“I think I understand, sir.”
“Look at this,” said Rodgers, handing him the top sheet from the papers he carried. “Captain Gilliss’s death certificate.”
Hugh read aloud what the naval surgeon had attested to a dozen years ago, how Captain Gilliss “ ‘departed this life on the 9th day of February, in the year 1865, and that he died of serous apoplexy. He had been stationed at the Naval Observatory for some years, a locality noted for its insalubrity. During the last summer and fall he was frequently attacked with intermittent and, on one occasion remittent fever, which left him in a weak condition; this, combined with excessive mental labor incident to his position no doubt caused his death in the line of duty.’ ”
Hugh handed the paper back to Gilliss’s fourth successor.
“One of my projects,” said Rodgers. “Putting together evidence of what’s gone on here for thirty years. What good it will do when I state my case is anyone’s guess, Mr. Allison. My own is that the Congress’s pity will be insufficient to move us away from here. Their pride—in something this national astrolabe has achieved—could well be another matter. So get cracking, Mr. Allison. Don’t give me apoplexy.”
“Yes, sir,” said Hugh.
The admiral was already on his way out, but he stopped at the doorway to turn around and ask: “Your question about the lighthouse board: was it meant as some sort of clue to your intentions? I’m thinking of Quincy Adams’s expression for this place: a ‘lighthouse of the sky.’ Are you ready to find some great ship, some great astral body that’s been sailing undetected?”
A formidable, intelligent man, thought the young astronomer. And as to the last point, exactly wrong.
But what answer could he give him? How could he say that he was the astral body he wanted others, far distant, to detect, if only as scattered spangles of light? He would appear more mad than foolish. And so, with the admiral, as with so many others now, he ended up appearing evasive, or ethereal, or without wanting to, rude. If he “larked about,” as Mr. Hall said, it was partly so his cap and bells might distract them from questioning him seriously.
He could only smile and let Rodgers depart.
At 8:00 that same evening, Cynthia May sat in her room with Charles Reade’s latest novel. Through the closed door she could hear Dan Farricker, accompanied by Fanny Christian on the piano, singing “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen.” She failed to detect the rapping of the front knocker, but did notice the sudden cessation of music that followed, along with some unusually animated sounds from Mrs. O’Toole.
She cracked her door to listen.
“Charleston, you say!” the landlady was exclaiming. “But you really didn’t need to. I’m from Columbia myself.”
The softer, though jaunty, reply came up the stairs: “I should have known.”
It can’t be. She went to the landing.
“This is Miss Christian,” said the landlady. “And here are Miss Park, Mr. Farricker, Mr. Manley. My son, Harry, I’m afraid, is indisposed.”
“I seem to have interrupted your entertainment,” said the visitor. “Miss Christian’s sheet music appears frozen in mid-turn.”
She would kill Fanny; if the girl said one word to him, she would kill her.
“You must join in the merriment,” ordered Mrs. O’Toole. “It’s such a pleasure to have visitors after the season has ended.”
Oh, Jehoshaphat, the season, thought Cynthia, rolling her eyes and further sharpening her ears.
“Mrs. May?” the new arrival gently reminded the landlady.
“Oh, yes,” sighed Mrs. O’Toole, bowing to duty. “Let me get her for you.”
Cynthia darted back from her door and waited for a knock. Her disgust at having to share him with this parched little world, at his having to endure even a moment of its moth-eaten conversation, outweighed her surprise and pride. She calmly fastened a comb to her hair.
“Mrs. May! A caller.”
“I shall be right down.”
She waited until the landlady’s footsteps retreated to the parlor. Then she pinched her cheeks, put away Charles Reade, and picked up the biography of Galileo that she’d borrowed from the Observatory’s library. She went down the stairs with an index finger between two pages of the book, as if marking her place.
“Tell me this, Mr. Allison,” Louis Manley was saying as she reached the parlor. “Mr. Hayes now claims that the Negro will get a fair share of offices in the South once the Custom House investigation is over. Do you think that is possible? Will your people stand for it?”
