“Well,” said Shea, pulling on his beard and giving it some thought. “It’s against regulations, but I imagine the lady might like to see the New England granite on the inside walls. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of it came from quarries she rode past growing up.”
He said he’d fetch a key. Hugh accompanied him and made a note of where this crucial object hung. It was so massive it looked like a ceremonial joke, but it actually turned a lock, and with one push and a slight groan from both the hinges and Officer Shea himself, the giant eastern door gave way.
“Be careful in them shoes, ma’am.”
Some squeaks indicated the presence of at least a few rats, attracted by remnants of the engineers’ recent lunches.
“Even in this light you can tell the granite’s blue,” said Shea, holding his lantern up to one of the walls. Its stones turned out to be as heavily inscribed as an Egyptian tomb’s.
Cynthia looked upward, calculating the rate at which the shaft tapered toward the night sky—one-quarter inch to the foot, she felt certain—while Hugh intently surveyed some rotten-looking scaffolds.
“How ever did they get up there?” Cynthia asked Shea. “The workmen, I mean.”
“You’ve brought me to the most interesting thing of all,” said the watchman. “There’s going to be a steam elevator rising the whole five hundred and fifty feet! And two iron stairways, on the north and south sides. Fifty flights for the fellows who’ll be doing the construction!”
“But in the earliest days?” asked Cynthia, whose lantern-lit expression, like Hugh’s, was growing anxious.
Officer Shea walked behind one of the scaffolds and beckoned the couple to join him near the granite wall. “See there? Dangerous as all hell—you should pardon my language, ma’am. But there it is. Wooden steps on iron struts, winding around all four walls. The grade is nice and gentle, but I wouldn’t trust those planks with my life. The air that seeps in here has made ’em soggier than my lungs.”
Hugh knocked one or two of them with his hand. “At the very top, Officer. What caps the thing now?”
The watchman laughed. “Nothing but some wooden flats. You hear ’em banging up and down whenever there’s a storm. The next big rain’ll let in enough water to drown those rats, I promise you.”
“But,” Hugh asked, “one can still get all the way up—and out onto the top edge?”
“Well,” said the watchman. “In theory.”
Four nights after dining with Cynthia, Conkling sat in his rooms at Wormley’s and let impatience get the better of him. Having her eventual consent meant nothing compared to her immediate absence. He wanted her here now, wanted the only numbers before him to be the grand exponential ones she dealt in, not these double-digit tallies, the yea-and-nay projections he’d been revising for weeks. Right now the nominations fight seemed less a thrilling strike at the king than a laborious effort to hoist his three overfed lieutenants above their own difficulties in New York.
Frustrated with ardor and suspicion, he reached for one of his gilt-edged note cards:
My dear Madam Costello—
This should be taken as a severe caution. Anytime you see peril to a Scorpio from consorting with an Aries, you had better think to inform him and not her. I shall assume you were telling Mrs. May the truth—at least as you see it from behind your celestial counter—but I shall not have you informing her of my worries and affairs. Where the three of us are concerned, all intelligence is to travel in one direction only—from her, through you, to me. Is that clear? I shall call on you tomorrow evening, and when I do, you had better tell me everything there is to be told about Mr. Hugh Allison. I do not trust Mrs. May on the subject, and woe betide your little den of necromancy if I cease to trust you.
Roscoe Conkling
When they got off the ferry from New Jersey, after the long nighttime train ride from Washington, Hugh and Cynthia headed straight to the Battery. Each carried a Gladstone bag, but neither seemed tired from the many hours of travel. The sunrise over the Hudson, this Friday, December 7, had appealed to both of them, but it stirred nothing like the excitement they now displayed over the distant approach of the Juliette Marie. The telegraph operator in Sandy Hook had communicated the first sight of the ship, and a revenue cutter carrying inspectors from the Custom House was already setting out to meet her. Cynthia imagined the mad salutes that had greeted Conkling’s arrival back in August, and felt certain they couldn’t match the crowing gusto with which Hugh Allison was waving his long white muffler at the precious cargo heading their way.
