Two Moons

by Thomas Mallon

  “Papa.” A soft voice, the only female one he loved hearing in this house, followed an even softer knock.

  “Come in, my darling.”

  His daughter, Bessie, whose full beauty had arrived with her twentieth birthday, stood before him.

  “Pale blue is most assuredly your color, my dear.” He gently took her hand. “One of your colors.”

  Bessie looked at the carpet; her father’s ability to assess the female form was too well known—here in this house, especially—for her to encourage its display.

  “You were muttering,” she said.

  “Ah,” apologized Conkling. “The newspaper.” It had long been his unconscious habit to read the most agitating stories aloud, taking the parts of both villain and hero if the journal supplied sufficient dialogue.

  “Are you upset?” she asked.

  “No, my darling. And you mustn’t be either. This little spring shower over the Custom House will blow away. It’s mere foolishness.”

  “Oh, I hope we’ve not declared ourselves opposed to foolishness altogether!” She smiled at him. “I’ve had less than my share of it lately.”

  He looked at her, questioningly.

  “I should so like to have been in New York on Tuesday.”

  “I see,” said her father, letting go of her hand. “I’m sorry, Bessie. It would not have been a good idea.”

  “I do hear it was rather grand,” she persisted, determined to risk teasing him.

  “I didn’t pay the reports of it much attention.” The reports of how Hayes had been in New York; unveiled a statue in Central Park; dined with the Chamber of Commerce at Delmonico’s; stayed at the Fifth Avenue Hotel—arriving just two hours after Roscoe Conkling had checked out from his weekend stay. If the general were still in office, it would have been Conkling on the President’s right at Delmonico’s, a seat no doubt occupied the other night by Evarts.

  “They say the crush at Governor Morgan’s mansion was enormous,” said Bessie, trying to retract her father from whatever angry reverie he’d just entered. “The lines of police had trouble holding back the crowds on Fifth Avenue. Even a pair of Russian dukes put in an appearance.”

  Conkling sighed. “And you should love to have been there, darling?” He looked up at her with fondness, even a hint of apology.

  “Of course,” she declared, swatting his boldly patterned waistcoat.

  Instead of joining her in laughter, her father’s face darkened.

  “I suppose you should like to have been there with Walter.”

  “Papa, don’t.”

  Now that he had broached the subject of Walter Oakman—Bessie’s new suitor, whom Conkling thought not half good enough—the two of them knew the rest of this conversation was hopeless. The tide of Conkling’s rage was sweeping in. His wit and kindness would remain hidden, like beach glass, until it washed out.

  “It was better not to have been there, Bessie. Lines of police! To hold back a crowd turning out for one of nature’s born followers. I’ll tell you something about police lines, Bessie. You’re too young to remember.” He reached into the bottom left-hand drawer of his massive desk, extracting a stiff, yellowing paper dated January 1, 1863. “ ‘Head Quarters, Washington, D. C.,’ ” he read. “ ‘Guards will pass the Hon. Roscoe Conkling and Family within the lines of the Defences of Washington, By Command of Maj. Gen. Heintzelman.’ ” He paused for a moment. “You were just a little girl. Perhaps you do remember that last trip?”

  “I remember, Papa.”

  “And then we had to come back here for two long years.”

  “Thanks to Uncle Copperhead.”

  This remark did make the two of them laugh together, over the long-ago time when Bessie Conkling, who listened so closely to her father’s words, thought that was her Uncle Horatio’s real name.

  “Yes, Bessie,” her father said, once again grave. “Those were the greatest of days. And when you hear these stories about me and Mr. Arthur and the rest of my friends, remember what party we’ve given all our service to.”

  That his worst opponents were these days inside that same party was a point Bessie understood to be not worth making. In their desertion of the general, and their coinage of “Grantism” as a slur, her father’s enemies had deserted the party and thereby the country, and from the way he saw it, their very senses. She just nodded.

