Two Moons (46 page)

It was fine not being recognized; it was preferable, at such a moment as this, to all the fawning attentions of the past. As Conkling fought his way, much more slowly now, across the Square and into the Ladies’ Mile, he tried to keep himself alert by remembering how a decade ago, in the city on his way to the state convention, he had walked this street on a hot summer day, craving anonymity. He had been shopping for a bracelet or a bottle of perfume, the kind of item he’d always made one of his clerks buy for the others, but which, that year, for her and only her, he had wanted to purchase himself, so that he could finger whatever object (a shawl, he finally decided) he would put into her hands.

Her.
Even after ten years the anger could warm him in a flash; it propelled him into a quickened step for the next hundred yards—until the feeling became just one more element, like the wind and needles of snow, sapping his strength to a point where he feared he would never make it to his hotel. But he would. He would count off his steps, fifty at a time, and turn this killing journey, almost three hours long by now, into a series of smaller, possible ones, incremental ones that bit by bit would get him where he was going. Fifty steps and then fifty more and then fifty more.

By the time Madison Square appeared, like a great frozen plain, he could move with only a quarter the speed he’d had starting out. But Roscoe Conkling
would
make it across this last expanse and into the
Hoffman House, whose outline, behind the great swirlings of white and gray, he thought he could perceive. Steady on, he thought, struggling under the weight of his coat, wondering if he should rid himself of it, too. No, he would need it tomorrow morning, when all this would be a melting memory and he’d be setting off, at 8:00 sharp, for the courts.

He was falling, going down, and he braced himself for pain, but it never came: his form sank soundlessly into a cushioning drift. He was face down, and panicking, until he managed, with what felt like the last power in him, to roll over and see a band of gray sky above the two white walls he was caught between. But he could not raise himself, no matter how hard he struggled, and his shout, so much less loud than the one he’d made to the cabman three hours ago, died against the sides of this snowy coffin he had just dug for himself.

No. He would not die.
He couldn’t, not like this—not after a lifetime of exertions with his Indian clubs, of fanning away his colleagues’ tobacco smoke, and fleeing the gluttonous mounds of chops and sauces they couldn’t wait to wash down with port. He had the strength of three men, everyone had always said it, and that would see him through, even if his survival now seemed to depend on his right foot, which stuck out beyond the edge of the drift and which someone, even a dog, was bound to come along and notice. But there was no one coming, so he fought again to raise himself, reversing the struggle he had made all those years in the Senate, when it took every bit of his strength
not
to rise from his chair, not to interrupt or thrash whoever was speaking against him.

But he could not get up.

At all costs, he must keep himself warm. He tried imagining himself dry and splendid in one of his old velvet-collared cutaways. He brought his hands to his face and brushed away the beginnings of a new layer of snow that had already descended on the ice and frosted his forelock, no longer the golden one that had made the women swoon, but a good sturdy gray one that belonged to a man still only
fifty-eight, and strong enough to see this through. He would be joking about it tomorrow in Superior Court.

But he was losing consciousness. He could feel it, could recognize the same delirious sensation he’d felt a half century before, when the horse had kicked up and broken his jaw. Just a little boy then. Broken his jaw. Broken it, just as he’d broken them, so many of them, Presidents even, and so many lesser breeds, so many political bodies you could tally them on that adding machine in the Stewart office.

But then he had lost his touch, failing to make the General a President once more, succeeding only in denying Blaine and Sherman the Mansion, and in putting Arthur—
Chet Arthur!
—on the ticket with Garfield. Who then went and did just as Hayes, nominating his own man instead of Roscoe Conkling’s for Arthur’s old job. So he had resigned from the Senate, creating the greatest storm ever, planning all the while to return in triumph once the state legislature insisted on his reappointment. But the little soldiers in Albany had had enough of him; they called his bluff and kept him out of office—until he glimpsed his redemption in fate’s greatest joke of all: Garfield’s killing and the ascension of Chet Arthur to the presidency of the United States. He’d gotten on the train to Washington and walked into the Mansion thinking he would now run the place as surely as he had the Custom House. And as soon as he asked Arthur to put one of their old men into the Collector’s position, Chet Arthur, the President of the United States, showed him the door. In the seven years since, Roscoe Conkling had fired his rhetorical cannon in the courtrooms of New York, mastering a dozen jurors rather than six dozen senators, eyeing millions in damages instead of votes.

Twenty minutes more passed, and he could hear the whole parade of them drumming in his ears: Blaine and Kate and Evarts, and now, suddenly, again,
her,
walking down the Irishwoman’s steps that other March day, clearing the humid stink that sat upon Washington like a curse.

Her.
One day, at the end of the following winter, when it was all over and the boy long buried, he’d gone to her lodgings and told her
that now, she must realize, was surely time for his protection and for their friendship to flourish. He had taken her in his arms, expecting, hoping, to have his face scratched before she submitted to his kisses. Instead, he’d heard only her laughter, a sound more final, and hateful, than that of any door he would ever hear slammed against him.

Her.
The mere pronoun was sufficient to call up one last lucid surge in him, enough anger and strength for him to roll back over on his stomach and push his arms down into the snow and, by God,
get up,
which he did, up and out of the drift, to stagger the rest of the way across the Square, the snow still coming at him, the Sun unimaginably distant and forever gone, farther away than the moons she’d tried to show him through the telescope that night.

Hoffman House. Where was the sign? After all this, did he have the wrong building?

“Where am I?” he shouted to the bellman, who’d come out to the snow-covered steps.

“The New York Club, sir.”

