Two Moons (5 page)

Hayes now claimed to have intended naming Evarts all along, and he was so dully honest he was probably telling the truth. But, Conkling thought, the sweat running down him now, the scandal wasn’t even in how it looked; the scandal was in what it would
mean,
to him, Roscoe Conkling, and the Republican party in the state of New York, which was only to say Roscoe Conkling twice, for he and the state party were one and the same.

Evarts and the President were over-mindful of the Democrats’ anger; too sensitive to whispers about “His Fraudulency” having been set up in the Executive Mansion without truly having won the election; too embarrassed by what they were finding in (or missing from) Grant’s cupboards. They had caught the nervous malady of reform and were looking for remedies: palliatives for their foes, smelling salts for themselves. They were readying bills to raise an army of “Civil Service” clerks, each full of “merit,” a procession of worker ants loyal to no one but themselves. If Evarts had his way, they would soon be
infesting the New York Custom House—
Roscoe Conkling’s
Custom House, the great turbine of patronage through which foreign goods passed so that money and grateful labor might pour forth upon Republican candidates, all over the city and state of New York. Evarts had never cooperated, never understood; he was blind to the beauty of the machine, as gleaming and efficient as the Corliss engine, whose towers and platforms and unimaginable horsepower had sent shudders through last year’s centennial crowds in Philadelphia.

If he had guessed it would be Evarts (and he should have), he would have built, he now swore to himself, an electoral commission that would have thrown the disputed prize to Tilden—yes, by God, to the Democrats who’d made the rebellion and soaked the country in blood. Now, three days after Hayes’s almost furtive inauguration, there was little he could do to stop Evarts’s nomination. He had tied it up in committee, but within a day or two he would have to let it out, and see whether Hayes and his new Secretary destroyed the Custom House before Roscoe Conkling could make himself—or, once more, Grant—President in 1880.

He sat down at his desk, a towel draped over his shoulders. The day was cooling off. A breeze blew into these rooms where, no matter how many politicians came calling, no cigar had ever been lit. He looked down at the neat stacks on the three sides of his blotter: his thick, gilt-edged notepaper; the pamphlet in which his commission speech had been reprinted; the encomiums from the foreign press (clipped and sent by Custom House agents who guided the papers through the port of New York). Beyond these accolades, what was his reward for all this statesmanship?
Evarts.

Perhaps he had been wrong, four years ago, to refuse Grant’s offer of the Chief Justiceship. He’d thought: he already had the Chief Justice’s daughter; did he need the late Salmon P. Chase’s job, too? Kate herself had argued against his filling her papa’s robes. She had seen bigger things, the biggest of all, ahead for him. And back then she’d believed, so long as she possessed her children and the favors of
Roscoe Conkling, that she could endure her marriage to the drunken whelp Sprague. By now, though, Sprague’s sodden tyranny had sapped her cheeks and spirit. Even when absent from it, traipsing through Europe alone in the old Chief Justice’s Washington house, she was no longer the girl whose looks and temperament, during the war, had enraged Mrs. Lincoln and enchanted every man left in the District of Columbia. She had grown, if not timid, then tired, and if weariness were all that Roscoe Conkling required, he might as well bring his own wallflower, Julia, down from Utica, where all these years, for both their sakes, he’d kept her stored. Julia meant recess—not just the congressional kind, during which he saw her and their daughter, Bessie, but a recess of the spirit, too, the dullness and retraction that always came upon him when he was out of Washington and in her presence.

That Kate might be fading into a copy of Julia; that his own political fortunes might be leading him back to Oneida County instead of the Executive Mansion just blocks from here: these terrible forebodings had drawn him, twice now, to the Irishwoman’s parlor at Third and D. A sense that destiny might be slipping from the War God of the Norsemen (a sobriquet he liked, though he feared it was a coinage of Blaine’s) had sent him looking for some destiny he might have overlooked, a better sort than the faltering one that now loomed; something hidden in the sky behind a bank of clouds that his own keen eyesight had not managed to pierce. He had been looking at the stars for years, gazing blankly at them from a hundred porches and lawns onto which he’d gone to escape the smoke of his colleagues. The other night, unwilling to watch those men cough bits of tobacco and turtle soup into the spittoons at Wormley’s, he’d stayed here, opening up the window and his Shakespeare.

He read the Bard straight through each year, not just so he might quote him, but to find himself in the pages. And on Sunday night he had found himself in Edmund, ranting with self-satisfaction in the first act of
Lear:

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeits of our own behavior, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by heavenly predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition on the charge of a star.

It was Roscoe Conkling he’d heard in the cut and thrust of those lines. This was the voice he sent up to the galleries, to Kate Chase Sprague and the women he didn’t even know; the voice with which he beat back every fool on the floor who lacked his head for figures and for consequences and for the long historical view. But it was a voice whose sudden hollowness, in all of a moment on Sunday night, he’d begun to fear. He’d felt an overpowering urge to seek its opposite, to turn its empty certainties inside out, to reverse the tide of its cheap scorn.

And so he had headed out to Trinity Episcopal at Third and C, where during the war, when it was a makeshift hospital and he a new congressman, he used to see the boys from his district bleeding through their bandages. In the years since, he had sometimes repaired there to think. But on Sunday night, a block before it, he had passed the planet reader’s signboard. He had always read, and always resisted, the astrologers’ notices in the
Star.
But this time he had gotten to Trinity only after he’d given in and called at the Irishwoman’s; he sat in the church to consider what she’d told him. He was moving out of Mars’ control toward that of Jupiter, which ruled a man in his years past fifty, bestowing on him more respect and less contention, increasing his “gravity” in a way the Irishwoman made seem literal and heavy. But, she had added, before he could cross over to the new planet’s dull protection, he must first, beginning this October, pass through his forty-ninth year, one of the grand climacterics for a man, full of snares to health and fortune.

