“Let’s just say that I’ll never have need of that device I asked you to procure for me. I’m sorry I put you to the trouble.”
“I don’t understand, dearie. What could she tell you that you didn’t already know?”
Without slackening her speed down E Street, Cynthia answered: “That after Dr. Malcolmson took Sally out of me, he knotted up my tubes. He reasoned that a second lying-in would kill me, so he left nothing to chance. And saw no need to tell a half-dead widow. He told my mother and her friend Mrs. Robinson instead, and if they told me, it was in terms too vague to be grasped by a convalescent. Mrs. Robinson doesn’t recall that part exactly, but she remembers every word Dr. Malcolmson spoke to her and my mother.”
Mary Costello, out of breath, tried asking another question as carefully as she could: “I’m sorry, dearie. But why would you be wanting—”
“Exactly right, Mary. Why would I be wanting?” Cynthia took another dozen steps before her glance was drawn to a crowd gathering at the intersection of Ninth and F, a block away. “Look,” she said to Mary, relieved by a chance to change the subject. She dragged the astrologer west to investigate the clamor.
The Patent Building, her former place of work, was crowned with flames. The greenhouse over the Ninth Street portico puffed great plumes of black smoke while broken glass crashed onto the sidewalk below. Burning papers rode the air, scintillating into wisps before disappearing altogether. As a team of fire horses rounded the corner, Cynthia recognized, across the street, two girls with whom she’d worked at Interior. She struggled to hear the rumors snaking from one part of the crowd to the next. The Wright and Thompson buildings, over on G, somebody said, were also ablaze. The records of the Indian office were burning just as Red Cloud and Spotted Tail rode the rails to Washington for a peace conference.
At a quarter past noon, the pine roof of the Patent Building’s western wing collapsed, exposing its iron supports like tree trunks during a brutal winter. “There go all the models,” said a sad old-timer, realizing that the room set aside to house so much Yankee ingenuity—a bit of it patented, most of it rejected—was now gone.
“They’re going to need Baltimore!” cried one madly excited clerk a few feet from Cynthia. “They’ve already called out Alexandria!” Without a doubt, the District’s hose carriages, which could barely get through the crowd, were never going to put out the fire by themselves.
“Get back!” cried a policeman. Mary Costello and Cynthia complied as quickly as they could, but not before a tiny, scorched contraption of balsa wood, hinges, and cotton completed its flying journey from the Model Room and landed at Cynthia’s feet. What, had it ever been built, was this invention meant to print or weave or bake? She picked it up and let it cool in her hands.
“Mary,” said Cynthia, “go back to D Street. You can still be there in time for your customer.”
“I can’t leave you here,” the planet reader said. “You’ve got the hysterics.” They both realized that Cynthia had some calm, preternatural variety of them. “What are you going to do?” Madam Costello shouted above the din of horses, clerks, and water.
“I’m going to watch,” said Cynthia. “And think.”
Two Dutchess County delegates regarded Roscoe Conkling on the dais. His forelock seemed more sharply twisted than ever, a perfect corkscrew, and his waistcoat an even brighter shade of blue than he sometimes favored.
“If Schurz thinks he got roasted on Monday …” said the first delegate to the second.
They laughed in anticipation of what the senator might dish out to the Interior Secretary as soon as he rose to address the state convention here in Rochester. Down in Washington, in response to the Patent Office blaze, the Cabinet was meeting without Hayes to discuss fire safety in federal buildings. The President was still off on his travels, and the odds were Conkling would raise a storm over a report that the other day, during his appearance in Atlanta, Hayes had tolerated a display of the Confederate flag.
“I see Cornell,” said the first delegate, pointing the other’s attention to the huge, stone-faced arbiter of the Custom House sitting two chairs away from Conkling. He was in double defiance of the President: having refused to resign his office, he was, by appearing here, also violating the June executive order against political activity.
“But where’s Arthur?” the second delegate wondered.
“They say Sherman’s offering him the Paris consulship if he’ll resign.”
The second delegate just laughed. “Conkling will never let him take it.”
