Two Moons

by Thomas Mallon

  She heard the movement of a switch, the smallest scrape of metal, and then a buzzing sound. Just beneath her feet she saw a thin, amazingly intense ring of light, a circle no wider than a thread. It was the rim of the powerful beam, trapped behind the projector’s blind.

  “All right, girl,” he said. “Get up. Carefully now.” He had already stood up on the edge. She was ready to join him, except for one thing. “Wait,” she said, taking off her coat and tossing it onto the step below the projector. “I suppose it’s foolish, but I want to look my best.”

  She put her hands, and then her knees, onto the width of stone. He leaned down and with great, tender caution grabbed her waist. Slowly, in a wind they could hear agitating the pulleys on a flagpole far below, they rose to their full heights. Not letting go of her waist, he stepped behind her and to the outside, as if trying to protect her from horse traffic in the road, instead of the 156-foot drop to the Mall.

  “Are you ready, darling?”

  “Yes.”

  He shortened the string between himself and the projector, making one loop over his finger, and then another, until she could see it, straight and tense, transecting the imprisoned ring of light. As her heart raced, awaiting the pull and the beam’s release, she became aware of a commotion far below, at the bottom of the shaft. Struck by the terrible thought that Officer Shea had found a reason to come back to his usual post, she said to Hugh, “Yes, dear. I’m ready. Let’s do it now.”

  But he was prolonging the moment, oblivious to the noise below, and she could not bear to rush him, even while she thought of the mere minutes it would take for someone to race up the winding stair and stop them. The sound of voices was growing louder, but the noise of the wind prevented her from making out any of the sharp words being exchanged below.

  “Get out of my way, you bog-trotting fool! I know who’s up there!”

  “Oh, do you now?” cried Mary Costello. “Well, I’m tellin’ you to leave them be.”

  “You dare to give me orders?” He laughed. “Standing there at, what is this, your tea wagon?” He looked at the conveyance just long enough to spot the cable that was connected to it and—good Lord!—rising straight up. Realizing this was the crucial link to whatever they were doing, Roscoe Conkling strode toward the wire, until Mary Costello interposed herself.

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll show you what it does. Give me your hand.”

  He’d done that when she’d added a bit of palmistry to their planet readings, but this time he extended his hand only to hear himself, a second later, screaming with pain, as she pressed it against the side of the boiler box.

  Before he could even think to move, the astrologer reached around and removed a pistol from the pocket of his greatcoat. “I knew you was armed,” she declared, with disgust. “You fellows always are when you’re in a lather.”

  Conkling, holding his burned hand in his good one, stared at her in a tearful mixture of rage and humiliation.

  “If you don’t get away with yourself,” warned Mary Costello, “I’ll run for a watchman. One’s bound to be down at the Ag’iculture building. Then you’ll be in a fine fix for an explanation!”

  She threw his pistol into a litter of boards and rags, and he took off into the night, not looking behind—or even up, to the unfinished pinnacle where Hugh Allison, at that moment, through the music of the wind, was telling Cynthia May: “Raise your arm!”

  She kept her left hand tightly around his waist, but extended her right one up into the dark, until he nodded his approval and then, with his own free left hand, the one not encircling her, pulled hard on the string.

  At their feet, the circular thread of illumination snapped open into a thick, blinding beam forty centimeters wide, a white shaft of light that flew a mile and a half up into the night sky. The beam rose twenty times higher than the Monument itself would ever rise; the man and woman, clasped into a single form, projected themselves upon it, unable to look down. As their lives depended on their balance, their eyesight would depend on Hugh’s ability to close the Mangin’s blind with another pull of the string.

  But they gave no thought to that now. Awash in the light, feeling herself carried away on it, Cynthia, for the first time in twenty-five years, lacked the slightest sense of the city beneath her. Hugh’s laughter and joy pealed into the heavens, and he let his right hand climb her back until it reached a silk hair ribbon. With one pull, he unfurled her gold-and-silver tresses upon the night. They waved like a pennant, a signal, eternally commending the two of them, and this moment, into the universe.

