Two Moons

by Thomas Mallon

  “Hall was there until things fogged over,” said Hugh. “Just him and George Anderson. He gave up about an hour ago, and he did the strangest thing before he left.”

  “What was that?”

  “He locked his observer’s book in a desk drawer. I’ve never seen anyone do that before.”

  Cynthia dismissed the behavior with a shrug, relieved to have at least some evidence that Hugh had actually been on the premises tonight. Lucid with coffee, she was now determined to force him on to another subject: “You have to tell me the exact state of things between you and Admiral Rodgers.”

  “Things between us are perfectly fine,” said Hugh, signaling the waiter for their bill.

  “They’re obviously not.”

  “If you don’t change the subject, I shall sing. Or order another whiskey.”

  “Tell me what he—”

  “In the gloaming …” He lilted loudly enough that two of the drunkards at the bar ceased their argument and made ready to join in.

  Mortified, she seized his hand. “All right, all right. Fanny Christian had a scandalous letter from a friend who’s on her honeymoon.”

  “That’s better,” he said, subsiding.

  “Now take me out of here.”

  It was unspoken, not unclear, that they would end up in his rooms, but for a while they walked with no set destination. Two blocks’ movement north brought them to Gay Street, and by way of apology, Hugh finally put his arm around her waist. Too weary to refuse the gesture, Cynthia leaned closer to him, and they turned the corner in silence, the whitewashed planting boxes at the foot of the trees helping to guide their steps through the dark.

  She was the first to see several people, a whole family, kneeling beneath a cherry tree in the front garden of no. 18. She squeezed Hugh’s arm, and the two of them halted, uncertain what to do next, having intruded on a scene that ought to be taking place indoors. Cynthia looked for a light inside, shifting her eyes from the crouched, murmuring figures toward the bay windows. But the house’s interior was entirely dark, the people in the garden visible only from a lamp in the hand of Angeline Hall, who was leading her family in prayer. The wavering light flared against the cheekbones of her gaunt face, which looked up at the sky as her free hand urged little Angelo to look up with her. She seemed to be both surveying and beseeching the heavens, as if they were on the verge of revealing something spectacular for the first time. Her husband, Asaph, stole just a single glance upward, concentrating on whatever course of prayer his wife was directing.

  “What could have brought them out here?” Cynthia whispered to Hugh. But he was already creeping comically away, his steps as high and stilted as an insect’s. With a finger to her lips, she implored him not to make her laugh and give them away. Only after he’d disappeared around the corner, did she start after him, desperate to be away from the Halls’ miserable worship, and irrationally frightened that Hugh was somehow gone forever.

  She ran through the dark, clutching her reticule, which contained the device Madam Costello had finally procured. She knew that tonight she would not use it, that she would press on the small of his beautiful back and hold him inside her, make him give her a child, as if his sex were the center of the universe and she the god of all creation.

  “They’re cheering for you, Father.”

  “Yes, my darling,” said Roscoe Conkling to his daughter, Bessie. He smiled modestly, and did not look up from the pile of mail and newspapers she had brought to his usual suite at Bagg’s Hotel here in Utica, in time for his arrival a half hour before. When she’d gone into the other room for a moment, he had raised the window just high enough that he might hear the crowd swell and chant. Still smiling over her discovery of this action, she was nonetheless impatient for him to take his place on the balcony and make the appearance the crowd had been ordered to come out and cheer. But he continued to feign indifference. Looking through the serials that had piled up in his two months’ absence, as if the latest number of Appleton’s compared in importance to the full-throated electorate outside, he asked her for a second time whether she was truly pleased with Malone’s edition of Shakespeare, the present he’d brought her from England.

  “It delights me, Father. It will be the only Shakespeare in the house you haven’t underlined for bits of rhetorical weaponry. Unless, of course, you marked it aboard ship while preparing something for tonight.”

  Without looking up, he smiled, trying to convey gratitude at her having spared him the sight of her fiancé this evening. “Have you looked through some of these papers you’ve brought me, my dear? It seems the Norfolk and New Orleans collectors have been getting the same scrutiny as our Mr. Arthur.”

