Two Moons (8 page)

“Most Aries have a wound on the head or a birthmark on the foot.”

Cynthia invited her to come around to the back of her chair. She lifted the strands of hair that had fallen from her upsweep, and a tiny scar, a white half-moon at the base of her skull, became visible. “A falling icicle from the top of a pine tree. I was six.”

Mary Costello looked down at the slim neck and shoulders until a motherly affection for this peculiar overage girl washed out all other conflicting feelings. She patted Cynthia’s cheek and went back to her own seat. “You wouldn’t know the feller’s birthday, would you?”

“Christmas Eve, 1849.” Before Madam Costello could attribute this knowledge to further infernal gifts, Cynthia added: “The day I started work I saw Mr. Harrison, the clerk, flip past it in his file, when he was inserting my own card.”

“This young man needs you,” said Madam Costello, suddenly.

Cynthia gave her a hard look, doubting the older woman could know such a thing without doing her own laborious mathematics.

“But you’ll be needing him,” said Madam Costello, whose eyes were closed and who seemed to be operating on instinct.

“How can that be?” asked Cynthia, disappointed. As a prediction, this mutual need sounded rather vague.

But Madam Costello was quite definite in her elaboration. “I mean
you’ll be needing
him
,” she said, pointing to Roscoe Conkling’s glass-covered picture. “October 30th, 1829. The moon still in Aquarius.”

Three pillows on the bed—giant puffed worlds of purple, red, and saffron—supported Hugh Allison’s head and feet. The great lampshades and ottomans among which he slept, like a sultan with no seraglio, came as a slight shock whenever he arrived home from the smooth brick and tubing of the dome. The pieces his mother had sent were so comically heavy that his bedroom looked ready to sink through the floor below—a dangerous prospect quite opposite from that imparted by the japonaiserie Mrs. Allison had shipped to Harvard Yard in 1867. That assemblage of items had been so light he sometimes thought his plastered room would detach itself from Grays Hall and float away. There his furnishings became the source of some teasing more witty than Simon Newcomb’s, but his Southernness had hardly set him apart. Simple chronology united him with his classmates, and set
all
of them apart from the recent Union dead, whose profuse, still-new ghosts turned each lecture hall and dining room into a grim basilica. Born on Christmas Eve 1849, Hugh had joined a civilian regiment of younger brothers, all of them born too late to go. They felt themselves blessed, but derelict, too, as detached from any clear destiny as Mrs. Allison’s translucent Japanese birds.

He had stayed on for graduate study and spent several years after that at Harvard’s Observatory, arriving here last year as the centennial faded and the election campaign grew white-hot. Newly resident in the District of Columbia, he’d found himself once more a noncombatant, ineligible to vote and, thanks to the commodore, subject to a less military sort of discipline than that preferred by Professor Pickering in Cambridge. Even so, no amount of freedom seemed likely to afford him the opportunity to do the only real work he hoped to accomplish, out far beyond this last double star he’d been investigating.

Although the windows were open, he felt flushed with heat and impatience while trying to answer a letter from his mother. Across his legs lay another of her gifts, a breakfast tray inlaid with a mosaic quotation from the
Rubaiyat;
atop that sat Hugh’s thus-far blank piece of writing paper. Mrs. Allison’s letter of April 11, lost between a pillow and the silk-covered comforter, expressed relief over the just-commenced withdrawal of federal troops from South Carolina, but so casually that a reader might have thought she was referring to some forty-eight-hour episode instead of a twelve-year occupation. This was her manner, a disproportion universally regarded as charming, even if it also caused, as it did in the incident she reported two paragraphs below, the merciless excoriation of a local shopkeeper who lacked the proper shade of green ribbon.

