Two Moons (43 page)

Senator Sargent, whose bill had been held over until tomorrow, used the opulence surrounding his colleagues as a retort to Senator Beck: “How much money do you think has been spent here tonight?”

“You stray from the point, my friend. I care nothing for the squanderings of the Spanish government. It’s our own depleted Treasury—”

“Surely,” said Senator Sargent, “a new temple of science—a permanent working display of the national genius—is better value for money than the fripperies of a single eve—”

“Beck is right,” said Senator Edmunds, who had to squeeze left so that Mrs. Yoshida, wife of the Japanese ambassador, might gain entrance to the hotel. “This is going too fast. Have a commission select the site and report to Congress.
Then
we can appropriate the money.”

“Consider the reports you’ve
already
seen,” countered Sargent, now decidedly worried about his bill’s fate. “Thurman was quoting from them this afternoon. We need to get those men out of there
now.
Do you want Admiral Rodgers to die the way his predecessors did?”

The wife of Senator Jones floated by, audibly, festooned with so much jangling silver she seemed a part of the orchestra.

“You should amend the bill,” suggested Edmunds. “Make it say—”

“Come,” said Senator Beck, tired of being jostled. “Let’s get ourselves inside and settle things tomorrow.”

“Easy, dearie, easy,” said Madam Costello, less than a mile away at that same hour. Having left the farrier’s, she and Cynthia were crossing B Street into the Mall, the latter pushing the wagon with such insistence she might soon lose her footing.

Hugh Allison, whose strength continued to ebb and whose kidneys remained ablaze night and day, was to meet them at the base of the Monument. As the two women trundled the projector across the hard
ground toward the engineer’s shack, Cynthia vainly tried to catch sight of him. The wind ripped through her plain coat, and she wondered how this obelisk, if it ever reached full height, would withstand such gusts—let alone how she and Hugh, if they succeeded in reaching its current summit, would keep themselves from falling off and sailing to the ground.

Perhaps they
would
have the strength, she decided all of a sudden, quite astonished, having discovered Hugh’s silhouette in the distance. He was moving quickly, dragging a large plank to the stone steps of the Monument—a ramp for the projector.

“Hello!” he shouted into the night, actually running up to her and Mary Costello. He made a low bow to the astrologer, and took Cynthia in his arms. “No sign of Shea!” he cried. “I’ve already swiped his key from the hook and opened the place up.”

“What if he yet comes?” asked Cynthia. She had no trouble counterfeiting worry over this point; her face showed real fear of all the work and risks they had ahead of them.

“An excellent choice,” said Hugh, pointing to Madam Costello, who was already pushing the wagon toward the steps. “We can’t keep up with you, Mary!”

“I can’t speak for youse two, but I’m eager to get this boiler going. I’m
freezing,
children!”

Conkling did not see two waiters scrambling to extinguish the branch of evergreen that had just caught fire from a bronze candelabrum. Nor did he see the calcium light outside Wormley’s, since he was coming down to the party, with Mrs. Sprague on his arm, from his own apartment in the hotel. Kate’s
vert d’eau
gown, trimmed with roses and lily of the valley, was perfectly draped, and so were her pearshaped pearls and diamonds, but she could not resist asking Roscoe to wait while she went to survey the enormous dressing room, where each lady had been promised the attentions of her own maid.

The War God told her to go satisfy her curiosity, but he frowned as soon as she was out of sight. Her boldness had begun to exasperate him. Coming up to his rooms just so they could make this entrance from the stairway! Half her attire was out of fashion, the other half a display of debt. He had succeeded in putting through tax relief for Edgewood—the late Chief Justice’s mansion deserved no less, he had argued one day in the Senate, after persuading her not to sit in the ladies’ gallery—but he hardly had the means Sprague had always had to dress her. Nor, in truth, did he any longer have the inclination. He would rather cloak Mrs. May’s honest poverty, ornamenting the simple frocks she earned with her nimble brain.

He greeted Madame Mantilla, complimenting the evening’s hostess on the roses that crowned her black hair. She tapped him with her fan—teasing this man whose eye for women the diplomatic corps knew as well as the Congress did. She suggested he turn around to admire the light streaming through the door.

“My!” said Conkling, startled by his first notice of the calcium display. The marvel immediately made him think of Cynthia’s experiment, which she had damned well better complete this week. Once she had secured her triumph, he would fasten her to his life and the apartments upstairs, where dear Kate would henceforth be visiting no more.

“Will you excuse me?” he asked Madame Mantilla. “Senator Sargent seems to want my attention.”

“Conkling,” said his California colleague, “I should like to introduce Professor Simon Newcomb, one of the Observatory’s chief eminences. We’re talking about the bill for removal.”

“Well,” said Newcomb, delighted to add Conkling to his web of influential acquaintance, “I’m rather removed from the Observatory myself. These days I’m at—directing, I should say—the Nautical Almanac Office.”

