Two Moons

by Thomas Mallon

  Conkling broke off a petal from one of the flowers and tore it with his fingers. He thought of the ladies who’d brought these blossoms yesterday, along with their twelve thousand signatures in search of a sixteenth amendment. Almost all senators had delivered the suffragists’ petitions, more out of gallantry than conviction, but he had been rewarded with this great spray for the seriousness with which he’d ordered the scrolls be received by the Committee on Privileges and Elections. Did their twelve thousand signatures, he now wondered, exceed the number of letters the machine had churned out against the Custom House nominations?

  They had been here in executive session for five hours, since 3:00 this afternoon, and under the rules of such a meeting there was no one in any of the balconies to look at him: no barely suppressed hisses and swoons, no encouraging notes from Kate, no serene looks of approbation from Mrs. Bruce. There was also, by custom, a rhetoric so freewheeling that he had been reminded all day of his first term in the House, back in ’59 at this very time of year, when he’d had to save the implacable Thad Stevens from a physical beating by six traitors coming across the aisle.

  “Mr. Bayard!”

  “Aye,” said the Delaware Democrat, emphatically. Two hours ago, as the sky above the dome turned from deep red to black, Bayard had stood and recited long passages from the fifth Jay Commission report, trying to regale his colleagues into outrage over the New York machine’s code names and tricks and strong-armings. “They have turned a fortress of protection into a den of thieves!” Conkling had listened, as he did now, playing with a newly struck sample silver dollar from the mint in Philadelphia, a jesting gift from Senator Jones of Nevada, who knew that the War God’s only alliance with the Administration involved opposition to silver coinage.

  “Mr. Blaine!”

  “Nay.”

  Now what was his game? wondered Conkling, as he sent a barely perceptible nod of appreciation toward his enemy from Maine, who probably thought a defeat for Hayes would remove the President from the field in 1880, setting up a direct contest between Blaine’s own forces and those of the General.

  Along with the silver dollar, Conkling had an opal stone from Galt’s jewelry store in his right pocket. The Irishwoman had made him carry it, just as she had advised him to release the Commerce Committee’s report on the thirtieth and postpone this vote on the nominations until today, the twelfth. Discord and harmony, sorrow and joy: they all had their particular angles and solar rays, it seemed. Thirty and 120 (12, a division by 10, would do just as well) stood as beneficent numbers, and must be chosen to propitiate the heavens. Striking on a date that corresponded to the more malignant rays would be overdoing things, she’d assured him.

  “Mr. Conkling!”

  “Nay.” Spoken as calmly as he could utter the word, just this side of boredom. There was no need for overdoing the theatrics now, not after pulling out every stop in the debate. It was time to let the alphabet continue its march toward Roscoe Conkling’s victory.

  When this triumph was had, he could concentrate on his next prize. The Irishwoman’s recent intelligence in this regard should turn out to be at least as useful as her political portents. He had had to wring the information from her, threatening Mary Costello with everything from building-code violations to the District insane asylum before she admitted that Mrs. May “plumb adored” that idiot girl-boy. Even so, this astrologer was too much trouble, her trade too embarrassing. He didn’t care what he derived from it: when these two campaigns were over, he would at last wean himself from her voodoo.

  “Mr. Edmunds!”

  “No!”

  Conkling smiled. His Vermont colleague, at his direction, had mocked rumors that the War God would lift his opposition to the nominations if Evarts would resign. “I don’t see Mr. Conkling playing checkers with this administration—no matter who’s sitting on the squares.”

  Yesterday, in the cloakroom, he had been all gentle persuasion, working the divided Democrats with as soft a touch as George William Curtis himself might have applied, while Senator Matthews, Hayes’s loyal fellow Buckeye, moved two steps behind him, hopelessly trying to shore up the other side.

  “Mr. Kernan!”

  “Aye!”

  You couldn’t blame old Fanny K., who by now had lost count of the defeats inflicted on his party by the machine back home.

