Two Moons (13 page)

The planet reader was at a loss for something to say.

“And the worst of it is, he’ll be having his hands around a much younger pair of ankles tonight.” Cynthia paused to lower her spoon. “Can you do voodoo on her?”

“Whom is it we might be talkin’ about?” asked Madam Costello, trying to convey both gentility and the faintest hint that some kind of offensive action might be possible.

“The younger—what else?—sister of a colleague’s fiancée. I hear he’s taking her to a supper at Commodore Sands’s house. You’d like the old commodore. They all say he looks like Merlin.”

“Dearie, it’s not all the same: voodoo, magic, planet reading.”

Cynthia sulked, worrying a not-quite-cooked piece of carrot in her mouth. Mary Costello looked at her, deciding it was just as well that Mrs. May had lost her interest in astrology. She wouldn’t have to do any more readings for the girl’s half-hearted reception, and she wouldn’t have to witness any more of her satanic arithmetic. She could, as a lover of romance and a good cry, just dispense some maternal affection toward her.

“How is your War God?” asked Cynthia, after biting through another carrot.

“Oh, suffering through more talk of ‘gross abuses’ in the weighers’ department. Honest me, why don’t these government fellers spend their efforts investigatin’ things like all this bad vinegar being sold in Chicago? It’s carryin’ folks off as surely as the river water took me husband.”

Mary Costello didn’t much care about the vinegar, which she’d learned of only from the
Star,
the same place she followed the weighers’ testimony. She was just trying to postpone the evening’s work. She had to translate the paper’s latest on the Custom House hearings into planetary movement and advice, and transcribe the latest tidbits of Mrs. May’s conversation—all for the great man up in Utica. She would report the girl’s adventure with the telescope, yes. But should she mention the beau at her ankles?

Looking across the table at Cynthia, whose expression might help her decide, she discovered the girl’s eyes to be brimming with tears.

The astrologer quickly rose from her seat and came around the table. She took the soup spoon from Cynthia’s hand and lay the girl’s head upon her breast, encouraging her to sob.

“Oh, Mary, it was wonderful.”

Stroking the poor thing’s hair, Madam Costello quietly offered a suggestion. “Darlin’, I have a henna so pale it’s more yellow than red. What do you say we rinse some into you?”

Commodore Sands’s dining room had no bell pull for summoning a servant, but the old gentleman accomplished that device’s purpose by tugging on the tip of his long beard to signal the unmarried daughter who acted as his hostess. Two quick tugs indicated it was time to separate the men and women around the big Eastlake table.

The ladies’ expulsion could not come soon enough for Hugh Allison, whose companion for the evening, from the moment he’d picked her up in the carriage, had never relinquished her lapdog. Hugh wished that the dog, part of a recent unaccountable craze, might somehow swallow a broken glass before going on to ingest Miss Ellen Gray. The animal was the girl’s whole conversation. Whatever the table discussed, an eclipse or an Indian massacre, reminded her “exactly of Buster” and some piece of the dog’s naughtiness that she would go on to recount. Hugh could not believe this flibbertigibbet was a minister’s daughter, just as she, he was sure, could not believe a man with such good looks and beguiling eyes could be paying her so little attention.

As soon as Miss Gray and Buster had been banished with the rest of the women to the front parlor, Sands led the men upstairs to the library and passed around cigars. Hugh and Miss Gray’s future brother-in-law, Henry Paul, lit theirs with a certain sense of humor, puffing like riverboat gamblers instead of gentlemen who’d grown into this after-dinner pleasure. The commodore turned to Professor Harkness, the only middle-aged man in the room, and said: “I’m glad to have these young people around. It does me good.”

Harkness looked toward Hugh and Henry Paul, and nodded his agreement, with restrained enthusiasm; he might have reminded the commodore that he was chronologically closer to the young people than to their kindly old host.

