Conkling stared at his reflection in the silver coffee spoon, aware of the gray flecks in his once-blazing hair, conscious that his complexion no longer carried its old apoplectic glow. He had to stir his blood back up, had to fight off the climacteric he could feel advancing ever nearer. It would arrive, according to the Irishwoman, on October 30, his forty-eighth birthday. How would he meet it with a sharp edge of vitality?
The cables from his man in Washington carried a note of panic. Fright, not economy, seemed to account for all the missing verbs and prepositions: PRESIDENT EVERY INTENTION ENFORCING ORDER. Cornell had already been told either to quit his party post or leave the Custom House. If he resisted, the sledgehammer would soon start smashing the machine’s inner gears. The Jay Commission had chosen to release its second report, another torrent of abuse, on July 4th. In little more than a week, a third report would follow with yet more appalling tales of malfeasance in Conkling’s kingdom, which he now summoned into a mental picture: the seven hundred miles of shoreline and riverbank, from Montauk to Albany, a magnet for eighty thousand dockings a year and all the skimmed tribute that ran through the counting house on Hanover Street. He pictured his chieftains back at home crying for their leader, clamoring for his return or at least his signals. But he had so far replied to neither his aide nor astrologer.
Was his silence really strategy, as he claimed to himself? Was it really because his absence might unsettle the opposition that he sat here, so far from the battle, waiting for Kate to choose from her trunkful of aging millinery? Or was he, without being able to admit it, truly hors de combat, lacking the stamina for war? Perhaps his slack feelings were attributable just to time away from his punching bag and dumbbells; or maybe the climacteric had stolen a march on the calendar and already infiltrated his spirit.
He looked up at a carriage rolling over the paving stones. The horses pulling it were fine specimens, both as beautiful as the bay that, forty years ago, had kicked at him and broken his jaw. When Kate finally came down, they would go off to the afternoon races at Auteuil. She would keep her face under a hatbrim and out of the sun, and he would find himself more solicitous than passionate. He had not, in truth, wanted to see her here. She had made the arrangements herself, interrupting her own summer trip to Germany, and he had felt unable to refuse her. To show the same indifference to his mistress as his wife would be not only cruel but perhaps the surest sign of the climacteric’s early arrival.
Kate tired him. Her faded looks and hats; her exhausted relief simply to be away from the drunken Sprague: they all went to make this rendezvous feel less like a plunge into passion than some careful lowering into a mineral bath. The two of them would probably fall asleep in the grandstand between races; last night he had noticed that the dear thing now even snored. The other day, up in the Place Vendôme, standing before the obelisk to Napoleon’s conquests, he’d watched her fall into a daydream. He had stared at her instead of the monument, and wondered if she were thinking of Sprague—not the inebriate brute he’d become, but the rich, dashing war governor who long ago had marched his thousand volunteers from Rhode Island to Washington, and slept with them in the streets of the capital until the rebel threat receded. She lived too much in the past; he must not let her make him tarry there more than he already did.
After their visit to the obelisk, he had ended up buying her a tiny clock in a shop off the plaza. Back at Edgewood, he knew, she would tell anyone who saw it that the purchase had been made not this summer by Senator Conkling, but long ago, by her father, the Chief Justice. The lie would be meant to keep the real story from finding its way into the gossip writings of “Miss Grundy” and “Olivia,” but its deeper, unacknowledged purpose would be the pleasure it afforded Kate herself, who even now—beyond mother, wife, or lover—preferred thinking of herself as a daughter.
MONEY DISBURSED VENUS. His aide’s first cable had carried this postscript, and since its receipt, Conkling’s mind had returned to Mrs. May several times a day. He understood from the planet reader that this woman, for all her sorrow, lived for the future, that she hated the past and its new false glamour, and longed to rise whole worlds above it and the present. She was fighting her way toward some kind of new life, and he yearned, on the basis of his single encounter and the astrologer’s stream of reports, to have her provoke a revitalization in him as well. SHE IS BLOOMING WITH YOUR BOUNTY, his aide had cabled, here relaying not only the Irishwoman’s every word, but adding on the “g” she would no doubt have dropped. As soon as he was home, Conkling looked forward to truly making the woman’s acquaintance, to hearing from her own lips the misadventures of her fellow boarders and the scientifics for whom she toiled.