  Mr. Harrison, the following afternoon, had charge of the Observatory’s single copy of the Star. The astronomers kept making off with it during agitated discussion of what had happened just hours before in the Senate. Was it good news or bad?

  Mr. Sargent, realizing the need to go more slowly, had agreed to Mr. Edmunds’s amendment that a commission be appointed before the appropriation of any money. The bill that had passed instructed the commissioners to find a site that “shall possess relatively the advantages of healthfulness, clearness of atmosphere, and convenience of access from the city of Washington; and report to the present session of Congress.”

  Passing the newspaper from hand to hand, each professor asked the other if he thought they would be leaving Foggy Bottom sooner or later, or whether—the darkest possibility—their hopes for removal might end up forgotten, along with the Forty-fifth Congress, in two years’ time.

  Admiral Rodgers bustled out to Harrison’s desk, dictating his next letter even before he reached the clerk, who had to start writing in medias res: “There are to be four domes for the Observatory: one for the twenty-six-inch telescope, and a smaller one over the room marked C, and two still smaller ones over rooms marked A and B …” Mr. Harrison didn’t even know to whom these words were going, just that the superintendent had decided to continue on the assumption that transference to higher ground was still proceeding with all speed. “The floors,” continued the admiral, “will be specially constructed to avoid vibration …”

  Simon Newcomb now arrived, with Mr. Todd in tow, no doubt to discuss what influence he might have upon appointments to the new commission. Wary of him as always, Professor Harkness changed the subject to another item, much smaller, on the Star’s front page, about a “strange, powerful light, observed and reported last night by many residents of the District, shining straight up from a spot believed to be at the westernmost region of the Mall, for at least one and one-half minute’s duration.” Newcomb, who knew his optics and now had the chance to let everyone know of his presence at Señor Mantilla’s ball, scoffed: “Absolute nonsense. People’s spectacles playing tricks on them. They were only seeing the refractive movements of a big calcium light the Spanish minister had playing outside Wormley’s. I should know, because—”

  His social note was interrupted by the excited arrival of little Angelo Hall, who earlier in the day had had a letter from his brother Asaph up at Harvard. “He’s going to teach me to box the next time he’s home! He’s taking lessons from the best man in the college, in exchange for teaching him geometry!”

  “That’s splendid, Angelo,” said Newcomb, whose desire to be rid of the boy was noted by David Todd.

  “Come over here, Angie,” said the younger man. “I’ve got a job for you. And yes, there’s a nickel in it.” He hustled the boy into the corridor outside Harrison’s office. “I know the weather’s bad, but I want you to go back up to High Street. Buy a copy of the Star along the way and once you’ve got it, circle this item. Here’s a pencil to use.” He indicated the inches of newspaper type pertaining to the Observatory bill’s passage. “When you’ve done that, I want you to leave the paper face up on the steps of the house where Mr. Allison used to live. Can you do that?” he asked.

  Angelo was perplexed—did Mr. Allison still live there, or not?

  “For a dime?” Todd asked.

  The boy nodded.

  “Good,” said Todd,
who walked back into Harrison’s office, telling himself that Angelo’s errand would give both Hugh Allison and Cynthia—she was sure to be there with him—some needed encouragement: they’d realize that if Hugh could survive this siege of sickness, he might spend the rest of a long career in a place fit for men instead of marsh rats.

  It was past sundown before Cynthia heard steps on the porch. She moved to the window, parted the curtain and saw Asaph Hall’s boy, wet with rain, holding a newspaper and a penny whistle. She went quickly down the stairs, acting automatically on the fear that Hugh’s presence in this house had become known. She pulled open the door and said, sternly: “He isn’t here, Angelo.”

  The boy gave her the same quizzical look he’d given David Todd a while ago. “No one told me he was. Mr. Todd just told me to leave this here.” He handed her the newspaper, pointing to the item he’d circled with Mr. Todd’s pencil.

  She read it in an instant, and nodded her thanks. The boy waved good-bye and she closed the door behind him, setting the paper down on a table beside the unopened letter from Mrs. Allison in Charleston. She climbed back up the stairs and entered the bedroom. Taking off her shoes, then moving a pillow out of the way, she lay down next to Hugh.

