Two Moons (19 page)

It had been three and a half weeks since he’d taken her in his arms—and then walked her home. She had not let him make love to her, and since then he had not pressed the case. Except for one night when he’d felt unwell, they had seen each other every second or third evening. He would walk her home—the two of them holding hands once they’d crossed Virginia Avenue—or to the chop house near Madam Costello’s. Inside the restaurant, he would diagram with a wax pencil over the fine print of a newspaper, teaching her the rudiments of astronomy and urging her to talk of her past, as if that were simply another place—which his drawings somehow suggested it was. With
each conversation they drew a bit closer. She felt herself becoming his, as imperceptibly as her hair was returning to its real color. She thought of herself as Venus—the planet, not the goddess—cautiously transiting the Sun until she was wholly, safely circled by his golden aura.

During the day, she calculated Venus’s actual transit, advancing the long three-year project with funds the Observatory’s men, on the basis of quite unscientific guessing, had decided were the result of “Mr. Harkness’s admirer,” a politically influential woman who’d been much taken with him, some months ago, when Professor Newcomb brought his associate to an evening meeting of the Washington Scientific Society.

Lately, Hugh himself had done little but write letters, at Admiral Rodgers’s direction, to astronomers across the country and throughout Europe who might join the observation parties being organized for next year’s transit of Mercury and full solar eclipse. He was expected to sit down with the admiral on the 30th, a week from Monday—a potential showdown that worried Cynthia and about which neither of them spoke, not even when Hugh’s collegial gossip and mimicry presented a natural opportunity to discuss Rodgers’s ways and expectations. They had also talked no more of Gauss’s fantastical drawings. Hugh feared, she thought, her disapproval of such an outlandish preoccupation; and disapprove of it she did.

Once they’d returned the corrected sheets to the Printing Office clerk, the two of them walked south on Eighth Street toward Pennsylvania Avenue. The noontime summer dust flew up from bare patches of the road where pavement laid by Boss Shepherd, the District’s modernizing governor, had failed to take. Hugh pointed toward Ninth Street and a house on the south side of E. “That’s Marini’s lair.” He and Henry Paul sometimes went to the bachelors’ cotillions run by this Italian dancing master. No less than Sir Edward and Lady Thornton, the British ambassador and his wife, had been to these gay affairs.

“And you’re really going to take me there?” asked Cynthia.

“I am going to take you there. But we can’t wait until the season
begins for some amusement. Let’s make a little excursion soon. The
Mary Washington
goes down the river a couple of evenings a week. We can get tickets right at the wharf.”

“We can pick a night when it’s cool,” said Cynthia. “Below, say, eighty-five degrees.” She pushed up the sleeves of her dress. “Honestly. Even Sitting Bull has gone up to Canada for the summer.”

“Do you want to make a day trip somewhere north instead?”

“No. That would require the railroad, and by the time you keep your promise the trains aren’t likely to be running.”

“My darling Cynthia, have you
ever
been able to take yes for an answer?”

“No,” she answered. “But you know I’m right. There, look! Proof of it!” She pointed to the already familiar sight of Albert, Mr. Hayes’s Negro driver, who kept one hand on the horses’ reins and used the other to hold a giant black parasol over his own head. “See? His boss is still in the District.” With the railroad strike beginning to spread, and at least one governor requiring federal troops to deal with rioters, the President had so far gone no farther than the Soldiers’ Home for relief from the summer’s heat.

“As I’ve said,” Hugh sighed, “you’re a natural scientist. You’ve got deductive powers to supplement your mathematical ones.”

“You remember the million dollars I said once passed through my hands?”

“Yes?”

“It was really one million three hundred and forty-eight thousand, six hundred and fifty. I was bored wielding the scissors, so I kept count.”

He laughed for the next several steps, while she considered how wrong he was about her mind. Whatever its peculiar gifts, her brain was an almost entirely emotional organ. Her never taking yes for an answer arose not from any scientific skepticism, but only out of the nervous uncertainties she feared would never leave her.

