“This sudden interest in public affairs, Miss Christian!” Dan Farricker nodded in mock admiration, and Fanny flounced from the room. As Dan well knew, Fanny couldn’t tell a Knight of Labor from an Odd Fellow, but she did understand that this horrid railroad strike would likely keep her from showing off the new pair of shoes she’d bought for a wedding in Philadelphia this weekend. By now Baltimore was full of General Hancock’s troops, charged by the President with preventing another convulsion like the one five nights earlier, when the local militia had shot into a crowd and killed nine people.
“You’re not going to find me defending the government’s property,” declared Louis Manley, once the rustle of Fanny’s skirts had receded. “I don’t care what these Cabinet secretaries order us to do. They don’t pay me enough for that!” The other lodgers didn’t know that his savings had never recovered from the $300 depletion they’d undergone when he bought his way out of the war.
Mrs. O’Toole, who tonight had put out only half as many cookies as usual, sighed that if the unrest kept up bread would soon go to ten cents a loaf and bringing in coal would get even more expensive than usual. Meanwhile, they sweltered in the late-July heat, and Dan Farricker reminded the landlady that ice was a local manufacture.
“Locally,” said Harry O’Toole, “things may soon get quite a bit worse. There’s talk of those Baltimore mobs marching on the District.”
His mother enacted a terrible shudder. The Plymouth and the Essex had arrived this afternoon, with more than five hundred marines, to defend Washington. It was all too reminiscent of the war, though this time Mrs. O’Toole actually hoped the capital would prevail against the threats to it.
“Oh, calm down, Harry.” Dan Farricker was laughing again. “You’ll need an electric belt for your nerves.”
The glass pane rattled in the vestibule door.
“It’s our intrepid Mrs. May,” said Dan.
“You walked home?” asked Mrs. O’Toole, unable to believe that Cynthia, at a time of such disturbance, would continue doing without the Pennsylvania Avenue streetcar. She handed her lodger a letter, without saying anything more. The whole parlor already knew about the foreign postmark.
“Paris,” said Cynthia, regarding the blue envelope. “You’ve seen views of it in your stereograph.”
If she wasn’t careful, she would get herself thrown out of here. She might not end up in the District jail, but she’d be in a shabbier place with an even worse landlady. What compelled her to be insulting? Was it the emboldening effect of the florid penmanship on the envelope? The certainty of whom the violet ink was from? Or was it—the most astonishing fact—her realization that she didn’t fear having the letter in her hand?
She refrained from opening it until she’d shampooed her hair, and even after reading it through to the bit about Conkling’s wanting to see the Observatory, she felt no great alarm. Since the extra funds for the Transit arrived, she’d felt almost in league with him. It was their little secret, and sitting with this odd piece of knowledge each day in the Observatory, a place that always made her feel how little she knew, was strangely fortifying. And now, thanks to Hugh Allison’s sentiments, however peculiarly expressed, she could stand by the window and read this letter without jumping out of her skin. Yes, she was more confident than she’d been that day in May when the last of Conkling’s missives had arrived.
She slipped the letter back into her dress pocket and put up her not-quite-dry but progressively-less-hennaed hair. She trotted back downstairs, hoping, and failing, to escape the parlor without exciting comment.
“Going out again?” asked Louis Manley. “It’s nearly eight o’clock. And quite dangerous, I should say.”
“She’s got a beau to protect her,” said Dan Farricker.
“Oh?” was all Mrs. O’Toole added to that. The failure of Mr. Allison, that charming South Carolinian, to reappear here at 203 F Street was a sore point with the landlady, and ascribed to the selfish dictates of the dried-up Mrs. May.
A moment later the same Mrs. May was listening to the sparrows and on her way, with a fast, light step, to the corner of Third and D. She looked forward to Mary Costello’s merriment, as well as her assistance with a quite sublunary matter. She found the astrologer in the little room at the back of the house, finished with the dinner Charles had brought and preparing what she announced would be her last dispatch to Conkling while he was still on the Continent. “Mr. Sharpe and Mr. Arthur have been in the city, negotiatin’ with Mr. McCormick—at the insistence of the President himself,” she said, with a slight uncertainty as to whether she had all the names right.
