“Henry,” asked Hugh, finally approaching Eastman’s assistant. “What the devil is afloat?”
Henry Martyn Paul was just four years out of Dartmouth. A big, genial fellow, at least six-two, he was engaged to a minister’s daughter and sang in a choral society. A few inches below his deep-set eyes, the bars of a mustache hung like the tassels on Hugh’s Arabian draperies, and looked almost too heavy for even his big face to support.
“Admiral Rodgers,” he explained.
“Ah,” said Hugh, finally realizing what the social commotion was about. “The new, if unyoung, broom. But he wasn’t expected until next week.”
“I know,” said Mr. Paul. “But he’s on the scene. I think they’ve got him over at the Willard now having dinner. Mr. Harrison was told this afternoon to assemble a greeting party.” Embarrassed that this should all be news to Hugh Allison, he added: “They really just scared up whoever was on hand.”
“Yes, I suppose I’m not handy,” said Hugh, giving the room a bemused scan.
Henry Paul declared, “I can’t say it’s a job I’d want to be starting at sixty-four years of age.”
“I heard that,” said Simon Newcomb, who had stopped at a nearby desk to inscribe one of his monographs for the incoming superintendent. Young David Todd, who boarded with the Newcombs, often minding the children and reading to the astronomer’s wife, held the book open to its front flyleaf and blotted his mentor’s signature while Newcomb held forth. “Do you really think this place will faze a man who’s surveyed the North Pacific and the Sandwich Islands, fought the Seminoles and raised the first Stars and Stripes on the recaptured soil of South Carolina?”
He didn’t wait for Hugh Allison to answer this custom-made jibe. He was off to another shelf, searching for more inscribable tokens of his accomplishment.
“I thought Rodgers was coming from the Boston Navy Yard,” Hugh said to Henry Paul.
“That’s a while back. Mare Island out in California was his last post. They say he ran the place honestly, too. Under Robeson!”
“Well,” said Hugh. “We’ll see how he likes working for Thompson.”
“ ‘The damned thing’s hollow!’ ” said Mr. Paul, repeating the by-now famous words of the new Navy secretary, and blushing with the realization that he’d just sworn. “Maybe the admiral will come up with some more money for our part of the service, too. You know, there’s talk of a couple of new ships, what with the Turks and Russians going to war.”
“All I want from Rodgers,” said Hugh, “is to get away from the 9.6-inch and this damned comet.”
Eastman shot him a glance.
“God, I’m hot,” Hugh complained, a bit less vocally, to Henry Paul. “Do you think Headmistress Newcomb will let me pour some soda water?”
As soon as he reached the tray of bottles, Mr. Harrison came rushing into the library with Professor Harkness and Commodore Sands, who had evidently been the new superintendent’s dining partners at the Willard.
“Gentlemen!” the clerk called out, as he attempted to peel off his gray gloves. “I have the honor to present—”
Captain Piggonan and Lieutenant Sturdy, the two Navy men amidst the civilian astronomers, snapped off salutes.
“Rear Admiral John Rodg—”
The new chief officer waved off the clerk. “You all know who I am, and I’m pleased to see you.” With white tufts of hair and a puffy, clean-shaven face, Rodgers looked more like an old Federalist than a modern man, thought Hugh. The admiral’s dress belt girdled a large circumference of waistline, and his wattles shook when he talked. Still, he moved toward the center of the room with a quick step.
“I didn’t expect such a company of welcomers. But I didn’t expect such an approach, either.” Rodgers’s facial expression showed severe disapproval of the muck he’d met with outside the Observatory grounds. “At my last post, the roads washed out each spring. In the summer, a single mulecart raised a tornado of dust above them. We were given half the money we required to improve them. But we improved them.” Unsure whether this was a scolding or a pledge or a mere report, the company of scientists remained silent, until Newcomb, attended by David Todd, strode over to the admiral, shook his hand and began piloting him through the half dozen introductions that would lead to the refreshments.
