Two Moons

by Thomas Mallon

  “You’re quoting yourself.”

  “Good!” said Conkling. “Then you did read the interview.” He closed the office door and took another look at the pile of photographic plates and charts beside her hat.

  “I don’t see the shawl I gave you.”

  “It’s too warm.”

  “And I don’t see the earrings.”

  “It’s too ordinary a day for them.”

  He lunged forward and took her in his arms, crushing her against the well-tended muscles of his torso. For two or three seconds, before she began to struggle, she allowed herself, in the aroma of cologne and soap, to feel not the danger and caddishness of the moment, but a shameful sense of safety; if she chose, she could surrender to this man who helped control the forces that had always pressed down on her; that had sent her father packing and her husband to war; that appropriated and canceled all the little pots of money by which people like her rose in the world or fell into its alleys.

  Suddenly, out in the corridor, the approaching sound of song:

  “Oh, Susanna, oh, don’t you cry for me—”

  “Oh, sweet Jaysus!” Cynthia cried.

  “An expression you learned from the Irishwoman?” whispered Conkling, as he pulled away from her. He picked up a chart and began to study it in the last seconds before Hugh Allison knocked at the door.

  “—with my banjo on my knee. Hello!”

  She glared at him. “You’re here early, Mr. Allison.”

  “And you’re here la—”

  “What brings you here?” she quickly interrupted.

  “Trans-Neptunian paperwork, Mrs. May. Until the Sun is fully down, we astronomers are just celestial clerks. You know that. But as soon as it’s dark, Mr. Todd and I shall sweep between 8° 30’ and 9°. Poor Toddy thought he saw his future a little above 9° last night, but it fizzled into another false alarm. Sir,” he said, finally getting around to Conkling, “I don’t believe we’ve met.” He shook the man’s hand, and without waiting for his name or giving his own, turned back toward Cynthia. “I’ve got something to show you. Find me when you’re free. I’ll be in the library with the old commodore.”

  Conkling, furious at being ignored, said, “Sands has come over to see me. To provide an historical perspective while Admiral Rodgers speaks from a future one.”

  “Well, it will be a pleasure for you,” said Hugh. “And who would you be, sir?”

  “Mr. Allison,” said Cynthia, “this is Senator Conkling. Senator Conkling, Mr. Allison.”

  Hugh burst out laughing. “Senator Roscoe Conkling himself? Well, sir, you’ll break my mama’s heart if you don’t give Matt Butler his seat! Anyway,” Hugh said, his interest in politics already spent, “you’re probably both here waiting for Harkness. I hear he’s over with Mr. Newcomb and the admiral. Until they get back, Senator, I suggest you get the present perspective from Mrs. May. You could have no better guide to this place. Just don’t keep me waiting too long,” he said to Cynthia, waving good-bye as he vanished back into the corridor. The door’s glass pane rattled, and Cynthia’s heart thumped. At least, she told herself, he hadn’t come in and grabbed her by the waist. At least he hadn’t called her Urania.

  Recovering her poise, she looked at Conkling and asked: “Why shouldn’t I strike you?”

  “Who,” he replied, “is that preposterous person?”

  “He’s the most brilliant man here.”

  “He’s an idiot. And he looks ill. I can’t bear being around sickness.”

  “Then pass a law against it. But first answer my question: Why shouldn’t I strike you?”

  “You’ve answered it yourself. You had sufficient time to pull away from me, if that’s what you wanted to do.”

  She slapped his face.

  “Mrs. May,” he said, forbearingly, as if looking at some hapless opponent who’d read only half the bill being debated. “That will only excite me further.”

  She hung her bonnet on the clothes tree and sat down behind her desk, as calmly as she could.

  “I hadn’t expected to find you here so early,” said Conkling.

  “When working this hard,” she said, pointing to the Transit-of-Venus tables as if she really ought to be getting back to them, “one loses track of day and night.”

  “When do these long nights finally end?”