  “I do wish it had been possible for you to be in New York,” he said with as much gentleness as he could muster. “I can still see you floating past the flowers at Nellie Grant’s wedding, outshining every other bridesmaid.” Three years on, the East Room nuptials of the President’s daughter could still make Conkling vibrate with emotion.

  Fearing a detour into the maudlin, Bessie risked a piece of gossip. “Have you heard that Mr. Evarts is begging Mrs. Hayes to break her rule and at least serve spirits to the diplomats?”

  “I hope she stands her ground,” said Conkling, resisting the raillery she’d hoped for. Fired up by his own temperance and his hatred of Evarts, he added: “I suspect there’s a good deal more about her that I would admire. She’s an educated woman, and I’ve always found that …” He let his voice trail off. He knew his daughter would find it unseemly for him to name even what mental qualities he found attractive in a woman; it had been too painfully long since she’d heard him admire any quality manifested by her mother, whom she loved as much as she did him.

  “But I have no wish to know more of Mrs. Hayes,” Conkling briskly concluded. “Not if it means having to see more of her husband.”

  “Well, perhaps I shall develop a taste for drink. That way I won’t be disappointed to miss any more presidential occasions.” Bessie leaned down to kiss her father’s forehead, at a spot just to the right of his famous curl. “Will you be joining us for dinner tonight?”

  “Yes, I shall be here.”

  She smiled, and rustled out of the room.

  Her gaiety; her sly charm. He hated to see them squandered on Walter Oakman, or to be crushed by his own moods. But he was his moods, and it was her sort of spirit, that kind of cleverness, that he required. One could not, alas, fully receive it from a daughter, and these days he could not even snatch it from Kate, not since her return from Europe last fall, with the gloom settled permanently upon her. With her son at school in Germany, mementoes of her father were her only distraction. She must have auctioned off a thousand of his possessions in ’75, and still the Edgewood mansion was smothered under the old Chief Justice’s spirit and things.

  On those occasions when they still met, Conkling’s physical ardor could be greater than before. The early, thrilling sensation of plundering Sprague’s treasure had subsided, replaced by the excitement of complete command. If she had aged, he—despite the winter’s illness and self-doubt—could stoke himself into a vitality that burned more urgently than ever. But he needed a woman whose time was approaching, not passing away.

  This one who had refused his invitation to the gallery, just before the session ended. How he loved her for that! Whatever he’d surmised from that single exchange outside the planet reader’s rooms, he had been right. He always knew for sure, always made up his mind at the first flashing sight of them. “Your War God’s war chest!” It amused him even now to think of the remark, along with all the other information the Irish necromancer had passed on in her last two letters, since the woman had begun calling there again. By now he could even name her fellow lodgers, and he knew all about her wizardry with numbers. He would make her drink, make her rattle off tables and equations as she lay pinned, naked, under his arms. How much more exciting the struggles of a woman with a brain than the surrender of those doxies, their wills as soft as their too-ample bosoms, in the back rooms of Wormley’s and the Willard. No, if he were to walk into Mrs. O’Toole’s parlor tonight, it would be straight to Cynthia May that he’d make his beeline, shocking the pretty young bitch who worked in the hat shop.

  Not to be back until autumn! Could he lay such a long flirtatious s
iege in the months that intervened? He had put that to the planet reader in his last letter, and gotten her reply two days ago: “As the war god, Mars, you travel alone, without a moon. But if you become Jupiter, and hurl your thunderbolts to protect the state, she may yet be in your orbit.” It was nonsense, perhaps, but he needed it; he needed a great deal more, and soon, if he weren’t to swell up and die here in Utica.

  Perhaps it was Neptune, not Jupiter, that he should become, at least between now and the fall. The general had set sail yesterday on his trip around the world, a two-year trek that would lead him through the Pyramids and Peking and over every other point on the globe. By the end of it he would reach his real destination, home, where Americans would realize at last how much they missed him.

  Maybe he should do a brief version of the same, just as far as Paris and Piccadilly, and only long enough for Hayes’s crowd to realize—once the Indian wars turned out to be not quite over, and the dollar not so sound, and the South not so pliant as they’d hoped—how they needed Roscoe Conkling and all the troops he could still command.