It had sounded more actuarial than astrological, but for all that, nearer the heavens than the false altitude of Capitol Hill, whose thick, overheated air he’d been choking on lately. If he were again to believe in himself, or even
be
himself, he required something new to believe in, a secret, even a ridiculous one. This winter he had experienced the first real illness of his life, a loss of vitality that had him, in January, collapsing in the Senate cloakroom after giving the two-day speech now preserved in these pamphlets on the desk. Almost an hour had passed before he roared back over the border of consciousness. He’d felt a doctor slapping alcohol onto his back and tried to throw him off. But the two senators who’d dragged him home from the chamber to his couch at the Arlington pushed him back down, and made him submit to their judgment that he was too sick to attend the evening session. Even so, the following morning he strode down the aisle, ten minutes late and sicker than anyone knew. Light-headed though he might have been, he instantly realized, from the hush accompanying his entrance, that he had carried the day—and saved the Republic as surely as the general had a dozen years before.

The whole episode was a harbinger of the dread climacteric, and he had decided he would fight it off, grab it by the throat and squeeze it, as if it were Blaine (who came to him in dreams) or even death itself. He would live again by asserting his will, by once more vanquishing something. His great act of conciliation, of statesmanship, had yielded nothing but Evarts. From now on, he would seek only victories, shunning compromise like the slow, fatiguing poison it had proved itself. He required an enemy, and he required a woman, a new one, who would first bewitch him and then surrender.

Still waiting for the errand boy, Conkling thought for the second time that day of Franklin Pierce. He would have nothing of him back in 1852. Still in his early twenties then, defending forgers one year, prosecuting slanderers the next, he’d gained his first political foothold with the Whigs, canvassing Utica against Pierce and for General Scott. Why should the Irishwoman have had that old campaign biography
out? Did it signify, he wondered, her ability to reverse the disastrous course of his current planetary influence? Think of it, after all: what had proved better for him than Scott’s defeat and Pierce’s victory? With the Whigs past reviving, the time for the Republican party, the home of all his victories, had arrived. So who knew what disguise his current celestial blessings wore? Yes, the book was an encouraging token. Even if it wasn’t what he now most wanted from Madam Costello.

“It’s about time!” he shouted down the stairs, at the first sound of the hotel’s dogsbody. “You’ll have a dime for this and nothing more.” He instructed the boy to carry an envelope with a gilt-edged note to the woman who did business at the southeast corner of Third and D. “Wait for a reply,” he said, somewhat more softly, realizing it was this lad who would be bringing him what the note politely demanded of Mary Costello: the name and address of the woman he’d passed coming through her door.

“And then,” said Commodore Sands, caught between a laugh and a wheeze, aiming his diminished voice into Hugh Allison’s politely lowered ear, “he’s supposed to have tapped the hull and said, ‘The damned thing’s hollow!’ ” The retired officer, both palms pressing on the tip of his cane, rocked in his chair until his long white beard shook. “ ‘The damned thing’s hollow!’ ”

Hugh laughed, too, even though the story of the new Navy Secretary’s amazement over what floated the vessels in his charge had been making the rounds for several days; and even though he knew the old commodore’s merriment would soon dissolve into quiet gloom over the service’s lost luster: Thompson, the landlubbing Hoosier who had gotten Navy as a political reward, had fewer than thirty hollow hulls to keep track of.

“He can’t be worse than his predecessor, sir.”

“What’s that?”

“I said I doubt he’ll steal so much as Mr. Robeson did.”

“Oh, yes, you’re right about that. You’re right about that, son.”

Benjamin Sands patted Hugh Allison’s arm, the gesture demonstrating both kindliness and his desire to leave. Three years after his retirement, he still came out to the Observatory for an occasional look through the twenty-six-inch Great Equatorial, the glory acquistion of his tenure. Tonight, however, as so often, the mists swirling over Foggy Bottom had failed to clear. The dome would not be opened up.

“Shall I take you home, sir?”

“No, no, Mr. Allison. I’ve got one of my sons-in-law coming to fetch me. You go about your business. I’ll wait for him outside.”

“Good night, sir.”

“Good night, son. And mind you don’t fall asleep here.”

“No, sir.”

“Where have you got your rooms?”

“Up in Georgetown, sir.”

“A good mile away?”

“At least.”

“Good, good. You need respites from all this.” He twitched his nose and waggled his finger, and Hugh nodded his understanding; the old man was referring to the unhealthful air beyond the dome.

The commodore began shuffling off. “Poor Davis, eh? Poor Davis.”

His younger but now dead successor had shaken with chills through much of the winter. These past few weeks Davis’s son and interim replacement, now bustling into the dome, had shaken mostly with impatience, as he struggled to bring the Observatory’s affairs into some sort of order. “It was old Sands,” he now complained to Hugh, “who started letting you prima donnas streak around like your comets, doing whatever you please.”

“You can hardly blame me,” Hugh replied with a laugh the lieutenant commander failed to appreciate. “I only got here last summer.”

But Davis’s point was well taken. It was why the civilian astronomers
had loved the old commodore; he’d understood that their enthusiasms and eurekas would not take flight if confined by navy discipline and limited to navy needs.

Tonight Hugh was supposed to train the Great Equatorial on some double stars that Pulkowa Observatory near Saint Petersburg had asked the Americans to help investigate. An old friend of his up in Cambridge was working on the problem, too, and getting more or less nowhere, something the great Professor Newcomb took pleasure in teasing Hugh about. Any minute that would start again, since Newcomb was inside the dome, too, nipping at Davis’s heels, reminding the acting superintendent of another perquisite he had somehow neglected to bestow upon Simon Newcomb.