Hugh nodded at her.
“I don’t know about my daddy,” he said. “My mother is sure to treat any colored revenue clerk as poorly as she would any white one.”
Mrs. O’Toole laughed.
“Mr. Allison,” said Cynthia.
“Mrs. May,” he replied, with a slight bow and much more emphatic smile. The parlor’s population paid keen attention. “Late as it is, might I take you for a walk?”
“Oh, won’t you stay, Mr. Allison?” cried Mrs. O’Toole. “I’ll bring out my son’s stereograph. We have the most wonderful pictures of Venice.”
“I’m afraid I already spend too much time looking through lenses, my dear lady, and I’ve several hours of that in front of me before the night is over. Another time, I hope. Perhaps you’ll even have some pictures of Columbia.”
Mrs. O’Toole glistened for a moment, then turned a drier eye on her boarder.
“Shall we, Mrs. May?” said Hugh, offering his arm. “You may actually need a wrap, despite summer’s arrival.”
“Then I’ll get one,” said Cynthia, putting down her book and heading toward the hall.
“You’ll forget where you are,” said Joan Park, crisply, pointing to the now-closed Galileo volume.
“I should love to forget where I am,” said Cynthia.
Out on F Street, she closed her eyes for a few seconds and sighed. “I feel like her,” she said, pointing to the Goddess of Liberty atop the Capitol. “Set free, from all of them.”
“You have terrible manners,” said Hugh. “Worse than mine on some occasions.”
“I don’t know how you can bear sharing so much as a home state with that woman.”
“If she let her voice relax into its natural origins, she’d sound like a moonshiner out of Pickens County. Poor Mrs. May, having to put up with her.” He gave a parting glance to the Capitol and declaimed, “Ah, yes, there it is, the summit of our ambitions.”
“I remember the years before they put on the top of the dome. It looked like a morning-mush bowl.”
She walked with Hugh down F Street, her eyes detouring into the alleys filled with shacks and crippled veterans and Negro children carrying buckets to the cisterns.
“I hate it here,” she told him. “People talk about all the roads they’ve paved and all the trees they’ve planted and how they’ve backfilled the canal, but it’s as awful as ever.”
“Do you hate it just here? Or do you hate it everywhere?”
“What a question.”
“It’s a serious question.”
It was a serious question, he thought. He knew her woes by now. She had parcelled them out to him over the last weeks—the husband, the little girl, the small humiliations and great fears of her poverty. He also knew, or sensed, that she wanted to transcend them. But before he exposed his own heart’s desire—made a burden and a gift of it to her—he needed to know that her hopes were more than weak ones whose failure would allow her to cherish her injuries even more.
“Of course I like other places,” Cynthia answered. “Such as I’ve seen them.”
“Yes, your home in the northern latitudes, with its aurora-green ceiling.”
“Yes. It’s lovely.”
“Then why don’t you go back to it?” he asked.
“Because if I did, I should have to teach school or else freeze to death.”
“You don’t like children?”
“I can’t bear them in the
aggregate,” Cynthia answered. “I liked my daughter.”
No, he thought; she cannot help herself.
But then, as if she did not want to grandstand with her grief, he heard her voice hoist itself into a lighter, silvery register. “If I had the chance, I’d go back to Charleston, to that house you described with the cypress library and the delft-tiled fireplaces.”
“And the constantly shifting furniture. My daddy would come home from the courthouse never knowing if he’d walk in on Louis XIV or Genghis Khan.”
She relaxed a bit and leaned into him, and they walked in silence until they came in sight of the Treasury. She was about to tell him of her own father, but could wait no longer to ask the night’s obvious question. “Why did you come? It can’t be to buy me my dinner. I’ve already eaten Mrs. O’Toole’s parsnips.”
“Ah, parsnips,” he said. “The symbolical vegetable of the day.”
