Two Moons

by Thomas Mallon

  “Irritatingly perfect,” he said, looking down her columns.

  She laughed and ran to the stepladder, determined to claim another look at the comet as her reward. But before she reached the second step, the two of them heard voices from the adjoining second-floor room. Hugh put a finger to his lips and pointed to the door near the steam pipe. “This instant,” he whispered, and in no more time than that the two of them were standing out on the roof with their backs against the walls of the dome, lest whoever entered it spy them through the door’s small panes of glass.

  Cynthia’s heart pounded. She wanted him to take her hand, but he was standing on the other side of the door, flush with its hinges, while she stood inches from the knob. If she looked sideways she could see his face, observe the calm smile that rested on it. With her naked eye she tried to find the comet in the sky, so that she might wish on it, implore its Maker not to let everything new in her life come crashing down—not like this, as if she were in some farce at the National. But she could not see the moving speck of light, so she stood still and looked at the treetops as voices came out the tiny open window.

  Admiral Rodgers was the louder of the two men speaking. “What’s all this?” he asked.

  “Mr. Allison’s notes, I believe” was the reply—from Asaph Hall, by the sound of him.

  “Allison. Is he solid?”

  “I shouldn’t know what to say,” responded the admiral’s companion.

  “He doesn’t much like whatever he’s given to do,” said Rodgers. “I suppose he wants a project of his own. But I haven’t heard him propose one.”

  “One’s heart must be in one’s work” was all Professor Hall would say.

  “And your heart,” said Rodgers. “Is it really in, or on, that white spot on Saturn? You’ve been measuring it through sixty rotations, they tell me.”

  Asaph Hall made no response.

  “Does that spot constitute your real ambitions, your dreams?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t say.”

  The admiral laughed. The two of them were very near the door now; Cynthia could hear Hall nervously spinning the globe.

  “I haven’t yet decided just how far to let you all roam,” said Rodgers. “On your own, that is.” There was a pause, during which Cynthia imagined him staring at the astronomer. “Are the most powerful dreams the silent ones, perhaps?” By now the admiral didn’t seem to expect an answer. Cynthia and Hugh heard him go on to declare: “I’d say the dome itself is in better shape than the roof. The timber out there is rotting.”

  The roof’s two inhabitants looked at each other, aware that the moment of maximum peril had arrived. But then, from inside, they heard a loud, resigned sigh, and footsteps beginning to move away from the door. “Well, Professor Hall,” said Rodgers. “Keep walking with me. I learn a bit more each time I pace the building with one of you. But don’t do all the chattering.”

  Cynthia, shaking badly, heard the two men exit the dome on the other side. The sound of Rodgers’s laughter preceded that of a closing door.

  “My heart won’t stop racing,” she said.

  “Come here,” Hugh offered, gently moving her to the widow’s walk. “There’s no need to whisper now.” They looked down into the rising mist at the three watchmen going about their meteorological measurements. Rodgers had lately gotten them deputized as District of Columbia policemen. Along with everything else, he was determined to halt nighttime vandalism on the Observatory’s grounds.

  “Where is it?” asked Cynthia.

  “Our comet?”

  “Yes.”

  “On the other side. But you couldn’t see it without the telescope.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “Sidereal origin,” Hugh explained, with no great interest. “A chunk of matter belched from one of the stars. At great speed, I’ll grant you that.” He waited a moment before turning to look directly into her eyes. “I, too, don’t want to ‘calculate’ everything, Mrs. May. I didn’t come here to do a catalogue like Professor Yarnall. Believe me, I have no wish to turn the heavens into Montgomery Ward.”

  “Why are you here?”

  He wasn’t going to answer. He had anticipated her question before finishing his own remark; he was already gesturing toward the door that would take them back inside the dome.

  She tried to keep him out on the roof, beside her, by pointing down to the dark grounds below. “It’s hard to believe that even now we’re moving back toward the Sun, rushing our face into its light.”

  His own face betrayed no reaction to this banality, still the most advanced astronomical small talk she could make.

