Two Moons (22 page)

“Be on the lookout for a red cow,” he said, as the two of them crossed Eleventh Street.

She curled her lip against this latest piece of whimsy.

“No, really,” he went on. “One’s escaped from Gonzaga College. I have this from my barber. It could be anywhere.”

She clapped her ears and raced ahead.

“All right,” he said, struggling to keep up. “Then be on the lookout for your chariot instead.” She was supposed to take the Georgetown horsecar that left from the Treasury building. They would have a late supper at the Union Hotel once the last flares had been launched and he came home from Foggy Bottom. “While you’re at it,” he added, “see if you can’t find me a carriage.”

No one could ever keep up with her nervous pace, especially the kind she was setting now, but since leaving the Astoria Grounds she’d noticed that he was a step behind his usual step behind; and now he had stopped altogether.

“Wait here a moment.” He veered toward Milburn’s drugstore—for a bottle of whiskey, she suspected. She made a face.

“Tomorrow is Sunday,” he explained. “We have rather strict laws about such sales in quiet Georgetown.”

“Yes,” she said. “But today is Saturday.”

“Which will be followed by long, lingering, endless Sunday. Don’t move.”

He came out of Milburn’s with a bottle that he asked her to take to his rooms. They parted in front of the Treasury, and as her horsecar made its way up Pennsylvania and then High Street, she tried to look forward to the evening, reminding herself of all the reasons she liked Georgetown more than her own neighborhood near the Capitol. The alley dwellers weren’t so thick on the ground, and sitting in the Peabody Library had a way of calming her, of making her feel less like the interloper she always imagined herself in public places. The trees were fuller, too. Alighting from the streetcar, she admired the little colonnade of them leading to Hugh’s door, and took note of an advertisement tacked to one maple for a
WHITE WOMAN TO DO GENERAL HOUSEWORK
.

There was no chance it was Hugh who’d posted this bill. Letting herself in, she saw that his seraglio was even messier than usual, the pillows, cups, and newspapers a whirling agglomeration of debris, just like, he continued to assure her, the average comet.

She couldn’t bear sinking into Mrs. Allison’s pillows, so she settled into the chair behind the desk, the only hard one in the room, and looked around. Within an hour she could make this lair as orderly and right-angled as her own shabby precinct of Mrs. O’Toole’s. But would she? What was the point of prolonging the fancy that she and this young man would soon become respectable dwellers on these leafy heights, with Hugh going contentedly off each day for thirty years to work on a successor to Professor Yarnall’s star catalogue? This was not going to happen, and in any case, it wasn’t the daydream that had drawn her to him. But what
had
attracted her, besides the eyelashes and mischief? Was it, inscrutably, whatever had made him tack those sketches to the wall?

Or was she drawn to his apparent determination to throw himself away? Did she love this stubborn profligacy, and hope it would drag
her worried, frugal self down with him—into some lovely oblivion, where the waters could finally close over her head? She took the bottle from its wrapper and poured herself a glass of whiskey. But a moment later she began straightening up the desktop. No, she was not cut out to be a voluptuary.

And he, poor boy, was not cut out for this. She opened his sunspots notebook, the dull record he was charged with making by himself while young Mr. Todd remained on vacation in New Jersey.

The sight of this stupid table caused her to throw back half the whiskey in the unclean glass. But before the sting had left her throat, her eyes widened and her hands began to tremble. He had not even been
near
the Observatory on the 8th, neither at 10
A.M.
nor six in the evening. When she’d gone looking for him that morning, Mr. Harrison had said he was nowhere around; and that night they’d had an early supper at the Irving House.

So, she thought, negligence wasn’t good enough; he needed actively to disgrace himself. Closing the little notebook, she began to weep, soundlessly, the way she’d taught herself between the thin walls of all her rooming houses. She took a last sip of the whiskey and set the glass down on two unopened envelopes from Hugh’s mother—no doubt containing more shrill complaint of debts and darkies. They made her recall the sealed letters, a packet of ten, that John May had written her just before Chickamauga, one to be opened on each of her ensuing birthdays, if he didn’t survive. He’d marked the corner of each envelope, 1864 through 1874, and she had read all of them at first light on the day she was supposed to. They became, as the years went by, shorter and somehow less audible, embarrassed by their own repetitions
and the ruse they were attempting against fate, until they ceased altogether, John having run out of time to write, or just the ability to imagine her in the world more than ten years later.

In the ones he did write, he had always pictured her in New Hampshire, never here, and certainly not in August. The sun at the ball field had made her tired, she now realized, and as soon as the whiskey muffled her agitation over the sunspots fakery, she gave up the wooden desk chair for one of the couches, kicking away some of the pillows and falling into a dream of Rutherford B. Hayes, with whom she sat on a porch, watching the sun fall into Lake Winnipesaukee.

Hours later, she awoke to see Hugh drinking from the same glass she had used. He smiled as she came to.

“A little fizzle. Barely bigger than D’Arrest’s.”

She rubbed her eyes and looked at him.

“The Army rockets,” he explained.

“Of course,” she said, wondering if he’d even gone to the Observatory. Was there room for the sunspots notebook on the agenda of things she couldn’t bring herself to ask him about?

At the Union Hotel they were shown to their table at a quarter past ten by Riley Shinn himself, the proprietor who took such pride in the “Pocket Tuileries” he had created on a corner of Bridge Street. They ate their supper, while at the bar several men drunkenly argued the recent railroad strike, each a loud parrot of what he’d read in the papers or heard on the streetcar. “No innocent man ever gets killed in a riot!” declared the loudest of them.

