Two Moons (15 page)

“Run along, then,” said Mr. Harrison to the boy, before turning to Hugh and Henry Paul. “Now, I hope you two also want to make yourselves useful.”

“We three, actually,” said Hugh.

“My apologies, Mrs. May,” said the clerk. “It’s been a troublesome two days.”

“I’m to have Mrs. May, starting Tuesday, for five mornings,” said Hugh.

“Yes,” said Harrison. “Professors Harkness and Eastman have already told me.”

“Oh,” said Hugh. “Then it’s all taken care of.”

“Except, of course,” said Cynthia, “for the small matter of telling me what I shall be doing.”

“She
is
wonderfully precise,” said Hugh. “Didn’t I tell you, Mr. Paul?”

Cynthia made a stern face, and Henry Paul thought it best to go sharpen a pencil over Mr. Harrison’s wastebasket.

Hugh explained: “It’s D’Arrest’s comet, Mrs. May. She’s arrived, all too punctually, like a maiden aunt. And now she’s got to be entertained. I’ll sit up with her nights, if you’ll speed the calculations along each morning. Once we’ve discerned her current curve, I’ll treat you to a supper to celebrate what will be, by then, her predictable departure.”

Too surprised to give him the insult he deserved, she only nodded and said, “Then even
you
must admit that this one is an omen. Of grilled swordfish and Madeira. I won’t forget.” She walked over to Mr. Harrison’s desk to complete her time sheet for the week that was ending, and lost her pleased feeling when out of the corner of her eye she
noticed Henry Paul giving Hugh what appeared to be solemn advice. She strained to catch the last words of it—“especially now, with the gases”—and understood that Hugh had just been warned not to dare think of again bringing her here at night.

Three hours later, on another river, Roscoe Conkling crossed the deck of the chartered steam ferry
John H. Starin
and entered its dining room. The ship would soon embark from West Twenty-fourth Street for the short trip across the Hudson to Hoboken, New Jersey, where the senator would transfer to the vessel taking him to England. Out of deference to Conkling’s famous self-discipline in food and drink—and because the dozen passengers had already taken a very ample luncheon at the Custom House—the ferry’s table groaned under the barest minimum of champagne and hock and sweets.

Those making this brief
bon voyage
voyage included the Collector, Mr. Arthur, whose kid gloves and velvet collar befitted the nation’s highest-paid federal employee, and Alonzo Cornell, the Custom House’s stone-faced second-in-command, who also found time to serve as chairman of the New York State Republican committee. George Sharpe, the Surveyor, popped a champagne cork as the whistle blew and the
Starin
pulled out from the dock.

The senator was expected to make a toast, and he did not disappoint: “Had your purpose been to add to my regret at leaving these shores, and to the pangs of this parting, you could hardly have chosen a more effective method. Your unexpected presence and exceeding kindness make it harder to say good-bye even for a brief season.” In fact, the only thing making him sorry to go was the chance that another week at home might yet bring a reply from Mrs. May. “Nevertheless your farewell gives me immense gratification, and will be treasured with grateful remembrance wherever I may wander and whatever skies bend above.” With a gentle motion of his hands Conkling stifled the
cries of “Hear, hear!” and promised he would not allow his remarks to lengthen into something they “might expect from Mr. Evarts,” whose grandiloquence was as well established as his enmity toward all of them. “But, gentlemen, I do wish to say something else.” Here he lowered his voice to stop their laughter and excite the surge of fear he always could. “One of the most pleasant among the incidents which I anticipate in my journey abroad will be to thank the English people for England’s reception of General Grant.”

As soon as this line brought them to their feet huzzahing, Conkling sat down. The English had gone mad with adoration for the touring ex-President, forgetting how a dozen years before he’d put an end to the rebels for whom they’d displayed such sympathy. If they now insisted on swooning for the general wherever he went, through the streets of Liverpool or the halls of Oxford, that was fine with Roscoe Conkling, whose identification with Grant could only be perfected by traveling in his wake. He had timed his own departure perfectly. With the first reports of the Jay Commission’s investigations into the Custom House being cheered in the press, Hayes was bound to act before many more days passed. The President would at last declare an open war on the machine, and Roscoe Conkling’s absence would rattle those expected to carry it out.

“Now tell me, Senator. Just when will you be back?”

“The second week in August,” Conkling confided to Cornell, who’d chartered today’s ferry from an old associate with whom he’d once run a steamship line upstate. Huge and impassive, Cornell might lack the elegance of Chester Arthur, but Conkling admired his very coarseness, the way he’d thumbed his nose at his book-loving father and gone off to work as a telegraph boy. Ezra Cornell may have founded Western Union and his university, but his boy had made a
real
ascent, not this charade of starting at the bottom that Bessie’s young man was intent on acting out.

Still, it worried Conkling that Cornell’s brutish face was one of those the public fixed to the Custom House. Between Cornell and
Arthur, his dandyish opposite, there was little the average man could look at and find sympathetic, and with all the sworn evidence about “bones” and “hatchets” and other duns filling the newspapers, the machine’s men had begun to sound like the thieves in Fagin’s den. Testimony that the term “general aptitude” really concerned an applicant’s political know-how had provoked what Conkling regarded as the most detestable sound in the world: the laughter of one’s enemies.

He watched the sidewheel paddles of the other ferries and felt glad for this chartered steamer, which had allowed him to avoid the farm wagons and the newsboys at the docks of the commercial boats. Only the chance to see the ladies returning from their shopping could have made public conveyance worthwhile, and it was too early in the day for that.