  “Isn’t it strange, as well,” she added, “that this should be the last place in the city that the sunshine hits? The Capitol catches it first, and then I suppose the Church of the Ascension, and only then does it leak down to Foggy Bottom.”

  “Stop thinking of what comes to us,” he said, with unexpected sharpness. “Such as the Sun’s light. Such as the comet. Start thinking of the light that might come from us. At the same 185,200 miles per second. If Monsieur Foucault was right when he measured it in Paris.”

  He looked at her—pleased, she thought, to see her trying to attach this huge number to whatever cryptic possibility he was suggesting. His face, lit more from within than by the moon, or the bit of gaslight still shining out through the windowpanes, seemed flushed with kindness; engaged, at least for a moment, by her presence and gaze. But looking at him was like looking at the comet. For a second she could see the full, hale nucleus; then just the vague shimmer it threw off as it flew.

  A week later, on Friday, the 25th of May, Cynthia sat in the kitchen behind Madam Costello’s parlor. Between the two women sat a tureen of turkey soup brought over by Charlie from the hotel. It was barely past six, still light out, as Mary Costello watched Mrs. May’s troubled brow.

  “We should do the day of the week that you were born,” said the astrologer. “I can get out the constants for that.”

  “ ‘A child that’s born on the Sabbath day is fair and wise and good and gay.’ Very occasionally.”

  Madam Costello shook her head. “There’s much more to be learned than that.”

  “I’ve lost interest,” said Cynthia.

  “In the stars?”

  “In your representations of them. Your charts are the same as theirs. Zodiacs or perihelions—I can’t care for any of that now.”

  “Because you looked through their telescopes? Well, that’s what you wanted, ain’t it? Why the sour face?”

  Cynthia began the full story of Friday night, offering its details with pride, though at every sign of Madam Costello’s enthusiasm she indicated caution, by way of a raised finger or pursed lips. This was, she would have her know, a sad story, with a disappointing or at least inconclusive finish. “There’s some odd enterprise he keeps hinting at, some peculiar vision that keeps him apart from the other men. He’s a changeling, Mary, a boy who’s been snatched into some nighttime world, maybe by one of your leprechauns. He’s silly with what he sees, but lonely with it, too. There are moments when I feel he’s on the verge of wanting to impart this vision to me.” She paused to shake her head with self-disgust. “How I flatter myself.”

  When she ended her account, a considerable silence ensued, while Madam Costello, in her most concentrated manner, set about finding the salient point:

  “He held your ankles, dearie.”

  Cynthia made a disgusted sound. “And probably got cut for his trouble. He hasn’t come to see me since. I don’t know whether he’ll be using me again, don’t know what they’ll have him work on next, let alone what he’d like to work on. I’m back doing the Transit of Venus, at least until the money runs out and they put me on something else. Meanwhile, I’m trying not to fall asleep in front of Professor Harkness.”

  The planet reader was at a loss for something to say.

  “And the worst of it is, he’ll be having his hands around a much younger pair of ankles tonig
ht.” Cynthia paused to lower her spoon. “Can you do voodoo on her?”

  “Whom is it we might be talkin’ about?” asked Madam Costello, trying to convey both gentility and the faintest hint that some kind of offensive action might be possible.

  “The younger—what else?—sister of a colleague’s fiancée. I hear he’s taking her to a supper at Commodore Sands’s house. You’d like the old commodore. They all say he looks like Merlin.”

  “Dearie, it’s not all the same: voodoo, magic, planet reading.”

  Cynthia sulked, worrying a not-quite-cooked piece of carrot in her mouth. Mary Costello looked at her, deciding it was just as well that Mrs. May had lost her interest in astrology. She wouldn’t have to do any more readings for the girl’s half-hearted reception, and she wouldn’t have to witness any more of her satanic arithmetic. She could, as a lover of romance and a good cry, just dispense some maternal affection toward her.

  “How is your War God?” asked Cynthia, after biting through another carrot.