  “Yes, Father, I’ve kept up with everything. You’ll see that the same men in the Administration who couldn’t understand why you went away are now wondering what’s made you come back so early.”

  Conkling chuckled, and inclined his head toward the window. The crowd had begun a triumphalist rendition of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

  “Sir?” said Lewis Herbert, chairman of the welcoming committee. He, too, was eager to get Conkling before the crowd, but feared disrupting the War God’s anticipatory savor. “I’m sure they’ll be keen to hear you prognosticate about the President’s message to Congress.”

  “Oh, yes,” laughed Conkling. “Tell me: Do you, too, believe he’ll propose setting up a commission to arbitrate the next big labor strike?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “One could hardly expect different from an Administration invented by a commission.”

  Mr. Herbert threw his head back twice, indicating not only that this was a very good piece of wit indeed, but that, no, he had not forgotten who’d created the electoral commission ex nihilo.

  Conkling still seemed in no hurry. This noisy welcome, smoothly churned out by the machine’s local gears, would be the fourth one accorded him since Friday evening, when the Neckar had sailed past Governors Island and been greeted by trumpets, cannon fire, and the hoarse roar of every Custom House man aboard the Thomas Collyer, which had been chartered to run alongside Conkling’s vessel. An observer on shore would have thought the machine had its own navy. Conkling had taken salutes from two other steamers in the harbor, and resisted being so unmanly or ungrateful as to stopper his ears against the thirty tugboats all blowing their whistles at once. He’d just clenched his teeth and tipped his hat, provoking another round of huzzahs and the comic tootling of “Hail to the Chief” by a pipe organ he never succeeded in locating through the salt spray and darkening sky.

  The men from the Collyer had not let him disembark from the Neckar before boarding it themselves. They would have transferred him to the ferry on their shoulders had his formidable dignity not interfered. As it was, the crush of congratulation—about exactly what, no one seemed certain—delayed the party’s arrival at the Fifth Avenue Hotel until past 11 P.M. But the hundreds waiting in Madison Square with torches and banners and an urgent need for encouragement from their returning chieftain stayed fixed to the pavements until he arrived to excoriate their blue-nosed enemies.

  It had been the same in Albany and Schenectady, and it would be the same here in Utica, too, thought Lewis Herbert, but only if he could get Conkling out on the balcony. A plaintive look toward Miss Bessie produced a quiet nod and her movement through the French doors, where with a long taper she lit four Chinese lanterns tied to the balcony’s railing. The gesture produced the new level of delirium the crowd understood was now required of it. Finally, even the will of Roscoe Conkling could not resist such a tumult. He rose from his chair, and Lewis Herbert, gathering up the scrolled proclamation with its eight hundred signatures welcoming the senator home, preceded him onto the little stone platform.

  “Sir!” Herbert shouted into the summer night. “We welcome you home to the heart of New York. We welcome you as neighbors, and we pray that, whatever station you may ever adorn, the choicest blessings of heaven will attend you!” At this men
tion of Conkling’s unknown prospects, two great laureled placards—GRANT IN ’80 and CONKLING IN ’84—began waving and did not rest until the senator stepped forward and ordered the crowd’s silence.

  “My friends,” he said, in a quieter voice than they’d expected, “I come back to you a stronger, if not better, American. Comparisons may be invidious, but I have had the chance to make intercontinental ones all summer, and I can tell you I have never been so proud of my country or so content with my countrymen.”

  A dozen grateful flags waved their thirty-eight stars, and a voice at the back, eager to test the universality of Conkling’s compliment to his fellow Americans, cried: “What about Hayes?” The throng erupted in laughter and rhythmic applause, hoping to make the senator pour it on. Before Conkling could answer, two brave voices at the crowd’s center posed another loud question: “What about reform?” They were shouted down by renewed agitation for an answer to the first interrogative. The crowd knew the two questions were really the same, but the first had a better chance of making Conkling dive to the ad hominem depths that might make August 14, 1877, a night to remember. Since Mr. Cornell had just once more refused to resign either his party post or his perch at the Custom House, this could be the moment that Conkling opened a frontal assault upon the Administration.