  He was fully dressed now. She had accomplished that for him, just before dawn, after she’d finished gathering his drawings and notebooks into a single pile she could take with her. Around 3 A.M. she had heard him taking fast, shallow breaths and trying to rouse himself. As he’d struggled to get up, she’d taken him in her arms and felt him relax, as if he were remembering he had nothing left to do. Within the space of five minutes—sixty million miles—his breathing ceased altogether, at which moment she kissed his lips and looked out the window, fully certain, and trying to rejoice, that he was no longer in the room.

  On Saturday morning the weather cleared and they buried his body in the Oak Hill cemetery. She stood at the freshly covered grave with Mary Costello, David Todd, and Commodore Sands, the only ones she had told. The old man appeared confused, but seemed to respond to the comforting pats of Mary’s hand. When the astrologer eased him off for a stroll, David Todd nodded toward the mound of earth and made a frustrated admission to Cynthia: “I didn’t really understand him.”

  “I did,” she said, softly. “Even when he made no sense—or nothing the others would call sense—I understood him.”

  Fifty feet away, Mary Costello and the commodore made friends with the gravediggers, who had just made a place in the earth for Mr. Thomas Jackson, the eighty-nine-year-old currier from High Street, resident in the District since 1813. “Life ain’t fair, is it?” Mary asked. “If that boy back there lived to a ripe age like that, we’d be where? All the way in nineteen-thirty-something,” she guessed, removing her hand from the commodore’s to do a quick count on her fingers.

  After the funeral, it took the two women most of the afternoon to walk back to Third and D. Where Pennsylvania Avenue crossed Fourteenth Street, Mary Costello pointed south, toward the farrier’s, and inquired as softly as she could about what Cynthia wanted done with the light machine, which Hugh had helped them wheel back onto its bed of straw just before midnight on Wednesday.

  “Tell your friend to find an ironmonger who can chop it up and sell it for scrap,” said Cynthia.

  The astrologer couldn’t help asking: “How can you sound so cross toward something that did such a bang-up job? It gave the boy his heart’s desire.”

  “ ‘Cross’?” replied Cynthia. “I’m nothing like that, Mary. I just don’t want anyone else ever using it. Let it be scattered like the spray of a fountain.”

  She would sleep in Mary’s back bedroom tonight, after Charles delivered them a meal in his metal box. She could not face going back to Mrs. O’Toole, who had probably given her room away for all the time she’d spent in it these last three weeks.

  As they waited for Charles, she sat quietly on the window seat above the planet reader’s sign and stroked a suspicious Ra. When Mary saw her staring through the glass and into the street, she asked, without thinking, “That’s how you first saw him, ain’t it?” It took Cynthia a moment to realize that she meant the figure of Roscoe Conkling, ten months ago, after he’d strode up the sidewalk for his reading.

  “Well,” said the astrologer, “I doubt he’ll ever again be showin’ his face here. Or his hand.”

  Cynthia said nothing for a minute or two, then looked back from the window toward Madam Costello. “Tell me the future, Mary.”

  It was a subject the astrologer would prefer to avoid. Thoughts of what would now happen to this girl, most of them discouraging, had dominated her mind all the way down Pennsylvania Avenue. She tried changing the subject. “What was the name of that feller at the grave today? Not the old boy; the young one.”

  “David Todd.”

  “That’s right. He told me that he and Mr. Hugh were lookin’ for a new planet.”

  “Yes, they were.”

  “Well, I hope he keeps lookin’, and in the right place. Here’s a piece of the future I can tell you.” She got up from her chair to fetch The Light of Egypt from the kitchen table. “Here we go,” she said, after locating the page:

  “ ‘To our esoteric system there are ten celestial bodies somewhere, namely, the Sun and nine planets. At present we have only nine in all. Where, then, is the lost one? The exacted adept alone can solve this problem. Suffice it to say that it symbolizes the missing soul within the human constitution. Pulled out of the line of march by disturbing forces, this orb becomes for a time the prey of disruptive action and ultimately lost form, and is now an array of fragments.’ ”

  She stopped reading, noticing that Cynthia had closed her eyes.

