“I hope this doesn’t turn out to be a preacher’s Sabbath,” she said, pointing to the glass. “I’d hate to have you pondering angles of refraction while you’re supposed to be having an evening’s holiday.”
Hugh pointed to the smooth brimming head on the mug of beer he’d just been handed by the steward. “There are those who say you’d have a telescope of limitless strength if, instead of using a mirror, you spun a parabola of mercury with a uniform motion. Of course, the difficulty with that is you’d be able to look only at things directly above.” He tilted back his head and started to balance the glass of lager on his brow. “Please,” said Cynthia, anxious to avoid looking foolish, even as she remembered this trick as a particular skill of her brother’s.
“Is this mercury telescope what you talked about with Admiral Rodgers?”
“Goodness, no,” said Hugh. “They can barely find ways to maintain the equipment they’ve got.”
“Then what did you talk about?”
“Sunspots! That and my, what shall we call them, clerical duties. You’re more the scientist than I am these days, Mrs. May.” This might be putting it strongly, he thought, but it was better than telling her about the admiral’s September deadline. He rose to his feet, took her hand, and led her to the rain-lashed window. “There’s not a star in the sky,” he said.
“So it’s not a preacher’s Sabbath after all.”
“No, it’s even sadder. Under all those clouds the moment is lost.”
“Muffled, perhaps,” she said, seeing no reason the weather should disqualify the moment from romance.
“No, lost. Blacked out and gone forever. Instead of going forth, as light, at 185,000 miles per second. This patch of Earth can’t be seen, and so this moment is eternally obliterated. Remember the green bolts of your aurora?”
“Of course.”
“Well, they’re still flashing. That moment still lives.”
“And this moment doesn’t?”
“It might as well never have happened.”
“The poor moment. I was hoping you were pondering its romance, but here you are denying its very existence.”
“And even your aurora is just random flashes. One night of it looks like any other night of it. There’s no method in it. No proof of personality.”
“Except for God’s.”
“Really? Do you believe in Him, Mrs. May?”
“I certainly do. I strongly dislike Him, but I believe in Him.”
He was, she understood, talking about the Gauss business, and she still had no idea whether it would be wise to draw him out on this confusing (perhaps mad?) matter. To add to her vexation, Professor Piscorio had just started his bel canto. The first syllables of Italian gave her the awful sensation she always experienced from the sound of a foreign language, a feeling that she’d been struck deaf and blind. She couldn’t bear not knowing what the words meant; the lack of sense horrified her, as if random integers had been substituted for the sequence of pi.
“Come on,” said Hugh. “Let’s go.”
“Out there?”
“Yes, out there.” He pulled her through the French doors and onto the deck. She shrieked like a girl, but in the rain the sound was not loud enough to deflect anyone’s attention from Professor Piscorio’s piercing tenor. The two of them raced under a little canopy. Only as they caught their breath did she feel the touch of his hand.
“You’re burning up,” she said.
“With passion.”
No, she thought, trying to steady her nerves. It can’t be. If he were truly sick, if it were malaria, he’d be in a delirium. “We should go back inside.”
“No,” he said. “If we’ve come out here, then we ought to get drenched.”
“No!” she cried, as he pulled her out from under the awning and into the smack and splash of the rain upon the deck, a torrent of little silver globes and spangles that soon had them soaked to the skin.
The boat was passing Mount Vernon, which she had not seen since before the war, and which she had no desire to see now, not while she was in his arms and laughing. He was her boy magician; he had liquefied the hail of her girlhood into these magic, harmless, licking plops.
She looked up at the sky. “It’s as I’m always saying, Mr. Allison. Washington, D.C., has the most divine climate.”
“Cynthia,” he answered, looking into her eyes. “I have immortal longings.”
It was past 5 A.M. and the streetlamps were already doused, but the Pennsylvania Avenue trolley had another hour to go before its first run of the day. Cynthia knew her dress would be saturated, yet again, by the warm wet wind as she walked home in the dawn light.
