“So, you know that he’s sick. And you got that from your War God. Neither one of you can keep his mouth closed, it seems.”
Madam Costello pushed out her lower lip a fraction of an inch, adopting for the first time tonight the old, put-upon expression Cynthia had so often seen her deploy in the past. Surely, it seemed to be saying, you can’t be blaming me for the poor boy’s illness. “Yes,” the Irishwoman finally said. “I heard about it from the great man.” What she could have said, genuinely, in her own defense, she did not—namely, that she had never told Conkling, even when he threatened her, that Mrs. May had made up that Scorpio-Aries prohibition. And she would not embarrass the girl, even now, to let her know she had such knowledge.
Cynthia recalled the way that Hugh and Mary had joked and laughed and generally gotten on like a house on fire; and she remembered how shut out she’d felt. She wondered now whether Hugh—if he knew the whole farcical truth and could see the two women on this chilly corner waiting for a streetcar that showed no signs of coming—would be laughing. There was no doubt, she had to admit, that he would yield to the planet reader’s entreaties. But how could she, whose nature had never been forgiving, excuse this calamity-causing woman yet again? Mary Costello had twice betrayed her to Roscoe Conkling: first, by telling him her address and the ordinary details of her life; then by telling him about Hugh. And yet, logic told Cynthia: if Mary had not presented her to the War God like a bit of game stocked for a weekend shoot, then the Mangin projector, however delayed, would not soon be sitting a mile or so away at the Baltimore & Potomac station.
She took Mrs. Allison’s letter from her reticule and handed it, without comment, to Madam Costello. The astrologer walked it a few feet to the curb and read it by a lantern hanging from the side of a waiting private carriage. “I can barely find the boy in it” was all she said when she returned with the sheets of paper.
Cynthia shrugged and put the letter back in her bag. After a long pause, she said: “It’s his birthday, you know.”
“Of course I know,” replied Mary Costello. “Do you think planet readers forget such facts? You’ve got to forgive me, Cynthie! You got to be me friend again.” She squeezed the younger woman’s forearm.
“I have no friends,” Cynthia replied, without any affectation. It was the simple truth.
“All the more reason to let me be one,” said the astrologer. “I can redeem meself. I don’t know how just yet, but I’ll find a way. I’ll make it me New Year’s resolution.”
“Another year!” cried Cynthia, bursting into tears as the streetcar came into view. Were another twelve months more than she could bear, or more than she should hope for?
“Let me feed you supper,” said Mary, as they boarded the conveyance. “Charles is bringin’ around something special tonight, a bit on the late side, just before he goes home to his family.”
Before she could think it through, or again tote up the woman’s treacheries, Cynthia let herself give in. She was soon eating two lamb chops off the clean portable plates that Charles set on the dirty table, and she let herself drink a quarter bottle of sherry while Madam Costello did justice to the rest, all the while telling stories of the famine and Chicago and Iris Cummings. The hours went by and Cynthia’s own tongue loosened, but never to the point where she was in danger of telling Mary what had happened last week between herself and Conkling. As midnight, and Christmas, approached, it remained the one essential thing the astrologer did not know about her.
“Don’t doze off, dearie. I want you to go to Mass with me.”
“No,” said Cynthia. “My head’s too woozy already. I can’t sit there amidst all your people’s smells and bells.”
Madam Costello took no offense—and Cynthia showed no real resistance. At ten minutes before twelve, the two women were at Fifteenth and H Streets, climbing the steps between Saint Matthew’s red sandstone columns. They took seats in a pew near the back, but to the dismay of Cynthia’s head and stomach, they were not allowed to keep the seats for very long. All the standing and kneeling and sitting down again seemed more complicated than the whirling movements at Marini’s. But the Papists’ Latin did, Cynthia had to admit, soothe her uncomprehending ears, and the olive-skinned children of the Catholic diplomats who filled the church were prettier than the native urchins one saw gamboling over the District. She looked at one girl for some resemblance to the eleven-year-old she’d been when she came to this city, and found none, though she did, among the congregants, discover approximations of both John May and her brother, Fred. All her life, it seemed, she had been seeking analogs of the dead or, more strangely, of herself, as if she were an afterimage instead of something real.