  A sudden realization brought his fist down onto the desk. If he went abroad, he would have to ask Evarts for a passport and letters of introduction to anyone worth seeing. What could be more galling!

  And yet—looked at another way—what could be more delightful? Let Hayes and Co. wonder what he was up to, whose counsel he was keeping and supplying. It was a grand idea.

  He heard himself laughing—not, he hoped, loudly enough to bring Bessie back. He now had much to do in here. He had to write Evarts and then the steamship line, and before he wrote either, he had a longer, more delicious letter to write. He unstoppered a bottle of violet ink and let his pen suck up the stream of it that he would discharge to Mrs. Cynthia May at 203 F Street.

  “From the Greek, kometes,” said Hugh. “A ‘long-haired star.’ ”

  Cynthia had never worn stays, but she wished for them now, thinking they might disguise her trembling. “That’s a foolish name for something so beautiful,” she replied. “And aren’t comets always omens?” She was aware of his hands on her ankles, steadying her on the second step of the short wooden ladder leading to the telescope’s eyepiece.

  “It’s icy green,” she reported. “Just like my dress. And just like the aurora. Which I have actually seen.” Over supper in a tavern on Fifteenth Street, she had tried to inflame his interest with tales of meteor showers and other sky phenomena visible to a child of New Hampshire.

  “All right, Mrs. May. Come down now. There are no omens up there.”

  “I don’t want to come down,” she said. “I’m tired of numerical representations. I want to see the real thing.”

  “The eye’s image is itself just a representation.”

  “Oh, rubbish. This is real, and I don’t care about perihelions and the rest of it tonight.” Their task was to measure how far Comet No. 2 of 1877, discovered on April 6th by Dr. Winnecke of Bonn, had moved in the two days since Hugh Allison had last observed it through the 9.6-inch refractor. Several times during the past three weeks, he had gone to Cynthia’s desk in the morning to give her the times and coordinates he had noted the night before, so that she might help calculate the comet’s distance from the Sun. One or two more fixes of the already-fading object and their work together would be finished—unless Hugh was also assigned to track D’Arrest’s comet, whose return, after six and a half years, was expected any week. At supper, that prospect had given him and Cynthia the chance to speak of where they had been during the fall of 1870, the time of its last visit. Hugh Allison had been entering his last year at Harvard College, while Cynthia May was starting work at the Interior Department, six months after Sally’s death and one month after her mother’s, her once-mad grief having hardened into something cold, suddenly, like a gas changing straight into a solid.

  This afternoon he had proposed bringing her back to the dome to join him in the night’s observations. He’d said that getting her reductions on the spot would be a way for him to speed this dull project to completion; but they both knew the invitation had really resulted from her weeks of entreating to have a look at the body whose travels she was helping to map. So he had bought her supper, the two of them talking of their pasts until the sky became its blackest. Just before ten o’clock, he had sneaked her by Captain Piggonan and up to the telescope.

  He tickled her ankles. “Now.”

  “All right,” she said, laughing. “I’m coming down.” She leaned into the eyepiece for one last glimpse of Herr Winnecke’s comet (their calculations had indicated it would never be back) and to consider, for a second or two, that her own eye now pressed against the instrument through which Abraham Lincoln, a month after Gettysburg, had looked at the moon and Arcturus. It would be another opportunity for him to proclaim indifference to all matters political and historical. It would also feel like a betrayal of John May, whose last letters from Tennessee, with their mentions of Father Abraham, were the source of her own grudging fondness for Lincoln.

