As soon as this line brought them to their feet huzzahing, Conkling sat down. The English had gone mad with adoration for the touring ex-President, forgetting how a dozen years before he’d put an end to the rebels for whom they’d displayed such sympathy. If they now insisted on swooning for the general wherever he went, through the streets of Liverpool or the halls of Oxford, that was fine with Roscoe Conkling, whose identification with Grant could only be perfected by traveling in his wake. He had timed his own departure perfectly. With the first reports of the Jay Commission’s investigations into the Custom House being cheered in the press, Hayes was bound to act before many more days passed. The President would at last declare an open war on the machine, and Roscoe Conkling’s absence would rattle those expected to carry it out.
“Now tell me, Senator. Just when will you be back?”
“The second week in August,” Conkling confided to Cornell, who’d chartered today’s ferry from an old associate with whom he’d once run a steamship line upstate. Huge and impassive, Cornell might lack the elegance of Chester Arthur, but Conkling admired his very coarseness, the way he’d thumbed his nose at his book-loving father and gone off to work as a telegraph boy. Ezra Cornell may have founded Western Union and his university, but his boy had made a real ascent, not this charade of starting at the bottom that Bessie’s young man was intent on acting out.
Still, it worried Conkling that Cornell’s brutish face was one of those the public fixed to the Custom House. Between Cornell and Arthur, his dandyish opposite, there was little the average man could look at and find sympathetic, and with all the sworn evidence about “bones” and “hatchets” and other duns filling the newspapers, the machine’s men had begun to sound like the thieves in Fagin’s den. Testimony that the term “general aptitude” really concerned an applicant’s political know-how had provoked what Conkling regarded as the most detestable sound in the world: the laughter of one’s enemies.
He watched the sidewheel paddles of the other ferries and felt glad for this chartered steamer, which had allowed him to avoid the farm wagons and the newsboys at the docks of the commercial boats. Only the chance to see the ladies returning from their shopping could have made public conveyance worthwhile, and it was too early in the day for that.
But the expense and show of this departure! The newspapers were sure to tut-tut about such extravagance during the fourth year of an economic slump. They had blanched at the uncountable millions the Custom House had taken in during the last twelve months, and crooned with pleasure over the way Mr. Hayes, that Cincinnatus out of Cincinnati, set such a wonderful example by paying for his own servants in the Executive Mansion—these days less a seat of power than a needlepointed sampler, the whole fraudulent “First Family” gathered around the piano as the Interior Secretary picked out psalms and the Vice President, that detestable Wheeler, sang the bass notes.
The men were talking about it even now. George Sharpe, already drunk, shouted “Where are the oranges?”—the same question parched dignitaries were said to whisper at Hayes’s teetotaling hearth, knowing that at least one steward would be good enough to soak the citrus slices in whiskey.
“Don’t worry, Roscoe,” shouted Arthur, tapping him on the back. “When you return, we’ll let your trunk stay on the dock beyond forty-eight hours.” A roar of laughter greeted the Collector’s reference to the latest Treasury regulation, designed to limit the time that incoming goods might be coveted and pawed by the machine’s men. It was one more niggling preview of reform, and along with it Secretary Sherman had also just ordered that hearings on the Philadelphia customs operations be modeled on what had been done in New York. If Conkling was right, the ultimate plan to bring them all down had been hatched at last Tuesday’s meeting of the Cabinet.
“Conkling,” whispered Cornell, as grave as the others were raucous. “I cannot take the number of men down twenty percent. And that’s what Sherman’s going to ask.”
“Let Arthur take it down by eight. Not a percent, not a man further. And make sure the lot he fires includes at least one of Sherman’s friends. Send him a signal.”
“But how am I going to assess the ones who remain?” worried Cornell. Surveyor Sharpe’s testimony on the “voluntary” nature of all political contributions at the Custom House had gone down as risibly as “general aptitude.”
Conkling looked at Cornell without answering. Smart as he is, the senator thought, he doesn’t see what’s coming. He doesn’t understand that he and Sharpe and Arthur aren’t going to be reined in; they’re going to be sent packing. When Hayes did what Conkling expected him to, the machine’s men would have no choice. They would have to strike directly at the President, strangle his administration on the floor of Congress, or it would be the end of them.
“There’s the Mosel!” cried Chet Arthur, brushing a crumb from his scented whiskers and saluting the ship that would transport their chieftain across the Atlantic.
Conkling remained seated until the last possible moment, thinking how, when the final battle was joined, he would require a woman as surely as Booth had needed a horse.
On Friday, June 22, Cynthia had the afternoon free to navigate the noisy aisles of Washington’s Center Market. Looking up toward the grand ceiling of the young Gothic structure, she thought of the shabby old Baghdad that had once filled half of Lafayette Square, and where as a girl she had gone to buy groceries before meeting her father at the edge of the Treasury’s lawn.
Madam Costello, walking the aisles with her, knew no other market from her time in the capital, and had remarked coming in that with more great brick piles like this, the fire would have gone easier on Chicago.
