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  Praise for Thomas Mallon’s

  TWO MOONS

  “Mallon has a fabulous eye for the people at the edge of the historical picture.… The poisonous Washington atmosphere of hateful Reconstruction politics, tinged by the specter of malaria, practically seeps from the pages of the book.… Two Moons is a novel about a quaint kind of homegrown ambition and optimism that is uniquely American. You could call Thomas Mallon either a dreamy scholar or a scholarly dreamer. Either way, his fiction is as lucent as moonlight.”

  —The Washington Post

  “[A] playful, bittersweet, nearly perfect novel.… The book’s blend of brainy repartee, soulful poignancy and literary game-playing calls to mind the work of Tom Stoppard.… Droll, probing and heartbreaking.… Keeping one eye on the cosmos and another on its characters’ dreaming and scheming, the book does justice to the charms, struggles and inconsequence of human affairs in its own or any other era.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Mallon spreads, like a tapestry, a defining historical moment. He then illuminates it through the lives of its minor players, both real and imagined.… Two Moons is rich in texture and atmosphere.”

  —Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

  “Thomas Mallon’s writing sneaks up on you. No verbal pyrotechnics, a one-foot-after-the-other narrative approach—but every so often, you pause and realize that he’s been stringing together one perfectly balanced sentence after another, chapter after chapter.… Mallon is effective at evoking a time—not so unlike ours—when rationalism and mystical thought overlapped in unpredictable, personal ways.”

  —Salon

  “A wonderful piece of historical fiction. Mallon is a subtle, careful writer who packs his books with thought-provoking depth.”

  —The Denver Post

  “Mallon reliably marshals the kind of period detail that makes him a formidable historical novelist.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “American history, technological innovations, and romance excite Mallon’s incisive intelligence and lithe imagination.… Mallon refracts questions of war, women’s rights, and the ordering of the cosmos through the perfect prism of his heroine’s mind, adeptly mixing keen social commentary with sheer entertainment.”

  —Booklist

  “A sharp-witted young widow’s progress through post–Civil War Washington’s power-centers dominates this breezy and entertaining historical caper from the popular author of Henry and Clara and Dewey Defeats Truman.… Mallon recounts his characters’ respective machinations with good-humored energy in an essentially well-paced narrative.… He composes unfailingly graceful sentences, makes transitions expertly, and communicates nicely both his characters’ and his own pure pleasure in the spectacle of a vigorous country newly at peace and pleased to kick up its political and sexual heels.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  THOMAS MALLON

  Two Moons

  Thomas Mallon is the author of eight novels, including Watergate, Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, and Fellow Travelers, and seven works of nonfiction. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review, among other publications.

  www.thomasmallon.com

  BOOKS BY THOMAS MALLON

  Fiction

  Arts and Sciences

  Aurora 7

  Henry and Clara

  Dewey Defeats Truman

  Two Moons

  Bandbox

  Fellow Travelers

  Watergate

  Nonfiction

  Edmund Blunden

  A Book of One’s Own

  Stolen Words

  Rockets and Rodeos

  In Fact

  Mrs. Paine’s Garage

  Yours Ever

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2015

  Copyright © 2000 by Thomas Mallon

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House companies. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, in 2000.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

  Mallon, Thomas.

  Two moons / Thomas Mallon.

  p. cm.

  I. Title.

  PS3563.A43157 T96 2000 813′.54—dc21 99-34235

  Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN: 978-1-101-87252-9

  eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-87254-3

  Cover design by John Gall

  Author photograph © William Bodenschatz

  v3.1

  For Andrea Barrett

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  In the present state of our terrestrial system immortal bodies cannot exist. Had immortality been intended for man on earth, Infinite Wisdom would have adopted another plan …

  —Celestial Scenery; or, The Wonders of the Planetary System Displayed, 1839

  Open thy lattice, Love,

  Listen to me,

  In the voyage of life,

  Love our pilot will be.

  He’ll sit at the helm

  Wherever we rove,

  And steer by the lodestar

  He kindled above.

  —Stephen Foster

  The black ball rose up the flagpole. Spotting it from two blocks east, Cynthia May allowed herself to slow down. The hoisting of the canvas sphere, as big across as a wagon wheel, meant that ten minutes remained until noon, when Potomac ferry captains and fat boardinghouse mistresses all over northwest Washington would watch it drop and reset their clocks, and she would be due inside the Naval Observatory for her appointment.

  She crossed E Street at the corner of Virginia, taking off her hat as she went. March 8th, and already so hot that, after twenty blocks of walking, she’d sweated through the skimpy silk lining beneath the straw. With the hat in one hand and her book in the other, she had no hand free to hold her nose against the stink coming up from the water filling half the street. She wondered why the whole swamp that was Foggy Bottom didn’t sink, once and for all, into the river; and why the steps of the young man who’d been following her at a constant distance these past few blocks now seemed farther away. Had he been slowed by the smell, or by the thin streak of gray he’d no doubt noticed in her hair as soon as she took off her bonnet?