They had returned to the Seventh Street wharf a half hour after midnight, and managed to find a carriage that took the two of them back to Hugh’s rooms in Georgetown, where they changed out of their clothes and dried each other in the glow of the gaslight. His body was more slender and beautiful than either her brother’s or John May’s had been. It seemed to belong to some angel in the ether. She recalled it now, her eyes closed against the sight of a truck clattering its load of night soil to the Seventeenth Street docks.
The device she’d requested of Madam Costello had not yet been obtained from whatever party the astrologer had approached, and even so, Cynthia could hardly have expected to need it so soon as last night. In the event, she had not needed it. After a surprisingly long time, Hugh had expertly withdrawn from her, confirming—both to her relief and worry—his familiarity with women. Afterward, his passion safely spent, he had lain on top of her, his forehead still burning and his eyes still open, glazed and unblinking, like the dead soldier in an idealized engraving.
The weight of her drenched dress slowed her gait, and it was past six-thirty when she reached Mrs. O’Toole’s and let herself in, quietly enough, she hoped, not to be heard by Daisy, who was clinking the breakfast dishes and silver onto the table. Upstairs, she dried off with a worn hand towel and reached into the bottom drawer for a flannel nightgown to guard against chill. As soon as she had it on, she sat down at the small secretary to the left of her window and extracted some stationery from the drawer.
She looked at the violet ink to which she would now respond and, before deciding upon the salutation, wrote out an envelope to the Utica address she had memorized off the letter before this one.
If you are on the ocean, she wrote, in a hand not half so fancy as the War God’s, I hope your skies are fairer than they have been over the District. The railroad siege has lifted—for a day or two it felt quite like ’61—but not the clouds.
I should have thanked you before now for your quiet munificence in assisting Venus on her exceedingly slow transit across the Sun. (I assure you there was no sign of her in last night’s gloomy heavens.)
He would picture her, in her lonely room, looking vainly for that planet in the sky. Rereading the two short paragraphs she had composed thus far, she marveled at their sickening affectation. She had not known she possessed the talent.
I look forward to seeing you when you are next in Washington. You of course already know where to find me.
She could smell Hugh Allison on her hands, could feel his flushed brow. And she could still see his open eyes, barely holding in whatever wanted to escape from behind them at the speed of light. She shivered with fear inside the nightgown. But her instincts now told her that the moment might come when she required Roscoe Conkling. And in order to use him, she would have to be, as duplicitously as she could, Most Sincerely his, Cynthia May.
The second baseman caught a fly ball. “Only Neptune is missing,” said Cynthia.
“Oh, lordy,” replied Hugh, pulling his straw hat low against the hot sun. “Another’s preacher’s Sabbath.”
“Well, surely it’s occurred to you,” said Cynthia, gesturing toward the ball field on the Astoria Grounds. “It all revolves around the pitcher, so he’s the Sun, and the infielders are the four small inner planets. Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus are way out t
here beyond them.”
“Darling, it occurs to every astronomer. That’s why they’re tiresome company here—and why I thought to bring you along instead of Henry Paul.” He put his head on her shoulder and was soon dozing off, even though she was the one most worn out by their recreations of the last two, sweltering weeks: picnics in the Seventh Street park; horse races at Brightwood; shooting contests at the Schuetzen Festival. Hugh acted as if frantic indolence might substitute for meaningful work, or at least distract her from pressing the issue of his idleness at the Observatory. Their traipsing from one amusement to another appealed to her with its appearance of ordinary courtship, but upset her Yankee thrift of money and time.
All the rented velocipedes and bags of butterscotch candy could not really sustain the illusion that they were two young lovers with nothing to do but lark, or that Hugh wasn’t in serious trouble with the admiral. She had never learned the details of his meeting with Rodgers, but at the Observatory she’d begun to notice shrugging shoulders and pursed lips whenever Hugh Allison’s name was mentioned in the industrious presence of someone like Professor Harkness. It was folly to continue this romantic pantomime, so unconvincing even to herself, but she lacked the courage to ask questions that might make him tell her his days in Washington were numbered.