“Put it back on,” she gently urged. She tucked the ends of the wool into the lapels of his overcoat and reminded him: “We’ve got at least six hours of traipsing ahead of us.” By 4 P.M. the Juliette Marie’s cargo would have undergone the required inspections, and the two of them could claim the Mangin projector for its transfer to the ferry and a freight train south. Until then, with most of the day to kill, they wandered the many-leveled cornucopia of Stewart’s department store and sat by the huge open hearth of a Bowery beer garden.
Even so, they arrived at the Custom House well in advance of four o’clock, and had to spend some time just gazing at the immensity of its facade. Its Ionic colonnade stretched a whole block, and its windowed dome, so much higher than the Observatory’s, seemed to mock the tiny flag that flew from a pole on the roof below it.
She and Hugh made their way to an entrance on Hanover, or, as even the War God liked to joke, “Hand-over Street.” They climbed to the Rotunda, where hundreds of desks looked like haystacks in some vast imperial barn. The place seemed an inverse of the pension office back in the District, where a similar profusion of clerks sat disbursing mites to survivors of the war. Here it was all a matter of intake, the huge dome sucking in money as if its windows were the sluice gates of a dam.
By now, if the dam had operated with its usual speed, the Appraiser’s report to the Inspector would have made its way to the Surveyor and, at last, the office of the Collector, where it would be sitting on the desk of a Mr. Joseph Selden. He would report to Mrs. May and Mr. Allison that their projector had been cleared through the Port of New York with most of its fees paid and what little remained having been deferred to future installments. Cynthia looked forward to watching the professional smile that would appear on Mr. Selden’s face in gratitude for the couple’s contribution to the treasuries of both the United States and the New York Republican party. After handshakes all around, there would still be time to meet Mangin’s ami at the bonded warehouse for an instructive glimpse at the mechanical marvel before it was recrated and sent off on the rest of its journey.
Instead of smiling, Mr. Selden, without raising his eyes from the paper on his desk, said, “One thousand and eight hundred and fifty dollars.”
Hugh stood silent. “I don’t understand,” said Cynthia.
Mr. Selden looked up at her, his expression making it clear that, no, he was the one who didn’t understand.
“I was told that the bulk of the fee had already been paid,” said Cynthia, “and that what remained might be rendered—”
“One thousand eight hundred and fifty dollars. Payable immediately, or the item will be sold at auction thirty days from now.” Mr. Selden was already looking past them to see who was next and ready with a bank draft. “Please move away,” he said, putting the projector’s certificate into one of his desk’s lower drawers.
Hugh led Cynthia to a nearby bench. Even before sitting down, she realized what had occurred. Despite what he’d promised—had he promised? or merely indicated?—Conkling had decided not to work his will until she delivered the goods. To him, she was the same as the projector: a peculiar, desired commodity under embargo. Why keep his end of the bargain until she kept hers? She could picture him looking at the Senate calendar, counting the days until the nominations battle would be won or lost, and deciding not to play any card, in his public life or his hidden one, before it was absolutely necessary.
“Perhap
s Mr. May tried and failed,” said Hugh, soothingly. Not even at the height of his fevers had she permitted herself tears, but he saw her crying now.
The sound of “Mr. May” made her shake—over the ever-finer entanglement of her lies and the name’s strange evocation of John himself, not the brother he had never had. “But he assured me—” she started to say, before guilty sobs overtook her.
“Come,” said Hugh, more composed than she could have imagined. “We can’t let the poor Frenchman just stand there.”
They recognized Mangin’s friend, waiting at the bonded warehouse, by the long ends of his mustache and a plaintive palms-out gesture indicating he had already learned of the difficulty.
“We have some apologizing to do,” said Hugh.
Even Cynthia managed to express her hope that he hadn’t been waiting too long.
