Two Moons (6 page)

He might be the handsomest among them, thought Hugh, but Newcomb’s lush brown hair, one wing of it combed out to look as if it were catching a breeze, was more appropriate to some painter working his will on the models in a Paris atelier. He was, in fact, a seducer—not of women, but of the legislators and club presidents and hostesses who then advanced Simon Newcomb’s reputation for both genius and a charming ability to inspire public understanding of the arcane work performed by himself and his less glamorous colleagues.

“I’ll tell you something, Allison.” He had just clapped Hugh on the back. “A few years from now, you’ll be able to pick up a telephone and ask your Harvard mate exactly what the weather is doing up at his end. And then, on nights when it’s fine down here, and he tells you it’s fine up there as well, you can let
him
look for your double stars, and
I
can have another night under the eyepiece here! What do you say?”

Hugh just smiled. He was supposed to be grateful for the teasing, grateful the man had noticed him; but if he answered Newcomb’s question, he’d soon be required to blush with pleasure over the imitation of his Southern accent—affectionate, of course!—that was sure to ensue. And if he chose to tease the man back, to say that the use of “mate” betrayed Newcomb’s origins (Canadian) just as surely as Hugh Allison’s soft vowels did his, the response would be a stiff little smile, a
signal that Mr. Allison, just six years out of Harvard College, was decidedly out of line.

So he said nothing, and walked back to the little table with the paperwork he’d brought to occupy him while waiting on the weather. That reference to the “telephone”: it was exactly like Newcomb to have on his lips the very thing whose “possibilities” all the clubwomen and lecture-going clerks in town, armed with two inches’ worth of knowledge from the
Star,
were buzzing about these days. They spoke, for all of ten seconds, about the latest “miracle” God had wrought, before turning to the more pressing subject of the patent wars breaking out over the instrument, and who finally stood to make the most money from it. When the Observatory was rigged with a telephone, it would surely be Newcomb’s doing, and as he talked into it—to the program chairman inviting him to speak, or the
Leslie’s Illustrated
editor asking him for a scientific pronouncement on the modern world aborning—he would never realize how the telephone’s wires only stitched him more tightly to the earth and its noise. When Simon Newcomb spoke to audiences about the “outer planets,” they widened their eyes at the vasty phrase, unaware that the eminent man’s specialty made him, to Hugh Allison’s way of thinking, no more than a cosmic housecat, afraid to quit the solar system’s verandah for the true open spaces of the universe.

Hugh would have preferred anyone else’s company in the dome tonight, even that of dour Asaph Hall, so serious and secretive in his pursuits, a man who had struggled through life while Newcomb swanned. More self-taught than schooled, Hall had had to interrupt his early career for stints at carpentry and computation, all the while encouraged by his religious, grudge-collecting wife, who still governed him as the tides did the moon. Alas, only Newcomb stood here now, Davis having scurried off to deal, even at this late hour, with one more unpaid bill and leaky pipe.

Would the new permanent superintendent, whoever he turned out to be, keep giving them the latitude the commodore had established as the norm? Bless the old man. Hugh could picture him last year, just
after his own arrival, standing in line to greet Dom Pedro, the visiting emperor so hungry for American wonders. Benjamin Sands, who fifty years before had sailed along the Brazilian coast in the
Vandalia,
ended up being too shy to impart this reminiscence, since it would have meant interrupting Newcomb, who was reassuring Dom Pedro and his empress, at considerable length, that from now on he would make certain they received, back in São Paulo, each and every monograph he produced.

The paperwork before Hugh was perilously dull. If he wasn’t careful, he really would fall asleep here. He ought to start back for his rooms, but the thought of lying there alone, amidst all the Moorish furniture his mother had imported at Charleston and then sent north, made him linger in the dome, taking the one-in-a-hundred chance the skies would clear and Newcomb would give the signal to open up.

