Two Moons Read online

  Johnstown, Pennsylvania: so that’s where the chubby knuckle-cracker next to her had come from. Go home, Mr.—what is it?—Gilworth. Go home and leave this job to me.

  Could they please get on with the test itself? Having completed the sheet of personal questions, she put down her writing board and opened up her book, surprised, once she did, by the absence from the page of cosines and tangents. So accustomed had she become to seeing The Principles of Trigonometry open at her pillow and plate that she only now remembered how Hawthorne’s Life of Franklin Pierce was the book she had carried with her this morning, determined to sell it for whatever it would fetch. She no longer had any desire to possess this nearly last family heirloom, a campaign tract signed by both author and subject; the symbol of her father’s wrong turn. Whether or not she came home with this new job, she would come back with money for a new dress, something with no collar and plenty of color, something she could not wear to the Interior Department in the daily pursuit of Mrs. O’Toole’s rent and her own weekly bag of oranges, which were cheaper than the doctor or tonic she’d require without them.

  Where was the celebrated Professor Newcomb, inventor of the clock-drive on the Observatory’s biggest telescope? Mr. Harrison had promised, the other day when she’d come to inquire about the position, that the great man would administer the examination himself, and the young man who had just entered the room and begun exchanging words with Lieutenant Commander Davis could surely not be he. So pretty and slender, scarcely older, she guessed, than “b. 1855.” But the little roll of papers in his hand did look as if they might be examinations. He was tapping the baton they made against his cheek. Looked at all together, the blush of his brow and the blankness of the paper and the color of his eyes made a sort of red, white, and blue bunting, the banner at a summer picnic or—on second thought, against the black mourning of his hair—the flag upon a coffin. He was approaching them now; the slightly crooked teeth in his emergent grin making him look even younger, less a preoccupied intellect than a fellow of feeling and mischief.

  “This is Professor Allison,” explained Mr. Harrison, who had come out from behind his desk to make the introductions. “He will conduct the examination in the library.”

  They were led off single file, clear to the west wing, all the time listening to the young astronomer’s Carolina accent. “Professor Newcomb couldn’t make it, I’m afraid. He’s been called away to a meeting. I don’t know where or with whom. Perhaps the head of the Royal Society, or the empress of Brazil. I’m to be your poor substitute.” He gave a humorous bow, his frock coat, Cynthia noted, nipping attractively into the slim waist. “You can take your places and get started,” he said, pointing to some desks beneath shelves holding hundreds of ledgers. “It’s all fairly clear on the page. But if anything is not, I shall be wandering in and out, and you can grab my arm and ask your questions.” With that he was gone, leaving them with one another and the printed exam books.

  She did have questions, the ones she often wished to pose to merry young men on the streets and to women like “b. 1855”: What is it like to have missed the war, to have scampered through those years as a child, and to be living today in the here and now, not walking through an eternal aftermath? What must it be like to hear politicians speak of “reconstruction” as a civic task, duly planned and just completed, instead of a word for what would never come to your own inner dwelling, whose wooden beams remained split and strewn by the tempest?

  The following exercises are to determine with what degree of accuracy and rapidity you can use the tables of logarithms. Since no mistake must be made in your work it is necessary that, after writing down each logarithm, you read it off from your paper, look back in the table, get the corresponding number, and see if it agrees with that given on the paper. You must proceed in reverse order in taking out numbers corresponding to logarithms. Write neatly and carefully and write your name on each sheet of paper.

  “B. 1855” would have no trouble following the neatness injunction. Her examination and logarithms book were perfectly aligned on her desk; the extra pencil she’d brought lay perpendicular to both. Not a strand of her upswept hair dangled from her small straw hat.

  Exercise in 5-Place Logarithms. From the following values of log cot α find α (to the nearest tenth of a minute), and then log sin α, log cos α, log β cos α and β cos α. log β = 0.10909. The algebraic signs in the first column are those of the cotangents themselves.

