None of these jewels would end up in the District Commissioner’s pawnshop, which entered her thoughts again. This laughable city! Until it learned to manufacture something other than laws and transcript, it would straggle behind the rest of the nation like an overage foundling. She’d realized the other day that the only reason Washington had avoided the summer’s labor violence was an insufficiency of the workingmen needed to get a proper riot going.
She drummed her fingers more drowsily and wondered if they were watching the third or the fourth act.
On the other side of the armrest, however insistent Miss Morris might be for his attention, Hugh thought more about the stage’s lighting than its passions. Did the suddenly bright backdrop for the actress’s latest crisis of nerves derive its illumination from silvered glass or a lens? He wondered, too, when the day would come for the owners to replace the whole theater’s gaslights with electricity.
Although she wore no necklace, Hugh still heard Cynthia’s chin drop asleep upon her chest. He revived her with an immediate pinch: “Allons, debout, ma chère.” The play was, he had to admit, pretty dreadful. The two of them squeezed their way out of the audience—pardon, pardon, excusez-moi—and into the street.
“You are not,” he informed her, “delivered from the rest of the evening. Come.”
“Where are we going?”
“Marini’s. The season hasn’t really begun, but he’s giving a dance tonight—smaller than usual, but it’s supposed to last late.”
“I can’t go like this.”
In fact, though it might not be especially fancy, she had on her gayest dress, the bright green one she’d bought seven months ago, after being hired.
Hugh looked at her appraisingly—“One more touch, that’s all you require”—and propelled her toward the tobacconist’s on the corner.
“You’re open late!” he cried out to the proprietor. “I’d like some hairpins for the lady.”
Cynthia moved away, distressed by both the situation and the overenthusiastic enunciation. It was symptomatic, and she would have to enter it into the fever notebook when she got home.
“I’ve got no hairpins,” said the man behind the cash drawer. “But I can probably find something that would do you.”
“You’re a hero, my good man!”
Cynthia walked to the other side of the store and caught sight of Conkling’s portrait above an open cigar box. An engraving of Hayes perched atop another. They formed a poll on the Custom House nominations: the patron was invited to purchase his cigar from the President’s box if he thought Roosevelt and Co. would be confirmed, from the War God’s if he felt they’d be defeated.
“Now, then,” said Hugh, plucking two yellow flowers out of the corsage he’d given her to carry tonight. With one of the pipe cleaners he’d just bought, he fixed the blossoms to her hair. She felt mortified, like a goat being made to wear a bonnet, until he ran the backs of his fingers over her cheek, and told her, softly, without any sign of unnatural excitement, that she now looked even lovelier than before.
“Like a beacon,” he said, holding up a hand-mirror that was on the counter. “Let’s go.”
At every point on their way to Marini’s studio, she remained aware of just how many blocks she was from Mrs. Robinson’s, and of that small box of a bedroom in which she’d learned what she went to find out. It seemed as much a coffin for her and Hugh’s unconceived child as the small oak chest in which Sally had long ago been confided to the ground.
Hamilton Fish, Jr., the bachelor congressman from New York and one of Marini’s social impresarios, greeted them at the door. “Come in!” he cried, gesturing toward the scene within. “Magnificent, isn’t it?”
“Actually, less grand than I’ve seen it,” Hugh whispered to Cynthia. The two of them entered a ballroom festooned with silk swag and lilies. Mounds of ice cream sat atop a table at the far end, not far from a magnificent cheval-de-frise, left over from the famous night that Sir Edward and Lady Thornton had appeared. This trellis of silver spears circled the musicians. Two young diplomats, one with a Spanish accent, the other speaking the purest Hoosier, passed by Cynthia, discussing whether or not Robert Lincoln would take an offer to become a Third Assistant Secretary of State. A cluster of naval officers, their dates mostly in pink and showing more bare bosom than ever, had just come from the circus, which would depart Washington two nights hence. If only, thought Cynthia, Hugh had taken her there instead of to the National, or here.
“What a relief from nights with Mr. Todd,” he said, surveying the scene. He began mimicking the squirrelly movements of his trans-Neptunian colleague, whispering his excited surmises that made every nighttime speck a potential planet and promotion: “ ‘What’s that?’ ” “ ‘Don’t you see it?’ ” “ ‘At the top of the arc!’ ”
Cynthia did not laugh. She would rather be around Mr. Todd than all the hearties and belles parading by her. She could now even recognize Miss Ellen Gray across the room.
“My rival,” she told Hugh, pointing toward her.
“Oh, Lord,” he groaned. “Let’s find the dog and put him on the ice block.” Actually, much to Miss Gray’s disappointment, Marini did not permit even animals as small as Buster to get underfoot. He was serious about the dancing, and had several midshipmen here to display the skills he was known for teaching them at Annapolis. The dance floor itself was the last place Cynthia wanted to be, and after filling a silver bowl much past the rim with ice cream, she made a beeline for two empty chairs against the wall.
“I want to dance,” Hugh protested.
“Then dance with her,” Cynthia replied, nodding toward the décolleté Miss Gray.
He sat down, sighing. “All right. Let’s talk about her still-prospective brother-in-law instead.”