She looked away from his long, sleeping lashes and back to the baseball diamond. In the celestial analogy, what was the batter? And perhaps more to the point, what was the ball? Was it the light Hugh talked about dispatching into the heavens? A loud, sudden crack sent the little sphere disappearing into the late-afternoon light over center field, and for a second she thought of jabbing him in the ribs, of waking him and demanding that he explain, right now and comprehensibly, his preoccupation with those drawings on his wall. But in turning to him, her eyes were caught by the glinting chain of his gold watch. When extracted from his pocket, it showed a quarter to six.
There wasn’t time. She would ask him later, or next week.
“Wake up,” she whispered, barely able to make herself disturb his nap, let alone hector him over his life’s work and purpose. He only murmured, and nestled his head against her breast.
“Get up, you infant. You need to be at work.”
“Mmhn,” he groaned, rubbing his eyes. “My august responsibilities.”
He had been assigned to record, from the Observatory’s vantage, the time and position of some flares to be shot later this evening by the Army Signal Service. The Secretary of War and President Hayes, now said to be packing for his New Hampshire vacation, had attended the first round of these demonstrations last night on a road near the Soldiers’ Home. Stations inside the District and along the coast were watching for the lights sent up by rocket and mortar. At the Observatory, this vigil could easily be performed by the watchmen making their rounds of the barometers, but the menial task provided Rodgers with another chance to try humiliating Professor Allison into renewed productivity.
Hugh and Cynthia began the long walk back across town in sleepy silence. She wished the Army signals involved some calculations necessitating her presence, or that another collaborative comet were available until he finally came up with some bold but within-the-pale project, one he’d start in order to impress her, but end up truly interested in. She had a fantasy of him rushing to her desk one morning, ablaze with a eureka he’d experienced during his clerical labors over the next year’s eclipse, some exciting new scheme for doing those observations that would banish his self-disgust and make him a hero to the admiral.
“Be on the lookout for a red cow,” he said, as the two of them crossed Eleventh Street.
She curled her lip against this latest piece of whimsy.
“No, really,” he went on. “One’s escaped from Gonzaga College. I have this from my barber. It could be anywhere.”
She clapped her ears and raced ahead.
“All right,” he said, struggling to keep up. “Then be on the lookout for your chariot instead.” She was supposed to take the Georgetown horsecar that left from the Treasury building. They would have a late supper at the Union Hotel once the last flares had been launched and he came home from Foggy Bottom. “While you’re at it,” he added, “see if you can’t find me a carriage.”
No one could ever keep up with her nervous pace, especially the kind she was setting now, but since leaving the Astoria Grounds she’d noticed that he was a step behind his usual step behind; and now he had stopped altogether.
“Wait here a moment.” He veered toward Milburn’s drugstore—for a bottle of whiskey, she suspected. She made a face.
“Tomorrow is Sunday,” he explained. “We have rather strict laws about such sales in quiet Georgetown.”
“Yes,” she said. “But today is Saturday.”
“Which will be followed by long, lingering, endless Sunday. Don’t move.”
He came out of Milburn’s with a bottle that he asked her to take to his rooms. They parted in front of the Treasury, and as her horsecar made its way up Pennsylvania and then High Street, she tried to look forward to the evening, reminding herself of all the reasons she liked Georgetown more than her own neighborhood near the Capitol. The alley dwellers weren’t so thick on the ground, and sitting in the Peabody Library had a way of calming her, of making her feel less like the interloper she always imagined herself in public places. The trees were fuller, too. Alighting from the streetcar, she admired the little colonnade of them leading to Hugh’s door, and took note of an advertisement tacked to one maple for a WHITE WOMAN TO DO GENERAL HOUSEWORK.