  Cynthia’s last look around before beginning revealed a now fretful Mr. Gilworth of Johnstown, Pa. Could he really be finding this exercise so difficult? She set about filling in the table, sprinkling the numbers like raisins into a cupcake tin. It was more soothing than sewing, and less of a strain on the eye.

  Her columns grew longer, and if she squinted at them, the confetti of inkings began to resemble a skyful of stars. She had time to let her mind wander. The Magi’s search for Bethlehem; the music of Milton’s crystal spheres; the prognostications of the D Street astrologer in whose parlor Cynthia had lately spent a dollar she could not afford: they could all be reduced to these numbers. There was actually no need to squint and pretend that the digits were the stars. They were, by themselves, wildly alive, fact and symbol of the vast, cool distances in which one located the light of different worlds.

  She knew, from some long-ago visits here with her father and mother—a free weeknight amusement—that the Transit Circle, through which the men see stars cross the meridian, lay just beyond the walls of this room. The astronomers look up and watch the stars come in and out of their line of sight, and as the night wears on and the men grow tired—she is sure of this, so strongly has she imagined it—they have to feel it is not the axis of the earth, but the stars themselves that move. Parallax—she had recited the definition several times while she lay in bed studying this week—“the apparent change in the position of an object caused by a change in the viewing position of the observer.” What a comforting delusion, what an exaltation, when the object is a star, and the “viewing position” this Earth no God would choose for the center of His universe.

  As her columns lengthened and she went on to problems no. 2 and 3, she heard schoolchildren shuffling through the hall outside. Elsewhere pieces of equipment were being wheeled and crated. Here in the library the astronomers came and went in quiet, disputatious pairs—the older ones wearing full beards, the younger just muttonchops or a mustache—to fetch down a volume and settle a point. And yet, all this activity was only preparation or postscript. This was a theater, and what counted could not happen until night fell.

  Mr. Gilworth was left-handed, and he attracted Cynthia’s attention when his numerical jottings, so much slower than her own, gave way to a fast cursive movement. Added to the distressed expression on his face, it could mean only one thing: he had thrown in the towel and was writing a note to the examiner, like the wretched pupil he had no doubt always been back in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. A moment later, on his feet and trying to salvage some dignity, he put a small sour grape into her ear. “You know the dead admiral?” he whispered. “The elder Davis? Don’t believe what you read in the Star. It was malaria that killed him. And you know where he got it.” He pointed straight down, meaning “right here,” though nothing could feel more salubrious than the unaccountably cool confines of this hushed library. “Take care of yourself,” he said.

  She gave him the smallest of smiles as he retreated, leaving his half-done exam on the farthermost desk. If he didn’t go home to Pennsylvania, she decided, Mr. Gilworth had a great future. He was in a city that would always require men who can change what they want on an expedient dime.

  She was finished, and hoping they’d notice how she’d done the whole thing in ink, without one cross-out. Should she open Hawthorne’s life of Pierce? Or would that be too showy a way of idling out the time remaining, during which “b. 1855,” she could see, was still slowly, and in pencil, proceeding with what she wagered was only problem no. 2.

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p; They are going to pick me. A week from now, instead of trudging up the stone steps of the Patent Building and into the Interior Department, I shall be coming here each morning to calculate the men’s infinite gazings upon the night before. Yes, Professor Allison—he had come back into the room for the first time—you are going to pick me.

  Right now he stood over “b. 1855,” looking at her paper—without interest, Cynthia judged; not displeased, but certainly not impressed, either. She looked back down at her own work. No, whatever the girl was still doing, it wasn’t going to be good enough; not as good as what she herself had already accomplished without a flaw. And would accomplish every day, just as perfectly, in dresses more colorful than the ones on the hook back in her room. Surely, their eyes having been fixed on the stars all night, the navy men here, come daylight, would not mind a rustling of bright fabric, however old its female wearer.

  He approached, reentering her field of vision, crossing her meridian, the polished centermost floorboard in front of her desk. He looked at her paper, upside down, his head bowed low over it, to compensate for his vantage point. And when he raised his head, his face, flushed and smiling, rose up like the sun.

  “Cynthia May,” he said, pointing to the name she had obediently inscribed upon each sheet.

