Two Moons (31 page)

What a paradise of invention I’ve been wandering through! Last night, once I left my sister and Newsmith, I walked over to Wanamaker’s and looked at the blue-moon arc lamps (Brush’s latest) now lighting up the store. I wanted to place you in their glow—and that’s just what I did, in my mind’s feverish eye. (Do not be alarmed. The “feverish” is a figure of speech.) Our proposed endeavor makes me wonder: am I at heart an artist, like poor little Dietrich? A philosopher? I’m surely
not
an astronomer. The admiral is right about that, and I can hardly blame him for thinking it. In fact, at some time I’ll have to tell him all I’ve found out about the Mangin: if he’s going to serve on the government’s lighthouse board, he really ought to know!

I shall be home on Tuesday. Will you have this by then? It’s not yet noon, and I can still rush it to the post office. Of course, I could wait to tell you all that’s in it face to face—in one of my great, teeth-chattering rushes—but I’ve decided you must have at least one letter from me if we’re to call this a romance. It’s unfair that, up to now, our proximity has denied you one.

I burn for you—though not, again I swear, with fever. I am fine.

H.

“Mrs. May, you must try it. It leaves you glowing.”

Cynthia stopped rereading Hugh’s letter when Fanny Christian burst in, carrying a brand-new brand-name jar of enamel. Fanny
was
glowing: a patch of her pretty skin, above the dainty hollow near her collarbone, caught the Monday-morning light.

“I’ll try some on my hands, Fanny. They’re aging even faster than the rest of me.” Fanny eagerly rubbed in the heavy cream; she herself shone as much with commercial faith as with her own pulchritude.

“You do look even lovelier than usual,” said Cynthia. “Careful, or Dan will lunge at you.”

“Aw,” said Fanny. “He isn’t so bad. Did you know he’s taking bookkeeping classes down at Saint Matthew’s Institute?”

Fanny’s ensign had long since disappeared, and Cynthia gathered that Dan Farricker had crossed over into some new column of eligibility on the girl’s ledger of marital prospects, relocated there more, she supposed, by some new anxiety in Fanny herself (had she just had a birthday?) than his own efforts at self-improvement.

“As long as he doesn’t start going to gospel meetings at Lincoln Hall,” Fanny declared.

“You’re right. We wouldn’t want him
too
respectable.”

Fanny flashed a complicitous smile, as if to say that, when it came to a little disrespectability, well, these days Mrs. May ought to know. The older woman blushed and looked back down at her hands, pretending to concentrate on Fanny’s cosmetic efforts. What business was
it of this girl, or of anyone else in this house, to speculate on her comings and goings? “I think that’s enough, Fanny.” She pulled away her slippery fingers, and Fanny, disappointed over how little Mrs. May had praised the magic jar, said all right and retreated from the room.

Cynthia closed her eyes. It had always been this way: she could tease anyone, but never bear being teased herself. Was it any wonder that Mary Costello—whose uncorseted nature took such pity on the shackled, self-torturing Mrs. May—remained her only friend? What other woman could bear me? thought Cynthia, opening her eyes and looking into the mirror over her vanity.

It reflected not just her face, but the handwriting on Hugh’s Philadelphia letter. He
was
sick: in places the penmanship shook to the point of illegibility. And if that wasn’t enough to worry about, there was this reference to Conkling! She tried turning it into a reassurance: if the War God was now so famous that his public utterances had begun to register with even Hugh Allison, then Hugh would never be likely to believe that she knew the senator personally.

Would Conkling remark upon Butler today? Surely any fight over seating the South’s version of Sherman had to take place on the first day of the session. She checked again to see she had her ticket to the ladies’ gallery; it had come last night by messenger from Wormley’s. Within the hour, she might see parliamentary war not only over Butler but the Custom House as well: the Administration had just nominated its three replacements for the machine’s top men.