He looked over at the Great Equatorial, its mouth closed, its long gullet denied the spoon-feeding of light they’d meant to bring it tonight. For all its hugeness, and all the clock-driven power that kept it moving with the objects of its attention, the telescope was oddly unassertive, a receptor, never sending forth any light of its own. Between his index finger and thumb, Hugh took one of the gold buttons on his vest and twisted it, until the metal disk caught a flare of gaslight; then he wiggled it, so that the reflection played, like a djinn eager for escape, against the highest metal in the dome. Newcomb, sensing something above him, but not quite sure where or what it was, looked quizzically at Hugh, who let go of the button and looked down at an item of work he had promised Davis to have done before morning.

If you put the three examinations side by side, there was no comparison. Poor Mr. Gilworth had taken himself out of the running, and the younger of the ladies, for all the prettiness of her hand, was clearly too slow at her calculations. So that was that. He took a sheet of stationery from the table’s little drawer: “Mr. Harrison,” he wrote. “Please send a note to this Cynthia May—whatever her last name is—and have her report on Monday morning.”

“Mrs. May, you ought to be getting home now. It’s nearly six.”

“I could go a bit further with this one, Professor Harkness.” She pointed to the photographic plate, made in Tasmania on December 8, 1874. “It’s one of yours.”

“Ah, yes,” said William Harkness, the trace of a Scottish infancy in his voice. He regarded his three-year-old labors. “Not a very good plate, either. None of them is.” He sounded apologetic, as if the bad weather that had greeted the Transit of Venus teams that day in ’74 remained his fault, and the whole expedition had been a spendthrift act.

“Not at all,” said Cynthia. “The image here is quite clear, almost sharp.” She pointed to a small dot of planet crossing the Sun. “And the numbers are coming fine.”

The numbers were, in fact, not so fine. The trigonometric reductions that would yield Earth’s distance from the Sun—once the speed of Venus’s transit across the star was factored in—were, in truth, still hopelessly incomplete. Not from any flaw in Cynthia May’s mathematics—Professor Harkness had more than once marveled at her exactitude and speed—but by a cluster of coefficients beyond his control. Congressional appropriations for the work had proved as unreliable as the Pacific skies three Decembers ago. Cynthia was the only computer
now assigned to the 237 pictures the astronomers had managed to shoot, and there was no telling how soon they would have to shift her to something else. Realizing that this transit would not be the lustrous career-enhancer it had once appeared, Simon Newcomb, formerly much involved, had stepped discreetly out of Venus’s shadow and back into the moonlight of his prior research, where he would stay until some other part of the sky disclosed an opportunity for his shooting star. Quiet Professor Harkness had been left holding the bag.

“May I walk you eastward?” he asked. “I’m about ready to leave myself.”

He lived in Lafayette Square, and if she looked at the case objectively, the way Fanny Christian would, she’d be rushing to put away her papers and slide rule in order to join him. William Harkness, a bachelor turning forty, impressed her as solid and solicitous, but he wore the dullness men put on once they’d become disappointed with themselves. This ought to be a fascinating creature, thought Cynthia: what other navy man or scientific here could claim earlier careers as a newspaper reporter and army surgeon? But now, stranded on Venus, his beard going gray, Professor Harkness was a curiously routine specimen, a gentleman preoccupied by numbers, no different from the men she’d grown used to at Interior.

“Professor, I’m going to stay and finish two more calculations. Not the whole plate, I promise.”

“Very well, Mrs. May. We all appreciate your zeal. But do make sure not to stay past six-thirty.”

If it were up to her, she’d stay past nine, by which hour she’d have a chance to spot Hugh Allison, arriving for his night’s labors. In the seven weeks she’d been here, she had seen him only twice, when some daytime errand had him calling on Mr. Harrison or the Observatory’s librarian. Even then she’d merely spied him through the window of this little room they’d put her in, just beyond the one in which they kept the ships’ chronometers, hundreds of them, here for adjustment and repair, ticking madly, practically begging to get up and walk, as in
some fairy tale. Spending six days a week in here, she scarcely saw the other computers or the astronomers, let alone the 9.6-inch refractor and the Great Equatorial, whose nightly grindings didn’t commence until she was asleep at Mrs. O’Toole’s. “And where does Mr. Allison focus his attention?” she’d once asked Professor Harkness. “I don’t know that he
does
focus” was the only response.