“Hall was there until things fogged over,” said Hugh. “Just him and George Anderson. He gave up about an hour ago, and he did the strangest thing before he left.”

“What was that?”

“He locked his observer’s book in a desk drawer. I’ve never seen anyone do that before.”

Cynthia dismissed the behavior with a shrug, relieved to have at least some evidence that Hugh had actually been on the premises
tonight. Lucid with coffee, she was now determined to force him on to another subject: “You have to tell me the exact state of things between you and Admiral Rodgers.”

“Things between us are perfectly fine,” said Hugh, signaling the waiter for their bill.

“They’re obviously not.”

“If you don’t change the subject, I shall sing. Or order another whiskey.”

“Tell me what he—”

“In the gloaming …”
He lilted loudly enough that two of the drunkards at the bar ceased their argument and made ready to join in.

Mortified, she seized his hand. “All right, all right. Fanny Christian had a scandalous letter from a friend who’s on her honeymoon.”

“That’s better,” he said, subsiding.

“Now take me out of here.”

It was unspoken, not unclear, that they would end up in his rooms, but for a while they walked with no set destination. Two blocks’ movement north brought them to Gay Street, and by way of apology, Hugh finally put his arm around her waist. Too weary to refuse the gesture, Cynthia leaned closer to him, and they turned the corner in silence, the whitewashed planting boxes at the foot of the trees helping to guide their steps through the dark.

She was the first to see several people, a whole family, kneeling beneath a cherry tree in the front garden of no. 18. She squeezed Hugh’s arm, and the two of them halted, uncertain what to do next, having intruded on a scene that ought to be taking place indoors. Cynthia looked for a light inside, shifting her eyes from the crouched, murmuring figures toward the bay windows. But the house’s interior was entirely dark, the people in the garden visible only from a lamp in the hand of Angeline Hall, who was leading her family in prayer. The wavering light flared against the cheekbones of her gaunt face, which looked up at the sky as her free hand urged little Angelo to look up with her. She seemed to be both surveying and beseeching the heavens, as if
they were on the verge of revealing something spectacular for the first time. Her husband, Asaph, stole just a single glance upward, concentrating on whatever course of prayer his wife was directing.

“What could have brought them out here?” Cynthia whispered to Hugh. But he was already creeping comically away, his steps as high and stilted as an insect’s. With a finger to her lips, she implored him not to make her laugh and give them away. Only after he’d disappeared around the corner, did she start after him, desperate to be away from the Halls’ miserable worship, and irrationally frightened that Hugh was somehow gone forever.

She ran through the dark, clutching her reticule, which contained the device Madam Costello had finally procured. She knew that tonight she would not use it, that she would press on the small of his beautiful back and hold him inside her, make him give her a child, as if his sex were the center of the universe and she the god of all creation.

“They’re cheering for you, Father.”

“Yes, my darling,” said Roscoe Conkling to his daughter, Bessie. He smiled modestly, and did not look up from the pile of mail and newspapers she had brought to his usual suite at Bagg’s Hotel here in Utica, in time for his arrival a half hour before. When she’d gone into the other room for a moment, he had raised the window just high enough that he might hear the crowd swell and chant. Still smiling over her discovery of this action, she was nonetheless impatient for him to take his place on the balcony and make the appearance the crowd had been ordered to come out and cheer. But he continued to feign indifference. Looking through the serials that had piled up in his two months’ absence, as if the latest number of
Appleton’s
compared in importance to the full-throated electorate outside, he asked her for a second time whether she was truly pleased with Malone’s edition of Shakespeare, the present he’d brought her from England.

“It delights me, Father. It will be the only Shakespeare in the house you haven’t underlined for bits of rhetorical weaponry. Unless, of course, you marked it aboard ship while preparing something for tonight.”

Without looking up, he smiled, trying to convey gratitude at her having spared him the sight of her fiancé this evening. “Have you looked through some of these papers you’ve brought me, my dear? It seems the Norfolk and New Orleans collectors have been getting the same scrutiny as our Mr. Arthur.”

“Yes, Father, I’ve kept up with everything. You’ll see that the same men in the Administration who couldn’t understand why you went away are now wondering what’s made you come back so early.”

Conkling chuckled, and inclined his head toward the window. The crowd had begun a triumphalist rendition of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

“Sir?” said Lewis Herbert, chairman of the welcoming committee. He, too, was eager to get Conkling before the crowd, but feared disrupting the War God’s anticipatory savor. “I’m sure they’ll be keen to hear you prognosticate about the President’s message to Congress.”

“Oh, yes,” laughed Conkling. “Tell me: Do you, too, believe he’ll propose setting up a commission to arbitrate the next big labor strike?”

“Yes, sir.”

“One could hardly expect different from an Administration
invented
by a commission.”

Mr. Herbert threw his head back twice, indicating not only that this was a very good piece of wit indeed, but that, no, he had not forgotten who’d created the electoral commission
ex nihilo.

Conkling still seemed in no hurry. This noisy welcome, smoothly churned out by the machine’s local gears, would be the fourth one accorded him since Friday evening, when the
Neckar
had sailed past Governors Island and been greeted by trumpets, cannon fire, and the hoarse roar of every Custom House man aboard the
Thomas Collyer,
which had been chartered to run alongside Conkling’s vessel. An
observer on shore would have thought the machine had its own navy. Conkling had taken salutes from two other steamers in the harbor, and resisted being so unmanly or ungrateful as to stopper his ears against the thirty tugboats all blowing their whistles at once. He’d just clenched his teeth and tipped his hat, provoking another round of huzzahs and the comic tootling of “Hail to the Chief” by a pipe organ he never succeeded in locating through the salt spray and darkening sky.