Still, the throbbing in her jaw counted for nothing compared to a sudden upturn in their fortunes. For the third time today, as Hugh chattered on, she reminded herself of this, and tried truly to believe it. Deimos and Phobos, despite their names, had proved celestial boons. On Friday afternoon, everyone at the Observatory had gathered in the library for the admiral’s announcement that Professor Newcomb, effective tomorrow, the 15th, would be leaving to assume the directorship of the Nautical Almanac Office. “It is an unequaled opportunity for carrying on the work in mathematical astronomy I have most at heart,” Newcomb himself told his astonished, and not altogether unhappy, audience. Later on, he came in to see Professor Harkness and put things a bit differently: “Over there they’ll give my recommendations the respect that only comes with clear authority. Finally, Harkness, my hands will be untied. I’ve insisted, by the way, on a new office over in the Corcoran Building.”
The real reason for his departure, Cynthia felt sure, was the unbearably bright light now shining upon Asaph Hall. In churning out the various publications of the Almanac Office, Newcomb might get the chance to conduct whatever research he chose; but nothing had ever much prevented him from doing that right where he was. The “annoyances” he complained about to Harkness were more truly the lustful itchings of his own pride, which suffered a fresh wound when the admiral, just a minute after announcing his departure, appeared pleased to get on to more momentous news, reading out a letter that would cover the report he was finally ready to send Secretary Thompson, a compendium of memoranda and death certificates “advocating the removal of the Observatory to a more healthful location, in which the services of the officers on duty at night will meet with no interruptions from malarial influences, and where the fogs arising from the river will not obscure the heavens.” After a dramatic pause, Rodgers had declared, “Toward this end, I am requesting a congressional appropriation of $100,000.” While the astronomers marveled in silence at the vastness of the sum, the admiral informed them that a copy of the “removal report,” as it would henceforth become known, was in Mr. Harrison’s office for their individual perusal.
Before the day was out, Simon Newcomb had asked Mrs. May if she would consider joining him at the Almanac Office for a salary equal to the one she was now paid, and with the opportunity, enjoyed by all the Almanac’s computers and copyists, of working at home. “Thank you, Professor Newcomb,” she’d responded to this man who hadn’t the slightest idea of how people like herself actually lived, “but I can’t think of any more awful privilege.” His startled reply—“Very well, then”—was no doubt the last set of words she would ever hear from him.
Then Friday afternoon brought a second offer of employment, or at least a reprieve. Admiral Rodgers, so occupied with trying to dispel malaria’s influence, suddenly realized he had to deal with the abrupt lifting of Newcomb’s. Aware of his shorthandedness, as well as how unsympathetic it would look to remove a young malarial astronomer at the very moment the Observatory was soliciting congressional pity, the admiral informed Hugh that he could stay on for a while after all. “You will continue working with Mr. Todd, not just on the sunspots, but on his trans-Neptunian search.” Though he took care not to say it, the admiral hoped that pairing Allison and Todd might lead to the sort of teamwork, or rivalry, that could in turn lead to another spectacular like the moons. Rodgers’s whole communication to Hugh had lasted less than a minute, before he and Mr. Harrison were off to deal with one more set of plumbers and plasterers proceeding with the peculiar task of making the present Observatory look as spruce as possible for any powerful visitors who might be able to help get it torn down.
Now, two days later, as Hugh and Cynthia approached the naval academy’s main gate via Hanover Street, she rehearsed all these events, as well as her renewed fantasies, in the privacy of her imagination. She would buy dress shirts for him at Thompson’s; they would have an 8 percent interest account at the Riggs Savings Bank; each night their little son would wave good-bye to his papa as he went off to look at the stars from some new, “healthful location.”
