Two Moons

by Thomas Mallon

  “My racehorse,” he used to call her, both to compliment and mock her stringy vigor. Sometimes she was like a cat with the evening crazies, quick-pacing the parlor to no clear purpose. Vitality was shooting out of her now. She’d felt it starting to burn hours before; by six o’clock it had become the chief reason not to join Professor Harkness on his bachelor’s stroll home. She was in a mood to cover ground and count streets, to make a long tangential trek, twice the distance and with three times the turns her walk home required.

  After several minutes, she was rushing through Lafayette Square, ahead of the professor, for all she knew, and then angling up Vermont Avenue, clear to Fourteenth and M, where a circle of ground had been fenced off for an equestrian statue of General Thomas, “the Rock of Chickamauga.” The granite support was already in place, as yet without its horse and rider. The District’s new bronze forest of wartime commemorations generally repelled her, but something in Cynthia felt denied by this empty pedestal, so like the bulky first-floor piers of the 9.6-inch and Great Equatorial. She would like to see this general, no doubt wreathed in laurels for having so famously defended his army’s left flank—while John May got shot on the right one, to die on a litter during the retreat to Rossville that General Thomas had finally had to make in any case. “One must look at the numbers,” she could remember a friend of her father’s telling her after the battle. “Sixteen thousand Union losses; eighteen thousand Confederates, Mrs. May. A few more such victories and the Confederacy is done for.” He had meant to comfort her with this thought that Chickamauga had not been such a Union defeat as it looked—even if poor Sergeant May, by dying, had failed to contribute to the encouraging ratio.

  She started back down the other side of Vermont Avenue. For more than a dozen years she had been in retreat, pretending at first it was the orderly kind that John May’s company had made to Rossville. In fact, she had been routed. Half of John’s pension had gone to his mother, and she had borrowed so heavily against her own half, to support the three sick and unemployable souls she had left to her, that it was soon gone altogether. In the last months of her daughter’s life, when her father was already dead, Cynthia and her mother and Sally had been reduced to a single room. The little girl had coughed in one bed, while Mrs. Lawrence, palsied and delusive, shook in another and Cynthia slept on a pallet between them. In the space of six months, both beds became empty. The morning after Mrs. Lawrence’s funeral, perplexed and frightened by the quiet, Cynthia had walked to the washstand and stared at the old, gaunt woman she saw in John May’s shaving mirror. Lacking the courage to kill herself, she had instead smashed the glass against the basin. Two days later, blinking at the sun, she emerged from the room; four weeks of searching after that, she was at a desk, paginating government reports from the Indian territories.

  These last six years she had marched in a somnolent lockstep, pretending not to care if life drove her to the last ditch. Only recently, hardly daring to admit the change in direction, had she turned around and begun pushing back. Her first nights working with The Principles of Trigonometry had been a strictly numerical business, in which the real sum of every problem she solved was the extra dollar a day she hoped to gain by moving from Interior to the Observatory. But the astral purpose of all the numbers soon began to paint her imagination, turning it blue and silver like a night sky. The world acquired a new immensity, and made a thrilling suggestion that the stale, small circle in which she moved might feel huge and giddy if she thought of it as a speck flying through the void. Her mind soon began sliding upon the tangents she was only supposed to be measuring. Today she felt determined to get away from pictures of Venus in its endless frozen transit and find her way up from those ground-floor piers to the actual telescopes.

  On Pennsylvania Avenue, she stopped at a sidewalk photo vendor to look at the oval-framed miniatures of yesterday’s soldiers and today’s Great Men. She flipped through the pictures of blue-coated boys—leftover images, unnamed and unclaimed, taken by camp photographers. She was hoping, as always, to spot one of John May. The odds against this were nearly infinite, but the exercise had a soothing fidelity. She had no photograph or sketch of her dead husband, and she sometimes wondered if she might one day gasp in false recognition at a picture in the bins, one that matched not the John May who had gone to war, but the mutation of his face inside her head after four thousand nights of dreaming alone.

