“Yes, indeed, sir,” Hugh replied. “I’m looking forward to entirely new quarters.”
The state dining room was filled with French foods and ices and pastries, but no wine of any kind. Cynthia and Hugh drank hot cider and sat amongst a gaggle of regimental wives, who teased Mr. Yarnall about his evident braininess, while his tall (and surely older?) wife made attempts—no doubt a nightly occurrence at home—to get him to eat a bit more. The two of them did not get up to dance, a concession to Hugh’s frailty, though they told themselves it was to preserve the memory of their perfect moment on the floor of Marini’s studio.
Just before midnight the entire company of guests went out to the south lawn to hear a volley of guns welcoming in the New Year. The old Ohio Volunteers joked about the greater safety they now enjoyed in proximity to this familiar noise, while Hugh cocked his head between each flash and boom.
“Sound is dreadful slow,” he said, drawling a little and feeling pleased, as he held Cynthia’s hand. “We’ll travel much more quickly.” She nodded her head, so that he could feel it, against his shoulder.
The Marine Band, knowing the Hayeses’ preference for retiring early, struck up “Home, Sweet Home.”
“Guide us on, thou great Jehovah!”
The wet spots on the upholstery—thanks to the Capitol’s always leaky roof—had been discomfort enough to Cynthia. But now, while she continued to wait here in the ladies’ gallery, there was this singing to put up with. The suffragists, having rallied for days at Lincoln Hall, had begun crowing in a nearby reception room, hoping their collective voice would carry down to the Senate floor.
Cynthia had passed them a minute ago, as Mrs. Crocker finished an attack upon a faction of the delegates she charged with being free-love advocates. A group of peacemakers had then tried smoothing things over with a recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. At the present moment, across the way in the press gallery, Cynthia could see a beardless newspaperman picking up one of the just-installed telephones to see if it worked. The suffrage spectacle seemed wickedly trivial, but all its offshoots had the city momentarily enthralled. The wives of Admiral Dahlgren and General Sherman had just assured the Star that they had not, no matter what anyone said, gone onto the Senate floor the other day to urge votes against the female franchise.
A cessation of song brought Cynthia only new irritation: leaving the reception room and crowding into the gallery, the singers pressed her wet dress into her skin. Down below, Senator Sargent asked that a representative of the ladies be permitted to address the body, a proposal sure to be rejected by his colleagues but only after it had earned him admiring glances from the sex. Known supporters of the cause found their entrances greeted with approving murmurs, none more so than Roscoe Conkling. He scanned the gallery’s front row and made a gallant bow in its direction. Cynthia then saw him whisper to the page, and within a minute the boy arrived in the gallery to tell her the senator would be in his basement office twenty minutes from now.
She did not wish to watch his performance on the floor, so she made her way to the appointment well ahead of schedule and waited before the now-familiar cartoons. She avoided the horsehair sofa.
The War God swept in exactly on time. She sidestepped his embrace, and spoke the first words: “When did you get back?”
“Two days after the New Year,” he said. “To convene my Mexican committee.” He paused and glared. “As you surely know. I’ve sent three messages to your lodgings.”
“The parlor maid is careless about getting such things to us.”
“You’re a liar, Cynthia.”
“I’m preoccupied, Senator.”
“It’s well past time you called me Roscoe,” he said, too pleased by her appearance this afternoon to risk scolding her any further. He sat down on the edge of the desk, gesturing for her to take the chair behind it. Once she did, he asked: “And what is the preoccupation? Your plans for fame?”
She smiled, approximating what she supposed, even now, might be his idea of flirtatiousness.
“Your machine,” he inquired: “Is it safe? In good repair?”
He was looking, she could tell, for gratitude.
“It’s in excellent order, though still at the B&P.” One day last week, Hugh had had enough strength to go inspect it with her, but not enough to trundle it any closer to the Monument. She had begun doubting he would ever summon the energy required for what they still, through the pain-filled nights on High Street, referred to as the “experiment.”