The astrologer’s other reports, on the stars’ relation to political events, were harder to interpret, and would probably be so even if the cables permitted a full amplification. But he did not like her apparent new concentration upon Hayes as a Libra, “the same as Adam himself,” pure and primordial and carrying the scales of justice in his sign. Had Conkling come forth a week earlier from his own mother’s womb, that would have been he. Instead, the charts said he represented the crash of Adam’s eagle aspirations to the desert floor, and their foul reincarnation as the scorpion. Months ago the Irishwoman had explained all this with her cunning tact, and he’d thought he had accepted it, but her recent emphasis on Hayes—the suggestion that the President might, or even should, prevail—could not fail to trouble him. It was shameful enough to have a weakness for all this fortune-telling (a vice he had so far kept hidden better than his colleagues concealed their own propensities for drink and gambling), but it seemed intolerable that the celestial tidings should bring him further anxiety instead of solace.
And yet, there was this last bit, perhaps garbled on its five-thousand-mile journey under the ocean: the planet reader’s response to his own news of having dined with the general, a Taurus, who was, she replied, the HIGHEST EMANATION OF EARTHLY TRIGON, AND CONSTELLATION OF PLANET VENUS. Her last letters to Utica had contained much about what she called “triplicities,” and here was another, though the Greek word sounded like Mrs. May’s trigonometry.
And what, by God, if that were the point, thought Conkling, putting down his coffee cup in a double surge of excitement and embarrassment. This might be it, even if it had taken the Irishwoman’s mumbo-jumbo to lift the veil. The trigon was the trigonometry that Mrs. May applied to her transiting Venus, and the real triplicity of the high-flying Taurus could only be the third term, the political grail locked inside a jar of prohibitive tradition. A jar that could be broken. He sat for a second, his eyes closed, gloriously heartened, feeling the first, vital surge putting the second, guilty one to rout—just as he would go home to rout Hayes and all machine’s foes, restoring Grant and the stalwart saviors of the Union to their central place in the political firmament. He would not live in the past; he would re-create it as the future.
“Monsieur patron! La papeterie, s’il vous plaît.”
“Oui, monsieur,” said the owner, stepping off his ladder to fetch the American gentleman his stationery.
My dear Mrs. May, wrote Conkling, at a delightful, rediscovered speed. My climb to the top of Sacré-Coeur the other night, thrilling though it may have been, took me not a millionth the distance you travel each day to Venus without ever leaving your desk. I am delighted that the Secretary’s supplement has reinvigorated your work. I, too, feel marvelously revitalized and ready to make my return home, after which, following a brief period in Utica, I look forward to coming to Washington. May I count on you to show me a bit of the Observatory, that I might see firsthand the good use to which you’re putting Mr. Thompson’s funds? Au revoir, madame. ROSCOE CONKLING
His signature looked, once more, as bold as the cables’ capital letters. With one hand he stuffed the dispatches into his waistcoat, and with the other he handed the proprietor the letter to post.
“Mr. Chester,” said a female voice coming up from behind.
He stoo
d and turned to greet Kate, whose eyes, under the broad brim of her flowered bonnet, looked lovely but still half-dead. He must not fall into them.
“My dear,” he said, plucking a paper flower from the newly tricolored struts of the awning. “Shall we celebrate Monsieur Lafayette a day early?”
“A fine idea,” said Kate, who took his arm and resisted mentioning that it was Friday the thirteenth.
“I’m accustomed to seeing Mr. Todd,” said the clerk, referring to Simon Newcomb’s assistant, who often took the Observatory’s data to and from the Government Printing Office.
“He’s on vacation in New Jersey,” said Hugh. “We all just had a penny postcard from Toms River. Mrs. May and I thought we would check on our own work today.”
“Let me get the proofs,” said the clerk, who nodded with some surprise at Cynthia. He retrieved the long galleys of numerical columns pertaining to D’Arrest’s comet, then sent her and Hugh to an iron-topped table where they could go over them.