“You know, I’m not for reform,” she said, suddenly. “The ‘civil service’ variety. I’m right with the Public Printer on that.”

“You?” asked Hugh. “The most meritorious of them all? You’d have Hayes’s job if the world worked fairly.”

“But it doesn’t work fairly. And the old, corrupt ways left some elbow room for human kindness. They could always take on a genteel widow who’d fallen into want, or somebody’s brother-in-law who drank and could barely read but had three children at home. That sort of unfairness kept some people from falling off the earth.”

He knew her fears. He’d inferred them from peculiar things that bubbled up in her conversation, things she knew because she thought she ought to know them, or just couldn’t get them out of her mind: the way profanity might get you a five-dollar fine from an out-of-sorts policeman; or default on a twenty-dollar bond get you tethered to a chain gang. She had great nerve, this girl, but she didn’t like wasting her courage—not when the world required so much of it. Last Saturday, after they’d gone to the Corcoran and seen a boy hustled out because he was blocking someone’s view, using too big an easel to copy the work of some second-rate master, Hugh had done a cartwheel through the last gallery to irritate the pompous guard. For his trouble, he had earned only Cynthia’s anger. “You
fool,
” she’d said, and meant it.

Prompted by this memory of the art gallery, he reached into his coat to withdraw a carefully wrapped pastel, done at his own request by Trouvelot, the sketch artist who was often around the Observatory to make pictures of phenomena like the Horseshoe Nebula, or Saturn sporting Professor Hall’s white spot.

On the paper that Hugh unrolled Cynthia saw her own face and pastel streaks of her own hair, some of them gray, swirling like constellations toward the edge of the sheet.

He laughed at her disbelief. “You didn’t know I had him watching you the other day, did you? You thought he was doing Venus, for Harkness, didn’t you?”

“Is this for me?” she asked.

“It is not,” he replied. “It goes on my wall. Next to the Gauss sketches.”

“No one is safe!” cried Louis Manley, five days later in Mrs. O’Toole’s parlor.

“You don’t need to tell
me
,” said Joan Park. “They’re discharging Mr. Croggon, who’s worked in the bond vaults for
twelve years.
It would seem that the honest supervision of four hundred million dollars is less important than someone’s complaint about his owing his position to his brother.”

“And can you imagine, Miss Park, if these new ‘nepotism’ standards were also applied to the Army and Navy?”

She and Mr. Manley shook their heads and clucked until this smug display prompted a cry of disgust from Fanny Christian: “I don’t know how you can talk of
that
when there are mobs in the streets ready to tear up the rail tracks!”

“This sudden interest in public affairs, Miss Christian!” Dan Farricker nodded in mock admiration, and Fanny flounced from the room. As Dan well knew, Fanny couldn’t tell a Knight of Labor from an Odd Fellow, but she did understand that this horrid railroad strike would likely keep her from showing off the new pair of shoes she’d bought for a wedding in Philadelphia this weekend. By now Baltimore was full of General Hancock’s troops, charged by the President with preventing another convulsion like the one five nights earlier, when the local militia had shot into a crowd and killed nine people.

“You’re not going to find
me
defending the government’s property,” declared Louis Manley, once the rustle of Fanny’s skirts had receded. “I don’t care what these Cabinet secretaries order us to do. They don’t pay me enough for that!” The other lodgers didn’t know that his savings had never recovered from the $300 depletion they’d undergone when he bought his way out of the war.

Mrs. O’Toole, who tonight had put out only half as many cookies as usual, sighed that if the unrest kept up bread would soon go to ten cents a loaf and bringing in coal would get even more expensive than
usual. Meanwhile, they sweltered in the late-July heat, and Dan Farricker reminded the landlady that ice was a local manufacture.

“Locally,”
said Harry O’Toole, “things may soon get quite a bit worse. There’s talk of those Baltimore mobs marching on the District.”