  She went through the last half-dozen soldiers in their stiff, proud mattes before moving on to the actors and statesmen, florid poses in floral frames, filling two trays of the seller’s bin. She laughed at all the bought-and-paid-for senators straining to look Roman, each jowl arranged for maximum nobility. To think there were people who collected these images, while the boys to their left had lacked anyone at home to send their likenesses—let alone, when the time came, their bodies.

  And, wouldn’t you know it, here was the funniest one of all. She looked through the thin glass at the long straight nose and pointed beard, under which there was no hint of a jowl. The muscled shoulders and well-developed chest brimmed up against the bottle-green waistcoat, certain to have been tinted the exact shade on the subject’s orders to the photographer. A single curl, a corkscrew like Hyperion’s, spiraled down a marble forehead toward two eyes whose pupils seemed determined to project light instead of absorb it. “The Hon. Roscoe Conkling, Utica, New York.”

  It had been a month and a half since his card arrived, along with a ticket to the Senate gallery. They were still in her purse. She had carried them around with continuing annoyance at that stupid Irishwoman, who was surely responsible for their arrival. “Madam Costello” had turned out to be a panderer, no better than the trull who’d taught her planet reading back in Chicago. It angered Cynthia every time she thought of it. The ridiculous incident had put a stop to her astrological readings before they’d begun. At the very least, she ought to go take back her Life of Franklin Pierce.

  And yet there was, she supposed, another side to the matter. It was not as if she hadn’t felt flattered by the great man’s absurd attention; those burning eyes of his needed spectacles. And it wasn’t as if, having fallen into a new rut, like transiting Venus, she had ceased to be interested in what the other planets’ movements might have to say about her future.

  She stuffed Conkling’s visage behind the less grandiose one of George McCrary, Secretary of War, and gave herself a choice: she could go home, or she could barge in on Madam Costello and set things to rights. If she did the latter, she would be too late for dinner at Mrs. O’Toole’s table. But did she not now make $1,150 per annum? Could she not sit down, three hours hence if she so pleased, to eat a chop at any restaurant in town?

  She reached back into the bin.

  “How much is Conkling?” she asked the vendor.

  “Twenty-five cents.”

  “I’ll take him.”

  “You don’t like cats,” said Madam Costello.

  “I do like cats,” said Cynthia, lifting Ra from her lap and planting him on the floor. “As a species they have their uses.” At Mrs. O’Toole’s they kept down the mice, creatures Cynthia detested not from female fright, but for their mingy pathos, the sort of neediness she was sure people attributed to her, even now, when she was struggling back to something like life.

  “It’s me you can’t abide, ain’t it?” asked Madam Costello, pushing forward her lower lip.

  Cynthia sighed. “No. But you must know I’m cross with you.”

  “How couldn’t I!” the astrologer moaned, knowing she was about to be forgiven. “Seven weeks since we made our arrangement, and you haven’t been back until today! I know I’ve done somethin’ wrong.”

  “You know exactly what you did wrong,” said Cynthia. She set Conkling’s tinted picture on the table between them.

  “What a lad!” cried Madam Costello, fingering the subject’s high forehead. “ ‘War God of the Norsemen,’ ” she said, reverently.

  “More like the Beau of the Post
Box,” said Cynthia. “Stop being coy, Madam Costello. You know it was you—”

  “Call me Mary.”

  “—who gave him Mrs. O’Toole’s address. So he could send me his ridiculous note.”

  “He has a lovely hand, don’t he?”

  Cynthia stared, daring the woman to stall her any longer.

  “Yes, dearie, I told him where you was at.” The astrologer played with the ribbons on her cuff as she searched for a suitable explanation. “I just thought, what with the both of you being creatures of the political life—you remember that book you brought round with you—well, I thought it only a sort of civic service to acquaint the two of you.”

  Cynthia laughed aloud, and after a few difficult seconds, Madam Costello couldn’t help joining in. “I’m sorry. But it’s the nature of me work. I reveal secrets. I don’t keep ’em. And besides, he’s safely back in Utica right now, with his wife.”

  “Poor Mrs. Sprague,” said Cynthia.

  “Oh, then you know about his lady friend?”

  “Every page and barmaid on Capitol Hill knows about the two of them. You can’t be much of a soothsayer if that’s your idea of a secret.”