“Twenty-fifth Street?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, I want the Hoffman House!”

“Where have you come from, sir?”

“From Wall Street. On foot.”

“Good God!” cried the bellman, dragging in the form of Roscoe Conkling, which had just collapsed and was soon to breathe no more.

She watched the snow pile up on the windowsill. Looking out, she could almost imagine it was forty years ago in Laconia. Around herself she tightened her shawl—its appliquéd stars long ago plucked off.

Despite the weather, the Pension Building had refused to close early, and she had sat until day’s end at her typewriter, addressing envelopes for checks and occasionally looking up to see the flakes come down outside. The new girl next to her marveled at the brain-power
of the men who in another part of the building actually calculated these disbursements, each number different from the next. As always, when such a remark was made, she had nodded her agreement.

She had left the Observatory six months after he died, because she could no longer stand to be around it, and because she realized that she was getting sick herself. It had now been ages since she’d been west of Lafayette Square, but the astronomers, twelve years later, were still where they had always been. Some time ago she had read about the purchase of a farm northwest of the city, off Tenallytown Road, and had even lately heard rumors that construction of a new Observatory was soon, at last, to commence there. Admiral Rodgers had died in ’82, of malaria that had turned into Bright’s disease. She didn’t know the name of the current superintendent, but now, like everyone else, she knew that malaria was borne by mosquitoes.

The Pension Building’s ventilation was excellent—some of the windows even had screens—and she was comfortable entering it each morning, crossing under the frieze of tiny, endlessly tramping soldiers. She felt at home with the superannuated and, especially, the dead—all those names, more of them each year, crossed from the rolls. They were easier company for her mind than the living. Mary Costello had died two years ago, but she sometimes still enjoyed thinking of her.

Mr. Todd had sent Christmas letters for several years, telling her such news as his marriage to Mabel Loomis and, eventually, his departure from the Observatory for Amherst College—in good health, he assured her. She still saw Simon Newcomb, grayer and more stout, engraved in the magazines. And she sometimes spotted Professor Harkness and Mr. Harrison, from a distance, on the street, the first quite straight and the latter by now badly stooped.

She opened the window several inches, wincing against the cold air. Brushing snow from a length of the ledge, she located the wrapped bit of cheese she had set out the other day. After undoing the paper, she took out a box of crackers from beneath the bed. Eating upstairs was strictly forbidden here at Mrs. Cleary’s on Sixth Street, but she had so far managed to stay out of trouble. Also from under the bed,
inside a hatbox, she pulled out two small bottles, one of rum, and the other Schenck’s Pulmonic Syrup, which she knew she continued to buy more for its alcohol content than any prophylactic properties. She would drink from both tonight, but she never worried about waking up. It was rare that she could stay asleep past five.

She supposed she would like two more years, no more than that. D’Arrest’s comet would be back for the second time before then. One night in ’83, during hours of public viewing, she had gone to the Observatory, quite unrecognized, to see it through the Great Equatorial. She would see it once more, and that would be enough.

It was terribly cold tonight, and it took her several minutes to realize she hadn’t closed the window after retrieving the cheese. She did that now, and then finished off the crackers with some rum. While she sipped, she argued with herself about whether to indulge a particular pleasure that up to now she had permitted herself only once or twice a year, most recently on his birthday. She mustn’t overdo it, lest she wear out the pleasure and the little metal sheet, but she was especially lonely tonight, and the temptation was more than she could withstand.

So she crossed the room to her shelf of books, taking up the biography of Franklin Pierce that Mary Costello had returned to her once the War God was gone from both their lives. Pressed between the pages, she found his Harvard photograph; M. Trouvelot’s drawing of herself; and the folded Gauss sketches, still bearing the tack-holes where they’d been fixed to the walls on High Street. What she wanted, however, was the piece of foil, even thinner than the sketches’ paper. She extracted this latter item with great care and took it over to the apparatus Mr. Todd had managed to acquire, at her entreaty, a year before he left the District: a little machine nearing obsolescence even then and thought by now, by most, to be quite useless. Her fingers ached with the cold and her arthritis, but she managed, once she placed the metal wafer on the cylinder, to turn the crank. As soon as she placed the stylus onto the foil, she looked out the window and toward a star—which one, she did not know. She closed her eyes in time to hear him say:
Darling! I’m here!

AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For help and encouragement with this book I am especially grateful to Jan K. Herman, Historian of the navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery, which is today housed in the Old Naval Observatory in Washington. I thank Mr. Herman for his own history of the site
(A Hilltop in Foggy Bottom)
and for personally guiding me through the rooms and domes where Asaph Hall and Simon Newcomb and Admiral Rodgers once worked; and where Hugh Allison and Cynthia May never did.

I am also much indebted to Steve Dick of the U.S. Naval Observatory’s Office of History and Public Affairs. I urge readers interested in the actual story of the Martian moons’ discovery and the Observatory’s removal from Foggy Bottom to keep an eye out for Mr. Dick’s forthcoming history of the institution.

I would like to repeat, if I may, a cautionary word I gave in two previous novels of mine: “Nouns always trump adjectives, and in the phrase ‘historical fiction’ it is important to remember which of the two words is which.” In
Two Moons,
even while attempting to get dozens of things right, I have deliberately gotten more than a few quite wrong—through distortion or outright invention. I have been largely faithful to Roscoe Conkling’s public life, and to what I believe was the general tenor of his private one; for his particular adventure with the imaginary Cynthia May, only I, of course, can claim responsibility—and I confess to walking these days at a fast new clip past the War God’s statue in Madison Square Park.