“I got the idea for this evening at the big wedding,” said Sands, referring to the nuptials of Admiral Porter’s daughter, two weeks ago at Epiphany Church. The retired superintendent had spent most of his time taking appreciative notice of the young couple there, instead of, like so many others, straining to be noticed by the assemblage of Navy brass or Mrs. Rutherford B. Hayes herself.

“Now Rodgers may not be young, but he’s a man of the future,” said the commodore to Harkness.

“That he is,” said the professor.

“I heard him fuming the other afternoon,” said Henry Paul, “about the cost of dragging all that marble to the Capitol for the big Navy monument. ‘Another damned sarcophagus,’ ” Paul grunted, in pretty fair imitation of the observatory’s new chief. “Said he’d rather have a functioning service than a memorial to vanished glory.”

“I don’t know how they got the marble over the pavements,” said Harkness. “Wood or concrete, half of what’s in the District crumbles as soon as it’s laid.”

“We
do
have too many monuments,” said Sands, softly. “This proposal of Sheridan’s to bring back Custer’s body.
It’s
a sort of monument. Dangerous, and silly. We’re always better left where we fall. Bury a man at sea and the ship sails right on.” He seemed afraid of slipping into his own sad daydream; the other men noticed his effort to raise his voice and sit up straighter. “Now, will he be letting you do what you want?”

The question, addressed more or less to them all, concerned Rodgers.

“I hope so, sir,” said Harkness, normally not much more of a conversationalist than Asaph Hall. He knew the commodore’s unrestrictive regime remained a great point of pride to the old man. “I can still remember the first annual report issued during your tenure, how it gave us individual credit for our accomplishments.”

“And your mistakes,” said Sands, laughing. “But it
was
better to have names put to feats, instead of just claiming them all for ‘the Observatory,’ as if the building itself got up each night to do the work.” He turned to Hugh Allison. “Mr. Eastman called on me the other day. He says you’ve been looking at a new comet.”

“Yes, sir, but she’s already beginning to disappear.”

“ ‘She?’ ” asked Harkness, as if it weren’t perfectly routine for the men to refer to celestial bodies as their naval counterparts referred to ships. All at once Hugh realized that Captain Piggonan had, in fact,
seen Mrs. May the other night; and had said something that found its way to Harkness and who knew how many others.

“Will ‘she’ be back?” asked Harkness.

“I don’t believe she will, Professor.” He paused, knowing he could keep himself as calm as he had on the roof last Friday. “The trajectory I’ve been seeing doesn’t indicate periodicity. Mr. Eastman does, however, expect D’Arrest’s comet to be back in about a month, its fourth visit since ’51.”

The commodore, who couldn’t resist the lure of his own past, said, “How I still remember those meteors way back in ’33. Not that that shower we watched together was anything negligible; right, Mr. Harkness? How long ago was that? Four years? Five?”

“Ten, sir. November of ’67.”

“Ten!” cried Sands, clearly distressed.

Hugh tried to distract him. “Herr Winnecke’s comet is nothing so spectacular as either of those showers, I’m sure, Commodore.”

“Oh?” said Sands. “A small light?”

“Yes,” said Hugh. “A kindly light, though not one that will lead anyone much anywhere.”

“Not on a par with what this French fellow may soon give us!” said Henry Paul. The journals had been full of the latest electric light experiments. “But unless he succeeds in turning it down, it won’t do much good for anybody.”

Hugh could not let this go unchallenged. “What’s wrong with a great big light, a powerful blaze?” he asked. “Why confine it to a parlor?”

Harkness was about to extol the sort of useful, modest light in the commodore’s library, which electricity might allow into the room even more efficiently than the gas jets did, when Buster came tearing over the threshold, yelping without letup.

“Henry, if you was creatin’ a dog,” said Hugh, in the drawl he used only for sarcasm, “would you make up a mastiff or”—he pointed to the creature at Mr. Harkness’s trouser cuff—“
that
thing?”

Ellen Gray had rushed into the room just in time to hear the question,
and she looked hurt. Her future brother-in-law hid his laughter behind his left hand, while Hugh removed Buster from Professor Harkness’s pants. Not used to such a firm grip, the animal immediately ceased barking.