His mother enacted a terrible shudder. The
Plymouth
and the
Essex
had arrived this afternoon, with more than five hundred marines, to defend Washington. It was all too reminiscent of the war, though this time Mrs. O’Toole actually hoped the capital would prevail against the threats to it.

“Oh, calm down, Harry.” Dan Farricker was laughing again. “You’ll need an electric belt for your nerves.”

The glass pane rattled in the vestibule door.

“It’s our intrepid Mrs. May,” said Dan.

“You
walked
home?” asked Mrs. O’Toole, unable to believe that Cynthia, at a time of such disturbance, would continue doing without the Pennsylvania Avenue streetcar. She handed her lodger a letter, without saying anything more. The whole parlor already knew about the foreign postmark.

“Paris,” said Cynthia, regarding the blue envelope. “You’ve seen views of it in your stereograph.”

If she wasn’t careful, she would get herself thrown out of here. She might not end up in the District jail, but she’d be in a shabbier place with an even worse landlady. What compelled her to be insulting? Was it the emboldening effect of the florid penmanship on the envelope? The certainty of whom the violet ink was from? Or was it—the most astonishing fact—her realization that she didn’t fear having the letter in her hand?

She refrained from opening it until she’d shampooed her hair, and even after reading it through to the bit about Conkling’s wanting to see the Observatory, she felt no great alarm. Since the extra funds for the Transit arrived, she’d felt almost in league with him. It was their little secret, and sitting with this odd piece of knowledge each day in the
Observatory, a place that always made her feel how
little
she knew, was strangely fortifying. And now, thanks to Hugh Allison’s sentiments, however peculiarly expressed, she could stand by the window and read this letter without jumping out of her skin. Yes, she
was
more confident than she’d been that day in May when the last of Conkling’s missives had arrived.

She slipped the letter back into her dress pocket and put up her not-quite-dry but progressively-less-hennaed hair. She trotted back downstairs, hoping, and failing, to escape the parlor without exciting comment.

“Going out again?” asked Louis Manley. “It’s nearly eight o’clock. And quite dangerous, I should say.”

“She’s got a beau to protect her,” said Dan Farricker.

“Oh?” was all Mrs. O’Toole added to that. The failure of Mr. Allison, that charming South Carolinian, to reappear here at 203 F Street was a sore point with the landlady, and ascribed to the selfish dictates of the dried-up Mrs. May.

A moment later the same Mrs. May was listening to the sparrows and on her way, with a fast, light step, to the corner of Third and D. She looked forward to Mary Costello’s merriment, as well as her assistance with a quite sublunary matter. She found the astrologer in the little room at the back of the house, finished with the dinner Charles had brought and preparing what she announced would be her last dispatch to Conkling while he was still on the Continent. “Mr. Sharpe and Mr. Arthur have been in the city, negotiatin’ with Mr. McCormick—at the insistence of the President himself,” she said, with a slight uncertainty as to whether she had all the names right.

“I’ve read all that,” said Cynthia, as if she were still a customer who deserved better. Perhaps one reason she couldn’t take Conkling’s letter too seriously was the silliness of the political atmosphere in which he fumed. Mr. McCormick, the assistant Treasury Secretary, had just been hoist on the petard of the administration’s reforms: while he was ordering Sharpe and Arthur to clean out the Custom House, somebody
had gotten around to reminding
him
that he now had to resign his post on the party’s national committee.

“Have you told Senator Conkling that our local Lucy Webb Hayes Temperance Society has proclaimed its opposition to the railroad strike?” Cynthia laughed at the folly of it all, but Madam Costello, after a moment’s consideration, shook her head: “No, he has a liking for Mrs. Hayes. A respectfulness, I should say. He’s a complicated one, our War God is.”

“Suit yourself,” said Cynthia. She wished her companion believed a little more in fresh air. The room was dark, and it smelled of cabbage and cat.