Two Moons

by Thomas Mallon

  “Cynthia,” he whispered. “I stay because you’re here.”

  She looked up at him.

  “And you,” he said, “are here for the duration.”

  He was right. She would never leave this city, any more than he would make a success or find some sensible home elsewhere. They were both incapable of reversing the eccentric courses they were on. They weren’t traveling around the Sun at all. They were unperiodic comets, on their way to nowhere and never to return. They would leave no traces, no child to outlast them on Earth, from which he would be, she felt certain, the first to depart.

  She grasped his right hand with her left. “I want to stand with you.”

  “You’ve already done that,” he said. “You’ve taken good care of me.”

  “No, I want to stand with you in the light. It’s all I want to do.” She hoped he heard the echo of his own phrase, the words he’d used when she first sat in the room on High Street, beside the drawings.

  He said nothing, just looked at the damaged contraption sitting on the step below them.

  “Tell me,” she said, “exactly what’s in Philadelphia.”

  “A man who knows just the machine I require. An aplanatic-mirror projector.”

  “And this is the hard part?”

  “Impossible, actually. It’s built in France, and has so far been used only by the army over there. If I exceeded even my father’s capacity for borrowing, I might afford the projector itself. But no one’s going to lend me the import duty—probably half as much again—to get it through a Custom House.”

  She picked up the contraption and tossed it down the wet stone steps. “Order the machine,” she said.

  Cynthia helped Madam Costello put the supper dishes back into the tin box Charles would pick up tomorrow morning. She wished the astrologer might scrape the mashed potatoes off them a bit more thoroughly; despite the presence of Ra, there had been more than one mouse in evidence tonight. But they were in a hurry. She’d not gotten here until nearly seven, after checking on Hugh in Georgetown, and the sun was now long gone.

  “All right, Mary, let’s get going. Tonight’s the last one I can get you in, and by Saturday the moons will have become invisible for two years.”

  “I’m just sorry I won’t get to meet our boy,” said the planet reader. “Poor thing. After all this time, I can’t tell you how I was lookin’ forward to it.”

  “He’s doing much better,” insisted Cynthia. “But it will be a while before he’s recovered enough strength from this last spell to go back there.”

  He was a bit better: the most recent siege had consisted of four paroxysms, fewer than the last time, each only five hours long and further apart from one another than the last set. But even now, during one of the fever’s intermissions, he looked sallow and lacked appetite. Cynthia would not tell Mary what the worst of it had been like—the hoarse cries for ice water, the blue fingertips and confused mind. When pressed, she would give up only one or two playful, less intimate, details—such as the way Hugh smiled when his ears began buzzing, a sign that the quinine had started to work.

  She nudged the older woman out the front door and told her she could fuss with her bonnet on the way. Right now they needed to raise their umbrellas and get going. It was the wettest, warmest October anyone could remember. Gnats were still in the air, flying between the raindrops. Even at this hour the horsecar Cynthia flagged down was crowded with passengers too damp and uncomfortable to go about on foot. She put nickels into the box for herself and Mary, and then managed to find two seats near the glass rear doors. The car’s population could also be attributed to the impending return of Congress, which had remustered an army of lobbyists to another season’s residence in the District. Mrs. O’Toole, aware of how much more she could be getting for her rooms—perhaps even renting one of them to a congressman—gave her regulars a severe look if they tried to take so much as an extra pat of butter at breakfast.

  The War God had informed both Cynthia and Madam Costello—not to mention the general public, through an announcement in the press—that he did not intend returning to the capital until Sunday, the fourteenth, just one night before the Special Session would open.

  “I forgot to show you this,” said Cynthia, reaching into her pocket for a newspaper cutting. “Or maybe he sent you one, too.” A cartoon from one of the New York dailies showed Conkling as a colossus, one foot upon the Senate, the other on the Custom House: “The New Official Doorkeeper.”

  “He’s proud of himself,” said Cynthia.

