Two Moons (25 page)

In truth, Hugh had insisted on fending for himself tonight. When the first signs of a fever had come upon him the day before, he’d acted as if another sweetheart had shown up, practically shoving Cynthia out the door on to High Street. “I can’t have you seeing me unless I’m at my handsomest. Go. I’ll send word when I’m presentable. Or at least not infectious.” He’d blown her a kiss from several feet away.

So she would eat her dinner with Mary Costello, whom she found at the back of her parlor reading, with unusual intentness,
The Light of Egypt.

“Listen to this, dearie. ‘The true son of Mars is a genuine pugilist of the first water, and is never so happy as when thoroughly engaged in vanquishing his opponent.’ ”

“You must have had news of the War God. The
Star
reports prostration in Utica.”

“ ‘Without a spice of this planet,’ ” the astrologer went on, her finger following beneath the line in her book, “ ‘all men would be shiftless, effeminate cowards.’ ”

“Why this burst of study, Mary?”

Madam Costello frowned. “I’m worried about me livelihood. Your scientific fellas are takin’ all the mystery out of the heavens. Calculating how fast these little moons go and how many miles they are across—like they’re some claim to be staked in Colorado!”

Cynthia laughed.

“Think I’m foolish, if you like,” said the astrologer. “But you ought to be paying attention to the
real
importance of Mars, instead of totin’ up all those figures. You know, in spite of his nickname, the War God’s a Scorpion. Mars’ chief sign is Aries. That’s
you,
darlin’, if you haven’t forgotten.”

“Well, Mary,” said Cynthia. “It’s too late to produce another Aries for 1878.”

The subject of love and motherhood, even prevention of the latter, succeeded in distracting Madam Costello from her long-term business worries. She closed
The Light of Egypt.

“It’s as I promised,” she said. “You don’t have to worry about that, not if you’re using what I gave you.”

“I’m not using it. And I’m not worrying, either.”

“Sweet Jaysus.”

“There’s nothing growing inside me, Mary. I can tell.” Cynthia pressed on her womb through the pockets of her dress, faintly crackling a piece of paper as she did.

“Why would you want to do somethin’ like—”

She could tell what the astrologer was thinking—that she had decided to use the oldest ruse of the sex to capture a younger man. But that was not it. Hugh Allison, her reason had been telling her, could only be a temporary phenomenon. His transit across her life would
reach its conclusion when the admiral let him go, or some other unrealizable vision made him pick up one morning for a spot on the other side of the globe. She had no confidence that her love could long restrain him, and no desire that “honor”—the idea made her laugh—should keep him where he was. But a child would keep him alive to her, the way Sally was supposed to have continued John. If need be, she would go away to have it, and then raise it on her own, telling the boy—for so she imagined it would be—that she was his aunt or even his grandmother.

“Do you want to see the moons, Mary?”

“You’re changing the subject, dearie. How can—” The astrologer’s attention wheeled around, once she realized what Cynthia was offering. “You mean Demo and the other one? See them for
real?
Through the telescope?”

“Yes, and Mars itself,” said Cynthia, who watched the planet reader bite her lip and consider. Going to the Observatory might mean surrendering to the power of her competition, but the chance actually to
see
one of the planets (she had never known how to spot them in the sky) was irresistible.

“Good,” said Cynthia. “You can chaperone me.” She extracted a telegram from her pocket and laid it before the astrologer.
SHALL REQUIRE SPECIAL VIEWING
, Conkling had wired her.
EXPECT YOUR COMPANY NIGHT OF
6TH
.

“I’m surprised you’d see him,” said Madam Costello.

“I surprise myself,” answered Cynthia.

“Once around the planet every seven hours.”

Hugh groaned over Cynthia’s report of Phobos’ scurryings. “As bad as Miss Gray’s goddamned little dog.”

They were awaiting Dr. Kelly, who they both knew would be making a diagnosis of miasmatic fever. By Thursday evening, the 23rd,
there could be little doubt. Cynthia had already done the mathematics: Hugh’s malarial symptoms ran like a sine curve. When he’d shooed her away on Tuesday, he’d been fighting off the languor that typically precedes the paroxysms, which were coming every twenty-four hours. She could now remember him opening his jaw in great yawns while drinking coffee three mornings ago. She’d since stayed away, but today, alarmed that no one else at the Observatory had had word of him, she’d come up here to his rooms after lunch.

She was still asking for precise descriptions of his physical experience during the past three days and two nights. “It felt as if ice water were pouring down my back,” he told her, obediently, about the chills. When she’d arrived this afternoon, his hair had been standing up like an angry cat’s, his teeth chattering so hard she’d been afraid he’d crack one of them. All this had by now passed off. They were waiting for the hot stage, and then a delirious ocean voyage of sweating. In the current lucid interval, she tried to occupy him with routine matters, such as a slip of paper bearing Mr. Todd’s observations from the previous afternoon: “A group of two sizeable spots, well surrounded by faculae, has appeared at the east limb of the Sun. I can define it into only two spots at present.” Hugh regarded the paper with comprehension, but no interest.

“They have him writing out most of the announcements to the other observatories,” Cynthia explained. “Or at least adding some custom touches to the typeset broadside.”

“So they don’t need me for even that. You know,” he said, shutting his eyes, aware of the pain he was about to inflict, “they’re going to let me go by the fifteenth of next month.”

Cynthia listened without turning toward him, so he wouldn’t see the tears that had welled. “I assumed as much” was all she said. “And, oh, I forgot to tell you. The old commodore sends you his good wishes. More sincere than those the admiral dispatched.”