  As the tally lengthened, Conkling felt a moment’s nostalgia for Kate. This could have been one of their victories, something to share; but she had gotten wind of his other campaign, and was for the moment too angry even to see him, let alone join in the crowing about to break loose.

  He thought of that French apparatus, whatever it was, sitting in the bonded warehouse. A week from now, after Mrs. May had been good, kept her part of the bargain and forsworn the rebel pup, he would have Chet Arthur—a famous man now, thanks to all this—sign the item through personally. Surely she would get a charge out of that.

  “Mr. Matthews!”

  “Aye!” The President, Matthews had argued all afternoon, had a right to his own choices in matters of appointment. But what the President didn’t have were the votes, and by the end of the roll, the nominations had been defeated 35–21, exactly the totals Conkling had predicted that morning. He had triumphed for the party, triumphed for the Union, and when the clerk announced the totals, the cheers and groans and cries of “Shame!” were louder than anything the galleries, had they been occupied, could have produced.

  He raised his hand—he was calm even now—seeking recognition from Wheeler.

  “Mr. Conkling.”

  He rose to his feet. His colleagues fell silent.

  “ ‘The heavens themselves,’ ” he began, making his fellow bardolators search their brains for the source of his trope, “ ‘the planets, and this center / Observe degree, priority, and place. / Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, / Office, and custom, in all line of order.’ ”

  He aimed the words at Wheeler himself, and ignored the roars of appreciation over their general aptness and the way he had hit “custom” with particular force. Plucking the tallest flower from the suffragists’ bouquet, he strode out of the chamber, alone, and down the bronze staircase to the office where he would have a telegraph boy dispatch the news to Chet Arthur. In the near darkness of his descent, he had to feel his way along the frescoes, his right hand brushing first an eagle, then a Cupid, then a serpent.

  A half hour later, as a case of champagne popped in the Custom House, Admiral Rodgers opened a single bottle of Möet & Chandon and poured out the tiniest portions, like a rum tot, to the large group he had assembled in the Observatory’s library. Asaph Hall might not be present—he was home helping Angeline through one of her headaches, which newfound recognition had not permanently banished—but the company included Professors Eastman; old Yarnall and young Mr. Todd; Mr. Paul and Mr. Harrison; and the man and woman of the hour, Professor Harkness and Mrs. May.

  “May this success,” declared Rodgers, his glass held high, “prefigure others. I toast all of you who participated in the far-flung operations of the Transit of Venus back in 1874, and all who in the years since have brought the project to this point. We offer our special thanks, for their long labor, to Professor Harkness and our own sublunary Venus, Mrs. May.”

  “Hear! Hear!” the scientifics cried.

  “Thank you,” said Cynthia, who then nodded her apologies and left the library, as they’d all expected she would.

  Mr. Harrison quietly followed and asked, as she put on her hat, if there wasn’t something he could do to help.

  “I’m fine, Mr. Harrison, I assure you.”

  “I daresay he’s home by now,” said the clerk. “Sleeping peacefully and gaining strength.” After two nights in the Navy hospital, Hugh had been informed that he was suffering from nephritis. Captain Piggonan and Lieutenant Sturdy had this morning put him on the train to Charleston.

  “Yes,” said Cynthia. “I’m sure he’s quite comfortable.” She pictured him amidst w
hatever ridiculous furnishings the mother had now filled the house with; she wondered if he recognized anything on the walls, whether he was lucid enough to realize his circumstances or convinced he was somehow once again fourteen.

  “It was probably high time for him to leave us,” said Mr. Harrison, searching, not very successfully, for the right words. “This nephritis, he probably had it for months. The symptoms are so similar to malaria’s.”

  “Yes,” said Cynthia, quoting the naval physician, “ ‘an allergic response to infection elsewhere in the body.’ The one eventually caused the other.”

  “Prolonged bedrest,” said Mr. Harrison. “That’s the best medicine. The kind one can only get at home.”

  Yes, thought Cynthia, until his kidneys fail entirely.

  “You gave him the very best care,” said Mr. Harrison. “You couldn’t have known it was anything other than it appeared. You were probably filling him up with water when you should have been denying it to him.” He realized, hopelessly, that he was making things worse.