“You mean Henry Paul?”
“Yes. Can we trust him? If our projector makes it across the ocean and then through Customs and then down here, we shall still need a third person to run its little engine while we go aloft with the light.” Cynthia shook her head, forcefully. “You can’t yet think of help from anyone else, least of all someone at the Observatory. There’s too much danger the wrong people will find out.” Anyone would be wrong; could there be a more repellent prospect than Hugh’s sharing their intimate madness, their production of a cosmic imprint instead of a child, with a third party? She changed the subject. “You haven’t told me the latest news from New York.”
“Mangin’s ami wants me there when it arrives, and you should come with me. I’m sure you can arrange two days off with Harkness and Harrison. You’ve put in so much extra time.”
Henry Paul, catching sight of the two of them, crossed the room. “Mrs. May!” he exclaimed, not unwelcomingly, but with great surprise. She knew what he was thinking: a peculiar friendship was one thing, but for Allison to bring her here, like a girl you were courting?
“Watch out for Ellen,” Henry warned Hugh, smiling as he spoke of his future sister-in-law. “She still hasn’t forgiven you that night at the commodore’s. She’ll breathe fire if she spots you.”
“My guess,” said Hugh, turning to Cynthia, “is that she can put out five hundred carcels. We’ll strap her to the apparatus.”
Looking at the floor, Cynthia pressed the back of her cold spoon quite hard against his hand. Henry Paul, with a still-friendly but puzzled look, decided to leave these two odd ducks to themselves. He made a little bow and went looking for some pretty girl who could be counted on to simper over his impending removal from the marriage market.
Cynthia now struck Hugh’s knuckles, much harder, with the edge of the spoon. “Don’t tell anyone anything. Don’t even make an obscure joke like that. It will get them asking questions.”
“Why can’t I jaw on about my project the way they always do about theirs?” He offered his hand to be kissed, and when she declined, he soothed his knuckles, babyishly, with his own lips, a gesture that irritated and then aroused her—and thereby irritated her all over again.
“Yours isn’t a project. It’s—I don’t know, I suppose it’s a vision.”
“You’re right. I really am a philosopher. I took the wrong diploma entirely. In fact,” he said, his voice starting to rise, “I could—”
“You’re more an addled poet,” she said, sweetly, trying to calm him and herself.
“I sing the body electric—”
Afraid he would start singing for real, as at Riley Shinn’s, she pointed to the wealth of ice cream dripping down the great block of ice. “I’d like some more.”
“Tell me something. I must know: how are we going to get our miracle machine through Customs? My faith in you is complete, but I do find myself curious. I keep assuming it’s through the good offices of someone your father once knew at the Treasury. Would that be right?”
Amazed that her facility for lying had blossomed so gaudily, she heard herself responding: “No, it’s my brother-in-law. He can radically reduce the fee, and let you pay it in a few token installments over several years.” All she had needed to answer was “yes.” The useless lie and its embellishments had appeared like spontaneous growths in a laboratory dish. (To start with, John May had no brother.) Would she even remember the details of this duplicity? She wondered if she was developing powers of deception for further use with the War God, who no doubt imagined her, even now, toiling at the Observatory. “And that’s the only brother-in-law I want to speak of,” she added. “No more talk of requesting help from Henry Paul, not unless you want Miss Gray and perhaps even the admiral knowing what you intend to do. Now get me more ice cream.”
She knew from his contented expression—he was probably back dreaming of the little Mangin—that he would never again bring up the import duty. But when he turned directly toward her, he insisted upon one thing: “Only after you’ve danced with me.”
“Out of the question. Ice cream.”
“No dessert for you until I’ve finished my dancing.”
He pulled her on to the floor and into some complicated human geometry, whether a minuet or quadrille she hadn’t the least idea. But, fearing the even greater embarrassment that fleeing the polished marble would bring, she began to move. She felt dozens of female eyes on her; they were agog that such a creature was here, and wondering, too, in their brief looks at Mr. Allison, if this young man was well enough to have come out himself. His fast, slender figure might be fetching from a distance, but close up it revealed itself as too slim, and his color looked decidedly suspect.
And yet, the more they watched, the more relaxed Cynthia became. The dance was geometry, nothing but, and Hugh Allison was an expert, describing its arches and angles and small circles with his extended arms and shining shoes. All she had to do was replicate the shapes, become the double-side of his glittering mirror. Within two minutes a dozen years had fallen from her face, and she cared no more about the cruel company and the waste, cared no more if the ice cream melted into a flood of gruel, so long as the violinists didn’t stop.
“Tell me, Mrs. May,” asked Hugh, when the pattern required that he hold her by the waist and sweep her twice around him, “how strong are your immortal longings?”
“Stronger and stronger,” she replied, as the dance’s next movement spun him off into a line of three males, each of whom faced his partner from a half-dozen feet away.
“And yours?” she called across the distance.
“Nearer and nearer fulfillment.”
A moment arrived when the couples had to orbit an empty center, to swirl like a solar system without a sun. “Our” machine, he had called it. It was now her vision, too, a folie à deux, and she wanted it, as much as she still wanted him. Her hand in his, moving faster now, she asked: “How do we get inside?” How would they, after crossing the mud and debris at the site, get themselves and their machine into the absurd, abandoned plinth of the Monument?
