As I have never been known to hunger for money (or to manage it), my sister appeared suspicious, but she remained more inattentive than anything else, preferring to discuss the sway she hopes to gain over Mother when Mr. Newsmith—my brother-in-law—extracts our father from his current embarrassment. Her only other topic of conversation involved General Butler, the martial flower of our home state, he of the silver whip and missing foot, and whether he will be allowed to take his seat in the Senate after having killed so many of your sectional partisans during the late war. Senator Conkling says anyone entering the chamber “with his hands and face dripping with the blood of murder, should be inquired into”—at the very least, I should suppose. Sister handed me the newspaper containing this rhetorical flourish, and kept on about it for the rest of the evening. (A discouraging thought: do you suppose a species that concerns itself with such things is worth projecting through time and space?)
What a paradise of invention I’ve been wandering through! Last night, once I left my sister and Newsmith, I walked over to Wanamaker’s and looked at the blue-moon arc lamps (Brush’s latest) now lighting up the store. I wanted to place you in their glow—and that’s just what I did, in my mind’s feverish eye. (Do not be alarmed. The “feverish” is a figure of speech.) Our proposed endeavor makes me wonder: am I at heart an artist, like poor little Dietrich? A philosopher? I’m surely not an astronomer. The admiral is right about that, and I can hardly blame him for thinking it. In fact, at some time I’ll have to tell him all I’ve found out about the Mangin: if he’s going to serve on the government’s lighthouse board, he really ought to know!
I shall be home on Tuesday. Will you have this by then? It’s not yet noon, and I can still rush it to the post office. Of course, I could wait to tell you all that’s in it face to face—in one of my great, teeth-chattering rushes—but I’ve decided you must have at least one letter from me if we’re to call this a romance. It’s unfair that, up to now, our proximity has denied you one.
I burn for you—though not, again I swear, with fever. I am fine.
H.
“Mrs. May, you must try it. It leaves you glowing.”
Cynthia stopped rereading Hugh’s letter when Fanny Christian burst in, carrying a brand-new brand-name jar of enamel. Fanny was glowing: a patch of her pretty skin, above the dainty hollow near her collarbone, caught the Monday-morning light.
“I’ll try some on my hands, Fanny. They’re aging even faster than the rest of me.” Fanny eagerly rubbed in the heavy cream; she herself shone as much with commercial faith as with her own pulchritude.
“You do look even lovelier than usual,” said Cynthia. “Careful, or Dan will lunge at you.”
“Aw,” said Fanny. “He isn’t so bad. Did you know he’s taking bookkeeping classes down at Saint Matthew’s Institute?”
Fanny’s ensign had long since disappeared, and Cynthia gathered that Dan Farricker had crossed over into some new column of eligibility on the girl’s ledger of marital prospects, relocated there more, she supposed, by some new anxiety in Fanny herself (had she just had a birthday?) than his own efforts at self-improvement.
“As long as he doesn’t start going to gospel meetings at Lincoln Hall,” Fanny declared.
“You’re right. We wouldn’t want him too respectable.”
Fanny flashed a complicitous smile, as if to say that, when it came to a little disrespectability, well, these days Mrs. May ought to know. The older woman blushed and looked back down at her hands, pretending to concentrate on Fanny’s cosmetic efforts. What business was it of this girl, or of anyone else in this house, to speculate on her comings and goings? “I think that’s enough, Fanny.” She pulled away her slippery fingers, and Fanny, disappointed over how little Mrs. May had praised the magic jar, said all right and retreated from the room.
Cynthia closed her eyes. It had always been this way: she could tease anyone, but never bear being teased herself. Was it any wonder that Mary Costello—whose uncorseted nature took such pity on the shackled, self-torturing Mrs. May—remained her only friend? What other woman could bear me? thought Cynthia, opening her eyes and looking into the mirror over her vanity.
It reflected not just her face, but the handwriting on Hugh’s Philadelphia letter. He was sick: in places the penmanship shook to the point of illegibility. And if that wasn’t enough to worry about, there was this reference to Conkling! She tried turning it into a reassurance: if the War God was now so famous that his public utterances had begun to register with even Hugh Allison, then Hugh would never be likely to believe that she knew the senator personally.