  Madam Costello looked hurt, but decided to ignore the remark. “Come summertime Mrs. Sprague can return to the arms of her husband.”

  “A great pleasure for them both, I’m sure.” The two women again laughed together. They doubted whether Kate Chase Sprague, that fading belle who had dazzled the city fifteen years ago, would even bother quitting her late father’s Washington mansion to summer at her drunken husband’s Rhode Island estate.

  “In any case, what does your War God want with someone besides his wife and his mistress? With me. He must have some compulsive attraction to the withered.”

  “Don’t go underestimating yourself, Mrs. May. But if it’s any comfort, you’ve got nothin’ to worry about from him until June. Maybe even October, if those talkin’ in the Star are right.” Upon confirming Hayes’s Cabinet, including Evarts, over Conkling’s lofty abstention, Congress had decamped for home, and the President might well decide to wait a whole six months before calling it back into special session.

  “You’ve become quite the expert in public affairs, haven’t you, Mary?”

  The astrologer was too delighted by this first use of her Christian name to be bothered by the sarcasm, or by Cynthia’s reaching for the pile of newspaper cuttings at the far end of the table.

  “I have to keep current,” protested Mary Costello. “Now don’t be disrupting them. They all pertain—”

  “To the War God’s fortunes, I see,” said Cynthia, leafing through the stack. “Here’s one you should have circled in red wax: ‘The commission soon to be appointed by the Secretary of the Treasury to inquire into alleged irregularities in the New York Custom House, and the alleged perpetration of frauds in the importation of goods …’ Alleged irregularities, indeed! The source of your War God’s war chest!”

  “I have to read the stars in light of current circumstance,” said Madam Costello, with as much grandeur and plausibility as she could summon.

  “You mean you tell him what he wants to hear,” said Cynthia, as she replaced the clippings on the table.

  “The stars don’t just illuminate the invisible,” said Madam Costello. “They also make plainer what we can already see. And let me ask you, Mrs. May: if you harbor so many doubts, why have you come back? Surely not just to scold me.”

  “A good question,” said Cynthia. She stood up and walked over to the parlor’s small fireplace, fingering some china ornaments on its mantel and carefully choosing her words. “Because I half believe you,” she said, not taking her eyes from the object in hand. Once trigonometry had brought her own attention to the stars, she had found herself tempted by astrology’s mathematics. They seemed to be a gaudy grease for the heavens’ machinery, something to set the spheres moving even faster. “The stars and the planets are too orderly to be without meaning. I doubt your Master Gabriel actually knows how to read that meaning, and I’m certain no Presbyterian preacher has seen into it.” She paused to pick up another figurine. “But I want to see into it.”

  “It sounds as if you want me to be teachin’ you the trade,” said Madam Costello, who quickly corrected herself: “the art of reading the planets.”

  “Right now,” said Cynthia, “I want you to help me see the heavens through a telescope.” She walked briskly back to her chair and pulled it close to Mary Costello’s. “The first thing I want you to tell me are my prospects for getting off Venus.”

  Within a few seconds, she had dispelled the astrologer’s perplexity, explaining to her the past month and a half with Professor Harkness. She described the comings and goings of the Observatory men, the sights and sounds beyond the walls and above the ceilings. She needed to know the likelihood—and best methods—of penetrating them. Madam Costello listened intently, not even rising when the colored man from the nearby hotel arrived with the dinner pail she ordered three or four nights a week.

  “Set it down in back, Charlie. Would you be wantin’ to join me, Mrs. May?”

  “No,” said Cynthia. “And I shouldn’t keep—”

  “I can warm it later on the stove. Right now I want you to answer me somethin’. What happened to the young feller who figured into things the last time we spoke? The one whose coloring you was so keen on.”

  Pleased by the astrologer’s memory, Cynthia had no hesitation responding: “I’m still not sure what he does. He doesn’t advertise himself like Professor Newcomb.”

  The older woman got up and went over to a bureau near the front of the room. From a middle drawer she extracted a large sheet of paper, which she set down between herself and Cynthia.

  “What is this?” the younger woman asked.

