“They have him writing out most of the announcements to the other observatories,” Cynthia explained. “Or at least adding some custom touches to the typeset broadside.”
“So they don’t need me for even that. You know,” he said, shutting his eyes, aware of the pain he was about to inflict, “they’re going to let me go by the fifteenth of next month.”
Cynthia listened without turning toward him, so he wouldn’t see the tears that had welled. “I assumed as much” was all she said. “And, oh, I forgot to tell you. The old commodore sends you his good wishes. More sincere than those the admiral dispatched.”
She sat down beside him with a freshly dipped washcloth. “Now tell me: when you looked into the mirror yesterday, did your lips appear purplish?”
“How do you know to ask all this?”
“I did some reading at the Peabody, an hour before I got here. I’d begun to have my suspicions.”
“My darling, self-improving Cynthia. When Dr. Kelly arrives, please give yourself some relief. Go hear the lecturer at Forrest Hall.”
“No. I’ll want to stay. Besides, I dislike that place. What’s now the auditorium was a gaggle of prison cells during the war.”
Hugh moaned. “Oh, not the war again. Always the war. Don’t you know we all die?”
“No one here is going to die,” she said, briskly sponging his forehead. But as she looked into his eyes, she could see that he had not been remarking on his own sickness. He really had been speaking of the whole vale of tears. She made him drink another glass of Apollinaris water.
“Do you understand the problem of the glare?” he asked. “Why it is those two moons were always invisible?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Then think by analogy. Think how, if bright planets have moons, bright stars must have planets.”
His own eyes were shining now. She had the feeling he was at last prepared to explain his vision, and that she, knowing how little was left to lose, was prepared to listen. She knelt down beside him, and turned his face toward her. The skin was livid and would soon be flushed. “Tell me,” she said. “This light you talk about sending forth into the universe. Who is supposed to see it? Is it the same as those patterns in the drawings?” She pointed to the pictures on the wall.
“Did you know there’s supposed to be a total eclipse of the moon tonight?” he asked. He stared at her, and she realized that he was not changing the subject. “No one will see it for all the clouds,” he said.
“Which means no one will see us for the clouds.”
He looked at her and whispered “yes,” knowing she was ready to understand him.
“Tell me what you want to do.”
“Hand me the lamp,” he said, softly. Once she brought it from the table, he sat up and held the glass cone just beneath his chin. “I want to stand inside a light that will travel for hundreds of years, and still be as young as I was when somebody finally spots it.”
“Your ‘immortal longings.’ ”
“Yes.”
“You want to communicate with those faraway creatures.”
“No,” he said, sinking back onto the pillow. “I just don’t want to die.”
She could not let him lose the energy to tell her the rest. “Here,” she said, pouring another glass of water. “You’ll need this when the sweating starts. Now tell me, how would these creatures, supposing they were even to look at Earth, ever find you?”
He managed a smile. “I’d have to stand out, wouldn’t I? Go get the newspaper. No, not today’s, the one on the chair.”
He wanted her to look at the Evening Star from August 4th, at an item he’d circled with a black crayon. “What would you think, as a stranger to this country and city, if you came upon that?”
This morning the President, accompanied by his son, Webb C. Hayes, visited the monument office at the City Hall, to examine the plan of Mr. Larkin G. Meade for the completion of the Washington monument. Mr. Meade’s plan is to place on the column, as it now stands, a figure of Washington, 85 feet in height, of hammered bronze.
“I should think,” said Cynthia, “that this must have been a great, unusual man.”
“I wouldn’t care about that. Only that he was still, in his way, conspicuous. Your eye would go right to him. Especially if he were lit up.”
“What would it take to make this happen?” asked Cynthia.
“Are you talking about Mr. Meade’s scheme, or mine?”
“Yours.”
He laughed, and turned over on his side. “Equipment as expensive as it is unwieldy.”
She said nothing for a time. Then she whispered, “You need to sleep.” Unexpectedly, he obliged.