Conkling pointed to a letter from the Treasury atop his blotter. “Read it,” he urged, as if offering a good occasion for laughter. “It announces the Secretary’s intention to put my Custom House men into uniforms. They’ll be more professional that way.” With great delight, he let Mr. Sherman’s words drip. “The only thing that matters, Cynthia, is Hayes’s not sending the nominations back up. He won’t do it even as a futile gesture. He’s scared to.” She remained quiet, wondering how she could get to her request and still flatter him into believing that she’d also come for his company.
“What refreshment may I get for you?” he asked, pointing to the decanters across the room, and leering a bit. They both knew, didn’t they, how she required something to loosen her natural inclinations?
“Soda water,” she said.
“I shall join you in that,” replied Conkling. “And you will join me on the sofa. Come,” he added, with a wave. While he poured the drinks, she sat down on the cushion closest the door.
“So what do you think of the women?” he asked. “Have you changed your mind about the suffrage?”
“No,” answered Cynthia. “And from what little I’ve seen of the Senate, I haven’t changed my mind about democracy, either.”
Conkling scowled, genuinely hurt. “I suppose you’d like some Venetian doge or Bavarian king being the patron of your astronomic arts.” He paused, then forced himself to resurrect his smile. “When are you going to explain this undertaking of yours?”
“Not until I’ve made a success of it.”
Conkling took a sip of the soda water before replying: “That’s one advantage you scientifics have over politicians. Our failures are forever documented”—he pointed to a pile of newspapers and the Congressional Record—“whereas only your triumphs need be.”
“Your setbacks are triumphs, too. In their way.” She indicated the cartoons on the wall. “There’s more flattery than scorn in most of those.”
“You wouldn’t think so if you were the one being drawn—and quartered.”
His look was so serious, so shamelessly in search of sympathy, that she had to resist laughing. Finally, she replied: “I should say I’m a very fit subject for caricature. There’s the long neck to start with—”
Before she could proceed with a self-loathing inventory, Conkling took hold of her neck, lightly, between his hands, and used an index finger to twirl the hair at its nape. “Your height is an aspect of beauty.”
“I need to be much taller,” she declared, removing his hands, gently, taking care not to provoke him. “As high as a hundred fifty-six feet.”
To her relief, he smiled. “Your experiment.”
“Yes,” she said. “Which leads me to ask a favor.” She took an extra breath. “There’s a guard, a federal watchman named John Shea, at the site of Washington’s Monument. Can you get him reassigned, away from there, during the week of the twenty-first? The nights midweek, especially.” The Observatory’s Meteorology Department had pronounced them “promising” when Cynthia made a casual-sounding inquiry about the month’s weather.
“Reassigned to another piece of government property?”
“Yes.”
Conkling seemed caught between a desire to show how he could play with such minions like candies in a dish, and an inability to figure out just what he might do with this one of them named Shea. He twisted his forelock, then suddenly brightened: “We’ll put him at Wormley’s. The twenty-first? You’re talking about the week of the S
panish minister’s great party—to celebrate the marriage of Alfonso whatever-his-numeral to a cousin.” He sniffed at the idea of such consanguinity, but soon resumed taking pleasure in his scheme. “There will be foreign eminences around the place all week, and I don’t mean just the usual wastrels of the diplomatic corps. Important visitors. Evarts’s department will jump at the chance to see them all better protected. And he won’t question the particulars of any request from Senator Conkling—not this month, believe me! So, that’s done. And at Wormley’s I can keep an eye on this Shea while you perform your scientific mischief at the Monument.”
Cynthia pointed to his desk. “Write it down. Put it on your list of things to do.”
The War God, like Dan Farricker teasing Fanny, said, “Not until you give me a kiss.”
She had been waiting for this moment, with but one poor card to play. “That’s not possible right now.” She rose from the sofa. “Do you recall how you needed to keep distance between us until your battle was won? Well, I need to keep away from you until I’ve accomplished what I’m trying to do.”
He stood up and fumed: “You haven’t been seeing the Irishwoman, have you? This sounds like her nonsense.”
