Two Moons by Thomas Mallon Read Free Book Online

perquisite he had somehow neglected to bestow upon Simon Newcomb.
    He might be the handsomest among them, thought Hugh, but Newcomb’s lush brown hair, one wing of it combed out to look as if it were catching a breeze, was more appropriate to some painter working his will on the models in a Paris atelier. He was, in fact, a seducer—not of women, but of the legislators and club presidents and hostesses who then advanced Simon Newcomb’s reputation for both genius and a charming ability to inspire public understanding of the arcane work performed by himself and his less glamorous colleagues.
    “I’ll tell you something, Allison.” He had just clapped Hugh on the back. “A few years from now, you’ll be able to pick up a telephone and ask your Harvard mate exactly what the weather is doing up at his end. And then, on nights when it’s fine down here, and he tells you it’s fine up there as well, you can let him look for your double stars, and I can have another night under the eyepiece here! What do you say?”
    Hugh just smiled. He was supposed to be grateful for the teasing, grateful the man had noticed him; but if he answered Newcomb’s question, he’d soon be required to blush with pleasure over the imitation of his Southern accent—affectionate, of course!—that was sure to ensue. And if he chose to tease the man back, to say that the use of “mate” betrayed Newcomb’s origins (Canadian) just as surely as Hugh Allison’s soft vowels did his, the response would be a stiff little smile, asignal that Mr. Allison, just six years out of Harvard College, was decidedly out of line.
    So he said nothing, and walked back to the little table with the paperwork he’d brought to occupy him while waiting on the weather. That reference to the “telephone”: it was exactly like Newcomb to have on his lips the very thing whose “possibilities” all the clubwomen and lecture-going clerks in town, armed with two inches’ worth of knowledge from the Star, were buzzing about these days. They spoke, for all of ten seconds, about the latest “miracle” God had wrought, before turning to the more pressing subject of the patent wars breaking out over the instrument, and who finally stood to make the most money from it. When the Observatory was rigged with a telephone, it would surely be Newcomb’s doing, and as he talked into it—to the program chairman inviting him to speak, or the Leslie’s Illustrated editor asking him for a scientific pronouncement on the modern world aborning—he would never realize how the telephone’s wires only stitched him more tightly to the earth and its noise. When Simon Newcomb spoke to audiences about the “outer planets,” they widened their eyes at the vasty phrase, unaware that the eminent man’s specialty made him, to Hugh Allison’s way of thinking, no more than a cosmic housecat, afraid to quit the solar system’s verandah for the true open spaces of the universe.
    Hugh would have preferred anyone else’s company in the dome tonight, even that of dour Asaph Hall, so serious and secretive in his pursuits, a man who had struggled through life while Newcomb swanned. More self-taught than schooled, Hall had had to interrupt his early career for stints at carpentry and computation, all the while encouraged by his religious, grudge-collecting wife, who still governed him as the tides did the moon. Alas, only Newcomb stood here now, Davis having scurried off to deal, even at this late hour, with one more unpaid bill and leaky pipe.
    Would the new permanent superintendent, whoever he turned out to be, keep giving them the latitude the commodore had established as the norm? Bless the old man. Hugh could picture him last year, justafter his own arrival, standing in line to greet Dom Pedro, the visiting emperor so hungry for American wonders. Benjamin Sands, who fifty years before had sailed along the Brazilian coast in the Vandalia, ended up being too shy to impart this reminiscence,