  She calculated the lengthiest lie that she could get away with. “In a fortnight, I suppose. The whole project should be finished a few weeks after that.”

  “All right, then. Two weeks from tonight, a proper entertainment for the two of us. Write down the date.”

  “Do you really think I need to write such things down in order to remember them?” She pointed to the elegant tangle of trigonometry covering the sheets in front of her, then rose with whatever dignity she could manage. The War God was smiling, freshly aroused by her gumption and the thought of her breadwinning brain work.

  “Let me take you to the superintendent’s office,” she said.

  “I doubt the admiral’s yet there.”

  “Good. Then you can sit outside it and wait, like an ordinary mortal.” She could not take him to see Commodore Sands, not if it meant another encounter with Hugh, so she delivered him to Mr. Harrison, who would have to blither some more until Rodgers arrived. She herself went to the library.

  “Is he as frightening as everyone says?” asked the twinkling commodore, rising unsteadily to greet her.

  “He’s a bogeyman,” she said, while the old man kissed her hand. “He’s about as scary as a Punch puppet.” Wishing this were true, she urged Hugh, with her eyes, to spirit her away before Mr. Harrison thought to bring him in here.

  The commodore laughed. “You two go off,” he said, a little smile opening a hole in his long white beard. Alone of everyone at the Observatory, he seemed to accept the idea of an actual romance between Mr. Allison and the older woman. “I’ll have one of my little dozes while I wait for the senator and the admiral. It will fortify me.”

  A moment later, Hugh was leading Cynthia down a flight of steps diagonally opposite the packing room. He lit a lantern and walked ahead of her through a dark, muddy tunnel. The two of them stepped gingerly, hoping no rats were about, until they reached the passageway’s bricked-up conclusion. Standing before a large puddle and a pair of abandoned brooms, Cynthia, who had had enough surprises for one late afternoon, asked Hugh: “What is this place?”

  It was, he explained, the entrance to the old magnetic observatory, where thirty years before, the scientifics had studied the effects of earthly magnetism upon navigation. The underground annex had been built and buried too cheaply, soon becoming a flooded mess that had to be blocked off and abandoned.

  “Why did you bring me down here?”

  “Two reasons,” he replied. “First, this one.” He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed her deeply. She was afraid he might smell Conkling’s various perfumes and pomades, but his own medicinal aromas—liniment and horehound lozenges—masked the War God’s. His embrace was ardent but wholly different from the senator’s ravenous assault. He came to her as if they were two children in a basement misbehaving on a rainy day. She could feel all the pure excitement of first love, and even as her pulse raced, she responded to his kiss with self-hatred for the subjugated safety she had let herself feel with Conkling a few minutes before.

  “Why?” she asked again.

  “Why here? The illicit feel of it,” he whispered, between kisses upon her neck. “Romance requires some of that, don’t you think? As much as it requires the odd love letter.”

  “You said two reasons,” she responded, the precisionist in her getting, as always, the upper hand.

  “Ah, yes, the second reason.” He picked up one of the brooms and pointed it at the bricked-up entryway. “A dramatic backdrop for the serious matter I’m about to bring up—we require one, just like Miss Clara Morris at the National. Now, do we know what’s on the other side of this wall? What was left inside when they gave up th
is place?”

  “We do not.”

  “Exactly. Any more than we know what was left inside the shaft of the Monument when they abandoned it. My point is simple: it’s time for a reconnaissance mission.”

  “Already?” asked Cynthia, suddenly dreading the prospect. “The projector is still weeks away from arriving.”

  “It could be in New York as early as the thirtieth.”

  She said nothing, and wondered how she would keep her nerve when the time came.

  “Thanks to your brother-in-law, it will whoosh through Customs,” Hugh fairly shouted, swinging the broom like a baseball bat. “Then we’ll get it down here, and it still won’t even be Christmas! It’s time to get ready, darling.”

  “All right,” she said, taking hold of the second broom and squeezing its handle. “Some night soon.”

  Conkling watched her play with the larger earring, which dangled toward her freshly enameled neck. He was waiting for an answer.

