Two Moons (45 page)

On Saturday morning the weather cleared and they buried his body in the Oak Hill cemetery. She stood at the freshly covered grave with Mary Costello, David Todd, and Commodore Sands, the only ones she had told. The old man appeared confused, but seemed to respond to the comforting pats of Mary’s hand. When the astrologer eased him off for a stroll, David Todd nodded toward the mound of earth and made a frustrated admission to Cynthia: “I didn’t really understand him.”

“I did,” she said, softly. “Even when he made no sense—or nothing the others would call sense—I understood him.”

Fifty feet away, Mary Costello and the commodore made friends with the gravediggers, who had just made a place in the earth for Mr. Thomas Jackson, the eighty-nine-year-old currier from High Street, resident in the District since 1813. “Life ain’t fair, is it?” Mary asked. “If that boy back there lived to a ripe age like that, we’d be where? All the way in nineteen-thirty-something,” she guessed, removing her hand from the commodore’s to do a quick count on her fingers.

After the funeral, it took the two women most of the afternoon to walk back to Third and D. Where Pennsylvania Avenue crossed Fourteenth Street, Mary Costello pointed south, toward the farrier’s, and inquired as softly as she could about what Cynthia wanted done with the light machine, which Hugh had helped them wheel back onto its bed of straw just before midnight on Wednesday.

“Tell your friend to find an ironmonger who can chop it up and sell it for scrap,” said Cynthia.

The astrologer couldn’t help asking: “How can you sound so cross toward something that did such a bang-up job? It gave the boy his heart’s desire.”

“ ‘Cross’?” replied Cynthia. “I’m nothing like that, Mary. I just don’t want anyone else ever using it. Let it be scattered like the spray of a fountain.”

She would sleep in Mary’s back bedroom tonight, after Charles delivered them a meal in his metal box. She could not face going back to Mrs. O’Toole, who had probably given her room away for all the time she’d spent in it these last three weeks.

As they waited for Charles, she sat quietly on the window seat above the planet reader’s sign and stroked a suspicious Ra. When Mary saw her staring through the glass and into the street, she asked, without thinking, “That’s how you first saw him, ain’t it?” It took Cynthia a moment to realize that she meant the figure of Roscoe Conkling, ten months ago, after he’d strode up the sidewalk for his reading.

“Well,” said the astrologer, “I doubt he’ll ever again be showin’ his face here.
Or
his hand.”

Cynthia said nothing for a minute or two, then looked back from the window toward Madam Costello. “Tell me the future, Mary.”

It was a subject the astrologer would prefer to avoid. Thoughts of what would now happen to this girl, most of them discouraging, had dominated her mind all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue. She tried changing the subject. “What was the name of that feller at the grave today? Not the old boy; the young one.”

“David Todd.”

“That’s right. He told me that he and Mr. Hugh were lookin’ for a new planet.”

“Yes, they were.”

“Well, I hope he keeps lookin’, and in the right place. Here’s a piece of the future I
can
tell you.” She got up from her chair to fetch
The Light of Egypt
from the kitchen table. “Here we go,” she said, after locating the page:

“ ‘To our esoteric system there are ten celestial bodies somewhere, namely, the Sun and nine planets. At present we have only nine in all. Where, then, is the lost one? The exacted adept alone can solve this problem. Suffice it to say that it symbolizes the missing soul within the human constitution. Pulled out of the line of march by disturbing forces, this orb becomes for a time the prey of disruptive action and ultimately lost form, and is now an array of fragments.’ ”

She stopped reading, noticing that Cynthia had closed her eyes.

“Go on, Mary. I’m listening.”

“All right. ‘The ring of planetoids lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The time will ultimately come when this orb will be reconstituted.’ ” Stumbling over the long adverbs and hyphenates, Mary Costello wanted to quit, but she saw Cynthia’s hand lift itself from Ra and urge, in an exhausted circular motion, that she finish reading what she’d started.

“ ‘Until that time,’ ” Madam Costello concluded, “ ‘the missing soul
will seek its physical mate in vain, except in rare cases. When this day shall arrive, the Utopia of Neptune and the millennium of Saint John will begin upon Earth. May that time speedily arrive!’ ”

The planet reader looked up and saw that Cynthia had at last fallen asleep. She closed her book and gently took the cat from the younger woman’s lap.

Across the city, in the last minutes of daylight, Mr. Todd, who
would
be looking for a new planet tonight, though in a different precinct of the heavens, made an entry in his notebook. At 1:00
P.M.
this afternoon, through the Transit Circle, he had observed the disappearance of two sunspots.

“Outrageous!” cried Roscoe Conkling. “Forty dollars?”

The cabman tried to steady his horse; she was losing her footing in the deepening snow on lower Broadway, and he didn’t care if this crazy swell became a fare or not.

“It’s a real blizzard, sir,” said William Sulzer, the young lawyer who came up alongside Conkling and tried calming him down while the cabman calmed his horse. “I heard a fellow at the next corner asking for fifty.”

“Get along!” Conkling shouted up to the driver, before smacking the horse’s rump.

“You may not find another,” warned Sulzer. “I’ll wager nearly every horsecar and coach in the city has stopped running.” He struggled to keep a clear view of the older man, as the icy snow, more like needles than flakes, blew into his eyes.

“Damned near every
man
in the city has stopped running!” cried Conkling.

He had been furious for most of the day, ever since showing up this morning to defend an $80 million estate against some parasites trying to break the decedent’s will. There he’d been in Superior Court at 9
A.M.
, ready to do battle for the shade of Mrs. A. T. Stewart, widow of the department store magnate, only to find that nobody else had braved the weather to get down to the courtroom. He’d spent the past
eight hours at a desk in the Stewart Building, now almost invisible behind the swirling snow.

