Two Moons

by Thomas Mallon

  And so he had headed out to Trinity Episcopal at Third and C, where during the war, when it was a makeshift hospital and he a new congressman, he used to see the boys from his district bleeding through their bandages. In the years since, he had sometimes repaired there to think. But on Sunday night, a block before it, he had passed the planet reader’s signboard. He had always read, and always resisted, the astrologers’ notices in the Star. But this time he had gotten to Trinity only after he’d given in and called at the Irishwoman’s; he sat in the church to consider what she’d told him. He was moving out of Mars’ control toward that of Jupiter, which ruled a man in his years past fifty, bestowing on him more respect and less contention, increasing his “gravity” in a way the Irishwoman made seem literal and heavy. But, she had added, before he could cross over to the new planet’s dull protection, he must first, beginning this October, pass through his forty-ninth year, one of the grand climacterics for a man, full of snares to health and fortune.

  It had sounded more actuarial than astrological, but for all that, nearer the heavens than the false altitude of Capitol Hill, whose thick, overheated air he’d been choking on lately. If he were again to believe in himself, or even be himself, he required something new to believe in, a secret, even a ridiculous one. This winter he had experienced the first real illness of his life, a loss of vitality that had him, in January, collapsing in the Senate cloakroom after giving the two-day speech now preserved in these pamphlets on the desk. Almost an hour had passed before he roared back over the border of consciousness. He’d felt a doctor slapping alcohol onto his back and tried to throw him off. But the two senators who’d dragged him home from the chamber to his couch at the Arlington pushed him back down, and made him submit to their judgment that he was too sick to attend the evening session. Even so, the following morning he strode down the aisle, ten minutes late and sicker than anyone knew. Light-headed though he might have been, he instantly realized, from the hush accompanying his entrance, that he had carried the day—and saved the Republic as surely as the general had a dozen years before.

  The whole episode was a harbinger of the dread climacteric, and he had decided he would fight it off, grab it by the throat and squeeze it, as if it were Blaine (who came to him in dreams) or even death itself. He would live again by asserting his will, by once more vanquishing something. His great act of conciliation, of statesmanship, had yielded nothing but Evarts. From now on, he would seek only victories, shunning compromise like the slow, fatiguing poison it had proved itself. He required an enemy, and he required a woman, a new one, who would first bewitch him and then surrender.

  Still waiting for the errand boy, Conkling thought for the second time that day of Franklin Pierce. He would have nothing of him back in 1852. Still in his early twenties then, defending forgers one year, prosecuting slanderers the next, he’d gained his first political foothold with the Whigs, canvassing Utica against Pierce and for General Scott. Why should the Irishwoman have had that old campaign biography out? Did it signify, he wondered, her ability to reverse the disastrous course of his current planetary influence? Think of it, after all: what had proved better for him than Scott’s defeat and Pierce’s victory? With the Whigs past reviving, the time for the Republican party, the home of all his victories, had arrived. So who knew what disguise his current celestial blessings wore? Yes, the book was an encouraging token. Even if it wasn’t what he now most wanted from Madam Costello.

  “It’s about time!” he shouted down the stairs, at the first sound of the hotel’s dogsbody. “You’ll have a dime for this and nothing more.” He instructed the boy to carry an envelope with a gilt-edged note to the woman who did business at the southeast corner of Third and D. “Wait for a reply,” he said, somewhat more softly, realizing it was this lad who would be bringing him what the note politely demanded of Mary Costello: the name and address of the woman he’d passed coming through her door.

  “And then,” said Commodore Sands, caught between a laugh and a wheeze, aiming his diminished voice into Hugh Allison’s politely lowered ear, “he’s supposed to have tapped the hull and said, ‘The damned thing’s hollow!’ ” The retired officer, both palms pressing on the tip of his cane, rocked in his chair until his long white beard shook. “ ‘The damned thing’s hollow!’ ”

  Hugh laughed, too, even though the story of the new Navy Secretary’s amazement over what floated the vessels in his charge had been making the rounds for several days; and even though he knew the old commodore’s merriment would soon dissolve into quiet gloom over the service’s lost luster: Thompson, the landlubbing Hoosier who had gotten Navy as a political reward, had fewer than thirty hollow hulls to keep track of.