“No, no,” said Louis Hiver, “un quart d’heure, at the most. But such a shame!” He pointed to the projector, still uncrated from its inspection, but roped off to any but an official’s touch. “And so easy to operate—it would be great pleasure to show you!” He leaned his head, insouciantly, to one side. “But if you like—maybe while you remain in the city and try to, how do you say, straighten this out—I will show you something else. I wish you could have been there this morning at the office!”
“What office is that?” Hugh knew almost nothing about him. Davidson had had him writing to Hiver at a rooming-house address.
“Of the Scientific American. I am the new ‘European correspondent.’ I am Scientific Frenchman!” He smiled and bounced, more like Cynthia’s idea of an Italian.
“Come to the office tomorrow and you will have a pleasure.”
She looked doubtfully at Hugh. However weary she might be, a lifetime of parsimony was urging her to start back for Washington tonight and avoid the price of the hotel. But she could tell from the sight of Hugh that he wasn’t up to it. He had had to put down his bag several times during their walk here from Hanover Street. Right now it rested at his feet, and she worried that some over-zealous inspector might try to tax or confiscate it.
Hugh indicated to M. Hiver that their plans were up to the lady.
“We’ll come round in the morning,” said Cynthia, taking a card with the magazine’s address.
When they’d set out yesterday, she had anticipated the delightful moment when they would register at the Astor House as Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Allison. Now nothing could dispel her dark mood. From the dining-room window, she could see the offices of the New York Herald, and while they ordered their meal she silently wished that that paper’s reporter had vanquished the War God by inventing statements even beyond the ridiculous bombast he had actually uttered in his interview. She couldn’t even stand that they were staying in a Republican establishment.
“Why didn’t you arrange for us to lodge at the New York? Isn’t that where Southerners stay when they come to the city?” The question came out like a fishwife’s complaint, but she could hardly risk explaining her objection.
“Eat up, darling. We’re on the American plan.”
His equanimity was breaking her heart. Managing an expression that she hoped looked like a smile, she told him: “You know I’ll end up filching every one of those rolls.”
How wonderful this could have been. She looked around the room, guessing which diners were the excited transients and which the permanent boarders. She thought that she and Hugh, so subdued, must resemble the latter.
“Maybe tomorrow morning we can also have some fun riding the elevator up at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,” he suggested. The Astor was too old and shallow to have one. This proposed lark, conceived sometime back, she was sure, when the Monument had begun looming large in their imaginations, threatened to make her cry again. She loved him for his fecklessness and failure, she decided. She wanted only those things, not the brute security of the War God’s fleeting embrace.
Along the gaslit fourth-floor corridor, she steadied his exhausted frame. They were making their way toward a handsome double bed, another part of her earlier anticipations. It was covered by a beautiful white brocade, not the riot of pasha’s pillows back in Georgetown. The key to the room had made her think of Officer Shea at the Monument, and the bedspread soon directed her mind to another, still unseen bed—the one upstairs at Wormley’s.
While Hugh took off his shirt, and she laid her dress upon the hassock, she made a silent pledge to herself: I shall yet make his dream happen. I shall free the machine. Flushed, his forehead damp, he was soon asleep in her arms. With her eyes wide open, she thought: what a small price it will be to pay! Once the War God had his Senate victory and passed beyond the Zodiac prohibition she had fabricated—even sillier than Mary’s actual divinations—she would let Roscoe Conkling have her tired form for whatever use he desired. And then she and Hugh would have the projector.
Stroking his wet hair and pondering the astrological lie she had added to so many others, she realized—amazed she hadn’t thought of it sooner—that it was Mary who had given them up. Conkling had reneged on his promise because Madam Costello, in her infuriating brogue, must have told him about “that charming boy-o” Mrs. May was “so sweet on.” There was no point to even cursing her in the bitter darkness of this hotel room. The planet reader’s indiscretion about the War God’s climacteric had, after all, been the basis for Cynthia’s own lie. Mary Costello, the heavens’ charlatan! She was more like the heavens themselves, directing all their destinies by who-knew-what proportions of shrewdness, stupidity, and sheer obliviousness.
