Two Moons (42 page)

“You realize she has a looser tongue than Mr. Todd,” said Cynthia.

“But we’re the only ones she knows to talk to at the Observatory. Think about it.”

She already had.

The train platform at the B&P station extended westward into the Mall. Cynthia stood near its end, looking toward the base of the Monument, unable to imagine herself at its top—even without the projector and a very sick lover. By Wednesday the 16th, Hugh was no more fit to proceed than he had been the week before, but she had decided she could no longer wait to get the Mangin out of the terminal’s freight room and ready for its task. Several minutes ago she had asked Mary Costello to sit in the waiting room under the station’s Gothic spires while she went to claim the machine. But so far she had just paced the
concourse and the platform, doubting that she and the planet reader would succeed in their plan of getting the projector to a shed owned by a friend of Mary’s, a farrier near Fourteenth and B. There they were supposed to find, already delivered, two hundred feet of cable, purchased with the last of Hugh’s savings—“dipping into my burial money,” he’d told her.

“You a magician?” asked the freight clerk, once the crate had finally been torn away from this object whose name and purpose he could scarcely guess at.

Cynthia was already too busy inspecting the machine to answer. She flipped open the metal blind that hid a 40 cm. lamp, and felt the outlines of the aplanatic mirror that would make the beam twenty times more powerful than any a cylindrical one could produce. She tested the trunnions on which the projector was mounted, moving the lamp vertically and around, making sure the light could be shined in the only direction that counted—straight up. The field wagon that supported the apparatus carried, as well, a tiny boiler, which drove a small steam engine, which in turn powered the little Gramme dynamo-electric machine. It was a sort of Lilliputian factory; but out on the street, with one woman pushing, the other pulling, and a tarpaulin on top, the whole assemblage would resemble nothing so much as a lunch cart.

The journey she and Mary took—avoiding the holes in the intersections and the missing planks of the B Street sidewalk—was less than the three kilometers the light beam was guaranteed to travel upward. The astrologer, aware that being helpful here was crucial to her redemption, took care to ask as few questions as possible. But there was one she couldn’t refrain from posing.

“Once you take this
out
of the shed we’re going to—on the night in question, is what I mean—ain’t you worried about runnin’ into a uniform? Maybe even an Army feller? After all, dearie, once you step on to the Mall you’ll be on government property, and Lord knows, once you get to the needle itself—”

Cynthia said nothing. She kept pulling a trifle faster than Mary
Costello pushed. “I suppose you could drug him!” said the planet reader, with a laugh. “Just like Catherine Bailey did with that poor old gent from the Soldiers’ Home. Knocked him out at the bar she keeps near Boundary. Took
fifty
dollars off him—can’t imagine how he had that much—and when he woke up and found that she had it, she claimed—”

“—that he’d given it to her to buy a wedding dress.” Cynthia read the
Star
’s crime columns, too, but ever since the War God had fired Mary from her political prognosticating, police items were the
only
thing the astrologer read, and repeated. “Your job,” said Cynthia, as firmly as Miss Wilton had ever spoken to the girls back in Laconia, “will be to tend the fire.” She tapped the boiler box beneath the tarp.

“I’m a quick study,” Madam Costello assured her.

At the farrier’s, Cynthia noticed the coiled cable—Hugh’s purchase—resting on some straw in the corner. The wire, fortunately, was thinner than she’d expected, and with Mary’s help she moved it to the single shelf on the bottom of the cart, then covered the whole conglomeration with a second tarpaulin: a glance above had revealed some damp rafters.

“We’re allowed to come in and out of here at any hour, am I right?” she asked, nervously. “And how much does he want for us to keep it here?”

“Relax, dearie. He wants nothin’ a’tall. He was me last beau.”

That afternoon, back at her desk, Cynthia noticed how the astronomers who’d been to a reception given by the Smithsonian’s Professor Baird talked with a new ease about their encounters with the Institution’s worthies. There was a sudden air of confidence about the Observatory: the bill for its removal had just been voted out of committee, and some of the men had jokingly begun to call the place “Reservation No. 4,” as did that portion of the legislation about selling
the old site once a new one had been found. The bill now boldly called for an appropriation of
three
hundred thousand dollars, toward both land and construction, and no less sober a man than Professor Harkness was starting to imagine the rise of a modern wonder in the hills northwest of the city. “I mustn’t let my fancy work more quickly than the Congress,” he soon said, returning to the business of ordering special cameras for next summer’s eclipse.

In the superintendent’s office, however, utopian prospects remained the order of the day. Mr. Harrison was writing one letter to Professor Ormond Stone in Cincinnati, thanking him for all he’d done to support the removal bill; and then, without so much as stopping to re-dip his pen, writing another to Dr. Porter, the president of Yale, begging that he weigh in on the matter at this crucial moment.