Her enameled hands shook. Hugh, still in Pennsylvania, believed she would be at the Observatory, not on Capitol Hill, this afternoon. But Professor Harkness—rewarding her for the extra time she’d put in on Venus and, more tacitly, the nursing she’d provided their poor, hopeless colleague—had granted her request for the day off. She had lied to Conkling, too. He had asked for her company this evening, and agreed to settle for an appearance in the gallery and at afternoon tea, after she’d told
him
she was required at the Observatory for night work.

It could not succeed. Her life would catch fire like the Patent Building.

At one minute before noon, he began his march down the corridor, the oxblood shoes he’d bought in Bond Street tapping out a precise beat on the black-and-white marble. Conkling looked straight ahead, avoiding the lobbyist’s salute and the newsman’s cry, but he did cast a sidelong greeting to the seller of photographs (yes, his own was still at the front of the bin). Then he looked straight up, to Constantino Brumidi—still on the scaffold at the age of seventy-five, as he’d been for a quarter century, painting his frescoes on the Capitol ceiling—and Brumidi waved.

Conkling passed the Supreme Court room and entered the Senate chamber, taking his place and appraising the vase of fresh flowers on his newly varnished desktop. By his quick count, another dozen of the seventy-six desks were also so adorned, including Blaine’s, which to his annoyance sported a much larger bouquet. He nodded to two of his colleagues, Burnside and Stanley Matthews, and signed a fast autograph for the page who’d been dispatched to acquire it by some partisan in the galleries. Favor-seekers and retired senators milled about the floor for the last minute or two before the Vice President picked up his gavel.

While the chaplain made his invocation and called upon God’s mercy toward the absent and gravely ill Senator Morton of Indiana, Conkling’s lip curled in disapproval of the mess so many of these lawmakers had already made of their places in the chamber. Newspapers lay crumpled under their chairs, and eraser shavings dotted the blotters. As the chaplain went on, Conkling quietly extracted the card from his bouquet. “Once more unto the breach …” From Kate, of course, her good wishes for the combat to come, and her rebuke for his not taking her to
Henry V
as soon as he’d arrived in town. She had returned to Edgewood, fleeing Rhode Island and Sprague earlier than usual.

“My little man,” said Conkling to a nearby page—they all worshiped him, and he did his best to keep it that way—“will you do this kindness for me?” He indicated a desire to have the flowers removed.

“To your office, sir?” the boy whispered, as the chaplain yet continued.

“To your mother,” said Conkling.

Kate was not in the ladies’ gallery, but once he dared to look up, he could spot Mrs. May, in just the place he’d picked out for her. She made a stiff, charming wave, unable to hide her amusement over something.

She had not been in the Senate since Pierce’s time, and while she watched the War God’s comical housekeeping, she also tried to remember the name of the Vice President who would have been presiding in the old chamber on that long-ago day when her father had smuggled her in (twelve years old and already five foot three). She looked around at the female spectators and realized that Conkling had hidden her in plain sight. Dozens of eyes were on the companion he had provided her, the dazzling Mrs. Bruce, perhaps the best-looking politician’s wife in the city and, to the mortification of its Southern women (and more than a few of its northern ones), a Negress. Married to the Mississippi senator whom Conkling had championed during the man’s first, most difficult days here, she had told Cynthia, within minutes of meeting her at the appointed spot near the staircase, that she and Senator Bruce intended to name their firstborn son after the War God. Right now she sat serenely oblivious to the looks she was attracting, her eyes gazing up toward the light coming through the frosted glass of the ceiling.

Cynthia looked at Conkling’s shiny hair and broad shoulders and wondered if he used glycerine lotion, like Fanny, to fight down dandruff. Even seated, he was a magnificent specimen, and for a moment, to her relief and secret disappointment, she thought: he cannot possibly desire
me
for
that.
It had to be some peculiar mental electricity she suggested. She had finally come to believe that Hugh’s physical ardor for her was real; and yet she knew that her mothering aroused (in him as well as her) an odd, additional thrill. What sort of charge did Conkling imagine drawing from her?

