Two Moons

by Thomas Mallon

  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!”

  Harry O’Toole, the landlady’s gaunt son, sat under the engraving of a mournful dog that dominated the boarders’ parlor on F Street.

  “Four hundred and seventy-six thousand, two hundred and six dollars and six cents from Internal Revenue,” he said, “and four hundred and eighty-six thousand, four hundred and ninety-one dollars and eighty-one cents from Customs.”

  Joan Park, the Treasury clerk who had asked him to read the daily balances from the front page of the newspaper, nodded seriously, as if the figures were her personal responsibility. Certain that her Pitman squiggles required as much brain power as Mrs. May’s logarithms, she sped up her embroidery needle to contrast with Cynthia’s idle grip on a teacup.

  Cynthia was sure that her absence from the supper table had been the boarders’ postprandial topic of conversation until a few moments ago, when she finally arrived to join them for the tea and cookies Mrs. O’Toole made Harry set out nightly—“a little lagniappe” was how she liked to put it, her conversation having reclaimed another of its Southernisms. Like many of the old secesh landladies in the District, she’d lately thrown off an obsolete caution before her Yankee transients.

  “Anything else of interest, Mr. O’Toole?” asked Joan Park.

  Harry scanned the Star. “More about the new ‘merit system’ over at Interior.” He looked over the newspaper at Cynthia to say, with admiration or sarcasm she couldn’t tell, “I’m sure Mrs. May would be distinguishing herself if she hadn’t changed places.”

  “Veterans will still get preference, ‘merit’ or no merit,” said Louis Manley, who had bought his way out of the war and was, at thirty-six, unhappy with his position in the Bureau of Engraving.

  Fanny Christian and Dan Farricker, the two lodgers who worked outside the government, ignored the federal talk and concentrated on the checkerboard between them. Dan, who sold pianos at Decker Bros., was the closest thing Mrs. O’Toole’s house had to a blade, though at thirty-one and with thinning hair, he was, even viewed objectively, beneath the twenty-two-year-old Fanny’s marital ambitions. Good company is all he was, after she came home from her work at Palmer’s hat shop. Cynthia regarded the two of them over by the tea wagon, knowing they were waiting for Harry O’Toole to go to bed so that Dan might break out a deck of cards and Fanny take off the shoes that had pinched her feet all day in Palmer’s showroom.

  Cynthia’s eyes were sharp enough to read the fine print of Harry’s paper three feet away, and she found herself wondering what stories Mary Costello would be clipping tonight. How honest was the woman? The astrologer had been square enough to start that chart in exchange for the book, but Cynthia now suspected she’d passed on the volume to Conkling as a sort of bona fides, evidence that he’d gone to a politically minded necromancer, without telling him she’d acquired it ten minutes before.

  The sound of the 9:00 bell came through the parlor window. It was still, after all these years, calling the slaves home. Cynthia pictured Professor Harkness pouring himself a glass of warm milk over in Lafayette Square, where all would be even more placid than in this parlor. She glanced at the legs of the table near Harry, their wooden claws clenched, as if in anticipation—but of what? The sight annoyed her, made her wish the carvings would relax and send the table with its lamp crashing to the carpet. Her mind went back to the Observatory, wanting to know how far the mist was rising against the dome, whether it was high enough to stop the night’s work or just rustling around the building’s base like the dry ice she had seen once or twice on the stage at the National. If the sky was clear, the place would soon be springing to life, with Hugh Allison going about his business.

  Otherwise, he’d be home in Georgetown. She had spied his address in Mr. Harrison’s card file, right beside his birthday, and had copied it onto the back of Conkling’s gallery pass. Looking at the parlor’s clock, a minute behind the slaves’ bell, she tried willing Harry and Mr. Manley and Joan to retire. Once they were gone, she could sneak back out, past Fanny and Dan, who would be just enough absorbed in each other not to notice.

  The Irishwoman had helped make her bold. She was still embarrassed to have called on the planet reader, but wondered whether the first sight of Mr. Allison would have excited her like destiny itself had she not already begun thinking of what prophecy, as well as consolation, might lie in the stars. She did not want to lose her new resolve; she did not want to resume her retreat. Tonight she would split off from this latest bedraggled parlor regiment, and with the stars’ light to guide her, she would double back toward the battle of life.

  “Here to join your gang?” asked Captain Piggonan.

  “Surely no one’s come out besides myself,” replied Hugh Allison, who had seen how high the mist was two blocks before reaching the gate. “Well, aside from Asaph Hall,” he drawled. “But he’s a Puritan. I’m just an optimist.”

  The captain’s muttonchops drooped. Hugh began to sense there was something he didn’t know.

  “Actually, you’ll find quite a crowd,” Piggonan confessed awkwardly. “They’re all in the library.”

  Hugh gave him a puzzled look and set off. As soon as he entered the room, the half-dozen astronomers he found amidst the books and desks ceased what appeared to have been general conversation. They nodded their greetings and split up into murmuring clusters, the dispersal revealing a table set with cakes and whiskey and a coffee urn.

  Hugh wondered whether he should seek an explanation from Mr. Hall, who had lately been observing a giant white spot on Saturn, as
well as the satellites of Uranus and Neptune, objects too indistinct and far away to be of much interest to astronomers lately concentrating on the two inner planets in their transits across the Sun. A moon circling Mars would be another matter, of course. With the exception of Hugh Allison, no scientist here was indifferent to the planet’s proximity and myth, or to the way it traveled alone, like a bursting shell that never quite landed.

  Yes, he would ask Hall. But the dour Yankee had just put his nose into a book, making use of whatever time remained until this unexplained little party got under way.

  “What’s going on?” Hugh instead asked Simon Newcomb, who was brushing past him.

  “No waistcoat?” was the only reply he got.

  Old Professor Yarnall then? He’d been here for a quarter century and was said to be finishing the great star catalogue he had been working on all those years. But Lieutenant Sturdy, recently assigned the task of helping him complete it, was leading the old gentleman to the coffee urn. Would he have to ask Professor Eastman, the man to whom he had reported since being ordered to chase the comet? Eastman was in charge of the 9.6-inch and the Meteorology Department—the Observatory’s dullest realm, to which Hugh dreaded being someday assigned. If they ended up wanting weather from him, he might as well be outside with the watchmen, who even tonight would be checking the dry and wet solar thermometers and reading the barometric pressure.