  “There is a good reason I can’t be persuaded to go up there,” she said, pointing to the upper floors of Wormley’s.

  “And what is that?” he asked, slamming his spoon against the dish of clear soup.

  “You’ve just entered your forty-ninth year,” she explained, crossing her fingers for luck beneath the tablecloth. “You’re a Scorpio going through Scorpio’s period on the calendar, and you’re approaching one of the great battles of your life. Intimacy with an Aries would be folly until that battle is over. Do you want to know the exact alignments that proscribe it?”

  “You’ve gotten this nonsense from the Irishwoman.”

  Cynthia measured the warring proportions of disappointment and fear in his eyes. Nonsense it was, and made up entirely by herself, but such nonsense was his vice, and she thought she could see it persuading him.

  “I cannot speed up the battle,” he said, pouting.

  “I’m jealous,” she replied. Her evasive mumbo-jumbo was going to work, and she felt giddy with relief. “You must prefer Chester Arthur to me.”

  “No,” said Conkling, as he sank against the plush chair-back. He looked the way he did on those infrequent occasions when he allowed himself to compromise. He was trying to dwell on the essential fact: he had gotten her consent. It was a matter of when, not whether. It would be a slow conquest, like his undoing of Hayes. He reminded himself that the protractedness of that enterprise had afforded a great incidental pleasure, the spectacle of his enemies trying to second-guess and placate him. Perhaps it would be the same with this campaign.

  “Did you see,” he asked, “that Mr. Evarts is refusing to appoint any ex-rebels to ambassadorships?”

  “Yes,” she replied. “Mrs. O’Toole was decrying the injustice of it all at breakfast.”

  “That’s my doing. He thinks I’ll relent on the Custom House if I get my way in other matters. Well, he’s going to be disappointed. And wait until your secesh landlady hears the speech I give against Butler tomorrow. I hope the mother of that idiot boy-astronomer hears it, too.”

  “Who?” asked Cynthia, feigning perplexity. “Oh, Mr. Allison.”

  “Yes, the one you say is so brilliant. What’s your interest in him? Entirely dispassionate, I hope.”

  She began to play with the other, smaller earring. “Entirely passionate, I’m afraid. As to an idea that he has.” Now that she had won a reprieve, she had to risk discussion of Hugh, had to gamble that the War God could be made to believe she had only an intellectual affinity for the skinny, high-strung rebel.

  “And what would this ‘idea’ be?”

  “A piece of astronomical investigation you wouldn’t comprehend any more than I can grasp your parliamentary strategy.”

  He glowed again, the way he had at the Observatory, excited by her intellect, this competing force that he would break against the rhythms of his will.

  All at once, she declared: “I have a favor to request. A gift I would have asked for instead of the shawl and the earrings you bestowed.”

  “Simply name it, Mrs. May.”

  “It involves corruption.” Before he could lose his sudden, thrilled expression, she launched into an account of the Mangin projector’s current voyage from Le Havre to New York; of how it traveled fully paid for; of how Mr. Allison could not get financial backing from an Observatory that lacked his breadth of vision; of how American science would be noting his accomplishments long after the name of Asaph Hall had been forgotten.

  “Does this concern his ‘trans-Neptunian planet’?” Conkling pronounced the hypothetical body as if it were some cherished project of Evarts and Hayes.

  “Yes,” said Cynthia, hoping he understood as little of astronomy as he did Madam Costello’s malleable art.

  “What exactly do you hope to gain from this?” he asked.

  “My own small bit of immortality.” Let him think she meant a footnote in the history of science, not the mad gesture toward eternity that she and Hugh intended to make.

  Conkling’s eyes lit up further. Her ambition appealed to the same part of him that had been excited into accepting an invitation to address the Women’s Suffrage Association after the New Year. He took out a small pencil and thick, gilt-edged notecard. “I do have to write myself reminders,” he said. “Now when is this French machine supposed to arrive?”