Conkling listened to Vice President Wheeler murmur the senators toward the first day’s business. A year and a half ago, Hayes hadn’t even known the old hypochondriac’s name. This dull burgher out of the House, so in love with his own rectitude he wouldn’t accept a new post office for Malone, New York—let alone a pay raise or some railroad stock. Now, like Blaine, he had moved to the other side of the Capitol, and Conkling would have to look at him, day in and day out, as the session wore on, just as last year he’d had to read his reformist campaign speeches in all the newspapers. Since Wheeler lost his wife, the Hayeses had attached him, like Schurz, to the family hearth, creating the ridiculous spectacle of a President in near-constant touch with his Vice President.

The new senators, the ones filling sudden vacancies, took their oaths and were presented to the body by senior homestate colleagues; especially sentimental flourishes attended the younger Cameron’s replacement of his retiring father. Two chairs remained conspicuously empty, but there would be no action today on Butler and Kellogg. The Republicans would not even caucus until tomorrow, a delay upon which Conkling had insisted; and when that meeting finally occurred, it just might have to continue through the reading of the President’s message.

Hayes.
Conkling twisted his forelock and thought about His Fraudulency down at the other end of the Avenue. The way the man humbly claimed not to “fill” his office but to “occupy” it: he hardly did
that,
just took up a few cubic feet of space, a paperweight, keeping things in place until a breathing man once more seized the premises.

But with all that was happening—Colonel Shafter raiding Mexico; the aggrieved Sioux leaving town; the aggrieved Ponca arriving; silver to be remonetized; the labor unions to be subdued—nothing mattered but the Custom House nominations, which Roscoe Conkling would strangle. Replacing Chet Arthur with
Roosevelt,
that detestable do-gooding businessman with his wheezing Harvard son! (The effrontery of little pince-nezed junior, wanting last year to talk
boxing
with
Roscoe Conkling, while the senator suffered through the last evening of Union League speeches he would ever endure.) Then young Mr. Prince, this “constitutional scholar” with his
book,
to be put in place of Cornell. And they said his Rochester speech was insulting!

They all thought Conkling would never fill
or
occupy the White House. Last year in Cincinnati, Roosevelt Senior had been with those who’d done their best to derail any movement by the convention toward that possibility. Well, after Grant came back in ’80, the reformers would die off—perhaps for real, from the shock of it—and Roscoe Conkling would have his own reward four years later, when he would still be only fifty-five, and have safely outrun the climacteric.

This current battle would be fought subtly, slowly. He would bleed Hayes’s pigs instead of butchering them.

“Mr. President,” he said, rising during a short lull in the mutual admiration and torch-passing. “I move that we adjourn for the day.”

His Republican colleagues fell silent, then seconded, and then said aye. Wheeler, confused, brought his gavel down.

Conkling nodded up at Mrs. May. A moment later she was safely delivered to the foot of the staircase by Mrs. Bruce, to whom the senator bid a grateful good-bye.

On their walk to Wormley’s, Cynthia handed him the slender volume she’d bought at Morrison’s:
Is Our Republic a Failure?
It was her attempt at humor, meant to continue last month’s royalist flirtations, but he didn’t see the joke.

“Hardly, Mrs. May. Only a mechanism misunderstood and falsely characterized. We are a government of laws
and
men, and must endeavor to remain so.” He moved to illustrate his utterance, asking her, with his sharp-toothed debater’s smile, if she knew that the supposedly reform-minded President intended to appoint an old friend, a regimental chum from Civil War days, to the consulship in Melbourne.

“I had no idea,” she said, wondering if she was supposed to laugh or appear shocked.

“And the President’s Democratic friends will vote the fellow in. We
have a unique situation, Mrs. May: a Republican President whose incumbency is swelling the ranks of the Democracy.” She started to tell him that it would be all right for him to shave off a few syllables, the way she and Professor Harkness sometimes did one or two decimal places, but he hurried on with his explanation. “This is how it happens: Republican officeholders, postmen, and tax collectors, even up in your native New Hampshire, are afraid of losing their positions for looking too ‘political’; so they enroll in the other party. Madness! All these disloyal clerks.”