Two Moons (32 page)

“Who should be your footsoldiery.”

“Exactly.”

Mr. Wormley, the ex-slave who had made himself rich running the best-appointed hotel in the District, showed the senator and his guest to their table.

“I’ve talked too much of myself,” said Conkling, as they waited for their tea—just lemon, no milk, he insisted to the waiter. “You must tell me how Deimos and Phobos have been.”

“They’re gone. They won’t swim back into view until late in ’79.”

About when the General would. Conkling reached into his waistcoat for a small box. “To remind you of them in the meantime.”

Opening the velvet-covered case to find a pair of earrings, she was amused at the thought of some jeweler at Galt’s turning them out by the dozen to keep up with the senator’s seasonal demand. But then she noticed the stones: each was red, like the planet, but one was larger than the other, in mimicry of the moons. She could no longer pretend that the War God’s attentions weren’t serious, or at least customized. Please, she thought, let these be garnets and not rubies. How much pressure could she bear? (But if they
were
rubies—her mind quickly began working—think how much they could fetch at the District Commissioner’s pawnshop, a new depression-relief effort designed to provide the genteelly impoverished with some cash for their heirlooms. Enough to get the Mangin projector through the Custom House?)

“You’re blushing redder than the stones,” said Conkling.

“Yes,” said Cynthia, “I am.” She shut the little case and said, as demurely as she could, “I’ll put them on later.”

“Ah—
later.
” He made it sound like a place instead of a time, some perfumed Xanadu inside his mind or, more likely, a red-velvet lair behind one of the doors here at Wormley’s.

“Yes, much later,” she replied. “When I’m home after pushing Venus another few miles across the Sun. It will practically be dawn.”

“Is this what comes from my supplemental appropriation? Are they working you that hard? Not to mention denying me your company?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Every evening you can think of. It’s the busiest time I’ve seen there yet.” This work of hers, however falsely she described its schedule, was not just her best alibi; she could see, from the look he had, how much it excited him, the spectacle of a woman earning her bread with her brains, performing a task that even his supple mind couldn’t manage. Did he also think she was
devoted
to this work, and extended those long hours out of zealous vocation? If he did, might it not be all right to ask his help for a deserving young man, equally passionate about the skies, a visionary who needed some equipment his superiors were too blinkered to requisition?

No, she could not ask for that; if she did, this young man would become personal to him—a
man,
in short; a rival different from Hayes and Evarts and Roosevelt, but meant to be crushed even flatter.

“You must
keep
working hard, Mrs. May, so that Senator Sargent’s bill carries the day.” He sounded like the admiral, until he pointed straight up, toward what she understood were his rooms, and said, “We must succeed in moving you to all
sorts
of higher ground.” Pleased with his joke, he laughed, and glared, and said: “The health of us both depends on it.”

Miss Clara Morris was “the greatest emotional actress living”—the placards outside the National said so—but from the third row Cynthia
found the woman, so tiny and so tragic and so acclaimed for this impersonation of “Miss Multon,” a bit hard on the ears. She’d rather have waited for Jefferson to come back in
Rip Van Winkle,
or even for Lydia Thompson to return with her British Blondes, than be seeing this, but once
Henry V
left, Hugh—madly Francophilic since discovering the Mangin machine—had insisted on their going to see these five long acts penned by two dull Frenchmen.

Loud as they might be, Miss Morris’s emotings could not keep Cynthia’s mind from wandering back to the time she had seen Salvini do
Othello.
If the War God knew she were here now—instead of, as she’d told him, making nightly use of his Transit appropriation with Professor Harkness—might he storm down the aisle and strangle her with his golden foulard? As her fingers drummed the armrest she shared with Hugh, she looked around the rebuilt theater, phoenixed from its ashes four years ago, and wondered how safe it was even now. The recent government inspection of the Observatory showed only what everyone there had known all along—it was a worse firetrap than the Patent Office—but the report’s official stamp had somehow now allowed fire to crowd onto Cynthia’s always long agenda of preoccupations. The jewels that dangled from the ears and bosoms of all the lobbyists’ wives here in the audience were glinting even during this dimly lit moment of calamity for Miss Morris; with little effort, Cynthia could imagine the baubles’ concentrated light igniting a velvet seat cover.

None of
these
jewels would end up in the District Commissioner’s pawnshop, which entered her thoughts again. This laughable city! Until it learned to manufacture something other than laws and transcript, it would straggle behind the rest of the nation like an overage foundling. She’d realized the other day that the only reason Washington had avoided the summer’s labor violence was an insufficiency of the workingmen needed to get a proper riot going.

She drummed her fingers more drowsily and wondered if they were watching the third or the fourth act.

On the other side of the armrest, however insistent Miss Morris might be for his attention, Hugh thought more about the stage’s lighting
than its passions. Did the suddenly bright backdrop for the actress’s latest crisis of nerves derive its illumination from silvered glass or a lens? He wondered, too, when the day would come for the owners to replace the whole theater’s gaslights with electricity.

Although she wore no necklace, Hugh still heard Cynthia’s chin drop asleep upon her chest. He revived her with an immediate pinch:
“Allons, debout, ma chère.”
The play
was,
he had to admit, pretty dreadful. The two of them squeezed their way out of the audience—
pardon, pardon, excusez-moi
—and into the street.

“You are not,” he informed her, “delivered from the rest of the evening. Come.”

“Where are we going?”

“Marini’s. The season hasn’t really begun, but he’s giving a dance tonight—smaller than usual, but it’s supposed to last late.”

“I can’t go like this.”

In fact, though it might not be especially fancy, she had on her gayest dress, the bright green one she’d bought seven months ago, after being hired.

Hugh looked at her appraisingly—“One more touch, that’s all you require”—and propelled her toward the tobacconist’s on the corner.