“The same way,” he said, while the music sped up and their feet followed, “that the light finds us. The same way,” he said, as they reached maximum velocity, “that we make love.” They spun and drove forward in a single movement, and the violin bows beat like wings. She trusted her feet and looked into his eyes.
“Breaking and entering,” he explained, his voice flying on the music.
Cynthia stood outside the packing room, putting on her hat. The days remained as warm and wet as last month’s, but they had grown short, and she hoped to be back at Mrs. O’Toole’s before the sun was gone. She had just left a bag of oranges for Hugh in Mr. Harrison’s office, where there was considerable activity for 4:45 P.M. Mr. Gardner, the instrument maker, had come bustling in, quite agitated, from the machine shop, unable to find some of the equipment on the admiral’s latest list of items requiring service or superannuation. Mr. Harrison, “expecting an unexpected guest,” had had no time or suggestions for him.
Now, though she had trouble believing her ears, she understood why. The nearby voice of the short-notice visitor, just arrived and braying for the superintendent, could belong only to the War God. A hairpin still between her lips, Cynthia leaned against the pier of the 9.6-inch and listened to the conversation coming from the doorway of Mr. Harrison’s office on the other side.
“We were excited to get word of your coming,” the flustered clerk was saying. “I’ve sent someone to bring back Admiral Rodgers. He’s over at the Corcoran Building. As you may know, the Almanac Office just moved over there, and he and Mr. Newcomb are having to sort out some confusion over—”
“Yes,” said Conkling, always bored with explanations of his inconvenience.
Cynthia made a fast, unseen flight back to her desk, her bonnet swishing in her right hand as she went. She did not want Conkling to find her, but knew she would be wise to let that happen—to make him think that she had just arrived for one of the long working nights she had said they required of her. Instead of putting her bonnet on the clothes tree, she threw it atop a pile of papers, to give the little room an appearance of her fresh arrival.
Conkling’s visit, she realized, was in keeping with the strategy he had displayed throughout the whole first month of the Special Session. He had contrived to make the Custom House nominations look like the last thing on his mind—less important than the New York State bakers’ complaints or gilding the statue atop the Capitol or, it now seemed, the future of the Observatory.
“Allow me to wander,” she heard him saying to Mr. Harrison, who had stuck to the senator during a noisy passage toward the Chronometer Room.
“Yes, by all means,” said the clerk. “You’ll see just why the $28,909 has been requested in the interim, for repairs.”
“Indeed,” said Conkling. “Plus thirty-five cents. I’ve read the report to Secretary Thompson, my good man.”
“It’s not for me to say, of course,” Mr. Harrison went right on. “But I’m sure the admiral will make the point that spending a hundred thousand dollars for removal instead would be the better bargain. So long, of course, as there’s no factory nearby to shake the instruments and obscure them with smoke.” Like some powerful ether whose effect varied with every person exposed to it, Conkling had turned the discreet, unflappable clerk into a chattering font of presumption.
Within another minute, the two men came upon Cynthia’s little office, and the senator—all annoyance flooded out by delight—was crying “Aha!”
“Mrs. Cynthia May,” said Mr. Harrison. “Our most exceptional computer.”
“Charmed,” said Conkling, taking her hand.
“Stunned,” replied Cynthia.
“I shall let Mrs. May tell me about her work,” said Conkling, dismissing the clerk with a definite glance. “She can guide me back to your office in time for the admiral’s arrival.”
“Certainly,” said Mr. Harrison, who was subsiding back toward normality, except for a slight confusion about Conkling’s familiarity toward Mrs. May.
“You have time for our esoteric affairs?” asked Cynthia, once she and the War God were alone.
“Oh, yes,” said Conkling, who made a fast visual inventory of the space she inhabited every night. “The nominations are dying a slow death. I’ve just had the Commerce Committee draft a letter to Sherman asking the exact grounds on which my men have been dismissed. That should prolong the President’s agony another week or two. I spent today on other matters entirely—in fact, I took to the floor to explain my latest interview. Did you read it? Everyone else did.”
“Yes,” said Cynthia. Friday’s New York Herald had arrived by messenger at Mrs. O’Toole’s this morning.
Conkling twirled a protractor on his right forefinger and laughed. “I did have to take back the bit about praising Tilden. That really was going too far, and I had to blame the newsman for making up exactly the words he’d heard from my mouth. But I did not retract what I said about the Republican party.” He put down the little measuring device, and all at once seemed to glow before her eyes, as if attached to the engine of Hugh’s magic machine. “There is one single bulwark, Mrs. May, against the old slavocracy, against German radicalism, against the silver-coining forces of inflation.” She had begun to count, as if he were reciting the Seven Deadly Sins. “That bulwark is the Republican party,” he went on. “And that is why I look upon these wealthy New York reformers as such fools. They are to be the worst sufferers if this nation passes back into the hands of the other party, controlled in the South by evil traditions and ruled in the North by its socialistic elements.”
Two Moons Page 23