  But the senator would do things in his own good time. Looking out over all their heads, he declared, in a quite unstentorian voice: “England may have her farflung empire, and her eight centuries of parliamentary rule, but every fair wind of progress and liberty blows more strongly at this country’s back than hers.” Cheers, somewhat less lusty than they might have been, greeted the remark; perhaps the parliamentary reference was the prelude to a first full salvo against the President?

  No. More like Cook than Conkling, the senator went casually on with his travelogue: “English hotels would seem sadly behind the times here. Indeed, they would not be endured by anyone accustomed to the comforts of Bagg’s.” Local pride swelled the roar for this particular observation, but could not banish the confusion and disappointment that were starting to define the crowd’s mood. Was it for this they’d been summoned from every post office and courthouse in four counties? “Telegraphic service in general,” Conkling went on, “is inferior to ours. Railway travel is destitute of comforts and conveniences which here are matters of course.”

  One of the reformist handful worked up the courage to taunt the speaker with a shout of “Hail to the War God!”, daring him to act like the bully he was supposed to be. The faithful, instead of tearing the mocker limb from limb, fell silent, secretly glad for the insult, which might provoke the sort of speech they’d come to hear.

  Stung at last, Conkling snapped off a rejoinder. “Remember it was Vulcan who gave Jove his thunderbolts!” The crowd burst into a bedlam of delight over this allusion to the Electoral Commission. But the senator retracted his artillery as soon as he’d brought it out, returning to his dull memorandum about the severity of the European depression relative to America’s; the undeniable greatness of French paintings; and the magnanimity of the Germans (a nationality well represented on the Utica voting rolls) who, in their conquest of Paris, had chosen to preserve the city’s art instead of plunder it.

  As things turned out, the crowd needn’t have worried. Conkling had always known the moment at which to raise his voice, to take the sharp hook of his invective and yank the crowd up from the first inches of slumber into which it was sinking. “General Grant,” he said, simply, letting the name hang in the air, a subject and predicate both.

  The listeners, now silent and fully alert, prepared for the senator’s verbal evocation of the former President.

  “Honors wait upon him wherever he goes. Unlike myself, he may remain long abroad. But when he returns you will find that all the distinctions poured upon him have not washed out a jot of his Americanism or made him anything save the same upright, downright Republican without cant or palaver.”

  He spat out the last two nouns like bits of gristle, and the true believers roared their approval. The reformers would not dare raise another taunt.

  “He remains a lion,” said Conkling of the general. “Incapable of the flatulent self-righteousness with which these new times are furnished.”

  More roars; leonine ones, the roarers hoped.

  “He would not recognize the politicians who have whined and crept in his wake these past six months. I suspect that they will creep and whine for another short time to come—until they turn around and see how the lion they thought was long gone is charging up from behind! Good night, ladies and gentlemen!”

  He turned on his heel, the tail of his waistcoat slicing the air as he dashed back through the French doors. Bessie glimpsed his high color and sheer happiness. If his crescendo had been lacking in particulars, it hardly mattered. The crowd now knew the essential thing: the bloodlust of political combat was upon Roscoe Conkling. He was ready to push back the legions of change.

  Within five minutes the senator was leading his own parade, marching with Mr. Herbert and other local worthies at the head of a lusty civic mob. Down Genesee Street and along Hopper, the torches daubed the night sky like paintbrushes. Snare drums and tubas heralded what could no longer be doubted: the War God was ready to unmake the President he had made. Block after block, Conkling literally set the pace, his army of favorites rushing to keep up on this opening charge against merit.

  Upon reaching the house at Rutger Park, they saw its four chimneys hung with locomotive lamps. At the sight of them, the tubas gave their best imitation of a train whistle, and Conkling made a dramatic, solitary walk up his driveway to the open front door, where Julia stood, bathed in light.