This could only be the fever talking. Whatever vision those drawings involved, it was surely not so lunatic as this. She would wait until the whole paroxysm was over. Then she would ask again, and find out what he really meant.
But when she reached down to feel his forehead, it was perfectly temperate.
“Please, sir, there’s no need for you to stand in line.”
Lieutenant Sturdy had recognized Roscoe Conkling but not Mrs. May, who was on the senator’s arm, closely cloaked and bonneted against the evening rain.
“Nonsense,” said Conkling, glad to display his egalitarianism to the queue behind the telescope.
Visitors to the Great Equatorial were fewer but more choice than they had been a week ago. While encouraged by the great public interest, Admiral Rodgers had decided to restrict viewing to invited guests and those with specially requested passes; after a week of open doors, his temper had erupted over a smashed chronometer, three stolen library books, and all the grime tracked in on the boots of a thousand Washingtonians eager for diversion during the late-summer heat. Since the moons’ discovery, the seasonal round of fevers had kept three astronomers and two of the watchmen away from the premises. Tonight, Lieutenant Sturdy, who had yet to make a full recovery from the attack he’d suffered in June, was on duty by himself to deal with callers.
Because the arrival of Conkling’s carriage at Mrs. O’Toole’s would have produced a bedlam of curiosity and comment, he had picked up Mrs. May at Madam Costello’s, making it clear, as soon as he arrived, that both the trip to the Observatory and the dinner that followed would be à deux. Moving up the line now, he pointed out a wealthy spinster who’d set her cap for the widowed Vice President, and two rows ahead of her the unfortunate Mr. and Mrs. Henry Rathbone, whom Cynthia had recognized on her own. They had been sent passes by Professor Harkness, their neighbor in Lafayette Square, and were even now, a dozen years after accompanying the Lincolns to Ford’s Theatre, exciting the whispers and nudges commanded by the freakish. Upon realizing who they were, young Mr. Todd stopped briefly in the tracks he was making to a temporarily installed five-inch equatorial, through which he had decided to find a trans-Neptunian planet and make a name for himself as great as Asaph Hall’s. Hall himself, exhausted after three weeks of monitoring his discoveries, was unlikely to appear tonight, even if the skies should clear.
“This will be the first time you’ve ever held my hand beneath the light of two moons,” said one young lady to her swain, repeating an already overused piece of popular wit. Cynthia wondered if the girl might be Miss Ellen Gray and, more alarmingly, whether Conkling might now be inspired to some amorous talk of his own.
In fact, he frowned, as if suddenly recalled to his serious involvement with the public purse strings. “Tell me exactly what I shall be seeing, Mrs. May.”
“With what’s left of the clouds, probably nothing but a splotch in the southeast sky. I’m afraid we’ve led you ‘this way to the egress.’ ”
When they reached the instrument, he insisted she look first, and kept his hand on her back while she bent to the eyepiece. For all the rumors coming from Europe—tales of Italian astronomers seeing great channels, possibly even canals, on the nearer-than-ever planet—Cynthia saw no sign of either stripes or moons.
She straightened up
until her gaze was level with the senator’s. “The War God without his attendants, I fear. I’m sorry.”
“I assure you, Mrs. May, I have all my troops in place.” He flashed her his wild, white smile, unstained by tobacco, before leaning down to take a three-second look at Mars, which might have been an assembly district not worth carrying.
“Let me take you to my world,” he said, coming back up.
Tonight that world was armed and roaring. Before leaving on a trip to Ohio and the South, the President had finally demanded the resignations of Arthur, Sharpe, and Cornell—and all three had refused to tender them. Still, in his carriage on their way to the Arlington Hotel, Conkling insisted on hearing more of Cynthia’s own story, what she’d begun telling him on the ride out to Foggy Bottom. Passing the empty pedestal of Washington’s Monument—and trying not to think of whatever strange illumination Hugh Allison imagined putting atop it—she recalled to Roscoe Conkling how, as an eleven-year-old girl in ’53, she had seen a few of the last stones set into the base of the obelisk, before the money and national unity required for the work ran out.
