Two Moons (18 page)

Roscoe Conkling was not in Paris. “Mr. Arthur Chester” was, however, registered at a small hotel in the Place Dauphine, his room adjoining that of Mrs. Kate Chase Sprague. On July 13, as noon approached, the incognito senator sat outdoors at a café three floors below the improvised suite and took a second cup of coffee from the proprietor, who was fixing some tricolor decorations to his awning in preparation for tomorrow’s Bastille Day festivities.

Waiting for Kate to come down, Conkling found himself more occupied by the just-past American Fourth of July than its continental equivalent. The English papers, which he’d bought while strolling on the other side of the river, made prominent mention of Senator Blaine’s holiday oration. Conkling’s sworn enemy, responsible for his most enraging nickname, had attacked the President’s soft Southern policy, and warned against using recent army raids into Mexico—supposedly made in hot pursuit of bandits—as an excuse to grab territory that could then be turned into another Southern state.

What pleasure was there in having his old enemy attack his new one? If anyone were to convulse the Republican party that held all three of them, it should be Conkling himself. And yet, since docking at Southampton on the 27th, he had been wondering whether he really had the strength and stomach for combat. England had failed to excite
him: Richard III’s palace was now a coffee house, and Pitt’s monument in Westminster Abbey had turned out to be a paltry thing, hardly a fit tribute to that prescient sound-money politician. He had written to Bessie that nothing in the shops couldn’t be found less dear and better made right at home. Even his dinner with Grant had somehow left him more drained than nourished; the whole table of flatterers at the Grosvenor Hotel had been less inclined to push the general back into the electoral wars than just to sit and bask in his autumnal aura.

Conkling stared at his reflection in the silver coffee spoon, aware of the gray flecks in his once-blazing hair, conscious that his complexion no longer carried its old apoplectic glow. He
had
to stir his blood back up, had to fight off the climacteric he could feel advancing ever nearer. It would arrive, according to the Irishwoman, on October 30, his forty-eighth birthday. How would he meet it with a sharp edge of vitality?

The cables from his man in Washington carried a note of panic. Fright, not economy, seemed to account for all the missing verbs and prepositions:
PRESIDENT EVERY INTENTION ENFORCING ORDER
. Cornell had already been told either to quit his party post or leave the Custom House. If he resisted, the sledgehammer would soon start smashing the machine’s inner gears. The Jay Commission had chosen to release its second report, another torrent of abuse, on July 4th. In little more than a week, a third report would follow with yet more appalling tales of malfeasance in Conkling’s kingdom, which he now summoned into a mental picture: the seven hundred miles of shoreline and riverbank, from Montauk to Albany, a magnet for eighty thousand dockings a year and all the skimmed tribute that ran through the counting house on Hanover Street. He pictured his chieftains back at home crying for their leader, clamoring for his return or at least his signals. But he had so far replied to neither his aide nor astrologer.

Was his silence really strategy, as he claimed to himself? Was it really because his absence might unsettle the opposition that he sat here, so far from the battle, waiting for Kate to choose from her trunkful of aging millinery? Or was he, without being able to admit it, truly
hors de combat,
lacking the stamina for war? Perhaps his slack feelings were attributable just to time away from his punching bag and dumbbells; or maybe the climacteric had stolen a march on the calendar and already infiltrated his spirit.

He looked up at a carriage rolling over the paving stones. The horses pulling it were fine specimens, both as beautiful as the bay that, forty years ago, had kicked at him and broken his jaw. When Kate finally came down, they would go off to the afternoon races at Auteuil. She would keep her face under a hatbrim and out of the sun, and he would find himself more solicitous than passionate. He had not, in truth, wanted to see her here. She had made the arrangements herself, interrupting her own summer trip to Germany, and he had felt unable to refuse her. To show the same indifference to his mistress as his wife would be not only cruel but perhaps the surest sign of the climacteric’s early arrival.

Kate tired him. Her faded looks and hats; her exhausted relief simply to be away from the drunken Sprague: they all went to make this rendezvous feel less like a plunge into passion than some careful lowering into a mineral bath. The two of them would probably fall asleep in the grandstand between races; last night he had noticed that the dear thing now even snored. The other day, up in the Place Vendôme, standing before the obelisk to Napoleon’s conquests, he’d watched her fall into a daydream. He had stared at her instead of the monument, and wondered if she were thinking of Sprague—not the inebriate brute he’d become, but the rich, dashing war governor who long ago had marched his thousand volunteers from Rhode Island to Washington, and slept with them in the streets of the capital until the rebel threat receded. She lived too much in the past; he must not let her make
him
tarry there more than he already did.

After their visit to the obelisk, he had ended up buying her a tiny clock in a shop off the plaza. Back at Edgewood, he knew, she would tell anyone who saw it that the purchase had been made not this summer by Senator Conkling, but long ago, by her father, the Chief Justice.
The lie would be meant to keep the real story from finding its way into the gossip writings of “Miss Grundy” and “Olivia,” but its deeper, unacknowledged purpose would be the pleasure it afforded Kate herself, who even now—beyond mother, wife, or lover—preferred thinking of herself as a daughter.

MONEY DISBURSED VENUS
. His aide’s first cable had carried this postscript, and since its receipt, Conkling’s mind had returned to Mrs. May several times a day. He understood from the planet reader that this woman, for all her sorrow, lived for the future, that she hated the past and its new false glamour, and longed to rise whole worlds above it and the present. She was fighting her way toward some kind of new life, and he yearned, on the basis of his single encounter and the astrologer’s stream of reports, to have her provoke a revitalization in him as well.
SHE IS BLOOMING WITH YOUR BOUNTY
, his aide had cabled, here relaying not only the Irishwoman’s every word, but adding on the “g” she would no doubt have dropped. As soon as he was home, Conkling looked forward to truly making the woman’s acquaintance, to hearing from her
own
lips the misadventures of her fellow boarders and the scientifics for whom she toiled.