  She turned around to smile, to show him the thirty-five years on the face atop her still-slim frame and, God only knew how, still-fast carriage. The boy looked startled, but appreciative, as if pleased to be fooled by such a handsome woman, however much she might be past eligibility for his serious attention.

  She stepped onto the Observatory grounds, this supposed park without a bench to be found. Lifting her skirts and drawing them tight, she hoped to minimize the grass stains they were bound to acquire from the patch of shaded lawn she picked to si
t on, a dozen feet from some clerks eating an early lunch. “You filthy thing,” she hissed, smacking the mosquito on her bare wrist. “Die.” She closed her eyes, determined, before the interview, to compose herself against the unnatural heat of this city; even now, a quarter century after leaving New Hampshire as a ten-year-old girl, she would not accept it. It was winter.

  Her eyes still shut, she soundlessly recited five trigonometric formulae. Her numbers were fine; fixed and reliable, as she knew they would be. It was her appearance that was shaking her confidence, the spinsterish agitation her face might betray. Perhaps a bit hysterical, she could picture the examiners noting at the bottom of her paper, until they realized she was not a spinster but a widow, and their amusement turned to something worse, a depressed sort of pity that would make them decide how, all things being equal (or not) among the candidates, they’d really be better off having some bumptious young man about.

  Even before noon arrived, she had worked her anticipated resentments into a grudge that felt actual, even long-standing. Rising to her feet, briskly enough to startle the nearby diners, she strode toward the building’s east wing and into the Chronometer Room, where in a voice more loud than was necessary she greeted a young man bent over his desk.

  “I am Cynthia May,” she said. “I have an appointment with Professor Newcomb.”

  Mrs. John May, she was about to add, in case the fellow mistook what she’d told him for two Christian names, like Mary Jane, as people often did. But he just held up his left hand, like a policeman, indicating she should come no closer and say no more. With his other hand he tapped a telegraph key. A second later, up above, she heard a light thump.

  “Time ball,” he said, grinning broadly as he beckoned her forward with the same hand he’d used to halt her. “My one tap makes it fall, and gives Western Union their signal. So they can set all their clocks.”

  Surprised that the boy’s keystroke should connect her to people far from the local ferry captains and boardinghouse mistresses, to cities not seething with faction and heat, she let her own face relax into a smile. More quietly than before, she said: “Mrs. John May, for—”

  “If it’s Professor Newcomb you want, you don’t want me,” said the boy. “But the truth is you don’t want him either, not just yet. If you’re here about the computer’s job, you’re wanted first in Davis’s office.” He crooked his finger and drew a path on the air. “He likes to look ’em over.”

  Who could “he” be? Admiral Charles Davis had died three weeks ago. Cynthia knew so from both the Evening Star and Fanny Christian’s most recent gentleman caller, a young ensign whose presence one evening at the boarders’ table had been a rare concession from Mrs. O’Toole. Approaching the admiral’s office, she could see that she was right: Charles H. Davis was now no more than his portrait, which hung outside the door, draped in black, the late subject’s walrus mustache and rectangular flaps of hair quite immobile and unwelcoming.

  Inside, she took her place on a bench between the two other applicants. Standing beside a desk, a much younger man, with the same flaps of hair and mustache, looked her up and down quite neutrally, not pausing in his drone of instructions to a slim, balding clerk whose nameplate identifed him as Mr. Harrison. “Tell Professor Baird at the Smithsonian that he may bring his party of ladies here to look through the Great Equatorial if he gives us plenty of advance warning, if the night they pick turns out to be clear, and if they get here early.”

  “Yes, Commander Davis,” said the clerk.

  “The son,” whispered the job-seeker at Cynthia’s right. “A lieutenant commander. Also Charles H. He was attached here when the old man was carried off. They’ve made him officer-in-charge until the new superintendent comes on.”

  Cynthia watched the younger Davis brush away a length of hair that hung in limp contrast to the stiff wisp of gold braid sparkling his uniform.

  “Professor Newcomb will be along any moment,” Mr. Harrison said to Cynthia, repeating the explanation he must already have given the others, his soft tone an apology for the lieutenant commander’s preoccupation.

  “Then,” said Davis, still standing over his clerk, “you can tell Mr. Morrison that the narrative of the polar expedition is not yet ready for issue, and when you’re done with that you can write Mr. Watson up in Oswego and tell him that the report he requests of the 1874 Transit of Venus is not yet published. That’s right,” he said, looking over to the applicants, as if to warn them of the Observatory’s chronically short appropriations, “eighteen hundred and seventy-four.” And with that he marched back from Mr. Harrison’s desk to his own.