Hugh watched as Rodgers made each astronomer’s acquaintance. He had something clipped but, it seemed, particular to say to every one of them, and he got the last word of each exchange.
“Now you, young man,” he finally said to Hugh himself. “You can’t afford a coat?”
“I hadn’t anticipated a chill. Or such distinguished company.”
“Discover another comet,” said Rodgers. “Then you can come in without a coat.”
With that he was off to a spot under the portrait of Captain James Gilliss, the Observatory’s wartime superintendent. He motioned for Professor Harkness.
“What happened to him?” asked Rodgers, pointing up at the portrait.
“Captain Gilliss served here from 18—”
“How did he end up?”
Harkness appeared to hesitate, as if struggling to avoid some indelicacy.
“Toward the end of his tenure, he was increasingly unwell, complaining of, primarily, or first—”
“You mean malaria,” said Rodgers. He turned and looked at them as if they were all mad, their heads too high in the clouds to notice the mire that anchored their instruments.
“Mr. Harrison!” he called. “I shall be in at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. I shall want two bottles of quinine on my desk. And at that time you can tell me”—he was already halfway to the door—“what his secret is.” He pointed back toward Professor Yarnall, easily the senior man in age and service.
Without having touched a single cake or drop of coffee, Rodgers was gone. Professor Harkness, after raising his palms in a gesture of perplexed apology to his colleagues, followed him out.
Asaph Hall, still holding the book he’d been consulting, and eager to remove himself from this sudden vexation, asked Hugh Allison: “Do you think viewing conditions may have cleared?”
Hugh swallowed the last of his soda water. “I daresay the dome has blown off.”
In fact, the view was no better than before. The fog and temperature had both risen. A few minutes after Rodgers’s exit, Hugh strode across the grounds, removing his collar and stuffing it into his waistband, where the letter to his mother still hung, limp with humidity.
Looking toward the main gate, he noticed a female form in a dark-colored dress. She was watching the admiral go off in his carriage, and taking care, it seemed, not be be observed. A closer approach revealed the figure to be, of all people, the new computer.
“It’s nearly eleven o’clock,” said Hugh, coming up to her from behind.
“I know,” she said, turning around.
“What are you doing here, Miss, Cynthia May, is it? I’m afraid I can’t remember the rest of your name.”
“Just Cynthia May. Mrs. May,” she said, regretting her coquettishness the month before. But as she looked at Hugh Allison’s face in the available moonlight, she more than ever understood what had made her lie, and she had to force herself to blow away the deception: “Mrs. John May. I am a widow. Please walk with me,” she urged. “I don’t want Professor Harkness to know that I’ve returned.”
“You’ve still not explained what you’re doing here.” He said it with no hint of rebuke, only curiosity, as if inexplicable behavior, including his own, were a familiar part of his experience.
“I came to see you. I intended to go to your lodgings in High Street, but when I started out the night looked clearer than it is now, so I headed here instead. I thought you might have come out to observe. And I see that I was right.”
“You know where I live,” said Hugh.
“Yes,” she said, evenly, while struggling to read his expression. Was she only wishing it to register pleasure, or was that really there?
“And what is
your address?”
“Number 203 on F Street.”
“You walked here from there? For the second time today?”
“Yes.”
“And you intended to walk all the way up High Street? Tell me what for.” He was not angry. He was intrigued; she was certain.
“I want to know what it is you do here.”
“Comets. Apparently for some time to come.”
Her eyes brightened. “I’m stuck in Tasmania. It’s been December 8, 1874, from the moment I arrived here.”
“Ah, the Transit of Venus. Tell me, Mrs. May, do you know what a comet really is?”
“I can scarcely imagine, but I’m sure it’s something wonderful.”
He pointed to the mud at their feet, a suspension of ashes and newsprint and even a horseshoe. “I suspect a comet is the most awful collection of debris. It may look like that gas lamp over there, but that’s just the light it takes from the Sun.”