At a quarter to five, while the first evening shadows crossed the tops of Cynthia’s hands, Mr. Todd looked in on her. Having waited for Professor Harkness to step out, he asked, quite excitedly, if it were true that Mr. Allison was back. “Angelo Hall swears he saw him bundled up on a back porch on High Street. Oh, please tell me it’s so, Mrs. May.”

“Could we make it our secret?” she replied, after some hesitation. “Even if it means fibbing to little Angelo?”

“Yes,” Mr. Todd assured her.

“He
has
come back,” she said, “and he’s gaining strength daily.” She delighted in her own lie, stringing it out to delude herself as much as David Todd. “In fact, he’s told me more than once that he hopes you’re ‘still looking’—not just for the trans-Neptunian planet, but also for new sunspots.”

Mr. Todd clapped his hands. “You tell him that the other night I had a good look at this odd, elongated object I first spotted on the fifth. I suspect it’s a nebula—probably Herschel G.C. 2776—but I’m not discouraged. And neither should he be! We’ll find it yet.”

“I’m glad you stopped in,” said Cynthia. “I’ve made you more cheerful, I think—although you seemed rather lively to begin with.”

“I’m cheerful and perplexed, all at once, Mrs. May. I’m taking Miss
Loomis to the opera tonight.
The Bohemian Girl.
That’s the source of my cheer. But Professor Newcomb has finally asked me to transfer to the Almanac Office, as general superintendent of computations. That’s the reason for my perplexity. He just dropped by to see the admiral and he made me the offer not ten minutes ago. I’m trying to make up my mind. You know,” he added, as if afraid to think out loud about himself, “there’s always a place for
you
there, Mrs. May.”

She smiled.

“You can’t stay here forever,” he teased.

“No,” she answered, glancing at the clock. “It’s time for me to think of getting home.”

“Will you be looking in on him?” asked Todd.

“Yes, David, and I’ll give him your message.”

On her way out, she passed Mr. Eastman and Mr. Hall, who these days was looking at Venus, not in transit across the Sun, but on her own bright rounds in the night sky. The two men nodded to Cynthia, and as she began her walk to Georgetown, she tried maintaining the false high spirits she had displayed to Mr. Todd. She returned to her old fantasy—less likely than Professor Harkness’s—of a new, salubrious Observatory to which she’d send Hugh off each night, for years and years.

At the same hour, two miles to the east, in the basement of the Capitol, Roscoe Conkling bore down on his gilt-edged note cards, composing a eulogy for Senator Morton, whose long fatal illness had preoccupied the upper body for much of the time since it reconvened last October. Mrs. Hayes was thought likely to attend tomorrow’s orations in the chamber, and much as that possibility pleased him, he found himself more inspired by a fantasy of Cynthia May looking down on him from the ladies’ gallery. “Death is nature’s supreme
abhorrence,” he wrote, his violet ink beginning to flow. “The dark valley, with its weird and solemn shadows, illumined by the rays of Christianity, is still the ground which man shudders to approach.” Yes, if she heard this, she would reflect upon it and seek his protection once and for all. “The grim portals of the narrow house seem, in the lapse of centuries, to have gained rather than lost in impressive and foreboding horror.”

He looked up for a second, then reread what he had written. Morton, alas, was getting lost. So he turned to his bookshelf, as he had done composing so many other memorials, for the morocco-bound Bard. “Put out the light,” he sighed, resolved to work through the evening. “And then put out the light.”

At 9
P.M.
on Wednesday, the 23rd, three senators stood near the front end of Wormley’s canopy, continuing a debate they’d had on the floor that afternoon.

“My dear man,” said Mr. Beck to Mr. Sargent, “the Treasury cannot write these men a check for three hundred thousand dollars before they’ve even found the spot they want to buy. With your bill, they will inevitably spend that much, even if some cheaper parcel were available. Money appropriated becomes money spent, as surely as night follows day.”

Outside Wormley’s, guests arriving for the Spanish minister’s party would have been hard put to say which of its daily phases the world was passing through. Across the road, on the corner of Saint Matthew’s, a calcium light had been set up to shine straight at the hotel’s awning. Those coming to celebrate King Alfonso’s marriage stepped out of their carriages into a bath of whiteness that was certainly not night, but not quite day, either, unless it were a sort of celestial day found in the afterlife. The glow was so pure that one expected to hear a seraphim choir instead of the mere stringed instruments
whose sound floated out from the four hotel parlors that Wormley had combined into a huge single ballroom.