“I’ve read all that,” said Cynthia, as if she were still a customer who deserved better. Perhaps one reason she couldn’t take Conkling’s letter too seriously was the silliness of the political atmosphere in which he fumed. Mr. McCormick, the assistant Treasury Secretary, had just been hoist on the petard of the administration’s reforms: while he was ordering Sharpe and Arthur to clean out the Custom House, somebody had gotten around to reminding him that he now had to resign his post on the party’s national committee.
“Have you told Senator Conkling that our local Lucy Webb Hayes Temperance Society has proclaimed its opposition to the railroad strike?” Cynthia laughed at the folly of it all, but Madam Costello, after a moment’s consideration, shook her head: “No, he has a liking for Mrs. Hayes. A respectfulness, I should say. He’s a complicated one, our War God is.”
“Suit yourself,” said Cynthia. She wished her companion believed a little more in fresh air. The room was dark, and it smelled of cabbage and cat.
“I’ll tell you what I also don’t tell the man,” said Mary Costello.
“And what’s that?”
“I don’t tell him that Mrs. Sprague has rented out her Edgewood mansion for the summer—to no less than Mr. Schurz and the Postmaster General!”
Cynthia smiled. She was sure that Kate Chase Sprague, wherever she might be in Europe, hadn’t informed Conkling she was providing a cool summertime perch to two members of the detested Cabinet.
“Come, Mary, let’s take a walk.”
The astrologer made a face, but Cynthia insisted, and as the older woman put on her hat, the younger one said, “Before we go I want to give you this.” She handed Madam Costello a slim printed pamphlet, just struck off at the G.P.O., titled “Orbital Calculations of D’Arrest’s Periodical Comet, 1877.” Its authorship was identified only as “United States Naval Observatory,” but the astrologer, quite aware of what Cynthia’s little gift meant, got suddenly teary. “Oh, sweetheart” was all she said, knowing full well that Mrs. May would not actually be able to admit or discuss how this inscrutable, number-filled quarto embodied a friendship with Mr. Allison that four months ago had been just a flight of mortified fancy. The pamphlet was scientific proof of their connection, or at least its beginnings, and to Mary Costello it was practically a baby.
The two women walked to the Mall, across which ran a set of railroad tracks. On each side some blue-coated soldiers kept a listless watch.
“The Army must be feedin’ these fellers regular,” said Mary. “Else the brass would have to worry about the boys ripping up those wooden ties themselves.”
“I suspect somebody’s doing just that farther up the line,” said Cynthia, who then confided: “That’s why Mr. Allison and I will be taking our excursion on the water next week.”
“Are you lookin’ to know a propitious hour for that?” The planet reader wanted to repay the gift of the pamphlet.
“No,” said Cynthia, avoiding Mary Costello’s gaze and looking westward down the Mall. “It’s something distinctly material I need. The name of someone who can fashion a device to prevent conception.”
“Sweet Jaysus!”
“Oh, don’t get modest with me, Mary. And don’t tell me what-was-her-name in Chicago didn’t—”
“Iris Cummings.”
“Didn’t acquaint you with such things.”
“Bu
t you’re talkin’ about Chicago.”
“The same people exist in every place, and you know them all. Mary.”
“Well, I suppose—”
“Good. And later on, after you’ve gotten me this device, you can tell me the most propitious time to stop using it.”
During these early days of his administration, Admiral Rodgers continued to conduct much of his business with the astronomers in the late evening hours, when they were on the scene making observations. Between appointments at his desk he could wander over to the Great Equatorial or the 9.6-inch or the Transit Circle and keep learning what their real activities entailed.