  “He ought to have picked on someone his own size,” replied Madam Costello, reflecting the by-now conventional view that Conkling’s ferocity had been greatly in excess against the dainty Mr. Curtis, whose reform partisans had just staged a polite rally of rebuttal in New York City. Was the senator really intent on destroying the rest of his own party? Wasn’t it, some wondered, as if General Sherman had burned half the Union on his way to Georgia? To judge from his almost daily letters to Cynthia, Conkling remained convinced that he had triumphed in Rochester, and that his appearance there was only a foretaste of final victory in the Senate. “It was said of Burke that he did not always adapt his style to the capacity of his hearers,” he wrote her in defense of himself. “Is not this a habit of men of genius?”

  The two women got off the streetcar near Virginia Avenue, and entered the Observatory grounds at Twenty-third Street. Early fall was the worst time of year for both fever and fog, and the mist was rising thickly off the grass and mud. “It’s a fearful-looking place,” said Madam Costello, who had never been to this part of town. “Like the moors in one of those novels.”

  Inside, things were more cheerful. Captain Piggonan was up and around once more, and he greeted the ladies at the door. Despite atmospheric conditions, several astronomers had come out tonight: Professors Yarnall and Eastman were at the Transit Circle, and Henry Paul had left word that he might be over later, if the skies showed any shred of promise when he emerged from the National Theatre; Lydia Thompson and Her British Blondes were on the bill.

  The admiral himself was bustling about, pleased to see so much activity. The moons, though fading from the sky, were still radiating energy into his scientifics. In fact, he was secretly disappointed that a few more of them weren’t sidelined with miasmatic influence: it wouldn’t hurt for there to be a lot of sickness about when Senator Sargent, an acquaintance from Rodgers’s California days, introduced the removal bill, with its request for $100,000, to the reconvening Congress. This thought soon shamed him, and he decided, while passing the spittoon outside Mr. Harrison’s office, to tell Captain Piggonan not to let people stay too late tonight. “We’re leeward of the wind,” he noted, “and that makes things worse.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the captain, who resumed leading the visitors toward the Great Equatorial.

  “Mrs. May,” said the admiral, nodding politely to his computer and her companion.

  “He’s a handsome old gent,” the astrologer whispered to Cynthia.

  A voice rang out behind them—“This must be Mary Costello!”—a voice too young and emphatic to belong to Professor Harkness, who had arranged for the planet reader’s pass. No, Cynthia realized; the voice belonged to Hugh.

  “How can you possibly be up?” she asked, getting the whole question out before she’d finished wheeling around.

  “For God’s sake!” cried Madam Costello. “It’s the boy himself!”

  “I’m a miracle of modern medicine,” he explained, with a big smile. “And the product of excellent nursing,” he added, bowing to Cynthia, who three hours before had been soothing him with a cold sponge. “This way, ladies. I can take over from here, Captain Piggonan.”

  So light on his feet he appeared to be gliding, Hugh led them into the dome. Forgetting all about the admiral, Mary Costello confidentially pronounced Cynthia’s fellow “as beautiful as a painting.”

  “An engraving from one of your novels,” said Cynthia, who was truly distre
ssed. “The ghost striding those moors.”

  Madam Costello registered awe at the sight of the telescope, and accepted Hugh’s offer of his arm. “Let me introduce you to Mr. Todd,” he said. “Beginning next month, the two of us will be using this behemoth to search for that trans-Neptunian planet. Isn’t that right, David? Until then, Mr. Paul will be looking through it for Venusian satellites.”

  “Allison,” said Todd, who looked to Cynthia for some explanation, “are you sure you ought to be here tonight? I mean, are you quite up to—”

  “Mr. Todd and I,” said Hugh, talking right over him, “have been having our preliminary looks through the nine-inch telescope. I’ll show you that one later, Mary. He’s been reading great stacks of stuff on Uranus when he’s not been reading fairy tales to Mrs. Newcomb’s children and Catholic theology to Mrs. Newcomb herself. He’s a good and faithful servant, our young Mr. Todd, and we’re all in a fright we’ll lose him to the Almanac Office.”