“No,” said Cynthia, “it’s my own nonsense. I can concentrate on only one great object at a time.” She forced herself to stroke his whiskers. “Besides, I don’t require astrology. I can make real contact with the heavens.”
“Who’s now helping you?”
“No one you know. Almost no one at all. I’m doing the important things myself,” she said, and then thought to add, “now that Mr. Allison is no longer among us.”
“Is he dead?” asked Conkling, so visibly encouraged he had to catch himself. “Or do you mean he’s still so sick that he remains away?”
“I’m afraid he’ll never be back.”
Conkling took her in his arms, ignoring her prohibitions, though he permitted her to stand stiff and unresponsive in his embrace. “Cynthia, I don’t want you for mere sport on the sofa. I want you to stimulate me in every sort of way. In return, I shall make your life exciting. You shall see how the next year, and especially the one after it, eighteen hundred and eighty, will—”
“I am amazed that we made it to this year.” She withdrew, taking care to smile as she did, and to deny him his kiss as cheerfully as possible.
“By the time you’ve done your work,” he mused, trying for a gentle envoi, “the sign of Aquarius will be underway.”
“So you remember some of what our planet reader taught you.” She was already on her way through the door, waving as gaily as she could. “Remember Officer Shea, too.”
Her heart pounded as she strode the noisy basement corridor. She did not want to go out into the rain, and there was no point returning to the Observatory: by now they would have decided she was home sick for the day. But she could not face the real sickbed in Georgetown, either; not yet. So she walked the Capitol’s corridors and climbed its staircases for a time, pausing to look up at the painted ceiling beneath the dome, on which Washington, ascending more quickly than his Monument, was assumed into the heavens.
“Will you really be ready by the twenty-third?” she asked. When she’d left this morning, sweat had been running down his back; now he was cold to the touch. His feet, which she could never get him to keep stockinged, were blue-veined blocks of ice.
“I shall have to be,” he said, drawing the blanket tighter. “The only way to make this corpse of mine work will be to scare it. Let’s have everything ready, one chance only, and then I’ll know I have to do it. Do or die. Do and die.”
She no longer let such remarks upset her, but the sight of the chamber pot, pitifully full of dark-colored urine, made her cringe. She went to the fireplace and with the tongs extracted the bricks she had warming. She put them near his feet and managed to get a pair of socks on him; they both smiled during the effort. Standing up, she ran her hands through his hair, which was bristled up like John Brown’s. When the chills passed off, he would feel pleasant, perhaps even amorous, but soon after that he’d be burning up or doubled over with pains in his kidneys. She had ceased keeping precise charts of symptoms and medication. Neither one of them had time for the illness’s details; the only tabulations and diagrams in the room pertained to the Mangin and the Monument. The Gauss sketches remained on the wall, along with the pastel of her by Monsieur Trouvelot, though all the sheets had crinkled up like parchment during a year’s alternations of humidity and cold.
“Now what about Mr. Todd?” she asked, as she placed his feet onto the warm bricks.
“No,” said Hugh. “I remain opposed. He’ll stand on the Mall looking up for his planet, and within a week he’ll have reported the whole story to Mr. and Mrs. Newcomb.”
“We need someone,” she insisted, more gently than she would have if she weren’t feeling the thinness of his ankles.
“We don’t have many friends to choose from, do we?” he asked. “We should both have been more convivial all these years, darling.”
She said nothing, and at last he made his own suggestion. “Well, what about your friend the astrologer? She’s got a strong Hibernian back, I’d wager. She can help us wheel the machine, and then charm Officer Shea away from his post.”
“You realize she has a looser tongue than Mr. Todd,” said Cynthia.
“But we’re the only ones she knows to talk to at the Observatory. Think about it.”
She already had.
