She put the Star back down on the table. “Have you found something you can afford?” asked Mrs. O’Toole.
“I’ll have to afford it,” said Cynthia, heading back upstairs toward her night’s sleep.
She had never liked dreams—they made the mind a fun house, setting all the world’s diameters loose from their circles, scattering them like tangents. Had she been aware of her own dreamlessness tonight, she would have been grateful. As it was, she didn’t awaken until a half hour past her usual time, and even then she stayed in bed, with her eyes open, telling herself what she absolutely must do today. Looking through the sprig of holly and the windowpane, she regarded the Sun, whose light even forty years ago the author of Celestial Scenery had guessed to travel at 192,000 miles per second. Two decades before meeting Hugh Allison and Mr. Michelson, she had underlined the sentence that came just after the numerical estimate: “It follows that, if the sun was annihilated, we should see him for eight minutes afterward …”
She contined to lie beneath the counterpane, watching the Sun and wondering if somehow, so far from here, the planet Mercury had just gone dark; and then Venus; and soon, any minute, unaware it was about to be scuppered, Earth. She lay still, one eye on the Sun and the other on her clock, until eight minutes had passed, at which time she sighed and got up to dress.
The vendor was dozing when she asked for a bag of lemon drops. Along the Capitol’s main corridor, both representatives and spectators had become thin on the ground. Tomorrow, the man told her once he’d awakened and apologized, he would close his stand until after the New Year. Cynthia noticed a similar lack of business for the photograph seller. Even the War God’s picture went begging in the face of reduced holiday traffic. She looked at the forelock and wondered whether, since his recent triumph, Mary Costello had begun displaying this image of Conkling even more prominently in her parlor.
Admitted by one of the passes that had arrived inside each envelope from Wormley’s, Cynthia took a seat in the ladies’ gallery, only a minute or two ahead of Conkling himself, who strode past Captain Bassett, the doorkeeper, to take his seat on the floor. Senators with desks in the neighborhood of the War God’s dared not light their cigars so close to his presence. The visual result, as seen from the galleries above, was a kind of smoke ring that swirled at a safe distance from Conkling’s own clear, central atmosphere. So well known were his aversions that even nearby colleagues who chewed their tobacco made sure to expectorate a bit more carefully into the pink china spittoons by their desks.
She watched Gordon, the Georgia Democrat whose new enmity really stemmed from Conkling’s attempt to impose a radical revenue collector on his territory. He glared at his foe from across the aisle. Conkling did not return the look, but Cynthia noticed old Hannibal Hamlin, Lincoln’s Vice President, keeping an eye on both men; less than a week had passed since he and Senator Thurman had had to separate the potential duelists.
Conkling did not look up at her, but she knew he was aware of her presence. There was no possibility he had failed to receive her note by now—and sure enough, a page boy was soon kneeling beside her to whisper: “Mrs. May?”
He escorted her from the gallery to the basement floor beneath the chamber. A dull roar of running drains came from the baths on the House side and, even with its custom depleted, the restaurant’s tabletops made a considerable noise beneath plates of oysters and tumblers of whiskey. The boy nodded greetings to a Capitol policeman and led her past a row of gas lamps to the small office Conkling maintained down here.
“He says he’ll be with you as soon as he can, ma’am. Will you be all right here alone?”
“Yes,” she said, perplexing the little fellow with her nervous laughter. “Much safer than I’ll be otherwise.”
As soon as he had closed the door and left, she busied herself with surveying the cartoons framed on the wall; even the ones from Nast paid tribute to Conkling’s slim waist and broad shoulders. Then she went over to the letters on his desk. Up from the blotter came an exuberant rush of words from Chester Arthur in New York. “I appreciate how great the strain must have been upon you and hope you will now be able to get a little rest. For myself, personally, I thank you cordially for your vindication of my official character. We hope to see you here soon and to hear the details of the battle.”