  “I prefer the other name for nephritis,” declared Cynthia. “Bright’s disease.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Harrison, trying a smile. “Makes it sound more like a blessing than an affliction.”

  “Yes. As if the patient were sick with light. Drunk on it.”

  “Are you sure,” he asked, “that I can’t escort you home?”

  “I’m sure,” she said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  She walked past the Monument and toward the lights of Capitol Hill, down which news of the War God’s triumph was already flowing. She carried with her two oranges that Hugh had left behind at the Observatory. She would eat them, alone, in her room.

  “Add some Pratt’s, Harry.”

  Mrs. O’Toole gestured toward the kitchen, where her son would find a bottle of astral oil for the lamp that was running low. Four days before the solstice, a spirit of holiday profligacy—and the desire to display it—had taken hold of the landlady. The boarders nodded appreciatively. An hour after supper, Cynthia was still among them, reading the paper. She usually purchased her own copy from a newsboy two corners down, but he had been out of the Star as she arrived home, and it was considered bad manners to take the parlor copy up to one’s room.

  There was another reason she had so far declined going upstairs: a series of messengered letters, in creamy hotel envelopes, which had been coming from Wormley’s, one each day since last Wednesday, and which the housemaid who received them in the afternoons had had the kindness to slide under Cynthia’s own door rather than leave on the hall table with the always-much-picked-over post. Each of the War God’s triumphant cries and pleadings to be sensible now lay, in small shreds, at the bottom of a wastebasket by her vanity.

  Instead of facing another, she preferred to sit here yet awhile in the parlor, watching the ever-more-respectable Dan Farricker read Baldwin’s monthly (perhaps even the poetry they set amidst the shirt-collar advertisements) and listening to the ever-more-sensible Fanny scold him with a new sort of proprietorship. If the announcement of an engagement had been made, Cynthia had missed it, but the way Fanny was complaining of Dan’s trip to John Chamberlain’s gambling house seemed to foreshadow a housewife with her eye on domestic economies.

  Joan Park, who lately made much mention of her plans to work at the Children’s Hospital on Christmas Day, now asked Cynthia if she had come to the paper’s item about the new commissioner for the District almshouse. Sure that Miss Park’s interest in the subject had less to do with concern for the poor than a fear—identical to Cynthia’s—of ending her days in that very institution, she was about to reply that no, she hadn’t, when Louis Manley, licking a postage stamp, observed that “Charity begins at home.” He was sending five dollars to a sister back in Ohio.

  “Make sure it sticks,” said Cynthia, sufficiently disgusted by the sight of his tongue to retreat to her room, under whose door she found, sure enough, a letter, though not one from Roscoe Conkling. It had been postmarked four days ago in Charleston. The housemaid must have remembered that boy from South Carolina who’d come around a couple of times and decided, if this was from him, that it deserved the sort of privacy she’d given those envelopes from Wormley’s.

  But the letter was not from Hugh. It was from his mother, whose swirls of aquamarine ink informed Cynthia May that her Washington address had been found

  amidst the hospital papers in the pocket of my son’s greatcoat, the one I bought for him here in Charleston two, or perhaps three, winters ago. I am assuming that you are one of his assistants, and am writing to let you know that since his arrival yesterday evening he has been resting well and, by my own observation, rapidly improving. He fluctuates with fever but is already getting the very best medicine from our physician, Dr. Berry, who succeeded in keeping my family supplied with potions during even the darkest days of the blockade; we were, I assure you, very glad to pay whatever the dangerous traffic might bear back then—and would have been, even if Mr. Allison, my husband, had not realized some unexpected gains during that dreadful period.

  My son is now asleep in a room at the back of the house’s third story, just behind a stretch of porch that has, I’m afraid, never been right since the great hurricane that preceded the war. (The storm also tore one of our box chimneys, since replaced, clean away from the house.) I am sitting in a Louis Quinze chair just two feet from the bed (same period) in which he now lies. As I’ve watched him, I have been knitting a ball of yarn that rests in a sweetgrass basket made by my downstairs colored girl, whose mother worked in the Petigru family, to which, as my son has no doubt told you, I am connected by my great-uncle.