  A half hour later she was telling the carriage driver Conkling had summoned for her to head for the Mall, specifically the north-side entrance of the Agriculture Department.

  She spotted Hugh standing there, just as he’d promised. She had selected this night for their scouting mission because a late rendezvous with him had ensured her resistance to Conkling: she could not have surrendered without Hugh’s being stood up and herself found out.

  “What ever made you pick such a pair of shoes?” Hugh asked, pointing to her feet as they walked west across the Mall’s soft ground.

  “Oh,” she said, starting on one more lie. “It was Fanny’s birthday and we were all being a little fancy. I should have thought to change them.” She quickly changed the subject instead: “I see the cows are gone.” The cattle sheds she could remember ringing the truncated Monument during the war had given way to a handful of what looked like miners’ shacks: construction sheds for the Corps of Engineers. Thanks to the last Congress’s centennial spirit, the Corps had been asked to inspect the Monument’s foundations and see whether it was worth resuming work on the site after more than twenty years. Ground had been carved out around the steps at the base, exposing the old underpinnings.

  Looking at the hundred-and-fifty-foot shaft, Cynthia had the impression of something being driven into the earth instead of raised above it. The fog was nearly as bad here as it would be at the Observatory, a short distance west and a few feet lower into the mud of the Potomac. She did not want to go any farther, but Hugh was scampering merrily ahead, pulling her by her right arm. As they raced to the eastern front of the obelisk, its massive door looking ever larger, she could hear her lunar earrings click inside her pocket.

  “Make some noise,” Hugh ordered, once they reached the steps.

  “Why?”

  “To excite a watchman. There must be one here.”

  “I can’t think—”

  “On the count of three. One, two, three: In the gloaming—” He bellowed the song until a sharp “Who goes there?” cut him off.

  “See?” he whispered, as a uniformed man approached the pair of them. “And what cheer from you, sir?” cried Hugh, who pumped the guard’s hand and offered a big smile along with his greeting. She could see that charm would be tonight’s burglary tool.

  He told Officer Shea who he was; and that the lady was Mrs. May, who worked with numbers over at the Observatory. The officer had a female cousin good with figures? Well, fancy that. And he’d really been at this post for fourteen years, ever since Gettysburg itself? Hugh kept sending the watchman’s words right back to him, in a honeyed, lilting version that cheered their original speaker and made him think he was a much m
ore clever fellow than he’d realized out here night after night, year after year.

  “Oh, it’s been dispiriting as can be, Mr. Allison. For a long time I thought they’d tear the thing down rather than finish it. And I don’t mind telling you, I’ve had more than one bout of marsh fever sitting out here every fall.”

  “Have you tried Schenck’s Pulmonic Syrup? It’s marvelous, isn’t it, Mrs. May?”

  “The best remedy you can find,” she assured Officer Shea, who nodded his thanks and went on to declare that matters had been more cheerful since the engineers arrived with their shovels and plumb lines. Their investigations of the ground had shown it surprisingly sturdy for a patch so near a swamp. If Congress and the Monument Society continued to provide the money, the shaft might yet rise to its full five hundred and fifty feet.

  The watchman revealed himself as a frustrated guide who would rather be showing visitors around a finished memorial than guarding this sodden site of interruption and uncertainty. As it was, he could name every item that had gone into the cornerstone in 1848. “We’ve got something from your outfit, you know,” he told Hugh, explaining that the Astronomical Observations for 1845, presented by Superintendent Maury, were right inside the stone, along with the Farmers’ Almanac and every coin they’d minted to that day.

  “The dollar of our daddies,” said Cynthia.

  “Perfectly phrased, ma’am,” said Shea, a bit shyly, who embarked on a vigorous explanation of how resuming the coinage of silver might give help to debtors like himself. “Why should the banking interests get all—”

  “Might we have a look inside?” asked Hugh, who said he hated to miss any of the officer’s argument, but felt he must point out the lateness of the hour. He really ought to be seeing Mrs. May home, and they would so enjoy getting a glimpse of the interior first.