  “Yes,” she replied, looking into his eyes. “Like Mary Jane.”

  “I’ll cut your tongue out!” cried Mary Costello. She scooped up Ra, the yellow tabby who had his paw in the cream and looked as if he might splash a drop or two on her silk wrapper or—worse yet, sweet Jaysus!—the chart she was preparing for the man himself. “Away with you, now,” she murmured, kissing the old cat and placing him in a patch of sun on the windowsill above her hand-painted sign: “Madam Costello, Disciple of Mlle. Lenormand, Paris. PLANET READER.” It was a big day here at the corner of Third and D Streets. “Mustn’t make a mess,” she cautioned Ra, making her way back to the consulting table. “Not with our magnificent Scorpion coming.”

  The senator, as he’d told her on his single previous visit, had a birthdate of October 30, 1829, seven days into his Sun sign, which, according to Master Gabriel’s Gospel of the Stars, open next to the teapot, made him and those similarly born “full of courage and anger and much given to flattery. Many promises will they make and little will they perform. After the serpent’s fashion they will beguile those who trust them and with smiling faces will lure their enemies to destruction.”

  “Well!” laughed Mary Costello. “We can’t go telling him that, can we, pussums?” Unworried by Master Gabriel’s dire trumpetings, she poured herself another cup of tea. The sky, thank heavens, held as many explanations as it did stars. Whatever the Sun failed to yield, the moon could supply; what the monthly cycles would deny you, the hourly ones might provide. Born at noon, or close to it, the senator could safely be promised measures of fame and prosperity even greater than those he already enjoyed.

  Did she have time to peruse one of Master Gabriel’s competitors before he arrived? She consulted the clock on the mantelpiece. It always ran behind, and for a moment she wished she might live nearer the river, close enough to see the ball drop at noon. Clients had a right to expect a certain precision, and a clock such as hers, unable to keep up with Earth’s movement through the heavens, must surely fail to inspire confidence. She draped a scarf over it, hiding the face if not the ticking, and went back to her books and her chart-in-progress. Her predictions for the senator’s absent wife, home in Utica, and for his mistress in her mansion above the city, were phrased so politely they would sound more like inquiries after the health of family members than nuggets of celestial information designed to manage his movements between the women.

  “I shall never keep all the politics in my head, ain’t that so, Ra?” If the senator did become a real client, she would have to take the Star regularly, not buy it every third or fourth day and put it into the canary’s cage half-read. She had trouble enough keeping straight what she actually knew of the sun, moon, and stars; how would she manage the long list of the senator’s enemies and concerns?

  Well, this wouldn’t be the first load Mary Costello had hoisted in her forty-seven years; and she was a much quicker study of earthly mortals than the spheres that swirled around them. Ten minutes after he’d pulled her doorbell on Sunday night, a complete surprise, she had a pretty good idea as to why the senator had come to seek her out. He was, he’d told her, responsible for the President due to be enthroned the following morning. Having more or less created the commission that settled the mad, disputed election in favor of Governor Hayes, he stood as the Prime Mover, the hand that had flung the Sun into position. And yet, she could tell that this knowledge had left him, maybe for the first time in his life, afraid and resentful. Having failed to become the Sun himself (what he really craved), and newly aware of those seeking to banish him where no light shone at all, the senator had reached a secret crisis in his fortunes and confidence. So he had come to her in the night, looking over his well-muscled shoulder, dressed in his magnificent clothes and face and voice, this gorgeous brute requiring whatever reassurance she could call down from the stars.

  She looked around for her turban—not a piece of professional paraphernalia, just something she used to hide her thinning hair. “Now, don’t I look lovely, pussums?” She laughed at herself in the mirror, before taking the window seat below Ra’s sill. Together they looked out onto the street, toward the people getting down from the trolley: the women, sweating in their velvet; the anxious, office-seeking men, moving between their hotels and whichever new Cabinet Secretary they’d be calling on next. She usually welcomed drop-ins, but the senator had instructed her to keep the decks clear this afternoon, and she had hung a “by appointment only” shingle beneath the placard invoking Mlle. Lenormand.