“Please don’t talk in riddles. Don’t make me think you came out just to exasperate me.”
He gave her hand a reassuring pat. They continued on to the War Department, past the southern edge of Lafayette Square. Would he now propel her down New York Avenue and toward the Observatory? She could not let him. She could not risk it.
“Look at that one,” he said, pointing to Washington’s Monument, which lately another committee was struggling to get completed more than twenty years after the funds had run out. “They may have covered your mush bowl, but there’s a saltcellar without its cap. This way,” he said, turning her northwest, toward Pennsylvania Avenue.
“Where are we going?”
“To Georgetown. My rooms, I suppose. It’s still too early to spot the comet.”
She stopped, and withdrew her arm from his. “If I’m to be a fallen woman, it’s going to require more enthusiasm than ‘I suppose.’ ”
He laughed, and took back her arm. “I’d wager you don’t like lapdogs either, Mrs. May.”
“I don’t like dogs of any kind, but you’re talking in riddles again.” She couldn’t stand the feeling that their real conversation was always hiding from them, flowing like the old Tiber Creek lately channeled underground. “Tell me plainly why you came for me, or I won’t go any farther.”
She could feel the muscles in his arm tense and then, as if given permission, suddenly relax. “I need someone to talk to, Cynthia.”
She said nothing, just tried to imagine what these words had cost him, tried to imagine the grass and the road collapsing beneath them, plunging them into the subterranean creek, where they might float, at last truly speaking to each other.
“All right, then,” she finally declared. “Your rooms.”
The wordlessness that persisted between them, along the many blocks to their destination on High Street, bothered her less than the fringed Moorish world he ushered her into once they arrived. Whatever he’d said of his mother hadn’t quite prepared her for this. “Did your father ever come home to these things?”
“No. Mother wouldn’t have liked the suggestion of dancing girls in his presence. Look,” he said, picking up a sort of medallion from the mantel. “From her Chinese period. It’s malaria. The fellow with the hammer stands for the headache, and the boy with the cookstove is fever.”
Cynthia took the disk and moved it closer to the lamp, trying to see what the third figure carried. “The bucket of water?”
“I’m not certain. Chills, I should think. I’m planning on giving the thing to John Eastman once he’s completely himself again.”
She sat down between an orange pillow and a mauve one. “You don’t have many books for a Harvard man.”
“Only the essentials.”
“And what are these drawings?” Tacked to the wall were several sketches, in which a blank triangle was formed between shaded squares that appeared to be, on closer inspection, a pattern of treetops:
“A friend of mine found drawings just like these in Gauss’s notebooks. Carl Friedrich Gauss. My friend resketched them for me and sent the stuff over from Germany. He’s there in Göttingen helping to edit Gauss’s writings. The trees are meant to be an actual forest. The shapes would be created by cutting great paths, hundreds of miles long, between them.”
“To what end?” asked Cynthia.
“So that the shapes would be visible from great distances.”
He noted her perplexity, and waited a moment before saying, in a whisper he couldn’t help making theatrical: “Not from down here, Cynthia. From up above and far beyond. To whomever might be watching us.”
With his lips parted in an expectant smile, and his eyes wide with excitement, he looked at her. She knew what he now expected her to ask—who was this marvelous man, Gauss?—but she could only pose a question she felt more to the point: “This sort of thing interests you?”
His expression collapsed, and he let his body follow, into a chair behind the table. He sighed, loudly: “I’m afraid it’s all that interests me.”
“I’m sure I’m being thick-skulled, but it sounds like Jules Verne. You mean creatures up above and beyond?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe there are such creatures.” He still looked disappointed, so she searched for some sort of lighthearted consolation. “And if there were,” she suggested, “they might be the sort who carry lapdogs. Wouldn’t that be awful?”
“I’m not especially interested in the creatures.” He came out from behind the desk, his voice reanimated. “I’m interested in the way light can carry us, forever, at 185,000 miles per second, more or less.”