Would Conkling remark upon Butler today? Surely any fight over seating the South’s version of Sherman had to take place on the first day of the session. She checked again to see she had her ticket to the ladies’ gallery; it had come last night by messenger from Wormley’s. Within the hour, she might see parliamentary war not only over Butler but the Custom House as well: the Administration had just nominated its three replacements for the machine’s top men.
Her enameled hands shook. Hugh, still in Pennsylvania, believed she would be at the Observatory, not on Capitol Hill, this afternoon. But Professor Harkness—rewarding her for the extra time she’d put in on Venus and, more tacitly, the nursing she’d provided their poor, hopeless colleague—had granted her request for the day off. She had lied to Conkling, too. He had asked for her company this evening, and agreed to settle for an appearance in the gallery and at afternoon tea, after she’d told him she was required at the Observatory for night work.
It could not succeed. Her life would catch fire like the Patent Building.
At one minute before noon, he began his march down the corridor, the oxblood shoes he’d bought in Bond Street tapping out a precise beat on the black-and-white marble. Conkling looked straight ahead, avoiding the lobbyist’s salute and the newsman’s cry, but he did cast a sidelong greeting to the seller of photographs (yes, his own was still at the front of the bin). Then he looked straight up, to Constantino Brumidi—still on the scaffold at the age of seventy-five, as he’d been for a quarter century, painting his frescoes on the Capitol ceiling—and Brumidi waved.
Conkling passed the Supreme Court room and entered the Senate chamber, taking his place and appraising the vase of fresh flowers on his newly varnished desktop. By his quick count, another dozen of the seventy-six desks were also so adorned, including Blaine’s, which to his annoyance sported a much larger bouquet. He nodded to two of his colleagues, Burnside and Stanley Matthews, and signed a fast autograph for the page who’d been dispatched to acquire it by some partisan in the galleries. Favor-seekers and retired senators milled about the floor for the last minute or two before the Vice President picked up his gavel.
While the chaplain made his invocation and called upon God’s mercy toward the absent and gravely ill Senator Morton of Indiana, Conkling’s lip curled in disapproval of the mess so many of these lawmakers had already made of their places in the chamber. Newspapers lay crumpled under their chairs, and eraser shavings dotted the blotters. As the chaplain went on, Conkling quietly extracted the card from his bouquet. “Once more unto the breach …” From Kate, of course, her good wishes for the combat to come, and her rebuke for his not taking her to Henry V as soon as he’d arrived in town. She had returned to Edgewood, fleeing Rhode Island and Sprague earlier than usual.
“My little man,” said Conkling to a nearby page—they all worshiped him, and he did his best to keep it that way—“will you do this kindness for me?” He indicated a desire to have the flowers removed.
“To your office, sir?” the boy whispered, as the chaplain yet continued.
“To your mother,” said Conkling.
Kate was not in the ladies’ gallery, but once he dared to look up, he could spot Mrs. May, in just the place he’d picked out for her. She made a stiff, charming wave, unable to hide her amusement over something.
She had not been in the Senate since Pierce’s time, and wh
ile she watched the War God’s comical housekeeping, she also tried to remember the name of the Vice President who would have been presiding in the old chamber on that long-ago day when her father had smuggled her in (twelve years old and already five foot three). She looked around at the female spectators and realized that Conkling had hidden her in plain sight. Dozens of eyes were on the companion he had provided her, the dazzling Mrs. Bruce, perhaps the best-looking politician’s wife in the city and, to the mortification of its Southern women (and more than a few of its northern ones), a Negress. Married to the Mississippi senator whom Conkling had championed during the man’s first, most difficult days here, she had told Cynthia, within minutes of meeting her at the appointed spot near the staircase, that she and Senator Bruce intended to name their firstborn son after the War God. Right now she sat serenely oblivious to the looks she was attracting, her eyes gazing up toward the light coming through the frosted glass of the ceiling.
Cynthia looked at Conkling’s shiny hair and broad shoulders and wondered if he used glycerine lotion, like Fanny, to fight down dandruff. Even seated, he was a magnificent specimen, and for a moment, to her relief and secret disappointment, she thought: he cannot possibly desire me for that. It had to be some peculiar mental electricity she suggested. She had finally come to believe that Hugh’s physical ardor for her was real; and yet she knew that her mothering aroused (in him as well as her) an odd, additional thrill. What sort of charge did Conkling imagine drawing from her?