  She hoped he wouldn’t ask for a complete horoscope, at least not yet. Only with great difficulty—using lima beans to calculate, when she ran out of fingers—had she located the moon’s position in his Sun sign. Numbers and history had never been her suit. When told, ten years ago, back in Chicago, that the twelve signs of the Zodiac matched up to the twelve tribes of Israel, she’d asked Iris Cummings just who these twelve tribes were, and how come they hadn’t turned into a baker’s dozen under the hot desert sun.

  Looking over the windowsill and down at her sign, Mary Costello realized that these days she sometimes thought she had been a pupil of Mlle. Lenormand’s, and that Mlle. Lenormand really was a famous Parisian planet reader instead of a name she’d found on the label inside a hat at Cooley & Wardsworth’s. If the truth be told (but who had to tell it?), it was Iris Cummings who’d taught her the stars. Iris, the smallest girl at Madame Lou Harper’s establishment on Monroe Street, but smart as could be; could talk about Venus and Jupiter by the hour whenever she came into the Hankinses’ gambling house, where Mary Costello in those days wiped tables. Al and George had loved superstition; behind the bar, amidst the pinochle decks, there was always a pack of tarot cards, and they craved hearing little Iris go on about all the mysteries that only seem beyond our reckoning. Mary had started making notes, first inside her head and then on a tablet she kept in her shack one street behind Hair Trigger Block.

  She’d picked up plenty, certainly enough to tell the senator that the moon in Scorpio is an evil thing, and that those born with it require quite a bundle of additional planetary influences to keep from hurting other folk. Yes, she could tell him that, but what she’d learned in life—more important than all she’d learned from little Iris or Master Gabriel—would make her keep her trap shut about this unattractive lunar truth. She gave people as much knowledge as they could comfortably stand, and no more.

  Candles: lit or unlit? “What do you think, pussums?” Unlit, she decided. The senator sought not hocus-pocus but expertise, a heavenly species of the facts and figures his committees knotted into laws and budgets. Wearing a bracelet or two less wouldn’t hurt, either. She slid one off her wrist just as the doorbell rang. Fluffing
her turban, she looked out the window and saw—oh, bejaysus!—not the senator at all, but that tiresome girl, that tall bird of an Aries who lived a couple of streets away and had been here a week or so ago. And what for? She mocked the stars’ predictions even as she sought them. Every other female who came up these steps settled for an encouraging word about a lover or a legacy, but this one couldn’t make clear what she was seeking to know. Now, how to get rid of her quickly?

  “The sign, Mrs. May. Please read the sign!” Madam Costello reached over the windowsill and tapped the “by appointment only” board.

  “No,” said Cynthia May. “Reading signs is your job. Can’t you let me in for one fast question?”

  A different look lay upon the younger woman’s face today, nothing like the pinched and pawnbrokered aspect that had come to the door just a week ago. You’d have thought she’d found love and a legacy since then.

  “Oh, come in,” said Mary Costello, trying to grumble, though secretly grateful for some company to take the edge off waiting for the visitor she was beginning to fear would never show.

  Cynthia bustled up the steps. “I won’t even take tea,” she said. “I won’t even sit down.”

  “Darlin’,” said Mary Costello. “You’re practically giggling. And if you commence to, I’m sure to start giggling meself.” She immediately proceeded to, prompted by her guest’s improved disposition and her own habit of snatching any sign of cheer, like a stick of firewood, to keep her spirits alight.

  “My question is this,” said Cynthia May. “Does a person’s coloration tell you anything about him? The way his hair and eyes and flesh come into harmony, like an artist’s paints?”

  Madam Costello looked puzzled, then disapproving. “I think you want one of the ancient humorists, dear, those that could tell you whether the look of someone’s face means a lot of blood or too much bile. I could never read anyone’s temper or future that way. Never thought of studyin’ the phrenology, either. All that muckin’ about on somebody’s scalp.” She affected a little shudder. “Long ago I had the chance to be a hairdresser, but I thought it a foul opportunity. Now, is this all about a feller?”