  “He can’t be worse than his predecessor, sir.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I said I doubt he’ll steal so much as Mr. Robeson did.”

  “Oh, yes, you’re right about that. You’re right about that, son.”

  Benjamin Sands patted Hugh Allison’s arm, the gesture demonstrating both kindliness and his desire to leave. Three years after his retirement, he still came out to the Observatory for an occasional look through the twenty-six-inch Great Equatorial, the glory acquistion of his tenure. Tonight, however, as so often, the mists swirling over Foggy Bottom had failed to clear. The dome would not be opened up.

  “Shall I take you home, sir?”

  “No, no, Mr. Allison. I’ve got one of my sons-in-law coming to fetch me. You go about your business. I’ll wait for him outside.”

  “Good night, sir.”

  “Good night, son. And mind you don’t fall asleep here.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Where have you got your rooms?”

  “Up in Georgetown, sir.”

  “A good mile away?”

  “At least.”

  “Good, good. You need respites from all this.” He twitched his nose and waggled his finger, and Hugh nodded his understanding; the old man was referring to the unhealthful air beyond the dome.

  The commodore began shuffling off. “Poor Davis, eh? Poor Davis.”

  His younger but now dead successor had shaken with chills through much of the winter. These past few weeks Davis’s son and interim replacement, now bustling into the dome, had shaken mostly with impatience, as he struggled to bring the Observatory’s affairs into some sort of order. “It was old Sands,” he now complained to Hugh, “who started letting you prima donnas streak around like your comets, doing whatever you please.”

  “You can hardly blame me,” Hugh replied with a laugh the lieutenant commander failed to appreciate. “I only got here last summer.”

  But Davis’s point was well taken. It was why the civilian astronomers had loved the old commodore; he’d understood that their enthusiasms and eurekas would not take flight if confined by navy discipline and limited to navy needs.

  Tonight Hugh was supposed to train the Great Equatorial on some double stars that Pulkowa Observatory near Saint Petersburg had asked the Americans to help investigate. An old friend of his up in Cambridge was working on the problem, too, and getting more or less nowhere, something the great Professor Newcomb took pleasure in teasing Hugh about. Any minute that would start again, since Newcomb was inside the dome, too, nipping at Davis’s heels, reminding the acting superintendent of another perquisite he had somehow neglected to bestow upon Simon Newcomb.

  He might be the handsomest among them, thought Hugh, but Newcomb’s lush brown hair, one wing of it combed out to look as if it were catching a breeze, was more appropriate to some painter working his will on the models in a Paris atelier. He was, in fact, a seducer—not of women, but of the legislators and club presidents and hostesses who then advanced Simon Newcomb’s reputation for both genius and a charming ability to inspire public understanding of the arcane work performed by himself and his less glamorous colleagues.

  “I’ll tell you something, Allison.” He had just clapped Hugh on the back. “A few years from now, you’ll be able
to pick up a telephone and ask your Harvard mate exactly what the weather is doing up at his end. And then, on nights when it’s fine down here, and he tells you it’s fine up there as well, you can let him look for your double stars, and I can have another night under the eyepiece here! What do you say?”

  Hugh just smiled. He was supposed to be grateful for the teasing, grateful the man had noticed him; but if he answered Newcomb’s question, he’d soon be required to blush with pleasure over the imitation of his Southern accent—affectionate, of course!—that was sure to ensue. And if he chose to tease the man back, to say that the use of “mate” betrayed Newcomb’s origins (Canadian) just as surely as Hugh Allison’s soft vowels did his, the response would be a stiff little smile, a signal that Mr. Allison, just six years out of Harvard College, was decidedly out of line.