“You precede me,” said Conkling, his teeth still visible in the shuttered cab. “I did see them hoist some of the marble to the Capitol dome, but I can’t claim an acquaintance with our history as long as yours.”
“But I’ve been only an observer of history, not one of its makers.” Good God, she was better at this—which was to say, worse—than she’d been writing that first note to him. She ought to be blushing with shame, but here in the dark what would be the point? There was nothing to do but laugh, which is what he began to do as well. They were on to each other, or so at least it would seem. But how could they be, when she wasn’t on to herself, wasn’t half certain of her plan, let alone whether this barrel-chested warrior with his glistening forelock could really, somehow, save Hugh from the admiral. But here she was, playing with fire, after six months of grasping at quicksilver.
“Now, Mrs. May, you will be a maker of history one day. You doubtless know it was I who presented the women’s suffrage petition to the Senate before the end of its last session.”
“Thank you,” she said, laughing. “But no, thank you.”
“You’re indifferent to the franchise? To equality?”
“I’m indifferent to democracy, Senator Conkling. I’ve seen the mad shuffle of administrations—six different ones I can now recall myself. All the scrambling for someone else’s place as soon as the election-night music stops. What good does it do anybody?”
“Ah,” said Conkling, shimmering at the prospect of friction. “A reformer.” What could be more exciting than to subdue this laughing, strong-minded woman? She was better than he’d let himself hope.
“No, sir,” she replied. “I’m afraid I’m your ally, at least in opposition to what people call reform. But I should really prefer a king: no spoils or ‘merit,’ just one long, steady reign giving way to another, the clerks peacefully dying at their desks, the monarch doing the same on his throne.”
“You’re medieval, Mrs. May. Where would you put yourself in such a world? Inside a cloister?”
“No,” she answered. “I too much prefer the company of men. And I don’t generally like Papists. I suppose that’s undemocratic of me, too. As a girl, I remember clapping with glee when they told us someone had stolen the Pope’s gift of a stone from the monument back there and thrown it into the Potomac.”
“You make me wish I were a Catholic and a reformer,” whispered Conkling, leaning forward as if he might begin wrestling with her right here in the carriage.
The two of them laughed so heartily that a small bottle in her dress pocket banged against the armrest. She pulled it out to satisfy Conkling’s curiosity. “Schenck’s Pulmonic Syrup,” she explained, since it was too dark for him to read the label. “For a friend.”
“A queenly act of kindness,” he said, warming back up to the medieval theme.
She just smiled, with teeth not so bright as his. She would let him assume that her errand of mercy was for someone at the boardinghouse. In fact, she’d been carrying the bottle around all day, so nervous about tonight she’d forgotten to leave it in Hugh’s mail slot inside Mr. Harrison’s office. His paroxysms had stopped nine days after Dr. Kelly commenced treatment, and the great question now was how severe the recurrences, sure to take place every two or three weeks, would turn out to be.
“Malaria?” asked Conkling, to her surprise.
“Yes,” she answered, evenly.
“Dreadful business. I had a touch of it myself last year.”
She could feel his fears (Mary Costello had told her about the climacteric) and how immediately he wanted to be rid of the subject. Once the carriage reached the Arlington, he banished the topic with a practical gesture, ordering the driver to have someone in the hotel dispatch a large case of quinine to Mrs. May’s address. “I don’t care if it requires their getting Milburn’s to open up at this hour. Tell them I want it done.”
She gratefully tapped the back of his hand as he led her into the hotel dining room, where he was immediately approached by two partisans: a member of the Pennsylvania delegation and an undersecretary of state from Grant’s last Cabinet. Cynthia withdrew a few steps to a point where only the War God’s voice could be heard: “Meanwhile, we’ve succeeded in removing him.” The hearty laughter of Conkling’s auditors made her understand that they were speaking of Hayes and his trip.
The senator settled for broiled shad and seltzer, but delighted in Mrs. May’s order of oyster soup, venison, and a blancmange dessert. She was happy to let him perceive her appetite as a kind of prestidigitation, instead of the poverty-instinct it actually was.