It was all nonsense, and she loathed herself for entertaining it. The academy’s Lover’s Lane, down which they now walked, with Hugh discoursing upon every tree and flagstone, was really still the thinnest of ice, cracked with the perils of further illness and renewed disapproval by the admiral. And yet, she could not stop herself from thinking that she might not need Conkling’s help after all. What if, before she was in too deep, she just avoided another encounter, allowed him to go back to Mrs. Sprague or some other diversion as he brought forth political apocalypse?
They entered the old Government House library, where Hugh’s meeting, arranged several days before Friday’s events, was scheduled to take place. He had been maddeningly merry in withholding its purpose from her, teasing out the possibility it involved some new, sensible ambition, before hinting that, after all, it probably didn’t. She had been, until they boarded the train this morning, fearful of watching him confide his “projection” scheme to another scientific, and after he started jabbering, she had begun to worry that he might not be able to sustain coherence on any subject, let alone his vision.
Hugh and the man he was here to see recognized each other by their conspicuous youth. It turned out, during their opening courtesies, that Mr. Albert Michelson, an instructor of physics at the academy, was even three years younger than Mr. Allison. A childhood emigré from eastern Europe, he had an accent more like the American West than Poland, the result of an upbringing in Virginia City, Nevada.
“Admiral Porter is up in Newport inspecting torpedo stations,” Michelson explained. “This library is really his domain, but he’s not around to see us trespassing over it.”
“Ah, Newport,” said Hugh. “Where you might all still be had things turned out differently.” (He had learned only during today’s train ride that the naval academy had relocated to Newport for the duration of what Cynthia still called, to his amusement, the “rebellion.”)
“Yes,” said Michelson, smiling at the possibility. “But I can tell by your voice that you would have been called home to join the other navy.”
“Weren’t we lucky to have been too young for it!”
Michelson might be more grave in his manner, but Cynthia observed a quick rapport between the two boys, and was relieved to see Hugh, even amidst the pleasantries, making an effort to concentrate.
“Mrs. May,” said Michelson, once Hugh had introduced her, “that is my wife over there—Margaret.”
Cynthia waved at the pretty young woman who sat across the room wearing a sweet expression and a frock that bespoke approaching maternity. The men’s clear expectation was that Mrs. May would go off and join this other member of the sex, but Cynthia took a seat between the two of them.
“How are you feeling?” a now-awkward Michelson asked Hugh.
“Quite all right. A bit of late-summer languor. It was really nothing.”
“They had me as a watch-officer on the Constitution for most of the last few months,” said Michelson, who himself looked none too robust. “Nothing but dried apples to eat most of the time.” After a pause, he asked, “So, did you learn of me from Professor Newcomb? I’ve heard that he’s interested in the speed of light as well.”
“Only in the hopes of outrunning it,” said Hugh. “No, I learned of your interests through our friend Jack Cass.”
“Oh,” said Michelson, recognizing the name of Hugh’s onetime Cambridge colleague. “Well, I thought we might as well come here instead of to my laboratory, because so far all I have is a drawing. As you can see,” he added, holding up a pencil and managing to smile at Cynthia, “it’s very portable.” He began making a diagram in the margin of a newspaper:
Hugh nodded as Michelson laid down each line. He knew, before the other man even said it, that s was meant to represent the light source; m a revolving mirror; l a long-focus lens; and M a plane mirror.
“Tell me,” said Hugh. “If you’re s
uccessful, how far off do you expect your results to be from Foucault’s?”
“Oh, not much at all. He was very close, within a few thousand miles per second, I should think.”
“That’s good,” said Hugh, with a peculiar delight that Cynthia and Michelson both noted, the latter with some perplexity.
Cynthia rose and excused herself and said she could not wait a moment longer to talk with Mr. Michelson’s clearly charming wife. She’d been determined to monitor Hugh’s demeanor, and she’d found it less erratic than she’d feared. But she didn’t have the nerve to hear any more of what he might now say to Michelson. If he didn’t start in on his vision, what else would he speak of?