The Collector’s gratitude lay beside a whole stack of letters from the Custom House. She supposed the pile of congratulations contained even the precious signature of Mr. Joseph Selden, which, if she accomplished what she was here to do, might yet appear on the Mangin projector’s certificate of admission through the Port of New York.
She sat quietly on a horsehair sofa for the better part of an hour, her eyes closed, until, without any knock, the door opened, allowing in a gust of soap-scented air. The realization that Conkling had just emerged from a bath and changed his clothes repelled her more than filth would have.
“I’ve lately achieved one reconciliation,” he declared. “Are you going to make it two, Mrs. May?” He extended both his hands toward her, smiling as gently as he could manage.
“Who was the first?” she asked, keeping her own hands in her lap. “Senator Gordon?”
“No,” Conkling said, laughing as he sat down in a chair across from the sofa. “He still cowers every night at Willard’s wondering if my aide will come by with a set of pistols. I was speaking of Blaine, actually. I still don’t know what his game is, but I’ve thanked him for assisting in our victory. The other day I offered him the chairmanship of this Mexican committee—he was, after all, the one who first raised the alarm about those raids.” He didn’t tell her how disgusted he’d been when the newspapers’ praise of Blaine’s Fourth of July oration reached him in Paris. “But he’s had to go out to Hot Springs for whatever’s ailing him. That leaves me with the committee and a late start upon the holidays.”
“What a shame,” said Cynthia. “You could have gone to Utica already, perhaps via New York, in time to spend an evening with the Hayeses.”
Conkling roared his delight. “And all the other Union Leaguers, licking their wounds at their big reformist dinner. By the way,” he added, in a more subdued voice, while examining his fresh pink fingernails, “I hear that Roosevelt is dying.”
“You’d like that, I suppose,” said Cynthia. “It would mean you’d won a fight to the death.”
“No,” said Conkling, looking hurt that she should think such a thing. “I prefer a gentle submission.” He paused and tried to read her expression. “I’ve missed you these last tumultuous weeks. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, you know.”
“It does,” said Cynthia. “When do you return to Utica?”
“Only when nothing is here to detain me.”
“You mean the committee.”
“No, my dear Cynthia. I mean you.”
“Well, I should hate to keep you … embargoed.”
He risked a quiet laugh. “Surely you’ve forgiven me by now. What happened in New York was only my way of keeping you tethered until the fight had reached its successful conclusion. My lovely reward, to be opened when the stars finally allowed.”
“Such a lovely package. As shopworn as the jewels in the District Commissioner’s pawnshop.”
“You mustn’t say such things.”
“I’ll say whatever I like!” Her shout surprised them both, but when she saw that her anger only further provoked his excitement, she retreated toward playfulness. “You’re being rude, Senator. Offer me whiskey.”
“I keep that for my colleagues,” Conkling explained, his eyes traveling to the tray of decanters.
“Yes,” said Cynthia. “Those unabstemious men, so much weaker than yourself.”
He poured her a glass and sat down beside her on the couch. “Let us be friends again,” he said, softly. “Just the two of us. No more Irishwoman in between, trafficking in our secrets.”
“And no more Mr. Allison,” said Cynthia.
“He’s gone, too. Yes.”
“You made it your business to find that out.”
“Of course,” said Conkling, without apology. He had inquired of the admiral himself.
“Mr. Allison may be gone,” said Cynthia, “but I still want his machine.”
“You do?” asked Conkling, much surprised.
“Yes,” she replied. “For my own small glory. I know well enough what he wanted to do with it. I think I can do it on my own.”
Conkling stroked her hand. “My femme savante.” He rose from the sofa and went to his desk, extracting from its top drawer the same document Mr. Selden had consigned to his lower one eleven days ago in New York. “Come here and see,” he instructed. She joined him behind the blotter while he dipped his pen into a bottle of violet ink and wrote across the top of the paper: “Let this through. R. C.”
“Shall I have to claim it in New York myself?” asked Cynthia, knowing she would never have an advantage equal to the one she held right now.
“Where would you like it shipped?”
“Have them send it to the B&P station, to be held for as long as need be.”