It was tedious work. Cynthia read each set of coordinates digit by digit and decimal by decimal; Hugh replied either by saying “correct” or holding up a finger while he checked the handwritten sheets from which the printers had worked. Easily bored, he would often interrupt their labor to start chatting or fuss with his pipe. At one point he crinkled his nose against the almost overpowering smell of ink, to which Cynthia seemed immune.
“It only bothers me with memories,” she said. “Of my first job, at the Treasury—in the middle of the war, after John May went away. A friend of my father’s knew how badly off we were, and more importantly, knew General Spinner and Mr. Chase himself. So I was hired and given a pair of shears, with which I sliced sheets of greenbacks from morning ’til night, until they realized I was expecting Sally. In my day, Mr. Allison, I let a million dollars slip through my hands.”
He returned her smile and went back to saying “correct” or raising his finger. The way they worked the proofs matched the regulated manner of their now frequent conversations about the war. He would let her rattle off the sorrows she had locked up for a dozen years, gently nodding or saying yes or prompting her with a question when her embarrassment threatened to dry up whatever story she needed to tell. When he felt she had had enough for a while, he would jest her back into the present—as he did now, retracting the two of them from D’Arrest’s orbit by pointing out two chattering idlers behind the counter. “Their speech still seems free.” He had in mind the Public Printer’s recent, much-noticed jeremiad against reform and the way it had begun “to interfere with the rights of citizenship.” Hugh expected her to grin, but she responded by saying “longitude of perihelion” as sternly as she could. He rolled his eyes and resumed concentrating.
It had been three and a half weeks since he’d taken her in his arms—and then walked her home. She had not let him make love to her, and since then he had not pressed the case. Except for one night when he’d felt unwell, they had seen each other every second or third evening. He would walk her home—the two of them holding hands once they’d crossed Virginia Avenue—or to the chop house near Madam Costello’s. Inside the restaurant, he would diagram with a wax pencil over the fine print of a newspaper, teaching her the rudiments of astronomy and urging her to talk of her past, as if that were simply another place—which his drawings somehow suggested it was. With each conversation they drew a bit closer. She felt herself becoming his, as imperceptibly as her hair was returning to its real color. She thought of herself as Venus—the planet, not the goddess—cautiously transiting the Sun until she was wholly, safely circled by his golden aura.
During the day, she calculated Venus’s actual transit, advancing the long three-year project with funds the Observatory’s men, on the basis of quite unscientific guessing, had decided were the result of “Mr. Harkness’s admirer,” a politically influential woman who’d been much taken with him, some months ago, when Professor Newcomb brought his associate to an evening meeting of the Washington Scientific Society.
Lately, Hugh himself had done little but write letters, at Admiral Rodgers’s direction, to astronomers across the country and throughout Europe who might join the observation parties being organized for next year’s transit of Mercury and full solar eclipse. He was expected to sit down with the admiral on the 30th, a week from Monday—a potential showdown that worried Cynthia and about which neither of them spoke, not even when Hugh’s collegial gossip and mimicry presented a natural opportunity to discuss Rodgers’s ways and expectations. They had also talked no more of Gauss’s fantastical drawings. Hugh feared, she thought, her disapproval of such an outlandish preoccupation; and disapprove of it she did.
Once they’d returned the corrected sheets to the Printing Office clerk, the two of them walked south on Eighth Street toward Pennsylvania Avenue. The noontime summer dust flew up from bare patches of the road where pavement laid by Boss Shepherd, the District’s modernizing governor, had failed to take. Hugh pointed toward Ninth Street and a house on the south side of E. “That’s Marini’s lair.” He and Henry Paul sometimes went to the bachelors’ cotillions run by this Italian dancing master. No less than Sir Edward and Lady Thornton, the British ambassador and his wife, had been to these gay affairs.
“And you’re really going to take me there?” asked Cynthia.
“I am going to take you there. But we can’t wait until the season begins for some amusement. Let’s make a little excursion soon. The Mary Washington goes down the river a couple of evenings a week. We can get tickets right at the wharf.”