Twenty minutes later, she and Hugh were back outside the academy’s gates, walking down Annapolis’s wavy brick sidewalks. He was now quite silent. With her palm gently brushing the telegraph poles they were passing, she wondered how anyone could imagine a need to project himself beyond the distances and speed these wires afforded. Strung under the sea, they could convey even Mary’s Costello’s words to England and France.
He slipped his arm around her waist. “Did Mrs. Michelson resent your lack of interest in her baby?”
“Oh,” said Cynthia, laughing as gaily as she could. “Do you think it was so apparent?”
What would he say if he knew the truth? In the bed on High Street he had ceased withdrawing from her because he thought the press of her hands on his back a wordless reassurance that there was no risk of conception; that they needn’t trouble themselves with anything but increasing their mutual pleasure. She had never used the device. But, however silently, she was troubled—by the thought that his misperception might, in a roundabout way, be true; that there was something wrong; that there was no risk of a baby.
“Tell me, please,” she said, “that all this conversation with Mr. Michelson is applicable to finding a trans-Neptunian planet for the admiral.”
He didn’t hear her request. Once more, he had started talking with the rapidity of an engine. “Would you like to go to Philadelphia soon? We could stay with my hateful sister. A quick trip, just long enough for me to see about some equipment. Obtaining the machinery may be the hard part.”
“I don’t want to hear even the easy part,” she said.
“Of course you don’t,” he replied, kissing her neck.
There was a new popular misconception in Washington that, if one held a mirror up to Mars, one would see Deimos and Phobos, no matter that they were invisible to the naked eye. It was a trick of optics, of course; a cheap mirror rendered multiple, diminishing images of the planet itself, an astral body that Cynthia, as she looked into her own mirror to brush her hair on Monday morning, the 24th, would be content never to see again. The new moons had made for so much work at a time when so many people had fallen sick that the healthy ones, like herself, were woefully tired. Professor Harkness had instructed her to take the day off, and she was obliging him. She had risen an hour later than usual, then brought a slice of bread and the newspaper back up to her room. Keeping one eye on the Star while brushing, she noticed that the standoff between Conkling’s men and the President continued. Mr. Arthur was meeting with Secretary Sherman at the Treasury and, no doubt as Conkling wanted, resisting any compromise.
MADAME ROSS.
507 11TH ST.
THE CELEBRATED ASTROLOGIST
AND CLAIRVOYANT.
CURES ALL DISEASES INCIDENT
TO FEMALES.
CONSULTATIONS
STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL.
LADIES $1, GENTLEMEN $1.50.
She spotted this advertisement for one of Mary Costello’s rivals not far from another promising “Happy Relief to Young Men from the Effects of Errors and Abuses in Early Life. Manhood restored. Impediments to marriage removed. New method of treatment. New and remarkable remedies.”
She tried counting the occasions of her intimacy with Hugh. She wound up using her fingers, not from a sudden loss of mathematical prowess, but because she kept pausing over some particular memory of each night and losing track of the tally. The occasions were too few in number to constitute a reliable scientific sampling, but something—she felt more and more certain—was wrong, and it had nothing to do with any “errors and abuses” of his. She had been cursed twice, as regularly as ever, since her first night in the bed on High Street. And yet, at each monthly sign of her apparent fertility, she began hearing the voice of her mother—in particular, the words Ellen Lawrence had said while helping her stagger to a chamber pot the first time she’d bled after Sally’s delivery: You will never again have to worry about that. Her mother had not been talking about the bleeding, but the nearly fatal pain of the child’s Cesarean birth. The reassurance had been echoed, Cynthia could now recall with some effort, by the cluckings of Mrs. Sidney Robinson, a busybody neighbor who late in the war often foisted herself upon Mrs. Lawrence and who that day had sat in a corner of the room marveling over “modern miracles.” At the time, Cynthia herself had been too weak and indifferent to think of anything but collapsing back into bed and cradling her undersized, too-quiet baby girl.