  “Mrs. Conkling,” he said, with a nod so slight only she could detect this token of thanks for her usual forbearance. Both husband and wife knew that this—not the loudly applauded kiss that followed—would be their most intimate moment for the foreseeable future.

  After what was more the suggestion of a bow than its actual execution, Conkling slipped inside and shut the door. Down at the end of the drive, Bessie sighed and smiled, knowing that her father, before another quarter hour went by, would slip out the back door and into a carriage for the discreet return to Bagg’s.

  Lewis Herbert, having been spared any eruptions of the Conkling temper, mopped his brow in relief over the evening’s success. Turning to the senator’s daughter, he fished for some small compliment: “It can’t have seemed much after the New York and Albany welcomes, but I’m glad he wasn’t too tired to enjoy our own small demonstration.” Miss Conkling merely smiled. Hoping for something more, Mr. Herbert dipped his rod once again. “I meant to say, he seemed in just the right mood to indulge our little effort.”

  “Oh, yes,” said Bessie, “his mood could not have been more lively.” She did not tell Mr. Herbert its real source, which she felt certain lay near the top of the mail stack she’d brought to the hotel. She had taken note of her father’s expression while he read the contents of a small envelope postmarked at Washington and addressed in a spiky, but recognizably feminine, hand.

  “Look up, Mrs. May! There’s a new moon in the sky!”

  Young Angelo Hall was racing down High Street, thrilled to find an even slightly familiar face to whom he could shout his news.

  It was Friday morning, August 17, six days since Cynthia had seen the boy kneeling in his front garden. It hardly mattered trying to disguise the fact that she was coming from Hugh’s rooms. The boy was too excited by his tidings to notice such a thing, and she felt unable to justify the deception, in any case. This might be the first morning in the past five that she had awakened beside Hugh, but there was no getting past the fact that she was a fallen woman now.

  “Tell me what you mean, Angelo.”

  “I’m not supposed to!” cried the boy, tugging the bow at the back of her dress, orbiting around her as if she were a planet. “My papa’s done it! He’s found the moon of Mars!” Saying the words only excited
him further, and he was off on another dash, leaving Cynthia to continue alone on her walk to the Observatory.

  She wondered if Angelo’s proclamation could possibly be true, and whether she should go back and communicate such startling news to Hugh. No, she would keep on her way and let him sleep. The last thing she needed was to start showing up late to her desk. Quickening her step, she noticed how the murky weather of the last several days had finally burned off. Asaph Hall, she knew from Hugh, had been so eager for the skies to clear that two nights ago he had defied the usual prohibition against sleeping at the Observatory. Could it be a Martian moon that he’d been after? And could he actually have found it?

  The mood at the Observatory offered nothing confirmatory. Indeed, everything was so normal—Mr. Harrison sharpening his pencils at 9:00 on the dot, Professor Harkness offering his usual shy goodmorning nod—that one couldn’t imagine any event out of the ordinary having occurred. Unless something so extraordinary had happened, an astronomical occurence of such moment, that it must, for now, be kept secret from peripheral employees like herself. As soon as she removed her bonnet, she reached into the top drawer of her desk for Thomas Dick’s Celestial Scenery, published three years before her birth and passed along to her by a disappointed schoolmate at Miss Wilton’s who’d received it as a prize.

  Along with Principles of Trigonometry, the book had made the long odyssey of rooming houses with Cynthia, and sure enough it had something to say on the subject of the moment: “As Mars ranks among the smallest planets of the system, its satellite, if any exist, must be extremely small … it could scarcely be distinguishable by our telescopes, especially when we consider that such a satellite would never appear to recede to any considerable distance from the margin of Mars.… The long duration of winter in the polar regions of Mars seems to require a moon to cheer the inhabitants during the long absence of the sun; and if there be none, the people of those regions must be in a far more dreary condition than the Laplanders and Greenlanders of our globe.”