The astrologer’s other reports, on the stars’ relation to political events, were harder to interpret, and would probably be so even if the cables permitted a full amplification. But he did not like her apparent new concentration upon Hayes as a Libra, “the same as Adam himself,” pure and primordial and carrying the scales of justice in his sign. Had Conkling come forth a week earlier from his own mother’s womb, that would have been he. Instead, the charts said he represented the crash of Adam’s eagle aspirations to the desert floor, and their foul reincarnation as the scorpion. Months ago the Irishwoman had explained all this with her cunning tact, and he’d thought he had accepted it, but her recent emphasis on Hayes—the suggestion that the President might, or even should, prevail—could not fail to trouble him. It was shameful enough to have a weakness for all this fortune-telling (a vice he had so far kept hidden better than his colleagues concealed
their own propensities for drink and gambling), but it seemed intolerable that the celestial tidings should bring him further anxiety instead of solace.

And yet, there was this last bit, perhaps garbled on its five-thousand-mile journey under the ocean: the planet reader’s response to his own news of having dined with the general, a Taurus, who was, she replied, the
HIGHEST EMANATION OF EARTHLY TRIGON
,
AND CONSTELLATION OF PLANET VENUS
. Her last letters to Utica had contained much about what she called “triplicities,” and here was another, though the Greek word sounded like Mrs. May’s trigonometry.

And what, by God, if that were the point, thought Conkling, putting down his coffee cup in a double surge of excitement and embarrassment. This might be
it,
even if it had taken the Irishwoman’s mumbo-jumbo to lift the veil. The trigon
was
the trigonometry that Mrs. May applied to her transiting Venus, and the real triplicity of the high-flying Taurus could only be
the third term,
the political grail locked inside a jar of prohibitive tradition. A jar that could be broken. He sat for a second, his eyes closed, gloriously heartened, feeling the first, vital surge putting the second, guilty one to rout—just as
he
would go home to rout Hayes and all machine’s foes, restoring Grant and the stalwart saviors of the Union to their central place in the political firmament. He would
not
live in the past; he would re-create it as the future.

“Monsieur patron! La papeterie, s’il vous plaît.”

“Oui, monsieur,” said the owner, stepping off his ladder to fetch the American gentleman his stationery.

My dear Mrs. May,
wrote Conkling, at a delightful, rediscovered speed.
My climb to the top of Sacré-Coeur the other night, thrilling though it may have been, took me not a millionth the distance you travel each day to Venus without ever leaving your desk. I am delighted that the Secretary’s supplement has reinvigorated your work. I, too, feel marvelously revitalized and ready to make my return home, after which, following a brief period in Utica, I look forward to coming to Washington. May I count on you to show me a bit of the Observatory, that I might see firsthand the good use to which you’re putting Mr. Thompson’s funds? Au revoir, madame. ROSCOE CONKLING

His signature looked, once more, as bold as the cables’ capital letters. With one hand he stuffed the dispatches into his waistcoat, and with the other he handed the proprietor the letter to post.

“Mr. Chester,” said a female voice coming up from behind.

He stood and turned to greet Kate, whose eyes, under the broad brim of her flowered bonnet, looked lovely but still half-dead. He must not fall into them.

“My dear,” he said, plucking a paper flower from the newly tricolored struts of the awning. “Shall we celebrate Monsieur Lafayette a day early?”

“A fine idea,” said Kate, who took his arm and resisted mentioning that it was Friday the thirteenth.

“I’m accustomed to seeing Mr. Todd,” said the clerk, referring to Simon Newcomb’s assistant, who often took the Observatory’s data to and from the Government Printing Office.

“He’s on vacation in New Jersey,” said Hugh. “We all just had a penny postcard from Toms River. Mrs. May and I thought we would check on our own work today.”

“Let me get the proofs,” said the clerk, who nodded with some surprise at Cynthia. He retrieved the long galleys of numerical columns pertaining to D’Arrest’s comet, then sent her and Hugh to an iron-topped table where they could go over them.

It was tedious work. Cynthia read each set of coordinates digit by digit and decimal by decimal; Hugh replied either by saying “correct” or holding up a finger while he checked the handwritten sheets from which the printers had worked. Easily bored, he would often interrupt their labor to start chatting or fuss with his pipe. At one point he crinkled
his nose against the almost overpowering smell of ink, to which Cynthia seemed immune.

“It only bothers
me
with memories,” she said. “Of my first job, at the Treasury—in the middle of the war, after John May went away. A friend of my father’s knew how badly off we were, and more importantly, knew General Spinner and Mr. Chase himself. So I was hired and given a pair of shears, with which I sliced sheets of greenbacks from morning ’til night, until they realized I was expecting Sally. In my day, Mr. Allison, I let a million dollars slip through my hands.”

He returned her smile and went back to saying “correct” or raising his finger. The way they worked the proofs matched the regulated manner of their now frequent conversations about the war. He would let her rattle off the sorrows she had locked up for a dozen years, gently nodding or saying yes or prompting her with a question when her embarrassment threatened to dry up whatever story she needed to tell. When he felt she had had enough for a while, he would jest her back into the present—as he did now, retracting the two of them from D’Arrest’s orbit by pointing out two chattering idlers behind the counter. “
Their
speech still seems free.” He had in mind the Public Printer’s recent, much-noticed jeremiad against reform and the way it had begun “to interfere with the rights of citizenship.” Hugh expected her to grin, but she responded by saying “longitude of perihelion” as sternly as she could. He rolled his eyes and resumed concentrating.