“Now add up the tariff.” Conkling pointed her attention to the prices on the stiff cardboard bill. He knew of her numerical skills from Madam Costello, and her speed in performing this second stunt pleased him as much as her eating had.
“It isn’t anything special,” she said. “A bit like being double-jointed.”
He reached across the plates and linen and took her fingers. “Are you double-jointed, too, Mrs. May?”
“No,” she said, surprised at her ability to leave her hand in his. “Just slightly arthritic.”
The remark pleased him more than her acquiescence would have. A scratch or slap, she realized, would have delighted him.
“Our special session doesn’t begin until the fifteenth of next month,” he explained briskly. “I shall be back a week or so beforehand. I usually stay here, but I’ll be at Wormley’s this year instead.” Everything about the Arlington—its worn furniture, slow messengers, and clumsy bootblacks—had begun to irritate him. On the train down for this quick trip he had decided to have all his things, including the pulleys and punching bag, transferred to new quarters.
“How will you occupy yourself for the next five weeks?” she asked. “Can you obstruct the Administration from so great a distance?”
Charmed once more, he let his laughter peal. “Oh, there’s much that can and will be done, Mrs. May. Our state convention begins in Rochester on the twenty-sixth—and how I wish you could be there! That would give you a taste for politics!”
“Will our friend be helping to tailor your rhetoric?”
At this reference to Mary Costello, Conkling’s smile disappeared entirely. “Why do you consult her?” he asked, as if ordering Mrs. May to take on his own embarrassment over such a weakness.
“She amuses me,” said Cynthia, who all at once despised herself for not saying, simply, that Mary was her friend. “I like to ponder the correspondences between her heavens and mine.”
“Typology?” asked Conkling. “The Old Testament prefiguring the New?”
“Yes,” said Cynthia. “Something like that.”
The maitre d’, having only now been made aware of Conkling’s presence, scurried over to the table and interrupted: “Sir, how fine it is to see you! And Madame, a pleasure.” So excited was he by Conkling’s return—and on
such a day of political swordsmanship—that he quite forgot himself and burbled over: “And shall we soon have the pleasure of seeing Mrs. Sprague again, too?”
Conkling looked at the man as if he might horsewhip him. “Mrs. Sprague will soon be home from Europe and in Rhode Island for a time. With the governor. Her husband.”
On every occasion the maitre d’ could recall, Conkling had gloried in inquiries like the one just made. Mortified to realize that this was not to be such an instance, the dining room manager beat the humblest of retreats.
Conkling turned back to his guest: “Are you ready for your carriage, Mrs. May?”
“Yes,” said Cynthia, knowing that this time she was supposed to be; and that next time, when no carriage would be called, she would have to be prepared to stay.
A week and a half later, on Sunday, September 16, Hugh and Cynthia arrived in Annapolis an hour early for an appointment he’d made at the naval academy. He had hardly stopped talking on the train from Washington, and now, while they killed time strolling through the graveyard of Saint Anne’s Church, he was still barely pausing to take a breath.
“Do you think I need spectacles from Alexander’s? Of course, if this haziness is just some temporary effect of the fever, I don’t want to be stuck with them. I couldn’t count the number of pairs my father’s gone through—never manages to hang on to them. Mother used to say he’s lost as much at the optician’s as at the gaming tables. Now, your eyes seem to me to be absolutely extraord—”
“We’ll see about the glasses when we’re back,” she said as patiently as she could. She didn’t know about his eyesight, but this nattering certainly was part of the disease, an aspect of the febrile excitement that rose from the sufferer in the interval between the clustered paroxysms. Hugh’s gaze was darting and inattentive, and he couldn’t keep his hands still. Otherwise, he seemed to feel fine. His spirits were high, and for the moment he was experiencing less physical discomfort than she. Four days after Conkling’s visit, having saved up the money since June, she had had a wisdom tooth pulled by Dr. McFarlan.
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