  Todd, who had been hedging his bets—proofreading the great man’s latest lunar manuscript each morning before he came to the Observatory—looked perplexed at the teasing. Cynthia, craving one moment of merriment without a hardship or emergency to avert, smiled for the first time.

  “Here you are!” said Hugh, placing Madam Costello at the end of a short line behind the telescope. The current visitors were mostly legislators and their wives, back in the capital a few days early and sought out by the admiral to come see the Observatory-produced marvels they’d been missing while home. By next week, once the moons were gone, he would no longer be able to bribe their eyes with celestial delight, and the hard work of daytime buttonholing on Capitol Hill would begin. Rodgers wondered how he would secure even the small fraction of attention needed to get his bill passed, what with the competing claims of the Custom House battle and the bill to resume silver coinage—a bonanza for the western mining interests, represented here tonight by Mrs. Senator Jones from Nevada, who wore great quantities of the semiprecious metal and loudly extolled “the dollar of our daddies.”

  When Madam Costello’s turn to look through the eyepiece finally arrived, she crossed herself before leaning into it. Cynthia and Hugh watched her take a long look, discerning heaven-knew-what patterns and truths, until the astrologer bounced away from the giant tube, laughing with such delight that she’d be bursting her stays, if she were wearing any.

  “Now, Mary, admit it,” said Hugh, “how can all your sorcery compete with our reality?”

  She actually pushed him, gave the boy a playful shove in the ribs, and said: “You’ve got me, Mr. Hugh! You win hands down. It’s better than the stereopticon!”

  Cynthia watched the two of them laughing to beat the band. They had that quality so praised everywhere you went, that grace and ease she had never felt able to manifest herself. It was “charm,” whose display by others always left her feeling defeated. She felt her own face hardening with impatience and envy.

  The three of them moved away to let the remaining solons and their consorts have a turn. While Hugh and Madam Costello continued their flirtation, Cynthia watched the lawmakers and understood that their chief thought looking upward through the telescope was of dominion. News of Chief Joseph’s surrender had come today; the West was won, and someday the red planet might have to give up just as the red man had. The silver jewelry clattering against the bosom of Mrs. Senator Jones seemed a kind of war cry, a signal that the momentarily strapped Republic was still irreversibly on the march, and quite unwilling to stop at fifty-four forty, at least without a fight.

  Hugh offered to walk Madam Costello back to the line for a second look. “Only if you let me do a whole chart for you, Mr. Hugh! Not just these wisps and hints I attach to our girl’s.”

  “Ah, Mary! There’s no need for it,” he said. “You’d see nothing but sunny skies!”

  They were giggling.

  “Would you excuse us for a moment?” Cynthia asked the astrologer. “I need to speak with him.” Hugh shrugged in surrender, and kissed Mary Costello’s hand before allowing Cynthia to lead him out of the dome and off to the library.

  “Why are you here?” she asked.

  “Just putting my shoulder to the cosmic wheel. Looking for that trans-Neptunian planet.”

  “You’ve got to leave. You’re sick.”

  “Soon. I promise. It’s already ten o’clock and the fog has pretty much put paid to the rest of the evening. But I should help little Toddy with a few things before I go.”

  “It’s only nine o’clock, Hugh.” She had reset his watch, as well as the two clocks in his rooms, just as the books at the Peabody advised: if a miasmatic patient thought it was later than it actually was, the mind could sometimes speed up the paroxysms.

  He smiled as he adjusted the timepiece. “I’m on to you, my dear. That trick won’t work again. Now let yourself relax a bit, and let me get out of your hair for a while. If I’m feeling all right on Friday, I’m heading to Philadelphia.”

  “You’re not up to that.”

  “Yes, I am. The last paroxysms were five hours apart, according to your splendid record-keeping; and the last of those was more than a day ago. I’m entering a long interval. You said it yourself, just before you went off to Mary’s this evening.”

  “Yes, I said it—while I was sponging your dehydrated limbs.”