Cheerful and aroused, the War God asked if there were any further demands she had to make.
“I shall no doubt make some more when I’m ready to use the projector.” Her feeling of success shrank to disappointment as soon as she spoke this small piece of bravado. Even if the machine’s release from New York acted as a miracle potion and revived Hugh, the odds against his ever being well enough to use it seemed higher than even she could count.
Conkling took her in his arms. His eyes flared as he looked into hers. She dared not avert her own gaze.
“It is I who gild the dome,” he said. “I who print the money and raise up the buildings, all from here. It is I who rein in the wayward men I’ve put on their little thrones.” He kissed her neck.
“Your world moves too slowly for me,” she declared, closing her eyes as she submitted to his touch. “And it disappears too fast.”
“Riddles,” he said, breathing hard and undoing the small bow at her collar. “How fast does your world move, Cynthia?”
“At one hundred and eighty-five thousand miles per second.”
Flushed with ardor at the idea of her brain moving through territory where his could not follow, he ordered her: “Square the number.”
Fewer than ten seconds passed before she said, “Thirty-four billion, two hundred and twenty-five million. Miles per second.”
He flung her down on the couch, then removed his waistcoat and shirt, revealing his well-tended torso. In the dim light of the basement office, for all the fire in his eyes he looked to Cynthia like the painting of a lion, without a drop of sweat on him. She remembered Hugh, so different in the same sort of light, all damp and gleaming. At this moment, however, her mind filled up not with longing for him, or with fear of the War God, but a strange certainty of her own temporary power in the world, the force of her unlikely gravity this year upon these two moons who had revolved around Cynthia May as surely as Asaph Hall’s discoveries made their race around Mars.
She undid her own hair. “I have one immediate demand.”
“Tell me,” said Conkling, hoarsely.
“Turn down the lamp,” she ordered.
As he rose to comply, she thought of Hugh’s words to her on the Mary Washington last July, while they had sailed down the Potomac in the rainstorm. Under all those clouds the moment is lost. He had assured her that any action taking place without light to carry it through the heavens simply died with itself. It might as well never have happened.
“Yes,” she told Conkling, as he returned to the sofa. “I prefer being with you in the dark.”
“I imagine you got sick of that disk crossing the Sun,” said David Todd, referring to Venus.
“Yes,” said Cynthia. Mr. Todd was the only other soul around the Observatory at 5 P.M. on Christmas Eve. “But it will be exciting if you find your disk.” She knew that even tonight he hoped to see a trans-Neptunian planet streak across the nebula he’d begun concentrating on ten days ago.
“What are you working on now?” he asked, pointing to the still considerable piles of papers and photographic plates atop her desk.
“Just some last touches on the report,” said Cynthia. “A very quiet conclusion to this part of the project. Certainly nothing like watching the actual Transit three years ago, I’m sure—though I must say, it’s hard to imagine Professor Hall standing on a deck in Vladivostok with the Pacific crashing beyond him.”
Mr. Todd smiled and leafed through a fair copy of what would soon go to the Government Printing Office. When he spoke again, he was too shy to look up. “I miss him,” he said.
She couldn’t bring herself to answer.
“I miss his amusing ways,” said Mr. Todd. “The way he would josh me. The way he’d mimic the admiral, the way he’d mimic you.”
She stared at Mr. Todd, sick for a moment with apprehension, until he looked straight at her, smiling. “It was reverent mimicry in your case, Mrs. May. He’d say, ‘Be serious, Mr. Allison,’ as if he wanted, that minute, to hear you scolding him. He’d laugh for a few seconds and then he’d become serious, or at least attentive to whatever he and I were supposed to be doing. I always knew it was you he was imitating, because when he did it he sounded like us.”
Yankees, he meant.
“Are you not going home, Mr. Todd?” asked Cynthia.
“No,” said the young man. “I’ll be spending the holiday with the Newcombs.”
“Well, I wish you a very merry Christmas.”