  “The beginnings of your star chart,” said Madam Costello, who pointed to a small annotation at the paper’s bottom right corner. MRS. MAY, APRIL 10, 1842. “I’m an honest woman,” she explained. “You gave me your book in exchange for my readings, and so I set to work, before you disappeared.”

  “Tell me my chances of transiting away from Venus.”

  Madam Costello sighed. “Well, there’s all sorts of figurin’ to be done. First, we need to know where the moon was when you came forth from your mammy.” She took The Gospel of the Stars from the top of the bureau and opened it to the chart of constants on page 59. “ ‘Divide the year of birth by 19, multiply the remainder by 11 and divide the result by 30,’ ” she read, trying to conceal the anxiety that this part of her job always provoked. “ ‘To this remainder add the day of month and the constant according to the above table and divide the result by 30. The remainder will be the moon’s age. To find her longitude’ ”—she pronounced the word with a hard “g”—“ ‘on any date, multiply her age by 12, which will give the number of degrees that are to be added to the Sun’s longitude at noon.’ ”

  She reached behind her for some paper and a pencil, wincing as her corset pinched.

  “Three hundred and forty-eight degrees,” said Cynthia.

  “Sweet Jaysus! How did you do that?”

  “I applied the constant and did the arithmetic.” Impatient with the older woman’s marveling, she asked, “Now what do I do with the number? The 348.”

  “You add it to January 21st, when the Sun enters Aquarius. That’ll give you the moon’s position when you were born.”

  “Three hundred and forty-eight days after January 21st is January 4th.”

  Madam Costello crossed herself to ward off whatever spirit was serving up these instant calculations, and also because the moon in Capricorn was a celestial phenomenon she wished on no one. Stirring with awe and suspicion, she asked Cynthia: “You really done these numbers in your head? And you’re really an Aries?”

  Cynthia nodded.

  “Most Aries have a wound on the head or a birthmark on the foot.”

  Cynthia invited her to come around to the back of her chair. She lifted the strands of
hair that had fallen from her upsweep, and a tiny scar, a white half-moon at the base of her skull, became visible. “A falling icicle from the top of a pine tree. I was six.”

  Mary Costello looked down at the slim neck and shoulders until a motherly affection for this peculiar overage girl washed out all other conflicting feelings. She patted Cynthia’s cheek and went back to her own seat. “You wouldn’t know the feller’s birthday, would you?”

  “Christmas Eve, 1849.” Before Madam Costello could attribute this knowledge to further infernal gifts, Cynthia added: “The day I started work I saw Mr. Harrison, the clerk, flip past it in his file, when he was inserting my own card.”

  “This young man needs you,” said Madam Costello, suddenly.

  Cynthia gave her a hard look, doubting the older woman could know such a thing without doing her own laborious mathematics.

  “But you’ll be needing him,” said Madam Costello, whose eyes were closed and who seemed to be operating on instinct.

  “How can that be?” asked Cynthia, disappointed. As a prediction, this mutual need sounded rather vague.

  But Madam Costello was quite definite in her elaboration. “I mean you’ll be needing him,” she said, pointing to Roscoe Conkling’s glass-covered picture. “October 30th, 1829. The moon still in Aquarius.”

  Three pillows on the bed—giant puffed worlds of purple, red, and saffron—supported Hugh Allison’s head and feet. The great lampshades and ottomans among which he slept, like a sultan with no seraglio, came as a slight shock whenever he arrived home from the smooth brick and tubing of the dome. The pieces his mother had sent were so comically heavy that his bedroom looked ready to sink through the floor below—a dangerous prospect quite opposite from that imparted by the japonaiserie Mrs. Allison had shipped to Harvard Yard in 1867. That assemblage of items had been so light he sometimes thought his plastered room would detach itself from Grays Hall and float away. There his furnishings became the source of some teasing more witty than Simon Newcomb’s, but his Southernness had hardly set him apart. Simple chronology united him with his classmates, and set all of them apart from the recent Union dead, whose profuse, still-new ghosts turned each lecture hall and dining room into a grim basilica. Born on Christmas Eve 1849, Hugh had joined a civilian regiment of younger brothers, all of them born too late to go. They felt themselves blessed, but derelict, too, as detached from any clear destiny as Mrs. Allison’s translucent Japanese birds.