  “Which will soon be dancing. Come, Mrs. May, it’s time to get on with things. I’m going to inquire into the Frenchman’s projector. To think I once imagined using a ring of Brush lamps and a double-sided mirror! The arrangement almost makes me laugh now. With this new machine, if I can get it, my little scheme will seem practically, well, practical.”

  She pursed her lips. “I don’t want you going up there alone. You need someone to look after you, and I can’t get away from here. Mr. Harkness wants to finish the Venus measurements by Christmas, because the admiral wants another accomplishment—a whole impressive, mystifying book of photographs and figures—to set in front of the senators before they vote. He’s driving me relentlessly. And you’re driving me crazy.”

  “I’ll be fine, my sweetheart.” He put his arm over her shoulder. “And have you forgotten? You want to do this, too. We’re going to stand in the light together. A great flashing shaft of it two miles high.”

  “All right,” she said, knowing she couldn’t change his mind. “But promise me you’ll leave here soon, not more than a half hour from now. You’ll catch your death.”

  “I promise,” he replied, kissing her, and not confiding his certainty that he already had.

  The Sketch Club

  Carmac Street

  Philadelphia

  Saturday morning, October 13, 1877

  Dearest Urania,

  I’m here as the guest of my old painter friend, Willie Dietrich, who’s a member. This was all arranged at the last minute, so that I don’t have to stay with my hateful sister in her mansion on South Third. Even so, last evening I did sit out on one of its cast-iron balconies with her and the brother-in-law. As I looked at Sister’s black curls—stiffer than the wooden shutters behind them—I asked her husband (more Yankee than thou) how much 26,000 francs really is.

  You do not want to know.

  But you do want to know everything else about M. Mangin’s aplanatic-mirror projector, version no. three.

  My friend Davidson (this one not a pansy like Willie) has unimaginably exact diagrams of its every component down to the smallest bolt. We took the schematics outside onto the steps of the Franklin and sat between the columns under the flag, and I don’t think I said anything for a full five minutes, some sort of record for me. After that I never stopped. I had a hundred questions and Davidson answered every one. Not only did he know Mangin; he even got to know some of Foucault’s confrères during his three years in Paris. (This, my darling, is why you should have gone to college. The experience itself gives you nothing, but your fellow alumni can provide you with Mangin’s projector, Gauss’s drawings and rooms at the
Sketch Club.)

  Numéro trois—that’s number three to you—is so small that everything can sit on a single four-wheeled wagon: the projector (just 40 cm. in diameter); the dynamo-electric machine; a steam engine with its own tiny boiler! The projector itself detaches from the cart and can be carried by two people. Yes, carried up to where we’ll be going. The rest of what’s on the cart can stay below, regulated by someone else, sending up its energy through a cable attached to the projector. To accomplish our little plan we shall need no more than one strong-backed confederate (if I may use that word).

  I must be in touch with a Frenchman in New York, an acquaintance of Davidson’s who’s Mangin’s close friend. Only this gentleman can arrange the projector’s sale—and its shipment across the Atlantic. (To think that this machine merveilleuse—fewer than a dozen exist, all in the hands of French generals—was designed to spotlight an advancing enemy and flash command signals upon the clouds. An “optical telegraph,” Davidson calls it. Well, clouds are the last thing you and I will want its light to hit.)

  Do you see how you’ve emboldened me? You’re more persuasive than Mother. You’ve told me not to worry about the import tariff, and for the present, I shan’t. This morning I am so excited I would be willing to steal whatever’s required to pay it—notwithstanding Dr. Wills’s “Sermon on the 8th Commandment,” which printed pamphlet lies on the night-table here. As for buying the machine itself: there should be enough money—if I empty the bank account I’ve still got in Cambridge and if my brother-in-law comes through with the sum that he promised last night. He wondered why the government isn’t financing the purchase of equipment for its own experimenters, so I gave him a manly nudge and a wink, telling him my enterprise was being conducted after hours, and that the results of my light-projecting investigations were bound to have commercial possibilities. Once he thought my purpose was money instead of knowledge—let alone what it really is—both he and his purse strings relaxed.