Mrs. Allison’s husband, a shy lawyer more interested in gambling than the courthouse, deferred to her in all things that didn’t directly involve cards or horses or dice. Hugh, while growing up, had often tearfully taken the side of some housemaid or cook who’d displeased her. These days he paid attention only to the airier portions of her long epistolary monologues, replying with a light breeze of his own. “Yes, Mother,” he began writing. “I had read that the troops were leaving. See what miracles Rutherfraud B. has performed? The other day he spoke to the deaf-mutes at their college here, after viewing marvels of botany and rhetoric they had managed without their full five senses. The
Star,
alas, makes no mention of his having delivered any of them from silence with a clap on the ears.”

Deciding to forgo his waistcoat for a venture outside his lodgings, he sealed the letter and tucked it behind his belt. The jade clock showed three-quarters past seven, time for him to go dine somewhere along High Street on his way down to Foggy Bottom.

A street or two from his rooms, not far from an oyster house that looked suitable, he passed the offices of the American Tract Society, where a plainly dressed sidewalk solicitor invited him to put money into any of three boxes: one for the destitute; another for the missions;
and the last for a special collection of “$2,000 to print a life of Christ in the language of Japan.”

The undauntedness of this last scheme—its humble reaching through space and time to connect two points—appealed to Hugh’s feelings, which these days tended to quicken only when a nerve connecting them to his intellectual occupations was tripped. The hand-painted sign of this gentle tractarian proved just such a stimulus; Hugh reached into his trousers pocket and extracted a half-dollar, which he tossed into the third container.

“God bless you, sir,” said the man behind the money box.

“And God love you,” Hugh replied, with a smile, having recovered his merriment and faithlessness.

Walking away, a tract in his right hand, he pondered the collector’s evident belief in the usefulness of his work, and the certainty with which he had no doubt accepted his post on the pavement. Hugh himself had spent the past few weeks irritated by the pointless task he had been given to perform by the overworked and temporary Lieutenant Commander Davis. Pulled from the double-star investigation he’d been making without much enthusiasm, he was now chasing, all on his own, one fitfully visible comet, plotting its course for a report that would be filed to the Observatory’s credit, something the Navy’s budget-makers could tally, like a sortie performed or a sinking accomplished. Hugh feared for Commodore Sands’s old free rein; if the elder Davis’s permanent replacement arrived with a taste for quantifiable results, Hugh Allison might never find himself acting as anything but a small supply ship for the fanfared voyages of Simon Newcomb.

Who besides himself might be under the dome tonight? And what sort of sky would greet him once he crossed New Hampshire Avenue? Would the fog be low enough for them to open up, to begin the night’s work by listening to the grind of the retracting metal, terrible groans produced by the unequal settling of the different walls that separated the Observatory’s rivalrous precincts?

With the institution’s lateral arrangements so rickety, how, Hugh
wondered, walking south into thicker air, could he construct the ladder he imagined raising into the galaxy?

“Why, Mrs. Hall!” he cried, greeting the astronomer’s wife. Two doors from the oyster house, she was unexpectedly in front of him, carrying a bolt of cotton cloth. “You must have woven that yourself,” he teased his Georgetown neighbor, “to have acquired it at this hour!”

“No, Mr. Allison. The dry goods man agreed to stay open late the other day when I placed my order. I told him this would be the only time I could come for it myself. I didn’t trust any of my boys to see that the shopkeeper had secured the right variety.”

Even in the weak streetlight, he could see dark circles around her eyes. Her nose was long and she was far too thin, but her mouth, Hugh noticed, was an oddly voluptuous Cupid’s bow.

“And I’ll wager Mr. Hall was unavailable to help,” he said. “Already under the dome?”

“Oh, yes,” said Mrs. Hall, checking the sky. “The weather’s not good, but I make sure he doesn’t get discouraged. I always get him out the door.”

“Indeed,” said Hugh, who like every other man at the Observatory knew the story of how Mrs. Hall had years ago taken it upon herself to write the letter that persuaded Captain Gilliss to give Asaph his due by promoting him to professor.

“Mr. Allison, you went to Harvard, didn’t you?”

“I did,” Hugh answered. “They indulged me for four years at the College, and then another four and a half at the Observatory. A scandal, really.”