The train platform at the B&P station extended westward into the Mall. Cynthia stood near its end, looking toward the base of the Monument, unable to imagine herself at its top—even without the projector and a very sick lover. By Wednesday the 16th, Hugh was no more fit to proceed than he had been the week before, but she had decided she could no longer wait to get the Mangin out of the terminal’s freight room and ready for its task. Several minutes ago she had asked Mary Costello to sit in the waiting room under the station’s Gothic spires while she went to claim the machine. But so far she had just paced the concourse and the platform, doubting that she and the planet reader would succeed in their plan of getting the projector to a shed owned by a friend of Mary’s, a farrier near Fourteenth and B. There they were supposed to find, already delivered, two hundred feet of cable, purchased with the last of Hugh’s savings—“dipping into my burial money,” he’d told her.
“You a magician?” asked the freight clerk, once the crate had finally been torn away from this object whose name and purpose he could scarcely guess at.
Cynthia was already too busy inspecting the machine to answer. She flipped open the metal blind that hid a 40 cm. lamp, and felt the outlines of the aplanatic mirror that would make the beam twenty times more powerful than any a cylindrical one could produce. She tested the trunnions on which the projector was mounted, moving the lamp vertically and around, making sure the light could be shined in the only direction that counted—straight up. The field wagon that supported the apparatus carried, as well, a tiny boiler, which drove a small steam engine, which in turn powered the little Gramme dynamo-electric machine. It was a sort of Lilliputian factory; but out on the street, with one woman pushing, the other pulling, and a tarpaulin on top, the whole assemblage would resemble nothing so much as a lunch cart.
The journey she and Mary took—avoiding the holes in the intersections and the missing planks of the B Street sidewalk—was less than the three kilometers the light beam was guaranteed to travel upward. The astrologer, aware that being helpful here was crucial to her redemption, took care to ask as few questions as possible. But there was one she couldn’t refrain from posing.
“Once you take this out of the shed we’re going to—on the night in question, is what I mean—ain’t you worried about runnin’ into a uniform? Maybe even an Army feller? After all, dearie, once you step on to the Mall you’ll be on government property, and Lord knows, once you get to the needle itself—”
Cynthia said nothing. She kept pulling a trifle faste
r than Mary Costello pushed. “I suppose you could drug him!” said the planet reader, with a laugh. “Just like Catherine Bailey did with that poor old gent from the Soldiers’ Home. Knocked him out at the bar she keeps near Boundary. Took fifty dollars off him—can’t imagine how he had that much—and when he woke up and found that she had it, she claimed—”
“—that he’d given it to her to buy a wedding dress.” Cynthia read the Star’s crime columns, too, but ever since the War God had fired Mary from her political prognosticating, police items were the only thing the astrologer read, and repeated. “Your job,” said Cynthia, as firmly as Miss Wilton had ever spoken to the girls back in Laconia, “will be to tend the fire.” She tapped the boiler box beneath the tarp.
“I’m a quick study,” Madam Costello assured her.
At the farrier’s, Cynthia noticed the coiled cable—Hugh’s purchase—resting on some straw in the corner. The wire, fortunately, was thinner than she’d expected, and with Mary’s help she moved it to the single shelf on the bottom of the cart, then covered the whole conglomeration with a second tarpaulin: a glance above had revealed some damp rafters.
“We’re allowed to come in and out of here at any hour, am I right?” she asked, nervously. “And how much does he want for us to keep it here?”
“Relax, dearie. He wants nothin’ a’tall. He was me last beau.”
That afternoon, back at her desk, Cynthia noticed how the astronomers who’d been to a reception given by the Smithsonian’s Professor Baird talked with a new ease about their encounters with the Institution’s worthies. There was a sudden air of confidence about the Observatory: the bill for its removal had just been voted out of committee, and some of the men had jokingly begun to call the place “Reservation No. 4,” as did that portion of the legislation about selling the old site once a new one had been found. The bill now boldly called for an appropriation of three hundred thousand dollars, toward both land and construction, and no less sober a man than Professor Harkness was starting to imagine the rise of a modern wonder in the hills northwest of the city. “I mustn’t let my fancy work more quickly than the Congress,” he soon said, returning to the business of ordering special cameras for next summer’s eclipse.
Two Moons Page 29