Conkling looked at him, unimpressed.

Newcomb went confidently on: “But I shall say this. Once the Observatory is up on safer ground, it will be time to think about reorganizing
the whole place. We’ve been lucky with our naval commanders—lucky with them
individually
—but scientists need credit where credit is due, and there’s no making sure the next superintendent will have the liberality of his predecessors. Having a scientific administer the place would—”

“Surely,” said Conkling, “there’s more danger of credit being grabbed by any fellow scientist put in there to run the show?”

“On the contrary,” said Newcomb, in his best ladies’-club manner, unaware that Roscoe Conkling did not enjoy being disabused of ideas. “A navy man can know so little of astronomy that he’ll keep men around the place who have no business being there. And that’s the worst dispensing of credit there is—wasting equipment on someone who can’t pull his weight. Why, they’ve got one young fellow over there now—I’m sure he looks, on paper, just like the rest of us to Admiral Rodgers—and he hasn’t got any sort of investigation going. I couldn’t tell you
what
he’s been doing. And yet he’s been allowed to remain on the staff for more than a year. He’s sickly, and I thought that would take care of things—a shame, of course—but now I learn that he’s back, still drawing his wages and still doing nothing that anyone can—”

“How do you
know
that he’s back?” asked Conkling.

The question struck Newcomb as peculiar, but he answered it, untruthfully. “I heard one of the astronomers mention it.” He couldn’t very well say he’d overheard Asaph Hall’s little boy jabbering to Mr. Todd.

Senator Sargent fidgeted, hoping they would get back to the important subject of his bill. Conkling said nothing more to Newcomb, didn’t even nod. He just looked directly into the white light beyond the entrance.
She had lied to him.
That idiot rebel boy was still part of things. This experiment was still
theirs.

He saw a guard cross in front of the doors. The uniformed figure cut into the light, and Conkling wondered if this might be the fellow she’d made him reassign from the Monument.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” he said.

“But—” pleaded Senator Sargent, to no avail. His colleague was already charging up the stairs to his apartments.

She had
deceived
him. Denying him was one thing—an obstacle, an incitement—but deception enraged him. Being laughed at was the only assault that could trump it in the host of life’s assaults to which he was subject. He listened to the noise of the party come up the stairs. The fat, fleshy guests; the awful clinging of Kate: it all repelled his senses. He shut the door against it and struck the punching bag several times, until his hands, pleasantly stimulated, reached for his gloves and his pistol. He didn’t arm himself as often as his critics claimed, but self-protection was only prudent when walking the District at this hour. He would find out just what was going on at the Monument this week, and he would give this overgrown girl—who had asked for favors, who had come halfway to heel, and who had now deceived him—the surprise of her unhappy life.

She feared each step up the wooden struts would be her last. Between them they carried the projector, dismounted from its wagon, like a giant loving cup. The attached cable rose from below like a snake being charmed. A fleet-footed person could make the whole corkscrew climb to the top of the Monument in two or three minutes, but she and Hugh had been at it for nearly twenty by the time they reached the last half-rotted steps. They finally sat down, putting the projector on the plank between them. Cynthia, breathing hard, at last dared to look down the hollow shaft. At the bottom she saw Mary Costello warming her hands over the little fire she’d got going in the boiler box.

Fearing the cable would soon be too taut, Cynthia shouted down for the astrologer to uncoil the rest of it.

“Right away, dearie!” came the response, flying upward through the granite-lined shell.

“Are you ready, darling?” asked Hugh, eerily less out of breath than she.

“Yes, I think so.”

“Good,” he said, rising from the top step. “Make sure your skirts are gathered up and tied.”

She nodded, checking the knot she had made before leaving the farrier’s.

He took a hammer from his waistcoat pocket and tapped on one of the wooden flats covering the obelisk’s unfinished top. To their relief, it lifted easily—too easily, they soon realized, as the wind took it up and out like a kite. “Jaysus!” came Mary Costello’s cry a moment later, when she heard it crash on the steps outside the Monument’s open door. “Are you two all right up there?”

They were too occupied with the sight just revealed—a satin sky spattered with shining dimes—to answer. For a moment Cynthia wished they could stop now, right here, in this unexpected moment of perfection, but Hugh was already hoisting himself onto the stone edge. He sat down and held out his arms, reaching for the projector, urging her to lift it to the wooden step he had just vacated. She strained to raise it by herself, and for a moment, afraid she would fail, she frantically tried thinking of an alternative way. But then a surge of vitality allowed her to lift it in a single jerk. The lamp came down hard upon the already cracked step, threatening to fall clear through it, but the boards held, and once the projector ceased wobbling, she took Hugh’s hand and joined him on the rim of stone. Seated with her legs dangling into the Monument, and her eyes on the stars, she felt as if they had climbed into the world’s attic.

“It occurs to me,” said Hugh, “that I’ve never asked if you’re afraid of heights.”