The two men now watched the gentleman approaching the podium, George William Curtis, Jr. “He’ll have to take it a few minutes from now,” said the first delegate. The Harper’s editor, sure to be another victim of Conkling’s rhetoric this afternoon, had not long ago turned down the British ambassadorship for something like the opposite of Arthur’s reasons to refuse the French post. As head of the National Civil Service Reform Association, Curtis preferred to remain at home, waging war against the machine at gatherings like these and in the pages of his magazine. Harper’s, along with its cries for the merit system, had of late also been running illustrated articles about women’s fall fashions, providing Conkling’s men the chance to make jokes they considered especially delicious.
Actually, Conkling liked the full-bosomed drawings better than anything Curtis had ever published, but his contempt for their purveyor was undiminished. As he watched him take the lectern now, he knew the business ahead would be almost too easy. Curtis would go down like some hapless redcoat, marching stiffly to annihilation.
“Fellow Republicans,” said the editor, his softness of tone an advertisement of reasonableness. “I ask this convention to resolve that the lawful title of Rutherford B. Hayes to the presidency is as clear and perfect as that of George Washington, and that his efforts toward the correction of evils and abuses in the Civil Service have justified the promises this party made in its platform last year.”
As the catcalls of the Custom House smothered any applause for reform, Conkling sat impassively, considering Curtis’s strategy, which assumed that the senator could not repudiate the results of his own Electoral Commission without repudiating himself. It was a pitiful underestimation of Conkling’s ability to maneuver, a failure to recognize his now complete lack of interest in compromise. Under the bright blue sleeves of his coat, the War God invisibly flexed the muscles of his forearms, thinking, as he got ready to rise, about the message he’d had from Kate, who wanted him near her, secreted in some Newport hotel until Congress convened next month. He had already told her it was impossible; he would never again let her sap his strength.
Curtis sat down in the front row of the auditorium, next to Chauncey Depew of the New York Central. Conkling strode to the podium and nodded down at the two of them.
“This is a state convention,” he began, evenly. “Its business is to nominate candidates for state offices. The national Administration is not a candidate or in question here.” Loud cheers from the machine’s men; but Conkling stopped them with a sharp outward thrust of his hand. “Who has the right to say it wishes to influence our proceedings or disturb our harmony? I won’t assume that any man has been entrusted to introduce matters foreign to our duties and calculated to foment discord.”
The Irishwoman had said that the first blows against the Libra Hayes were best struck from the side and behind. And so he would attempt to make Curtis’s resolution seem less reprehensible than unnecessary. He would have chosen this route by his own dead reckoning, but he was nonetheless comforted, to his small secret shame, to be navigating by the stars. The astrologer’s most interesting report had been the news, telegraphed last night, that Mrs. May was slightly under the weather—a female complaint, but nothing of any consequence. Even at this moment, hearing the always inspiring sound of his own voice, his mind drifted south to her. He had to force himself to concentrate, to glare at Curtis, whose damp rhetorical life consisted mostly of eulogies and Phi Beta Kappa orations, phrase
s crocheted over a corpse or some banquet table of beardless students. Conkling would fire his words into Curtis’s own ears, the way he did at whoever stood opposing him on the floor of the Senate. “The reformers’ vocation and ministry,” he proclaimed, “is to lament the sins of other people. Their stock in trade is rancid, canting self-righteousness. They are wolves in sheep’s clothing. Their real object is office and plunder. When Dr. Johnson defined patriotism as the last refuge of a scoundrel, he was unconscious of the then undeveloped capabilities and uses of the word ‘reform.’ ”
Curtis, still in the senator’s sights, shook his head in apparent sadness, a gesture that infuriated Conkling. The War God now allowed the machine’s men to let loose a deafening, discordant chorus, in which howls against the reformers seemed to contradict the allied cheers for Conkling himself. The speaker patiently allowed it all to subside, and while he never took his eyes off Curtis, he could glimpse the slender form of Cynthia May darting across the floor of his mind. He tried to ignore it, opening his mouth to declaim the next portion of his text, which contained the one insult that would put paid to Curtis, that would drown the editor in the glee of his enemies.