There was no chance it was Hugh who’d posted this bill. Letting herself in, she saw that his seraglio was even messier than usual, the pillows, cups, and newspapers a whirling agglomeration of debris, just like, he continued to assure her, the average comet.
She couldn’t bear sinking into Mrs. Allison’s pillows, so she settled into the chair behind the desk, the only hard one in the room, and looked around. Within an hour she could make this lair as orderly and right-angled as her own shabby precinct of Mrs. O’Toole’s. But would she? What was the point of prolonging the fancy that she and this young man would soon become respectable dwellers on these leafy heights, with Hugh going contentedly off each day for thirty years to work on a successor to Professor Yarnall’s star catalogue? This was not going to happen, and in any case, it wasn’t the daydream that had drawn her to him. But what had attracted her, besides the eyelashes and mischief? Was it, inscrutably, whatever had made him tack those sketches to the wall?
Or was she drawn to his apparent determination to throw himself away? Did she love this stubborn profligacy, and hope it would drag her worried, frugal self down with him—into some lovely oblivion, where the waters could finally close over her head? She took the bottle from its wrapper and poured herself a glass of whiskey. But a moment later she began straightening up the desktop. No, she was not cut out to be a voluptuary.
And he, poor boy, was not cut out for this. She opened his sunspots notebook, the dull record he was charged with making by himself while young Mr. Todd remained on vacation in New Jersey.
AUGUST 5 10 A.M. NO SPOTS
6 6 P.M. THE SAME
8 10 A.M. NO SPOTS
6 P.M. THE SAME
The sight of this stupid table caused her to throw back half the whiskey in the unclean glass. But before the sting had left her throat, her eyes widened and her hands began to tremble. He had not even been near the Observatory on the 8th, neither at 10 A.M. nor six in the evening. When she’d gone looking for him that morning, Mr. Harrison had said he was nowhere around; and that night they’d had an early supper at the Irving House.
So, she thought, negligence wasn’t good enough; he needed actively to disgrace himself. Closing the little notebook, she began to weep, soundlessly, the way she’d taught herself between the thin walls of all her rooming houses. She took a last sip of the whiskey and set the glass down on two unopened envelopes from Hugh’s mother—no doubt containing more shrill complaint o
f debts and darkies. They made her recall the sealed letters, a packet of ten, that John May had written her just before Chickamauga, one to be opened on each of her ensuing birthdays, if he didn’t survive. He’d marked the corner of each envelope, 1864 through 1874, and she had read all of them at first light on the day she was supposed to. They became, as the years went by, shorter and somehow less audible, embarrassed by their own repetitions and the ruse they were attempting against fate, until they ceased altogether, John having run out of time to write, or just the ability to imagine her in the world more than ten years later.
In the ones he did write, he had always pictured her in New Hampshire, never here, and certainly not in August. The sun at the ball field had made her tired, she now realized, and as soon as the whiskey muffled her agitation over the sunspots fakery, she gave up the wooden desk chair for one of the couches, kicking away some of the pillows and falling into a dream of Rutherford B. Hayes, with whom she sat on a porch, watching the sun fall into Lake Winnipesaukee.
Hours later, she awoke to see Hugh drinking from the same glass she had used. He smiled as she came to.
“A little fizzle. Barely bigger than D’Arrest’s.”
She rubbed her eyes and looked at him.
“The Army rockets,” he explained.
“Of course,” she said, wondering if he’d even gone to the Observatory. Was there room for the sunspots notebook on the agenda of things she couldn’t bring herself to ask him about?
At the Union Hotel they were shown to their table at a quarter past ten by Riley Shinn himself, the proprietor who took such pride in the “Pocket Tuileries” he had created on a corner of Bridge Street. They ate their supper, while at the bar several men drunkenly argued the recent railroad strike, each a loud parrot of what he’d read in the papers or heard on the streetcar. “No innocent man ever gets killed in a riot!” declared the loudest of them.
Two Moons Page 15