“Even the Earth steals its light,” said Cynthia.
“Yes,” he sighed. “It does.”
She could not understand his disapproval of something so elementary, but it didn’t matter. The important thing was that he hadn’t jumped back at the thought of her waiting for him in the dark.
“Let me work with you on the comets,” she said, before she could lose her nerve. “I’ll speed you up and get you the more quickly on to something else. I’m the fastest computer here. I’m faster than any computer you knew in Cambridge.”
He pointed to Rodgers’s departing carriage. “You needn’t worry any more about Harkness. He just went off with the new commander. Now we must find you a carriage, so you don’t have to take that walk for a fourth time in one day. If we can’t, I’ll walk you home myself.”
“It’s quite all right,” said Cynthia. “I walk as fast as I calculate.”
“It’s far too late. You’ll get knocked down at a crossing before the horse sees you.”
She pulled the white collar from his waistband, delighted to feel it still soaked with the sweat of his neck. She fastened it around her upper left arm. “There,” she said. “It will steal the moonlight. And the drivers will notice me.” She adjusted her hat and set off. “Professor Allison, you need me.”
“How long should the batter pudding steam?”
“Three-quarters of an hour, Maureen.”
They couldn’t lower their damned voices? Conkling got up from the chair in his study to shut the door, rather more loudly than he might have. The rasp of the cook, the refined birdsong of his wife: he would not endure any more of those female noises floating up the stairwell and disturbing his peace.
Pudding, no less. Since the old cook’s death he’d been hoping for lighter fare, but that late mass of starched Irishwoman had left her daughter and recipe book to carry on in her place. With the Special Session definitely put off until October, he was stranded here in Utica to fatten and fume in the dainty world of the Seymours. When he had married Julia twenty-two years ago, he did not calculate—no one could have—the extent to which he would become the enemy, a sort of caged, snorting bully, in his own house. No one could have foreseen that his brother-in-law, the delicate Horatio, would become the state’s Democratic governor in the middle of the war, or that Horatio’s Copperhead colleagues would rob Roscoe Conkling of the congressional seat he’d won just before it. Things became even worse in ’68, by which time Conkling had fought his way back and up into the Senate. As he made himself ready to campaign for Grant, who should become the general’s Democratic opponent but Horatio. There was never any doubt that Grant would beat him, or that Conkling would work on the general’s behalf, but all the gentle, sporting brother-in-law jokes had sickened him; the quadrennial mortal combat he loved was tamed into the sack race at a family picnic.
And what a family. Inside this house in Rutger Park, the atmosphere always swayed with the vapors. When Grant’s partisans, nine years before, had hinted at a drop of madness running through the Seymour clan, Conkling had almost choked on the denials that gallantry obliged him to issue. The charge was probably the truest thrown by either side. How long had it been after their marriage—six months? a year?—before he decided that Julia’s once-attractive delicacy was something weaker than mere feminine frailty?
He had made certain, from then on, to save himself, to keep his vitality undrained by all that was needy and flailing and unsoothable within her. Tonight, after the pudding and the whining, but before the tears, he would decamp to Bagg’s Hotel downtown, as had long been his custom, for a few nights at a time, during these long stretches when the congressional calendar forced him home. He had spent last weekend in New York, at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and though both the planet reader and political instinct counseled lying low just now, it was all he could do to keep from grabbing the straps of his valise and summoning a ride to the railway station.
He made himself sit still, even with the women’s voices leaking in under the heavy oak door. He reached for the first newspaper on a stack that gave the lie to his oft-repeated declaration that he read only the Herald. He read everything, even Curtis’s unending attacks on him in Harper’s, because they got his blood up after too long a bath in the stagnant Seymour waters. He needed his enemies sharp and uncrushed, so that he could do the crushing. And if one believed the papers—which he did not, at least not enough to desist from this new hidden vice of consulting the stars—his enemies were harder and more jagged than ever.