Even so, she would not lose her new optimism, her belief that this job might lead not only to more money but to some imaginative perspective from which she could regard herself as the denizen of some faraway star instead of the overheated little District of Columbia. Venus, alas, was failing to prove such an alternative home, not with Professor Harkness as its sober governor and her own attentions limited to the planet’s movements on one day three years ago. Still, each evening when it came time to put away her ruler and turn down the lamp, she felt a certain pride in the accuracy of her work. She never had more than a dozen eraser shavings to sweep from her desk before walking out to the Observatory’s lobby.

There, right now, beside the pier of the 9.6-inch, whose tube and lenses were concealed on the third floor under the dome, she ran into Mr. Harrison, who was putting on a pair of gloves.

“How fancy we are,” she said, fingering the writer’s bump on her own bare middle finger as she watched the clerk struggle into the tight gray kid. “What might be the occasion for these?”

“I’m going to meet our future,” he grunted, not looking up from his efforts.

How cryptic we are, too, she thought, waving good night and stepping off into Foggy Bottom’s already thickening air. The stink hit her as forcefully as ever. The only remedy was to keep moving, exactly what the stagnant pond on E Street as well as the Potomac itself—more a lake than a river by the time it reached this basin—refused to do. As her long legs scissored east at a great clip, she again congratulated herself on not wearing any face enamel, which would only be soaking in the moisture and smells and making her carry them home. Fanny
Christian was all excited about some new powders she kept on her vanity table, insisting they might soon replace paint completely, but her evangelism had little chance of converting Cynthia, who had never applied a drop of the old stuff, not even during the first year of the war, when she’d been trying to catch John May’s eye.

“My racehorse,” he used to call her, both to compliment and mock her stringy vigor. Sometimes she was like a cat with the evening crazies, quick-pacing the parlor to no clear purpose. Vitality was shooting out of her now. She’d felt it starting to burn hours before; by six o’clock it had become the chief reason not to join Professor Harkness on his bachelor’s stroll home. She was in a mood to cover ground and count streets, to make a long tangential trek, twice the distance and with three times the turns her walk home required.

After several minutes, she was rushing through Lafayette Square, ahead of the professor, for all she knew, and then angling up Vermont Avenue, clear to Fourteenth and M, where a circle of ground had been fenced off for an equestrian statue of General Thomas, “the Rock of Chickamauga.” The granite support was already in place, as yet without its horse and rider. The District’s new bronze forest of wartime commemorations generally repelled her, but something in Cynthia felt denied by this empty pedestal, so like the bulky first-floor piers of the 9.6-inch and Great Equatorial. She would like to see this general, no doubt wreathed in laurels for having so famously defended his army’s left flank—while John May got shot on the right one, to die on a litter during the retreat to Rossville that General Thomas had finally had to make in any case. “One must look at the numbers,” she could remember a friend of her father’s telling her after the battle. “Sixteen thousand Union losses; eighteen thousand Confederates, Mrs. May. A few more such victories and the Confederacy is done for.” He had meant to comfort her with this thought that Chickamauga had not been such a Union defeat as it looked—even if poor Sergeant May, by dying, had failed to contribute to the encouraging ratio.

She started back down the other side of Vermont Avenue. For more
than a dozen years she had been in retreat, pretending at first it was the orderly kind that John May’s company had made to Rossville. In fact, she had been routed. Half of John’s pension had gone to his mother, and she had borrowed so heavily against her own half, to support the three sick and unemployable souls she had left to her, that it was soon gone altogether. In the last months of her daughter’s life, when her father was already dead, Cynthia and her mother and Sally had been reduced to a single room. The little girl had coughed in one bed, while Mrs. Lawrence, palsied and delusive, shook in another and Cynthia slept on a pallet between them. In the space of six months, both beds became empty. The morning after Mrs. Lawrence’s funeral, perplexed and frightened by the quiet, Cynthia had walked to the washstand and stared at the old, gaunt woman she saw in John May’s shaving mirror. Lacking the courage to kill herself, she had instead smashed the glass against the basin. Two days later, blinking at the sun, she emerged from the room; four weeks of searching after that, she was at a desk, paginating government reports from the Indian territories.