“And I wish you the same, Mrs. May.” He bowed slightly and made steps to leave the room, pausing at the threshold only when he heard her say “David?” and then—the most her emotions would permit—“Thank you.”
Hard as it was to imagine Mr. Hall, another Yankee, on the eastern coast of Russia, Cynthia found it even more difficult to think of him making camp, seven months from now, near La Junta, Colorado, where he and Mrs. Hall would be, after a long trip on the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe, to observe the solar eclipse. Professor Harkness had taken over the preparations for the Observatory’s next spectacular—a meticulously planned road show, unlike last summer’s serendipitous-seeming lunar display. The admiral was hoping that Congress would grant his legislative wishes well before the observing parties set out, but either way, July 29, 1878, would find the Halls in Colorado, and Professor Harkness in Cheyenne along with Monsieur Trouvelot the illustrator and Mr. Alvan Clark, manufacturer of the Great Equatorial itself. Almost all the rest of the Observatory’s staff would be at various points west. Harkness’s desktop, which Cynthia was no shyer about inspecting than she had been Conkling’s, revealed that Mr. Todd—who might not yet even know it—would be with a group in Texas. Deals for discount railroad fares to transport the scientists and ship the instruments were already being negotiated.
The Mangin projector, to be shipped from New York the day after tomorrow, would arrive in Washington late Wednesday night. Upon learning this three days ago, Cynthia had sent a telegram to Charleston, one that she hoped Hugh would comprehend and Mrs. Allison would fail to. Since then, she had heard nothing from either one, and had begun to wish for even a second letter from the mother, which might contain a gold nugget of information that she could pan from the babbling stream of self-regard.
It was soon past six o’clock, late enough that she had to think about leaving the premises and facing Christmas Eve with whoever remained at Mrs. O’Toole’s. She bid Lieutenant Sturdy and Captain Piggonan good-bye and walked over the hardened mud toward Virginia Avenue. As she went, she looked up at the canvas telegraph ball lying unhoisted on the roof. She tried thinking about her first day here, but could not rid her mind of the War God’s sofa, his well-oiled endearments and machine-like thrusts. Closing her eyes against these mental images sometimes had a helpful effect, so she practiced the trick right now, all the way to the edge of the grounds.
The sound of a familiar voice
kept her from walking into the gatepost.
“I know you don’t want to be seein’ me, dearie, but please open your eyes. I can’t deny you’ve got every right to turn and walk the other way. But, for the love of Jaysus, it is Christmas. Say you’ll hear me out, for at least as long as it takes to walk to the streetcar.”
Cynthia said nothing, and quickened her pace. She was determined to get away from the woman, but as she went even faster she could hear Mary Costello puffing, and see her pressing a hand against the stitch in her side. When the planet reader finally fell behind, Cynthia did not stop for her, and took this as proof of her own disinclination to forgive the stupid woman; she would have done with her mischief forever. But when she arrived at the stop for the streetcar, which she’d had no intention of taking—hoping that a walk would get her home as late as possible—she stood still and waited, as if it had been her plan to ride it all along.
“I’ve had me comeuppance!” Madam Costello cried out half a block from the stop. From there on, until she arrived out of breath at Cynthia’s side, the volume and speed of her explanation never faltered. “He came and fired me the day after he won his vote. And he blamed me for spilling the beans about you and Mr. Hugh. Even though he forced me to! Said it caused all kinds of trouble I had no business making.”
Cynthia’s laughter stopped the astrologer’s pleading narrative.
“Dearie, I don’t know exactly what happened in New York. All’s I know is—”
“All you know! That’s your problem, Mary. You know everything, everyone’s secrets, and you pass them around as if they’re your own!”
“I can’t stop meself.” She was sniffling now. “I shouldn’t have told him about Mr. Hugh, but I shouldn’t have told you about the great man’s climacteric, neither. I was just trying to give the spheres a nudge, thinkin’ that if I did, then maybe everyone would get what he wanted.” She wiped her nose and subsided a while, before asking, “How is the boy? Any better?”
Two Moons Page 27