The Custom House hearings were on every other page. Hayes had insisted on sending the smug, pince-nezed reformers to Hanover Street and dragging all the party’s best lieutenants before the investigative commission’s amused stenographers—all in the name of a new snivel service. At the head of the commission Hayes had even put John Jay, that Union Leaguer suffering the perpetual dread he’d never get to be Chief Justice like his grandfather.
What really lay at the heart of all this was Hayes’s hatred for Roscoe Conkling, the kind of hatred one can only muster toward somebody one owes everything. His Fraudulency despised the foot-soldiery of the Custom House for failing to carry New York for him, and he hated Conkling for being the one who, at the last possible moment, he had needed to make him President.
Oh, to have the general, instead of this trimmer, back in the Mansion! By god, if things kept going the way they were, they would put the general back.
“Mr. John O’Brien, United States Weigher for the Twelfth District,” reported the Times, “was not aware that his assistant weighers and laborers drew money on the pay-rolls while acting as officers of election; he had no body-servant who drew pay from the Government, and did not know any one who had; he could not advantageously reduce his force.”
Well, good for Mr. John O’Brien. But dozens of others would have to testify before it was over, and who knew whether they would all hold up, especially the ones forced to talk behind closed doors. Chet Arthur, Collector of the Port of New York, was trying his best to keep the whole stew from boiling over, but so far his best hadn’t been very good. Sherman had let him help pick the investigators, but given the aggression they were displaying, one had to ask if Arthur—that loyal, perfumed popinjay whose job paid more than Hayes’s own—shouldn’t stick to picking the best wines and wallpapers off the latest boat to come in from LeHavre.
There was no telling how far this would go. Three years ago they had lost the moiety system, a trinity that Conkling had relied on more than the one above the stars. One-half for the United States Government; one-quarter for the officers who opened the crate and found the violation; and one-quarter for the informer who had suggested they open it. By this method, even Julia’s imported china had fed three people before it ever got to Utica.
He himself had never taken much, had always stuffed the party’s pockets fatter than his own, because the party was the country. It had saved the Union, while Copperheads like his brother-in-law would have gently waved the traitors good-bye. To this day, every time anyone accused Roscoe Conk
ling of waving the bloody shirt, he became only more determined to grind their faces into the stains.
“My dear Chet,” he started writing to Arthur:
I want your concessions to be strategic, and less numerous than your obstructions. Both can be made in the same tone of sweet reason. When the commission calls for a better class of men to work the Custom House, ones untainted by “politics,” I want you to tell them that better men will only follow better pay. When the commissioners cry for reductions in the force, tell them in a firm voice that the inevitable effect of such “reform” will be foreign goods slipping through without a duty being paid, because they have evaded the notice of the remaining inspectors’ overworked eyes. Make these bolts of untaxed cloth sound like Hessians; ask Mr. Jay if he would really let our shores be vulnerable to such invasion. I count on you to strike a noble pose throughout. Do not let them utter “politics” as an insult.
He had nothing to be ashamed of. He had brought the Electoral Commission into being, given the country a means of resolving the deadlocked election. And as that group did its unappetizing work, he had stayed away, let others do the deal-making at Wormley’s, where amidst the stench of tobacco and whiskey and the sauces thick as mud, Evarts and company had lifted the lash off the back of the South for the last few votes needed to make President a man who, when all was said and done, not one of them truly wanted.
Now they cried “Reform!” as if reform were something that might stir the heart. “Mr. Conkling is a passionate man,” his colleagues liked to say, encoding a curse in the compliment. They meant that Mr. Conkling had too much passion, was too impatient with the lace of figures and amendments and courtesies in which they loved to tangle themselves like parlor pussycats. A year and a half ago, when Bruce, the Mississippi Negro, raised his hand to take the oath, they sat behind their newspapers, trying to hide their dismay: when they’d cried abolition, they hadn’t quite meant for it to come to this. So who strode across the floor to shake Bruce’s black hand? Roscoe Conkling, whose tongue and gaze they now had one more reason to fear.
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