“I shall walk!” Conkling informed Sulzer.

“How far is your destination?” asked the younger man.

“Madison Square. The Hoffman House.”

Sulzer attempted a low whistle, to signal discouragement, but it died in the freezing wind.

“You may accompany me, or you may wait for another thieving hack,” said Conkling, whose expensively shod feet were already moving northward.

How could Sulzer say no? If he didn’t freeze to death over the three-mile journey, he would be making conversation with Lord Roscoe himself, the most erect fallen politician any aspiring one could ever hope to meet.

The trick, he supposed, was to keep his head down and—except when he had to talk—his mouth closed against the icy buckshot of snow. “Fine week for the circus to be in town!” he managed to shout, before bringing his muffler back up over his lips.

No response from Conkling. Had the wind kept him from hearing? Or was the remark, in the blizzard’s rage, too inane to produce any interest in a man who had for twenty years held every Congress and state convention spellbound by his flights of oratory and contempt?

It was best to stick to business. “Will you win the Stewart case, sir?”

“I should say so!” Conkling replied with a laugh, not breaking stride, his teeth glinting behind puffs of frozen breath. “If I can carry the day for Jay Gould, I can deliver justice to a widow’s poor ghost.”

Eighty million dollars must make the widow Stewart’s poor ghost nearly as rich as the railroad baron, but who could count that high? thought Sulzer. Certainly not the thin, underclad Italian struggling, just ahead of them, to get his shovel one foot farther through the snow. He was the only other sign of life on the block in front of them. Ordinarily at this hour the lamps in the shops and offices would be multiplying themselves into a great chandelier; but today the few squares of visible light were twinkling off, one by one, the proprietors not wanting
to lose another moment getting to their lodgings—which were surely, Sulzer thought, a lot closer than Madison Square.

He looked at the shuttered news kiosk, which had put on a hat of snow, and thought of the last rumors he’d heard before running into Conkling: the El switches had frozen and the sidewheelers had stopped running back and forth across the Hudson. The world was falling asleep, like Rip Van Winkle. Sulzer was so cold he could barely feel his feet, let alone the cobblestones buried inches beneath them. The whooshes of cold wind, carrying not just snow but ash from the sidewalk barrels, were pushing him into a sort of wakeful delirium. He plodded on, lifting one leg and then the other, beginning to wonder if he hadn’t made Conkling up, conjured him like one of the spirits from the graveyard at Saint Paul’s, which the two of them now were passing.

But Lord Roscoe was still very real and alive, setting a pace Sulzer knew he wouldn’t be able to keep up for more than another hundred yards.

“Sir!” he cried toward Conkling’s right shoulder, a foot ahead of his own left one. He gestured across the street to a saloon whose sign was big enough to be read through the riot of flakes and filth upon the air.

Conkling turned around, having caught the sound, though not the words. Seeing Sulzer motion toward the doors of the bar, which looked to be the only business open on the street, he yelled: “They should pour that poison into these horses!” He was managing to smile and walk backward as he bellowed toward the younger man: “It would get them moving, or put them out of their misery!” He pointed to two of the harnessed animals, confused and immobile at the curb. The effort to speak was now more than Sulzer could make, so he just struggled to catch up, wishing he’d never gotten out of bed today, let alone offered his company to this man twice his age and clearly twice his strength.

Conkling charged forward on the path he was breaking, fending off extraneous humans. He waved a beggar back into his doorway and, before she could fall on her drenched bustle, steadied a woman straining
on tiptoe to catch sight of some still-distant rescuer. She didn’t realize she was momentarily in the arms of the “War God of the Norsemen,” but her expression of surrender showed Sulzer that Conkling still had his magnetism.

The younger man simply could not keep up, could not go another block with his face a frozen fire behind his sodden muffler. People were going to die out here tonight. This storm that had come out of nowhere was hungry for them. Escaping it, immediately, was more important than effecting contact with this other force of nature. “Mr. Conkling!” he shouted to the broad back in front of him. “Don’t you think we should try for rooms here?” They had reached the Astor House, but as soon as Sulzer made the suggestion, the squinting doorman took a step out from under the canopy and shook his head from side to side. “ ‘Haven’t got a bed left, sirs. They’ve started renting space on the billiard tables, if you want to lie there for the night. I’m serious.”

Conkling threw his head back. His loud laughter made itself heard, but he couldn’t shake the icicles from his whiskers. He turned to Sulzer, whose name he had already forgotten. “Go get a spot for yourself, young man. No one’s going to put
me
behind the eight ball!”

And with that, not stopping to wave, he was off, alone, block after block, for another hour, toward Union Square, the dirty needles of snow ever at him, no more interested in who he was, or used to be, than they were in the children struggling across the gutter with pails of milk and coal. “Don’t touch it, you idiots!” shouted Conkling. The children had become entranced by a fallen, sizzling telegraph wire. They fell back from it at the sound of the stranger’s voice—a good thing, too, for Conkling was now shaken to discover that the strength to roar another warning had suddenly left him. He was, he had to admit, exhausted, unsure how far he’d gone or how long he’d walked. He stopped at the corner, looking for a passable angle across the Square, trying to get the bearings he could never remember deserting him before. His coat was a heavy, wet ruin, his left arm sore from working to keep his hat upon his head during the long trudge. The hat was a ruin, too. He threw it into a snowbank and blinked a half dozen times,
as if he might be able to wipe the maelstrom in front of his eyes into some sort of visibility.

He mustn’t just stand here. He must do what he’d always done, bull ahead, ignoring all to his right and left, including a man who was staring at him, reconsidering him now that the hat was off. There had been a time when no one needed a second glance to know he was looking at the senator who kept his money sound and barred the doors of the Custom House to all the rebel-coddling reformers who thought their men could do the people’s business better than the Conkling machine.