But this morning, thirteen years later, she could think of nothing but Mrs. Robinson’s words, and when she completed dressing, she went immediately downstairs and out of the house. The morning was so hot, and her pace to Mary Costello’s so fast, that she ought to have been carrying a fan, but waving one on the street always made her feel like an insect. She was perspiring heavily by the time she reached Third and D, where the astrologer was ushering out one embarrassed young gentleman, no doubt a troubled office-seeker, and showing in another—Conkling’s lieutenant, who after taking a good look at Cynthia, went off with the latest portents to be telegraphed to his boss in upstate New York.
“Mary,” she said, “please make me a cup of tea.”
“Would coffee suit you as well?”
She thought of the grimy sugar spoon and the milk that would have gone off and asked again for tea, all by itself, if that would be all right. While the kettle boiled, she petted Ra and tried, against the fast beating of her pulse, to remember all she had once tried to forget: the unexpected rush to the Armory Square hospital; the bleeding and infection and delirium; the first sight of Sally, scarcely alive; and afterward, when she was conscious enough to hear them, the moans of wounded soldiers behind a door and down a corridor. She recalled the countenance of one of Miss Dix’s nurses, a mixture of amazement and contempt that a girl could bring a new life into the world at such a time as this and take up a soldier’s bed in order to do it. She had almost died, of course—that’s what Dr. Malcolmson later told her, along with the news that Sally had been lifted out of her at the last possible moment like Caesar or Macduff, a fact that had interested her as a scientific curiosity and nothing more.
“Mary,” she asked, as she was handed her tea. “Do you have a copy of Boyd’s?”
“Over there, dearie. But it’s two or three years old.”
Cynthia put down her cup and went to get the city directory.
“What’s eating at you?”
“He’s not in it,” said Cynthia, double-checking the page.
“Come sit back down and drink your tea.”
“But old Mrs. Robinson’s still around, I know it. I passed her in the street last year.”
“Who ain’t in the directory?”
“An old doctor named Malcolmson. He must have died without my noticing.” Cynthia went on thumbing the directory, looking for where Mrs. Robinson resided—by now no doubt one more poor widow. She had left the Lawrences’ street just after the war.
“Isn’t it Dr. Kelly taking care of our boy up in Georgetown?”
“Dr. Malcolmson is the man who delivered my Sally—or who from my womb ‘untimely ripped’ her.”
“You sound like Shakespeare. Did the War God teach you that?”
Cynthia put her bonnet back on. “I’ve found her.”
“Now Mrs. May, what’s this about?”
“Co
me with me, Mary. I have to see Mrs. Robinson.”
“What’s she supposed to tell you? I can’t walk out of here, girlie. I’ve got one coming at half past twelve.”
“It’s only ten-thirty. Don’t argue with me.”
She required company, wordless support, if she was going to learn for a fact what she’d already deduced. As they walked to Mrs. Robinson’s lodgings at Eleventh and E, the planet reader, sensing an urgency unusual even for Mrs. May, obliged with her silence.
The old woman who responded to the knocker was without a doubt Mrs. Robinson, even if she now lacked two of the teeth that Cynthia had seen in her mouth a year ago on Pennsylvania Avenue.
“Mrs. Robinson, do you remember me?”
“Of course I remember you,” said the old lady, with more suspicion than friendliness. “You’re Ellen Lawrence’s girl.”
“May I speak with you?”
“You already are.”
Cynthia brought Mary Costello with her into the parlor. “May my friend wait out here while we go in there?” She pointed to the old lady’s minuscule bedroom, which had a door they could close.
Left by herself, Madam Costello pitied the old woman’s threadbare surroundings and puzzled over some distant bells and shouts that had begun to make themselves heard through the parlor’s closed window. Ten minutes later, Cynthia emerged and said, “Let’s go.” The astrologer knew not to ask anything until they were outside and walking.
“What is it, darlin’?”
Two Moons Page 19