She would not, however, permit herself to look for any transposition of Hugh here in this church. When his face crossed her mind, she forced herself to imagine him for real, still alive, asleep, the blankets up to his chin in Charleston.
What was taking place up on the altar seemed no more a church service than the snowless ground outside had looked like the setting for Christmas. She pondered the host that Mary Costello, who could hardly be said to have fasted tonight, marched right up to receive. The idea of transubstantiation, that the bread could be the actual body of Christ, reincarnated after a fast flight through nineteen hundred years—and yet, to anyone’s plain taste and touch, still bread—seemed not so much a miracle or fraud as a riddle. As Mary came back from her quick trip to the altar and presumably heaven, her head most piously bowed, Cynthia could not help but think of the farmer and the fox and the chicken and the corn—and of the superintendent’s irritated letter, written just the other day, to a Mr. Sykes of Windsor Locks, Connecticut. Admiral Rodgers liked to respond personally to the simple scientific questions ordinary people often sent the Observatory; the task made him feel more akin to the astronomers under his authority. But Mr. Sykes’s inquiry, as to where light first appeared on Earth, had seemed unanswerable. Mr. Harrison, much amused, had shared with her a copy of the admiral’s reply: “You ask of a circle, where does it begin? In a true circle, it is all alike, with neither beginning nor end. When light first appeared, then someone saw it on the horizon first. At the same moment, some one had it at midday; and at the same moment someone had the Sun setting—who saw it first? Your question is one that admits no answer—so it seems to me; and I do not care to ask the Greenwich Observatory about it.”
She shared his lack of interest in conundrums. She didn’t want theology to be the final end of astronomy, the way the author of Celestial Scenery seemed to think it could be, revealing God to man as never before. She believed in God, but wished she could make herself stop doing so. She didn’t want yet another authority from whom she had to rent her life in the world. She didn’t want Him in the sky; she wanted the specks of heaven that she and Hugh had seen together, like D’Arrest’s comet, to belong to the two of them alone. The “experiment” that they would now never perform hadn’t, of course, been an experiment at all. It had been meant as an act of pure self-assertion; not so much an inquiry into the heavens as an insult to them.
She looked at the gaudy golden sunburst of the chalice, not yet replaced behind its little set of curtains, and prayed to God, as politely as she could manage, that He cease to exist.
A week later, on New Year’s Eve, Cynthia sat before the mirror at her vanity and brushed her hair, which she now judged to be fully one-quarter gray. She had been home from the Observatory since the middle of the afternoon, after a shortened workday during which Mr. Harrison and nearly everyone available stuffed portfolios with dozens of reports—recent and obsolete, exciting and arcane—for the perusal of the Senate committee soon to debate the removal legislation. The rush of self-advertisement had turned them into a sort of collective Simon Newcomb, and one or two of the astronomers had been heard to wonder whether the admiral might not be overdoing it.
She had agreed to see Mary Costello tomorrow for a cup of tea and a New Year’s trip to Center Market. No formal reconciliati
on had been achieved between them, but Cynthia’s loneliness had effected a truce. In fact, she could use the planet reader’s company tonight. She had come up here straight after dinner, avoiding the boarders who had declared their intention to stay awake in the parlor past midnight. Fanny was out with Dan Farricker, leaving behind a listless party presided over by Joan Park at the piano. Cynthia had even spirited a small plate of crackers from the kitchen, so that appetite wouldn’t force her, any more during 1877, back into the lodgers’ midst.
The day after tomorrow she would go to the station to see the projector, whose arrival had been delayed by holiday rail traffic until just yesterday. She would examine the machine carefully, and try to remember enough detail to prove its reality in the last-chance report she would make to Hugh.
Louis Manley and Harry O’Toole had been mildly drunk even before dinner concluded, and they’d come up and down the stairs two or three times already, singing to themselves in soft slurs. Cynthia thought she could hear the footsteps of one of them even now, and she began to bristle, until she realized that the singing voice in the hall belonged to neither Mr. Manley nor Harry:
While we seek mirth and beauty and music light and gay,
There are frail forms fainting at the door …
She gave a sharp cry and knocked over the plate of crackers. Racing to the threshold, she flung open the door and enfolded him in her arms. For a moment she would not even look into his flushed, ecstatic face; she merely held him as tight as she dared, and gathered him into the room.