Conkling listened to Vice President Wheeler murmur the senators toward the first day’s business. A year and a half ago, Hayes hadn’t even known the old hypochondriac’s name. This dull burgher out of the House, so in love with his own rectitude he wouldn’t accept a new post office for Malone, New York—let alone a pay raise or some railroad stock. Now, like Blaine, he had moved to the other side of the Capitol, and Conkling would have to look at him, day in and day out, as the session wore on, just as last year he’d had to read his reformist campaign speeches in all the newspapers. Since Wheeler lost his wife, the Hayeses had attached him, like Schurz, to the family hearth, creating the ridiculous spectacle of a President in near-constant touch with his Vice President.
The new senators, the ones filling sudden vacancies, took their oaths and were presented to the body by senior homestate colleagues; especially sentimental flourishes attended the younger Cameron’s replacement of his retiring father. Two chairs remained conspicuously empty, but there would be no action today on Butler and Kellogg. The Republicans would not even caucus until tomorrow, a delay upon which Conkling had insisted; and when that meeting finally occurred, it just might have to continue through the reading of the President’s message.
Hayes. Conkling twisted his forelock and thought about His Fraudulency down at the other end of the Avenue. The way the man humbly claimed not to “fill” his office but to “occupy” it: he hardly did that, just took up a few cubic feet of space, a paperweight, keeping things in place until a breathing man once more seized the premises.
But with all that was happening—Colonel Shafter raiding Mexico; the aggrieved Sioux leaving town; the aggrieved Ponca arriving; silver to be remonetized; the labor unions to be subdued—nothing mattered but the Custom House nominations, which Roscoe Conkling would strangle. Replacing Chet Arthur with Roosevelt, that detestable do-gooding businessman with his wheezing Harvard son! (The effrontery of little pince-nezed junior, wanting last year to talk boxing with Roscoe Conkling, while the senator suffered through the last evening of Union League speeches he would ever endure.) Then young Mr. Prince, this “constitutional scholar” with his book, to be put in place of Cornell. And they said his Rochester speech was insulting!
They all thought Conkling would never fill or occupy the White House. Last year in Cincinnati, Roosevelt Senior had been with those who’d done their best to derail any movement by the convention toward that possibility. Well, after Grant came back in ’80, the reformers would die off—perhaps for real, from the shock of it—and Roscoe Conkling would have his own reward four years later, when he would still be only fifty-five, and have safely outrun the climacteric.
This current battle would be fought subtly, slowly. He would bleed Hayes’s pigs instead of butchering them.
“Mr. President,” he said, rising during a short lull in the mutual admiration and torch-passing. “I move that we adjourn for the day.”
His Republican colleagues fell silent, then seconded, and then said aye. Wheeler, confused, brought his gavel down.
Conkling nodded up at Mrs. May. A moment later she was safely delivered to the foot of the staircase by Mrs. Bruce, to whom the senator bid a grateful good-bye.
On their walk to Wormley’s, Cynthia handed him the slender volume she’d bought at Morrison’s: Is Our Republic a Failure? It was her attempt at humor, meant to continue last month’s royalist flirtations, but he didn’t see the joke.
“Hardly, Mrs. May. Only a mechanism misunderstood and falsely characterized. We are a government of laws and men, and must endeavor to remain so.” He moved to illustrate his utterance, asking her, with his sharp-toothed debater’s smile, if she knew that the supposedly reform-minded President intended to appoint an old friend, a regimental chum from Civil War days, to the consulship in Melbourne.
“I had no idea,” she said, wondering if she was supposed to laugh or appear shocked.
“And the President’s Democratic friends will vote the fellow in. We have a unique situation, Mrs. May: a Republican President whose incumbency is swelling the ranks of the Democracy.” She started to tell him that it would be all right for him to shave off a few syllables, the way she and Professor Harkness sometimes did one or two decimal places, but he hurried on with his explanation. “This is how it happens: Republican officeholders, postmen, and tax collectors, even up in your native New Hampshire, are afraid of losing their positions for looking too ‘political’; so they enroll in the other party. Madness! All these disloyal clerks.”