And yet, as he began to speak, he knew that he was also speaking to her. The same words he flung at Curtis were ones, at a much lower volume, he should like Mrs. May to hear after the two of them had wrestled over politics. They were words he would have her understand, for all their brimstone, as the truest definition of Roscoe Conkling. He believed, didn’t he, the sentences he was now firing at the editor of Harper’s: “For the last twenty-two years I have labored for the Republican party and stood by its flag; and never in twenty-two years have I been false to its principles, its cause, or its candidates. Who are these men, in newspapers and elsewhere, cracking their whips over the Republican party and its conscience and convictions? They are of various sorts and conditions—the man-milliners, the dilettanti, and carpet knights of politics, men whose efforts have been expended in denouncing and ridiculing and accusing honest men who, in storm and in sun, in war and peace, have clung to the Republican flag and defended it against those who have tried to trail and trample it in the dust!”
The senator’s men now clapped as if they really were a machine, in great crisp waves. Conkling felt a surge of carnal excitement, which he quickly sublimated into fealty: “Gentlemen! President Grant and all who stood by that upright, fearless magistrate have been objects of the bitter, truthless aspersions of these ‘reformers.’ They forget that parties are not built up by deportment, or by ladies’ magazines, or by gush.” He minced a half step or two away from the podium. The regulars bellowed their approval; the newspaper reporters added another inch to the Spanish moss of Pitman shorthand on their pads; Curtis whispered a few words to Chauncey Depew; and Bessie, from the wings, shot her father a cautionary glance, which he would ignore—her penalty for bringing Walter Oakman around the other night.
“Yes, gentlemen, there are about three hundred persons in New York who believe themselves to ‘occupy the solar walk and Milky Way,’ and even up there they lift their skirts very carefully for fear heaven itself might stain them. They would have people fill appointive office by nothing less than divine selection!”
The “solar walk” and “Milky Way” were for Mrs. May. Would she realize that when she saw the phrases in the Washington papers?
“I conclude with what a great Crusader told Richard of England and Leopold of Austria when they disputed the preliminaries of a battle.” The regulars would think it Shakespeare and feel a stirring of sentiment at their chieftain’s customary invocation of the Bard: “ ‘Let the future decide between you, and let it declare for him who carries furthest into the ranks of the enemy the sword of the cross!’ ”
The nays soon had it, 295 to 109. Conkling stepped down from the dais and strode the center aisle of the auditorium, unblinking in his triumph. He passed Curtis and Depew without a handshake.
“Senator! Senator!” cried the reporters.
He ignored them too, on his way to the telegraph office that had been set up outside the hall.
A RAIN OF METEORS UPON MY FOES. A SHOWER OF KISSES UPON YOU. I RETURN WITHIN A WEEK. GO TONIGHT TO 3RD AND D. A PRESENT AWAITS YOU.
The key operator, shaking with the fear he would make an error transmitting what the senator had scribbled on a slip of paper, looked up in relief when Conkling was gone, replaced by the man from the New York Herald, whose dispatch reported that the War God, having just denied the President’s right to hold office, had “acted the part of a blind and infuriate Samson, crushing himself beneath the edifice against whose pillars he leaned his mighty shoulders.”
“Interior says no one new will be taken on just to deal with the fire damage,” Louis Manley informed the other boarders.
“I should hope not!” replied Miss Park, who had spent her afternoon doing the paperwork for a taxpayer’s anonymous $7,500 contribution to the Treasury’s conscience fund. “We’ve lost thirty clerks under the new budget.”
“Mrs. O’Toole,” asked Dan Farricker, “are you disappointed the Sioux will be staying at the Continental instead of here?” Only Fanny Christian laughed at his suggestion. The landlady herself shuddered over the thought of the Indian peace delegation, now on their way by train to the capital, bringing their savage paints and smells into her parlor.
Dan patted his hand against his open mouth, silently imitating a war cry for the benefit of Fanny, who pulled an ostrich feather from a vase and stuck it behind her head.