But the expense and show of this departure! The newspapers were sure to tut-tut about such extravagance during the fourth year of an economic slump. They had blanched at the uncountable millions the Custom House had taken in during the last twelve months, and crooned with pleasure over the way Mr. Hayes, that Cincinnatus out of Cincinnati, set such a wonderful example by paying for his own servants in the Executive Mansion—these days less a seat of power than a needlepointed sampler, the whole fraudulent “First Family” gathered around the piano as the Interior Secretary picked out psalms and the Vice President, that detestable Wheeler, sang the bass notes.

The men were talking about it even now. George Sharpe, already drunk, shouted “Where are the oranges?”—the same question parched dignitaries were said to whisper at Hayes’s teetotaling hearth, knowing that at least one steward would be good enough to soak the citrus slices in whiskey.

“Don’t worry, Roscoe,” shouted Arthur, tapping him on the back. “When you return, we’ll let
your
trunk stay on the dock beyond forty-eight hours.” A roar of laughter greeted the Collector’s reference to the latest Treasury regulation, designed to limit the time that incoming goods might be coveted and pawed by the machine’s men. It was one
more niggling preview of reform, and along with it Secretary Sherman had also just ordered that hearings on the Philadelphia customs operations be modeled on what had been done in New York. If Conkling was right, the ultimate plan to bring them all down had been hatched at last Tuesday’s meeting of the Cabinet.

“Conkling,” whispered Cornell, as grave as the others were raucous. “I cannot take the number of men down twenty percent. And that’s what Sherman’s going to ask.”

“Let Arthur take it down by eight. Not a percent, not a man further. And make sure the lot he fires includes at least one of Sherman’s friends. Send him a signal.”

“But how am I going to assess the ones who remain?” worried Cornell. Surveyor Sharpe’s testimony on the “voluntary” nature of all political contributions at the Custom House had gone down as risibly as “general aptitude.”

Conkling looked at Cornell without answering. Smart as he is, the senator thought, he doesn’t see what’s coming. He doesn’t understand that he and Sharpe and Arthur aren’t going to be reined in; they’re going to be sent packing. When Hayes did what Conkling expected him to, the machine’s men would have no choice. They would have to strike directly at the President, strangle his administration on the floor of Congress, or it would be the end of them.

“There’s the
Mosel
!” cried Chet Arthur, brushing a crumb from his scented whiskers and saluting the ship that would transport their chieftain across the Atlantic.

Conkling remained seated until the last possible moment, thinking how, when the final battle was joined, he would require a woman as surely as Booth had needed a horse.

On Friday, June 22, Cynthia had the afternoon free to navigate the noisy aisles of Washington’s Center Market. Looking up toward the grand ceiling of the young Gothic structure, she thought of the shabby
old Baghdad that had once filled half of Lafayette Square, and where as a girl she had gone to buy groceries before meeting her father at the edge of the Treasury’s lawn.

Madam Costello, walking the aisles with her, knew no other market from her time in the capital, and had remarked coming in that with more great brick piles like this, the fire would have gone easier on Chicago.

“Look, look, look,” she now ordered, tugging Cynthia toward a table of scarves. “This gold one’d be like a royal sash with your new locks.”

“I don’t think so,” said Cynthia, checking the pin in the borrowed turban that covered her newly hennaed hair. “Oh,
why
did I give in and let you do this?”

“Because he’s bein’ so encouraging,” said the astrologer. “You’ve got your new comet and your supper and your new hair. Pin him down about the supper, dearie.”

“I have,” said Cynthia. “He said a week from tomorrow.”

The two women embarked on a long promenade past household furnishings. Cynthia regarded the tables full of pillow slips and washbasins and all the other things she had never had to purchase during her years in lodgings; they made her feel estranged from the normal world. Did Mrs. O’Toole, obliged to buy such things in great multiples, feel even more peculiar? She hoped so.

“Get me out of here,” said Madam Costello, “or I’ll burn an even bigger hole in me pocket. Did you see that paste jewelry, round the bend and five miles back? You’d swear it was the best opal, wouldn’t you? The birthstone for October.”

“I know all about your Scorpio,” said Cynthia, looking down at the much-shorter woman and noticing the thinness of the hair that had lent out its turban. For more than three weeks, since the arrival of Conkling’s letter, she had been unable to summon any real anger toward her. The scoldings and sarcasm were no more than a light comedy between them. She ought to hate the Irishwoman’s treachery, but her new fears only left her admiring a certain shamelessness she needed more of herself.
She now reasoned: what harm could Conkling actually do? He was a comet of highly doubtful periodicity: another appearance, even in the mails, was most unlikely. By now—sailing after Grant, the newspapers said—he would have turned his attentions elsewhere.

She could not, alas, turn her own attentions from the odd and beautiful Mr. Allison. In fact, she worried that her old cheese-paring caution would reassert itself, and that Hugh would begin to look only like danger instead of new life. If she wanted to maintain the boldness of her approach to him, she needed Madam Costello, this fairy-tale crone, to keep her nerve from burning low.

“All right,” she said, pushing the older woman out into the sunshine over Indiana Avenue. “You were going to tell me more about Capricorns.”

“Well,” said Madam Costello, shifting her ragged reticule from one hand to the other. “They’re often associated with sin.”