“Look, look, look,” she now ordered, tugging Cynthia toward a table of scarves. “This gold one’d be like a royal sash with your new locks.”
“I don’t think so,” said Cynthia, checking the pin in the borrowed turban that covered her newly hennaed hair. “Oh, why did I give in and let you do this?”
“Because he’s bein’ so encouraging,” said the astrologer. “You’ve got your new comet and your supper and your new hair. Pin him down about the supper, dearie.”
“I have,” said Cynthia. “He said a week from tomorrow.”
The two women embarked on a long promenade past household furnishings. Cynthia regarded the tables full of pillow slips and washbasins and all the other things she had never had to purchase during her years in lodgings; they made her feel estranged from the normal world. Did Mrs. O’Toole, obliged to buy such things in great multiples, feel even more peculiar? She hoped so.
“Get me out of here,” said Madam Costello, “or I’ll burn an even bigger hole in me pocket. Did you see that paste jewelry, round the bend and five miles back? You’d swear it was the best opal, wouldn’t you? The birthstone for October.”
“I know all about your Scorpio,” said Cynthia, looking down at the much-shorter woman and noticing the thinness of the hair that had lent out its turban. For more than three weeks, since the arrival of Conkling’s letter, she had been unable to summon any real anger toward her. The scoldings and sarcasm were no more than a light comedy between them. She ought to hate the Irishwoman’s treachery, but her new fears only left her admiring a certain shamelessness she needed more of herself. She now reasoned: what harm could Conkling actually do? He was a comet of highly doubtful periodicity: another appearance, even in the mails, was most unlikely. By now—sailing after Grant, the newspapers said—he would have turned his attentions elsewhere.
She could not, alas, turn her own attentions from the odd and beautiful Mr. Allison. In fact, she worried that her old cheese-paring caution would reassert itself, and that Hugh would begin to look only like danger instead of new life. If she wanted to maintain the boldness of her approach to him, she needed Madam Costello, this fairy-tale crone, to keep her nerve from burning low.
“All right,” she said, pushing the older woman out into the sunshine over Indiana Avenue. “You were going to tell me mo
re about Capricorns.”
“Well,” said Madam Costello, shifting her ragged reticule from one hand to the other. “They’re often associated with sin.”
“That makes no sense,” said Cynthia. “Christ Himself was a Capricorn.”
“Is,” said Madam Costello, crossing herself. “But Christ is a very new soul. Go back further. Think of the scapegoat, dearie. And think of this, too: why was the Christ baby put into the manger with the goat?”
“I haven’t the least idea.”
“To conquer sin and death.”
Cynthia scowled. “So Capricorns are associated with both redemption and sin.”
“Yes.”
“This is why I always lose you, Mary. You see that, surely?” She took an orange from her dress pocket and began peeling it. “All right, keep going.”
“Funny thing is, for all these associations, they ain’t generally very spiritual, your Capricorns.”
“Well, he does seem more interested in how the heavens function than in who made them.”
“They’re not terrible hard workers, either. They ain’t the men to hew the wood and draw the water.”
“He’s not the busiest bee at the Observatory, I’ll grant you that. But he can’t help it. This comet bores him. When he gives me its position each morning—”
“Nor are they the most favored lot. In the body, I mean. They can be awful plain, and narrow in the chest.”
“That is rubbish,” said Cynthia, throwing the orange rind into the street. “He could not be more scrumptious. The chest maybe is on the narrow side, but I’d rather look at him than at one of these trenchermen exploding all the buttons on their vests.”
Mary Costello, ignoring the rebuke, searched her brain for anything else she could recall about Capricorns without her books in front of her.
“Coal,” she said. “The Capricorns govern coal.”
Cynthia offered no response to this piece of information, and the planet reader had no idea of its significance herself. She just nudged the younger woman with her elbow and said, “We’ll get you to squeeze him into a diamond, eh?”
Around the corner, on Seventh Street, some larger than usual typography sprang up from the newsman’s stack of the Evening Star: EXECUTIVE ORDER ISSUED. Madam Costello fetched two cents from her bag. “Will you read it to me, dearie? Nice and slow? You won’t trip over some of these words the way I do.”
In fact, the news on which Mary Costello would now have to put the best astrological face was all too plain: “No assessments for political purposes, on officers or subordinates, should be allowed. No useless officer or employee should be retained. No officer should be required, or permitted to take part in the management of political organizations, caucuses, conventions, or election campaigns.”
Cynthia, done reciting, looked down at the Irishwoman, who was twisting the reticule’s string much too tightly around her finger.
“Surely you don’t have to worry about this right now,” said Cynthia, as soothingly as she was capable of saying anything. “He’ll probably be home by the time your letter could ever find him.”
“The cable, dearie,” said Madam Costello, lifting her eyes from the planks of the sidewalk. “The big wire under the ocean. The office boy has instructions to send him something from me every third day.”
At 6:00 P.M. on Monday night, June 25, Admiral Rodgers came into the central dome and stood at the pier of the 9.6-inch refractor.
“I’ve been looking for you,” he said to Hugh Allison.