“We can pick a night when it’s cool,” said Cynthia. “Below, say, eighty-five degrees.” She pushed up the sleeves of her dress. “Honestly. Even Sitting Bull has gone up to Canada for the summer.”
“Do you want to make a day trip somewhere north instead?”
“No. That would require the railroad, and by the time you keep your promise the trains aren’t likely to be running.”
“My darling Cynthia, have you ever been able to take yes for an answer?”
“No,” she answered. “But you know I’m right. There, look! Proof of it!” She pointed to the already familiar sight of Albert, Mr. Hayes’s Negro driver, who kept one hand on the horses’ reins and used the other to hold a giant black parasol over his own head. “See? His boss is still in the District.” With the railroad strike beginning to spread, and at least one governor requiring federal troops to deal with rioters, the President had so far gone no farther than the Soldiers’ Home for relief from the summer’s heat.
“As I’ve said,” Hugh sighed, “you’re a natural scientist. You’ve got deductive powers to supplement your mathematical ones.”
“You remember the million dollars I said once passed through my hands?”
“Yes?”
“It was really one million three hundred and forty-eight thousand, six hundred and fifty. I was bored wielding the scissors, so I kept count.”
He laughed for the next several steps, while she considered how wrong he was about her mind. Whatever its peculiar gifts, her brain was an almost entirely emotional organ. Her never taking yes for an answer arose not from any scientific skepticism, but only out of the nervous uncertainties she feared would never leave her.
“You know, I’m not for reform,” she said, suddenly. “The ‘civil service’ variety. I’m right with the Public Printer on that.”
“You?” asked Hugh. “The most meritorious of them all? You’d have Hayes’s job if the world worked fairly.”
“But it doesn’t work fairly. And the old, corrupt ways left some elbow room for human kindness. They could always take on a genteel widow who’d fallen into want, or somebody’s brother-in-law who drank and could barely read but had three children at home. That sort of unfairness kept some people from falling off the earth.”
He knew her fears. He’d inferred them from peculiar things that bubbled up in her conversation, things she knew because she thought she ought to know them, or just couldn’t get them out o
f her mind: the way profanity might get you a five-dollar fine from an out-of-sorts policeman; or default on a twenty-dollar bond get you tethered to a chain gang. She had great nerve, this girl, but she didn’t like wasting her courage—not when the world required so much of it. Last Saturday, after they’d gone to the Corcoran and seen a boy hustled out because he was blocking someone’s view, using too big an easel to copy the work of some second-rate master, Hugh had done a cartwheel through the last gallery to irritate the pompous guard. For his trouble, he had earned only Cynthia’s anger. “You fool,” she’d said, and meant it.
Prompted by this memory of the art gallery, he reached into his coat to withdraw a carefully wrapped pastel, done at his own request by Trouvelot, the sketch artist who was often around the Observatory to make pictures of phenomena like the Horseshoe Nebula, or Saturn sporting Professor Hall’s white spot.
On the paper that Hugh unrolled Cynthia saw her own face and pastel streaks of her own hair, some of them gray, swirling like constellations toward the edge of the sheet.
He laughed at her disbelief. “You didn’t know I had him watching you the other day, did you? You thought he was doing Venus, for Harkness, didn’t you?”
“Is this for me?” she asked.
“It is not,” he replied. “It goes on my wall. Next to the Gauss sketches.”
“No one is safe!” cried Louis Manley, five days later in Mrs. O’Toole’s parlor.
“You don’t need to tell me,” said Joan Park. “They’re discharging Mr. Croggon, who’s worked in the bond vaults for twelve years. It would seem that the honest supervision of four hundred million dollars is less important than someone’s complaint about his owing his position to his brother.”
“And can you imagine, Miss Park, if these new ‘nepotism’ standards were also applied to the Army and Navy?”
She and Mr. Manley shook their heads and clucked until this smug display prompted a cry of disgust from Fanny Christian: “I don’t know how you can talk of that when there are mobs in the streets ready to tear up the rail tracks!”
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