“You’re open late!” he cried out to the proprietor. “I’d like some hairpins for the lady.”

Cynthia moved away, distressed by both the situation and the overenthusiastic enunciation. It was symptomatic, and she would have to enter it into the fever notebook when she got home.

“I’ve got no hairpins,” said the man behind the cash drawer. “But I can probably find something that would do you.”

“You’re a hero, my good man!”

Cynthia walked to the other side of the store and caught sight of Conkling’s portrait above an open cigar box. An engraving of Hayes perched atop another. They formed a poll on the Custom House nominations: the patron was invited to purchase his cigar from the President’s box if he thought Roosevelt and Co. would be confirmed, from the War God’s if he felt they’d be defeated.

“Now, then,” said Hugh, plucking two yellow flowers out of the corsage he’d given her to carry tonight. With one of the pipe cleaners he’d just bought, he fixed the blossoms to her hair. She felt mortified, like a goat being made to wear a bonnet, until he ran the backs of his fingers over her cheek, and told her, softly, without any sign of unnatural excitement, that she now looked even lovelier than before.

“Like a beacon,” he said, holding up a hand-mirror that was on the counter. “Let’s go.”

At every point on their way to Marini’s studio, she remained aware of just how many blocks she was from Mrs. Robinson’s, and of that small box of a bedroom in which she’d learned what she went to find out. It seemed as much a coffin for her and Hugh’s unconceived child as the small oak chest in which Sally had long ago been confided to the ground.

Hamilton Fish, Jr., the bachelor congressman from New York and one of Marini’s social impresarios, greeted them at the door. “Come in!” he cried, gesturing toward the scene within. “Magnificent, isn’t it?”

“Actually, less grand than I’ve seen it,” Hugh whispered to Cynthia. The two of them entered a ballroom festooned with silk swag and lilies. Mounds of ice cream sat atop a table at the far end, not far from a magnificent
cheval-de-frise,
left over from the famous night that Sir Edward and Lady Thornton had appeared. This trellis of silver spears circled the musicians. Two young diplomats, one with a Spanish accent, the other speaking the purest Hoosier, passed by Cynthia, discussing whether or not Robert Lincoln would take an offer to become a Third Assistant Secretary of State. A cluster of naval officers, their dates mostly in pink and showing more bare bosom than ever, had just come from the circus, which would depart Washington two nights hence. If only, thought Cynthia, Hugh had taken her there instead of to the National, or here.

“What a relief from nights with Mr. Todd,” he said, surveying the scene. He began mimicking the squirrelly movements of his trans-Neptunian colleague, whispering his excited surmises that made every
nighttime speck a potential planet and promotion: “ ‘What’s that?’ ” “ ‘Don’t you see it?’ ” “ ‘At the top of the arc!’ ”

Cynthia did not laugh. She would rather be around Mr. Todd than all the hearties and belles parading by her. She could now even recognize Miss Ellen Gray across the room.

“My rival,” she told Hugh, pointing toward her.

“Oh, Lord,” he groaned. “Let’s find the dog and put him on the ice block.” Actually, much to Miss Gray’s disappointment, Marini did not permit even animals as small as Buster to get underfoot. He was serious about the dancing, and had several midshipmen here to display the skills he was known for teaching them at Annapolis. The dance floor itself was the last place Cynthia wanted to be, and after filling a silver bowl much past the rim with ice cream, she made a beeline for two empty chairs against the wall.

“I want to dance,” Hugh protested.

“Then dance with her,” Cynthia replied, nodding toward the
décolleté
Miss Gray.

He sat down, sighing. “All right. Let’s talk about her still-prospective brother-in-law instead.”

“You mean Henry Paul?”

“Yes. Can we trust him? If our projector makes it across the ocean and then through Customs and then down here, we shall still need a third person to run its little engine while we go aloft with the light.” Cynthia shook her head, forcefully. “You can’t yet think of help from anyone else, least of all someone at the Observatory. There’s too much danger the wrong people will find out.”
Anyone
would be wrong; could there be a more repellent prospect than Hugh’s sharing their intimate madness, their production of a cosmic imprint instead of a child, with a third party? She changed the subject. “You haven’t told me the latest news from New York.”

“Mangin’s
ami
wants me there when it arrives, and you should come with me. I’m sure you can arrange two days off with Harkness and Harrison. You’ve put in so much extra time.”

Henry Paul, catching sight of the two of them, crossed the room. “Mrs. May!” he exclaimed, not unwelcomingly, but with great surprise. She knew what he was thinking: a peculiar friendship was one thing, but for Allison to bring her
here,
like a girl you were courting?

“Watch out for Ellen,” Henry warned Hugh, smiling as he spoke of his future sister-in-law. “She still hasn’t forgiven you that night at the commodore’s. She’ll breathe fire if she spots you.”

“My guess,” said Hugh, turning to Cynthia, “is that she can put out five hundred carcels. We’ll strap her to the apparatus.”

Looking at the floor, Cynthia pressed the back of her cold spoon quite hard against his hand. Henry Paul, with a still-friendly but puzzled look, decided to leave these two odd ducks to themselves. He made a little bow and went looking for some pretty girl who could be counted on to simper over his impending removal from the marriage market.

Cynthia now struck Hugh’s knuckles, much harder, with the edge of the spoon. “Don’t tell anyone
anything.
Don’t even make an obscure joke like that. It will get them asking questions.”

“Why can’t I jaw on about my project the way they always do about theirs?” He offered his hand to be kissed, and when she declined, he soothed his knuckles, babyishly, with his own lips, a gesture that irritated and then aroused her—and thereby irritated her all over again.

“Yours isn’t a project. It’s—I don’t know, I suppose it’s a vision.”