  If tomorrow is fine, we intend taking Hugh to the beach on Sullivan’s Island. It was from there, near Fort Moultrie, that he watched the firing upon Fort Sumter when he was eleven years old. I remember seeing him, once fire was returned, count upon his fingers the interval of seconds between the cannon’s flash and the roar of its sound. (He had always done this during a storm, after the lightning and before the thunder.) I’m sure his memory of the event is vivid enough to be with him even now. Perhaps an hour ago I heard him mutter something about “the battery,” surely in a dream of that wonderful spectacle. The apparent rapidity of his mind, as he sleeps, convinces me of his waxing vitality. I have, as well, heard him say the words “cargo” and “shipment,” and can only assume them to be portions of thoughts—escaping the arms of Morpheus!—about the shipping office on East Bay Street, where he repairs at this time of year to see his favorite Campbell cousin …

  Cynthia could feel Hugh’s consciousness, like one of the Observatory’s telescopes in a fog, trying to poke through this mad letter. She could imagine the rolling eyes and laughter with which he would have greeted any glimpse of the screed unfurling beside that yarn basket. In its unstoppable egotism, the letter resembled the automatic writing of a medium, and for an idle second or two Cynthia wondered whether Mary Costello—should real astronomers ever put planet readers out of business—might switch over to that other black art and ruin a new set of lives by misdirecting their ethereal mail.

  She stared at the envelope. She could not go to South Carolina. She had no money and, worse, no standing. If Hugh was as fevered as he appeared still to be—that “rapidly improving” was an empty piece of sociability—there would be no one to let her past the front door. She could not even write to Charleston: he now had less privacy than she did here at Mrs. O’Toole’s. How could she put anything real, be it sentiment or news, onto a sheet that might be read aloud to him by that mother?

  Still and all, his mind remained flickeringly alive. She knew what “cargo” still sailed upon his dreamy view—and she knew she had to bring that cargo here. To what practical purpose, she did not know. But he had never had a purpose for the Mangin projector that could remotely be called practical, and if getting him cryptic word of its arrival were to give him hope—assuming he ever regained sufficient lucidity to understand the news—then it wo
uld be worth it. She had to effect the machine’s release and its shipment to Washington.

  Five minutes ago, she had read an advertisement in the Star: “Wanted—By a Gentleman, two unfurnished rooms, communicating, on second floor, with or without Board, for a lady, where seclusion can be assured.” One saw notices like that in the paper every day. The city was full of rooms stuffed with such ladies, who ate terrapin during the congressional session and dry toast once it was over. She would be luckier than they, as she would have to do what was required of her only a single time—if, that is, Roscoe Conkling would still accept her aging favors. She had abandoned the idea of submitting to him once Hugh went into the hospital, but now her determination flared back to what it had been two weeks ago, when she lay awake in the Astor House.

  For days after the nomination fight, the papers had remained full of the War God’s victory dancing: the champagne he had let himself drink at a dinner with Jay Gould; the duel he’d nearly fought with a Georgia senator who dared, during this period of triumph, to murmur disagreement over a parliamentary point. Lord Roscoe was at the opposite of his overdue climacteric; he was like some voracious rubber plant ready to reach out and strangle anything that crossed his path in the Senate chamber or at Wormley’s. Her own ravishing, she decided, would happen so fast and completely as to escape her own notice.

  She looked at the mingy sprig of holly attached to her window by Mrs. O’Toole, and a sudden anxiety overtook her. With Christmas eight days away, was the great man even still available? What if, after working herself back up toward surrender, she discovered that he’d just decamped for the chilly hearth in Utica?

  She went quickly downstairs to scan the paper. “I’m looking for a bargain in gloves,” she told the immediately curious boarders. Her eyes raced down the political columns for some assurance that Conkling remained in Washington. Yes, there it was, notice of a meeting, tomorrow morning, by his committee inquiring into the Mexican raids against Texas.