“Miss Christian, please,” scolded Mrs. O’Toole.
Fanny replaced the feather and sighed. “Buffalo Bill says Little Big Man’s a bad egg, even though he’s the one got stabbed by Crazy Horse and not the other way around.”
Cynthia, passing through while putting on her hat, wondered how Conkling had kept himself from stabbing Curtis when the bloodlust was on him. She’d received his telegram upon arriving home. This afternoon she’d dispatched her own note, from the Observatory, asking Hugh to meet her, briefly, downtown at 8:00; she couldn’t soon risk another early-morning return to Mrs. O’Toole’s. Now, when the landlady asked where she might be on her way to, she replied, “A friend who lives on D Street. I’ll be home before nine-thirty.”
Glances exchanged by Joan Park and Louis Manley expressed doubt that Mrs. May would fulfill this pledge, but Cynthia ignored them on her way out. A few minutes later she was at her real destination, not Madam Costello’s block but the steps of the badly singed Patent Building. She climbed them almost up to the columns, looking for a space between puddles of water and soggy wads of paper. When she found one, she gathered her skirts against her ankles and sat down, becoming as much an object of curiosity as the boarded-up windows to the occasional evening passerby.
Hugh did not arrive until 8:15, and he climbed the steps slowly, looking more gaunt than slender. But she could tell that he was calm. The nervous chatter had stopped a day or two ago, which meant, if she had her reading at the Peabody right, that the intermission of symptoms was ending. Another attack could come any day.
“The toasted Parthenon,” he said. “An inspired location for our rendezvous.” It was almost chilly tonight, and as soon as he sat down, he put his arm around her. She closed her eyes for a moment, grateful to be warmed this way instead of by Conkling’s present—an expensive shawl with an appliqué of small silver stars, which he’d had sent from New York City. Mary Costello had excitedly forwarded the parcel to the boardinghouse, in time to arrive almost simultaneously with the War God’s telegram. But it had gone straight into a drawer. As far as Cynthia knew, Hugh was still unaware of Conkling’s existence—probably even as a public figure.
“What do you suppose this is?” she asked. From her reticule she withdrew the small damaged contraption that had flown through Monday morning’s fire.
Hugh turned it over in his hand, twice, smiling with a sort of gay reverence toward the object’s inscrutable ingenuity. “I haven’t the slightest id
ea,” he said, setting it down on the step below them.
“It came from in there.” She pointed up toward the damaged Model Room.
“Someone’s unpatented dream,” said Hugh. “Someone’s failure.” She said nothing, and he looked back at her with concern. “You’re not yourself, Mrs. May. Now, most people are so awful it comes as a relief when they’re not themselves. But in your case it’s a shame.”
“Will you be going back to work with Todd tonight?”
“Yes,” said Hugh. “It’s becoming fun. He may be crazier than I am.”
“You’re not crazy,” said Cynthia.
“You’re right. I just have hidden depths.”
“Why do you stay?” she asked. “Forget for a moment the admiral’s reprieve: why do you choose to stay?”
“My dear, it’s not as if the Allison family has any money to spare right now. I do more or less have to make my living.”
“But there are other observatories. Ones whose telescopes aren’t always cloaked with fog.”
“Yes,” he said, “that’s true. And can you imagine how eager they’d be to have me after the record I’ve achieved here?”
“Those other places wouldn’t make you sick.”
“No,” he said, smiling. “They wouldn’t.”
She couldn’t bear it any longer—the feckless, merry fatalism. She put her head between her hands.
“Don’t you worry about me,” said Hugh. “Next summer I’m going to avoid the fever season altogether. I’ll be out west, high and dry and healthy with one of the eclipse-observing parties. I ought to know, right? I wrote all those letters starting to organize them, remember?”
Next summer was too far away to imagine. Between now and then they both had to make a whole trip around the Sun. She wasn’t sure she had the strength for even that automatic journey.
“I’ll go out to Colorado and stay straight through August.” He sucked in a great lungful of air and pounded his chest in imitation of the rude health they knew he would never enjoy. She closed her eyes, refusing to laugh.
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