“Sir,” said Hugh, who had dozed off. “I had D’Arrest’s comet well in sight last night. I’ll be looking again—”
“You’ll get your best view after midnight. Don’t spend the hours until then in here.”
“How is Mr. Eastman, Admiral?”
“Listless. Aching. But past any delirium. If the initial fever had been half a degree higher, we’d have lost him. You appear a bit listless yourself, Mr. Allison.”
“I hope not, sir.” He also hoped the charts on the table where he sat concealed the copy of the Atlantic he’d been reading.
“Do any of you,” asked Rodgers, “ever look at the Sun?”
“It’s never been a specialty here, sir.”
“The head of the Army Signal Corps wants us to observe the Sun’s spots and what he calls its ‘protruberances.’ Something different from the spots, I gather.”
“We’d need better spectrographic equipment,” said Hugh.
Rodgers removed a chip of peeled paint from the telescope’s pier. “He has a good mind,” said the admiral. “I like his company.” General Meigs, the Army’s chief of staff, was Rodgers’s brother-in-law, and the admiral easily socialized across service lines. “More stimulating than the Ancient Mariner, certainly.”
“And who might that be, sir?” asked Hugh, as if he didn’t know the nickname for Hayes’s Navy Secretary. He noticed a smile as Rodgers worked off another couple of paint chips with his thumb, revealing the pier’s antebellum color.
“The other day,” said the admiral, “he remarked on how some ensigns had just ‘won their spurs.’ ”
Hugh’s laughter had barely escaped his lungs before Rodgers snapped: “And how do you plan on earning yours?”
The admiral did not seem to expect an immediate answer; if he had startled Mr. Allison with the question, that appeared to be enough for the moment. “I’m thinking about holding monthly meetings of the entire staff. As things stand, I talk to all of you, but you don’t talk amongst yourselves, except in your little cliques. For instance, I’ll hear from a third party that Mr. Harkness doubts Mr. Newcomb’s accuracy, but Mr. Newcomb never hears of it at all. Let us air these things.”
“It’s too bad the air itself is one of our difficulties,” said Hugh.
Rodgers, peeling away at another brick, allowed the change of subject. “I’m determined to connect this place to the sewer. The Board of Health are quite uninterested in our drainage problems, but there is no reason we can’t run a pipe from the Twenty-third Street gate to the corner of Twenty-second and Virginia.” His middle finger finished the second brick and moved on to a third. “And then there’s the boiler.” He flicked some dust from his hand and turned to face the younger man. “It would require thirty thousand dollars to repair everything on this site. A hundred thousand might allow us to start a new building somewhere else. What do you think we ought to do, Mr. Allison?”
Hugh straightened the charts on his table. “I’m sure you’ll make the right decision, sir.”
“You think so?” said Rodgers. “All right, suppose I choose to try to get us out of here altogether. Where am I going to find the money?” Hugh looked the admiral in the eye, but said nothing.
“The Ancient Mariner wants to separate us from the Navy, and do you know what, Mr. Allison? He may be right. It makes about as much sense for the Navy to be measuring distant stars as it does for sailors to be wearing spurs. We’ve long since known all we need to about navigating by the heavens, and I daresay the Navy doesn’t need you doctors of philosophy to keeps its chronometers in working order. Tell me what you think.”
“About putting a civilian in charge?”
“Yes.”
“Whoever it was would tilt the rest of us toward his own interests.”
“You may be right,” said Rodgers. “Mr. Newcomb would have all of you scurrying in his moonlight. Then you’d rebel, and he’d have to hang you like the Molly Maguires.” The admiral shifted the papers he was carrying from his left hand to the one that had been peeling paint. “Even so, I’m not sure, Mr. Allison. Most of you say you’re happy having me about, but you may just be buttering my parsnips. Newcomb and Holden admit they would prefer someone with a necktie giving the orders, but they may be buttering their own parsnips. I will tell you one thing.”
“Yes, sir?”
“If I’m going to get us out of here, you’re all going to have to do spectacular work. Things that get the place into the newspapers. The sort
of things that will send Mr. Newcomb’s clubwomen into a frenzy of admiration. It’s as plain as this, Mr. Allison: you must rise to higher heights, if I’m to move you to higher ground.”
Hugh nodded.
“My new astronomical acquaintances up in Cambridge say you may be the best man to have trained there since the rebellion.”
“I doubt that.”
“So do I, but I’m prepared to entertain the thought. They also say that you’re unsound. I don’t care if they’re right about that, not if they’re right about the other part. But Eastman and the rest tell me you’ve not proposed any substantial projects of your own here. Why is that?”
“Sir,” said Hugh, “is it true that you’ll be serving on the lighthouse board?”
Rodgers said nothing for a moment. “I’ve not decided. If I say yes, I’ll get to make a summer cruise of the New England coast, while they test their new illuminating devices. You’ve answered my question with a question, Mr. Allison. Unless you’ve given me an indirect answer? Well,” said the admiral, deciding not to press the point, “this may be a start. Still, I won’t wait long before I make you give me something definite, something bold enough to get attention, and not too bold to preclude results.”
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