Thus it was already growing dark on Monday, July 30, when Hugh entered the gates for his meeting with the superintendent. Atypically enough, he was early, and so he strolled to a point on the grounds where, in sight of the river, he positioned himself under a lamp to give a second reading to his mother’s latest, and somewhat alarming, letter from Charleston. The losses at piquet were once sustainable. But what he has whirled away at the roulette wheel (whose discovery behind Dr. Brown’s surgery has brought quite justifiable shame to your father and his reckless friends)—well, I cannot remember how I began constructing this sentence, but suffice it to say that it beggars all description. His losses are infinitely worse than those incurred during what he still cheerfully calls the “panics” of ’59 and ’66—whose full dreadfulness I shielded you from in your youth. Except for the house (and my soul shakes to think what secret liens may attach to it), we are quite nearly ruined …
Because his mother’s alarm and father’s cheer galloped in a close race, Hugh found it difficult, even on a second reading, to tell just how dire these current reverses really were. He skipped the letter’s last part, remembering its implication that he really ought to be home, and that even less honor attached to his continuing absence at this federal institution than to his sister’s marriage to “that Philadelphia banker,” sure to be of no help during the current crisis.
He looked out upon the Plymouth and Essex—poised, one might think, to fire upon the Observatory as if it were Fort Sumter, a shelling he had actually witnessed as a boy. Because of Cynthia, he had given the war more thought in the last four weeks than he had during its own four years. The other day, in a supply room upstairs, Mr. Harrison had pointed out a windowpane scratched with the nickname of Matthew Maury’s daughter and the initials of her playmates, and Hugh had actually been able to follow the clerk’s long, poignant story of how the Observatory’s last antebellum superintendent had had to resign his post and go home and serve his native Virginia.
He felt light-headed going into the building. Pressing the back of his hand to his forehead, he thought of Cynthia’s coolness to the touch, the invigorating chill she had not lost even in their moment of excitement in his rooms. Outside the admiral’s office he found Lieutenant Sturdy—much better, thank you—chatting with Captain Piggonan and Henry Paul. “Going in to see the old man?” asked the latter.
“Yes,” said Hugh, as the juice of Sturdy’s tobacco struck the inside of the spittoon they stood near.
“Well, give him what he wants,” advised Hugh’s youngest colleague.
Admiral Rodgers did not look up from the book he held in front of his face, a Royal Astronomical Society publication, from 1857: “Report on the Observatories of His Highness the Rajah of Travancore,” by John Allan Brown, F.R.S. “One of my opposite numbers,” said the admiral, finally putting the monograph down. “Who worked on a smaller but even more difficult stage. I read these things to cheer myself up. Sit down.”
A fly buzzed through the unscreened window and Hugh nodded, knowing he had nothing to say.
“Have you seen your friend Commodore Sands?” asked Rodgers.
“Not for a while, sir. He’s in the country.”
“To which he still removes his family every summer. He told me he nearly died the one time he lingered here.”
Hugh expressed a wish for the commodore’s long life.
“Look at this,” said Rodgers, handing a letter across his desk. “Not as good as a death certificate, but useful nonetheless.” Dr. Alexander Garrett, a physician at the Observatory around the time Hugh was born, pronounced himself ready to say that Professor James Ferguson—who back in the 1850s had seen a number of new asteroids through the 9.6-inch—had died, like so many of his colleagues, “due to malarial agencies.”
Rodgers got up from his desk and went over to the window. With most of his back to Hugh, he continued speaking. Half his musings seemed intended for whatever spirit of place might be hovering outside in the evening haze. “These constant eruptions requiring the Army,” he said softly. “They want my brother-in-law dispatching troops against railway ruffians, against Indians in the Dakota, against bandits down in Mexico. They want the Navy to stop these mobs in California from terrifying all the poor Chinamen looking for work.” He paused for a second or two. “Mr. Hall tells me Mars is now approaching closer to us than it’s been since the time of Antietam. Maybe that accounts for our current bellicosity. It almost makes one believe in astrology, doesn’t it?”
Hugh was about to say no, it didn’t, an opinion that Cynthia’s recently confessed acquaintance with the Irish planet reader had done nothing to change. But the sight of Rodgers, at a low ebb and still not arrived at his point, kept him silent.
“And with all this going on,” the admiral finally concluded, “I’m supposed to gain us the government’s attention.”
“I’m afraid I have nothing new to propose,” said Hugh, relieved to be out with it.