She now remembered how he and Mr. Paul had talked of Michelson, the young man over in Annapolis, but more strongly she recalled his own voice on the roof that night: Stop thinking of what comes to us. Start thinking of the light that might come from us. She quoted the lines to him.
“Exactly,” he responded.
“Exactly? You’re giving me riddles again. Really, what does all this have to do with astronomy?”
“Nothing, really.” He laughed, and let himself collapse again, this time onto the same sofa where she sat. Only the immense mauve pillow, which he now compacted with a soft blow from his fist, rested between them. “The admiral had me on the carpet tonight. He’s determined to get some work out of me at last.” He pulled off his right boot and moaned, in comic agony: “What am I going to do?”
“You sound like some pupil about to be expelled. And put your boot back on.”
“I just might be expelled. They’re not forever going to be satisfied having me chase other men’s comets. Nor, incidentally, are they going to let you chase Mr. D’Arrest’s much longer. When I left the place a couple of hours ago, I saw Harrison and Harkness scratching their heads in wonder. It seems the Navy has just disbursed a pot of money to be used, quite specifically, to complete the Transit of Venus work. The two of them have no idea who squeezed it out of the Ancient Mariner, but it was surely someone powerful.”
Her hand shook. Conkling’s visage, the one she knew from that photograph in the street-seller’s bin, seemed to dance in the gaslight. She reached up to her comb, hoping the gesture would steady her fingers and disguise the agitation that had to be visible on her face.
“What have you done?” Hugh cried, tossing the mauve pillow onto the floor.
“I’ve done nothing!”
“Yes, you have! Your hair. Bring it closer to the lamp.” He swung himself around to the other side of her, throwing the orange pillow on top of the mauve. He pulled her against him, taking her head between his hands, so it was just inches from the tasseled lampshade. “It’s awful,” he pronounced, loosening the comb and spilling her upsweep onto her shoulders and down her back. “Promise you’ll restore it to the way it was. Promise,” he said, gathering up a great handful of her tinted tresses and rubbing his face into them.
She drew back, waiting for him to open his eyes, and once he did, she looked into his face, hating its youth and thick lashes and unhurt beauty. She hit it, once, with a closed fist, as hard
as she could, bringing tears not to his eyes but her own, as she gave herself final permission to love him.
Roscoe Conkling was not in Paris. “Mr. Arthur Chester” was, however, registered at a small hotel in the Place Dauphine, his room adjoining that of Mrs. Kate Chase Sprague. On July 13, as noon approached, the incognito senator sat outdoors at a café three floors below the improvised suite and took a second cup of coffee from the proprietor, who was fixing some tricolor decorations to his awning in preparation for tomorrow’s Bastille Day festivities.
Waiting for Kate to come down, Conkling found himself more occupied by the just-past American Fourth of July than its continental equivalent. The English papers, which he’d bought while strolling on the other side of the river, made prominent mention of Senator Blaine’s holiday oration. Conkling’s sworn enemy, responsible for his most enraging nickname, had attacked the President’s soft Southern policy, and warned against using recent army raids into Mexico—supposedly made in hot pursuit of bandits—as an excuse to grab territory that could then be turned into another Southern state.
What pleasure was there in having his old enemy attack his new one? If anyone were to convulse the Republican party that held all three of them, it should be Conkling himself. And yet, since docking at Southampton on the 27th, he had been wondering whether he really had the strength and stomach for combat. England had failed to excite him: Richard III’s palace was now a coffee house, and Pitt’s monument in Westminster Abbey had turned out to be a paltry thing, hardly a fit tribute to that prescient sound-money politician. He had written to Bessie that nothing in the shops couldn’t be found less dear and better made right at home. Even his dinner with Grant had somehow left him more drained than nourished; the whole table of flatterers at the Grosvenor Hotel had been less inclined to push the general back into the electoral wars than just to sit and bask in his autumnal aura.
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