He closed the door behind them and executed a deep bow. When he raised his head back up, too quickly, the blood drained from his face, leaving him wide-eyed and nearly translucent. He grabbed the bedpost so as not to fall over, and finally succeeded in his attempt to stand before her—in evening clothes and splendidly shined shoes.
“I snuck in as the cook was going out the back door. It’s a good thing your Mrs. O’Toole didn’t see me. She’d think Sherman was starving her countrymen even now.”
He raised his hand as sternly as he could, to halt her questions and tears.
“I’m all right, Cynthia. I’m not, of course, but I’m obviously up and around. The fevers aren’t so bad or so frequent as when I left here three weeks ago. I suppose the body has all it can do keeping my kidneys in torment; it can’t be bothered with my once-flaming brow.”
He walked over to her vanity, stepping on one of the crackers, and sat down.
“I’ve been trying to gain strength ever since I got your telegram. I got here yesterday—you might say I’m on the run—but I didn’t want to scare you. I waited until I could appear a bit more robust.” He began to laugh, but stopped himself, knowing jokes were sure to make her cry.
“It’s here,” she said. “It’s at the B&P station.”
He closed his eyes. “Great, great girl,” he whispered.
“My brother-in-law was finally able to manage things.” She looked at him as he sat sideways. He held the spools of the chairback as if he might otherwise fall off.
“You don’t have the strength for this,” she said.
“I have just enough. And I’ll have more in a week. I’m learning how to trick Mr. Bright’s little malady. We’ll keep me a secret for a week or so, in my rooms, and send a rosy telegram to my mother and father. Once we’ve done what we’re going to, I can collapse for a while. And then, old girl, I’m afraid you’ll have to send me home for good.”
A dozen objections and cautionary notes clamored in her mind, but she let none of them past her lips. What he now, and for the last time, required of life was a great burst of energy. She would help him kindle whatever he had left within himself.
“Why are you dressed like that?” For the moment it was all she could think to ask.
“It’s New Year’s Eve, darling, in case you haven’t noticed. Put on your green dress, the one you wore to Marini’s.” From the pocket of his tailcoat he withdrew a loosely knotted handkerchief, out of which he extracted a single, mostly unhurt white rose.
As if there wasn’t a moment to waste—knowing, in fact, that there never again would be—she went and got her coral comb in the vanity’s bottom drawer. In a handful of fast movements, she knotted her hair and fixed the flower to her sudden coiffure. “Where are we going?” she asked.
“An anniversary party,” he replied. “For an old Ohio couple.”
She laughed. He was joking about the Hayeses’ silver celebration taking place tonight at the White House. The subject of Miss Grundy’s most recent dispatches and much of Fanny Christian’s dinner conversation, it would be the grandest, least political, entertainment of the yearlong administration: only old friends from back home, and worthy Ohioans now living in the capital, had been sent invitations.
“Can you remember to call me Mr. Yarnall?” asked Hugh. “Or Mordecai, at more intimate moments?” From another pocket he pulled a stiff card with the presidential seal.
“The ancient star-cataloguer is a Buckeye, dear. Born in Urbana when dinosaurs roamed the earth. So he got an invitation, which he showed all around the dome one night, five or six weeks ago. Alas, he actually has to be in Ohio, for the holidays, so he can’t go. But he made a great casual show of leaving the card out on his desk. It’s been there since before Thanksgiving. I went in and retrieved it this morning.”
She gave him a pinched, fearful look.
“Darling,” he responded, “if we’re going to travel a billion miles every hour and a half, we’d better be able to perform a little local trespassing.” He stood up to undo the top button of the plain dress she had on. “There’s another reason for us to go, but you won’t know it until we get there. So, come. The green dress. Now.”