At the latter he had bounced from one project to another—measuring the mass of Io, peering into the Mare Imbrium dust, finding another star in the Omega Centauri cluster. He had worked well—some said brilliantly—when he worked at all, but over time he’d become occupied by the musings he couldn’t share with his Cambridge colleagues. “A year or so ago they told me it would be an excellent idea to apply for the post that had opened up here. You’d be
amazed at how solicitous they were of my professional fortunes.” He soothed Mrs. Hall’s embarrassment by laughing. “I understood the message. And so here I am.”

“My eldest son is now in Cambridge,” she said. “Preparing for the College’s entrance examinations.”

“I’ve still got a few books that he could use. Cook’s lectures on chemistry, Wayne’s
Apology
for Plato. Would you like me to send them up to him? I can assure you they never suffered from overuse.”

Mrs. Hall nodded. “That would be very kind of you. I don’t like Cambridge, Mr. Allison. I want my young Asaph to succeed there, but I shall never like the city or the College. Mr. Hall and I were there before the war. We had lodgings on North Avenue, and he did computations until they finally began to regard him with some seriousness.” She looked at Hugh with a sort of severe affection; if she could not approve his own lack of ambition, she seemed to like him the better for his having experienced Harvard’s disenchantment. “We were mocked for living on bread and milk, but we persisted, and when we left there for here we had three hundred dollars in the bank.”

“I’m afraid I had a very easy time of it—my mother sent money whenever she sent a lamp or a cabinet. I’m sure your boy will make more of life there than I did, Mrs. Hall. I can’t say I was a very serious undergraduate.”

“They always thought me
too
serious in Cambridge,” she replied. “I suffer from headaches and they called me morbid.”

“I’ll tell you a secret, Mrs. Hall.” He smiled as he lowered his head and whispered. “I’m morbid, too.”

“A merry man like yourself? Mr. Hall says you’re always larking about.”

Hugh laughed. “
That
should worry me, I suppose.”

“But it doesn’t. So then where is your morbidity, Mr. Allison?”

“I think a lot about death, Mrs. Hall. I want to cheat him.”

She appeared startled by the remark.

“I don’t think of him as my enemy,” said Hugh. “Just my competitor.”

“There is only one way to cheat death, Mr. Allison. And that’s why I’m relieved to see you carrying that.” She pointed to the tract in his right hand.

“Oh,” said Hugh, laughing now. “I’m afraid I was only trying to be polite. That’s why I took it from the fellow back there.”

“You disappoint me. Mr. Hall lacked religion when I first came to know him. But when we lived in Ohio, early in our marriage, I succeeded in securing his acceptance of Christianity. Too few of the men at the Observatory profess their faith seriously, I’m afraid, even while they go about investigating God’s domain.”

“Then I suppose you’re saying I should read this.”

Mrs. Hall’s full lips couldn’t help turning upward into a smile.

“God wants to come into your heart, Mr. Allison.”

“Can’t I go to Him instead?”

Her expression withheld judgment on the nature of his question; she waited for some explanation.

“He made us in His image, did He not, Mrs. Hall? What if we completed the job by giving our images an eternal life, equal to His?”

“Are you speaking of a spiritual quest, or an astronomical one?”

“I don’t know,” said Hugh, before he added, with a laugh, “but please don’t tell Mr. Hall, in any case. He’ll think I’ve larked straight over the edge. As it is, I suppose
you
think I’m blaspheming.”

“If this is to be your work, Mr. Allison, you should pursue it against all discouragement from anyone.”

Her mind—he could tell from the hard, set look on her face—was not in the religious empyrean where she spent half her time, but back upon her ambitions for her son, and the slights so long inflicted by astronomers upon Asaph Hall and herself.

“You’re right, Mrs. Hall. Here’s to faith in unlikely schemes.” He raised an imaginary glass. “Now, before I have my oysters, I’m going to go back and contribute another half-dollar toward that Japanese New Testament!”