  “Go on, Mary. I’m listening.”

  “All right. ‘The ring of planetoids lies between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The time will ultimately come when this orb will be reconstituted.’ ” Stumbling over the long adverbs and hyphenates, Mary Costello wanted to quit, but she saw Cynthia’s hand lift itself from Ra and urge, in an exhausted circular motion, that she finish reading what she’d started.

  “ ‘Until that time,’ ” Madam Costello concluded, “ ‘the missing soul will seek its physical mate in vain, except in rare cases. When this day shall arrive, the Utopia of Neptune and the millennium of Saint John will begin upon Earth. May that time speedily arrive!’ ”

  The planet reader looked up and saw that Cynthia had at last fallen asleep. She closed her book and gently took the cat from the younger woman’s lap.

  Across the city, in the last minutes of daylight, Mr. Todd, who would be looking for a new planet tonight, though in a different precinct of the heavens, made an entry in his notebook. At 1:00 P.M. this afternoon, through the Transit Circle, he had observed the disappearance of two sunspots.

  “Outrageous!” cried Roscoe Conkling. “Forty dollars?”

  The cabman tried to steady his horse; she was losing her footing in the deepening snow on lower Broadway, and he didn’t care if this crazy swell became a fare or not.

  “It’s a real blizzard, sir,” said William Sulzer, the young lawyer who came up alongside Conkling and tried calming him down while the cabman calmed his horse. “I heard a fellow at the next corner asking for fifty.”

  “Get along!” Conkling shouted up to the driver, before smacking the horse’s rump.

  “You may not find another,” warned Sulzer. “I’ll wager nearly every horsecar and coach in the city has stopped running.” He struggled to keep a clear view of the older man, as the icy snow, more like needles than flakes, blew into his eyes.

  “Damned near every man in the city has stopped running!” cried Conkling.

  He had been furious for most of the day, ever since showing up this morning to defend an $80 million estate against some parasites trying to break the decedent’s will. There he’d been in Superior Court at 9 A.M., ready to do battle for the shade of Mrs. A. T. Stewart, widow of the department store magnate, only to find that nobody else had bra
ved the weather to get down to the courtroom. He’d spent the past eight hours at a desk in the Stewart Building, now almost invisible behind the swirling snow.

  “I shall walk!” Conkling informed Sulzer.

  “How far is your destination?” asked the younger man.

  “Madison Square. The Hoffman House.”

  Sulzer attempted a low whistle, to signal discouragement, but it died in the freezing wind.

  “You may accompany me, or you may wait for another thieving hack,” said Conkling, whose expensively shod feet were already moving northward.

  How could Sulzer say no? If he didn’t freeze to death over the three-mile journey, he would be making conversation with Lord Roscoe himself, the most erect fallen politician any aspiring one could ever hope to meet.

  The trick, he supposed, was to keep his head down and—except when he had to talk—his mouth closed against the icy buckshot of snow. “Fine week for the circus to be in town!” he managed to shout, before bringing his muffler back up over his lips.

  No response from Conkling. Had the wind kept him from hearing? Or was the remark, in the blizzard’s rage, too inane to produce any interest in a man who had for twenty years held every Congress and state convention spellbound by his flights of oratory and contempt?

  It was best to stick to business. “Will you win the Stewart case, sir?”

  “I should say so!” Conkling replied with a laugh, not breaking stride, his teeth glinting behind puffs of frozen breath. “If I can carry the day for Jay Gould, I can deliver justice to a widow’s poor ghost.”

  Eighty million dollars must make the widow Stewart’s poor ghost nearly as rich as the railroad baron, but who could count that high? thought Sulzer. Certainly not the thin, underclad Italian struggling, just ahead of them, to get his shovel one foot farther through the snow. He was the only other sign of life on the block in front of them. Ordinarily at this hour the lamps in the shops and offices would be multiplying themselves into a great chandelier; but today the few squares of visible light were twinkling off, one by one, the proprietors not wanting to lose another moment getting to their lodgings—which were surely, Sulzer thought, a lot closer than Madison Square.