  The young officer was clearly overwhelmed, whether with mourning or his temporary responsibilities, Cynthia could not tell. Whichever the case, her sympathies lay more naturally with the hard-worked Mr. Harrison, who was already into his ink bottle, turning the lieutenant commander’s complaints into correspondence. His labors would go more quickly with a Remington, she thought, though the acquisition of one here anytime soon had to be unlikely, given how everything else seemed behind schedule. The Interior Department, where she worked, had just purchased a half dozen of the machines—the first cause of her presence here today. When she’d heard that the reward for mastering the Remington’s use and listening to its sixfold clatter in the clerks’ room would be only fifty cents more a day, she had decided to act upon a piece of information picked up from Fanny Christian’s gentleman caller.

  “They’re hiring another computer to work with the stargazers,” he’d said in mocking awe of the scientists whose perimeter he sometimes paraded along. “Some of those fellows have domes bigger than the one on the building,” he’d added, provoking such laughter that Cynthia had been able to slip away from the table without excusing herself. For the past eight nights, she had sat in her room working with The Principles of Trigonometry, an almost forgotten prize-book she had carried away from Miss Wilton’s School for Young Ladies in Laconia, and brought with her to all the places, comfortable and shabby, that she had called home for the past twenty years. Always good with numbers—“freakishly so,” Miss Wilton had said—she had made it her business to find out what the Observatory position entailed. She decided that, with a week of cramming, she just might escape her desk at Interior. Instead of becoming a typewriter, she would make herself a computer.

  Despite the lieutenant commander’s hints of institutional poverty, the Observatory job paid a dollar a day more than the one she had, an amount no doubt equally compelling to the two aspirants she sat between, a dismayingly pretty girl, probably no more than twenty-five, and a plump young man whose finger-poppings seemed louder to her nervous ears than the clatter of the Remingtons she was truant from today. She’d sent a note around to her department early in the morning, claiming to be ill. As it was, three days after President Hayes’s swearing-in, the new Secretary’s men would be too busy looking for the money the old Secretary’s men had stolen to notice the absence of one female copyist.

  “If you would fill these out,” Mr. Harrison said, handing the applicants writing boards with forms headed PERSONAL INFORMATION.

  All right, then: May, Cynthia. Not like Mary Jane. She wrote her name in the Spencerian hand she’d struggled to master twenty years ago, and which Remington would soon kill off just as surely as if he’d blasted it with one of his revolvers. DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH: April 10, 1842, Laconia, New Hampshire. Where it would still, quite sensibly, be winter, and Mr. Harrison and the put-upon lieutenant commander would be warming their hands at the same open stove, and getting a bit friendlier for it. She looked left, into the lap of her distaff competition. Even worse than she’d feared: b. 1855. Oh, honestly.

  PRESENT ADDRESS: The first word looked more like a command than an adjective, an order to embarrass herself into admitting that 203 F Street, Mrs. O’Toole’s peeling green lodging house, was her only remaining perch in the world. LENGTH OF STAY AT PRESENT ADDRESS: Having to put down “7 months,” the seven long months since she’d lef
t the last lodging house (nearly as bad as the current one) seemed an affront, and so she wrote down 24 years, the amount of time she had lived, one way or another, in the District of Columbia, ever since her father, Frederick Lawrence, the bank manager in Laconia, had hitched his family’s then-prosperous wagon to the little shooting star that was Franklin Pierce.

  Fred Lawrence’s usefulness to the curly-haired lawyer during a state constitutional convention in 1850 had earned him a summons to Washington at the start of 1853, to work under old Mr. Guthrie in the Treasury. Cynthia could still recall that man’s Kentucky accent and wide-brimmed hat from the one visit she and her eleven-year-old twin brother had been permitted to make to the department early in Mr. Pierce’s single, unsatisfactory term, during which the bank in Laconia failed, leaving her father to decide, even as Mr. Buchanan came in and the country began seriously to shatter, that Washington would now be a better place to sustain his family. Within five years, his bad judgment and the rebellion had reduced him to little more than a scrivener, who moved his family from one set of rooms to another, each smaller than the last. Frederick Lawrence, in his soft, pious voice, would remind them that they were hardly starving, though he ceased to use that word when information came, in the summer of 1864, that Frederick Lawrence, Jr., had in fact starved to death, at Andersonville.

  NAME OF WIFE, the form requested. Mr. Harrison’s courteous inked carat—“or husband”—prompted Cynthia to write Sgt. John May, dec. 1863, Chickamauga. Married less than three months before that battle, she had brought her child into the world six months later. There was even a place for Sally on the form. A box marked CHILDREN, a small clerkly grave for daughter, d. 1870, diphtheria. Two years after Cynthia’s father; five months before her mother.

  For the last six years there had been no mouth to feed but her own, at the hotel restaurants and boardinghouse tables along F Street. From one rented room to the next, she carried with her what few pictures, books, and spoons she could stand to look at or afford not to sell.