His step was surprisingly quick, if not quite steady, across the dozen blocks to the Executive Mansion. He chattered on about his father’s debts and mother’s snobberies, asked for news of the Observatory and details of how Cynthia’s brother-in-law had effected the Mangin projector’s release from New York. She told him not to trouble himself with that, and made him take her arm for most of the way, until they spotted, near a score of other carriages, the Hayeses’ new team of Virginia grayhorses, hitched up and ready for a midnight ride.
“Forgive me,” said Hugh. “I’m going to be indelicate.” He slipped behind the empty sentry box, a relic of Mr. Lincoln’s day and soon to be dismantled. It took Cynthia a moment to realize that he was relieving himself, his kidneys having been tormented by the nephritis beyond another moment’s endurance.
Mr. Loeffler, the German usher, let them into the main foyer and, once Hugh had flourished their invitation, announced them as Professor and Mrs. Yarnall.
There were flowers everywhere: smilax in the chandeliers; azalea on the tables and poinsettias against each mirror. Members of the President’s old regiment, the Twenty-third Ohio Volunteers, by far the loudest and largest cluster of guests, admired the only gift that had been allowed by the honored couple: a silver tray engraved with the log cabin at Gawley Bridge, West Virginia—Hayes’s headquarters for a long stretch of the war. Cynthia regarded the First Lady’s schoolmates, most of them turned out in black velvet, while lawyers from Lima and Xenia who’d once practiced with the President consulted their fist-filling gold watches to get an idea of how much time remained until the Chief Magistrate and his wife descended the staircase. The lawyers’ wives remarked upon whether the Ohioans living in Washington had acquired airs; their daughters ogled Webb Hayes, the President’s handsomest son, who acted as his secretary and, on occasion, his bodyguard.
The Marine Band mixed Civil War marches with tunes like “Grandfather’s Clock.” Hugh and Cynthia milled about, smiling at each other and their “fellow” Buckeyes, and avoiding Miss Grundy, otherwise known as Miss Austine Snead, lest the Star’s scribe—right over there, her white kid glove holding a small gold pencil—inquire too deeply into the history and current doings of Professor and Mrs. Mordecai Yarnall.
At 9:00, Dr. McCabe, the mi
nister who had married the First Couple a quarter century before, was seen to put himself nervously into position at the foot of the staircase. The guests hushed and backed away as the Marine Band struck up the “Wedding March.” The President and his wife, suddenly in view, began their descent. Mrs. Hayes, though decidedly plump, had elected to appear all in white, down to her slippers. A silver comb held her shiny black hair, and the President—a Grand Army button on his coat—squeezed her hand as it clutched his arm. They reached the bottom of the stairs just as the band finished its song; the crowd, unsure of what to do, broke into a great, spontaneous cheer.
As Dr. McCabe repeated the blessings he had urged the heavens to make so long ago upon the then-much-humbler couple, Hugh, standing with Cynthia at the back of the throng, reached into his pocket for a silver ring and placed it upon the third finger of her left hand.
“This is all I can manage for a ceremony,” he whispered into her ear. “I’m sorry we didn’t have more time together. But we’ll take a wedding trip that lasts forever. Twenty-five years from now, we’ll be beyond Aldebaran.”
Cynthia said nothing. Her struggle to maintain composure succeeded only thanks to the sound of trumpets, which summoned the guests from the brief ceremony into the East Room, where they would be received by the remarried bride and groom.
Moving down the line in a daze, Cynthia was just enough conscious of the moment to be glad that, without a bustle, she had no need to attempt a “Grecian bend.” When she came within earshot of the President, she could hear him talking to a banker from Toledo.
“In the language of the press,” said Hayes, “ ‘Senator Conkling has won a great victory over the Administration.’ But the end is not yet. I am right, and I shall win in the long run.”
The banker pumped the President’s arm encouragingly, and Mr. Loeffler once more announced, “Professor and Mrs. Mordecai Yarnall.”
Cynthia shook Lucy Hayes’s hand and looked into her intelligent face—it was no wonder even the War God spoke well of her—while on her left, she could hear the President talking to Hugh: “It will be good if we can find a way to move you fellows, after all the fine work you’ve accomplished.”
Two Moons Page 28