  He offered his hand, helping her down to the linoleum patterned like a carpet at the foot of the stepladder. The modern flooring was one of the few features Admiral Rodgers had found to approve of in his whirlwind first month, during which he had personally gone to New York to order equipment and periodicals; loudly complained to the Board of Health about the state of the streets beyond the Observatory’s front gates; and begun preparations for assembling the parties who would go west next year to witness the transit of Mercury and a full solar eclipse. Mr. Harrison complained to Cynthia that he had to ice his hand some nights, so relentless was the admiral’s appetite for correspondence and clerical reorganization of all kinds. Rodgers’s zeal for on-site improvements did not, however, lessen his already firm conviction that the whole institution should be torn down and rebuilt somewhere less occluded and disease-ridden.

  Cynthia took a seat at the little desk near the globe, while Hugh climbed back up to the refractor to find the comet for himself and call down its coordinates. Segmenting it through the filar micrometer’s wire, he turned it into one point of a plane triangle with Earth and the Sun, and then instructed Mrs. May to digitize it into one more piece of information about the known world.

  By the curved wall of the dome she worked the numbers. Looking at the swift movement of her writing hand, she thought of Charles Bogue, the murdered pencil seller whose killers, according to the Star, had just been convicted in court. Did his humble life mean more, or less, when contemplated against the heavenly immensity she had just seen? Was he not exalted, and leveled, to the same degree of mystery, wondrous and infinitesimal, as a Ulysses Grant? She was conscious of a new peacefulness within herself, a swelling of what she’d begun to feel with The Principles of Trigonometry. The Earth seemed nothing more than a streetcar doing a wide endless loop of the celestial city. John May, in his hasty grave in Tennessee, and Sally, inside her mean box in the Presbyterians’ cemetery, were actually sitting with her, fellow passengers, just across some narrow aisle separating life and death. They were all on the same wheeled mote, ineffably whirling with Herr Winnecke’s comet.

  “They’ll kill us if they find us,” said Hugh.

  She looked up in alarm. “You promised no one else would be here until eleven-thirty at least.”

  “I hope so,” said Hugh, drawing out the words in dire mockery, but not taking his eye from the telescope.

  She regarded the small of his back and his thighs. “There’s a piece of gossip I didn’t tell you over supper.”

  “And what’s that, Mrs. May?”

  “I heard Professor Harkness talking with Mr. Eastman. About Professor Newcomb. It seems he isn’t getting what he wants. He thought that Admiral Rodgers would instantly recognize how he ought to be running things here, and now he knows that he’s miscalculated.”

  “He should have gone to Harvard two years ago,” said Hugh. “When he had the chance. But no. ‘If Harvard needs my services, surely the government needs them m
ore.’ That’s actually what he said. Pompous ass.” Hugh shifted his head and looked at the comet with his other eye.

  “What a scandal that you should quarrel amongst yourselves,” she said. “How can you, with infinity in front of your faces like a balloon? I want another look.”

  He turned around but did not step off the ladder, just smiled down at Cynthia and began reciting, with theatrical self-amusement: “ ‘O, not in wrath but lovingly, / In beauty pure and high, / Bright shines the stranger visitant, / A glory in our sky.’ ”

  “What is that?”

  “Mrs. Hall’s verse about Donati’s comet. It hangs on one of the walls downstairs. The comet came through in fifty-eight, seven years after D’Arrest’s. And it’s said to have been much more spectacular. My father took me to see it through a telescope in Charleston when I was eight.”

  “ ‘Said to have been’?” Cynthia mocked. “Of course, Master Allison couldn’t be swept away by such ephemera, not even at eight years old.”

  “Not even at eight years old,” he said, still smiling.

  “You shouldn’t make sport of the Halls,” she scolded.

  “I don’t,” said Hugh. “I admire them far more than the Newcombs of the world. Glum old Asaph had to eke out his living doing more mathematical calculations than even you could stomach. But he kept at his work, with Angeline saying her fanatic’s prayers behind him, and the two of them climbed into the sky one humble rung at a time.” He stepped down the ladder and said, “Let me look at your numbers.”

  She knew he was leaving out the story of Mr. Hall’s years here during the war, when he shyly managed to do his astronomy after days spent helping the wounded on the battlefields outside the District. Did Mr. Allison think that was just another humble rung?