  “Oh, suffering through more talk of ‘gross abuses’ in the weighers’ department. Honest me, why don’t these government fellers spend their efforts investigatin’ things like all this bad vinegar being sold in Chicago? It’s carryin’ folks off as surely as the river water took me husband.”

  Mary Costello didn’t much care about the vinegar, which she’d learned of only from the Star, the same place she followed the weighers’ testimony. She was just trying to postpone the evening’s work. She had to translate the paper’s latest on the Custom House hearings into planetary movement and advice, and transcribe the latest tidbits of Mrs. May’s conversation—all for the great man up in Utica. She would report the girl’s adventure with the telescope, yes. But should she mention the beau at her ankles?

  Looking across the table at Cynthia, whose expression might help her decide, she discovered the girl’s eyes to be brimming with tears.

  The astrologer quickly rose from her seat and came around the table. She took the soup spoon from Cynthia’s hand and lay the girl’s head upon her breast, encouraging her to sob.

  “Oh, Mary, it was wonderful.”

  Stroking the poor thing’s hair, Madam Costello quietly offered a suggestion. “Darlin’, I have a henna so pale it’s more yellow than red. What do you say we rinse some into you?”

  Commodore Sands’s dining room had no bell pull for summoning a servant, but the old gentleman accomplished that device’s purpose by tugging on the tip of his long beard to signal the unmarried daughter who acted as his hostess. Two quick tugs indicated it was time to separate the men and women around the big Eastlake table.

  The ladies’ expulsion could not come soon enough for Hugh Allison, whose companion for the evening, from the moment he’d picked her up in the carriage, had never relinquished her lapdog. Hugh wished that the dog, part of a recent unaccountable craze, might somehow swallow a broken glass before going on to ingest Miss Ellen Gray. The animal was the girl’s whole conversation. Whatever the table discussed, an eclipse or an Indian massacre, reminded her “exactly of Buster” and some piece of the dog’s naughtiness that she would go on to recount. Hugh could not believe this flibbertigibbet was a minister’s daughter, just as she, he was sure, could not believe a man with such good looks and beguiling eyes could be paying her so little attention.

  As soon as Miss Gray and Buster had been banished with the rest of the women to the front parlor, Sands led the men upstairs to the library and passed around cigars. Hugh and Miss Gray’s future brother-in-law, Henry Paul, lit theirs with a certain sense of humor, puffing like riverboat gamblers instead of gentlemen who’d grown into this after-dinner pleasure. The commodore turned to Professor Harkness, the only middle-aged man in the room, and said: “I’m glad to have these young people around. It does me good.”

  Harkness looked toward Hugh and Henry Paul, and nodded his agreement, with restrained enthusiasm; he might have reminded the commodore that he was chronologically closer to the young people than to their kindly old host.

  “I got the idea for this evening at the big wedding,” said Sands, referring to the nuptials of Admiral Porter’s daughter, two weeks ago at Epiphany Church. The retired superintendent had spent most of his time taking appreciative notice of the young couple there, instead of, like so many others, straining to be noticed by the assemblage of Navy brass or Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes herself.

  “Now Rodgers may not be young, but he’s a man of the future,” said the commodore to Harkness.

  “That he is,” said the professor.

  “I heard him fuming the other afternoon,” said Henry Paul, “about the cost of dragging all that marble to the Capitol for the big Navy monument. ‘Another damned sarcophagus,’ ” Paul grunted, in pretty fair imitation of the observatory’s new chief. “Said he’d rather have a functioning service than a memorial to vanished glory.”

  “I don’t know how they got the marble over the pavements,” said Harkness. “Wood or concrete, half of what’s in the District crumbles as soon as it’s laid.”

  “We do have too many monuments,” said Sands, softly. “This proposal of Sheridan’s to bring back Custer’s body. It’s a sort of monument. Dangerous, and silly. We’re always better left where we fall. Bury a man at sea and the ship sails right on.” He seemed afraid of slipping into his own sad daydream; the other men noticed his effort to raise his voice and sit up straighter. “Now, will he be letting you do what you want?”

  The question, addressed more or less to them all, concerned Rodgers.