  So he said nothing, and walked back to the little table with the paperwork he’d brought to occupy him while waiting on the weather. That reference to the “telephone”: it was exactly like Newcomb to have on his lips the very thing whose “possibilities” all the clubwomen and lecture-going clerks in town, armed with two inches’ worth of knowledge from the Star, were buzzing about these days. They spoke, for all of ten seconds, about the latest “miracle” God had wrought, before turning to the more pressing subject of the patent wars breaking out over the instrument, and who finally stood to make the most money from it. When the Observatory was rigged with a telephone, it would surely be Newcomb’s doing, and as he talked into it—to the program chairman inviting him to speak, or the Leslie’s Illustrated editor asking him for a scientific pronouncement on the modern world aborning—he would never realize how the telephone’s wires only stitched him more tightly to the earth and its noise. When Simon Newcomb spoke to audiences about the “outer planets,” they widened their eyes at the vasty phrase, unaware that the eminent man’s specialty made him, to Hugh Allison’s way of thinking, no more than a cosmic housecat, afraid to quit the solar system’s verandah for the true open spaces of the universe.

  Hugh would have preferred anyone else’s company in the dome tonight, even that of dour Asaph Hall, so serious and secretive in his pursuits, a man who had struggled through life while Newcomb swanned. More self-taught than schooled, Hall had had to interrupt his early career for stints at carpentry and computation, all the while encouraged by his religious, grudge-collecting wife, who still governed him as the tides did the moon. Alas, only Newcomb stood here now, Davis having scurried off to deal, even at this late hour, with one more unpaid bill and leaky pipe.

  Would the new permanent superintendent, whoever he turned out to be, keep giving them the latitude the commodore had established as the norm? Bless the old man. Hugh could picture him last year, just after his own arrival, standing in line to greet Dom Pedro, the visiting emperor so hungry for American wonders. Benjamin Sands, who fifty years before had sailed along the Brazilian coast in the Vandalia, ended up being too shy to impart this reminiscence, since it would have meant interrupting Newcomb, who was reassuring Dom Pedro and his empress, at considerable length, that from now on he would make certain they received, back in São Paulo, each and every monograph he produced.

  The paperwork before Hugh was perilously dull. If he wasn’t careful, he really would fall asleep here. He ought to start back for his rooms, but the thought of lying there alone, amidst all the Moorish furniture his mother had imported at Charleston and then sent north, made him linger in the dome, taking the one-in-a-hundred chance the skies would clear and Newcomb would give the signal to open up.

  He looked over at the Great Equatorial, its mouth closed, its long gullet denied the spoon-feeding of light they’d meant to bring it tonight. For all its hugeness, and all the clock-driven power that kept it moving with the objects of its attention, the telescope was oddly unassertive, a receptor, never sending forth any light of its own. Between his index finger and thumb, Hugh took one of the gold buttons on his vest and twisted it, until the metal disk caught a flare of gaslight; then he wiggled it, so that the reflection played, like a djinn eager for escape, against the highest metal in the dome. Newcomb, sensing something above him, but not quite sure where or what it was, looked quizzically at Hugh, who let go of the button and looked down at an item of work he had promised Davis to have done before morning.

  If you put the three examinations side by side, there was no comparison. Poor Mr. Gilworth had taken himself out of the running, and the younger of the ladies, for all the prettiness of her hand, was clearly too slow at her calculations. So that was that. He took a sheet of stationery from the table’s little drawer: “Mr. Harrison,” he wrote. “Please send a note to this Cynthia May—whatever her last name is—and have her report on Monday morning.”

  “Mrs. May, you ought to be getting home now. It’s nearly six.”

  “I could go a bit further with this one, Professor Harkness.” She pointed to the photographic plate, made in Tasmania on December 8, 1874. “It’s one of yours.”

  “Ah, yes,” said William Harkness, the trace of a Scottish infancy in his voice. He regarded his three-year-old labors. “Not a very good plate, either. None of them is.” He sounded apologetic, as if the bad weather that had greeted the Transit of Venus teams that day in ’74 remained his fault, and the whole expedition had been a spendthrift act.

  “Not at all,” said Cynthia. “The image here is quite clear, almost sharp.” She pointed to a small dot of planet crossing the Sun. “And the numbers are coming fine.”