She sat down beside him with a freshly dipped washcloth. “Now tell me: when you looked into the mirror yesterday, did your lips appear purplish?”

“How do you know to ask all this?”

“I did some reading at the Peabody, an hour before I got here. I’d begun to have my suspicions.”

“My darling, self-improving Cynthia. When Dr. Kelly arrives, please give yourself some relief. Go hear the lecturer at Forrest Hall.”

“No. I’ll want to stay. Besides, I dislike that place. What’s now the auditorium was a gaggle of prison cells during the war.”

Hugh moaned. “Oh, not the war again.
Always
the war. Don’t you know we
all
die?”

“No one here is going to die,” she said, briskly sponging his forehead. But as she looked into his eyes, she could see that he had not been remarking on his own sickness. He really had been speaking of the whole vale of tears. She made him drink another glass of Apollinaris water.

“Do you understand the problem of the glare?” he asked. “Why it is those two moons were always invisible?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Then think by analogy. Think how, if bright planets have moons, bright stars must have planets.”

His own eyes were shining now. She had the feeling he was at last prepared to explain his vision, and that she, knowing how little was left to lose, was prepared to listen. She knelt down beside him, and turned his face toward her. The skin was livid and would soon be flushed. “
Tell
me,” she said. “This light you talk about sending forth into the universe. Who is supposed to see it? Is it the same as those patterns in the drawings?” She pointed to the pictures on the wall.

“Did you know there’s supposed to be a total eclipse of the moon tonight?” he asked. He stared at her, and she realized that he was not changing the subject. “No one will see it for all the clouds,” he said.

“Which means no one will see
us
for the clouds.”

He looked at her and whispered “yes,” knowing she was ready to understand him.

“Tell me what you want to do.”

“Hand me the lamp,” he said, softly. Once she brought it from the
table, he sat up and held the glass cone just beneath his chin. “I want to stand inside a light that will travel for hundreds of years, and still be as young as I was when somebody finally spots it.”

“Your ‘immortal longings.’ ”

“Yes.”

“You want to communicate with those faraway creatures.”

“No,” he said, sinking back onto the pillow. “I just don’t want to die.”

She could not let him lose the energy to tell her the rest. “Here,” she said, pouring another glass of water. “You’ll need this when the sweating starts. Now tell me, how would these creatures, supposing they were even to look at Earth, ever find
you
?”

He managed a smile. “I’d have to stand out, wouldn’t I? Go get the newspaper. No, not today’s, the one on the chair.”

He wanted her to look at the
Evening Star
from August 4th, at an item he’d circled with a black crayon. “What would you think, as a stranger to this country and city, if you came upon that?”

This morning the President, accompanied by his son, Webb C. Hayes, visited the monument office at the City Hall, to examine the plan of Mr. Larkin G. Meade for the completion of the Washington monument. Mr. Meade’s plan is to place on the column, as it now stands, a figure of Washington, 85 feet in height, of hammered bronze.

“I should think,” said Cynthia, “that this must have been a great, unusual man.”

“I wouldn’t care about that. Only that he was still, in his way, conspicuous. Your eye would go right to him. Especially if he were lit up.”

“What would it take to make this happen?” asked Cynthia.

“Are you talking about Mr. Meade’s scheme, or mine?”

“Yours.”

He laughed, and turned over on his side. “Equipment as expensive as it is unwieldy.”

She said nothing for a time. Then she whispered, “You need to sleep.” Unexpectedly, he obliged.

This could only be the fever talking. Whatever vision those drawings involved, it was surely not so lunatic as this. She would wait until the whole paroxysm was over. Then she would ask again, and find out what he really meant.

But when she reached down to feel his forehead, it was perfectly temperate.

“Please, sir, there’s no need for
you
to stand in line.”

Lieutenant Sturdy had recognized Roscoe Conkling but not Mrs. May, who was on the senator’s arm, closely cloaked and bonneted against the evening rain.

“Nonsense,” said Conkling, glad to display his egalitarianism to the queue behind the telescope.

Visitors to the Great Equatorial were fewer but more choice than they had been a week ago. While encouraged by the great public interest, Admiral Rodgers had decided to restrict viewing to invited guests and those with specially requested passes; after a week of open doors, his temper had erupted over a smashed chronometer, three stolen library books, and all the grime tracked in on the boots of a thousand Washingtonians eager for diversion during the late-summer heat. Since the moons’ discovery, the seasonal round of fevers had kept three astronomers and two of the watchmen away from the premises. Tonight, Lieutenant Sturdy, who had yet to make a full recovery from the attack he’d suffered in June, was on duty by himself to deal with callers.

Because the arrival of Conkling’s carriage at Mrs. O’Toole’s would have produced a bedlam of curiosity and comment, he had picked up Mrs. May at Madam Costello’s, making it clear, as soon as he arrived,
that both the trip to the Observatory and the dinner that followed would be
à deux.
Moving up the line now, he pointed out a wealthy spinster who’d set her cap for the widowed Vice President, and two rows ahead of her the unfortunate Mr. and Mrs. Henry Rathbone, whom Cynthia had recognized on her own. They had been sent passes by Professor Harkness, their neighbor in Lafayette Square, and were even now, a dozen years after accompanying the Lincolns to Ford’s Theatre, exciting the whispers and nudges commanded by the freakish. Upon realizing who they were, young Mr. Todd stopped briefly in the tracks he was making to a temporarily installed five-inch equatorial, through which he had decided to find a trans-Neptunian planet and make a name for himself as great as Asaph Hall’s. Hall himself, exhausted after three weeks of monitoring his discoveries, was unlikely to appear tonight, even if the skies should clear.