“I didn’t think you did,” the superintendent said, coming back to his desk. “I felt sure that if you had something, you’d have been in to see me before now. I suppose you could be in here proffering some list of excuses, and I do thank you for not doing that. But the fact of your relative uselessness remains. I must, I’m afraid, tell you that in my current state of mind, and in our current state of affairs, ‘Orbital Calculations of D’Arrest’s Periodical Comet, 1877’ interests me rather less than ‘Report on the Observatories of His Highness the Rajah of Travancore.’ ”
Hugh suppressed a smile, which was altogether quashed by the admiral’s sudden directive: “I’m putting you on a sunspot watch with Mr. Todd. What we can do in that realm may not be much, but it seems to interest the meteorologically minded chief of the Signal Corps, and I’d rather have him in my debt than fighting me, the way I’m fighting with Lieutenant Hoxie and the Corps of Engineers. I don’t care if they built that wall on the northern perimeter. It was the District that ordered it—trying to cut us off even further, I suppose—and it’s the District that’s damn well going to pay for it. But as I say, I’ll take allies wherever I can find them. If the Signal Corps wants its sunspots, that’s good enough for me. But it’s not good enough for you, meaning for the talents I’ve been led to believe you possess. I suppose I should ask how goes your letter-writing.” He gave the term an extended, feminine trill, and Hugh took the insult. What else could he do? Talk about Gauss’s notebooks?
“The letters go well enough, sir. The ones relative to next year’s transit of Mercury—”
“They don’t take special skill, do they?”
“No, sir.”
“Which is why, Mr. Allison, I’ll be recommending to Professor Pickering that he find a place for you back in Cambridge. I’ve already written him a letter—and dated it September the fifteenth. I’ll keep it in my drawer until then. And not one day longer.”
“Yes, sir.”
With no word of good-bye, Rodgers took up his book, transporting himself back to Travancore and someone’s even harsher lot of astronomical administration. Hugh was left to show himself out and then, aimlessly, up to the Great Equatorial, where he saw Asaph Hall switching his intense gaze between the eyepiece and his notes and back again.
Hugh approached George Anderson, a Scottish jack-of-all-trades around the Observatory, possessed of as much motherwit as the rest of them h
ad training, and whose assistance Hall preferred above all others’. The two of them were a respectful, odd pair—the Scotsman so peppery and the Yankee so grave—as unlikely in their way as Hugh Allison and Cynthia May.
“He’s still excited about his white spot, isn’t he, Anderson?”
“But of course, Mister Ally. Do you know he’s knocked a whole quarter-hour off the length of Saturn’s day? Every book you’ll find down in that library is fifteen whole minutes off, because they never had something so noticeable as that white spot to fix on every time she comes round.”
“Yes,” said Hugh, not much interested. “I suppose that’s so.”
“Now don’t it, Mr. Ally, make you wonder what else those books might be wrong about?”
Hugh watched Anderson hurry back to Asaph Hall.
“And you’re certain you still want to go?”
“Yes,” Cynthia insisted, despite the tearing wind and rain. “We’re here, aren’t we? And it’s marvelously cool.”
She held Hugh’s umbrella while he handed a dollar, the cost of two tickets, to the Mary Washington’s paymaster. The crowd at the Seventh Street wharf was smaller than usual for a weeknight excursion, but the boat hadn’t canceled its run. For all the tree branches and litter blowing across the city, the atmosphere was calmer than it had been a few nights before. The riots in Pittsburgh and Baltimore were said to have subsided, and meetings to settle the strikers’ demands were reported to be in progress. It looked as if Mrs. O’Toole would keep getting her seven-cent bread, after all. “Fourteen loaves for what you just spent,” Cynthia now told Hugh, in the only manner she could comfortably use to convey her thanks.
The two of them marched arm in arm between garlanded banisters to the upper-deck’s grand saloon. The sofas and chairs that awaited them there were less plush and preposterous than what furnished Hugh’s rooms on High Street, but still fancy enough to make Cynthia think of her landlady’s parlor with renewed contempt. While a piano player warmed up for a vocal concert by Professor Piscorio, the couple lowered themselves into a small love seat and regarded their multiple reflections on the saloon’s mirrored walls.
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