“Who should be your footsoldiery.”
“Exactly.”
Mr. Wormley, the ex-slave who had made himself rich running the best-appointed hotel in the District, showed the senator and his guest to their table.
“I’ve talked too much of myself,” said Conkling, as they waited for their tea—just lemon, no milk, he insisted to the waiter. “You must tell me how Deimos and Phobos have been.”
“They’re gone. They won’t swim back into view until late in ’79.”
About when the General would. Conkling reached into his waistcoat for a small box. “To remind you of them in the meantime.”
Opening the velvet-covered case to find a pair of earrings, she was amused at the thought of some jeweler at Galt’s turning them out by the dozen to keep up with the senator’s seasonal demand. But then she noticed the stones: each was red, like the planet, but one was larger than the other, in mimicry of the moons. She could no longer pretend that the War God’s attentions weren’t serious, or at least customized. Please, she thought, let these be garnets and not rubies. How much pressure could she bear? (But if they were rubies—her mind quickly began working—think how much they could fetch at the District Commissioner’s pawnshop, a new depression-relief effort designed to provide the genteelly impoverished with some cash for their heirlooms. Enough to get the Mangin projector through the Custom House?)
“You’re blushing redder than the stones,” said Conkling.
“Yes,” said Cynthia, “I am.” She shut the little case and said, as demurely as she could, “I’ll put them on later.”
“Ah—later.” He made it sound like a place instead of a time, some perfumed Xanadu inside his mind or, more likely, a red-velvet lair behind one of the doors here at Wormley’s.
“Yes, much later,” she replied. “When I’m home after pushing Venus another few miles across the Sun. It will practically be dawn.”
“Is this what comes from my supplemental appropriation? Are they working you that hard?
Not to mention denying me your company?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Every evening you can think of. It’s the busiest time I’ve seen there yet.” This work of hers, however falsely she described its schedule, was not just her best alibi; she could see, from the look he had, how much it excited him, the spectacle of a woman earning her bread with her brains, performing a task that even his supple mind couldn’t manage. Did he also think she was devoted to this work, and extended those long hours out of zealous vocation? If he did, might it not be all right to ask his help for a deserving young man, equally passionate about the skies, a visionary who needed some equipment his superiors were too blinkered to requisition?
No, she could not ask for that; if she did, this young man would become personal to him—a man, in short; a rival different from Hayes and Evarts and Roosevelt, but meant to be crushed even flatter.
“You must keep working hard, Mrs. May, so that Senator Sargent’s bill carries the day.” He sounded like the admiral, until he pointed straight up, toward what she understood were his rooms, and said, “We must succeed in moving you to all sorts of higher ground.” Pleased with his joke, he laughed, and glared, and said: “The health of us both depends on it.”
Miss Clara Morris was “the greatest emotional actress living”—the placards outside the National said so—but from the third row Cynthia found the woman, so tiny and so tragic and so acclaimed for this impersonation of “Miss Multon,” a bit hard on the ears. She’d rather have waited for Jefferson to come back in Rip Van Winkle, or even for Lydia Thompson to return with her British Blondes, than be seeing this, but once Henry V left, Hugh—madly Francophilic since discovering the Mangin machine—had insisted on their going to see these five long acts penned by two dull Frenchmen.
Loud as they might be, Miss Morris’s emotings could not keep Cynthia’s mind from wandering back to the time she had seen Salvini do Othello. If the War God knew she were here now—instead of, as she’d told him, making nightly use of his Transit appropriation with Professor Harkness—might he storm down the aisle and strangle her with his golden foulard? As her fingers drummed the armrest she shared with Hugh, she looked around the rebuilt theater, phoenixed from its ashes four years ago, and wondered how safe it was even now. The recent government inspection of the Observatory showed only what everyone there had known all along—it was a worse firetrap than the Patent Office—but the report’s official stamp had somehow now allowed fire to crowd onto Cynthia’s always long agenda of preoccupations. The jewels that dangled from the ears and bosoms of all the lobbyists’ wives here in the audience were glinting even during this dimly lit moment of calamity for Miss Morris; with little effort, Cynthia could imagine the baubles’ concentrated light igniting a velvet seat cover.
Two Moons Page 22