  The numbers were, in fact, not so fine. The trigonometric reductions that would yield Earth’s distance from the Sun—once the speed of Venus’s transit across the star was factored in—were, in truth, still hopelessly incomplete. Not from any flaw in Cynthia May’s mathematics—Professor Harkness had more than once marveled at her exactitude and speed—but by a cluster of coefficients beyond his control. Congressional appropriations for the work had proved as unreliable as the Pacific skies three Decembers ago. Cynthia was the only computer now assigned to the 237 pictures the astronomers had managed to shoot, and there was no telling how soon they would have to shift her to something else. Realizing that this transit would not be the lustrous career-enhancer it had once appeared, Simon Newcomb, formerly much involved, had stepped discreetly out of Venus’s shadow and back into the moonlight of his prior research, where he would stay until some other part of the sky disclosed an opportunity for his shooting star. Quiet Professor Harkness had been left holding the bag.

  “May I walk you eastward?” he asked. “I’m about ready to leave myself.”

  He lived in Lafayette Square, and if she looked at the case objectively, the way Fanny Christian would, she’d be rushing to put away her papers and slide rule in order to join him. William Harkness, a bachelor turning forty, impressed her as solid and solicitous, but he wore the dullness men put on once they’d become disappointed with themselves. This ought to be a fascinating creature, thought Cynthia: what other navy man or scientific here could claim earlier careers as a newspaper reporter and army surgeon? But now, stranded on Venus, his beard going gray, Professor Harkness was a curiously routine specimen, a gentleman preoccupied by numbers, no different from the men she’d grown used to at Interior.

  “Professor, I’m going to stay and finish two more calculations. Not the whole plate, I promise.”

  “Very well, Mrs. May. We all appreciate your zeal. But do make sure not to stay past six-thirty.”

  If it were up to her, she’d stay past nine, by which hour she’d have a chance to spot Hugh Allison, arriving for his night’s labors. In the seven weeks she’d been here, she had seen him only twice, when some daytime errand had him calling on Mr. Harrison or the Observatory’s librarian. Even then she’d merely spied him through the window of this little room they’d put her in, just beyond the one in which they kept the ships’ chronometers, hundreds of them, here for adjustment and repair, ticking madly, practically begging to get up and walk, as in some fairy tale. Spending six d
ays a week in here, she scarcely saw the other computers or the astronomers, let alone the 9.6-inch refractor and the Great Equatorial, whose nightly grindings didn’t commence until she was asleep at Mrs. O’Toole’s. “And where does Mr. Allison focus his attention?” she’d once asked Professor Harkness. “I don’t know that he does focus” was the only response.

  Even so, she would not lose her new optimism, her belief that this job might lead not only to more money but to some imaginative perspective from which she could regard herself as the denizen of some faraway star instead of the overheated little District of Columbia. Venus, alas, was failing to prove such an alternative home, not with Professor Harkness as its sober governor and her own attentions limited to the planet’s movements on one day three years ago. Still, each evening when it came time to put away her ruler and turn down the lamp, she felt a certain pride in the accuracy of her work. She never had more than a dozen eraser shavings to sweep from her desk before walking out to the Observatory’s lobby.

  There, right now, beside the pier of the 9.6-inch, whose tube and lenses were concealed on the third floor under the dome, she ran into Mr. Harrison, who was putting on a pair of gloves.

  “How fancy we are,” she said, fingering the writer’s bump on her own bare middle finger as she watched the clerk struggle into the tight gray kid. “What might be the occasion for these?”

  “I’m going to meet our future,” he grunted, not looking up from his efforts.

  How cryptic we are, too, she thought, waving good night and stepping off into Foggy Bottom’s already thickening air. The stink hit her as forcefully as ever. The only remedy was to keep moving, exactly what the stagnant pond on E Street as well as the Potomac itself—more a lake than a river by the time it reached this basin—refused to do. As her long legs scissored east at a great clip, she again congratulated herself on not wearing any face enamel, which would only be soaking in the moisture and smells and making her carry them home. Fanny Christian was all excited about some new powders she kept on her vanity table, insisting they might soon replace paint completely, but her evangelism had little chance of converting Cynthia, who had never applied a drop of the old stuff, not even during the first year of the war, when she’d been trying to catch John May’s eye.