“Allison,” said Henry Paul. “Think of a whole city, every single house shining with its own electric lights, tens of thousands of them.”

“We’d have even more trouble seeing than we do now,” said Harkness, imagining the astronomers done out of their nights.

“But think of how much work everyone else would accomplish,” offered Henry Paul.

“I don’t know,” murmured the commodore. “I’d miss blowing out my lamp.”

With the hand not encircling Buster, Hugh extracted his pocket watch. “May I see you home, Miss Gray?”

Annoyed that the conversation hadn’t been transformed by her arrival, and unable to think of Buster’s analogical relationship to whatever they
were
talking about, she shook her head.

“Then I’m sure Mr. Paul and your sister will manage to get you there.” He deposited Buster, who instantly resumed yelling, into her delicate hands.

“Commodore,” said Hugh. “My thanks for a very pleasant evening. Gentlemen, please convey my compliments to the rest of the ladies.”

While getting his hat in the vestibule downstairs, Hugh could overhear Sands, who he knew liked him, ask the remaining guests: “He’s not terribly Southern, is he?”

Harkness answered: “When it comes to laissez-faire, Commodore, he may be the exception who proves your rule. The boy needs military discipline, never mind scientific direction.”

Before he could hear this last remark, Hugh was gone, into the night, on foot and sick with a vision.

His mind went back seven years, to the spring of 1870, when Willie Dietrich, a glum little pansy who lived in the same Harvard house and was terribly sweet on him, asked if he might paint his portrait. He’d sat
for him half a dozen times. The canvas that resulted was to say the least flattering, though less distinguished by the subject’s smoldering beauty than a kind of absurd serenity. To look at the painting, one might think young Mr. Allison knew all about the future and considered every one of its coming manifestations perfectly acceptable. Hugh had let Dietrich keep the portrait for himself and had never seen it since leaving Cambridge.

Some weeks after the picture was finished, Hugh and another friend, on slightly drunken impulse, had dropped into a Brattle Street studio to be photographed. They sat motionless for several minutes, the backs of their heads in metal posing clamps, and thought no more of the adventure once they were back out on the street. After a week, they nearly forgot to claim their pictures—and to pay the bill. But once he did pick up his order, Hugh sat on the steps of Grays Hall, holding the photograph a foot in front of him, and realizing how different its subject was from Willie Dietrich’s Hugh Allison. The young man in the photograph was no less idealized—the art practiced on Brattle Street having its conventions, too—but
this
Hugh Allison seemed to know so much less about the future than his painted version. It had nothing to do with the expression, or with any intention on the part of photographer or subject. It had to do with the way the young man in the photograph had existed for only the few minutes of his exposure, not a half-dozen sittings over several weeks, each prolonged by whatever excuse Dietrich’s ardor could invent. The man in the photograph had existed only at two-thirty in the afternoon of June 2, 1870, and he owed his continuing visibility not to someone’s paint box but to his own reflected light—what had come off his face and burned its way through the photographer’s lens, finally settling on the glass plate. It was an act of total assertion, the perpetuation of himself
by
himself.

Now,
think,
Hugh had told himself in 1870: if that light were to travel not a fraction of a fraction of a second to reach the glass eye that was looking for it, but a thousand years or more, a trillion times a trillion
miles, then the face reflecting it would remain alive for the unimaginable length of the journey.

The day he’d called for the photograph had been the first of a Commencement weekend, when the Yard was full of whatever boys remained from the Class of 1820, old men now, wisps of white hair flying over their stooped shoulders. As he held his own picture, their catastrophe struck him full in the face, in a way the Recent Glorious Dead’s never had. No amount of manly nostalgia, with which the weekend was replete, could mask the sheer cruelty and meaninglessness of the old men’s lives, or his own. As night snuffed the spring day, he had gone walking, the photograph in his pocket, through Mount Auburn cemetery, whose gravestones were awash in moonlight and the merry airs drifting over from the old men’s parties.