  “I hope so, sir,” said Harkness, normally not much more of a conversationalist than Asaph Hall. He knew the commodore’s unrestrictive regime remained a great point of pride to the old man. “I can still remember the first annual report issued during your tenure, how it gave us individual credit for our accomplishments.”

  “And your mistakes,” said Sands, laughing. “But it was better to have names put to feats, instead of just claiming them all for ‘the Observatory,’ as if the building itself got up each night to do the work.” He turned to Hugh Allison. “Mr. Eastman called on me the other day. He says you’ve been looking at a new comet.”

  “Yes, sir, but she’s already beginning to disappear.”

  “ ‘She?’ ” asked Harkness, as if it weren’t perfectly routine for the men to refer to celestial bodies as their naval counterparts referred to ships. All at once Hugh realized that Captain Piggonan had, in fact, seen Mrs. May the other night; and had said something that found its way to Harkness and who knew how many others.

  “Will ‘she’ be back?” asked Harkness.

  “I don’t believe she will, Professor.” He paused, knowing he could keep himself as calm as he had on the roof last Friday. “The trajectory I’ve been seeing doesn’t indicate periodicity. Mr. Eastman does, however, expect D’Arrest’s comet to be back in about a month, its fourth visit since ’51.”

  The commodore, who couldn’t resist the lure of his own past, said, “How I still remember those meteors way back in ’33. Not that that shower we watched together was anything negligible; right, Mr. Harkness? How long ago was that? Four years? Five?”

  “Ten, sir. November of ’67.”

  “Ten!” cried Sands, clearly distressed.

  Hugh tried to distract him. “Herr Winnecke’s comet is nothing so spectacular as either of those showers, I’m sure, Commodore.”

  “Oh?” said Sands. “A small light?”

  “Yes,” said Hugh. “A kindly light, though not one that will lead anyone much anywhere.”

  “Not on a par with what this French fellow may soon give us!” said Henry Paul. The journals had been full of the latest electric light experiments. “But unless he succeeds in turning it down, it won’t do much good for anybody.”

  Hugh could not let this go unchallenged. “What’s wrong with a great big light, a powerful blaze?” he asked. “Why confine it to a parlor?”

  Harkness was about to extol the sort of useful, modest
light in the commodore’s library, which electricity might allow into the room even more efficiently than the gas jets did, when Buster came tearing over the threshold, yelping without letup.

  “Henry, if you was creatin’ a dog,” said Hugh, in the drawl he used only for sarcasm, “would you make up a mastiff or”—he pointed to the creature at Mr. Harkness’s trouser cuff—“that thing?”

  Ellen Gray had rushed into the room just in time to hear the question, and she looked hurt. Her future brother-in-law hid his laughter behind his left hand, while Hugh removed Buster from Professor Harkness’s pants. Not used to such a firm grip, the animal immediately ceased barking.

  “Allison,” said Henry Paul. “Think of a whole city, every single house shining with its own electric lights, tens of thousands of them.”

  “We’d have even more trouble seeing than we do now,” said Harkness, imagining the astronomers done out of their nights.

  “But think of how much work everyone else would accomplish,” offered Henry Paul.

  “I don’t know,” murmured the commodore. “I’d miss blowing out my lamp.”

  With the hand not encircling Buster, Hugh extracted his pocket watch. “May I see you home, Miss Gray?”

  Annoyed that the conversation hadn’t been transformed by her arrival, and unable to think of Buster’s analogical relationship to whatever they were talking about, she shook her head.

  “Then I’m sure Mr. Paul and your sister will manage to get you there.” He deposited Buster, who instantly resumed yelling, into her delicate hands.

  “Commodore,” said Hugh. “My thanks for a very pleasant evening. Gentlemen, please convey my compliments to the rest of the ladies.”

  While getting his hat in the vestibule downstairs, Hugh could overhear Sands, who he knew liked him, ask the remaining guests: “He’s not terribly Southern, is he?”

  Harkness answered: “When it comes to laissez-faire, Commodore, he may be the exception who proves your rule. The boy needs military discipline, never mind scientific direction.”