The following day, Hugh and Cynthia did not make it to the Scientific American’s offices until past noon. Alone of all the editors and copyists, M. Hiver remained behind after the short weekend workday.
“Come in, come in,” he said, looking up from the drawings of a contraption that appeared to Cynthia not so different from the one that had come flying out of the Patent Office in September. “Let me show you what the men from New Jersey brought in yesterday.”
He led them into an adjoining room where on a table sat a small machine consisting chiefly of one brass rod, wrapped in tin foil, and a stylus. M. Hiver now cranked the rod into a fast rotation. “We write about it and make them rich,” he said. He applied the stylus to the rod. “They soon go and build them by the hundred in Merlot Park.”
“Mary had a little lamb …”
Hugh and Cynthia jumped back several inches.
“What is this little lamb?” asked Hiver. “I still do not understand.”
The voice was feeble, but the ditty unmistakable, and it continued until M. Hiver ceased turning the crank and replaced the foil with a fresh piece. He then lifted the first stylus and set down a second one, which his visitors only now noticed near the other end of the brass rod.
“Hard to imagine, but a month ago they are experimenting with paper instead of the tin. Watch. We make music!” He grabbed a horn that stood in a corner of the room and, cranking the apparatus with his free hand, blew three loud notes. Then, as soon as he cranked again and applied the first stylus instead of the second, the sounds came back out, not quite so loud as they’d gone in, but still, incredibly, alive.
He then quickly tore the foil from the machine and crumpled it. “We gave a promise not to make any more.”
Hugh’s amazement lasted for several minutes, but consciousness of the blow he’d suffered at the Custom House soon repossessed him. “M. Hiver,” he asked, almost shyly, “have you got photographs of the Mangin projector? Davidson had only sketches, but he told me that you might—”
“Oh, yes, come. I’ll show you.”
They both looked at Cynthia, who wanly smiled and said that they should go ahead. “I’ll browse here, like Mary’s lamb,” she said, gesturing at all the peculiar objects to be seen in the inner room. Hugh assumed she was too sad to look any more at the Mangin, and he only wished he could show the same resistance; as soon as he began examining the pictures with Hiver, he heard himself speak of the machi
ne as something that belonged to the past, a lover who had died making the crossing.
Cynthia listened to his voice as she focused her energies in the other room. Carefully recalling each procedure she had seen M. Hiver perform, she took a new piece of foil from the small pile of sheets on the table. She would have to get Hugh to speak forcefully. As soon as she had the foil in place, she smashed an empty glass beaker and sliced her finger with one of the shards. After one loud shout, she bit her lip, swallowed the pain and applied the second stylus to the cylinder she was already cranking.
“Darling! I’m here!” shouted Hugh. He had run into the room with M. Hiver, and before either one of them could see what she had done—her body still blocked their view of the machine—she lifted the stylus.
“I’m all right,” she said, apologizing for her clumsiness with a hapless, female glance at M. Hiver. “It’s the smallest scratch, and I’m very embarrassed. Please go back to the photographs and let me clean up the glass.”
“You’re certain?” asked Hugh.
“Quite.”
As soon as they were gone, she opened her Gladstone bag and laid the piece of tin foil, very carefully, between the sheets of Astor House stationery that she’d taken from their room. There it remained during the long trip back to Washington, during which Hugh, seeming to pass through several phases of disease all at once, rose into a febrile exaltation. The clock showed 11:45 P.M. when they arrived at the Baltimore & Potomac station. He was carried off the train by two porters, in a delirium, his teeth chattering so badly Cynthia feared he might swallow his madly merry tongue.
The bouquet on his desk measured twice the size of those still arriving for Butler, who had taken his seat the week before, despite the heavy guns of oratory that Conkling had fired to keep him off it. But the War God was about to win the only battle that counted.
“The clerk will call the roll,” ordered Vice President Wheeler.
Two Moons Page 25
