Mr. Hugh, but I shouldn’t have told you about the great man’s climacteric, neither. I was just trying to give the spheres a nudge,
thinkin’ that if I did, then maybe everyone would get what he wanted.” She wiped her nose and subsided a while, before asking, “How
is
the boy? Any better?”

“So, you know that he’s sick. And you got
that
from your War God. Neither one of you can keep his mouth closed, it seems.”

Madam Costello pushed out her lower lip a fraction of an inch, adopting for the first time tonight the old, put-upon expression Cynthia had so often seen her deploy in the past. Surely, it seemed to be saying, you can’t be blaming
me
for the poor boy’s illness. “Yes,” the Irishwoman finally said. “I heard about it from the great man.” What she could have said, genuinely, in her own defense, she did not—namely, that she had never told Conkling, even when he threatened her, that Mrs. May had
made up
that Scorpio-Aries prohibition. And she would not embarrass the girl, even now, to let her know she had such knowledge.

Cynthia recalled the way that Hugh and Mary had joked and laughed and generally gotten on like a house on fire; and she remembered how shut out she’d felt. She wondered now whether Hugh—if he knew the whole farcical truth and could see the two women on this chilly corner waiting for a streetcar that showed no signs of coming—would be laughing. There was no doubt, she had to admit, that
he
would yield to the planet reader’s entreaties. But how could
she,
whose nature had never been forgiving, excuse this calamity-causing woman yet again? Mary Costello had twice betrayed her to Roscoe Conkling: first, by telling him her address and the ordinary details of her life; then by telling him about Hugh. And yet, logic told Cynthia: if Mary had not presented her to the War God like a bit of game stocked for a weekend shoot, then the Mangin projector, however delayed, would not soon be sitting a mile or so away at the Baltimore & Potomac station.

She took Mrs. Allison’s letter from her reticule and handed it, without comment, to Madam Costello. The astrologer walked it a few feet to the curb and read it by a lantern hanging from the side of a waiting
private carriage. “I can barely find the boy in it” was all she said when she returned with the sheets of paper.

Cynthia shrugged and put the letter back in her bag. After a long pause, she said: “It’s his birthday, you know.”

“Of course I know,” replied Mary Costello. “Do you think planet readers forget such facts? You’ve
got
to forgive me, Cynthie! You got to be me friend again.” She squeezed the younger woman’s forearm.

“I have no friends,” Cynthia replied, without any affectation. It was the simple truth.

“All the more reason to let
me
be one,” said the astrologer. “I can redeem meself. I don’t know how just yet, but I’ll find a way. I’ll make it me New Year’s resolution.”

“Another year!” cried Cynthia, bursting into tears as the streetcar came into view. Were another twelve months more than she could bear, or more than she should hope for?

“Let me feed you supper,” said Mary, as they boarded the conveyance. “Charles is bringin’ around something special tonight, a bit on the late side, just before he goes home to his family.”

Before she could think it through, or again tote up the woman’s treacheries, Cynthia let herself give in. She was soon eating two lamb chops off the clean portable plates that Charles set on the dirty table, and she let herself drink a quarter bottle of sherry while Madam Costello did justice to the rest, all the while telling stories of the famine and Chicago and Iris Cummings. The hours went by and Cynthia’s own tongue loosened, but never to the point where she was in danger of telling Mary what had happened last week between herself and Conkling. As midnight, and Christmas, approached, it remained the one essential thing the astrologer did not know about her.

“Don’t doze off, dearie. I want you to go to Mass with me.”

“No,” said Cynthia. “My head’s too woozy already. I can’t sit there amidst all your people’s smells and bells.”

Madam Costello took no offense—and Cynthia showed no real resistance. At ten minutes before twelve, the two women were at Fifteenth
and H Streets, climbing the steps between Saint Matthew’s red sandstone columns. They took seats in a pew near the back, but to the dismay of Cynthia’s head and stomach, they were not allowed to
keep
the seats for very long. All the standing and kneeling and sitting down again seemed more complicated than the whirling movements at Marini’s. But the Papists’ Latin did, Cynthia had to admit, soothe her uncomprehending ears, and the olive-skinned children of the Catholic diplomats who filled the church were prettier than the native urchins one saw gamboling over the District. She looked at one girl for some resemblance to the eleven-year-old she’d been when she came to this city, and found none, though she did, among the congregants, discover approximations of both John May and her brother, Fred. All her life, it seemed, she had been seeking analogs of the dead or, more strangely, of herself, as if she were an afterimage instead of something real.

She would not, however, permit herself to look for any transposition of Hugh here in this church. When his face crossed her mind, she forced herself to imagine him for real, still alive, asleep, the blankets up to his chin in Charleston.

What was taking place up on the altar seemed no more a church service than the snowless ground outside had looked like the setting for Christmas. She pondered the host that Mary Costello, who could hardly be said to have fasted tonight, marched right up to receive. The idea of transubstantiation, that the bread could be the actual body of Christ, reincarnated after a fast flight through nineteen hundred years—and yet, to anyone’s plain taste and touch, still bread—seemed not so much a miracle or fraud as a riddle. As Mary came back from her quick trip to the altar and presumably heaven, her head most piously bowed, Cynthia could not help but think of the farmer and the fox and the chicken and the corn—and of the superintendent’s irritated letter, written just the other day, to a Mr. Sykes of Windsor Locks, Connecticut. Admiral Rodgers liked to respond personally to the simple scientific questions ordinary people often sent the Observatory; the task made him feel more akin to the astronomers under his authority. But
Mr. Sykes’s inquiry, as to where light first appeared on Earth, had seemed unanswerable. Mr. Harrison, much amused, had shared with her a copy of the admiral’s reply: “You ask of a circle, where does it begin? In a true circle, it is all alike, with neither beginning nor end. When light first appeared, then someone saw it on the horizon first. At the same moment, some one had it at midday; and at the same moment someone had the Sun setting—who saw it first? Your question is one that admits no answer—so it seems to me; and I do not care to ask the Greenwich Observatory about it.”